Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [77]
“All right.”
“We need each other. Just people sharing the air, that’s all.”
“All right,” he said.
“But I know what’s happening. You’re going to drift away. I’m prepared for that. You’ll stay away longer, drift off somewhere. I know what you want. It’s not exactly a wish to disappear. It’s the thing that leads to that. Disappearing is the consequence. Or maybe it’s the punishment.”
“You know what I want. I don’t know. You know.”
“You want to kill somebody,” she said.
She didn’t look at him when she said this.
“You’ve wanted this for some time,” she said. “I don’t know how it works or how it feels. But it’s a thing you carry with you.”
Now that she’d said it, she wasn’t sure she believed it. But she was certain he’d never argued the idea in his mind. It was in his skin, maybe just a pulse at the side of the forehead, the faintest cadence in a small blue vein. She knew there was something that had to be satisfied, a matter discharged in full, and she thought this was at the heart of his restlessness.
“Too bad I can’t join the army. Too old,” he said, “or I could kill without penalty and then come home and be a family.”
He was drinking scotch, sipping it, neat, and smiling faintly at what he’d said.
“You can’t go back to the job you had. I understand that.”
“The job. The job wasn’t much different from the job I had before all this happened. But that was before, this is after.”
“I know that most lives make no sense. I mean in this country, what makes sense? I can’t sit here and say let’s go away for a month. I’m not going to reduce myself to saying something like that. Because that’s another world, the one that makes sense. But listen to me. You were stronger than I was. You helped me get here. I don’t know what would have happened.”
“I can’t talk about strength. What strength?”
“That’s what I saw and felt. You were the one in the tower but I was the berserk. Now, damn it, I don’t know.”
After a silence he said, “I don’t know either,” and they laughed.
“I used to watch you sleep. I know how strange that sounds. But it wasn’t strange. Just by being who you were, being alive and back here with us. I watched you. I felt I knew you in a way I’d never known you before. We were a family. That’s what it was. That’s how we did it.”
“Look, trust me.”
“All right.”
“I’m not set on doing anything permanent,” he said. “I go away a while, come back. I’m not about to disappear. Not about to do anything drastic. I’m here now and I’ll be back. You want me back. Is that right?”
“Yes.”
“Go away, come back. Simple as that.”
“There’s money coming,” she said. “The sale is almost complete.”
“Money coming.”
“Yes,” she said.
He’d helped work out details of the transaction concerning her mother’s apartment. He’d read contracts, made adjustments and e-mailed instructions from a casino on some Indian reservation where a tournament was in progress.
“Money coming,” he said again. “The kid’s education. Now through college, eleven or twelve years, criminal sums of money. But that’s not what you’re saying. You’re saying we can afford a major loss I might suffer in the card rooms. This won’t happen.”
“If you believe it, I believe it.”
“Hasn’t happened and it won’t,” he said.
“What about Paris? Will that happen?”
“It became Atlantic City. A month from now.”
“How does the warden feel about conjugal visits?”
“You don’t want to be there.”
“I don’t. You’re right,” she said. “Because thinking about it is one thing. Seeing it would put me in depression. People sitting around a table going shuffle shuffle. Week after week. I mean catching planes to go play cards. I mean aside from