Falling Man

10

They walked the entire route, north for twenty blocks and then across town and finally down toward Union Square, a couple of miles in steam heat, with police in riot helmets and flak jackets, small children riding their parents’ shoulders. They walked with five hundred thousand others, a bright swarm of people ranging sidewalk to sidewalk, banners and posters, printed shirts, coffins draped in black, a march against the war, the president, the policies.

She felt remote from the occasion even as it pressed upon her. Police helicopters went beating overhead and there was a rank of men chanting and screaming at the marchers. Justin took a leaflet from a woman in a black headscarf. She had pigment dappled on her hands and looked off toward some middle distance, avoiding eye contact. People stopped to watch a burning float, papiermâché, and the crowd became more dense, collapsing in on itself. She tried to take the kid’s hand but that was over now. He was ten and thirsty and went dodging off to the other side of the street, where a man sold soft drinks from stacked crates. There were a dozen police nearby, positioned in front of red netting that was draped beneath a construction scaffold. This is where they would detain the overcommitted and uncontrollable.

A man came up to her, slouching out of the crowd, black man, hand on heart, and said, “This here’s Charlie Parker’s birthday.”

He was almost looking at her but not quite and then moved on and said the same thing to a man wearing a T-shirt inscribed with a peace sign and in his reproachful tone she caught the implication that all these people, these half million in their running shoes and sun hats and symbol-bearing paraphernalia, were shit-faced fools to be gathered in this heat and humidity for whatever it was that had brought them here when they might more suitably be filling these streets, in exactly these numbers, to show respect to Charlie Parker on his birthday.

If her father were here, if Jack, he would probably agree. And, yes, she felt a separation, a distance. This crowd did not return to her a sense of belonging. She was here for the kid, to allow him to walk in the midst of dissent, to see and feel the argument against war and misrule. She wanted, herself, to be away from it all. These three years past, since that day in September, all life had become public. The stricken community pours forth voices and the solitary night mind is shaped by the outcry. She was content in the small guarded scheme she’d lately constructed, arranging the days, working the details, staying down, keeping out. Cut free from rage and foreboding. Cut free from nights that sprawl through endless waking chains of self-hell. She was marching apart from the handheld slogans and cardboard coffins, the mounted police, the anarchists throwing bottles. It was all choreography, to be shredded in seconds.

The kid turned and watched the man weave through the crowd, stopping here and there to make his announcement.

“Jazz musician,” she told him. “Charlie Parker. Died forty or fifty years ago. When we get home I’ll dig out some old long-playing records. LPs. Charlie Parker. Known as Bird. Don’t ask me why. Before you ask, don’t ask because I don’t know. I’ll find the records and we’ll listen. But remind me. Because I forget.”

The kid took more leaflets. People stood at the edges of the march handing out material on behalf of peace, justice, voter registration, paranoid truth movements. He studied the leaflets as he walked along, head bobbing so he could see the marchers in front of him, read the printed words in his hand.

Mourn the Dead. Heal the Wounded. End the War.

“Give yourself a break. Walk now, read later.”

He said, “Yeah right.”

“If you’re trying to match what you read and what you see, they don’t necessarily match.”

He said, “Yeah right.”

This was a new thing, the two drawled words of breezy dismissal. She pushed him toward the sidewalk and he drank his soda in the shade with his back against a building wall. She stood next to him, aware that he was slowly sinking down along the wall, a gestural comment on the heat and long walk, more drama than complaint.

Finally he came to rest in a tiny sumo squat. He sorted through his literature, spending some minutes looking at a particular leaflet. She saw the word Islam at the top of the middle page in the fold, followed by an 800 number. This was probably the leaflet he’d taken from the woman in the black headscarf. She saw words in boldface, with explanations.

A troupe of elderly women marched by singing an old protest song.

He said, “The Hajj.”

“Yes.”

He said, “The Shahadah.”

“Yes.”

“There is no god but Allah and Muhammad is His prophet.”

“Yes.”

He recited the line again, slowly, in a more concentrated manner, drawing it toward him in a way, trying to see into it. People stood nearby or shuffled past, marchers straying onto the sidewalk.

He recited the line in Arabic now. He recited the line, she told him it was Arabic, transliterated. But even this was too much, an isolated moment in the shade with her son, making her uneasy. He read the definition of another word that referred to the annual obligatory fast during the month of Ramadan. It made her think of something. He kept reading, mostly in silence and sometimes aloud, sticking the leaflet in the air and waiting for her to take it when he needed help pronouncing a word. This happened two or three times and when it didn’t happen she found herself thinking of Cairo, some twenty years earlier, the vaguest shapes in her mind, herself among them, stepping off a tour bus into a vast crowd.

The trip was a gift, graduation, and she and a former classmate were on the bus and then off the bus and in the middle of some kind of festival. The crowd was large enough to make any part of it seem the middle. The crowd was dense and streaming, sundown, taking them along past booths and food stalls, and the friends were separated within half a minute. What she began to feel, aside from helplessness, was a heightened sense of who she was in relation to the others, thousands of them, orderly but all-enclosing. Those nearby saw her, smiled, some of them, and spoke to her, one or two, and she was forced to see herself in the reflecting surface of the crowd. She became whatever they sent back to her. She became her face and features, her skin color, a white person, white her fundamental meaning, her state of being. This is who she was, not really but at the same time yes, exactly, why not. She was privileged, detached, self-involved, white. It was there in her face, educated, unknowing, scared. She felt all the bitter truth that stereotypes contain. The crowd was gifted at being a crowd. This was their truth. They were at home, she thought, in the wave of bodies, the compressed mass. Being a crowd, this was a religion in itself, apart from the occasion they were there to celebrate. She thought of crowds in panic, surging over riverbanks. These were a white person’s thoughts, the processing of white panic data. The others did not have these thoughts. Debra had these thoughts, her friend, her missing double, somewhere out there being white. She tried to look around for Debra but it was hard to do this, swing the shoulders free and turn. They were each in the middle of the crowd, they were the middle, each to herself. People talked to her. An old man offered her a sweet and told her the name of the festival, which marked the close of Ramadan. The memory ended here.

He recited the line in Arabic, by syllables, slowly, and she reached down for the leaflet and did her version, no less uncertain, only quicker. There were other words he handed up to her and she pronounced or mispronounced them and it made her uneasy, small as it was, reciting a line, explaining a ritual. It was part of the public discourse, the pouring forth, Islam with an 800 number. Even the old man’s face, in memory, in Cairo, brought her back in. She was in that memory and on this sidewalk simultaneously, the ghost of one city, the frontal thunder of the other, and she needed to flee both crowds.

They rejoined the downtown stage of the march and listened briefly to someone speaking on a makeshift platform in Union Square. Then they went into the bookstore nearby and wandered the long aisles, in the cool and calm. Thousands of books, gleaming, on tables and shelves, the place quiet, a summer Sunday, and the kid went into a bloodhound imitation, looking and sniffing at books but not touching, his fingertips pressed to his face to create sagging jowls. She didn’t know what this meant but began to understand that he wasn’t trying to amuse her or annoy her. The behavior was outside her field of influence, between him and the books.

They rode the escalator to the second floor and spent some time looking at science books, nature books, foreign travel, ficción.

“What’s the best thing you ever learned in school? Going back to the beginning, to the first days.”

“The best thing.”

“The biggest thing. Let’s hear it, wise guy.”

“You sound like Dad.”

“I’m filling in. I’m doing double duty.”

“When’s he coming home?”

“Eight, nine days. What’s the best thing?”

“The sun is a star.”

“The best thing you ever learned.”

“The sun is a star,” he said.

“But didn’t I teach you that?”

“I don’t think so.”

“You didn’t learn that in school. I taught you that.”

“I don’t think so.”

“We have a star map on our wall.”

“The sun’s not on our wall. It’s out there. It’s not up there. There is no up or down. It’s just out there.”

“Or maybe we’re out here,” she said. “That may be closer to the true state of things. We’re the ones that are out somewhere.”

They were enjoying this, a little tease and banter, and they stood at the tall window watching the end of the march, banners lowered and folded, the crowd splitting, drifting off, people moving toward the park or into the subway or the cross streets. It was amazing in a way, what he’d said, one sentence, five words, and think of everything it says about everything there is. The sun is a star. When did she realize this herself and why didn’t she remember when? The sun is a star. It seemed a revelation, a fresh way to think about being who we are, the purest way and only finally unfolding, a kind of mystical shiver, an awakening.

