Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [45]
I wake up thinking where’s everybody. I’m alone because that’s who I am. I’m thinking where’s the rest of them, wide awake, don’t want to get up. It’s like I need my documents to get out of bed. Prueba de ingreso. Prueba de dirección. Tarjeta de seguro social. Picture ID. My father who told jokes he didn’t care clean or dirty the kids have to learn these things. I had two husbands they were different except for their hands. I still look at a man’s hands. Because somebody said it’s a question of which brain is working today because everybody has two brains. Why is it the hardest thing in the world, get out of bed. I have a plant that needs water all the time. I never thought a plant could be work.
Benny said, “But where’s your day? You said this is your day.”
“This is the first like ten seconds. This is still in bed. Next time we’re here maybe I finish getting out of bed. Next time after that I wash my hands. That’s day three. Day four, my face.”
Benny said, “We live that long? By the time you take a pee we all be fatal.”
Then it was her turn. They’d been asking and then urging. They’d all written something, said something about the planes. It was Omar H. who brought it up again, in his earnest way, right arm raised.
“Where were you when it happened?”
For nearly two years now, ever since the storyline sessions began, with her marriage receding into the night sky, she’d listened to these men and women speak about their lives in funny, stinging, straightforward and moving ways, binding the trust among them.
She owed them a story, didn’t she?
There was Keith in the doorway. Always that, had to be that, the desperate sight of him, alive, her husband. She tried to follow the sequence of events, seeing him as she spoke, a figure floating in reflected light, Keith in pieces, in small strokes. The words came fast. She recalled things she didn’t know she’d absorbed, the fragment of spangled glass on the lid of his eye, as if sewn there, and how they’d walked to the hospital, nine or ten blocks, in near deserted streets, in halting steps and deepest silence, and the young man who assisted, a deliveryman, a kid, helping support Keith with one hand and holding a pizza carton with the other, and she nearly asked him how someone could phone in an order for takeout if the phones were not working, a tall Latino kid but maybe not, holding the carton by the bottom, balanced on the palm of his hand and out away from his body.
She wanted to stay focused, one thing following sensibly upon another. There were moments when she wasn’t talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funneled stretch of recent past. They sat dead still, watching her. People, lately, watched her. She seemingly needed watching. They were depending on her to make sense. They were waiting for words from her side of the line, where what is solid does not melt.
She told them about her son. When he was nearby, within sight or touch, in himself, in motion, the fear eased off. Other times she could not think of him without being afraid. This was Justin disembodied, the child of her devising.
Unattended packages, she said, or the menace of lunch in a paper bag, or the subway at rush hour, down there, in sealed boxes.
She could not look at him sleep. He became a child in some jutting future. What do children know? They know who they are, she said, in ways we can’t know and they can’t tell us. There are moments frozen in the run of routine hours. She could not look at him sleep without thinking of what was yet to come. It was part of his stillness, figures in a silent distance, fixed in windows.
Please report any suspicious behavior or unattended packages. That was the wording, wasn’t it?