Falling Man (4 page)

This was the last time he would stand here. There were no cats, there were only clothes. He put some things in a suitcase, a few shirts and trousers and his trekking boots from Switzerland and to hell with the rest. This and that and the Swiss boots because the boots mattered and the poker table mattered but he wouldn’t need the table, two players dead, one badly injured. A single suitcase, that was all, and his passport, checkbooks, birth certificate and a few other documents, the state papers of identity. He stood and looked and felt something so lonely he could touch it with his hand. At the window the intact page stirred in the breeze and he went over to see if it was readable. Instead he looked at the visible sliver of One Liberty Plaza and began to count the floors, losing interest about halfway up, thinking of something else.

He looked in the refrigerator. Maybe he was thinking of the man who used to live here and he checked the bottles and cartons for a clue. The paper rustled at the window and he picked up the suitcase and walked out the door, locking it behind him. He went about fifteen paces into the corridor, away from the stairwell, and spoke in a voice slightly above a whisper.

He said, “I’m standing here,” and then, louder, “I’m standing here.”

In the movie version, someone would be in the building, an emotionally damaged woman or a homeless old man, and there would be dialogue and close-ups.

The truth is that he was wary of the elevator. He didn’t want to know this but did, unavoidably. He walked down to the lobby, smelling the garbage coming closer with every step he took. The men with the vacuum pump were gone. He heard the drone and grind of heavy machinery at the site, earthmoving equipment, excavators that pounded concrete to dust, and then the sound of a klaxon that signaled danger, possible collapse of a structure nearby. He waited, they all waited, and then the grind began again.

He went to the local post office to pick up his undelivered mail and then walked north toward the barricades, thinking it might be hard to find a taxi at a time when every cabdriver in New York was named Muhammad.

4

Their separation had been marked by a certain symmetry, the steadfast commitment each made to an equivalent group. He had his poker game, six players, downtown, one night a week. She had her storyline sessions, in East Harlem, also weekly, in the afternoon, a gathering of five or six or seven men and women in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease.

The card games ended after the towers fell but the sessions took on a measure of intensity. The members sat on folding chairs in a room with a makeshift plywood door in a large community center. A steady bang and clatter bounced off the hallway walls. There were children racing around, adults in special classes. There were people playing dominoes and ping-pong, volunteers preparing food deliveries to elderly people in the area.

The group had been started by a clinical psychologist who left Lianne alone to conduct these meetings, which were strictly for morale. She and the members talked a while about events in the world and in their lives and then she handed out lined pads and ballpoint pens and suggested a topic they might write about or asked them to choose one. Remembering my father, that sort of thing, or What I always wanted to do but never did, or Do my children know who I am.

They wrote for roughly twenty minutes and then each, in turn, read aloud what he or she had written. Sometimes it scared her, the first signs of halting response, the losses and failings, the grim prefigurings that issued now and then from a mind beginning to slide away from the adhesive friction that makes an individual possible. It was in the language, the inverted letters, the lost word at the end of a struggling sentence. It was in the handwriting that might melt into runoff. But there were a thousand high times the members experienced, given a chance to encounter the crossing points of insight and memory that the act of writing allows. They laughed loud and often. They worked into themselves, finding narratives that rolled and tumbled, and how natural it seemed to do this, tell stories about themselves.

Rosellen S. saw her father walk in the door after a disappearance lasting four years. He was bearded now, head shaved, one arm missing. She was ten when this happened and she described the event in a run-on convergence, an intimacy of clean physical detail and dreamy reminiscence that had no seeming connection—radio programs, cousins named Luther, two of them, and a dress her mother wore to somebody’s wedding, and they listened to her read in a half whisper,
one arm missing,
and Benny in the next chair closed his eyes and rocked all through the telling. This was their prayer room, said Omar H. They summoned the force of final authority. No one knew what they knew, here in the last clear minute before it all closed down.

They signed their pages with first name and first letter of last name. This was Lianne’s idea, maybe a little affected, she thought, as if they were characters in European novels. They were characters and authors both, able to tell what they wished, cradle the rest in silence. When Carmen G. read her pieces she liked to embellish them with phrases in Spanish to seize the auditory core of an incident or an emotion. Benny T. hated to write, loved to talk. He brought pastry to the meetings, large jellied bladders that no one else would touch. The noise echoed in the hallway, kids playing piano and drums, others on roller skates, and the voices and accents of the adults, their polyglot English floating through the building.

Members wrote about hard times, happy memories, daughters becoming mothers. Anna wrote about the revelation of writing itself, how she hadn’t known she could write ten words and now look what comes pouring out. This was Anna C., a broad-bodied woman from the neighborhood. Nearly all of them were from the neighborhood, the eldest being Curtis B., eighty-one, a tall taciturn man with a prison history and a voice, in his readings, that had the resonance of entries in the
Encyclopaedia Britannica,
a collection he’d read front to back in the penitentiary library.

There was one subject the members wanted to write about, insistently, all of them but Omar H. It made Omar nervous but he agreed in the end. They wanted to write about the planes.

When he got back uptown the apartment was empty. He sorted through his mail. His name was misspelled on a couple of pieces of mail, this was not unusual, and he snatched a ballpoint pen from the mug near the telephone and made the corrections on the envelopes. He wasn’t sure when he’d started doing this and didn’t know why he did it. There was no reason why. Because it wasn’t him, with the name misspelled, that’s why. He did it and then kept doing it and maybe he understood at some snake-brain level of perception that he had to do it and would keep doing it down the years and into the decades. He did not construct this future in clear terms but it was probably there, humming under the skull. He never corrected the spelling on mail that was out-right third-class indiscriminate throwaway advertising matter. He almost did, the first time, but then did not. Junk mail was created for just this reason, to presort the world’s identities into one, with his or her name misspelled. In most other cases he made the correction, involving one letter in the first syllable of his last name, which was Neudecker, and then slit open the envelope. He never made the correction in the presence of someone else. It was an act he was careful to conceal.