Maybe she was just tired. It was time to go home, eat something, drink something. Eight or nine days or longer. Buy the kid a book and go home.

That night she sorted through her father’s collection of jazz records and played a side or two for Justin. After he’d gone to bed she thought of something else and took a jazz encyclopedia down from the dusty upper shelves and there it was, in six-point type, not only the year but the month and the day. This was Charlie Parker’s birthday.

She counted down from one hundred by sevens. It made her feel good to do this. There were mishaps now and then. Odd numbers were tricky, like some rough tumble through space, resisting the easy run of what is divisible by two. That’s why they wanted her to count down by sevens, to make it not so easy. She could descend into the single digits most times without a stumble. The most anxious transition was twenty-three to sixteen. She wanted to say seventeen. She was always on the verge of going from thirty-seven to thirty to twenty-three to seventeen. The odd number asserting itself. At the medical center the doctor smiled at the error, or didn’t notice, or was looking at a printout of test results. She was troubled by memory lapses, steeped in family history. She was also fine. Brain normal for age. She was forty-one years old and within the limited protocols of the imaging process, pretty much everything seemed to be unremarkable. The ventricles were unremarkable, the brainstem and cerebellum, base of skull, cavernous sinus regions, pituitary gland. All unremarkable.

She took the tests and examination, did the MRI, did the psychometrics, did word pairing, recall, concentration, walked a straight line wall to wall, counted down from one hundred by sevens.

It made her feel good, the counting down, and she did it sometimes in the day’s familiar drift, walking down a street, riding in a taxi. It was her form of lyric verse, subjective and unrhymed, a little songlike but with a rigor, a tradition of fixed order, only backwards, to test the presence of another kind of reversal, which a doctor nicely named retrogenesis.

At the Race amp; Sports Book, downtown, in the old casino, there were five rows of long tables set at graded levels. He sat at the far end of the last table in the top row, facing front, with five screens high on the wall ahead showing horses running in various time zones somewhere on the planet. A man read a paperback book at the table directly below him, cigarette burning down in his hand. Across the room at the lowest level a large woman in a hooded sweatshirt sat before an array of newspapers. He knew it was a woman because the hood was not raised and would have known anyway, somehow, through gesture or posture, the way she spread pages before her and used both hands to smooth them out and then nudged other pages out of reading range, in the wan light and hanging smoke.

The casino spread behind him and to either side, acres of neon slots, mostly empty now of human pulse. He felt hemmed in all the same, enclosed by the dimness and low ceiling and by the thick residue of smoke that adhered to his skin and carried decades of crowds and action.

It was eight a.m. and he was the only person who knew this. He glanced toward the far end of the adjacent table, where an old man with a white ponytail sat bent across the arm of his chair, watching horses in midrace and showing the anxious lean of body english that marks money on the line. He was otherwise motionless. The lean was all there was and then the voice of the track announcer, rapid-fire, the one mild excitement: Yankee Gal coming through on the inside.

There was no one else at the tables here. Races ended, others began, or they were the same races replayed on one or more of the screens. He wasn’t watching closely. There were flutters of action from another set of screens, recessed at a lower level, above the cashier’s cage. He watched the cigarette burn down in the hand of the man reading the book, just below him. He checked his watch again. He knew time and day of week and wondered when such scraps of data would begin to feel disposable.

The ponytailed man got up and left in the final furlong of a race in progress, curling his newspaper into a tight fold and snapping it on his thigh. The whole place stank of abandonment. In time Keith got up and walked over to the poker room, where he completed his buy-in and took his seat, ready for the start of the tournament, so-called.

Only three tables were occupied. In about the seventy-seventh game of hold ’em, he began to sense a life in all this, not for himself but the others, a small dawn of tunneled meaning. He watched the blinking woman across the table. She was thin, wrinkled, hard to see, right there, five feet away, hair going gray. He didn’t wonder who she was or where she’d go when this was over, to what sort of room somewhere, to think what kind of thoughts. This was never over. That was the point. There was nothing outside the game but faded space. She blinked and called, blinked and folded.

In the casino distance, the announcer’s smoky voice, in replay. Yankee Gal was coming through on the inside.

She missed those nights with friends when you talk about everything. She hadn’t stayed in close touch and felt no guilt or need. There were hours of talk and laughter, bottles uncorked. She missed the comical midlife monologues of the clinically self-absorbed. The food ran out, the wine did not, and who was the little man in the red cravat who did sound effects from old submarine movies. She went out only rarely now, went alone, did not stay late. She missed the autumn weekends at somebody’s country house, leaf-fall and touch football, kids tumbling down grassy slopes, leaders and followers, all watched by a pair of tall slender dogs poised on their haunches like figures in myth.

She didn’t feel the old attraction, the thing looked forward to. It was also a question of thinking of Keith. He would not want to do it. He’d never felt right in these surroundings and it would be impossible now for him to feel any different. People have trouble approaching him on the simplest social level. They think they will bounce off. They will hit a wall and bounce.

Her mother, this is what she missed. Nina was all around her now but only in the meditative air, her face and breath, an attending presence somewhere near.

After the memorial service, four months earlier, a small group went for a late lunch. Martin had flown in from somewhere, as usual, in Europe, and there were two of her mother’s former colleagues.

It was a quiet hour and a half, with stories of Nina and other matters, the work they were doing, the places they’d lately been. The woman, a biographer, ate sparingly, spoke at some length. The man said nearly nothing. He was director of a library of art and architecture.

The afternoon was fading away, over coffee. Then Martin said, “We’re all sick of America and Americans. The subject nauseates us.”

He and Nina had seen each other only rarely in the last two and a half years of her life. Each heard news of the other through mutual friends or from Lianne, who stayed in touch with Martin, sporadically, through e-mails and phone calls.

“But I’ll tell you something,” he said.

She looked at him. He had the same thirteen-day beard, the drooping lids of chronic jet lag. He wore the standard unpressed suit, his uniform, shirt looking slept-in, no tie. Someone displaced or deeply distracted, lost in time. But he was heavier now, his face went east and west, there were signs of bloat and sag that the beard could not conceal. He had the pressured look of a man whose eyes have gone smaller in his head.

“For all the careless power of this country, let me say this, for all the danger it makes in the world, America is going to become irrelevant. Do you believe this?”

She wasn’t sure why she’d stayed in touch with him. The disincentives were strong. There was what she knew about him, even if incomplete, and there was, more tellingly, how her mother had come to feel about him. It was guilt by association, his, when the towers fell.

“There is a word in German. Gedankenübertragung. This is the broadcasting of thoughts. We are all beginning to have this thought, of American irrelevance. It’s a little like telepathy. Soon the day is coming when nobody has to think about America except for the danger it brings. It is losing the center. It becomes the center of its own shit. This is the only center it occupies.”

She wasn’t sure what had brought this on, maybe something that someone had said, passingly, at an earlier point. Maybe Martin was having an argument with the dead, with Nina. They were clearly wishing they’d gone home, the colleagues, before the coffee and biscuits. This was not the occasion, the woman said, to argue global politics. Nina could have done it better than any of us, she said, but Nina isn’t here and the talk dishonors her memory.

Martin waved a hand in dismissal, rejecting the narrow terms of discourse. He was a link to her mother, Lianne thought. That’s why she’d stayed in touch. Even when her mother was alive, fadingly, he helped Lianne think of her in clearer outline. Ten or fifteen minutes on the phone with him, a man etched in regret but also love and reminiscence, or longer conversations that wandered toward an hour, and she’d feel both sadder and better, seeing Nina in a kind of freeze-frame, vivid and alert. She’d tell her mother about these calls and watch her face, looking hard for a sign of light.

Now she watched him.

The colleagues insisted on picking up the check. Martin did not contest the matter. He was done with them. They embodied a form of cautionary tact better left to state funerals in autocratic countries. Before leaving, the library director took a sunflower from the bud vase at the center of the table and placed it in the breast pocket of Martin’s jacket. He did this with a smile, possibly hostile, maybe not. Then he finally spoke, standing over the table and fitting his long body into a raincoat.

“If we occupy the center, it’s because you put us there. This is your true dilemma,” he said. “Despite everything, we’re still America, you’re still Europe. You go to our movies, read our books, listen to our music, speak our language. How can you stop thinking about us? You see us and hear us all the time. Ask yourself. What comes after America?”

Martin spoke quietly, almost idly, to himself.

“I don’t know this America anymore. I don’t recognize it,” he said. “There’s an empty space where America used to be.”

