Falling Man (21 page)

She took the tests and examination, did the MRI, did the psychometrics, did word pairing, recall, concentration, walked a straight line wall to wall, counted down from one hundred by sevens.

It made her feel good, the counting down, and she did it sometimes in the day’s familiar drift, walking down a street, riding in a taxi. It was her form of lyric verse, subjective and unrhymed, a little songlike but with a rigor, a tradition of fixed order, only backwards, to test the presence of another kind of reversal, which a doctor nicely named retrogenesis.

At the Race & Sports Book, downtown, in the old casino, there were five rows of long tables set at graded levels. He sat at the far end of the last table in the top row, facing front, with five screens high on the wall ahead showing horses running in various time zones somewhere on the planet. A man read a paperback book at the table directly below him, cigarette burning down in his hand. Across the room at the lowest level a large woman in a hooded sweatshirt sat before an array of newspapers. He knew it was a woman because the hood was not raised and would have known anyway, somehow, through gesture or posture, the way she spread pages before her and used both hands to smooth them out and then nudged other pages out of reading range, in the wan light and hanging smoke.

The casino spread behind him and to either side, acres of neon slots, mostly empty now of human pulse. He felt hemmed in all the same, enclosed by the dimness and low ceiling and by the thick residue of smoke that adhered to his skin and carried decades of crowds and action.

It was eight a.m. and he was the only person who knew this. He glanced toward the far end of the adjacent table, where an old man with a white ponytail sat bent across the arm of his chair, watching horses in midrace and showing the anxious lean of body english that marks money on the line. He was otherwise motionless. The lean was all there was and then the voice of the track announcer, rapid-fire, the one mild excitement:
Yankee Gal coming through on the inside.

There was no one else at the tables here. Races ended, others began, or they were the same races replayed on one or more of the screens. He wasn’t watching closely. There were flutters of action from another set of screens, recessed at a lower level, above the cashier’s cage. He watched the cigarette burn down in the hand of the man reading the book, just below him. He checked his watch again. He knew time and day of week and wondered when such scraps of data would begin to feel disposable.

The ponytailed man got up and left in the final furlong of a race in progress, curling his newspaper into a tight fold and snapping it on his thigh. The whole place stank of abandonment. In time Keith got up and walked over to the poker room, where he completed his buy-in and took his seat, ready for the start of the tournament, so-called.

Only three tables were occupied. In about the seventy-seventh game of hold ’em, he began to sense a life in all this, not for himself but the others, a small dawn of tunneled meaning. He watched the blinking woman across the table. She was thin, wrinkled, hard to see, right there, five feet away, hair going gray. He didn’t wonder who she was or where she’d go when this was over, to what sort of room somewhere, to think what kind of thoughts. This was never over. That was the point. There was nothing outside the game but faded space. She blinked and called, blinked and folded.

In the casino distance, the announcer’s smoky voice, in replay. Yankee Gal was coming through on the inside.

She missed those nights with friends when you talk about everything. She hadn’t stayed in close touch and felt no guilt or need. There were hours of talk and laughter, bottles uncorked. She missed the comical midlife monologues of the clinically self-absorbed. The food ran out, the wine did not, and who was the little man in the red cravat who did sound effects from old submarine movies. She went out only rarely now, went alone, did not stay late. She missed the autumn weekends at somebody’s country house, leaf-fall and touch football, kids tumbling down grassy slopes, leaders and followers, all watched by a pair of tall slender dogs poised on their haunches like figures in myth.

She didn’t feel the old attraction, the thing looked forward to. It was also a question of thinking of Keith. He would not want to do it. He’d never felt right in these surroundings and it would be impossible now for him to feel any different. People have trouble approaching him on the simplest social level. They think they will bounce off. They will hit a wall and bounce.

Her mother, this is what she missed. Nina was all around her now but only in the meditative air, her face and breath, an attending presence somewhere near.

After the memorial service, four months earlier, a small group went for a late lunch. Martin had flown in from somewhere, as usual, in Europe, and there were two of her mother’s former colleagues.

