Falling Man (7 page)

He waited.

“My phone was ringing. I was at my desk now, I don’t know, just to sit, to steady myself, and I pick up the phone. Then we’re talking, like hello, it’s Donna. It’s my friend Donna. I said, Did you hear that? She’s calling from home, in Philadelphia, to talk about a visit. I said, Did you hear that?”

She went through it slowly, remembering as she spoke, often pausing to look into space, to see things again, the collapsed ceilings and blocked stairwells, the smoke, always, and the fallen wall, the drywall, and she paused to search for the word and he waited, watching.

She was dazed and had no sense of time, she said.

There was water somewhere running or falling, flowing down from somewhere.

Men ripped their shirts and wound them around their faces, for masks, for the smoke.

She saw a woman with burnt hair, hair burnt and smoking, but now she wasn’t sure she’d seen this or heard someone say it.

Times they had to walk blind, smoke so thick, hand on the shoulder of the person in front.

She’d lost her shoes or kicked them off and there was water like a stream somewhere, nearby, running down a mountain.

The stairwell was crowded now, and slow, with people coming from other floors.

“Someone said, Asthma. Now that I’m talking, it’s coming back a little bit. Asthma, asthma. A woman like desperate. There were panic faces. That’s when I think I fell, I just went down. I went down five or six steps and hit the landing, like stumble-falling, and I hit hard.”

She wanted to tell him everything. This was clear to him. Maybe she’d forgotten he was there, in the tower, or maybe he was the one she needed to tell for precisely that reason. He knew she hadn’t talked about this, not so intensely, to anyone else.

“It was the panic of being trampled even though they were careful, they helped me, but it was the feeling of being down in a crowd and you will be trampled, but they helped me and this one man I remember, helping me get to my feet, elderly man, out of breath, helping me, talking to me until I was able to get going again.”

There were flames in elevator shafts.

There was a man talking about a giant earthquake. She forgot all about the plane and was ready to believe an earthquake even though she’d heard a plane. And someone else said, I been in earthquakes, a man in a suit and tie, this ain’t no earthquake, a distinguished man, an educated man, an executive, this ain’t no earthquake.

There were dangling wires and she felt a wire touch her arm. It touched the man behind her and he jumped and cursed and then laughed.

The crowd on the stairs, the sheer force of it, hobbling, crying, burnt, some of them, but mostly calm, a woman in a wheelchair and they carried her and people made room, bending into single file on the stairs.

Her face held an earnest appeal, a plea of some sort.

“I know I can’t sit here alive and safe and talk about falling down some stairs when all that terror, all those dead.”

He didn’t interrupt. He let her talk and didn’t try to reassure her. What was there to be reassuring about? She was slumped in the chair now, talking into the tabletop.

“The firemen racing past. And asthma, asthma. And some people talking said bomb. They were trying to talk on cell phones. They went down the stairs hitting numbers.”

This is where bottles of water were passed up the line from somewhere below, and soft drinks, and people were even joking a little, the equity traders.

This is where the firemen went racing past, going up the stairs, into it, and people got out of the way.

This is also where she saw someone she knew, going up, a maintenance man, a guy she used to joke with whenever she saw him, going up right past her, carrying a long iron implement, like something to pry open an elevator door, maybe, and she tried to think of the word for the thing.

He waited. She looked past him, thinking, and it seemed important to her, as if she were trying to recall the man’s name, not the name of the tool he was carrying.

Finally he said, “Crowbar.”

“Crowbar,” she said, thinking about it, seeing it again.

Keith thought he’d also seen the man, going up past him, a guy in a hard hat and wearing a workbelt with tools and flash-lights and carrying a crowbar, bent end first.

No reason ever to remember this if she hadn’t mentioned it. Means nothing, he thought. But then it did. Whatever had happened to the man was situated outside the fact that they’d both seen him, at different points in the march down, but it was important, somehow, in some indeterminate way, that he’d been carried in these crossing memories, brought down out of the tower and into this room.

