Falling Man_ A Novel - Don Delillo [88]
Only it didn’t look like Rumsey. He sat in his chair, head to one side. He’d been hit by something large and hard when the ceiling caved or even before, in the first spasm. His face was pressed into his shoulder, some blood, not much.
Keith talked to him.
He squatted alongside and took his arm and looked at the man, talking to him. Something came trickling from the corner of Rumsey’s mouth, like bile. What’s bile look like? He saw the mark on his head, an indentation, a gouge mark, deep, exposing raw tissue and nerve.
The office was small and makeshift, a cubicle wedged into a corner, with a limited view of morning sky. He felt the dead nearby. He sensed this, in the hanging dust.
He watched the man breathe. He was breathing. He looked like someone paralyzed for life, born this way, head twisted into his shoulder, living in a chair day and night.
There was fire up there somewhere, fuel burning, smoke blowing out of a ventilation duct, then smoke outside the window, crawling down the surface of the building.
He unbent Rumsey’s index finger and removed the broken mug.
He got to his feet and looked at him. He talked to him. He told him he could not wheel him out in the chair, wheels or not, because debris everywhere, he talked quickly, debris blocking door and hall, talking quickly to get himself to think in like manner.
Things began to fall, one thing and then another, things singly at first, coming down out of the gap in the ceiling, and he tried lifting Rumsey out of the chair. Then something outside, going past the window. Something went past the window, then he saw it. First it went and was gone and then he saw it and had to stand a moment staring out at nothing, holding Rumsey under the arms.
He could not stop seeing it, twenty feet away, an instant of something sideways, going past the window, white shirt, hand up, falling before he saw it. Debris in clusters came down now. There were echoes sounding down the floors and wires snapping at his face and white powder everywhere. He stood through it, holding Rumsey. The glass partition shattered. Something came down and there was a noise and then the glass shivered and broke and then the wall gave way behind him.
It took some time to push himself up and out. His face felt like a hundred pinpoint fires and it was hard to breathe. He found Rumsey in the smoke and dust, facedown in the rubble and bleeding badly. He tried to lift him and turn him and found he couldn’t use his left hand but was able to turn him partly.
He wanted to raise him onto his shoulder, using his left forearm to help guide the upper body while he grabbed the belt with his right hand and tried to snatch and lift.
He began to lift, his face warm with the blood on Rumsey’s shirt, blood and dust. The man jumped in his grip. There was a noise in his throat, abrupt, a half second, half gasp, and then blood from somewhere, floating, and Keith turned away, hand still clutching the man’s belt. He waited, trying to breathe. He looked at Rumsey, who’d fallen away from him, upper body lax, face barely belonging. The whole business of being Rumsey was in shambles now. Keith held tight to the belt buckle. He stood and looked at him and the man opened his eyes and died.
This is when he wondered what was happening here.
Paper was flying down the hallway, rattling in a wind that seemed to wash down from above.
There were dead, faintly seen, in offices to either side.
He climbed out over a fallen wall and made his way slowly toward the voices.
In the stairwell, in near dark, a woman carried a small tricycle tight to her chest, a thing for a three-year-old, handlebars framing her ribs.
They walked down, thousands, and he was in there with them. He walked in a long sleep, one step and then the next.
There was water running somewhere and voices in an odd distance, coming from another stairwell or an elevator bank, out in the dark somewhere.
It was hot and crowded and the pain in his face