Falling Man (27 page)

He smelled something dismal and understood it was him, things sticking to his skin, dust particles, smoke, some kind of oily grit on his face and hands mixing with the body slop, paste-like, with the blood and saliva and cold sweat, and it was himself he smelled, and Rumsey.

The size of it, the sheer physical dimensions, and he saw himself in it, the mass and scale, and the way the thing swayed, the slow and ghostly lean.

Someone took his arm and led him forward for a few steps and then he walked on his own, in his sleep, and for an instant he saw it again, going past the window, and this time he thought it was Rumsey. He confused it with Rumsey, the man falling sideways, arm out and up, like pointed up, like why am I here instead of there.

They had to wait at times, long stalled moments, and he looked straight ahead. When the line moved again he took a step down and then another. They talked to him several times, different people, and when this happened he closed his eyes, maybe because it meant he didn’t have to reply.

There was a man on the landing ahead, old man, smallish, sitting in shadow, knees up, resting. Some people spoke and he nodded his head okay, he waved them on nodding.

There was a woman’s shoe nearby, upside down. There was a briefcase on its side and the man had to lean to reach it. He extended a hand and pushed it with some effort toward the advancing line.

He said, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this. She fell and left it.”

People didn’t hear this or retain it or want to and they moved past, Keith moved past, the line beginning to wind down toward an area of some light.

It did not seem forever to him, the passage down. He had no sense of pace or rate. There was a glow stripe on the stairs that he hadn’t seen before and someone praying back in the line somewhere, in Spanish.

A man came up, moving quickly, in a hard hat, and they cleared a space, and then there were firemen, in full bulk, and they cleared a space.

Rumsey was the one in the chair. He understood that now. He had set him back down in the chair and they would find him and bring him down, and others.

There were voices up behind him, back on the stairs, one and then another in near echo, fugue voices, song voices in the rhythms of natural speech.

This goes down.

This goes down.

Pass it down.

He stopped again, second time or third, and people pushed around him and looked at him and told him to move. A woman took his arm to help and he didn’t move and she went on.

Pass it down.

This goes down.

This goes down.

The briefcase came down and around the stairwell, hand to hand, somebody left this, somebody lost this, this goes down, and he stood looking straight ahead and when the briefcase came to him, he reached his right hand across his body to take it, blankly, and then started down the stairs again.

There were long waits and others not so long and in time they were led down to the concourse level, beneath the plaza, and they moved past empty shops, locked shops, and they were running now, some of them, with water pouring in from somewhere. They came out onto the street, looking back, both towers burning, and soon they heard a high drumming rumble and saw smoke rolling down from the top of one tower, billowing out and down, methodically, floor to floor, and the tower falling, the south tower diving into the smoke, and they were running again.

The windblast sent people to the ground. A thunderhead of smoke and ash came moving toward them. The light drained dead away, bright day gone. They ran and fell and tried to get up, men with toweled heads, a woman blinded by debris, a woman calling someone’s name. The only light was vestigial now, the light of what comes after, carried in the residue of smashed matter, in the ash ruins of what was various and human, hovering in the air above.

He took one step and then the next, smoke blowing over him. He felt rubble underfoot and there was motion everywhere, people running, things flying past. He walked by the Easy Park sign, the Breakfast Special and Three Suits Cheap, and they went running past, losing shoes and money. He saw a woman with her hand in the air, like running to catch a bus.

He went past a line of fire trucks and they stood empty now, headlights flashing. He could not find himself in the things he saw and heard. Two men ran by with a stretcher, someone facedown, smoke seeping out of his hair and clothes. He watched them move into the stunned distance. That’s where everything was, all around him, falling away, street signs, people, things he could not name.

Then he saw a shirt come down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life.

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

D
ON
D
E
L
ILLO
, the author of fourteen novels, including
White Noise
and
Libra,
has won many honors in this country and abroad, including the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his novel
Underworld.
He has also written three plays.