Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [57]
A car went by, radio blasting.
It took a moment for him to come into view, upper body only, a man on the other side of the protective fence that bordered the tracks. He wasn’t a track worker in a blaze orange vest. She saw that much. She saw him from the chest up and heard the schoolkids now, calling to each other, all the games in suspension.
He seemed to be coming out of nowhere. There was no station stop here, no ticket office or platform for passengers, and she had no idea how he’d managed to gain access to the track area. White male, she thought. White shirt, dark jacket.
The immediate street was quiet. People passing looked and walked and a few stopped, briefly, and others, younger, lingered. It was the kids in the schoolyard who were interested and the faces high to her right, more of them now, floating in the windows of the projects.
White male in suit and tie, it now appeared, as he made his way down the short ladder through an opening in the fence.
This is when she knew, of course. She watched him lower himself to the maintenance platform that jutted over the street, just south of the intersection. This is when she understood, although she’d felt something even before her first glimpse of the figure. There were the faces in the high windows, something about the faces, a forewarning, the way you know something before you perceive it directly. This is who he had to be.
He stood on the platform, about three stories above her. Everything was painted brownish rust, the upper tiers of coarse granite, the barrier he’d just passed through and the platform itself, a slatted metal structure resembling a large fire escape, twelve feet long and six wide, accessible normally to workers on the tracks or those at street level arriving in a maintenance truck equipped with vertical boom and open bucket.
A train went by, southbound again. Why is he doing this, she thought.
He was thinking, not listening. He began to listen as they made their way uptown, talking in brief sprints, and he realized that the kid was using monosyllables again.
He told him, “Cut the crap.”
“What?”
“How’s that for monosyllables?”
“What?”
“Cut the crap,” he said.
“What for? You tell me I don’t talk.”
“That’s your mother, not me.”
“Now I talk, you tell me not to talk.”
He was getting better at this, Justin was, barely pausing between words. At first it was an instructive form of play but the practice carried something else now, a solemn obstinacy, nearly ritualistic.
“Look, I don’t care. You can talk in the Inuit language if you like. Learn Inuit. They have an alphabet of syllables instead of letters. You can speak one syllable at a time. It’ll take you a minute and a half to say one long word. I’m in no hurry. Take all the time you want. Long pauses between the syllables. We’ll eat whale blubber and you can speak Inuit.”
“I do not think I would like to eat whale meat.”
“It’s not meat, it’s blubber.”
“This is the same as fat.”
“Say blubber.”
“This is the same as fat. It is fat. Whale fat.”
Wise-ass little kid.
“The point is that your mother doesn’t like you talking this way. It upsets her. We want to give her a break. You can understand this. And even if you can’t understand it, don’t do it.”
The mixed skies were darker now. He began to think this was a bad idea, trying to meet her coming home. They went east a block, then north again.
There was something else he thought concerning Lianne. He thought he would tell her about Florence. It was the right thing to do. It was the kind of perilous truth that would lead to an understanding of clean and even proportions, long-lasting, with a feeling of reciprocal love and trust. He believed this. It was a way to stop being double