Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [19]
“I’m gadget crazy. I love those things.”
“Why do you have a better voice recorder than I had?”
“I think I’ve used it twice.”
“I used mine but then never listened. I liked to talk into it.”
“What did you say when you talked into it?”
“I don’t know. My fellow Americans,” he said.
“I thought everything was lost and gone. I didn’t report a lost driver’s license. I didn’t do anything, basically, but sit in this room.”
An hour later they were still talking. The cookies were small and awful but he kept nipping into them, unthinkingly, eating only the first baby bite and leaving the mutilated remains to litter the plate.
“I was at my screen and heard the plane approach but only after I was thrown down. That’s how fast,” she said.
“Are you sure you heard the plane?”
“The impact sent me to the floor and then I heard the plane. I think the sprinklers, I’m trying to recall the sprinklers. I know I was wet at some point, all through.”
He understood that she hadn’t meant to say this. It sounded intimate, to be wet all through, and she had to pause a moment.
He waited.
“My phone was ringing. I was at my desk now, I don’t know, just to sit, to steady myself, and I pick up the phone. Then we’re talking, like hello, it’s Donna. It’s my friend Donna. I said, Did you hear that? She’s calling from home, in Philadelphia, to talk about a visit. I said, Did you hear that?”
She went through it slowly, remembering as she spoke, often pausing to look into space, to see things again, the collapsed ceilings and blocked stairwells, the smoke, always, and the fallen wall, the drywall, and she paused to search for the word and he waited, watching.
She was dazed and had no sense of time, she said.
There was water somewhere running or falling, flowing down from somewhere.
Men ripped their shirts and wound them around their faces, for masks, for the smoke.
She saw a woman with burnt hair, hair burnt and smoking, but now she wasn’t sure she’d seen this or heard someone say it.
Times they had to walk blind, smoke so thick, hand on the shoulder of the person in front.
She’d lost her shoes or kicked them off and there was water like a stream somewhere, nearby, running down a mountain.
The stairwell was crowded now, and slow, with people coming from other floors.
“Someone said, Asthma. Now that I’m talking, it’s coming back a little bit. Asthma, asthma. A woman like desperate. There were panic faces. That’s when I think I fell, I just went down. I went down five or six steps and hit the landing, like stumble-falling, and I hit hard.”
She wanted to tell him everything. This was clear to him. Maybe she’d forgotten he was there, in the tower, or maybe he was the one she needed to tell for precisely that reason. He knew she hadn’t talked about this, not so intensely, to anyone else.
“It was the panic of being trampled even though they were careful, they helped me, but it was the feeling of being down in a crowd and you will be trampled, but they helped me and this one man I remember, helping me get to my feet, elderly man, out of breath, helping me, talking to me until I was able to get going again.”
There were flames in elevator shafts.
There was a man talking about a giant earthquake. She forgot all about the plane and was ready to believe an earthquake even though she’d heard a plane. And someone else said, I been in earthquakes, a man in a suit and tie, this ain’t no earthquake, a distinguished man, an educated man, an executive, this ain’t no earthquake.
There were dangling wires and she felt a wire touch her arm. It touched the man behind her and he jumped and cursed and then laughed.
The crowd on the stairs, the sheer force of it, hobbling, crying, burnt, some of them, but mostly calm, a woman in a wheelchair and they carried her and people made room, bending into single file on the stairs.
Her face held an earnest appeal, a plea of some sort.
“I know I can’t sit here alive and safe and talk about falling down some stairs when all that terror, all