Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [80]
She did not read further but knew at once which photograph the account referred to. It hit her hard when she first saw it, the day after, in the newspaper. The man headlong, the towers behind him. The mass of the towers filled the frame of the picture. The man falling, the towers contiguous, she thought, behind him. The enormous soaring lines, the vertical column stripes. The man with blood on his shirt, she thought, or burn marks, and the effect of the columns behind him, the composition, she thought, darker stripes for the nearer tower, the north, lighter for the other, and the mass, the immensity of it, and the man set almost precisely between the rows of darker and lighter stripes. Headlong, free fall, she thought, and this picture burned a hole in her mind and heart, dear God, he was a falling angel and his beauty was horrific.
She clicked forward and there was the picture. She looked away, into the keyboard. It is the ideal falling motion of a body.
The preliminary finding is death from natural causes, pending an autopsy and toxicological report. Suffered from chronic depression due to a spinal condition.
If this photograph was an element in his performances he said nothing about it when questioned by reporters after one of his arrests. He said nothing when asked whether anyone close to him had been lost in the attacks. He had no comments to make to the media on any subject.
Suspended from the railing of a roof garden in Tribeca.
Dangling from a footbridge over the FDR Drive.
MAYOR SAYS FALL MAN MORONIC.
He turned down an invitation to fall from the upper reaches of the Guggenheim Museum at scheduled intervals over a three-week period. He turned down invitations to speak at the Japan Society, the New York Public Library and cultural organizations in Europe.
His falls were said to be painful and highly dangerous due to the rudimentary equipment he used.
His body was discovered by his brother, Roman Janiak, a software engineer. The Saginaw County medical examiner’s office reports this was an apparent coronary event, tests pending.
His training included formal classes six days a week in both Cambridge and Moscow. Graduating actors gave a showcase presentation in New York for casting directors, artistic directors, agents and others. David Janiak, as a Brechtian dwarf, assaulted another actor, seemingly trying to rip the man’s tongue out of his mouth during what was supposed to be a structured improvisation.
She clicked forward. She tried to connect this man to the moment when she’d stood beneath the elevated tracks, nearly three years ago, watching someone prepare to fall from a maintenance platform as the train went past. There were no photographs of that fall. She was the photograph, the photosensitive surface. That nameless body coming down, this was hers to record and absorb.
Early in 2003 he began to reduce the number of performances and tended to appear only in remote parts of the city. Then the performances stopped.
He injured his back so badly in one of the falls that he had to be hospitalized. Police arrested him at the hospital for obstructing vehicular traffic and creating a hazardous or physically offensive condition.
Plans for his final jump at some unforeseen future time did not include a harness, according to his brother Roman Janiak, 44, who spoke to a reporter shortly after he identified the body.
Students at the Institute create their own movement vocabulary and maintenance program to follow throughout their careers. Study includes psychophysical exercises, Meyerhold’s biomechanics, Grotowski training, Vakhtangov’s plasticity training, individual and partner acrobatics, classical and historical dance, style and genre explorations, Dalcroze eurythmics, impulse work, slow motion, fencing, armed and unarmed stage combat.
It is not immediately known what brought David Janiak to a motel outside the small town more than five hundred miles from the site of the World Trade Center.
She looked into the keyboard. The man eluded her. All she