Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [24]
He thought of something out of nowhere, a phrase, organic shrapnel. Felt familiar but meant nothing to him. Then he saw a car double-parked across the street and thought of something else and then something else again.
There were the walks to and from school, the meals he cooked, something he’d rarely done in the past year and a half because it made him feel like the last man alive, breaking eggs for dinner. There was the park, every kind of weather, and there was the woman who lived across the park. But that was another matter, the walk across the park.
“We go home now,” Justin said.
She was awake, middle of the night, eyes closed, mind running, and she felt time pressing in, and threat, a kind of beat in her head.
She read everything they wrote about the attacks.
She thought of her father. She saw him coming down an escalator, in an airport maybe.
Keith stopped shaving for a time, whatever that means. Everything seemed to mean something. Their lives were in transition and she looked for signs. Even when she was barely aware of an incident it came to mind later, with meaning attached, in sleepless episodes that lasted minutes or hours, she wasn’t sure.
They lived on the top floor of a redbrick building, four-storied, and often now, these past days, she walked down the stairs and heard a certain kind of music, wailing music, lutes and tambourines and chanting voices sometimes, coming from the apartment on the second floor, the same CD, she thought, over and over, and it was beginning to make her angry.
She read stories in newspapers until she had to force herself to stop.
But things were ordinary as well. Things were ordinary in all the ways they were always ordinary.
A woman named Elena lived in that apartment. Maybe Elena was Greek, she thought. But the music wasn’t Greek. She was hearing another set of traditions, Middle Eastern, North African, Bedouin songs perhaps or Sufi dances, music located in Islamic tradition, and she thought of knocking on the door and saying something.
She told people she wanted to leave the city. They knew she wasn’t serious and said so and she hated them a little, and her own transparency, and the small panics that made certain moments in the waking day resemble the frantic ramblings of this very time of night, the mind ever running.
She thought of her father. She carried her father’s name. She was Lianne Glenn. Her father had been a traditional lapsed Catholic, devoted to the Latin mass as long as he didn’t have to sit through it. He made no distinction between Catholics and lapsed Catholics. The only thing that mattered was tradition but not in his work, never there, his designs for buildings and other structures, situated in mostly remote landscapes.
She thought she might adopt a posture of fake civility, as a tactic, a means of answering one offense with another. They heard it mainly on the stairs, Keith said, going up and down, and it’s only music anyway, he said, so why not just forget it.
They didn’t own, they rented, like people in the Middle Ages.
She wanted to knock on the door and say something to Elena. Ask her what the point is. Adopt a posture. This is retaliation in itself. Ask her why she’s playing this particular music at this highly sensitive time. Use the language of the concerned fellow tenant.
She read newspaper profiles of the dead.
When she was a girl she wanted to be her mother, her father, certain of her schoolmates, one or two, who seemed to move with particular ease, to say things that didn’t matter except in the way they were said, on an easy breeze, like birdflight. She slept with