Falling Man (16 page)

The members wanted to write about her and Lianne watched them at work, folded over their legal pads. Now and then a head would lift, someone staring into a memory or a word. All the words for what is inevitable seemed to crowd the room and she found herself thinking of the old passport photos on the wall of her mother’s apartment, from Martin’s collection, faces looking out of a sepia distance, lost in time.

The agent’s circular stamp at the corner of a photo.

The bearer’s status and port of embarkation.

Royaume de Bulgarie.

Embassy of the Hashemite Kingdom.

Türkiye Cumhuriyeti.

She’d begun to see the people before her, Omar, Carmen and the others, in the same isolated setting, with the signature of the bearer sometimes written across the photo itself, a woman in a cloche, a younger woman who looked Jewish,
Staatsange-hörigkeit,
her face and eyes showing deeper meaning than an ocean crossing alone might account for, and the woman’s face that’s almost lost in shadow, the printed word
Napoli
curled around the border of a circular stamp.

Pictures snapped anonymously, images rendered by machine. There was something in the premeditation of these photographs, the bureaucratic intent, the straightforward poses that brought her paradoxically into the lives of the subjects. Maybe what she saw was human ordeal set against the rigor of the state. She saw people fleeing, there to here, with darkest hardship pressing the edges of the frame. Thumbprints, emblems with tilted crosses, man with handlebar mustache, girl in braids. She thought she was probably inventing a context. She didn’t know anything about the people in the photographs. She only knew the photographs. This is where she found innocence and vulnerability, in the nature of old passports, in the deep texture of the past itself, people on long journeys, people now dead. Such beauty in faded lives, she thought, in images, words, languages, signatures, stamped advisories.

Cyrillic, Greek, Chinese.

Dati e connotati del Titolare.

Les Pays Etrangers.

She watches the members write about Rosellen S. A head lifts, then drops, and they sit and write. She knows they are not looking out of a tinted mist, as the passport bearers are, but receding into one. Another head comes up and then another and she tries not to catch the eye of either individual. Soon they would all look up. For the first time since the sessions began, she is afraid to hear what they will say when they read from the ruled sheets.

He stood near the front of the large room watching them work out. They were in their twenties and thirties, arrayed in ranks on the stair climbers and elliptical trainers. He walked along the near aisle, feeling a bond with these men and women, not sure quite why. They strained against weighted metal sleds and rode stationary bikes. There were rowing machines and spidery isotonic devices. He paused at the entrance to the weight room and saw powerlifters fixed between safety bars, grunting up out of their squats. He saw women at the speed bags nearby, throwing hooks and jabs, and others doing footwork drills, skipping rope, one leg tucked up, arms crossed.

An escort was with him, young man in white, on the staff of the fitness center. Keith stood at the rear of the great open space, people everywhere in motion, blood pumping. They quick-walked on the treadmills or ran in place, never seeming regimented, never rigidly linked. It was a scene charged with purpose and a kind of elemental sex, rooted sex, women arched and bent, all elbows and knees, neck veins jutting. But there was something else as well. These were the people he knew, if he knew anyone. Here, together, these were the ones he could stand with in the days after. Maybe that’s what he was feeling, a spirit, a kinship of trust.

He walked down the far aisle, escort trailing, waiting for Keith to ask a question. He was looking the place over. He would need to do serious gymwork once he started his job, days away now. It was no good spending eight hours at the office, ten hours, then going straight home. He would need to burn things off, test his body, direct himself inward, working on his strength, stamina, agility, sanity. He would need an offsetting discipline, a form of controlled behavior, voluntary, that kept him from shambling into the house hating everybody.

Her mother was asleep again. Lianne wanted to go home but knew she couldn’t. It was only five minutes ago that Martin had walked out the door, abruptly, and she didn’t want Nina to wake up alone. She went to the kitchen and found some fruit and cheese. She stood at the sink washing a pear and heard something in the living room. She turned off the faucet and listened and then went into the room. Her mother was talking to her.

“I have dreams when I’m not quite asleep, not all the way down, and I’m dreaming.”