They stayed, she and Martin, the only patrons left in the long room, below street level, and talked for some time. She told him about the last hard months of her mother’s life, ruptured blood vessels, loss of muscle control, the smeared speech and empty gaze. He bent low over the table, breathing audibly. She wanted to hear him talk about Nina and he did. It seemed all she’d known of her mother for an extended time was Nina in a chair, Nina in a bed. He lifted her into artists’ lofts, Byzantine ruins, into halls where she’d lectured, Barcelona to Tokyo.

“I used to imagine, when I was a girl, that I was her. I stood sometimes in the middle of the room and spoke to a chair or sofa. I said very smart things about painters. I knew how to pronounce every name, all the hard names, and I knew their paintings from books and museum visits.”

“You were frequently alone.”

“I couldn’t understand why my mother and father split up. My mother never cooked. My father never seemed to eat. What could go wrong?”

“You will always be a daughter, I think. First and always, this is what you are.”

“And you are always what?”

“I am always your mother’s lover. Long before I knew her. Always that. It was waiting to happen.”

“You almost make me believe it.”

The other thing she wanted to believe was that his physical bearing was not evidence of illness or some steep financial setback affecting his morale. It was the end of the long story, he and Nina, that had brought him to this dispirited point. Nothing more or less than that. This is what she believed and this is what stirred her sympathy.

“Some people are lucky. They become who they are supposed to be,” he said. “This did not happen to me until I met your mother. One day we started to talk and it never stopped, this conversation.”

“Even at the end of things.”

“Even when we no longer found agreeable things to say or anything at all to say. The conversation never ended.”

“I believe you.”

“From the first day.”

“In Italy,” she said.

“Yes. This is true.”

“And the second day. In front of a church,” she said. “The two of you. And someone took your picture.”

He looked up and seemed to study her, wondering what else she knew. She would not tell him what she knew or that she’d made no effort to find out more. She had not gone to libraries to examine the histories of underground movements in those years and she had not searched the Internet for traces of the man called Ernst Hechinger. Her mother hadn’t, she hadn’t.

“There’s a plane to catch.”

“What would you do without your planes?”

“There’s always a plane to catch.”

“Where would you be?” she said. “One city, which one?”

He’d come for the day, without a suitcase or carry-on. He’d sold his New York apartment and had reduced the number of his commitments here.

“I don’t think I’m ready to face that question. One city,” he said, “and I am trapped.”

They knew him here and the waiter brought complimentary brandies. They lingered a while longer, into twilight. She realized she would never see him again.

She’d respected his secret, yielded to his mystery. Whatever it was he’d done, it was not outside the lines of response. She could imagine his life, then and now, detect the slurred pulse of an earlier consciousness. Maybe he was a terrorist but he was one of ours, she thought, and the thought chilled her, shamed her-one of ours, which meant godless, Western, white.

He stood and lifted the flower out of his breast pocket. Then he smelled it and tossed it on the table, smiling at her. They touched hands briefly and went out to the street, where she watched him walk to the corner, arm raised to the tide of passing cabs.

11

The dealer touched the green button, a fresh deck rose to the tabletop.

In these months of mastering the game he was spending most of his time on the Strip now, sitting in leather recliners in the sports-book parlors, hunched under shade canopies in the poker rooms. He was finally making money, quiet amounts that began to show consistency. He was also going home periodically, three or four days, love, sex, fatherhood, home-cooked food, but was lost at times for something to say. There was no language, it seemed, to tell them how he spent his days and nights.

Soon he felt the need to be back there. When his plane came down over the desert he could easily believe that this was a place he’d always known. There were standard methods and routines. Taxi to the casino, taxi back to his hotel. He managed on two meals a day, didn’t require more. The heat pressed into metal and glass, made the streets seem to shimmer. At the table he didn’t study players for tells, didn’t care why they coughed or seemed bored or scratched a forearm. He studied the cards and knew the tendencies. There was that and the blinking woman. He remembered her from the casino downtown, invisible except for the fretful eyes. The blinking was not a tell. It was only who she was, some grown man’s mother firing chips into the pot, blinking in nature’s own arrangement, like a firefly in a field. He drank hard liquor sparingly, nearly not at all, and allowed himself five hours’ sleep, barely aware of setting limits and restrictions. Never occurred to him to light up a cigar, as in the old days, at the old game. He walked through crowded hotel lobbies under hand-painted Sistine ceilings and into the high glare of this or that casino, not looking at people, seeing essentially no one, but every time he boarded a flight he glanced at faces on both sides of the aisle, trying to spot the man or men who might be a danger to them all.

When it happened he wondered why he hadn’t known it would. It happened in one of the high-caste casinos, five hundred players assembled for a no-limit hold ’em tournament with a major buy-in. Over there, at the other end of the room, above the heads at the clustered tables, a man was standing to do a series of flexing exercises, loosen the neck and shoulder muscles, get the blood running. There was an element of pure ritual in his movements, something beyond the functional. He took deep full abdominal breaths, then dipped a hand toward the table and appeared to toss some chips into the pot without glancing at the action that spurred the bet. The man was strangely familiar. What was strange is this, that after the passage of several years someone might look so very different while being unequivocally himself. It had to be Terry Cheng, easing back into his chair now, dropping out of Keith’s line of vision, and of course this is who it was because how could any of this be happening, the poker circuit, the thunderous runs of money, the comped hotel rooms and high competition, without the presence of Terry Cheng.

It wasn’t until the next day, when the woman at the podium was making announcements about available seats at certain tables, that they stood together outside the rail.

Terry Cheng showed a wan smile. He wore tinted glasses and an olive jacket with wide lapels and glossy buttons. The jacket was too large, hanging off his shoulders. He wore loose trousers and hotel slippers, velour, and a silk shirt gone stale with wear.

Keith half expected him to speak in fifth-century Mandarin.

“I was wondering how long it would take you to spot me.”

“You spotted me, I take it.”

“About a week ago,” Terry said.

“And said nothing.”

“You were deep in your game. What would I say? Next time I looked up, you weren’t there.”

“I go to the sports book to relax. Eat a sandwich and drink a beer. I like the action going on around me, all the screens, all the sports. I drink a beer and pretty much ignore it.”

“I like to sit by the waterfall. I order a mild drink. Ten thousand people around me. In the aisles, in the aquarium, in the garden, at the slots. I sip a mild drink.”

Terry seemed to lean left, like a man about to drift toward an exit. He’d lost weight and looked older and spoke in an unfamiliar voice with a scratchy edge.

“You’re staying here.”

“When I’m in town. Rooms are high and wide,” Terry said. “One wall is all window.”

“Costs you nothing.”

“Incidentals.”

“A serious player.”

“I’m in their computer. Everything’s in their computer. Everything’s entered. If you lift an item from the minibar and don’t return it inside sixty seconds it’s charged directly and instantaneously to your account.”

He liked this, Terry did. Keith was undecided.

“When you check in, they give you a map. I still need it, after all this time. I never know where I am. Room service brings tea bags in the shape of pyramids. Everything’s very dimensional. I tell them not to bring me a newspaper. If you don’t read a newspaper, you’re never a day behind.”

They talked a minute longer, then went to their designated tables without making plans to meet later. The idea of later was elusive.

The kid stood at the far end of the table, spreading mustard on bread. She saw no trace of other forms of food.

She said, “I used to have a decent pen. Sort of silverish. Maybe you’ve seen it.”

He stopped and thought, eyes narrow, face going glassy. This meant he’d seen the pen, used it, lost it, given it away or traded it for something stupid.

“We have no serious writing instruments in this house.”

She knew what this sounded like.

“You have a hundred pencils and we have a dozen bad ballpoint pens.”

It sounded like the decline and fall of literate exchange on a surface such as paper. She watched him dip the knife back in the jar and spread the mustard carefully along the borders of the slice of bread.

“What’s wrong with ballpoints?” he said.

“They’re bad.”

“What’s bad about a pencil?”

“All right, pencils. Wood and lead. Pencils are serious. Wood and graphite. Materials from the earth. We respect this about a pencil.”

“Where’s he going this time?”

“ Paris. Major competition. I may join him for a few days.”

He stopped and thought again.

“What happens to me?”

“You live your life. Just be sure to lock the door behind you when you get home after a night of drinking and carousing.”

“Yeah right.”

“Do you know what carousing is?”

“Sort of.”

“Me too. Sort of,” she said. “And I’m not going anywhere.”

“Don’t you think I know that?”

