Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [49]
Later she would say what someone always says.
“Do you have to leave?”
He would stand naked by the bed.
“I’ll always have to leave.”
“And I’ll always have to make your leaving mean something else. Make it mean something romantic or sexy. But not empty, not lonely. Do I know how to do this?”
But she was not a contradiction, was she? She was not someone to be snatched at, not a denial of some truth he may have come upon in these long strange days and still nights, these after-days.
These are the days after. Everything now is measured by after.
She said, “Do I know how to make one thing out of another, without pretending? Can I stay who I am, or do I have to become all those other people who watch someone walk out the door? We’re not other people, are we?”
But she would look at him in a way that made him feel he must be someone else, standing there by the bed, ready to say what someone always says.
They sat in a corner booth glaring at each other. Carol Shoup wore a striped silk overblouse, purple and white, that looked Moorish or Persian.
She said, “Under the circumstances, what do you expect?”
“I expect you to call and ask.”
“But under the circumstances, how could I even bring up the subject?”
“But you did bring it up,” Lianne said.
“Only after the fact. I couldn’t ask you to edit such a book. After what happened to Keith, everything, all of it. I don’t see how you’d want to get involved. A book that’s so enormously immersed, going back on it, leading up to it. And a book that’s so demanding, so incredibly tedious.”
“A book you’re publishing.”
“We have to.”
“After it’s been making the rounds for how many years?”
“We have to. Four or five years,” Carol said. “Because it seems to predict what happened.”
“Seems to predict.”
“Statistical tables, corporate reports, architectural blueprints, terrorist flow charts. What else?”
“A book you’re publishing.”
“It’s badly written, badly organized and I would say deeply and enormously boring. Collected many rejections. Became a legend among agents and editors.”
“A book you’re publishing.”
“Line-editing this beast.”
“Who’s the author?”
“A retired aeronautical engineer. We call him the Unaflyer. He doesn’t live in a remote cabin with his bomb-making chemicals and his college yearbooks but he’s been working obsessively for fifteen or sixteen years.”
There was serious money to be made, by freelance standards, if a book was a major project. In this case it was also a rushed project, timely, newsworthy, even visionary, at least in the publisher’s planned catalog copy—a book detailing a series of interlocking global forces that appeared to converge at an explosive point in time and space that might be said to represent the locus of Boston, New York and Washington on a late-summer morning early in the twenty-first century.
“Line-editing this beast could put you in traction for years to come. It’s all data. It’s all facts, maps and schedules.”
“But it seems to predict.”
The book needed a freelance editor, someone able to work long hours outside the scheduled frenzy of phone calls, e-mails, lunch dates and meetings that an in-house editor encountered—the frenzy that constitutes the job.
“It contains a long sort of treatise on plane hijacking. It contains many documents concerning the vulnerability of certain airports. It names Dulles and Logan. It names many things that actually happened or are happening now. Wall Street, Afghanistan, this thing, that thing. Afghanistan is happening.”
Lianne didn’t care how dense, raveled and intimidating the material might be or how finally unprophetic. This is what she wanted. She didn’t know she wanted this until Carol mentioned the book, derisively, in passing. She thought she’d been invited to lunch