Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [78]
“You said it yourself. Most lives make no sense.”
“But isn’t it demoralizing? Doesn’t it wear you down? It must eat away your spirit. I mean I was watching on TV last night. Like a séance in hell. Tick tock tick tock. What happens after months of this? Or years. Who do you become?”
He looked at her and nodded as if he agreed and then kept nodding, taking the gesture to another level, a kind of deep sleep, a narcolepsy, eyes open, mind shut down.
There was one final thing, too self-evident to need saying. She wanted to be safe in the world and he did not.
13
When she received a summons for jury service some months earlier and reported to the United States District Court with five hundred other potential jurors and learned that the trial for which they’d been assembled concerned a lawyer accused of aiding the cause of terrorism, she filled out the forty-five-page questionnaire with truths, half-truths and heartfelt lies.
For some time before that day she’d been offered books to edit on terrorism and related subjects. Every subject seemed related. She wasn’t sure why she’d been so desperate to work on such books during the weeks and months when she could not sleep and there were songs of desert mystics in the hallway.
The trial was now in progress but she didn’t follow it in the newspaper. She’d been Juror Number 121, excused from serving on the basis of her written responses. She didn’t know whether it was the true answers or the lies that had made this happen.
She knew that the lawyer, an American woman, was associated with a radical Muslim cleric who was serving a life sentence for terrorist activity. She knew that the man was blind. This was common knowledge. He was the Blind Sheik. But she didn’t know the details of the charges made against the lawyer because she wasn’t reading the stories in the newspaper.
She was editing a book on early polar exploration and another on late Renaissance art and she was counting down from one hundred by sevens.
Died by his own hand.
For nineteen years, since he fired the shot that killed him, she’d said these words to herself periodically, in memoriam, beautiful words that had an archaic grain, Middle English, Old Norse. She imagined the words engraved on an old slant tombstone in a neglected churchyard somewhere in New England.
The grandparents hold sacred office. They’re the ones with the deepest memories. But the grandparents are nearly all gone. Justin has only one now, his father’s father, disinclined to travel, a man whose memories have settled into the tight circuit of his days, beyond easy radius of the child. The child is yet to grow into the deep shadow of his own memories. She herself, mother-daughter, is somewhere midway in the series, knowing that one memory at least is inescapably secure, the day that has marked her awareness of who she is and how she lives.
Her father wasn’t buried in a windy churchyard under bare trees. Jack was in a marble vault high on a wall in a mausoleum complex outside Boston with several hundred others, all chambered in tiers, floor to ceiling.
She came across the obituary late one night, looking at a newspaper that was six days old.
They die every day, Keith said once. There’s no news in that.
He was back in Las Vegas now and she was in bed, flipping the pages, reading the obits. The force of this obituary did not register at once. A man named David Janiak, 39. The account of his life and death was brief and sketchy, written in haste to make a deadline, she thought. She thought there would be a complete report in the paper of the following day. There was no photograph, not of the man and not of the acts that had made him, for a time, a notorious figure. These acts were noted in a single sentence, pointing out that he was the performance artist known as Falling Man.
She let the paper slip to the floor and turned off the light. She lay in bed, head propped on a couple of pillows. A car alarm began to sound down the street. She reached