When he appeared at the door it was not possible, a man come out of an ash storm, all blood and slag, reeking of burnt matter, with pinpoint glints of slivered glass in his face. He looked immense, in the doorway, with a gaze that had no focus in it. He carried a briefcase and stood slowly nodding. She thought he might be in shock but didn’t know what this meant in precise terms, medical terms. He walked past her toward the kitchen and she tried calling her doctor, then 911, then the nearest hospital, but all she heard was the drone of overloaded lines. She turned off the TV set, not sure why, protecting him from the news he’d just walked out of, that’s why, and then went into the kitchen. He was sitting at the table and she poured him a glass of water and told him that Justin was with his grandmother, released early from school and also being protected from the news, at least as it concerned his father.
He said, “Everybody’s giving me water.”
She thought he could not have traveled all this distance or even climbed the stairs if he’d suffered serious injury, grievous blood loss.
Then he said something else. The briefcase sat beside the table like something yanked out of a landfill. He said there was a shirt coming down out of the sky.
She poured water on a dishcloth and wiped dust and ash from his hands, face and head, careful not to disturb the glass fragments. There was more blood than she’d realized at first and then she began to realize something else, that his cuts and abrasions were not severe enough or numerous enough to account for all this blood. It was not his blood. Most of it came from somebody else.
The windows were open so Florence could smoke. They sat where they’d sat last time, one on either side of the coffee table, positioned diagonally.
“I gave myself a year,” he said.
“An actor. I can see you as an actor.”
“Acting student. Never got beyond the student part.”
“Because there’s something about you, in the way you hold a space. I’m not sure what that means.”
“Sounds good.”
“I think I heard it somewhere. What does it mean?” she said.
“Gave myself a year. I thought it would be interesting. Cut it to six months. I thought, What else can I do? I played two sports in college. That was over. Six months, what the hell. Cut it to four, was gone in two.”
She studied him, she sat there and stared, and there was something about this, such frank and innocent openness of manner that he stopped feeling unnerved after a while. She looked, they talked, here in a room he would not have been able to describe a minute after leaving.
“Didn’t work out. Things don’t work out,” she said. “What did you do?”
“Went to law school.”
She whispered, “Why?”
“What else? Where else?”
She sat back and put the cigarette to her lips, thinking about something. There were small brown specks on her face spilling from the lower forehead down onto the bridge of the nose.
“You’re married, I guess. Not that I care.”
“Yes, I am.”
“I don’t care,” she said, and it was the first time he’d heard resentment in her voice.
“We were apart, now we’re back, or beginning to be back.”
“Of course,” she said.
This was the second time he’d walked across the park. He knew why he was here but could not have explained it to someone and did not have to explain it to her. It didn’t matter whether they spoke or not. It would be fine, not speaking, breathing the same air, or she speaks, he listens, or day is night.
She said, “I went to St. Paul ’s yesterday. I wanted to be with people, down there in particular. I knew there would be people there. I looked at the flowers and the personal things people left, the homemade memorials. I didn’t look at the photographs of the missing. I couldn’t do that. I sat in the chapel for an hour and people came in and prayed or just walked around, only looking, reading the marble plaques. In memory of, in memory of. Rescue workers came in, three of them, and I tried not to stare, and then two more came in.”
She’d been married for a brief time, ten years earlier, a mistake so fleeting it left few marks. That’s what she said. The man died some months after the marriage ended, in a car crash, and his mother blamed Florence. That was the mark it left.
“I say to myself dying is ordinary.”
“Not when it’s you. Not when it’s someone you know.”
“I’m not saying we shouldn’t grieve. Just, why don’t we put it in God’s hands?” she said. “Why haven’t we learned this, after all the evidence of all the dead? We’re supposed to believe in God but then why don’t we obey the laws of God’s universe, which teach us how small we are and where we’re all going to end up?”
“Can’t be that simple.”
“Those men who did this thing. They’re anti everything we stand for. But they believe in God,” she said.
“Whose God? Which God? I don’t even know what it means, to believe in God. I never think about it.”
“Never think about it.”
“Does that upset you?”
“It frightens me,” she said. “I’ve always felt the presence of God. I talk to God sometimes. I don’t have to be in church to talk to God. I go to church but not, you know, week in, week out-what’s the word I’m thinking of?”
“Religiously,” he said.
He could make her laugh. She seemed to look into him when she laughed, eyes alive, seeing something he could not guess at. There was an element in Florence that was always close to some emotional distress, a memory of bearing injury or sustaining loss, possibly lifelong, and the laughter was a kind of shedding, a physical deliverance from old woe, dead skin, if only for a moment.
There was music coming from a back room, something classical and familiar but he didn’t know the name of the piece or the composer. He never knew these things. They drank tea and talked. She talked about the tower, going over it again, claustrophobically, the smoke, the fold of bodies, and he understood that they could talk about these things only with each other, in minute and dullest detail, but it would never be dull or too detailed because it was inside them now and because he needed to hear what he’d lost in the tracings of memory. This was their pitch of delirium, the dazed reality they’d shared in the stairwells, the deep shafts of spiraling men and women.
The talk continued, touching on marriage, friendship, the future. He was an amateur at this but spoke willingly enough. Mostly he listened.
“What we carry. This is the story in the end,” she said remotely.
His car hit a wall. His mother blamed Florence because if they’d still been married he wouldn’t have been in that car on that road and since she was the one who’d ended the marriage the blame was hers, the mark was hers.
“He was an older man by seventeen years. It sounds so tragic. An older man. He had an engineering degree but worked in the post office.”
“He drank.”
“Yes.”
“He was drinking the night of the crash.”
“Yes. It was afternoon. Broad daylight. No other cars involved.”
He told her it was time for him to leave.
“Of course. You have to. That’s the way these things happen. Everybody knows that.”
She seemed to be blaming him for this, the fact of leaving, the fact of marrying, the thoughtless gesture of reuniting, and at the same time did not seem to be talking to him at all. She was talking to the room, to herself, he thought, talking back in time to some version of herself, a person who might confirm the grim familiarity of the moment. She wanted her feelings to register, officially, and needed to say the actual words, if not necessarily to him.
But he remained in the chair.
He said, “What is that music?”
“I think I need to make it go away. It’s like movie music in those old movies when the man and woman run through the heather.”
“Tell the truth. You love those movies.”
“I love the music too. But only when it’s playing in the movie.”
She looked at him and got up. She went past the front door and down the hall. She was plain except when she laughed. She was someone on the subway. She wore loose skirts and plain shoes and was full-figured and maybe a little clumsy but when she laughed there was a flare in nature, an unfolding of something half hidden and dazzling.
Light-skinned black woman. One of those odd embodyings of doubtful language and unwavering race but the only words that meant anything to him were the ones she’d spoken and would speak.
She talked to God. Maybe Lianne had these conversations as well. He wasn’t sure. Or long troubled monologues. Or shy thoughts. When she raised the subject or spoke the name he went blank. The matter was too abstract. Here, with a woman he barely knew, the matter seemed unavoidable, and other matters, other questions.
He heard the music change to something that had a buzz and drive, voices in Portuguese rapping, singing, whistling, with guitars and drums behind them, manic saxophones.
First she’d looked at him and then he’d watched her walk past the door and down the hall and now he knew that he was supposed to follow.
She stood by the window, clapping her hands to the music. It was a small bedroom, without a chair, and he sat on the floor and watched her.
“I’ve never been to Brazil,” she said. “A place I think about sometimes.”
“I’m talking to somebody. Very early in the talks. About a job involving Brazilian investors. I may need some Portuguese.”
“We all need some Portuguese. We all need to go to Brazil. This is the disc that was in the player that you carried out of there.”
He said, “Go ahead.”
“What?”
“Dance.”
“What?”
“Dance,” he said. “You want to dance. I want to watch.”
She stepped out of her shoes and began to dance, clapping hands softly to the beat and beginning to move toward him. She reached out a hand and he shook his head, smiling, and pushed back toward the wall. She was not practiced at this. This was not something she’d allow herself to do alone, he thought, or with someone else, or for someone else, not until now. She moved back across the room, seeming to lose herself in the music, eyes closed. She danced in slow motion for a time, no longer clapping, arms up and away from her body, nearly trancelike, and began to whirl in place, ever slower, facing him now, mouth open, eyes coming open.
Sitting there, watching, he began to crawl out of his clothes.
It happened to Rosellen S., an elemental fear out of deepest childhood. She could not remember where she lived. She stood alone on a corner near the elevated tracks, becoming desperate, separated from everything. She looked for a storefront, a street sign that might give her a clue. The world was receding, the simplest recognitions. She began to lose her sense of clarity, of distinctness. She was not lost so much as falling, growing fainter. Nothing lay around her but silence and distance. She wandered back the way she’d come, or thought she’d come, and went into a building and stood in the entranceway, listening. She followed the sound of voices and came to a room where a dozen people sat reading books, or one book, the Bible. When they saw her, they stopped reciting and waited. She tried to tell them what was wrong and one of them looked in her handbag and found numbers to call and finally got someone, a sister in Brooklyn, it turned out, listed as Billie, to come to East Harlem and take Rosellen home.
Lianne learned this from Dr. Apter the day after it happened. She’d seen the slow waning, over months. Rosellen still laughed at times, irony intact, a small woman of delicate features and chestnut skin. They approached what was impending, each of them, with a little space remaining, at this point, to stand and watch it happen.
Benny T. said he had trouble some mornings getting his pants on. Carmen said, “That’s better than off.” She said, “Long as you can get them off, sweetheart, you’re the original sexy Benny.” He laughed and stomped a little, battering himself on the head for effect, and said it wasn’t really that kind of problem. He could not convince himself that the pants were on right. He put them on, took them off. He made certain the zipper was in front. He checked the length in the mirror, cuffs more or less on shoetops, except there were no cuffs. He remembered cuffs. These pants had cuffs yesterday so how come not today.
He said he knew how this sounded. It sounded peculiar to him too. He used this word, peculiar, avoiding more expressive terms. But when it was happening, he said, he could not get outside it. He was in a mind and body that were not his, looking at the fit. The pants did not seem to fit right. He took them off and put them on. He shook them out. He looked inside them. He began to think they were someone else’s pants, in his house, draped over his chair.
They waited for Carmen to say something. Lianne waited for her to mention the fact that Benny wasn’t married. Good thing you’re not married, Benny, with some guy’s pants on your chair. Your wife would have some explaining.
But Carmen said nothing this time.
Omar H. talked about the trip uptown. He was the only member of the group who lived out of the area, on the Lower East Side, and there was the subway, and the plastic card he had to swipe through the slot, swipe six times, change turnstiles,
PLEASE SWIPE AGAIN, and the long ride uptown, and the time he landed somewhere on a raw corner in the Bronx, not knowing what had happened to the missing station stops.
Curtis B. could not find his wristwatch. When he found it, finally, in the medicine cabinet, he could not seem to attach it to his wrist. There it was, the watch. He said this gravely. There it was, in my right hand. But the right hand could not seem to find its way to the left wrist. There was a spatial void, or a visual gap, a rift in his field of vision, and it took him some time to make the connection, hand to wrist, pointed end of wristband into buckle. To Curtis this was a moral flaw, a sin of self-betrayal. Once at an earlier session he read a piece he’d written about an event fifty years earlier when he killed a man with a broken bottle in a bar fight, gouging the face and eyes and then severing the jugular. He looked up from the page when he spoke these words: severing the jugular.
He used the same deliberate tone, dark and fated, in his account of the lost watch.
Coming down the stairs she said something and it was only seconds after Keith did what he did that she made the connection. He kicked the door they were walking past. He stopped walking, eased back and kicked hard, striking the door with the bottom of his shoe.
Once she made the connection between what she’d said and what he did, the first thing she understood was that his anger was not directed at the music or at the woman who played the music. It was directed at her, for the remark, the complaint she’d made, the persistence of it, the vexing repetition.
The second thing she understood was that there was no anger. He was completely calm. He was playing out an emotion, hers, on her behalf, to her discredit. It was almost, she thought, a little Zenlike, a gesture to shock and stimulate one’s meditations or reverse their direction.
No one came to the door. The music did not stop, a slowly circling figure of reeds and drums. They looked at each other and laughed, hard and loud, husband and wife, walking down the stairs and out the front door.
The poker games were at Keith’s place, where the poker table was. There were six players, the regulars, Wednesday nights, the business writer, the adman, the mortgage broker and so on, men rolling their shoulders, hoisting their balls, ready to sit and play, game-faced, testing the forces that govern events.
In the beginning they played poker in a number of shapes and variations but over time they began to reduce the dealer’s options. The banning of certain games started as a joke in the name of tradition and self-discipline but became effective over time, with arguments made against the shabbier aberrations. Finally the senior player, Dockery, pushing fifty, advocated straight poker only, the classical retro-format, five-card draw, five-card stud, seven-card stud, and with the shrinking of choice came the raising of stakes, which intensified the ceremony of check-writing for the long night’s losers.