It was a quiet hour and a half, with stories of Nina and other matters, the work they were doing, the places they’d lately been. The woman, a biographer, ate sparingly, spoke at some length. The man said nearly nothing. He was director of a library of art and architecture.

The afternoon was fading away, over coffee. Then Martin said, “We’re all sick of America and Americans. The subject nauseates us.”

He and Nina had seen each other only rarely in the last two and a half years of her life. Each heard news of the other through mutual friends or from Lianne, who stayed in touch with Martin, sporadically, through e-mails and phone calls.

“But I’ll tell you something,” he said.

She looked at him. He had the same thirteen-day beard, the drooping lids of chronic jet lag. He wore the standard unpressed suit, his uniform, shirt looking slept-in, no tie. Someone displaced or deeply distracted, lost in time. But he was heavier now, his face went east and west, there were signs of bloat and sag that the beard could not conceal. He had the pressured look of a man whose eyes have gone smaller in his head.

“For all the careless power of this country, let me say this, for all the danger it makes in the world, America is going to become irrelevant. Do you believe this?”

She wasn’t sure why she’d stayed in touch with him. The disincentives were strong. There was what she knew about him, even if incomplete, and there was, more tellingly, how her mother had come to feel about him. It was guilt by association, his, when the towers fell.

“There is a word in German.
Gedankenübertragung.
This is the broadcasting of thoughts. We are all beginning to have this thought, of American irrelevance. It’s a little like telepathy. Soon the day is coming when nobody has to think about America except for the danger it brings. It is losing the center. It becomes the center of its own shit. This is the only center it occupies.”

She wasn’t sure what had brought this on, maybe something that someone had said, passingly, at an earlier point. Maybe Martin was having an argument with the dead, with Nina. They were clearly wishing they’d gone home, the colleagues, before the coffee and biscuits. This was not the occasion, the woman said, to argue global politics. Nina could have done it better than any of us, she said, but Nina isn’t here and the talk dishonors her memory.

Martin waved a hand in dismissal, rejecting the narrow terms of discourse. He was a link to her mother, Lianne thought. That’s why she’d stayed in touch. Even when her mother was alive, fadingly, he helped Lianne think of her in clearer outline. Ten or fifteen minutes on the phone with him, a man etched in regret but also love and reminiscence, or longer conversations that wandered toward an hour, and she’d feel both sadder and better, seeing Nina in a kind of freeze-frame, vivid and alert. She’d tell her mother about these calls and watch her face, looking hard for a sign of light.

Now she watched him.

The colleagues insisted on picking up the check. Martin did not contest the matter. He was done with them. They embodied a form of cautionary tact better left to state funerals in autocratic countries. Before leaving, the library director took a sunflower from the bud vase at the center of the table and placed it in the breast pocket of Martin’s jacket. He did this with a smile, possibly hostile, maybe not. Then he finally spoke, standing over the table and fitting his long body into a raincoat.

“If we occupy the center, it’s because you put us there. This is your true dilemma,” he said. “Despite everything, we’re still America, you’re still Europe. You go to our movies, read our books, listen to our music, speak our language. How can you stop thinking about us? You see us and hear us all the time. Ask yourself. What comes after America?”

Martin spoke quietly, almost idly, to himself.

“I don’t know this America anymore. I don’t recognize it,” he said. “There’s an empty space where America used to be.”

They stayed, she and Martin, the only patrons left in the long room, below street level, and talked for some time. She told him about the last hard months of her mother’s life, ruptured blood vessels, loss of muscle control, the smeared speech and empty gaze. He bent low over the table, breathing audibly. She wanted to hear him talk about Nina and he did. It seemed all she’d known of her mother for an extended time was Nina in a chair, Nina in a bed. He lifted her into artists’ lofts, Byzantine ruins, into halls where she’d lectured, Barcelona to Tokyo.