He leaned forward, elbow braced on the coffee table, mouth pressed against his hand, and he watched her.

“We just kept going down. Dark, light, dark again. I feel like I’m still on the stairs. I wanted my mother. If I live to be a hundred I’ll still be on the stairs. It took so long it was almost normal in a way. We couldn’t run so it wasn’t some kind of running frenzy. We were stuck together. I wanted my mother. This ain’t no earthquake, making ten million dollars a year.”

They were moving out of the worst of the smoke now and this is when she saw the dog, a blind man and a guide dog, not far ahead, and it was like something out of the Bible, she thought. They seemed so calm. They seemed to spread calm, she thought. The dog was like some totally calming thing. They believed in the dog.

“We, finally, I don’t know how long we had to wait, it was dark wherever we were but then we came out and passed some windows and saw the plaza where it’s a bombed-out city, things on fire, we saw bodies, we saw clothes, pieces of metal like metal parts, things just scattered. This was like two seconds. I looked two seconds and looked away and then we went through the underground concourse and up into the street.”

This was all she said for a time. He went over to the chair by the door and found her cigarettes in the briefcase and took one out of the pack and put it in his mouth and then found the lighter.

“In the smoke all I could see was those stripes on the firemen’s coats, the bright stripes, and then some people in the rubble, all that steel and glass, just injured people sitting dreaming, they were like dreamers bleeding.”

She turned and looked at him. He lit the cigarette and walked over and handed it to her. She took a drag, closing her eyes and exhaling. When she looked again, he was back across the table, seated on the sofa, watching her.

“Light one up for yourself,” she said.

“Not for me, no.”

“You quit.”

“Long time ago. When I thought I was an athlete,” he said. “But blow some my way. That would be nice.”

After a while she began to speak again. But he didn’t know where she was, somewhere back near the beginning, he thought.

He thought, Wet all through. She was wet all through.

There were people everywhere pushing into the stairwell. She tried to recall things and faces, moments that might explain something or reveal something. She believed in the guide dog. The dog would lead them all to safety.

She was going through it again and he was ready to listen again. He listened carefully, noting every detail, trying to find himself in the crowd.

Her mother had said it clearly, years earlier.

“There’s a certain man, an archetype, he’s a model of dependability for his male friends, all the things a friend should be, an ally and confidant, lends money, gives advice, loyal and so on, but sheer hell on women. Living breathing hell. The closer a woman gets, the clearer it becomes to him that she is not one of his male friends. And the more awful it becomes for her. This is Keith. This is the man you’re going to marry.”

This is the man she marries.

He was a hovering presence now. There drifted through the rooms a sense of someone who has earned respectful attention. He was not quite returned to his body yet. Even the program of exercises he did for his postsurgical wrist seemed a little detached, four times a day, an odd set of extensions and flexions that resembled prayer in some remote northern province, among a repressed people, with periodic applications of ice. He spent time with Justin, taking him to school and picking him up, advising on homework. He wore a splint for a while, then stopped. He took the kid to the park to play catch. The kid could toss a baseball all day and be purely and inexhaustibly happy, unmarked by sin, anyone’s, down the ages. Throw and catch. She watched them in a field not far from the museum, into the sinking sun. When Keith did a kind of ball trick, using the right hand, the undamaged one, to flip the ball onto the back of the hand and then jerk the arm forward propelling the ball backwards along the forearm before knocking it into the air with his elbow and then catching it backhanded, she saw a man she’d never known before.

She stopped at Harold Apter’s office in the East 80s on her way to 116th Street. She did this periodically, dropping off photocopies of her group’s written pieces and discussing their situations in general. This is where Dr. Apter saw people for consultation, Alzheimer patients and others.

Apter was a slight man with frizzed hair who seemed formulated to say funny things but never did. They talked about the fade of Rosellen S., the aloof bearing of Curtis B. She told him she would like to increase the frequency of the meetings to twice a week. He told her this would be a mistake.