They played each hand in a glazed frenzy. All the action was somewhere behind the eyes, in naive expectation and calculated deceit. Each man tried to entrap the others and fix limits to his own false dreams, the bond trader, the lawyer, the other lawyer, and these games were the funneled essence, the clear and intimate extract of their daytime initiatives. The cards skimmed across the green baize surface of the round table. They used intuition and cold-war risk analysis. They used cunning and blind luck. They waited for the prescient moment, the time to make the bet based on the card they knew was coming. Felt the queen and there it was. They tossed in the chips and watched the eyes across the table. They regressed to preliterate folkways, petitioning the dead. There were elements of healthy challenge and outright mockery. There were elements of one’s intent to shred the other’s gauzy manhood.
Hovanis, dead now, decided at some point that they didn’t need seven-card stud. The sheer number of cards and odds and options seemed excessive and the others laughed and made the rule, reducing the dealer’s choice to five-card stud and five-card draw.
There was a corresponding elevation of stakes.
Then someone raised the question of food. This was a joke. There was food in casual platters on a counter in the kitchen. How disciplined can we be, Demetrius said, if we are taking time to leave the table and stuff our jaws with chemically treated breads, meats and cheeses. This was a joke they took seriously because leaving the table ought to be allowed only as a matter of severest bladder-racked urgency or the kind of running bad luck that requires a player to stand at the window looking out on the deep abiding tide of night.
So food was out. No food. They dealt the cards, they called or folded. Then they talked about liquor. They knew how stupid this was but they wondered, two or three of them, whether it might be advisable to narrow their intake to darkish liquors, to scotch, bourbon, brandy, the manlier tones and deeper and more intense distillations. No gin, no vodka, no wan liqueurs.
They enjoyed doing this, most of them. They liked creating a structure out of willful trivia. But not Terry Cheng, who played the sweetest game of poker, who played online at times for twenty hours straight. Terry Cheng said they were shallow people leading giddy lives.
Then someone made the point that five-card draw was even more permissive than seven-card stud and they wondered why they hadn’t thought of this sooner, with the player’s capacity to discard and draw as many as three cards, or to stand pat, or to fold if he sees fit, and they agreed to limit themselves to one game only, five-card stud, and the large sums they bet, the bright chips in stacks, the bluffs and counterbluffs, the elaborate curses and baleful stares, the dusky liquor in squat glasses, the cigar smoke collecting in stratiform patterns, the massive silent self-reproaches-these free-flowing energies and gestures were posed against the single counterforce, the fact of self-imposed restriction, all the more unyielding for being ordered from within.
No food. Food was out. No gin or vodka. No beer that was not dark. They issued a mandate against all beer that was not dark and against all dark beer that was not Beck’s Dark. They did this because Keith told them a story he’d heard about a cemetery in Germany, in Cologne, where four good friends, cardplayers in a game that had lasted four or five decades, were buried in the configuration in which they’d been seated, invariably, at the card table, with two of the gravestones facing the other two, each player in his time-honored place.
They loved this story. It was a beautiful story about friendship and the transcendent effects of unremarkable habit. It made them reverent and thoughtful and one of the things they thought was that they had to cite Beck’s Dark as the only dark because the beer was German and so were the cardplayers in the story.
Somebody wanted to ban sports talk. They banned sports talk, television talk, movie titles. Keith thought this was getting stupid. Rules are good, they replied, and the stupider the better. Rumsey the fartmeister, dead now, wanted to revoke all the prohibitions. Cigarettes were not prohibited. There was one cigarette smoker only and he was allowed to smoke all the cigarettes he wanted if he didn’t mind appearing helpless and defective. Most of the others smoked cigars and felt expansive, grand in scale, sipping scotch or bourbon, finding synonyms for banned words such as wet and dry.
You are not serious people, said Terry Cheng. He said, Get serious or die.
The dealer skimmed the cards over the green baize, never failing to announce the name of the game, five-card stud, even though it was the only game they now played. The small dry irony of these announcements faded after a time and the words became a proud ritual, formal and indispensable, each dealer in turn, five-card stud, and they loved doing this, straight-faced, because where else would they encounter the kind of mellow tradition exemplified by the needless utterance of a few archaic words.
They played it safe and regretted it, took risks and lost, fell into states of lunar gloom. But there were always things to ban and rules to make.
Then one night it all fell apart. Somebody got hungry and demanded food. Somebody else pounded the table and said, Food food. This became a chant that filled the room. They rescinded the ban on food and demanded Polish vodka, some of them. They wanted pale spirits chilled in the freezer and served neat in short frosted tumblers. Other prohibitions fell, banned words were reinstated. They bet and raised, ate and drank, and from that point on resumed playing such games as high-low, acey-deucy, Chicago, Omaha, Texas hold ’em, anaconda and a couple of other deviant strains in poker’s line of ancestry. But they missed, each dealer in turn, calling out the name of one game, five-card stud, to the exclusion of all other games, and they tried not to wonder what four other players would think of them, in this wallow of wild-man poker, tombstone to tombstone in Cologne.
At dinner they talked about a trip they might take to Utah during school break, to high valleys and clean winds, to breathable air, skiable slopes, and the kid sat with a biscuit in his fist, looking at the food on his plate.
“What do you think? Utah. Say it. Utah. A big leap forward from a sled in the park.”
He looked at the dinner his father had prepared, wild salmon, gummy brown rice.
“He has nothing to say. He has passed beyond monosyllables,” Keith said. “Remember when he spoke only in monosyllables. That lasted a while.”
“Longer than I expected,” she said.
“He has passed beyond that. He has gone to the next stage of his development.”
“His spiritual development,” she said.
“Total silence.”
“Utter and unbreakable silence.”
“ Utah is the place for silent men. He’ll live in the mountains.”
“He’ll live in a cave with insects and bats.”
The kid slowly raised his head from the plate, looking at his father or into his father’s clavicle, x-raying the slender bones beneath his father’s shirt.
“How do you know the monosyllables were really a school thing? Maybe not,” he said. “Because maybe it was Bill Lawton. Because maybe Bill Lawton talks in monosyllables.”
Lianne sat back, shocked by this, by the name itself, hearing him say it.
“I thought Bill Lawton was a secret,” Keith said. “Between the Siblings and you. And between you and me.”
“You probably already told her. She probably already knows.”
Keith looked at her and she tried to signal him that no, she hadn’t said a thing about Bill Lawton. She gave him a clenched look, eyes narrowed, lips tight, trying to drill the look into his forebrain, like no.
“Nobody told anybody anything,” Keith said. “Eat your fish.”
The kid resumed looking at the plate.
“Because he does talk in monosyllables.”
“All right. What does he say?”
There was no response. She tried to imagine what he was thinking. His father was back home now, living here, sleeping here, more or less as before, and he’s thinking the man can’t be trusted, can he? He sees the man as a figure that looms over the household, the man who went away once and came back and told the woman, who sleeps in the same bed as the man, all about Bill Lawton, so how can he be trusted to be here tomorrow.
If your child thinks you’re guilty of something, right or wrong, then you’re guilty. And it happens he was right.
“He says things that nobody knows but the Siblings and me.”
“Tell us one of these things. In monosyllables,” Keith said with an edge in his voice.
“No thank you.”
“Is that what he says or is that what you say?”
“The whole point,” he said, snapping the words clearly and defiantly, “is that he says things about the planes. We know they’re coming because he says they are. But that’s all I’m allowed to say. He says this time the towers will fall.”
“The towers are down. You know this,” she said softly.
“This time coming, he says, they’ll really come down.”
They talked to him. They tried to make gentle sense. She couldn’t locate the menace she felt, listening to him. His repositioning of events frightened her in an unaccountable way. He was making something better than it really was, the towers still standing, but the time reversal, the darkness of the final thrust, how better becomes worse, these were the elements of a failed fairy tale, eerie enough but without coherence. It was the fairy tale children tell, not the one they listen to, devised by adults, and she changed the subject to Utah. Ski trails and true skies.
He looked into his plate. How different is a fish from a bird? One flies, the other swims. Maybe this is what he was thinking. He wouldn’t eat a bird, would he, a goldfinch or a blue jay. Why should he eat a fish swimming wild in the ocean, caught with ten thousand other fish in a giant net on Channel 27?
One flies, the other swims.
This is what she felt in him, these stubborn thoughts, biscuit in his fist.
Keith walked through the park and came out on West 90th Street and it was strange, what he was seeing down by the community garden and coming toward him, a woman in the middle of the street, on horseback, wearing a yellow hard hat and carrying a riding crop, bobbing above the traffic, and it took him a long moment to understand that horse and rider had come out of a stable somewhere nearby and were headed toward the bridle path in the park.
It was something that belonged to another landscape, something inserted, a conjuring that resembled for the briefest second some half-seen image only half believed in the seeing, when the witness wonders what has happened to the meaning of things, to tree, street, stone, wind, simple words lost in the falling ash.
He used to come home late, looking shiny and a little crazy. This was the period, not long before the separation, when he took the simplest question as a form of hostile interrogation. He seemed to walk in the door waiting for her questions, prepared to stare right through her questions, but she had no interest in saying anything at all. She thought she knew by now. She understood by this time that it wasn’t the drinking, or not that alone, and probably not some sport with a woman. He’d hide it better, she told herself. It was who he was, his native face, without the leveling element, the claims of social code.
Those nights, sometimes, he seemed on the verge of saying something, a sentence fragment, that was all, and it would end everything between them, all discourse, every form of stated arrangement, whatever drifts of love still lingered. He carried that glassy look in his eyes and a moist smile across his mouth, a dare to himself, boyish and horrible. But he did not put into words whatever it was that lay there, something so surely and recklessly cruel that it scared her, spoken or not. The look scared her, the body slant. He walked through the apartment, bent slightly to one side, a twisted guilt in his smile, ready to break up a table and burn it so he could take out his dick and piss on the flames.
They sat in a taxi going downtown and began to clutch each other, kissing and groping. She said, in urgent murmurs, It’s a movie, it’s a movie. At traffic lights people crossing the street stopped to watch, two or three, seeming briefly to float above the windows, and sometimes only one. The others just crossed, who didn’t give a damn.
In the Indian restaurant the man at the podium said, We do not seat incomplete tables.
She asked him one night about the friends he’d lost. He spoke about them, Rumsey and Hovanis, and the one who was badly burned, whose name she’d forgotten. She’d met one of them, Rumsey, she thought, briefly, somewhere. He spoke only about their qualities, their personalities, or married or single, or children or not, and this was enough. She didn’t want to hear more.
It was still there, more often than not, music on the stairs.
There was a job offer he’d probably accept, drafting contracts of sale on behalf of Brazilian investors who were engaged in real-estate transactions in New York. He made it sound like a ride on a hang glider, completely wind-assisted.
In the beginning she washed his clothes in a separate load. She had no idea why she did this. It was like he was dead.
She listened to what he said and let him know she was listening, mind and body, because listening is what would save them this time, keep them from falling into distortion and rancor.
The easy names were the ones she forgot. But this one wasn’t easy and it was like the swaggering name of some football player from Alabama and that’s how she remembered it, Demetrius, badly burned in the other tower, the south tower.
When she asked him about the briefcase in the closet, why it was there one day and gone the next, he said he’d actually returned it to the owner because it wasn’t his and he didn’t know why he’d taken it out of the building.
What was ordinary was not more ordinary than usual, or less.
It was the word actually that made her think about what he said concerning the briefcase, although in fact there was nothing to think about, even if this was the word he’d used so often, more or less superfluously, those earlier years, when he was lying to her, or baiting her, or even effecting some minor sleight.
This was the man who would not submit to her need for probing intimacy, overintimacy, the urge to ask, examine, delve, draw things out, trade secrets, tell everything. It was a need that had the body in it, hands, feet, genitals, scummy odors, clotted dirt, even if it was all talk or sleepy murmur. She wanted to absorb everything, childlike, the dust of stray sensation, whatever she could breathe in from other people’s pores. She used to think she was other people. Other people have truer lives.
It’s a movie, she kept saying, his hand in her pants, saying it, a moan in the shape of words, and at traffic lights people watched, a few, and the driver watched, lights or not, eyes gliding across the rearview mirror.
But then she might be wrong about what was ordinary. Maybe nothing was. Maybe there was a deep fold in the grain of things, the way things pass through the mind, the way time swings in the mind, which is the only place it meaningfully exists.
He listened to language tapes labeled South American Portuguese and practiced on the kid. He said, I speak only little Portuguese, saying this in English, with a Latin accent, and Justin tried not to smile.