She walked across Washington Square Park behind a student saying
hopefully
into his cell phone. It was a bright day, chess players at their tables, a fashion shoot in progress under the arch. They said
hopefully.
They said
oh my god,
in delight and small awe. She saw a young woman reading on a bench, in the lotus position. Lianne used to read haiku, sitting crosslegged on the floor, in the weeks and months after her father died. She thought of a poem by Bashō, or the first and third lines. She didn’t remember the second line.
Even in Kyoto—I long for Kyoto.
The second line was missing but she didn’t think she needed it.

Half an hour later she was in Grand Central Station to meet her mother’s train. She hadn’t been here lately and was not accustomed to the sight of police and state troopers in tight clusters or guardsmen with dogs. Other places, she thought, other worlds, dusty terminals, major intersections, this is routine and always will be. This was not a considered reflection so much as a flutter, a downdraft of memory, cities she’d seen, crowds and heat. But the normal order was also in evidence here, tourists taking pictures, commuters in running flurries. She was headed to the information desk to check the gate number when something caught her eyes out near the approach to 42nd Street.

There were people clustered near the entrance, on both sides, others pushing through the doors but seemingly still engaged by something happening outside. She made her way out onto the crowded sidewalk. Traffic was building, a few horns blowing. She edged along a storefront and looked up toward the green steel structure that passes over Pershing Square, the section of elevated roadway that carries traffic around the terminal in both directions.

A man was dangling there, above the street, upside down. He wore a business suit, one leg bent up, arms at his sides. A safety harness was barely visible, emerging from his trousers at the straightened leg and fastened to the decorative rail of the viaduct.

She’d heard of him, a performance artist known as Falling Man. He’d appeared several times in the last week, unannounced, in various parts of the city, suspended from one or another structure, always upside down, wearing a suit, a tie and dress shoes. He brought it back, of course, those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump. He’d been seen dangling from a balcony in a hotel atrium and police had escorted him out of a concert hall and two or three apartment buildings with terraces or accessible rooftops.

Traffic was barely moving now. There were people shouting up at him, outraged at the spectacle, the puppetry of human desperation, a body’s last fleet breath and what it held. It held the gaze of the world, she thought. There was the awful openness of it, something we’d not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all. And now, she thought, this little theater piece, disturbing enough to stop traffic and send her back into the terminal.

Her mother was waiting at the gate, on the lower level, leaning on her cane.

She said, “I had to get out of there.”

“I thought you’d stay another week at least. Better there than here.”

“I want to be in my apartment.”

“What about Martin?”

“Martin is still there. We’re still arguing. I want to sit in my armchair and read my Europeans.”

Lianne took the bag and they rode the escalator up to the main concourse, steeped in dusty light slanting through the high lunettes. A dozen people were grouped around a guide near the staircase to the east balcony, gazing at the sky ceiling, the gold-leaf constellations, with a guardsman and his dog standing alongside, and her mother could not help commenting on the man’s uniform, the question of jungle camouflage in midtown Manhattan.

“People are leaving, you’re coming back.”

“Nobody’s leaving,” her mother said. “The ones who leave were never here.”

“I have to admit, I’ve thought of it. Take the kid and go.”

“Don’t make me sick,” her mother said.

Even in New York, she thought. Of course she was wrong about the second line of the haiku. She knew this. Whatever the line was, it was surely crucial to the poem.
Even in New York
—
I long for New York.

She led her mother across the concourse and along a passage that would bring them out three blocks north of the main entrance. There would be moving traffic there and cabs to hail and no sign of the man who was upside down, in stationary fall, ten days after the planes.

It’s interesting, isn’t it? To sleep with your husband, a thirty-eight-year-old woman and a thirty-nine-year-old man, and never a breathy sound of sex. He’s your ex-husband who was never technically ex, the stranger you married in another lifetime. She dressed and undressed, he watched and did not. It was strange but interesting. A tension did not build. This was extremely strange. She wanted him here, nearby, but felt no edge of self-contradiction or self-denial. Just waiting, that was all, a broad pause in recognition of a thousand sour days and nights, not so easily set aside. The matter needed time. It could not happen the way things did in normal course. And it’s interesting, isn’t it, the way you move about the bedroom, routinely near-naked, and the respect you show the past, the deference to its fervors of the wrong kind, its passions of cut and burn.

She wanted contact and so did he.

The briefcase was smaller than normal and reddish brown with brass hardware, sitting on the closet floor. He’d seen it there before but understood for the first time that it wasn’t his. Wasn’t his wife’s, wasn’t his. He’d seen it, even half placed it in some long-lost distance as an object in his hand, the right hand, an object pale with ash, but it wasn’t until now that he knew why it was here.

He picked it up and took it to the desk in the study. It was here because he’d brought it here. It wasn’t his briefcase but he’d carried it out of the tower and he had it with him when he showed up at the door. She’d cleaned it since then, obviously, and he stood and looked at it, full-grain leather with a pebbled texture, nicely burnished over time, one of the front buckles bearing a singe mark. He ran his thumb over the padded handle, trying to remember why he’d carried it out of there. He was in no hurry to open it. He began to think he didn’t want to open it but wasn’t sure why. He ran his knuckles over the front flap and unbuckled one of the straps. Sunlight fell across the star map on the wall. He unbuckled the second strap.