Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [79]
She waited for the car alarm to stop. When it stopped she turned on the light and got out of bed and went to the living room. There was a stack of old newspapers in a wicker basket. She looked for the five-day-old paper, which was the paper of the following day, but could not find it, whole or part, read or unread. She sat in the chair next to the basket waiting for something to happen or stop happening, a noise, a drone, an appliance, before she went to the computer in the next room.
The advanced search took no time. There he was, David Janiak, in pictures and print.
Dangling from the balcony of an apartment building on Central Park West.
Suspended from the roof of a loft building in the Williamsburg section of Brooklyn.
Dangling from the flies at Carnegie Hall during a concert, string section scattered.
Dangling over the East River from the Queensboro Bridge.
Sitting in the back seat of a police car.
Standing on the rail of a terrace.
Dangling from the bell tower of a church in the Bronx.
Dead at 39, apparently of natural causes.
He’d been arrested at various times for criminal trespass, reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct. He’d been beaten by a group of men outside a bar in Queens.
She clicked forward to the transcript of a panel discussion at the New School. Falling Man as Heartless Exhibitionist or Brave New Chronicler of the Age of Terror.
She read a few remarks, then stopped reading. She clicked forward to entries in Russian and other Slavic languages. She stared into the keyboard for a time.
Photographed being outfitted with a safety harness, an associate trying to shield him from the camera.
Photographed with bloody face in hotel lobby.
Dangling from parapet of tenement in Chinatown.
All his falls were headfirst, none announced in advance. The performance pieces were not designed to be recorded by a photographer. Those pictures that exist were taken by people who happened to be at the site or by a professional alerted to the event by a passerby.
He studied acting and dramaturgy at the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His training included a three-month residency at the Moscow Art Theatre School.
Dead at 39. No sign of foul play. Suffered from a heart ailment and high blood pressure.
He worked without pulleys, cables or wires. Safety harness only. And no bungee cord to absorb the shock of longer falls. Just an arrangement of straps under the dress shirt and blue suit with one strand emerging from a trouser leg and extending back to a secure structure at the top of the fall.
Most charges dismissed. Fines and warnings issued.
She came across another burst of foreign languages, many words decorated with acute accents, circumflexes and other marks whose names she couldn’t think of.
She looked into the screen waiting for a sound in the street, car brakes, car alarm, that would get her out of the room and back into bed.
His brother, Roman Janiak, a software engineer, assisted with most jumps, becoming visible to onlookers only when it was unavoidable. Plans for a final fall, according to him, did not include a safety harness.
She thought it could be the name of a trump card in a tarot deck, Falling Man, name in gothic type, the figure twisting down in a stormy night sky.
There is some dispute over the issue of the position he assumed during the fall, the position he maintained in his suspended state. Was this position intended to reflect the body posture of a particular man who was photographed falling from the north tower of the World Trade Center, headfirst, arms at his sides, one leg bent, a man set forever in free fall against the looming background of the column panels in the tower?
Free fall is the fall of a body within the atmosphere without a drag-producing device such as a parachute. It is the ideal falling motion of a body