Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [86]
God is the voice that says, “I am not here.”
She was arguing with herself but it wasn’t argument, just the noise the brain makes.
She had normal morphology. Then one late night, undressing, she yanked a clean green T-shirt over her head and it wasn’t sweat she smelled or maybe just a faint trace but not the sour reek of the morning run. It was just her, the body through and through. It was the body and everything it carried, inside and out, identity and memory and human heat. It wasn’t even something she smelled so much as knew. It was something she’d always known. The child was in it, the girl who wanted to be other people, and obscure things she could not name. It was a small moment, already passing, the kind of moment that is always only seconds from forgetting.
She was ready to be alone, in reliable calm, she and the kid, the way they were before the planes appeared that day, silver crossing blue.
IN THE HUDSON CORRIDOR
The aircraft was secured now and he sat in the jump seat across from the forward galley, keeping watch. He was either supposed to keep watch here, outside the cockpit, or to patrol the aisle, box cutter in hand. He was not confused, only catching a breath, taking a moment. This is when he felt a sensation high on his arm, the thin wincing pain of slit skin.
He sat facing a bulkhead, with the toilet behind him, first-class only.
The air was thick with the Mace he’d sprayed and there was somebody’s blood, his blood, draining through the cuff of his long-sleeved shirt. It was his blood. He didn’t look for the source of the wound but saw more blood beginning to show through the sleeve up toward the shoulder. He thought that maybe the pain had been there earlier but he was only now remembering to feel it. He didn’t know where the box cutter was.
If other things were normal, in his understanding of the plan, the aircraft was headed toward the Hudson corridor. This was the phrase he’d heard from Amir many times. There was no window he might look through without getting out of the seat and he felt no need to do that.
He had his cell phone on vibrate.
Everything was still. There was no sensation of flight. He heard noise but felt no motion and the noise was the kind that overtakes everything and seems completely natural, all the engines and systems that become the air itself.
Forget the world. Be unmindful of the thing called the world.
All of life’s lost time is over now.
This is your long wish, to die with your brothers.
His breath came in short bursts. His eyes were burning. When he looked left, partway, he could see an empty seat in the first-class cabin, on the aisle. Straight ahead, the bulkhead. But there was a view, there was a scene of clear imagining out the back of his head.
He didn’t know how he’d been cut. He’d been cut by one of his brothers, how else, accidentally, in the struggle, and he welcomed the blood but not the pain, which was becoming hard to bear. Then he thought of something he’d long forgotten. He thought of the Shia boys on the battlefield in the Shatt al Arab. He saw them coming out of trenches and redoubts and running across the mudflats toward enemy positions, mouths open in mortal cry. He took strength from this, seeing them cut down in waves by machine guns, boys in the hundreds, then the thousands, suicide brigades, wearing red bandannas around their necks and plastic keys underneath, to open the door to paradise.
Recite the sacred words.
Pull your clothes tightly about you.
Fix your gaze.
Carry your soul in your hand.
He believed he could see straight into the towers even though his back was to them. He didn’t know the aircraft’s location but believed he could see straight out the back of his head and through the steel and aluminum of the aircraft and into the long silhouettes, the shapes, the forms, the figures coming closer, the material things.
The pious ancestors had pulled their clothes tightly about them before battle. They were the ones who named the way. How could any death