She stood at the window watching him fold the bread and take a bite. This was whole-grain bread, nine-grain, ten-grain, no trans fat, good source of fiber. She didn’t know what the mustard was.

“What did you do with the pen? Silver pen. You know what I’m talking about.”

“I think he took it.”

“You think what. No, he didn’t. He doesn’t need a pen.”

“He needs to write things. Just like anybody.”

“He didn’t take it.”

“I’m not blaming him. I’m just saying.”

“Not this pen. He didn’t take this pen. So where is it?”

He looked into the tabletop.

“I think he took it. He might not even know he took it. I’m not blaming him.”

He was still standing, bread in hand, and would not look at her.

He said, “I really, honestly think he took it.”

People everywhere, many with cameras.

“You’ve burnished your game,” Terry said.

“Something like that.”

“The situation is going to change. All the attention, the television coverage, the armies of recruits, all soon to fade.”

“That’s good.”

“That’s good,” Terry said.

“We’ll still be here.”

“We’re poker players,” he said.

They sat in the lounge near the waterfall with soft drinks and snacks. Terry Cheng wore the hotel slippers, no socks, and ignored the cigarette that burned in his ashtray.

“There’s an underground game, private game, high stakes, select cities. It’s like a forbidden religion springing up again. Five-card stud and draw.”

“Our old game.”

“There are two games. Phoenix and Dallas. What’s that part of Dallas? Well-to-do.”

“ Highland Park.”

“Well-to-do people, older people, leaders of the community. Know the game, respect the game.”

“Five-card stud.”

“Stud and draw.”

“You do well. You win big,” Keith said.

“I own their souls,” Terry said.

Crowds moved around the open lounge, which vaguely resembled a carousel, hotel guests, gamblers, tourists, people headed to the restaurants, the lush shops, the art gallery.

“Did you smoke back then, when we played?”

“I don’t know. Tell me,” Terry said.

“I think you were the only one who didn’t smoke. We had a number of cigars and one cigarette. But I don’t think it was you.”

There were isolated instants, now and then, sitting here, when Terry Cheng seemed again to be the man at the table in Keith’s apartment, dividing chips in swift and artful fashion after the high-low games. He was one of them, only better at cards, and not really one of them at all.

“Did you see the man at my table?”

“In the surgical mask.”

“Significant winner,” Terry said.

“I can picture it spreading.”

“The mask, yes.”

“Three or four people one day, showing up in surgical masks.”

“No one knows why.”

“Then there are ten more and then ten more after that. Like those bicycle riders in China.”

“Whatever,” Terry said. “Exactly.”

Each followed the other’s line of thought along the narrowest track. Around them a wordless din so deeply settled in the air and walls and furniture, in the moving bodies of men and women that it wasn’t easily separable from no sound at all.

“It’s a break from the circuit. They drink aged bourbon and have wives in the other rooms somewhere.”

“ Dallas, you’re saying.”

“Yes.”

“I don’t know.”

“There’s a game getting started in Los Angeles. Same thing, stud and draw. Younger crowd. Like early Christians in hiding. Think about it.”

“I don’t know. I’m not sure I could survive a couple of nights in that kind of social arrangement.”

“I think it was Rumsey. The one man,” Terry said, “who smoked cigarettes.”

Keith stared into the waterfall, forty yards away. He realized he didn’t know whether it was real or simulated. The flow was unruffled and the sound of falling water might easily be a digital effect like the waterfall itself.

He said, “Rumsey was cigars.”

“Rumsey was cigars. You’re probably right.”

For all his looseness of manner, the clothing that didn’t fit, the tendency to get lost in the hotel’s deeper reaches and outlying promenades, Terry was set inflexibly in this life. There was no rule of correspondence here. This was not balanced by that. There was no element that might be seen in the light of another element. It was all one thing, whatever the venue, the city, the prize money. Keith saw the point of this. He preferred this to private games with easy banter and wives arranging flowers, a format that appealed to Terry’s vanity, he thought, but could not match the crucial anonymity of these days and weeks, the mingling of countless lives that had no stories attached.

“Did you ever look at that waterfall? Are you able to convince yourself you’re looking at water, real water, and not some special effect?”

“I don’t think about it. It’s not something we’re supposed to think about,” Terry said.

His cigarette had burned down to the filter.

“I worked in midtown. I didn’t experience the impact that others felt, down there, where you were,” he said. “I’m told, someone told me that Rumsey’s mother. What is it now? She took a shoe. She took one of his shoes and she took a razor blade. She went to his apartment and got these things, whatever she could find that might contain genetic material, like traces of hair or skin. There was an armory where she took these things for a DNA match.”

Keith stared into the waterfall.

“She went back a day or two later. Who told me this? She took something else, I don’t know, a toothbrush. Then she went back again. She took something else. Then she went back again. Then they moved the location. That’s when she stopped going.”

Terry Cheng, the old Terry, had never been so talkative. Telling even a brief story was outside the limits of what he took to be a superior self-restraint.

“I used to tell people. People talked about where they were, where they worked. I said midtown. The word sounded naked. It sounded neutral, like it was nowhere. I heard he went out a window, Rumsey.”

Keith looked into the waterfall. This was better than closing his eyes. If he closed his eyes, he’d see something.

“You went back to work in the law office for a while. I remember we talked.”

“It was a different firm and not a law office.”

“Whatever,” Terry said.

“That’s what it was, whatever.”

“But here we are and here we’ll be when the craze dies down.”

“You still play online.”

“I do, yes, but I can’t give this up. Here we’ll be.”

“And the man in the surgical mask.”

“Yes, he’ll be here.”

“And the blinking woman.”

“I haven’t seen the blinking woman,” Terry said.

“One day I’ll speak to her.”

“You’ve seen the dwarf.”

“Once only. Then he was gone.”

“A dwarf named Carlo. Significant loser. He’s the only player whose name I know except for you. I know the name because it belongs to a dwarf. There’s no other reason to know it.”

The massed slots bubbled behind them.

When he heard the news on the radio, School Number One, many children, he knew he had to call her. Terrorists taking hostages, the siege, the explosions, this was Russia, somewhere, hundreds dead, many children.

She spoke quietly.

“They had to know. They made a situation that had to come to this, with children. They absolutely had to know. They went there to die. They made a situation, with children, specifically, and they knew how it would end. They had to know.”

There was silence at either end. After a time she said it was warm, in the eighties, and added that the kid was fine, the kid was all right. There was an edge in her voice, followed by another silence. He tried to listen into this, find the link in her remarks. In the deep pause he began to see himself standing exactly where he was, in a room somewhere, in a hotel somewhere, with a telephone in his hand.

She told him that the findings were unremarkable. There was no sign of impairment. She kept using the word unremarkable. She loved the word. The word expressed enormous relief. There were no lesions, hemorrhages or infarcts. She read the results to him and he stood in his room and listened. There was so much to report that was unremarkable. She loved the word infarct. Then she said she wasn’t sure she believed the findings. Okay for now but what about later? He’d told her many times and told her again that she was devising ways to be afraid. This wasn’t fear, she said, but only skepticism. She was doing well. She had normal morphology, she said, quoting the report. She loved this term but couldn’t quite believe it referred to her. It was a question of skepticism, she said, from the Greek for skeptic. Then she talked about her father. She was slightly drunk, not half smashed but maybe a quarter, which was about as smashed as she ever got. She talked about her father and asked about his. Then she laughed and said, “Listen,” and she began to recite a series of numbers, pausing a beat between each, using a happy sort of singsong.

One hundred, ninety-three, eighty-six, seventy-nine.

He missed the kid. Neither liked talking on the phone. How do you talk to a kid on the phone? He talked to her. They talked sometimes in the middle of the night, her time, or middle of the night, his time. She described her position in bed, curled up, hand between her legs, or body spread wide above the sheets, phone on the pillow, and he heard her murmuring in the double distance, hand to breast, hand to pussy, seeing her so clearly he thought his head might explode.

12

There was a show of Morandi paintings at a gallery in Chelsea, still lifes, six of them, and a couple of drawings, still lifes, and of course she went. She had mixed feelings about going but went. Because even this, bottles and jars, a vase, a glass, simple shapes in oil on canvas, pencil on paper, brought her back into the midst of it, the thrust of arguments, perceptions, deadly politics, her mother and her mother’s lover.