“From this point on, you understand, it’s all about loss. We’re dealing inevitably here with diminishing returns. Their situation will grow increasingly delicate. These encounters need space around them. You don’t want them to feel there’s an urgency to write everything, say everything before it’s too late. You want them to look forward to this, not feel pressed or threatened. The writing is sweet music up to a point. Then other things will take over.”

He looked at her searchingly.

“What I’m saying is simple. This is for them,” he said.

“What do you mean?”

“It’s theirs,” he said. “Don’t make it yours.”

They wrote about the planes. They wrote about where they were when it happened. They wrote about people they knew who were in the towers, or nearby, and they wrote about God.

How could God let this happen? Where was God when this happened?

Benny T. was glad he was not a man of faith because he would lose it after this.

I am closer to God than ever, Rosellen wrote.

This is the devil. This is hell. All that fire and pain. Never mind God. This is hell.

Omar H. was afraid to go out on the street in the days after. They were looking at him, he thought.

I didn’t see them holding hands. I wanted to see that, Rosellen wrote.

Carmen G. wanted to know whether everything that happens to us has to be part of God’s plan.

I am closer to God than ever, am closer, will be closer, shall be closer.

Eugene A., in a rare appearance, wrote that God knows things we don’t know.

Ashes and bones. That’s what’s left of God’s plan.

But when the towers fell, Omar wrote.

I keep hearing they were holding hands when they jumped.

If God let this happen, with the planes, then did God make me cut my finger when I was slicing bread this morning?

They wrote and then read what they’d written, each in turn, and there were remarks and then exchanges and then monologues.

“Show us the finger,” Benny said. “We want to kiss it.”

Lianne encouraged them to speak and argue. She wanted to hear everything, the things everybody said, ordinary things, and the naked statements of belief, and the depth of feeling, the passion that saturated the room. She needed these men and women. Dr. Apter’s comment disturbed her because there was truth in it. She needed these people. It was possible that the group meant more to her than it did to the members. There was something precious here, something that seeps and bleeds. These people were the living breath of the thing that killed her father.

“God says something happens, then it happens.”

“I don’t respect God no more, after this.”

“We sit and listen and God tells us or doesn’t.”

“I was walking down the street to get my hair cut. Somebody comes running.”

“I was on the crapper. I hated myself later. People said where were you when it happened. I didn’t tell them where I was.”

“But you remember to tell us. That’s beautiful, Benny.”

They interrupted, gestured, changed the subject, talked over each other, shut their eyes in thought or puzzlement or in dismal re-experience of the event itself.

“What about the people God saved? Are they better people than the ones who died?”

“It’s not ours to ask. We don’t ask.”

“A million babies die in Africa and we can’t ask.”

“I thought it was war. I thought it was war,” Anna said. “I stayed inside and lit a candle. It’s the Chinese, my sister said, who she never trusted with the bomb.”

Lianne struggled with the idea of God. She was taught to believe that religion makes people compliant. This is the purpose of religion, to return people to a childlike state. Awe and submission, her mother said. This is why religion speaks so powerfully in laws, rituals and punishments. And it speaks beautifully as well, inspiring music and art, elevating consciousness in some, reducing it in others. People fall into trances, people literally go to the ground, people crawl great distances or march in crowds stabbing themselves and whipping themselves. And other people, the rest of us, maybe we’re rocked more gently, joined to something deep in the soul. Powerful and beautiful, her mother said. We want to transcend, we want to pass beyond the limits of safe understanding, and what better way to do it than through make-believe.

Eugene A. was seventy-seven years old, hair gelled and spiked, a ring in his ear.

“I was scrubbing the sink for once in my life when the phone rings. It’s my ex-wife,” he said, “that I haven’t talked to in like seventeen years, is she even alive or dead, calling from somewhere I can’t even pronounce it, in Florida. I say what. She says never mind what. That same voice of no respect. She says turn on TV.”