Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [67]
They rode the escalator to the second floor and spent some time looking at science books, nature books, foreign travel, ficción.
“What’s the best thing you ever learned in school? Going back to the beginning, to the first days.”
“The best thing.”
“The biggest thing. Let’s hear it, wise guy.”
“You sound like Dad.”
“I’m filling in. I’m doing double duty.”
“When’s he coming home?”
“Eight, nine days. What’s the best thing?”
“The sun is a star.”
“The best thing you ever learned.”
“The sun is a star,” he said.
“But didn’t I teach you that?”
“I don’t think so.”
“You didn’t learn that in school. I taught you that.”
“I don’t think so.”
“We have a star map on our wall.”
“The sun’s not on our wall. It’s out there. It’s not up there. There is no up or down. It’s just out there.”
“Or maybe we’re out here,” she said. “That may be closer to the true state of things. We’re the ones that are out somewhere.”
They were enjoying this, a little tease and banter, and they stood at the tall window watching the end of the march, banners lowered and folded, the crowd splitting, drifting off, people moving toward the park or into the subway or the cross streets. It was amazing in a way, what he’d said, one sentence, five words, and think of everything it says about everything there is. The sun is a star. When did she realize this herself and why didn’t she remember when? The sun is a star. It seemed a revelation, a fresh way to think about being who we are, the purest way and only finally unfolding, a kind of mystical shiver, an awakening.
Maybe she was just tired. It was time to go home, eat something, drink something. Eight or nine days or longer. Buy the kid a book and go home.
That night she sorted through her father’s collection of jazz records and played a side or two for Justin. After he’d gone to bed she thought of something else and took a jazz encyclopedia down from the dusty upper shelves and there it was, in six-point type, not only the year but the month and the day. This was Charlie Parker’s birthday.
She counted down from one hundred by sevens. It made her feel good to do this. There were mishaps now and then. Odd numbers were tricky, like some rough tumble through space, resisting the easy run of what is divisible by two. That’s why they wanted her to count down by sevens, to make it not so easy. She could descend into the single digits most times without a stumble. The most anxious transition was twenty-three to sixteen. She wanted to say seventeen. She was always on the verge of going from thirty-seven to thirty to twenty-three to seventeen. The odd number asserting itself. At the medical center the doctor smiled at the error, or didn’t notice, or was looking at a printout of test results. She was troubled by memory lapses, steeped in family history. She was also fine. Brain normal for age. She was forty-one years old and within the limited protocols of the imaging process, pretty much everything seemed to be unremarkable. The ventricles were unremarkable, the brainstem and cerebellum, base of skull, cavernous sinus regions, pituitary gland. All unremarkable.
She took the tests and examination, did the MRI, did the psychometrics, did word pairing, recall, concentration, walked a straight line wall to wall, counted down from one hundred by sevens.
It made her feel good, the counting down, and she did it sometimes in the day’s familiar drift, walking down a street, riding in a taxi. It was her form of lyric verse, subjective and unrhymed, a little songlike but with a rigor, a tradition of fixed order, only backwards, to test the presence of another kind of reversal, which a doctor nicely named retrogenesis.
At the Race & Sports Book, downtown, in the old casino,