Nina had insisted on returning the two paintings on her living room wall. They went back to Martin in the early stages of their estrangement, and the old passport photos as well. This was work done half a century earlier, the paintings, and the photographs were much older, most of them, and it was work that both women loved. But she honored her mother’s wishes, arranged the shipment, thought of the dollar value of the paintings, respected her mother’s integrity, thought of the paintings themselves, Berlin-bound, to be bargained over and sold in a cell-phone transaction. The room was tomblike without them.

The gallery was in an old industrial building with a cage elevator that required a living human, full-time, to crank the lever on a rotary control, bouncing visitors up and down the shaft.

She went down a long dim corridor and found the gallery. There was no one there. She stood at the first canvas, looking. The show was small, the paintings were small. She stepped back, moved close. She liked this, alone in a room, looking.

She looked at the third painting for a long time. It was a variation on one of the paintings her mother had owned. She noted the nature and shape of each object, the placement of objects, the tall dark oblongs, the white bottle. She could not stop looking. There was something hidden in the painting. Nina’s living room was there, memory and motion. The objects in the painting faded into the figures behind them, the woman smoking in the chair, the standing man. In time she moved on to the next painting and the next, fixing each in her mind, and then there were the drawings. She hadn’t approached the drawings yet.

A man came in. He was interested in looking at her before he looked at the paintings. Maybe he expected certain freedoms to be in effect because they were like-minded people in a rundown building, here to look at art.

She moved through the open doorway into the office area, where the drawings hung. At the desk a young man leaned over a laptop. She examined the drawings. She wasn’t sure why she was looking so intently. She was passing beyond pleasure into some kind of assimilation. She was trying to absorb what she saw, take it home, wrap it around her, sleep in it. There was so much to see. Turn it into living tissue, who you are.

She went back to the main room but could not look at the work the same way with the man there, watching her or not. He wasn’t watching her but he was there, fifty and leathery, a mug-shot monochrome, probably a painter, and she went out of the room and down the corridor, where she hit the elevator button.

She realized she hadn’t picked up a catalog but didn’t go back. She didn’t need a catalog. The elevator came rattling up the shaft. Nothing detached in this work, nothing free of personal resonance. All the paintings and drawings carried the same title. Natura Morta. Even this, the term for still life, yielded her mother’s last days.

There were times, in the sports book, when he glanced at one of the screens and wasn’t sure whether he was seeing a fragment of live action or of slow-motion replay. It was a lapse that should have unsettled him, an issue of basic brain function, one reality versus another, but it all seemed a matter of false distinctions, fast, slow, now, then, and he drank his beer and listened to the mingled sounds.

He never bet on these events. It was the effect on the senses that drew him here. Everything happened remotely, even the nearest noise. The high room was dimly lit, men seated heads up, or standing, or walking through, and out of the stealthy tension in the air come the shouts, a horse breaking out of the pack, a runner rounding second, and the action moves to the foreground, there to here, life or death. He liked listening to the visceral burst, men on their feet, calling out, a rough salvo of voices that brought heat and open emotion to the soft pall of the room. Then it was over, gone in seconds, and he liked that too.

He showed his money in the poker room. The cards fell randomly, no assignable cause, but he remained the agent of free choice. Luck, chance, no one knew what these things were. These things were only assumed to affect events. He had memory, judgment, the ability to decide what is true, what is alleged, when to strike, when to fade. He had a measure of calm, of calculated isolation, and there was a certain logic he might draw on. Terry Cheng said that the only true logic in the game was the logic of personality. But the game had structure, guiding principles, sweet and easy interludes of dream logic when the player knows that the card he needs is the card that’s sure to fall. Then, always, in the crucial instant ever repeated hand after hand, the choice of yes or no. Call or raise, call or fold, the little binary pulse located behind the eyes, the choice that reminds you who you are. It belonged to him, this yes or no, not to a horse running in the mud somewhere in New Jersey.

She lived in the spirit of what is ever impending.

They embraced, saying nothing. Later they spoke in low tones that carried a nuance of tact. They would share nearly four full days of indirection before they talked about things that mattered. It was lost time, designed from the first hour to go unremembered. She would remember the song. They spent nights in bed with the windows open, traffic noises, voices carrying, five or six girls marching down the street at two a.m. singing an old rock ballad that she sang along with them, softly, lovingly, word for word, matching accents, pauses and breaks, hating to hear the voices fade. Words, their own, were not much more than sounds, airstreams of shapeless breath, bodies speaking. There was a breeze if they were lucky but even in the damp heat on the top floor under a tar roof she kept the air conditioner off. He needed to feel real air, she said, in a real room, with thunder rumbling just above.

On these nights it seemed to her that they were falling out of the world. This was not a form of erotic illusion. She was continuing to withdraw, but calmly, in control. He was self-sequestered, as always, but with a spatial measure now, one of air miles and cities, a dimension of literal distance between himself and others.

They took the kid to a couple of museums and then she watched them toss a baseball in the park. Justin threw hard. He wasted no time. He snatched the ball out of the air, took it in his bare hand, smacked it back into the glove, reared back and threw hard and then, next toss, maybe a little harder. He was like a pitching machine with hair and teeth, register set to peak velocity. Keith was amused, then impressed, then puzzled. He told the kid to calm down, ease up. He told him to follow through. There was the windup, the release, the follow-through. He told him he was burning a hole in his old man’s hand.

She came across a poker tournament on TV. He was in the next room scanning a landfill of accumulated mail. She saw three or four tables, in long shot, with spectators seated among them, clustered in pockets, in spooky blue light. The tables were slightly elevated, players immersed in a fluorescent glow and bent in mortal tension. She didn’t know where this was taking place, or when, and she didn’t know why the usual method was not in effect, close-ups of thumbs, knuckles, cards and faces. But she watched. She hit the mute button and looked at the players seated around the tables as the camera slowly swept the room and she realized that she was waiting to see Keith. The spectators sat in that icy violet light, able to see little or nothing. She wanted to see her husband. The camera caught the faces of players previously obscured and she looked closely, one by one. She imagined herself in cartoon format, a total fool, hurrying to Justin’s room, hair flying, and dragging him out of bed and standing him up in front of the screen so he could see his father, Look, in Rio or London or Las Vegas. His father was twenty feet away at the desk in the next room reading bank statements and writing checks. She watched a while longer, looking for him, and then she stopped.

They talked on day four, sitting in the living room, late, with a horsefly fixed to the ceiling.

“There are things I understand.”

“All right.”

“I understand there are some men who are only half here. Let’s not say men. Let’s say people. People who are more or less obscure at times.”

“You understand this.”

“They protect themselves this way, themselves and others. I understand this. But then there’s the other thing and that’s the family. This is the point I want to make, that we need to stay together, keep the family going. Just us, three of us, long-term, under the same roof, not every day of the year or every month but with the idea that we’re permanent. Times like these, the family is necessary. Don’t you think? Be together, stay together? This is how we live through the things that scare us half to death.”

“All right.”

“We need each other. Just people sharing the air, that’s all.”

“All right,” he said.

“But I know what’s happening. You’re going to drift away. I’m prepared for that. You’ll stay away longer, drift off somewhere. I know what you want. It’s not exactly a wish to disappear. It’s the thing that leads to that. Disappearing is the consequence. Or maybe it’s the punishment.”

“You know what I want. I don’t know. You know.”

“You want to kill somebody,” she said.

She didn’t look at him when she said this.

“You’ve wanted this for some time,” she said. “I don’t know how it works or how it feels. But it’s a thing you carry with you.”

Now that she’d said it, she wasn’t sure she believed it. But she was certain he’d never argued the idea in his mind. It was in his skin, maybe just a pulse at the side of the forehead, the faintest cadence in a small blue vein. She knew there was something that had to be satisfied, a matter discharged in full, and she thought this was at the heart of his restlessness.

“Too bad I can’t join the army. Too old,” he said, “or I could kill without penalty and then come home and be a family.”

He was drinking scotch, sipping it, neat, and smiling faintly at what he’d said.

“You can’t go back to the job you had. I understand that.”

“The job. The job wasn’t much different from the job I had before all this happened. But that was before, this is after.”

“I know that most lives make no sense. I mean in this country, what makes sense? I can’t sit here and say let’s go away for a month. I’m not going to reduce myself to saying something like that. Because that’s another world, the one that makes sense. But listen to me. You were stronger than I was. You helped me get here. I don’t know what would have happened.”

“I can’t talk about strength. What strength?”

“That’s what I saw and felt. You were the one in the tower but I was the berserk. Now, damn it, I don’t know.”

After a silence he said, “I don’t know either,” and they laughed.

