Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [4]
“You have more to lose this time. Self-respect. Think about that.”
“Tell me this. What kind of painter is allowed to behave more unspeakably, figurative or abstract?”
She heard the buzzer and walked over to the intercom to listen to the doorman’s announcement. She knew what it was in advance. This would be Martin on the way up, her mother’s lover.
3
He signed a document, then another. There were people on gurneys and there were others, a few, in wheelchairs, and he had trouble writing his name and more trouble fastening the hospital gown behind him. Lianne was there to help. Then she wasn’t anymore and an orderly put him in a wheelchair and pushed him down a corridor and into a series of examining rooms, with urgent cases rolling by.
Doctors in scrubs and paper masks checked his airway and took blood-pressure readings. They were interested in potentially fatal reactions to injury, hemorrhage, dehydration. They looked for diminished blood flow to tissues. They studied the contusions on his body and peered into his eyes and ears. Someone gave him an EKG. Through the open door he saw IV racks go floating past. They tested his hand grip and took X rays. They told him things he could not absorb about a ligament or cartilage, a tear or sprain.
Someone took the glass out of his face. The man talked throughout, using an instrument he called a pickup to extract small fragments of glass that were not deeply embedded. He said that most of the worst cases were in hospitals downtown or at the trauma center on a pier. He said that survivors were not appearing in the numbers expected. He was propelled by events and could not stop talking. Doctors and volunteers were standing idle, he said, because the people they were waiting for were mostly back there, in the ruins. He said he would use a clamp for deeper fragments.
“Where there are suicide bombings. Maybe you don’t want to hear this.”
“I don’t know.”
“In those places where it happens, the survivors, the people nearby who are injured, sometimes, months later, they develop bumps, for lack of a better term, and it turns out this is caused by small fragments, tiny fragments of the suicide bomber’s body. The bomber is blown to bits, literally bits and pieces, and fragments of flesh and bone come flying outward with such force and velocity that they get wedged, they get trapped in the body of anyone who’s in striking range. Do you believe it? A student is sitting in a café. She survives the attack. Then, months later, they find these little, like, pellets of flesh, human flesh that got driven into the skin. They call this organic shrapnel.”
He tweezered another splinter of glass out of Keith’s face.
“This is something I don’t think you have,” he said.
Justin’s two best friends were a sister and brother who lived in a high-rise ten blocks away. Lianne had trouble remembering their names at first and called them the Siblings and soon the name stuck. Justin said this was their real name anyway and she thought what a funny kid when he wants to be.
She saw Isabel on the street, mother of the Siblings, and they stood at the corner talking.
“That’s what kids do, absolutely, but I have to admit I’m beginning to wonder.”
“They sort of conspire.”
“Yes, and sort of talk in code, and they spend a lot of time at the window in Katie’s room, with the door closed.”
“You know they’re at the window.”
“Because I can hear them talking when I walk by and I know that’s where they’re standing. They’re at the window talking in this sort of code. Maybe Justin tells you things.”
“I don’t think so.”
“Because it’s getting a little strange, frankly, all the time they spend, first, sort of huddled together, and then, I don’t know, like endlessly whispering things in this semi-gibberish, which is what kids do, absolutely, but still.”
Lianne wasn’t sure what this was all about. It was about three kids being kids together.
“Justin’s getting interested in the weather.