“I used to imagine, when I was a girl, that I was her. I stood sometimes in the middle of the room and spoke to a chair or sofa. I said very smart things about painters. I knew how to pronounce every name, all the hard names, and I knew their paintings from books and museum visits.”

“You were frequently alone.”

“I couldn’t understand why my mother and father split up. My mother never cooked. My father never seemed to eat. What could go wrong?”

“You will always be a daughter, I think. First and always, this is what you are.”

“And you are always what?”

“I am always your mother’s lover. Long before I knew her. Always that. It was waiting to happen.”

“You almost make me believe it.”

The other thing she wanted to believe was that his physical bearing was not evidence of illness or some steep financial setback affecting his morale. It was the end of the long story, he and Nina, that had brought him to this dispirited point. Nothing more or less than that. This is what she believed and this is what stirred her sympathy.

“Some people are lucky. They become who they are supposed to be,” he said. “This did not happen to me until I met your mother. One day we started to talk and it never stopped, this conversation.”

“Even at the end of things.”

“Even when we no longer found agreeable things to say or anything at all to say. The conversation never ended.”

“I believe you.”

“From the first day.”

“In Italy,” she said.

“Yes. This is true.”

“And the second day. In front of a church,” she said. “The two of you. And someone took your picture.”

He looked up and seemed to study her, wondering what else she knew. She would not tell him what she knew or that she’d made no effort to find out more. She had not gone to libraries to examine the histories of underground movements in those years and she had not searched the Internet for traces of the man called Ernst Hechinger. Her mother hadn’t, she hadn’t.

“There’s a plane to catch.”

“What would you do without your planes?”

“There’s always a plane to catch.”

“Where would you be?” she said. “One city, which one?”

He’d come for the day, without a suitcase or carry-on. He’d sold his New York apartment and had reduced the number of his commitments here.

“I don’t think I’m ready to face that question. One city,” he said, “and I am trapped.”

They knew him here and the waiter brought complimentary brandies. They lingered a while longer, into twilight. She realized she would never see him again.

She’d respected his secret, yielded to his mystery. Whatever it was he’d done, it was not outside the lines of response. She could imagine his life, then and now, detect the slurred pulse of an earlier consciousness. Maybe he was a terrorist but he was one of ours, she thought, and the thought chilled her, shamed her—one of ours, which meant godless, Western, white.

He stood and lifted the flower out of his breast pocket. Then he smelled it and tossed it on the table, smiling at her. They touched hands briefly and went out to the street, where she watched him walk to the corner, arm raised to the tide of passing cabs.

11

The dealer touched the green button, a fresh deck rose to the tabletop.

In these months of mastering the game he was spending most of his time on the Strip now, sitting in leather recliners in the sports-book parlors, hunched under shade canopies in the poker rooms. He was finally making money, quiet amounts that began to show consistency. He was also going home periodically, three or four days, love, sex, fatherhood, home-cooked food, but was lost at times for something to say. There was no language, it seemed, to tell them how he spent his days and nights.

Soon he felt the need to be back there. When his plane came down over the desert he could easily believe that this was a place he’d always known. There were standard methods and routines. Taxi to the casino, taxi back to his hotel. He managed on two meals a day, didn’t require more. The heat pressed into metal and glass, made the streets seem to shimmer. At the table he didn’t study players for tells, didn’t care why they coughed or seemed bored or scratched a forearm. He studied the cards and knew the tendencies. There was that and the blinking woman. He remembered her from the casino downtown, invisible except for the fretful eyes. The blinking was not a tell. It was only who she was, some grown man’s mother firing chips into the pot, blinking in nature’s own arrangement, like a firefly in a field. He drank hard liquor sparingly, nearly not at all, and allowed himself five hours’ sleep, barely aware of setting limits and restrictions. Never occurred to him to light up a cigar, as in the old days, at the old game. He walked through crowded hotel lobbies under hand-painted Sistine ceilings and into the high glare of this or that casino, not looking at people, seeing essentially no one, but every time he boarded a flight he glanced at faces on both sides of the aisle, trying to spot the man or men who might be a danger to them all.