Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [48]
He said it again, louder this time, and waited for the word to register. It was interesting, how the space between them changed. They were looking at him now. The man who’d made the remark was heavyset, in a shiny down jacket that resembled bubblewrap. People drifted along the aisle, in blurry colors. Both men were looking at him. The space was hot and charged and the one in bubblewrap stood brooding on the matter. Women were bouncing on the beds but Florence had seen and heard and she was seated at the edge of the mattress, watching.
The man was listening to his companion but did not move. Keith was happy to stand and watch and then he wasn’t. He walked over there and punched the man. He walked over, stopped, set himself and threw a short right. He hit the man up near the cheekbone, one blow only, and then he stepped back and waited. He was angry now. The contact set him off and he wanted to keep going. He held his hands apart, palms up, like here I am, let’s go. Because if anyone said a harsh word to Florence, or raised a hand to Florence, or insulted her in any way, Keith was ready to kill him.
The man, who’d lurched against his companion, turned now and charged, head down, arms bowed out, like a guy on a motorcycle, and the bouncing stopped all along the rows of beds.
Keith caught him with another right, to the eye this time, and the man lifted him off the floor, an inch or two, and Keith threw some kidney punches that were mostly lost in bubblewrap. There were men everywhere now, salesmen, security guards jogging down the aisle, a workman who’d been pushing a handcart. It was odd, in the general confusion after they’d been separated, how Keith felt a hand on his arm, just above the elbow, and understood at once that it was Florence.
Every time she saw a videotape of the planes she moved a finger toward the power button on the remote. Then she kept on watching. The second plane coming out of that ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone’s, into some other distance, out beyond the towers.
The skies she retained in memory were dramas of cloud and sea storm, or the electric sheen before summer thunder in the city, always belonging to the energies of sheer weather, of what was out there, air masses, water vapor, westerlies. This was different, a clear sky that carried human terror in those streaking aircraft, first one, then the other, the force of men’s intent. He watched with her. Every helpless desperation set against the sky, human voices crying to God and how awful to imagine this, God’s name on the tongues of killers and victims both, first one plane and then the other, the one that was nearly cartoon human, with flashing eyes and teeth, the second plane, the south tower.
He watched with her one time only. She knew she’d never felt so close to someone, watching the planes cross the sky. Standing by the wall he reached toward the chair and took her hand. She bit her lip and watched. They would all be dead, passengers and crew, and thousands in the towers dead, and she felt it in her body, a deep pause, and thought there he is, unbelievably, in one of those towers, and now his hand on hers, in pale light, as though to console her for his dying.
He said, “It still looks like an accident, the first one. Even from this distance, way outside the thing, how many days later, I’m standing here thinking it’s an accident.”
“Because it has to be.”
“It has to be,” he said.
“The way the camera sort of shows surprise.”
“But only the first one.”
“Only the first,” she said.
“The second plane, by the time the second plane appears,” he said, “we’re all a little older and wiser.”
8
The walks across the park were not rituals of anticipation. The road bent west and he walked past the tennis courts without thinking much about the room where she’d be waiting or the bedroom down the hall. They took erotic pleasure from each