She read newspaper profiles of the dead, every one that was printed. Not to read them, every one, was an offense, a violation of responsibility and trust. But she also read them because she had to, out of some need she did not try to interpret.
After the first time they made love he was in the bathroom, at first light, and she got up to dress for her morning run but then pressed herself naked to the full-length mirror, face turned, hands raised to roughly head level. She pressed her body to the glass, eyes shut, and stayed for a long moment, nearly collapsed against the cool surface, abandoning herself to it. Then she put on her shorts and top and was lacing her shoes when he came out of the bathroom, clean-shaven, and saw the fogged marks of her face, hands, breasts and thighs stamped on the mirror.
He sat alongside the table, left forearm placed along the near edge, hand dangling from the adjoining edge. He worked on the hand shapes, the bend of the wrist toward the floor, the bend of the wrist toward the ceiling. He used the uninvolved hand to apply pressure to the involved hand.
The wrist was fine, the wrist was normal. He’d thrown away the splint and stopped using the ice. But he sat alongside the table, two or three times a day now, curling the left hand into a gentle fist, forearm flat on the table, thumb raised in certain setups. He did not need the instruction sheet. It was automatic, the wrist extensions, the ulnar deviations, hand raised, forearm flat. He counted the seconds, he counted the repetitions.
There were the mysteries of word and glance but also this, that every time they saw each other there was something tentative at first, a little stilted.
“I see them on the street now and then.”
“Stopped me cold for a moment. A horse,” he said.
“Man on a horse. Woman on a horse. Not something I would think of doing myself,” Florence said. “Give me all your money. Wouldn’t matter. I’m not getting on a horse.”
There was a shyness for a time and then something that eased the mood, a look or a wisecrack or the way she begins to hum, in a parody of social desperation, eyes darting about the room. But the faint discomfort of those early moments, the sense of ill-matched people was not completely dispelled.
“Sometimes six or seven horses single file, going up the street. The riders looking straight ahead,” she said, “like the natives might take offense.”
“I’ll tell you what surprises me.”
“Is it my eyes? Is it my lips?”
“It’s your cat,” he said.
“I don’t have a cat.”
“That’s what surprises me.”
“You think I’m a cat person.”
“I see you with a cat, definitely. There ought to be a cat slipping along the walls.”
He was in the armchair this time and she’d placed a kitchen chair alongside and sat facing him, a hand on his forearm.
“Tell me you’re not taking the job.”
“Have to do it.”
“What happens to our time together?”
“We’ll work it out.”
“I want to blame you for this. But my turn is coming. Looks like the whole company is moving across the river. Permanently. We’ll have a nice view of lower Manhattan. What’s left of it.”
“And you’ll find a place to live somewhere nearby.”
She looked at him.
“Can you mean that? I don’t believe you said that. Do you think I’d put that much space between us?”
“Bridge or tunnel doesn’t matter. It’s hell on earth, that commute.”
“I don’t care. Do you think I care? They’ll resume train service. If they don’t, I’ll drive.”
“Okay.”
“It’s only Jersey.”
“Okay,” he said.
He thought she might cry. He thought this kind of conversation was for other people. People have these conversations all the time, he thought, in rooms like this one, sitting, looking.
Then she said, “You saved my life. Don’t you know that?”
He sat back, looking at her.
“I saved your briefcase.”
And waited for her to laugh.
“I can’t explain it but no, you saved my life. After what happened, so many gone, friends gone, people I worked with, I was nearly gone, nearly dead, in another way. I couldn’t see people, talk to people, go from here to there without forcing myself up off the chair. Then you walked in the door. I kept calling the number of a friend, missing, she’s one of the photographs on the walls and windows everywhere, Davia, officially missing, I can barely say her name, in the middle of the night, dial the number, let it ring. I was afraid, in the daytime, other people would be there to pick up the phone, somebody who knew something I didn’t want to hear. Then you walked in the door. You ask yourself why you took the briefcase out of the building. That’s why. So you could bring it here. So we could get to know each other. That’s why you took it and that’s why you brought it here, to keep me alive.”
He didn’t believe this but he believed her. She felt it and meant it.
“You ask yourself what the story is that goes with the briefcase. I’m the story,” she said.
The two dark objects, the white bottle, the huddled boxes. Lianne turned away from the painting and saw the room itself as a still life, briefly. Then the human figures appear, Mother and Lover, with Nina still in the armchair, thinking remotely of something, and Martin hunched on the sofa now, facing her.
Finally her mother said, “Architecture, yes, maybe, but coming out of another time entirely, another century. Office towers, no. These shapes are not translatable to modern towers, twin towers. It’s work that rejects that kind of extension or projection. It takes you inward, down and in. That’s what I see there, half buried, something deeper than things or shapes of things.”
Lianne knew, in a pinprick of light, what her mother was going to say.
She said, “It’s all about mortality, isn’t it?”
“Being human,” Lianne said.
“Being human, being mortal. I think these pictures are what I’ll look at when I’ve stopped looking at everything else. I’ll look at bottles and jars. I’ll sit here looking.”
“You’ll need to move the chair a little closer.”
“I’ll push the chair up to the wall. I’ll call the maintenance man and have him push the chair for me. I’ll be too frail to do it myself. I’ll look and I’ll muse. Or I’ll just look. After a while I won’t need the paintings to look at. The paintings will be excess. I’ll look at the wall.”
Lianne crossed to the sofa, where she gave Martin a light poke in the arm.
“What about your walls? What’s on your walls?”
“My walls are bare. Home and office. I keep bare walls,” he said.
“Not completely,” Nina said.
“All right, not completely.”
She was looking at him.
“You tell us to forget God.”
The argument had been here all this time, in the air and on the skin, but the shift in tone was abrupt.
“You tell us this is history.”
Nina looked at him, she stared hard at Martin, her voice marked by accusation.
“But we can’t forget God. They invoke God constantly. This is their oldest source, their oldest word. Yes, there’s something else but it’s not history or economics. It’s what men feel. It’s the thing that happens among men, the blood that happens when an idea begins to travel, whatever’s behind it, whatever blind force or blunt force or violent need. How convenient it is to find a system of belief that justifies these feelings and these killings.”
“But the system doesn’t justify this. Islam renounces this,” he said.
“If you call it God, then it’s God. God is whatever God allows.”
“Don’t you realize how bizarre that is? Don’t you see what you’re denying? You’re denying all human grievance against others, every force of history that places people in conflict.”
“We’re talking about these people, here and now. It’s a misplaced grievance. It’s a viral infection. A virus reproduces itself outside history.”
He sat hunched and peering, leaning toward her now.
“First they kill you, then you try to understand them. Maybe, eventually, you’ll learn their names. But they have to kill you first.”
It went on for a time and Lianne listened, disturbed by the fervor in their voices. Martin sat wrapped in argument, one hand gripping the other, and he spoke about lost lands, failed states, foreign intervention, money, empire, oil, the narcissistic heart of the West, and she wondered how he did the work he did, made the living he made, moving art, taking profit. Then there were the bare walls. She wondered about that.
Nina said, “I’m going to smoke a cigarette now.”
This eased the tension in the room, the way she said it, gravely, an announcement and an event suitably consequential, measured to the level of discussion. Martin laughed, coming out of his tight crouch and heading to the kitchen for another beer.
“Where’s my grandson? He’s doing my portrait in crayon.”
“You had a cigarette twenty minutes ago.”
“I’m sitting for my portrait. I need to unwind.”
“He gets out of school in two hours. Keith is going to pick him up.”
“Justin and I. We need to talk about skin color, flesh tones.”
“He likes white.”
“He’s thinking very white. Like paper.”
“He uses bright colors for the eyes, the hair, maybe the mouth. Where we see flesh, he sees white.”
“He’s thinking paper, not flesh. The work is a fact in itself. The subject of the portrait is the paper.”
Martin walked in licking foam from the rim of the glass.
“Does he have a white crayon?”
“He doesn’t need a white crayon. He has white paper,” she said.
He stopped to look at the vintage passport photos on the south wall, stained with age, and Nina watched him.
“So beautiful and so dignified,” she said, “those people and those photographs. I’ve just renewed my passport. Ten years come and gone, like a sip of tea. I’ve never cared much about how I look in photographs. Not the way some people do. But this photograph scares me.”
“Where are you going?” Lianne said.
“I don’t have to go anywhere to own a passport.”
Martin came around to her chair and stood behind it, leaning over to speak softly.
“You should go somewhere. An extended trip, when we get back from Connecticut. No one is traveling now. You should think about this.”
“Not a good idea.”
“Far away,” he said.
“Far away.”
“ Cambodia. Before the jungle overtakes what remains. I’ll go with you if you like.”
Her mother smoked a cigarette like a woman in the 1940s, in a gangster film, all nervous urgency, in black and white.
“I look at the face in the passport photo. Who is that woman?”
“I lift my head from the washbasin,” Martin said.
“Who is that man? You think you see yourself in the mirror. But that’s not you. That’s not what you look like. That’s not the literal face, if there is such a thing, ever. That’s the composite face. That’s the face in transition.”
“Don’t tell me this.”
“What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.”
“I don’t want to hear this,” he said.
“What we see is the living truth. The mirror softens the effect by submerging the actual face. Your face is your life. But your face is also submerged in your life. That’s why you don’t see it. Only other people see it. And the camera of course.”
He smiled into his glass. Nina put out her cigarette, barely smoked, waving away a trail of smeary mist.
“Then there’s the beard,” Lianne said.
“The beard helps bury the face.”
“It’s not much of a beard.”
“But that’s the art of it,” Nina said.
“The art of looking unkempt.”
“Unkempt but deeply sensitive.”
“This is American kidding. Am I right?” he said.
“The beard’s a nice device.”
“He speaks to it,” Nina said. “Every morning, in the mirror.”
“What does he say?”
“He speaks in German. The beard is German.”
“I am flattered, right?” he said. “To be the subject of such kidding.”
“The nose is Austro-Hungarian.”
He leaned toward Nina, still standing behind her, touching the back of his hand to her face. Then he took the empty glass to the kitchen and the two women sat quietly for a moment. Lianne wanted to go home and sleep. Her mother wanted to sleep, she wanted to sleep. She wanted to go home and talk to Keith for a while and then fall into bed, fall asleep. Talk to Keith or not talk at all. But she wanted him to be there when she got home.
Martin spoke from the far end of the room, surprising them.
“They want their place in the world, their own global union, not ours. It’s an old dead war, you say. But it’s everywhere and it’s rational.”
“Fooled me.”
“Don’t be fooled. Don’t think people will die only for God,” he said.
His cell phone buzzed and he altered his stance, turning toward the wall and seeming to speak into his chest. These fragments of conversation, which Lianne had heard before, from a distance, included English, French and German phrases, depending on the caller, and sometimes a small jeweled syllable such as Braque or Johns.
He finished quickly and put the phone away.
“Travel, yes, it’s a thing you ought to consider,” he said. “Get your knee back to normal and we’ll go, quite seriously.”
“Far away.”
“Far away.”
“Ruins,” she said.
“Ruins.”
“We have our own ruins. But I don’t think I want to see them.”
He moved along the wall toward the door.
“But that’s why you built the towers, isn’t it? Weren’t the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You build a thing like that so you can see it come down. The provocation is obvious. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice? It’s a fantasy, so why not do it twice? You are saying, Here it is, bring it down.”
Then he opened the door and was gone.
He watched poker on television, pained faces in a casino complex in the desert. He watched without interest. It wasn’t poker, it was television. Justin came in and watched with him and he outlined the game to the kid, in snatches, as the players paused and raised and the strategies unfolded. Then Lianne came in and sat on the floor, watching her son. He was seated at a radical slant, barely in contact with the chair and staring helplessly into the glow, a victim of alien abduction.
She looked at the screen, faces in close-up. The game itself faded into anesthesia, the tedium of a hundred thousand dollars won or lost on the flip of a card. It meant nothing. It was outside her interest or sympathy. But the players were interesting. She watched the players, they drew her in, deadpan, drowsy, slouched, men in misfortune, she thought, making a leap to Kierkegaard, somehow, and recalling the long nights she’d spent with her head in a text. She watched the screen and imagined a northern bleakness, faces misplaced in the desert. Wasn’t there a soul struggle, a sense of continuing dilemma, even in the winner’s little blink of winning?
She said nothing about this to Keith, who would have turned half toward her, gazing into space in mock contemplation, mouth open, eyelids slowly closing and head sinking finally to his chest.
He was thinking of being here, Keith was, and not thinking of it but only feeling it, alive to it. He saw her face reflected in a corner of the screen. He was watching the cardplayers and noting the details of move and countermove but also watching her and feeling this, the sense of being here with them. He had a single-malt scotch in his fist. He heard a car alarm sounding down the street. He reached over and knocked on Justin’s head, knock knock, to alert him to a revelation in the making as the camera located the hole cards of a player who didn’t know he was dead.