“I used to watch you sleep. I know how strange that sounds. But it wasn’t strange. Just by being who you were, being alive and back here with us. I watched you. I felt I knew you in a way I’d never known you before. We were a family. That’s what it was. That’s how we did it.”

“Look, trust me.”

“All right.”

“I’m not set on doing anything permanent,” he said. “I go away a while, come back. I’m not about to disappear. Not about to do anything drastic. I’m here now and I’ll be back. You want me back. Is that right?”

“Yes.”

“Go away, come back. Simple as that.”

“There’s money coming,” she said. “The sale is almost complete.”

“Money coming.”

“Yes,” she said.

He’d helped work out details of the transaction concerning her mother’s apartment. He’d read contracts, made adjustments and e-mailed instructions from a casino on some Indian reservation where a tournament was in progress.

“Money coming,” he said again. “The kid’s education. Now through college, eleven or twelve years, criminal sums of money. But that’s not what you’re saying. You’re saying we can afford a major loss I might suffer in the card rooms. This won’t happen.”

“If you believe it, I believe it.”

“Hasn’t happened and it won’t,” he said.

“What about Paris? Will that happen?”

“It became Atlantic City. A month from now.”

“How does the warden feel about conjugal visits?”

“You don’t want to be there.”

“I don’t. You’re right,” she said. “Because thinking about it is one thing. Seeing it would put me in depression. People sitting around a table going shuffle shuffle. Week after week. I mean catching planes to go play cards. I mean aside from the absurdity, the total psychotic folly, isn’t there something very sad about this?”

“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 back for the pillow nearest her and dropped it on top of the newspaper and then lay back, breathing evenly, eyes still open. After a while she closed her eyes. Sleep was out there somewhere over the curve of the earth.

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 that is subject only to the earth’s gravitational field.

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 knew was what she’d seen and felt that day near the schoolyard, a boy bouncing a basketball and a teacher with a whistle on a string. She could believe she knew these people, and all the others she’d seen and heard that afternoon, but not the man who’d stood above her, detailed and looming.

She went to sleep finally on her husband’s side of the bed.

14

There were rare moments between hands when he sat and listened to the sounds around him. It surprised him every time to find what an effort it takes to hear what is always there. The chips were there. Behind the ambient noise and stray voices, there was the sound of tossed chips, raked chips, forty or fifty tables of people stacking chips, fingers reading and counting, balancing the stacks, clay chips with smooth edges, rubbing, sliding, clicking, days and nights of distant hiss, like insect friction.

He was fitting into something that was made to his shape. He was never more himself than in these rooms, with a dealer crying out a vacancy at table seventeen. He was looking at pocket tens, waiting for the turn. These were the times when there was nothing outside, no flash of history or memory that he might unknowingly summon in the routine run of cards.

He walked down the wide aisle hearing the mutter of stickmen at the dice tables, a shout now and then from the sports book. Sometimes a hotel guest wheeling a suitcase wandered through, looking lost in Swaziland. In the off-hours he talked to dealers at empty blackjack tables, always the women, waiting in some zone of purged sensation. He might play a while, sitting and talking, making a point of not getting interested in the woman herself, just her conversation, fragments of life outside, her car trouble, her daughter Nadia’s riding lessons. He was one of them in a way, casino staff, passing some forgettable social moments before the action starts again.

It would all go flat at the end of the night, win or lose, but that was part of the process, the turn card, the river card, the blinking woman. Days fade, nights drag on, check-and-raise, wake-and-sleep. The blinking woman was gone one day and that was the end of her. She was stale air. He could not place her elsewhere, at a bus stop, in a mall, and saw no point in trying.

He wondered if he was becoming a self-operating mechanism, like a humanoid robot that understands two hundred voice commands, far-seeing, touch-sensitive but totally, rigidly controllable.

He’s estimating medium-ace across the table, the man in mirrored sunglasses.

Or a robot dog with infrared sensors and a pause button, subject to seventy-five voice commands.

Raise before the flop. Hit early and hard.

There was no fitness center in his hotel. He found a gym not far away and worked out when there was time. No one used the rowing machine. He half hated the thing, it made him angry, but he felt the intensity of the workout, the need to pull and strain, set his body against a sleek dumb punishing piece of steel and cable.

He rented a car and took a drive in the desert, starting back after dark and then climbing a rise and leveling out. It took him a moment to understand what he was looking at, many miles ahead, the city floating on the night, a feverish sprawl of light so quick and inexplicable it seemed a kind of delirium. He wondered why he’d never thought of himself in the middle of such a thing, living there more or less. He lived in rooms, that’s why. He lived and worked in this room and that. He moved only marginally, room to room. He took a taxi to and from the downtown street where his hotel was located, a place without floor mosaics and heated towel racks, and he hadn’t known until now, looking at that vast band of trembling desert neon, how strange a life he was living. But only from here, out away from it. In the thing itself, down close, in the tight eyes around the table, there was nothing that was not normal.

He was avoiding Terry Cheng. He didn’t want to talk to him, or listen, or watch his cigarette burn down.

The lucky jack did not fall.

He didn’t listen to what was said around him, the incidental bounce of dialogue, player to player. A fresh deck rose to the tabletop. He was gutted by fatigue at times, in a near feral state, eyes sweeping the table before the cards were dealt.

He used to think about Florence Givens every day. He still did, most days, today, in a taxi, staring at a billboard. He’d never called. He’d never thought of crossing the park again to see her, talk a while, find out how she was doing. He’d thought of it in a remote way, like landscape, like thinking of going back to the house where you grew up and walking along the back lanes and across the high meadow, the kind of thing you know you’ll never do.

It was finally who he was that counted, not luck or naked skill. It was strength of mind, mental edge, but not just that. There was something harder to name, a narrowness of need or wish, or how a man’s character determines his line of sight. These things would make him win but not too much, not winnings of such proportions that he’d slip into someone else’s skin.

The dwarf is back, Carlo, and he is happy to see this, watching the man take a seat two tables away. But he doesn’t look around the room for a sign of Terry Cheng so they might trade wry smiles.

Men in stylized yawns with arms raised, men staring into dead space.

Terry might be in Santa Fe or Sydney or Dallas. Terry might be in his room dead. It took Terry two weeks to understand that the fixture on the wall at one end of the long room, marked SHEER and BULK, was designed to operate the curtains at the other end of the room, to open and close the sheer inner curtain or the bulky outer. Terry had tried to open the curtains once by hand and then realized it didn’t matter, open or closed. There was nothing out there he needed to know.

He’d never told Lianne about the walks across the park. His experience with Florence was brief, maybe four or five encounters over a period of fifteen days. Is that possible, only that? He tried counting the times, sitting in a taxi at a stoplight, staring at a billboard. It all ran together now, with only the faint grain of something felt and held. He saw her in the tower as she’d described it, in forced march down the stairwell, and thought he saw himself at times, in split instants, unshaped, a false memory or too warped and fleeting to be false.

The money mattered but not so much. The game mattered, the touch of felt beneath the hands, the way the dealer burnt one card, dealt the next. He wasn’t playing for the money. He was playing for the chips. The value of each chip had only hazy meaning. It was the disk itself that mattered, the color itself. There was the laughing man at the far end of the room. There was the fact that they would all be dead one day. He wanted to rake in chips and stack them. The game mattered, the stacking of chips, the eye count, the play and dance of hand and eye. He was identical with these things.

He set the resistance level way up. He stroked hard, arms and legs but mostly legs, trying not to collapse his shoulders, hating every stroke. Sometimes there was no one else in the place, maybe somebody on a treadmill watching TV. He always used the rowing machine. He rowed and showered and the showers smelled of mildew. He stopped going after a while but then went back, setting the level higher still, wondering only once why this was a thing he had to do.

He was looking at five-deuce off-suit. He thought for a moment he might get up and leave. He thought he might walk out and get the first plane, pack and go, get a window seat and lower the shade and fall asleep. He folded his cards and sat back. By the time a fresh deck floated up he was ready to play again.

Forty tables, nine players a table, others waiting at the rail, screens high on three walls showing soccer and baseball, strictly atmospheric.

SHEER and BULK.

He didn’t want to listen to Terry Cheng at his conversational ease, in his new persona, chatting away by the blue waterfall, three years after the planes.

Older men with chapped faces, eyelids drawn down. Would he know them if he saw them in a diner, eating breakfast at the next table? Long lifetimes of spare motion, sparer words, call the bet, see the raise, two or three such faces every day, men nearly unnoticeable. But they gave the game a niche in time, in the lore of poker face and dead man’s hand, and a breath of self-esteem.

