Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [73]
“Did you smoke back then, when we played?”
“I don’t know. Tell me,” Terry said.
“I think you were the only one who didn’t smoke. We had a number of cigars and one cigarette. But I don’t think it was you.”
There were isolated instants, now and then, sitting here, when Terry Cheng seemed again to be the man at the table in Keith’s apartment, dividing chips in swift and artful fashion after the high-low games. He was one of them, only better at cards, and not really one of them at all.
“Did you see the man at my table?”
“In the surgical mask.”
“Significant winner,” Terry said.
“I can picture it spreading.”
“The mask, yes.”
“Three or four people one day, showing up in surgical masks.”
“No one knows why.”
“Then there are ten more and then ten more after that. Like those bicycle riders in China.”
“Whatever,” Terry said. “Exactly.”
Each followed the other’s line of thought along the narrowest track. Around them a wordless din so deeply settled in the air and walls and furniture, in the moving bodies of men and women that it wasn’t easily separable from no sound at all.
“It’s a break from the circuit. They drink aged bourbon and have wives in the other rooms somewhere.”
“Dallas, you’re saying.”
“Yes.”
“I don’t know.”
“There’s a game getting started in Los Angeles. Same thing, stud and draw. Younger crowd. Like early Christians in hiding. Think about it.”
“I don’t know. I’m not sure I could survive a couple of nights in that kind of social arrangement.”
“I think it was Rumsey. The one man,” Terry said, “who smoked cigarettes.”
Keith stared into the waterfall, forty yards away. He realized he didn’t know whether it was real or simulated. The flow was unruffled and the sound of falling water might easily be a digital effect like the waterfall itself.
He said, “Rumsey was cigars.”
“Rumsey was cigars. You’re probably right.”
For all his looseness of manner, the clothing that didn’t fit, the tendency to get lost in the hotel’s deeper reaches and outlying promenades, Terry was set inflexibly in this life. There was no rule of correspondence here. This was not balanced by that. There was no element that might be seen in the light of another element. It was all one thing, whatever the venue, the city, the prize money. Keith saw the point of this. He preferred this to private games with easy banter and wives arranging flowers, a format that appealed to Terry’s vanity, he thought, but could not match the crucial anonymity of these days and weeks, the mingling of countless lives that had no stories attached.
“Did you ever look at that waterfall? Are you able to convince yourself you’re looking at water, real water, and not some special effect?”
“I don’t think about it. It’s not something we’re supposed to think about,” Terry said.
His cigarette had burned down to the filter.
“I worked in midtown. I didn’t experience the impact that others felt, down there, where you were,” he said. “I’m told, someone told me that Rumsey’s mother. What is it now? She took a shoe. She took one of his shoes and she took a razor blade. She went to his apartment and got these things, whatever she could find that might contain genetic material, like traces of hair or skin. There was an armory where she took these things for a DNA match.”
Keith stared into the waterfall.
“She went back a day or two later. Who told me this? She took something else, I don’t know, a toothbrush. Then she went back again. She took something else. Then she went back again. Then they moved the location. That’s when she stopped going.”
Terry Cheng, the old Terry, had never been so talkative. Telling even a brief story was outside the limits of what he took to be a superior self-restraint.
“I used to tell people. People talked about where they were, where they worked. I said midtown. The word sounded naked. It sounded neutral, like it was nowhere. I heard he went out a window, Rumsey.”
Keith looked into the waterfall. This was better than closing his eyes. If he closed his eyes, he’d see something.
“You went back