“He’s dead,” he told his son, and the kid sat without comment in his makeshift diagonal, half in the chair, half on the floor, semi-mesmerized.
She loved Kierkegaard in his antiqueness, in the glaring drama of the translation she owned, an old anthology of brittle pages with ruled underlinings in red ink, passed down by someone in her mother’s family. This is what she read and re-read into deep night in her dorm room, a drifting mass of papers, clothing, books and tennis gear that she liked to think of as the objective correlative of an overflowing mind. What is an objective correlative? What is cognitive dissonance? She used to know the answers to everything then, it seemed to her now, and she used to love Kierkegaard right down to the spelling of his name. The hard Scandian k’s and lovely doubled a. Her mother sent books all the time, great dense demanding fiction, airtight and relentless, but it defeated her eager need for self-recognition, something closer to mind and heart. She read her Kierkegaard with a feverish expectancy, straight into the Protestant badlands of sickness unto death. Her roommate wrote punk lyrics for an imaginary band called Piss in My Mouth and Lianne envied her creative desperation. Kierkegaard gave her a danger, a sense of spiritual brink. The whole of existence frightens me, he wrote. She saw herself in this sentence. He made her feel that her thrust into the world was not the slender melodrama she sometimes thought it was.
She watched the faces of the cardplayers, then caught her husband’s eye, onscreen, in reflection, watching her, and she smiled. There was the amber drink in his hand. There was the car alarm sounding somewhere along the street, a reassuring feature of familiar things, safe night settling in. She reached over and snatched the kid from his roost. Before he went off to bed, Keith asked him if he wanted a set of poker chips and a deck of cards.
The answer was maybe, which meant yes.
Finally she had to do it and then she did, knocking on the door, hard, and waiting for Elena to open even as voices trembled within, women in soft chorus, singing in Arabic.
Elena had a dog named Marko. Lianne remembered this the instant she hit the door. Marko, she thought, with a k, whatever that might signify.
She hit the door again, this time with the flat of her hand, and then the woman stood there, in tailored jeans and a sequined T-shirt.
“The music. All the time, day and night. And loud.”
Elena stared into her, radiating a lifetime of alertness to insult.
“Don’t you know this? We hear it on the stairs, we hear it in our apartments. All the time, day and fucking night.”
“What is it? Music, that’s all. I like it. It’s beautiful. It gives me peace. I like it, I play it.”
“Why now? This particular time?”
“Now, later, what’s the difference? It’s music.”
“But why now and why so loud?”
“Nobody ever complained. This is the first time I’m hearing loud. It’s not so loud.”
“It’s loud.”
“It’s music. You want to take it personally, what can I tell you?”
Marko came to the door, a hundred and thirty pounds, black, with deep fur and webbed feet.
“Of course it’s personal. Anybody would take it personally. Under these circumstances. There are circumstances. You acknowledge this, don’t you?”
“There are no circumstances. It’s music,” she said. “It gives me peace.”
“But why now?”
“The music has nothing to do with now or then or any other time. And nobody ever said loud.”
“It’s fucking loud.”
“You must be ultrasensitive, which I would never think from hearing the language you use.”
“The whole city is ultrasensitive right now. Where have you been hiding?”
Every time she saw the dog out in the street, half a block away, with Elena carrying a plastic baggie to harvest his shit, she thought Marko with a k.
“It’s music. I like it, I play it. You think it’s so loud, walk faster on your way out the door.”
Lianne put her hand in the woman’s face.
“It gives you peace,” she said.
She twisted her open hand in Elena’s face, under the left eye, and pushed her back into the entranceway.
“It gives you peace,” she said.
Marko backed into the apartment, barking. Lianne mashed the hand into the eye and the woman took a swing at her, a blind right that caught the edge of the door. Lianne knew she was going crazy even as she turned and walked out, slamming the door behind her and hearing the dog bark over the sound of a solo lute from Turkey or Egypt or Kurdistan.
Rumsey sat in a cubicle not far from the north facade, a hockey stick propped in a corner. He and Keith played in pickup games at Chelsea Piers at two in the morning. In warmer months they wandered the streets and plazas at lunchtime, in the rippling shadows of the towers, looking at women, talking about women, telling stories, taking comfort.
Keith separated, living nearby for convenience, eating for convenience, checking the running time of rented movies before he took them out of the store. Rumsey single, in an affair with a married woman, recently arrived from Malaysia, who sold T-shirts and postcards on Canal Street.
Rumsey had compulsions. He admitted this to his friend. He admitted everything, concealed nothing. He counted parked cars in the street, windows in a building a block away. He counted the steps he took, here to there. He memorized things that crossed his consciousness, streams of information, more or less unwillingly. He could recite the personal data of a couple of dozen friends and acquaintances, addresses, phone numbers, birthdays. Months after the file of a random client crossed his desk, he could tell you the man’s mother’s maiden name.
This was not cute stuff. There was an open pathos in the man. At the hockey rink, in poker games, they shared a recognition, he and Keith, an intuitive sense of the other’s methodology as teammate or opponent. He was ordinary in many ways, Rumsey, a broad and squarish body, an even temperament, but he took his ordinariness to the deep end at times. He was forty-one, in a suit and tie, walking through promenades, in waves of beating heat, looking for women in open-toed sandals.
All right. He was compelled to count things including the digits that constitute the foreparts of a woman’s foot. He admitted this. Keith did not laugh. He tried to see it as routine human business, unfathomable, something people do, all of us, in one form or another, in the off moments of living the lives others think we are living. He did not laugh, then he did. But he understood that the fixation was not directed toward sexual ends. It was the counting that mattered, even if the outcome was established in advance. Toes on one foot, toes on the other. Always totaling ten.
Keith tall, five or six inches taller than his friend. He saw male pattern baldness develop in Rumsey, seemingly week by week, on their noontime walks, or Rumsey slumped in his cubicle, or holding a sandwich with both hands, head lowered to eat. He carried bottled water everywhere. He memorized the numbers on license plates even as he drove.
Keith seeing a woman with two kids, goddamn. She lived in Far fucking Rockaway.
Women on benches or steps, reading or doing crosswords, sunning themselves, heads thrown back, or scooping yogurt with blue spoons, sandaled women, some of them, toes exposed.
Rumsey eyes down, following the puck across the ice, body crashing the boards, free of aberrant need for a couple of happy shattering hours.
Keith running in place, on a treadmill at the gym, voices in his head, mostly his own, even when he wore a headset, listening to books on tape, science or history.
The counting always led to ten. This was not a discouragement or impediment. Ten is the beauty of it. Ten is probably why I do it. To get that sameness, Rumsey said. Something holds, something stays in place.
Rumsey’s girlfriend wanted him to invest in the business she ran with three relatives including her husband. They wanted to add stock, add running shoes and personal electronics.
The toes meant nothing if they were not defined by sandals. Barefoot women on the beach were not about their feet.
He compiled bonus miles on his credit cards and flew to cities chosen strictly for their distance from New York, just to use the miles. It satisfied some principle of emotional credit.
There were men in open-toed sandals, here and there, in the streets and parks, but Rumsey did not count their toes. So maybe it wasn’t just the counting that mattered. One had to factor in the women. He admitted this. He admitted everything.
The persistence of the man’s needs had a kind of crippled appeal. It opened Keith to dimmer things, at odder angles, to something crouched and uncorrectable in people but also capable of stirring a warm feeling in him, a rare tinge of affinity.
Baldness in Rumsey, as it progressed, was a gentle melancholy, the pensive regret of a failed boy.
They fought once, briefly, on the ice, teammates, by mistake, in a mass brawl, and Keith thought it was funny but Rumsey was angry, a little shrill with accusation, claiming that Keith threw a few additional punches after he realized who it was he was hitting, which wasn’t true, Keith said, but thought it might be, because once the thing starts, what recourse is there?
They walked toward the towers now, amid the sweep and crisscross of masses of people.
All right. But what if the digits don’t always total ten? You’re riding the subway, say, and you’re sitting eyes down, Keith said, and you’re absentmindedly scanning the aisle, and you see a pair of sandals, and you count and count again, and there are nine digits, or eleven.
Rumsey took this question with him up to his cubicle in the sky, where he went back to work on less arresting matters, on money and property, contracts and titles.
One day later he said, I would ask her to marry me.
And later still, Because I would understand that I was cured, like Lourdes, and could stop counting now.
Keith watched her across the table.
“When did it happen?”
“About an hour ago.”
“That dog,” he said.
“I know. It was a crazy thing to do.”
“What happens now? You’ll see her in the hall.”
“I don’t apologize. That’s what happens.”
He sat and nodded, watching her.
“Hate to say it but when I came up the stairs just now.”
“You don’t have to say it.”
“The music was playing,” he said.
“I guess that means she wins.”
“No louder, no softer.”
“She wins.”
He said, “Maybe she’s dead. Lying there.”
“Dead or alive, she wins.”
“That dog.”
“I know. It was totally crazy. I could hear myself speaking. My voice was like it was coming from somebody else.”
“I’ve seen that animal. The kid fears that animal. Won’t say it but does.”
“What is it?”
“A Newfoundland.”
“The whole province,” she said.
“You’re lucky.”
“Lucky and crazy. Marko.”
He said, “Forget the music.”
“He spells his name with a k.”
“So do I. Forget the music,” he said. “It’s not a message or a lesson.”
“But it’s still playing.”
“It’s still playing because she’s dead. Lying there. Being sniffed by big dog.”
“I need to get more sleep. That’s what I need,” she said.
“Big dog sniffing dead woman’s crotch.”
“I wake up at some point every night. Mind running nonstop. Can’t stop it.”
“Forget the music.”
“Thoughts I can’t identify, thoughts I can’t claim as mine.”
He kept watching her.
“Take something. Your mother knows about this. This is how people sleep.”
“I have a history with the things people take. They make me crazier. They make me stupid, make me forget.”
“Talk to your mother. She knows about this.”
“Can’t stop it, can’t go back to sleep. Takes forever. Then it’s morning,” she said.
The truth was mapped in slow and certain decline. Each member of the group lived in this knowledge. Lianne found it hardest to accept in the case of Carmen G. She appeared to be two women simultaneously, the one sitting here, less combative over time, less clearly defined, speech beginning to drag, and the younger and slimmer and wildly attractive one, as Lianne imagines her, a spirited woman in her reckless prime, funny and blunt, spinning on a dance floor.
Lianne herself, bearing her father’s mark, the potential toll of plaque and twisted filaments, had to look at this woman and see the crime of it, the loss of memory, personality and identity, the lapse into eventual protein stupor. There was the page she wrote and then read aloud, meant to be an account of her day, yesterday. This was not the piece they’d all agreed to write. This was Carmen’s piece.
I wake up thinking where’s everybody. I’m alone because that’s who I am. I’m thinking where’s the rest of them, wide awake, don’t want to get up. It’s like I need my documents to get out of bed. Prueba de ingreso. Prueba de dirección. Tarjeta de seguro social. Picture ID. My father who told jokes he didn’t care clean or dirty the kids have to learn these things. I had two husbands they were different except for their hands. I still look at a man’s hands. Because somebody said it’s a question of which brain is working today because everybody has two brains. Why is it the hardest thing in the world, get out of bed. I have a plant that needs water all the time. I never thought a plant could be work.
Benny said, “But where’s your day? You said this is your day.”
“This is the first like ten seconds. This is still in bed. Next time we’re here maybe I finish getting out of bed. Next time after that I wash my hands. That’s day three. Day four, my face.”
Benny said, “We live that long? By the time you take a pee we all be fatal.”
Then it was her turn. They’d been asking and then urging. They’d all written something, said something about the planes. It was Omar H. who brought it up again, in his earnest way, right arm raised.
“Where were you when it happened?”
For nearly two years now, ever since the storyline sessions began, with her marriage receding into the night sky, she’d listened to these men and women speak about their lives in funny, stinging, straightforward and moving ways, binding the trust among them.
She owed them a story, didn’t she?
There was Keith in the doorway. Always that, had to be that, the desperate sight of him, alive, her husband. She tried to follow the sequence of events, seeing him as she spoke, a figure floating in reflected light, Keith in pieces, in small strokes. The words came fast. She recalled things she didn’t know she’d absorbed, the fragment of spangled glass on the lid of his eye, as if sewn there, and how they’d walked to the hospital, nine or ten blocks, in near deserted streets, in halting steps and deepest silence, and the young man who assisted, a deliveryman, a kid, helping support Keith with one hand and holding a pizza carton with the other, and she nearly asked him how someone could phone in an order for takeout if the phones were not working, a tall Latino kid but maybe not, holding the carton by the bottom, balanced on the palm of his hand and out away from his body.
