Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [22]
They wrote and then read what they’d written, each in turn, and there were remarks and then exchanges and then monologues.
“Show us the finger,” Benny said. “We want to kiss it.”
Lianne encouraged them to speak and argue. She wanted to hear everything, the things everybody said, ordinary things, and the naked statements of belief, and the depth of feeling, the passion that saturated the room. She needed these men and women. Dr. Apter’s comment disturbed her because there was truth in it. She needed these people. It was possible that the group meant more to her than it did to the members. There was something precious here, something that seeps and bleeds. These people were the living breath of the thing that killed her father.
“God says something happens, then it happens.”
“I don’t respect God no more, after this.”
“We sit and listen and God tells us or doesn’t.”
“I was walking down the street to get my hair cut. Somebody comes running.”
“I was on the crapper. I hated myself later. People said where were you when it happened. I didn’t tell them where I was.”
“But you remember to tell us. That’s beautiful, Benny.”
They interrupted, gestured, changed the subject, talked over each other, shut their eyes in thought or puzzlement or in dismal re-experience of the event itself.
“What about the people God saved? Are they better people than the ones who died?”
“It’s not ours to ask. We don’t ask.”
“A million babies die in Africa and we can’t ask.”
“I thought it was war. I thought it was war,” Anna said. “I stayed inside and lit a candle. It’s the Chinese, my sister said, who she never trusted with the bomb.”
Lianne struggled with the idea of God. She was taught to believe that religion makes people compliant. This is the purpose of religion, to return people to a childlike state. Awe and submission, her mother said. This is why religion speaks so powerfully in laws, rituals and punishments. And it speaks beautifully as well, inspiring music and art, elevating consciousness in some, reducing it in others. People fall into trances, people literally go to the ground, people crawl great distances or march in crowds stabbing themselves and whipping themselves. And other people, the rest of us, maybe we’re rocked more gently, joined to something deep in the soul. Powerful and beautiful, her mother said. We want to transcend, we want to pass beyond the limits of safe understanding, and what better way to do it than through make-believe.
Eugene A. was seventy-seven years old, hair gelled and spiked, a ring in his ear.
“I was scrubbing the sink for once in my life when the phone rings. It’s my ex-wife,” he said, “that I haven’t talked to in like seventeen years, is she even alive or dead, calling from somewhere I can’t even pronounce it, in Florida. I say what. She says never mind what. That same voice of no respect. She says turn on TV.”
“I had to watch at a neighbor,” Omar said.
“Seventeen years, not one word. Look what has to happen before she finally gets it in her head to call. Turn on TV, she tells me.”
The cross talk continued.
“I don’t forgive God what He did.”
“How do you explain this to a child whose mother or father?”
“You lie to children.”
“I wanted to see that, the ones that were holding hands.”
“When you see something happening, it’s supposed to be real.”
“But God. Did God do this or not?”
“You’re looking right at it. But it’s not really happening.”
“He has the big things that He does. He shakes the world,” said Curtis B.
“I would say to someone at least he didn’t die with a tube in his stomach or wearing a bag for his waste.”
“Ashes and bones.”
“I am closer to God, I know it, we know it, they know it.”
“This is our prayer room,” Omar said.
No one wrote a word about the terrorists. And in the exchanges that followed the readings, no one spoke about the terrorists. She prompted them. There has to be something you want to say, some feeling to express, nineteen men come here to kill us.
She