Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [36]
“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