She wanted to stay focused, one thing following sensibly upon another. There were moments when she wasn’t talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funneled stretch of recent past. They sat dead still, watching her. People, lately, watched her. She seemingly needed watching. They were depending on her to make sense. They were waiting for words from her side of the line, where what is solid does not melt.
She told them about her son. When he was nearby, within sight or touch, in himself, in motion, the fear eased off. Other times she could not think of him without being afraid. This was Justin disembodied, the child of her devising.
Unattended packages, she said, or the menace of lunch in a paper bag, or the subway at rush hour, down there, in sealed boxes.
She could not look at him sleep. He became a child in some jutting future. What do children know? They know who they are, she said, in ways we can’t know and they can’t tell us. There are moments frozen in the run of routine hours. She could not look at him sleep without thinking of what was yet to come. It was part of his stillness, figures in a silent distance, fixed in windows.
Please report any suspicious behavior or unattended packages. That was the wording, wasn’t it?
She almost told them about the briefcase, the fact of its appearance and disappearance and what it meant if anything. Wanted to tell them but did not. Tell them everything, say everything. She needed them to listen.
Keith used to want more of the world than there was time and means to acquire. He didn’t want this anymore, whatever it was he’d wanted, in real terms, real things, because he’d never truly known.
Now he wondered whether he was born to be old, meant to be old and alone, content in lonely old age, and whether all the rest of it, all the glares and rants he had bounced off these walls, were simply meant to get him to that point.
This was his father seeping through, sitting home in western Pennsylvania, reading the morning paper, taking the walk in the afternoon, a man braided into sweet routine, a widower, eating the evening meal, unconfused, alive in his true skin.
There was a second level to the high-low games. Terry Cheng was the player who divided the chips, half to each winner, high and low. He’d do it in seconds, stacking chips of different colors and varying denominations in two columns or two sets of columns, depending on the size of the pot. He did not want columns so high they might topple. He did not want columns that looked alike. The idea was to arrive at two allotments of equal monetary value but never of evenly distributed colors, or anything close to that. He’d stack six blue chips, four gold, three red and five white and then match this, with steel-trap speed, fingers flying, hands sometimes crossing, with sixteen white, four blue, two gold and thirteen red, building his columns and then folding his arms and looking into secret space, leaving each winner to rake in his chips, in unspoken respect and semi-awe.
No one doubted his skills of hand-eye-mind. No one tried to count along with Terry Cheng and no one ever harbored the thought, even in the brooding depths of the night, that Terry Cheng might be wrong in his high-low determinations, just this once.
Keith talked to him on the telephone, twice, briefly, after the planes. Then they stopped calling each other. There was nothing left, it seemed, to say about the others in the game, lost and injured, and there was no general subject they might comfortably summon. Poker was the one code they shared and that was over now.
Her schoolmates called her Gawk for a time. Then it was Scrawn. This was not necessarily a case of hateful naming, coming mostly from friends and often with her connivance. She liked to pose in parody of a model on a runway, only all elbows, knees and wired teeth. When she began to grow out of her angularity, there were the times her father rolled into town, sunburnt Jack, shooting out his arms when he saw her, a beautifully burgeoning creature he loved in muscle and blood, until he went away again. But she remembered these times, his stance and smile, the half crouch, the set of his jaw. He’d shoot out his arms and she’d fall shyly into the enclosing fold. This was ever Jack, hugging and shaking her, looking so deeply into her eyes it seemed at times he was trying to place her in proper context.
She was darkish, unlike him, with large eyes and wide mouth and with an eagerness that could be startling to others, a readiness to encounter an occasion or idea. Her mother was the template for this.
Her father used to say of her mother, “She’s a sexy woman except for her skinny ass.”
Lianne was thrilled by the chummy vulgarity, the invitation to share the man’s special perspective, his openness of reference and slant rhyme.
It was Jack’s perspective on architecture that had drawn Nina. They met on a small island in the northeast Aegean where Jack had designed a cluster of white stucco dwellings for an artists’ retreat. Set above a cove, the grouping, from offshore, was a piece of pure geometry gone slightly askew-Euclidean rigor in quantum space, Nina would write.
Here on a hard cot, on a second visit, was where Lianne was conceived. Jack told her this when she was twelve years old and would not refer to it again until he called from New Hampshire, ten years later, saying the same things in the same words, the sea breeze, the hard cot, the music floating up from the waterfront, sort of Greek-Oriental. This was some minutes or hours, this phone call, before he gazed into the muzzle blast.
They were watching TV without the sound.
“My father shot himself so I would never have to face the day when he failed to know who I was.”
“You believe this.”
“Yes.”
“Then I believe it too,” he said.
“The fact that he would one day fail to recognize me.”
“I believe it,” he said.
“That’s absolutely why he did it.”
She was slightly drunk after an extra glass of wine. They were watching a late-night newscast and he thought of hitting the sound button when the commercials ended but then did not and they watched in silence as a correspondent in a desolate landscape, Afghanistan or Pakistan, pointed over his shoulder to mountains in the distance.
“We need to get him a book on birds.”
“Justin,” he said.
“They’re studying birds. Each kid gets to choose a bird and that’s the bird he or she studies. That’s his or her feathered vertebrate. His for boys. Hers for girls.”
There was stock footage on the screen of fighter planes lifting off the deck of a carrier. He waited for her to ask him to hit the sound button.
“He’s talking about a kestrel. What the hell’s a kestrel?” she said.
“It’s a small falcon. We saw them perched on power lines, mile after mile, when we were somewhere out west, back in the other life.”
“The other life,” she said, and laughed, and pushed up off the chair, headed for the bathroom.
“Come out wearing something,” he said, “so I can watch you take it off.”
Florence Givens stood looking at the mattresses, forty or fifty of them, arranged in rows at one end of the ninth floor. People tested the bedding, women mostly, bouncing lightly in seated positions or lying supine, checking for firmness or plushness. It took her a moment to realize that Keith was standing at her side, watching with her.
“Right on time,” she said.
“You’re the one who’s on time. I’ve been here for hours,” he said, “riding the escalators.”
They walked along the aisle and she stopped several times to check labels and prices and to press into the bedding with the heel of her hand.
He said, “Go on, lie down.”
“I don’t think I want to do that.”
“How else will you know if this is the mattress you want? Look around. They’re all doing it.”
“I’ll lie down if you’ll lie down.”
“I don’t need a mattress,” he said. “You need a mattress.”
She wandered along the aisle. He stood and watched and there were ten or eleven women lying on beds, bouncing on beds, and a man and a woman bouncing and rolling, middle-aged and purposeful, trying to determine if one person’s tossing would disturb the other’s sleep.
There were tentative women, bouncing once or twice, feet protruding from the end of the bed, and there were the others, women who’d shed their coats and shoes, falling backwards to the mattress, the Posturepedic or the Beautyrest, and bouncing with abandon, first one side of the bed, then the other, and he thought this was a remarkable thing to come upon, the mattress department at Macy’s, and he looked across the aisle and they were bouncing there as well, another eight or nine women, one man, one child, testing for comfort and sculptural soundness, for back support and foam sensation.
Florence was over there now, seated at the end of a bed, and she smiled at him and fell back. She bounced up, fell back, making a little game of her shyness in the midst of public intimacy. Two men stood not far from Keith and one of them said something to the other. It was a remark about Florence. He didn’t know what the man had said but it didn’t matter. It was clear from their stance and their vantage that Florence was the subject.
Keith stood ten paces away from them.
He said, “Hey fuckhead.”
The idea was that they’d meet here, have a quick lunch nearby and go their separate ways. He had to pick up the kid at school, she had a doctor’s appointment. It was a tryst without whisper or touch, set among strangers falling down.
He said it again, louder this time, and waited for the word to register. It was interesting, how the space between them changed. They were looking at him now. The man who’d made the remark was heavyset, in a shiny down jacket that resembled bubblewrap. People drifted along the aisle, in blurry colors. Both men were looking at him. The space was hot and charged and the one in bubblewrap stood brooding on the matter. Women were bouncing on the beds but Florence had seen and heard and she was seated at the edge of the mattress, watching.
The man was listening to his companion but did not move. Keith was happy to stand and watch and then he wasn’t. He walked over there and punched the man. He walked over, stopped, set himself and threw a short right. He hit the man up near the cheekbone, one blow only, and then he stepped back and waited. He was angry now. The contact set him off and he wanted to keep going. He held his hands apart, palms up, like here I am, let’s go. Because if anyone said a harsh word to Florence, or raised a hand to Florence, or insulted her in any way, Keith was ready to kill him.
The man, who’d lurched against his companion, turned now and charged, head down, arms bowed out, like a guy on a motorcycle, and the bouncing stopped all along the rows of beds.
Keith caught him with another right, to the eye this time, and the man lifted him off the floor, an inch or two, and Keith threw some kidney punches that were mostly lost in bubblewrap. There were men everywhere now, salesmen, security guards jogging down the aisle, a workman who’d been pushing a handcart. It was odd, in the general confusion after they’d been separated, how Keith felt a hand on his arm, just above the elbow, and understood at once that it was Florence.
Every time she saw a videotape of the planes she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote. Then she kept on watching. The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone’s, into some other distance, out beyond the towers.
The skies she retained in memory were dramas of cloud and sea storm, or the electric sheen before summer thunder in the city, always belonging to the energies of sheer weather, of what was out there, air masses, water vapor, westerlies. This was different, a clear sky that carried human terror in those streaking aircraft, first one, then the other, the force of men’s intent. He watched with her. Every helpless desperation set against the sky, human voices crying to God and how awful to imagine this, God’s name on the tongues of killers and victims both, first one plane and then the other, the one that was nearly cartoon human, with flashing eyes and teeth, the second plane, the south tower.
He watched with her one time only. She knew she’d never felt so close to someone, watching the planes cross the sky. Standing by the wall he reached toward the chair and took her hand. She bit her lip and watched. They would all be dead, passengers and crew, and thousands in the towers dead, and she felt it in her body, a deep pause, and thought there he is, unbelievably, in one of those towers, and now his hand on hers, in pale light, as though to console her for his dying.
He said, “It still looks like an accident, the first one. Even from this distance, way outside the thing, how many days later, I’m standing here thinking it’s an accident.”
“Because it has to be.”
“It has to be,” he said.
“The way the camera sort of shows surprise.”
“But only the first one.”
“Only the first,” she said.
“The second plane, by the time the second plane appears,” he said, “we’re all a little older and wiser.”
The walks across the park were not rituals of anticipation. The road bent west and he walked past the tennis courts without thinking much about the room where she’d be waiting or the bedroom down the hall. They took erotic pleasure from each other but this is not what sent him back there. It was what they knew together, in the timeless drift of the long spiral down, and he went back again even if these meetings contradicted what he’d lately taken to be the truth of his life, that it was meant to be lived seriously and responsibly, not snatched in clumsy fistfuls.
Later she would say what someone always says.
“Do you have to leave?”
He would stand naked by the bed.
“I’ll always have to leave.”
“And I’ll always have to make your leaving mean something else. Make it mean something romantic or sexy. But not empty, not lonely. Do I know how to do this?”
But she was not a contradiction, was she? She was not someone to be snatched at, not a denial of some truth he may have come upon in these long strange days and still nights, these after-days.
These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after.
She said, “Do I know how to make one thing out of another, without pretending? Can I stay who I am, or do I have to become all those other people who watch someone walk out the door? We’re not other people, are we?”
But she would look at him in a way that made him feel he must be someone else, standing there by the bed, ready to say what someone always says.
They sat in a corner booth glaring at each other. Carol Shoup wore a striped silk overblouse, purple and white, that looked Moorish or Persian.
She said, “Under the circumstances, what do you expect?”
“I expect you to call and ask.”
“But under the circumstances, how could I even bring up the subject?”
“But you did bring it up,” Lianne said.
“Only after the fact. I couldn’t ask you to edit such a book. After what happened to Keith, everything, all of it. I don’t see how you’d want to get involved. A book that’s so enormously immersed, going back on it, leading up to it. And a book that’s so demanding, so incredibly tedious.”
“A book you’re publishing.”
“We have to.”
“After it’s been making the rounds for how many years?”
“We have to. Four or five years,” Carol said. “Because it seems to predict what happened.”
“Seems to predict.”
“Statistical tables, corporate reports, architectural blueprints, terrorist flow charts. What else?”
“A book you’re publishing.”
“It’s badly written, badly organized and I would say deeply and enormously boring. Collected many rejections. Became a legend among agents and editors.”
“A book you’re publishing.”
“Line-editing this beast.”
“Who’s the author?”
“A retired aeronautical engineer. We call him the Unaflyer. He doesn’t live in a remote cabin with his bomb-making chemicals and his college yearbooks but he’s been working obsessively for fifteen or sixteen years.”
