Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [59]
She slipped around the corner of the building. It was a senseless gesture of flight, adding only a couple of yards to the distance between them, but then it wasn’t so odd, not if he truly fell, if the harness did not hold. She watched him, her shoulder jammed to the brick wall of the building. She did not think of turning and leaving.
They all waited. But he did not fall. He stood poised on the rail for a full minute, then another. The woman’s voice was louder now.
She said, “You don’t be here.”
Kids called out, they shouted inevitably, “Jump,” but only two or three and then it stopped and there were voices from the projects, mournful calls in the damp air.
Then she began to understand. Performance art, yes, but he wasn’t here to perform for those at street level or in the high windows. He was situated where he was, remote from station personnel and railroad police, waiting for a train to come, northbound, this is what he wanted, an audience in motion, passing scant yards from his standing figure.
She thought of the passengers. The train would bust out of the tunnel south of here and then begin to slow down, approaching the station at 125th Street, three-quarters of a mile ahead. It would pass and he would jump. There would be those aboard who see him standing and those who see him jump, all jarred out of their reveries or their newspapers or muttering stunned into their cell phones. These people had not seen him attach the safety harness. They would only see him fall out of sight. Then, she thought, the ones already speaking into phones, the others groping for phones, all would try to describe what they’ve seen or what others nearby have seen and are now trying to describe to them.
There was one thing for them to say, essentially. Someone falling. Falling man. She wondered if this was his intention, to spread the word this way, by cell phone, intimately, as in the towers and in the hijacked planes.
Or she was dreaming his intentions. She was making it up, stretched so tight across the moment that she could not think her own thoughts.
“I’ll tell you what I’m trying to do,” he said.
They passed a supermarket window splashed with broad-sheets. The kid had his hands hidden in his sleeves.
“I’m trying to read her mind. Will she walk down one of the avenues, First, Second, Third, or wander a little, here and there?”
“You said this already.”
It was something he’d been doing lately, extending the sleeves of his sweater to cover his hands. Each hand was closed into a fist and this allowed him to use his fingertips to secure the sleeve to the hand. Sometimes a thumb tip protruded and a trace of knuckles.
“I said this. All right. But I didn’t say I was going to read her mind. Read her mind,” he said, “and tell me what you think.”
“Maybe she changed her mind. She’s in a taxi.”
He wore a backpack to carry his books and school supplies, which left his hands free to be concealed. It was a mannerism that Keith associated with older boys who try to be noticeably peculiar.
“She said she’d walk.”
“Maybe she took the subway.”
“She doesn’t take the subway anymore. She said she’d walk.”
“What’s wrong with the subway?”
He noted the mood of somber opposition, the drag in the kid’s gait. They walked west now, somewhere below 100th Street, stopping at each intersection to peer uptown, trying to spot her among the faces and shapes. Justin pretended to lose interest, drifting toward the curb to study the dust and lesser debris. He didn’t like being deprived of his monosyllabic powers.
“There’s nothing wrong with the subway,” Keith said. “Maybe you’re right. Maybe she took the subway.”
He would tell her about Florence. She would look at him and wait. He would tell her it was not, in truth, the kind