“We need to have some lunch, both of us.”

“I almost feel I can open my eyes and see what I’m dreaming. Makes no sense, does it? The dream is not so much in my mind as all around me.”

“It’s the pain medication. You’re taking too much, for no reason.”

“The physical therapy causes pain.”

“You’re not doing the physical therapy.”

“This must mean I’m not taking the medication.”

“That’s not funny. One of those drugs you take is habit-forming. At least one.”

“Where’s my grandson?”

“Exactly where he was last time you asked. But that’s not the question. The question is Martin.”

“It’s hard to imagine that a day will come anytime soon when we stop arguing about this.”

“He was very intense.”

“You haven’t seen him when he’s intense. It’s a lingering thing, goes back years, well before we knew each other.”

“Which is twenty years, yes.”

“Yes.”

“But before that, what?”

“He was involved in the times. All that turmoil. He was active.”

“Bare walls. The art investor with bare walls.”

“Nearly bare. Yes, that’s Martin.”

“Martin Ridnour.”

“Yes.”

“Did you tell me once that’s not his real name?”

“I’m not sure. Maybe,” Nina said.

“If I heard it, then it came from you. Is that his real name?”

“No.”

“I don’t think you told me his real name.”

“Maybe I don’t know his real name.”

“Twenty years.”

“Not continuously. Not even for prolonged periods. He’s somewhere, I’m somewhere else.”

“He has a wife.”

“She’s somewhere else too.”

“Twenty years. Traveling with him. Sleeping with him.”

“Why do I have to know his name? He’s Martin. What will I know about him if I know his name that I don’t know now?”

“You’ll know his name.”

“He’s Martin.”

“You’ll know his name. This is nice to know.”

Her mother nodded toward the two paintings on the north wall.

“When we first knew each other I talked to him about Giorgio Morandi. Showed him a book. Beautiful still lifes. Form, color, depth. He was just getting started in the business and barely knew Morandi’s name. Went to Bologna to see the work firsthand. Came back saying no, no, no, no. Minor artist. Empty, self-involved, bourgeois. Basically a Marxist critique, this is what Martin delivered.”

“Twenty years later.”

“He sees form, color, depth, beauty.”

“Is this an advance in aesthetics?”

“He sees the light.”

“Or a sellout, a self-deception. Remarks of a property owner.”

“He sees the light,” Nina said.

“He also sees the money. These are very pricey objects.”

“Yes, they are. And at first, quite seriously, I wondered how he’d acquired them. I suspect in those early years he sometimes dealt in stolen art.”

“Interesting fellow.”

“He said to me once, I’ve done some things. He said, This doesn’t make my life more interesting than yours. It can be made to sound more interesting. But in memory, in those depths, he said, there is not much vivid color or wild excitement. It is all gray and waiting. Sitting, waiting. He said, It is all sort of neutral, you know.”

She did the accent with a deft edge, maybe a little nasty.

“What was he waiting for?”

“History, I think. The call to action. The visit from the police.”

“Which branch of the police?”

“Not the art-theft squad. I know one thing. He was a member of a collective in the late nineteen sixties. Kommune One. Demonstrating against the German state, the fascist state. That’s how they saw it. First they threw eggs. Then they set off bombs. After that I’m not sure what he did. I think he was in Italy for a while, in the turmoil, when the Red Brigades were active. But I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“No.”

“Twenty years. Eating and sleeping together. You don’t know. Did you ask him? Did you press him?”

“He showed me a poster once, a few years ago, when I saw him in Berlin. He keeps an apartment there. A wanted poster. German terrorists of the early seventies. Nineteen names and faces.”

“Nineteen.”

“Wanted for murder, bombings, bank robberies. He keeps it—I don’t know why he keeps it. But I know why he showed it to me. He’s not one of the faces on the poster.”

“Nineteen.”

“Men and women. I counted. He may have been part of a support group or a sleeper cell. I don’t know.”

“You don’t know.”