There was serious money to be made, by freelance standards, if a book was a major project. In this case it was also a rushed project, timely, newsworthy, even visionary, at least in the publisher’s planned catalog copy-a book detailing a series of interlocking global forces that appeared to converge at an explosive point in time and space that might be said to represent the locus of Boston, New York and Washington on a late-summer morning early in the twenty-first century.
“Line-editing this beast could put you in traction for years to come. It’s all data. It’s all facts, maps and schedules.”
“But it seems to predict.”
The book needed a freelance editor, someone able to work long hours outside the scheduled frenzy of phone calls, e-mails, lunch dates and meetings that an in-house editor encountered-the frenzy that constitutes the job.
“It contains a long sort of treatise on plane hijacking. It contains many documents concerning the vulnerability of certain airports. It names Dulles and Logan. It names many things that actually happened or are happening now. Wall Street, Afghanistan, this thing, that thing. Afghanistan is happening.”
Lianne didn’t care how dense, raveled and intimidating the material might be or how finally unprophetic. This is what she wanted. She didn’t know she wanted this until Carol mentioned the book, derisively, in passing. She thought she’d been invited to lunch to discuss an assignment. It turned out that the meeting was strictly personal. Carol wanted to talk about Keith. The only book Carol mentioned was precisely the one not intended for Lianne and precisely the one that Lianne needed to edit.
“Do you want dessert?”
“No.”
Stand apart. See things clinically, unemotionally. This is what Martin had told her. Measure the elements. Work the elements together. Learn something from the event. Make yourself equal to it.
Carol wanted to talk about Keith, hear about Keith. She wanted the man’s story, their story, back together, moment by moment. The blouse she was wearing belonged to another body type, another skin color, a knockoff of a Persian or Moroccan robe. Lianne noticed this. She had nothing interesting to tell this woman about Keith because nothing interesting had happened that was not too intimate for telling.
“Do you want coffee?”
“I hit a woman in the face the other day.”
“What for?”
“What do you hit people for?”
“Wait. You hit a woman?”
“They make you mad. That’s what for.”
Carol was looking at her.
“Do you want coffee?”
“No.”
“You have your husband back. Your son has a father full-time.”
“You don’t know anything.”
“Show some happiness, some relief, something. Show something.”
“It’s only beginning. Don’t you know that?”
“You have him back.”
“You don’t know anything,” she said.
The waiter stood nearby, waiting for someone to ask for the check.
“All right, look. If something happens,” Carol said. “Like the editor can’t deal with the material. The editor can’t work fast enough. She feels this book is destroying the life she has carefully built over the last twenty-seven years. I’ll call you.”
“Call me,” Lianne said. “Otherwise don’t call me.”
After that day, when she could not remember where she lived, Rosellen S. did not come back to the group.
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.
They sat waiting for R’s reply, watching him linger in the aura of his defined state.
She went down to the basement with a basket full of laundry. There was a small gray room, damp and stale, with a washer and dryer and a metallic chill that she felt in her teeth.
She heard the dryer in operation and walked in to see Elena leaning on the wall with her arms folded and a cigarette in her hand. Elena did not look up.
For a moment they listened to the load bounce around the drum. Then Lianne put her basket down and raised the lid of the washer. The filter pan held the lint rubble of the other woman’s wash.
She looked at it briefly, then took the pan out of the washer and extended it to Elena. The woman paused, then took it and looked. Without changing position she used a backhand motion to bang the pan twice against the lower part of the wall she was leaning on. She looked at it again, took a drag on her cigarette and handed the pan across to Lianne, who took it and looked and then placed it on top of the dryer. She threw her things in the washer, fistfuls of darks, and put the filter pan back on the agitator or activator or whatever it was called. She poured in detergent, made selections on the control panel, set the dial on the other side of the panel and closed the lid. Then she pulled the control knob to start the wash.
But she didn’t leave the room. She assumed the load in the dryer was nearly done or why would the woman be standing here waiting. She assumed the woman had come down only minutes ago, saw the load was not yet done and decided to wait rather than go up and down and up again. She couldn’t see the time dial clearly from this position and preferred not to make a show of looking. But she had no intention of leaving the room. She stood against the wall adjacent to the wall the woman was leaning on, half slouched. Their straitened lanes of vision possibly crossed somewhere near the middle of the room. She kept her back erect, feeling the impress of the old pocked wall against her shoulder blades.
The washer began to rumble, the dryer tossed and clicked, shirt buttons hitting the drum. There was no question that she would outwait the other woman. The question was what the woman would do with the cigarette if she finished smoking it before the load was done. The question was whether they’d look at each other before the woman left the room. The room was like a monk’s cell with a pair of giant prayer wheels beating out a litany. The question was whether a look would lead to words and then what.
It was a rainy Monday in the world and she walked over to Godzilla Apartments, where the kid was spending an after-school hour with the Siblings, playing video games.
She used to write poetry on days like this when she was in school. There was something about rain and poetry. Later there would be something about rain and sex. The poems were usually about the rain, how it felt to be indoors watching the lonely drops slide down the windowpane.
Her umbrella was useless in the wind. It was the kind of wind-whipped rain that empties the streets of people and makes day and place feel anonymous. This was the weather everywhere, the state of mind, generic Monday, and she walked very close to buildings and ran across streets and felt the wind hit straight down when she reached the redbrick heights of Godzilla.
She had a quick cup of coffee with the mother, Isabel, and then peeled her son off the computer screen and muscled him into his jacket. He wanted to stay, they wanted him to stay. She told them she was a villain too real for video games.
Katie followed them to the door. She wore red jeans rolled up and a pair of suede ankle boots that glowed neon along the welt when she walked. Her brother Robert hung back, a dark-eyed boy who looked too shy to speak, eat, walk a dog.
The telephone rang.
Lianne said to the girl, “You’re not still sky-watching, are you? Searching the skies day and night? No. Or are you?”
The girl looked at Justin and smiled in sly connivance, saying nothing.
“He won’t tell me,” Lianne said. “I ask and ask.”
He said, “No, you don’t.”
“But if I did, you wouldn’t tell me.”
Katie’s eyes went brighter. She was enjoying this, alert to the prospect of a crafty reply. Her mother was talking on the wall-mounted phone in the kitchen.
Lianne said to the girl, “Still waiting for word? Still watching for planes? Day and night at the window? No. I don’t believe it.”
She leaned toward the girl, speaking in a stage whisper.
“Still talking to that person? The man whose name some of us are not supposed to know.”
The brother looked stricken. He stood fifteen feet behind Katie, dead still, looking at the parquet floor between his sister’s boots.
“Is he still out there, somewhere, making you search the skies? The man whose name maybe we all know even if some of us are not supposed to know.”
Justin plucked her jacket away from her elbow, which meant let’s go home now.
“Maybe just maybe. This is what I think. Maybe it’s time for him to disappear. The man whose name we all know.”
She had her hands on Katie’s face, cradling it, caging it, ear to ear. In the kitchen the mother was raising her voice, talking about a credit-card problem.
“Maybe it’s time. Do you think that’s possible? Maybe you’re just not interested anymore. Yes or no? Maybe just maybe it’s time to stop searching the skies, time to stop talking about the man I’m talking about. What do you think? Yes or no?”
The girl looked less happy now. She tried to dart a look left to Justin, like what’s going on here, but Lianne pressed a little tighter and used her right hand to block the view, smiling at the girl mock-playfully.
The brother was trying to will his invisibility. They were confused and a little scared but that’s not why she took her hands from Katie’s face. She was ready to leave, that’s why, and all the way down on the elevator, twenty-seventh floor to lobby, she thought of the mythical figure who’d said the planes were coming back, the man whose name they all knew. But she’d forgotten it.
Rain was lighter now, wind diminished. They walked without a word. She tried to remember the name but could not do it. The kid would not walk beneath the spread umbrella, staying four paces back. It was an easy name, this much she knew, but the easy names were the ones that killed her.
This day, beyond others, she found it hard to leave. She came out of the community center and walked west, thinking about another day, not long in coming, when the storyline sessions would have to end. The group was reaching that time and she didn’t think she could do it again, start over, six or seven people, the ballpoint pens and writing pads, the beauty of it, yes, the way they sing their lives, but also the unwariness they bring to what they know, the strange brave innocence of it, and her own grasping after her father.
She wanted to walk home and when she got there she wanted to find a phone message from Carol Shoup. Call me soonest please. It was only a feeling but she trusted it and knew what the message would mean, that the editor had quit the assignment. She would walk in the door, listen to the four-word message and know that the editor could not handle the book, a text so webbed in obsessive detail that it was impossible to proceed further. She wanted to walk in the door and see the lighted number on the telephone. This is Carol, call me soonest. A six-word message that implied a great deal more. This is what Carol liked to say in her phone messages. Call me soonest. It was something promised, that last urgent word, an indication of auspicious circumstance.
She walked without plan, west on 116th Street past the barbershop and record shop, the fruit markets and bakery. She turned south for five blocks and then glanced to her right and saw the high wall of weathered granite that supported the elevated tracks, where trains carry commuters to and from the city. She thought at once of Rosellen S. but didn’t know why. She walked in that direction and came to a building marked Greater Highway Deliverance Temple. She paused a moment, absorbing the name and noticing the ornate pilasters above the entrance and the stone cross at roof’s edge. There was a sign out front listing the temple’s activities. Sunday school, Sunday morning glory, Friday deliverance service and Bible study. She stood and thought. She thought of the conversation with Dr. Apter concerning the day when Rosellen could not remember where she lived. This was an occasion that haunted Lianne, the breathless moment when things fall away, streets, names, all sense of direction and location, every fixed grid of memory. Now she understood why Rosellen seemed to be a presence in this street. Here was the place, this temple whose name was a hallelujah shout, where she’d found refuge and assistance.
Again she stood and thought. She thought of the language that Rosellen had been using at the last sessions she’d been able to attend, how she developed extended versions of a single word, all the inflections and connectives, a kind of protection perhaps, a gathering against the last bare state, where even the deepest moan may not be grief but only moan.
Do we say goodbye, yes, going, am going, will be going, the last time go, will go.
This is what she was able to recall from the limp script of Rosellen’s last pages.
He walked back through the park. The runners seemed eternal, circling the reservoir, and he tried not to think of the last half hour, with Florence, talking into her silence. This was another kind of eternity, the stillness in her face and body, outside time.
He picked up the kid at school and then walked north into a breeze that carried a faint stir of rain. He was relieved to have something to talk about, Justin’s schoolwork, his friends and teachers.
“Where do we go?”
“Your mother said she’d be walking home from the meeting uptown. We want to intercept her.”
“Why?”
“To surprise her. Sneak up on her. Lift her spirits.”
“How do we know which way she will come?”
“That’s the challenge. A direct route, an indirect route, she’s walking fast, she’s walking slow.”
He was speaking into the breeze, not quite to Justin. He was still back there, with Florence, double in himself, coming and going, the walks across the park and back, the deep shared self, down through the smoke, and then here again to safety and family, to the implications of one’s conduct.
In one hundred days or so, he would be forty years old. This was his father’s age. His father was forty, his uncles. They would always be forty, looking aslant at him. How is it possible that he was about to become someone of clear and distinct definition, husband and father, finally, occupying a room in three dimensions in the manner of his parents?
He’d stood by the window in those last minutes looking at the opposite wall, where a photograph hung, Florence as a girl, in a white dress, with her mother and father.
The kid said, “We go which way? This street or that street?”
It was a picture he’d barely noticed before and the sight of her in that setting, untouched by the consequences of what he’d come to say, caused a tightness in his chest. What she needed in him was his seeming calm, even if she didn’t understand it. He knew she was grateful for this, the fact that he was able to read the levels of her distress. He was the still figure, watching, ever attentive, saying little. This is what she wanted to cling to. But now she was the one who would not speak, watching him by the window, hearing the soft voice that tells her it is ended now.
Understand, he said.
Because what else finally was there to say? He watched the light fall from her face. This was the old undoing that was always near, now come inevitably into her life again, an injury no less painful for being fated.
She stood a moment longer outside the temple. There were voices in the schoolyard up ahead, across the street from the elevated tracks. A crossing guard stood at the corner, arms folded, with sparse traffic along the narrow one-way stretch between the sidewalk and the rampart of scarred stone blocks.
A train flew by.
She walked toward the corner, knowing there would be no message waiting when she got home. It was gone now, the sense that a message would be waiting. Three words. Call me soonest. She’d told Carol not to call unless she could deliver the book in question. There was no book, not for her.
A train went by, southbound this time, and she heard someone call in Spanish.
There was a row of apartment buildings, the projects, situated on this side of the tracks, and when she reached the corner she looked to her right, past the schoolyard, and saw the jutting facade of one wing of a building, heads in windows, half a dozen maybe, up around the ninth, tenth, eleventh floors, and she heard the voice again, someone calling out, a woman, and saw the schoolkids, some of them, pausing in their games, looking up and around.