The waterfall was blue now, or possibly always was, or this was another waterfall or another hotel.

You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen. There it is, the clink of chips, the toss and scatter, players and dealers, mass and stack, a light ringing sound so native to the occasion it lies outside the aural surround, in its own current of air, and no one hears it but you.

Here’s Terry slouching down a side aisle at three a.m. and they barely share a glance and Terry Cheng says, “Have to get back to my coffin by sunup.”

The woman from wherever she’s from, in the black leather cap, Bangkok or Singapore or L.A. She wears the cap slightly tilted and he knows they’re all so neutralized by the steady throb of call and fold that there’s very little happening, table-wide, in the popular art of fantasy fuck.

One night he sat in his room doing the old exercises, the old rehab program, bend of the wrist toward the floor, bend of the wrist toward the ceiling. Room service ended at midnight. Midnight TV showed soft-core films with naked women and penis-less men. He was not lost or bored or crazy. Thursday tournament started at three, sign-ups at noon. Friday tournament started at noon, sign-ups at nine.

He was becoming the air he breathed. He moved in a tide of noise and talk made to his shape. The look under the thumb at ace-queen. Along the aisles, roulette wheels clicking. He sat in the sports book unaware of scores or odds or point spreads. He watched the miniskirted women serving drinks. Out on the Strip a dead and heavy heat. He folded eight or nine hands in a row. He stood in the sportswear shop wondering what he might buy for the kid. There were no days or times except for the tournament schedule. He wasn’t making enough money to justify this life on a practical basis. But there was no such need. There should have been but wasn’t and that was the point. The point was one of invalidation. Nothing else pertained. Only this had binding force. He folded six more hands, then went all-in. Make them bleed. Make them spill their precious losers’ blood.

These were the days after and now the years, a thousand heaving dreams, the trapped man, the fixed limbs, the dream of paralysis, the gasping man, the dream of asphyxiation, the dream of helplessness.

A fresh deck rose to the tabletop.

Fortune favors the brave. He didn’t know the Latin original of the old adage and this was a shame. This is what he’d always lacked, that edge of unexpected learning.

She was only a girl, always a daughter, and her father was drinking a Tanqueray martini. He’d let her add a twist of lemon, giving her comically detailed instructions. Human existence, that was his subject this evening, on the deck of somebody’s beat-up house in Nantucket. Five adults, the girl on the fringes. Human existence had to have a deeper source than our own dank fluids. Dank or rank. There had to be a force behind it, a principal being who was and is and ever shall be. She loved the sound of that, like chanted verse, and thought of it now, alone, over coffee and toast, and something else as well, the existence that hummed in the words themselves, was and is, and how the chill wind died at nightfall.

People were reading the Koran. She knew of three people doing this. She’d talked to two and knew of another. They’d bought English-language editions of the Koran and were trying earnestly to learn something, find something that might help them think more deeply into the question of Islam. She didn’t know whether they were persisting in the effort. She could imagine herself doing this, the determined action that floats into empty gesture. But maybe they were persisting. They were serious people perhaps. She knew two of them but not well. One, a doctor, recited the first line of the Koran in his office.

This Book is not to be doubted.

She doubted things, she had her doubts. She took a long walk one day, uptown, to East Harlem. She missed her group, the laughter and cross talk, but knew all along this wasn’t just a walk, a matter of old times and places. She thought of the resolute hush that fell over the room when members took up pens and began to write, oblivious to the clamor around them, rap singers down the hall, barely school age, polishing their lyrics, or workers drilling and hammering on the floor above. She was here to look for something, a church, near the community center, Catholic, she thought, and it may have been the church that Rosellen S. used to go to. She wasn’t sure but thought it might be, made it be, said it was. She missed the faces. Your face is your life, her mother said. She missed the forthright voices that began to warp and fade, lives that dwindled into whisper.

She had normal morphology. She loved that word. But what’s inside the form and structure? This mind and soul, hers and everyone’s, keep dreaming toward something unreachable. Does this mean there’s something there, at the limits of matter and energy, a force responsible in some way for the very nature, the vibrancy of our lives from the mind out, the mind in little pigeon blinks that extend the plane of being, out beyond logic and intuition.

She wanted to disbelieve. She was an infidel in current geopolitical parlance. She remembered how her father, how Jack’s face went bright and hot, appearing to buzz with electric current after a day in the sun. Look around us, out there, up there, ocean, sky, night, and she thought about this, over coffee and toast, how he believed that God infused time and space with pure being, made stars give light. Jack was an architect, an artist, a sad man, she thought, for much of his life, and it was the kind of sadness that yearns for something intangible and vast, the one solace that might dissolve his paltry misfortune.

But this was crap, wasn’t it, night skies and divinely inspired stars. A star makes its own light. The sun is a star. She thought of Justin night before last, singing his homework. This meant he was bored, alone, in his room, making up monotone songs of addition and subtraction, presidents and vice-presidents.

Others were reading the Koran, she was going to church. She took a taxi uptown, weekdays, two or three times a week, and sat in the nearly empty church, Rosellen’s church. She followed others when they stood and knelt and she watched the priest celebrate the mass, bread and wine, body and blood. She didn’t believe this, the transubstantiation, but believed something, half fearing it would take her over.

She ran along the river, early light, before the kid was awake. She thought of training for the marathon, not this year’s but next, the pain and rigor of it, long-distance running as spiritual effort.

She thought of Keith with a call girl in his room, having automated teller sex.

After mass she tried to hunt down a taxi. Taxis were scarce here and the bus took forever and she wasn’t ready yet to take the subway.

This Book is not to be doubted.

She was stuck with her doubts but liked sitting in church. She went early, before mass began, to be alone for a while, to feel the calm that marks a presence outside the nonstop riffs of the waking mind. It was not something godlike she felt but only a sense of others. Others bring us closer. Church brings us closer. What did she feel here? She felt the dead, hers and unknown others. This is what she’d always felt in churches, great bloated cathedrals in Europe, a small poor parish church such as this one. She felt the dead in the walls, over decades and centuries. There was no dispiriting chill in this. It was a comfort, feeling their presence, the dead she’d loved and all the faceless others who’d filled a thousand churches. They brought intimacy and ease, the human ruins that lie in crypts and vaults or buried in churchyard plots. She sat and waited. Soon someone would enter and walk past her into the nave. She was always the first, always seated toward the rear, breathing the dead in candlewax and incense.

She thought of Keith and then he called. He said he’d be able to get home for a few days in a week or so and she said okay, good.

She saw the gray that was beginning to seep into her hair at the scalp. She would not stain it away. God, she thought. What does it mean to say that word? Are you born with God? If you never hear the word or observe the ritual, do you feel the breath alive inside you, in brain waves or pounding heart?

Her mother had a mane of white hair at the end, the body slowly broken, haunted by strokes, blood in the eyes. She was drifting into spirit life. She was a spirit woman now, barely able to make a sound that might pass for a word. She lay shrunken in bed, all that was left of her framed by the long straight hair, frosted white in sunlight, beautiful and otherworldly.

She sat in the empty church waiting for the pregnant woman to enter or maybe the old man who always nodded to her. One woman, then the other, or one woman and then the man. They’d established a pattern, these three, or nearly so, and then others entered and the mass began.

But isn’t it the world itself that brings you to God? Beauty, grief, terror, the empty desert, the Bach cantatas. Others bring you closer, church brings you closer, the stained glass windows of a church, the pigments inherent in the glass, the metallic oxides fused onto the glass, God in clay and stone, or was she babbling to herself to pass the time?

She walked home from church when there was time but otherwise tried to find a cab, tried to talk to the driver, who was in the twelfth hour of his shift and wanted only to finish without dying.

She stayed away from the subway, still, and never stopped noticing the concrete bulwarks outside train stations and other possible targets.

She ran early mornings and came home and stripped and showered. God would consume her. God would de-create her and she was too small and tame to resist. That’s why she was resisting now. Because think about it. Because once you believe such a thing, God is, then how can you escape, how survive the power of it, is and was and ever shall be.

He sat alongside the table, facing the dusty window. He placed his left forearm along the near edge of the table, hand dangling from the adjoining edge. This was the tenth day of twice-a-day, the wrist extensions, the ulnar deviations. He counted the days, the times per day.

There was no problem with the wrist. The wrist was fine. But he sat in his hotel room, facing the window, hand curled into a gentle fist, thumb up in certain setups. He recalled phrases from the instruction sheet and recited them quietly, working on the hand shapes, the bend of the wrist toward the floor, the bend of the wrist toward the ceiling. He used the uninvolved hand to apply pressure to the involved hand.