“He thinks these people, these jihadists, he thinks they have something in common with the radicals of the sixties and seventies. He thinks they’re all part of the same classical pattern. They have their theorists. They have their visions of world brotherhood.”

“Do they make him nostalgic?”

“Don’t think I won’t bring this up.”

“Bare walls. Nearly bare, you said. Is this part of the old longing? Days and nights in seclusion, hiding out somewhere, renouncing every trace of material comfort. Maybe he killed someone. Did you ask him? Did you press him on this?”

“Look, if he’d done something serious, causing death or injury, do you think he’d be walking around today? He’s not in hiding anymore, if he ever was. He’s here, there and everywhere.”

“Operating under a false name,” Lianne said.

She was on the sofa, facing her mother, watching her. She’d never detected a weakness in Nina, none that she could recall, some frailty of character or compromise of hard clear judgment. She found herself prepared to take advantage and this surprised her. She was ready to bleed the moment, bearing in, ripping in.

“All these years. Never forcing the issue. Look at the man he’s become, the man we know. Isn’t this the kind of man they would have seen as the enemy? Those men and women on the wanted poster. Kidnap the bastard. Burn his paintings.”

“Oh I think he knows this. Don’t you think he knows this?”

“But what do you know? Don’t you pay a price for not knowing?”

“It’s my price. Shut up,” her mother said.

She drew a cigarette from the pack and held it. She seemed to be thinking into some distant matter, not remembering so much as measuring, marking the reach or degree of something, the meaning of something.

“The one wall that holds an object is in Berlin.”

“The wanted poster.”

“The poster does not hang. He keeps the poster in a closet, in a mailing tube. No, it’s a small photograph in a plain frame, hanging over his bed. He and I, a snapshot. We’re standing before a church in one of the hill towns in Umbria. We’d met only a day earlier. He asked a woman walking by to take our picture.”

“Why do I hate this story?”

“His name is Ernst Hechinger. You hate this story because you think it shames me. Makes me complicit in a maudlin gesture, a pathetic gesture. Foolish little snapshot. The one object he displays.”

“Have you tried to determine whether this man Ernst Hechinger is wanted by the police somewhere in Europe? Just to know. To stop saying I don’t know.”

She wanted to punish her mother but not for Martin or not just for that. It was nearer and deeper and finally about one thing only. This is what everything was about, who they were, the fierce clasp, like hands bound in prayer, now and evermore.

Nina lit the cigarette and exhaled. She made it seem an effort to do this, breathe out smoke. She was drowsy again. One of her medications contained codeine phosphate and she was careful when taking it until recently. It was only days in fact, a week or so, since she’d stopped following the exercise regimen without altering her intake of painkillers. Lianne believed that this slackness of will was a defeat that had Martin in the middle of it. These were his nineteen, these hijackers, these jihadists, even if only in her mother’s mind.

“What are you working on?”

“Book on ancient alphabets. All the forms writing took, all the materials they used.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“You ought to read this book.”

“Sounds interesting.”

“Interesting, demanding, deeply enjoyable at times. Drawing as well. Pictorial writing. I’ll get you a copy when it’s published.”

“Pictograms, hieroglyphics, cuneiform,” her mother said.

She appeared to be dreaming aloud.

She said, “Sumerians, Assyrians, so on.”

“I’ll get you a copy, definitely.”

“Thank you.”

“You’re welcome,” Lianne said.

The cheese and fruit were on a platter in the kitchen. She sat with her mother a moment longer and then went in to get the food.

Three of the cardplayers were called by last name only, Dockery, Rumsey, Hovanis, and two by first name, Demetrius and Keith. Terry Cheng was Terry Cheng.

Someone told Rumsey one night, it was Dockery the waggish adman, that everything in his life would be different, Rumsey’s, if one letter in his name was different. An
a
for the
u.
Making him, effectively, Ramsey. It was the
u,
the
rum,
that had shaped his life and mind. The way he walks and talks, his slouchings, his very size and shape, the slowness and thickness that pour off him, the way he puts his hand down his shirt to scratch an itch. This would all be different if he’d been born a Ramsey.