A teacher walked slowly toward the fence, tall man, swinging a whistle on a string.
She waited at the corner. There were more voices now from the projects and she looked that way again, noting their line of sight. They were looking down at the tracks, northbound side, to a point almost directly above her. Then she saw the students, some of them backing across the yard toward the wall of the school building, and she understood they were trying to get a better view of this side of the tracks.
A car went by, radio blasting.
It took a moment for him to come into view, upper body only, a man on the other side of the protective fence that bordered the tracks. He wasn’t a track worker in a blaze orange vest. She saw that much. She saw him from the chest up and heard the schoolkids now, calling to each other, all the games in suspension.
He seemed to be coming out of nowhere. There was no station stop here, no ticket office or platform for passengers, and she had no idea how he’d managed to gain access to the track area. White male, she thought. White shirt, dark jacket.
The immediate street was quiet. People passing looked and walked and a few stopped, briefly, and others, younger, lingered. It was the kids in the schoolyard who were interested and the faces high to her right, more of them now, floating in the windows of the projects.
White male in suit and tie, it now appeared, as he made his way down the short ladder through an opening in the fence.
This is when she knew, of course. She watched him lower himself to the maintenance platform that jutted over the street, just south of the intersection. This is when she understood, although she’d felt something even before her first glimpse of the figure. There were the faces in the high windows, something about the faces, a forewarning, the way you know something before you perceive it directly. This is who he had to be.
He stood on the platform, about three stories above her. Everything was painted brownish rust, the upper tiers of coarse granite, the barrier he’d just passed through and the platform itself, a slatted metal structure resembling a large fire escape, twelve feet long and six wide, accessible normally to workers on the tracks or those at street level arriving in a maintenance truck equipped with vertical boom and open bucket.
A train went by, southbound again. Why is he doing this, she thought.
He was thinking, not listening. He began to listen as they made their way uptown, talking in brief sprints, and he realized that the kid was using monosyllables again.
He told him, “Cut the crap.”
“What?”
“How’s that for monosyllables?”
“What?”
“Cut the crap,” he said.
“What for? You tell me I don’t talk.”
“That’s your mother, not me.”
“Now I talk, you tell me not to talk.”
He was getting better at this, Justin was, barely pausing between words. At first it was an instructive form of play but the practice carried something else now, a solemn obstinacy, nearly ritualistic.
“Look, I don’t care. You can talk in the Inuit language if you like. Learn Inuit. They have an alphabet of syllables instead of letters. You can speak one syllable at a time. It’ll take you a minute and a half to say one long word. I’m in no hurry. Take all the time you want. Long pauses between the syllables. We’ll eat whale blubber and you can speak Inuit.”
“I do not think I would like to eat whale meat.”
“It’s not meat, it’s blubber.”
“This is the same as fat.”
“Say blubber.”
“This is the same as fat. It is fat. Whale fat.”
Wise-ass little kid.
“The point is that your mother doesn’t like you talking this way. It upsets her. We want to give her a break. You can understand this. And even if you can’t understand it, don’t do it.”
The mixed skies were darker now. He began to think this was a bad idea, trying to meet her coming home. They went east a block, then north again.
There was something else he thought concerning Lianne. He thought he would tell her about Florence. It was the right thing to do. It was the kind of perilous truth that would lead to an understanding of clean and even proportions, long-lasting, with a feeling of reciprocal love and trust. He believed this. It was a way to stop being double in himself, trailing the taut shadow of what is unsaid.
He would tell her about Florence. She would say she knew something was going on but in view of the completely uncommon nature of the involvement, with its point of origin in smoke and fire, this is not an unforgivable offense.
He would tell her about Florence. She would say she could understand the intensity of the involvement, in view of the completely uncommon nature of its origin, in smoke and fire, and this would cause her to suffer enormously.
He would tell her about Florence. She would get a steak knife and kill him.
He would tell her about Florence. She would enter a period of long and tortured withdrawal.
He would tell her about Florence. She would say, After we’ve just renewed our marriage. She would say, After the terrifying day of the planes has brought us together again. How could the same terror? She would say, How could the same terror threaten everything we’ve felt for each other, everything I’ve felt these past weeks?
He would tell her about Florence. She would say, I want to meet her.
He would tell her about Florence. Her periodic insomnia would become total, requiring a course of treatment that includes diet, medication and psychiatric counseling.
He would tell her about Florence. She would spend more time at her mother’s apartment, accompanied by the kid, remaining there well into evening and leaving Keith to wander empty rooms on his return from the office, as in the meager seasons of his exile.
He would tell her about Florence. She would want to be convinced that it was over and he would convince her because it was true, simply and forever.
He would tell her about Florence. She would send him to hell with a look and then call a lawyer.
She heard the sound and looked to her right. A boy in the schoolyard was dribbling a basketball. The sound did not belong to the moment but he wasn’t playing, only walking, taking the basketball with him, absently bouncing it as he walked toward the fence, head up, eyes on the figure above.
Others followed. With the man in full view now, students advanced from the far end of the yard toward the fence. The man had affixed the safety harness to the rail of the platform. The students advanced from every point of the schoolyard to get a closer look at what was happening.
She moved back. She moved the other way, backing into the building that stood on the corner. Then she looked around for someone, just to exchange a glance. She looked for the crossing guard, who was nowhere in sight. She wished she could believe this was some kind of antic street theater, an absurdist drama that provokes onlookers to share a comic understanding of what is irrational in the great schemes of being or in the next small footstep.
This was too near and deep, too personal. All she wanted to share was a look, catch someone’s eye, see what she herself was feeling. She did not think of walking away. He was right above her but she wasn’t watching and wasn’t walking away. She looked at the teacher across the street, whistle pressed in one fist, string dangling, his other hand gripping the strands of the chain-link fence. She heard someone above her, in the apartment building that occupied the corner, a woman at the window.
She said, “What you doing?”
Her voice came from a point somewhere above the level of the maintenance platform. Lianne didn’t look. The street to her left was empty except for a ragged man coming out of the arch-way beneath the tracks, carrying a bicycle wheel in his hand. This is where she looked. Then, again, the woman’s voice.
She said, “I call nine one one.”
Lianne tried to understand why he was here and not somewhere else. These were strictly local circumstances, people in windows, some kids in a schoolyard. Falling Man was known to appear among crowds or at sites where crowds might quickly form. Here was an old derelict rolling a wheel down the street. Here was a woman in a window, having to ask who he was.
Other voices now, from the projects and the schoolyard, and she looked up again. He stood balanced on the rail of the platform. The rail had a broad flat top and he stood there, blue suit, white shirt, blue tie, black shoes. He loomed over the sidewalk, legs spread slightly, arms out from his body and bent at the elbows, asymmetrically, man in fear, looking out of some deep pool of concentration into lost space, dead space.
She slipped around the corner of the building. It was a senseless gesture of flight, adding only a couple of yards to the distance between them, but then it wasn’t so odd, not if he truly fell, if the harness did not hold. She watched him, her shoulder jammed to the brick wall of the building. She did not think of turning and leaving.
They all waited. But he did not fall. He stood poised on the rail for a full minute, then another. The woman’s voice was louder now.
She said, “You don’t be here.”
Kids called out, they shouted inevitably, “Jump,” but only two or three and then it stopped and there were voices from the projects, mournful calls in the damp air.
Then she began to understand. Performance art, yes, but he wasn’t here to perform for those at street level or in the high windows. He was situated where he was, remote from station personnel and railroad police, waiting for a train to come, northbound, this is what he wanted, an audience in motion, passing scant yards from his standing figure.
She thought of the passengers. The train would bust out of the tunnel south of here and then begin to slow down, approaching the station at 125th Street, three-quarters of a mile ahead. It would pass and he would jump. There would be those aboard who see him standing and those who see him jump, all jarred out of their reveries or their newspapers or muttering stunned into their cell phones. These people had not seen him attach the safety harness. They would only see him fall out of sight. Then, she thought, the ones already speaking into phones, the others groping for phones, all would try to describe what they’ve seen or what others nearby have seen and are now trying to describe to them.
There was one thing for them to say, essentially. Someone falling. Falling man. She wondered if this was his intention, to spread the word this way, by cell phone, intimately, as in the towers and in the hijacked planes.
Or she was dreaming his intentions. She was making it up, stretched so tight across the moment that she could not think her own thoughts.
“I’ll tell you what I’m trying to do,” he said.
They passed a supermarket window splashed with broad-sheets. The kid had his hands hidden in his sleeves.
“I’m trying to read her mind. Will she walk down one of the avenues, First, Second, Third, or wander a little, here and there?”
“You said this already.”
It was something he’d been doing lately, extending the sleeves of his sweater to cover his hands. Each hand was closed into a fist and this allowed him to use his fingertips to secure the sleeve to the hand. Sometimes a thumb tip protruded and a trace of knuckles.
“I said this. All right. But I didn’t say I was going to read her mind. Read her mind,” he said, “and tell me what you think.”
“Maybe she changed her mind. She’s in a taxi.”
He wore a backpack to carry his books and school supplies, which left his hands free to be concealed. It was a mannerism that Keith associated with older boys who try to be noticeably peculiar.
“She said she’d walk.”
“Maybe she took the subway.”
“She doesn’t take the subway anymore. She said she’d walk.”
“What’s wrong with the subway?”
He noted the mood of somber opposition, the drag in the kid’s gait. They walked west now, somewhere below 100th Street, stopping at each intersection to peer uptown, trying to spot her among the faces and shapes. Justin pretended to lose interest, drifting toward the curb to study the dust and lesser debris. He didn’t like being deprived of his monosyllabic powers.
“There’s nothing wrong with the subway,” Keith said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe she took the subway.”
He would tell her about Florence. She would look at him and wait. He would tell her it was not, in truth, the kind of relationship that people refer to when they use the word affair. It was not an affair. There was sex, yes, but not romance. There was emotion, yes, but generated by external conditions he could not control. She would say nothing and wait. He would say that the time he’d spent with Florence was already beginning to seem an aberration-that was the word. It was the kind of thing, he’d say, that a person looks back on with a sense of having entered something that was, in truth, unreal, and he was already feeling this and knowing this. She would sit and look at him. He would mention the brevity of the thing, the easily countable occasions. He was not a trial lawyer but still, technically, a lawyer, even if he barely believed it himself, and he would assess his guilt openly and present the facts attending the brief relationship and include those crucial circumstances so often and aptly described as extenuating. She would sit in the chair no one ever sat in, the mahogany side chair set against the wall between the desk and the bookshelves, and he would look at her and wait.
“She’s probably already home,” the kid said, walking with one foot in the gutter and one up on the curb.
They went past a pharmacy and a travel agency. Keith saw something up ahead. He marked the stride of a woman crossing the street, uncertainly, near the intersection. She seemed to stop in midcrossing. A taxi obscured his view for a moment but he knew that something was wrong. He leaned over and gave the kid a backhand tap on the upper arm, keeping his eyes on the figure ahead. By the time she reached the corner on this side of the street, they were both running toward her.
She heard the train coming along the northbound track and watched him tense his body in preparation. The sound was a deep bass roll with an in-and-out recurrence, discrete not continuous, like pulsing numbers, and she could almost count the tenths of seconds as it grew louder.
The man stared into the brickwork of the corner building but did not see it. There was a blankness in his face, but deep, a kind of lost gaze. Because what was he doing finally? Because did he finally know? She thought the bare space he stared into must be his own, not some grim vision of others falling. But why was she standing here watching? Because she saw her husband somewhere near. She saw his friend, the one she’d met, or the other, maybe, or made him up and saw him, in a high window with smoke flowing out. Because she felt compelled, or only helpless, gripping the strap of her shoulder bag.
The train comes slamming through and he turns his head and looks into it (into his death by fire) and then brings his head back around and jumps.
Jumps or falls. He keels forward, body rigid, and falls full-length, headfirst, drawing a rustle of awe from the schoolyard with isolated cries of alarm that are only partly smothered by the passing roar of the train.
She felt her body go limp. But the fall was not the worst of it. The jolting end of the fall left him upside-down, secured to the harness, twenty feet above the pavement. The jolt, the sort of midair impact and bounce, the recoil, and now the stillness, arms at his sides, one leg bent at the knee. There was something awful about the stylized pose, body and limbs, his signature stroke. But the worst of it was the stillness itself and her nearness to the man, her position here, with no one closer to him than she was. She could have spoken to him but that was another plane of being, beyond reach. He remained motionless, with the train still running in a blur in her mind and the echoing deluge of sound falling about him, blood rushing to his head, away from hers.