He sat in deep concentration. He recalled the setups, every one, and the number of seconds for each, and the number of repetitions. With your palm down, bend your wrist toward the floor. With your forearm resting sideways, bend your wrist toward the floor. He did the wrist flexions, the radial deviations.

Mornings without fail, every night when he returned. He looked into the dusty glass, reciting fragments from the instruction sheet. Hold to a count of five. Repeat ten times. He did the full program every time, hand raised, forearm flat, hand down, forearm sideways, slowing the pace just slightly, day to night and then again the following day, drawing it out, making it last. He counted the seconds, he counted the repetitions.

There were nine people at mass today. She watched them stand, sit and kneel and she did what they did but failed to respond as they did when the priest recited lines from the liturgy.

She thought that the hovering possible presence of God was the thing that created loneliness and doubt in the soul and she also thought that God was the thing, the entity existing outside space and time that resolved this doubt in the tonal power of a word, a voice.

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 be better?

Every sin of your life is forgiven in the seconds to come.

There is nothing between you and eternal life in the seconds to come.

You are wishing for death and now it is here in the seconds to come.

He began to vibrate. He wasn’t sure whether it was the motion of the plane or only himself. He rocked in his seat, in pain. He heard sounds from somewhere in the cabin. The pain was worse now. He heard voices, excited cries from the cabin or the cockpit, he wasn’t sure. Something fell off the counter in the galley.

He fastened his seatbelt.

A bottle fell off the counter in the galley, on the other side of the aisle, and he watched it roll this way and that, a water bottle, empty, making an arc one way and rolling back the other, and he watched it spin more quickly and then skitter across the floor an instant before the aircraft struck the tower, heat, then fuel, then fire, and a blast wave passed through the structure that sent Keith Neudecker out of his chair and into a wall. He found himself walking into a wall. He didn’t drop the telephone until he hit the wall. The floor began to slide beneath him and he lost his balance and eased along the wall to the floor.

He saw a chair bounce down the corridor in slow motion. He thought he saw the ceiling begin to ripple, lift and ripple. He put his arms over his head and sat knees up, face wedged between them. He was aware of vast movement and other things, smaller, unseen, objects drifting and skidding, and sounds that weren’t one thing or another but only sound, a shift in the basic arrangement of parts and elements.

The movement was beneath him and then all around him, massive, something undreamed. It was the tower lurching. He understood this now. The tower began a long sway left and he raised his head. He took his head out of his knees to listen. He tried to be absolutely still and tried to breathe and tried to listen. Out past the office door he thought he saw a man on his knees in the first pale wave of smoke and dust, a figure deep in concentration, head up, jacket halfway off, dangling from one shoulder.

In time he felt the tower stop leaning. The lean felt forever and impossible and he sat and listened and after a while the tower began to roll slowly back. He didn’t know where the phone was but he could hear a voice on the other end, still there, somewhere. He saw the ceiling begin to ripple. The stink of something familiar was everywhere but he didn’t know what it was.

When the tower swung finally back to vertical he pushed himself off the floor and moved to the doorway. The ceiling at the far end of the hall moaned and opened. The stress was audible and then it opened, objects coming down, panels and wallboard. Plaster dust filled the area and there were voices along the hall. He was losing things as they happened. He felt things come and go.

The man was still there, kneeling in the doorway of the office opposite, thinking hard about something, blood showing through his shirt. He was a client or consulting attorney and Keith knew him slightly and they exchanged a look. No telling what it meant, this look. There were people calling along the hall. He took his jacket off the door. He reached behind the door and took his jacket from the hook, not sure why he was doing this but not feeling stupid about it, forgetting to feel stupid.

He went down the hall, putting on the jacket. There were people moving toward the exits, in the other direction, moving, coughing, helping others. They stepped over debris, faces showing stark urgency. This was the knowledge in every face, the distance they had to cover to street level. They spoke to him, one or two, and he nodded back or didn’t. They spoke and looked. He was the guy who thought jackets were required, the guy going the wrong way.

The stink was fuel and he recognized it now, oozing down from floors above. He got to Rumsey’s office at the end of the hall. He had to climb in. He climbed over chairs and strewn books and a filing cabinet on its side. He saw bare framework, truss bars, where the ceiling had been. Rumsey’s coffee mug was shattered in his hand. He still held a fragment of the mug, his finger through the ring.

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 seemed to shrink his head. He thought his eyes and mouth were sinking into his skin.

Things came back to him in hazy visions, like half an eye staring. These were moments he’d lost as they were happening and he had to stop walking in order to stop seeing them. He stood looking into nothing. The woman with the tricycle, alongside, spoke to him, going past.

He smelled something dismal and understood it was him, things sticking to his skin, dust particles, smoke, some kind of oily grit on his face and hands mixing with the body slop, paste-like, with the blood and saliva and cold sweat, and it was himself he smelled, and Rumsey.

The size of it, the sheer physical dimensions, and he saw himself in it, the mass and scale, and the way the thing swayed, the slow and ghostly lean.

Someone took his arm and led him forward for a few steps and then he walked on his own, in his sleep, and for an instant he saw it again, going past the window, and this time he thought it was Rumsey. He confused it with Rumsey, the man falling sideways, arm out and up, like pointed up, like why am I here instead of there.

They had to wait at times, long stalled moments, and he looked straight ahead. When the line moved again he took a step down and then another. They talked to him several times, different people, and when this happened he closed his eyes, maybe because it meant he didn’t have to reply.

There was a man on the landing ahead, old man, smallish, sitting in shadow, knees up, resting. Some people spoke and he nodded his head okay, he waved them on nodding.

There was a woman’s shoe nearby, upside down. There was a briefcase on its side and the man had to lean to reach it. He extended a hand and pushed it with some effort toward the advancing line.

He said, “I don’t know what I’m supposed to do with this. She fell and left it.”

People didn’t hear this or retain it or want to and they moved past, Keith moved past, the line beginning to wind down toward an area of some light.

It did not seem forever to him, the passage down. He had no sense of pace or rate. There was a glow stripe on the stairs that he hadn’t seen before and someone praying back in the line somewhere, in Spanish.

A man came up, moving quickly, in a hard hat, and they cleared a space, and then there were firemen, in full bulk, and they cleared a space.

Rumsey was the one in the chair. He understood that now. He had set him back down in the chair and they would find him and bring him down, and others.

There were voices up behind him, back on the stairs, one and then another in near echo, fugue voices, song voices in the rhythms of natural speech.

This goes down.

This goes down.

Pass it down.

He stopped again, second time or third, and people pushed around him and looked at him and told him to move. A woman took his arm to help and he didn’t move and she went on.

Pass it down.

This goes down.

This goes down.

The briefcase came down and around the stairwell, hand to hand, somebody left this, somebody lost this, this goes down, and he stood looking straight ahead and when the briefcase came to him, he reached his right hand across his body to take it, blankly, and then started down the stairs again.

There were long waits and others not so long and in time they were led down to the concourse level, beneath the plaza, and they moved past empty shops, locked shops, and they were running now, some of them, with water pouring in from somewhere. They came out onto the street, looking back, both towers burning, and soon they heard a high drumming rumble and saw smoke rolling down from the top of one tower, billowing out and down, methodically, floor to floor, and the tower falling, the south tower diving into the smoke, and they were running again.

The windblast sent people to the ground. A thunderhead of smoke and ash came moving toward them. The light drained dead away, bright day gone. They ran and fell and tried to get up, men with toweled heads, a woman blinded by debris, a woman calling someone’s name. The only light was vestigial now, the light of what comes after, carried in the residue of smashed matter, in the ash ruins of what was various and human, hovering in the air above.

He took one step and then the next, smoke blowing over him. He felt rubble underfoot and there was motion everywhere, people running, things flying past. He walked by the Easy Park sign, the Breakfast Special and Three Suits Cheap, and they went running past, losing shoes and money. He saw a woman with her hand in the air, like running to catch a bus.

He went past a line of fire trucks and they stood empty now, headlights flashing. He could not find himself in the things he saw and heard. Two men ran by with a stretcher, someone facedown, smoke seeping out of his hair and clothes. He watched them move into the stunned distance. That’s where everything was, all around him, falling away, street signs, people, things he could not name.

Then he saw a shirt come down out of the sky. He walked and saw it fall, arms waving like nothing in this life.