Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [61]
He didn’t see her when she went by. She couldn’t seem to walk quickly enough, passing more projects or the same spreading development, one street and then another. She kept her head down, seeing things as fleeting shimmers, a coil of razor wire atop a low fence or a police cruiser going north, the way she’d come, a blue-white flare with faces. This made her think of him back there, suspended, body set in place, and she could not think beyond this.
She found she was running now, shoulder bag bouncing against her hip. She kept the things they wrote, the early-stage members, placing the pages in a binder in her shoulder bag to be hole-punched and fitted in the rings when she got home. The street was nearly empty, a warehouse to her left. She thought of the police cruiser coming to a stop directly under the fallen man. She ran at a fair clip, the pages in the binder and the names of the members skimming through her mind, first name and first letter of last name, this was how she knew them and saw them, and the shoulder bag keeping time, knocking against her hip, giving her a tempo, a rhythm to maintain. She was running level with the trains now and then above them, running uphill into a ribbed sky with taller bundled clouds bleeding down into the low array.
She thought, Died by his own hand.
She stopped running then and stood bent over, breathing heavily. She looked into the pavement. When she ran in the mornings she went long distances and never felt this drained and wasted. She was doubled over, like there were two of her, the one who’d done the running and the one who didn’t know why. She waited for her breathing to ease and then stood upright. A couple of girls sat on a tenement stoop nearby, watching. She walked slowly to the top of the sloped street and then stopped again, remaining for some time with trains coming out of one hole and sinking into another, somewhere south of 100th Street.
She would take the pages home, the things they wrote, and place them with the earlier pages, hole-punched and fitted in the rings, numbering several hundred now. But first she would check the phone messages.
She crossed against the light and was standing on the crowded corner when she saw them coming toward her, running. They were bright and undisguised, moving past people wedged in routine anonymity. The sky seemed so near. They were bright with urgent life, that’s why they were running, and she raised a hand so they might see her in the mass of faces, thirty-six days after the planes.
IN NOKOMIS
He had his Visa card, his frequent-flyer number. He had the use of the Mitsubishi. He’d lost twenty-two kilos and converted this to pounds, multiplying by 2.2046. The heat on the Gulf Coast was fierce at times and Hammad liked it. They rented a little stucco house on West Laurel Road and Amir turned down an offer of free cable TV. The house was pink. They sat around a table on day one and pledged to accept their duty, which was for each of them, in blood trust, to kill Americans.
Hammad pushed a cart through the supermarket. He was invisible to these people and they were becoming invisible to him. He looked at women sometimes, yes, the girl at the checkout named Meg or Peg. He knew things she could never in ten lifetimes begin to imagine. In the drenching light he saw a faint trace of fine soft silky down on her forearm and once he said something that made her smile.
His flight training was not going well. He sat rocking in the simulator and tried to match responses to conditions. The others, most of them, did better. There was always Amir of course. Amir flew