She looked directly overhead and saw no sign of the woman in the window. She moved now, keeping to the side of the building, head down, feeling her way by hand along the rough surface of the masonry. His eyes were open but she guided herself by hand and then, once beyond the dangling figure, veered toward the middle of the sidewalk, moving quickly now.
Almost at once she came upon the derelict, the old thread-bare man, and he stood looking past her at the figure upended in midair. He seemed to be in a pose of his own, attached to this spot for half a lifetime, one papery hand clutching his bicycle wheel. His face showed an intense narrowing of thought and possibility. He was seeing something elaborately different from what he encountered step by step in the ordinary run of hours. He had to learn how to see it correctly, find a crack in the world where it might fit.
He didn’t see her when she went by. She couldn’t seem to walk quickly enough, passing more projects or the same spreading development, one street and then another. She kept her head down, seeing things as fleeting shimmers, a coil of razor wire atop a low fence or a police cruiser going north, the way she’d come, a blue-white flare with faces. This made her think of him back there, suspended, body set in place, and she could not think beyond this.
She found she was running now, shoulder bag bouncing against her hip. She kept the things they wrote, the early-stage members, placing the pages in a binder in her shoulder bag to be hole-punched and fitted in the rings when she got home. The street was nearly empty, a warehouse to her left. She thought of the police cruiser coming to a stop directly under the fallen man. She ran at a fair clip, the pages in the binder and the names of the members skimming through her mind, first name and first letter of last name, this was how she knew them and saw them, and the shoulder bag keeping time, knocking against her hip, giving her a tempo, a rhythm to maintain. She was running level with the trains now and then above them, running uphill into a ribbed sky with taller bundled clouds bleeding down into the low array.
She thought, Died by his own hand.
She stopped running then and stood bent over, breathing heavily. She looked into the pavement. When she ran in the mornings she went long distances and never felt this drained and wasted. She was doubled over, like there were two of her, the one who’d done the running and the one who didn’t know why. She waited for her breathing to ease and then stood upright. A couple of girls sat on a tenement stoop nearby, watching. She walked slowly to the top of the sloped street and then stopped again, remaining for some time with trains coming out of one hole and sinking into another, somewhere south of 100th Street.
She would take the pages home, the things they wrote, and place them with the earlier pages, hole-punched and fitted in the rings, numbering several hundred now. But first she would check the phone messages.
She crossed against the light and was standing on the crowded corner when she saw them coming toward her, running. They were bright and undisguised, moving past people wedged in routine anonymity. The sky seemed so near. They were bright with urgent life, that’s why they were running, and she raised a hand so they might see her in the mass of faces, thirty-six days after the planes.
IN NOKOMIS
He had his Visa card, his frequent-flyer number. He had the use of the Mitsubishi. He’d lost twenty-two kilos and converted this to pounds, multiplying by 2.2046. The heat on the Gulf Coast was fierce at times and Hammad liked it. They rented a little stucco house on West Laurel Road and Amir turned down an offer of free cable TV. The house was pink. They sat around a table on day one and pledged to accept their duty, which was for each of them, in blood trust, to kill Americans.
Hammad pushed a cart through the supermarket. He was invisible to these people and they were becoming invisible to him. He looked at women sometimes, yes, the girl at the checkout named Meg or Peg. He knew things she could never in ten lifetimes begin to imagine. In the drenching light he saw a faint trace of fine soft silky down on her forearm and once he said something that made her smile.
His flight training was not going well. He sat rocking in the simulator and tried to match responses to conditions. The others, most of them, did better. There was always Amir of course. Amir flew small planes and logged extra hours in Boeing 767 simulators. He paid in cash at times, using money wired from Dubai. They thought the state would read their coded e-mails. The state would check out airline databases and all transactions involving certain sums of money. Amir did not concede this. He received certain sums of money wired to a Florida bank in his name, first and last, Mohamed Atta, because he was basically nobody from nowhere.
They were clean-shaven now. They wore T-shirts and cotton slacks. Hammad pushed his cart down the aisle to the checkout and when he said something she smiled but did not see him. The idea is to go unseen.
He knew his weight in pounds but did not announce it to the others or glorify it to himself. He converted meters to feet, multiplying by 3.28. There were two or three of them in the house and others came and went but not with the frequency or the burning spirit of the days on Marienstrasse. They were beyond that now, in full and determined preparation. Only Amir burned now. Amir was electric, dripping fire from the eyes.
The weight loss had come in Afghanistan, in a training camp, where Hammad had begun to understand that death is stronger than life. This is where the landscape consumed him, waterfalls frozen in space, a sky that never ended. It was all Islam, the rivers and streams. Pick up a stone and hold it in your fist, this is Islam. God’s name on every tongue throughout the countryside. There was no feeling like this ever in his life. He wore a bomb vest and knew he was a man now, finally, ready to close the distance to God.
He drove the Mitsubishi down sleepy streets. One day, so strange, he saw a car with six or seven people crammed in, laughing and smoking, and they were young, maybe college kids, boys and girls. How easy would it be for him to walk out of his car and into theirs? Open the door with the car in motion and walk across the roadway to the other car, walk on air, and open the door of the other car and get in.
Amir switched from English to Arabic, quoting.
Never have We destroyed a nation whose term of life was not ordained beforehand.
This entire life, this world of lawns to water and hardware stacked on endless shelves, was total, forever, illusion. In the camp on the windy plain they were shaped into men. They fired weapons and set off explosives. They received instruction in the highest jihad, which is to make blood flow, their blood and that of others. People water lawns and eat fast food. Hammad ordered takeout at times, undeniably. Every day, five times, he prayed, sometimes less, sometimes not at all. He watched TV in a bar near the flight school and liked to imagine himself appearing on the screen, a videotaped figure walking through the gate-like detector on his way to the plane.
Not that they would ever get that far. The state had watch lists and undercover agents. The state knew how to read signals that flow out of your cell phone to microwave towers and orbiting satellites and into the cell phone of somebody in a car on a desert road in Yemen. Amir had stopped talking about Jews and Crusaders. It was all tactical now, plane schedules and fuel loads and getting men from one location to another, on time, in place.
These people jogging in the park, world domination. These old men who sit in beach chairs, veined white bodies and baseball caps, they control our world. He wonders if they think of this, ever. He wonders if they see him standing here, clean-shaven, in tennis sneakers.
It was time to end all contact with his mother and father. He wrote them a letter and told them he would be traveling for a time. He worked for an engineering firm, he wrote, and would soon be promoted. He missed them, he wrote, and then tore up the letter and let the pieces drift away in a rip-tide of memories.
In the camp they gave him a long knife that had once belonged to a Saudi prince. An old man whipped the camel to its knees and then took the bridle and jerked the head skyward and Hammad slit the animal’s throat. They made a noise when he did it, he and the camel both, braying, and he felt a deep warrior joy, standing back to watch the beast topple. He stood there, Hammad, arms spread wide, then kissed the bloody knife and raised it to the ones who were watching, the robed and turbaned men, showing his respect and gratitude.
One man on a visit did not know the name of the town they were in, outside another town called Venice. He’d forgotten the name or had never learned it. Hammad thought it didn’t matter. Nokomis. What does it matter? Let these things fade into dust. Leave these things behind even as we sleep and eat here. All dust. Cars, houses, people. This is all a particle of dust in the fire and light of the days to come.
They passed through, one or two, now and then, and sometimes they told him about women they’d paid for sex, okay, but he didn’t want to listen. He wanted to do this one thing right, of all the things he’d ever done. Here they were in the midst of unbelief, in the bloodstream of the kufr. They felt things together, he and his brothers. They felt the claim of danger and isolation. They felt the magnetic effect of plot. Plot drew them together more tightly than ever. Plot closed the world to the slenderest line of sight, where everything converges to a point. There was the claim of fate, that they were born to this. There was the claim of being chosen, out there, in the wind and sky of Islam. There was the statement that death made, the strongest claim of all, the highest jihad.
But does a man have to kill himself in order to accomplish something in the world?
They had simulator software. They played flight-simulator games on their computer. The autopilot detects deviations from the route. The windshield is birdproof. He had a large cardboard illustration of the flight deck in a Boeing 767. He studied this in his room, memorizing the placement of levers and displays. The others called this poster his wife. He converted liters to gallons, grams to ounces. He sat in a barber chair and looked in the mirror. He was not here, it was not him.
He basically stopped changing his clothes. He wore the same shirt and trousers every day into the following week and underwear as well. He shaved but basically did not dress or undress, often sleeping in his clothes. The others made forceful comments. There was one time he took his clothes to the laundromat wearing someone else’s clothes. He wore these clothes for a week and wanted the other man to wear his clothes now that they were clean, although clean or dirty didn’t matter.
Wrong-eyed men and women laughing on TV, their military forces defiling the Land of the Two Holy Places.
Amir had made the pilgrimage to Mecca. He was a hajji, fulfilling the duty, saying the funeral prayer, salat al-janaza, claiming fellowship with those who’d died on the journey. Hammad did not feel deprived. They were soon to perform another kind of duty, unwritten, all of them, martyrs, together.
But does a man have to kill himself in order to count for something, be someone, find the way?
Hammad thought about this. He recalled what Amir had said. Amir thought clearly, in straight lines, direct and systematic.
Amir spoke in his face.
The end of our life is predetermined. We are carried toward that day from the minute we are born. There is no sacred law against what we are going to do. This is not suicide in any meaning or interpretation of the word. It is only something long written. We are finding the way already chosen for us.
You look at Amir and see a life too intense to last another minute, maybe because he never fucked a woman.
But what about this, Hammad thought. Never mind the man who takes his own life in this situation. What about the lives of the others he takes with him?
He was not eager to bring this up with Amir but did finally, the two of them alone in the house.
What about the others, those who will die?
Amir was impatient. He said they’d talked about such matters in principle when they were in Hamburg, in the mosque and in the flat.
What about the others?
Amir said simply there are no others. The others exist only to the degree that they fill the role we have designed for them. This is their function as others. Those who will die have no claim to their lives outside the useful fact of their dying.
Hammad was impressed by this. It sounded like philosophy.
Two women rustling through a park in the evening, in long skirts, one of them barefoot. Hammad sat on a bench, alone, watching, then got up and followed. This was something that just happened, the way a man is pulled out of his skin and then the body catches up. He followed only to the street where the park ended, watching as they disappeared, brief as turning pages.
The windshield is birdproof. The aileron is a movable flap.
He prays and sleeps, prays and eats. These are dumb junk meals often taken in silence. The plot shapes every breath he takes. This is the truth he has always looked for without knowing how to name it or where to search. They are together. There is no word they can speak, he and the others, that does not come back to this.
One of them peels an orange and begins to pick it apart.
You think too much, Hammad.
Men spent years organizing secretly this work.
Yes, okay.
I saw, myself, these men walking through the camp when we are there.
Okay. But the thinking is done.
And the talking.
Okay. Now we do it.
He hands a slice of orange over to Hammad, who is driving.
My father, the other man says, he would die three hundred times to know what we are doing.
We die once.
We die once, big-time.
Hammad thinks of the rapture of live explosives pressed to his chest and waist.
But don’t forget, we are being stopped any minute by the CIA, the other man says.
He says this and then he laughs. Maybe it’s not true anymore. Maybe it’s a story they’ve told themselves so many times that they’ve stopped believing it. Or maybe they didn’t believe it then and only begin to believe it now, nearing the time. Hammad sees nothing funny in this, either way.
The people he looked at, they need to be ashamed of their attachment to life, walking their dogs. Think of it, dogs scraping at dirt, lawn sprinklers hissing. When he saw a storm bearing in from the gulf he wanted to spread his arms and walk right into it. These people, what they hold so precious we see as empty space. He didn’t think about the purpose of their mission. All he saw was shock and death. There is no purpose, this is the purpose.
When he walks down the bright aisle he thinks a thousand times in one second about what is coming. Clean-shaven, on videotape, passing through the metal detector. The girl at the checkout rolls the soup can over the scanner and he thinks of something funny he can say, saying it internally first to get the word order right.
He looked past the mud-brick huts toward the mountains. Bomb vest and black hood. We are willing to die, they are not. This is our strength, to love death, to feel the claim of armed martyrdom. He stood with the others in the old Russian copper mine, an Afghan camp now, theirs, and they listened to the amplified voice calling across the plain.
The vest was blue nylon with crisscross straps. There were canisters of high explosive wired into the belt. There were slabs of plastique high on his chest. This was not the method he and his brothers would one day employ but it was the same vision of heaven and hell, revenge and devastation.
They stood and listened to the recorded announcement, calling them to prayer.
Now he sits in the barber chair, wearing the striped cape. The barber is a slight man with little to say. The radio plays news, weather, sports and traffic. Hammad does not listen. He is thinking again, looking past the face in the mirror, which is not his, and waiting for the day to come, clear skies, light winds, when there is nothing left to think about.