by Don DeLillo
It was only seconds later that Nina dropped into a light sleep. She was taking a round of medications, a mystical wheel, the ritualistic design of the hours and days in tablets and capsules, in colors, shapes and numbers. Lianne watched her. It was difficult to see her fitted so steadfastly to a piece of furniture, resigned and unstirring, the energetic arbiter of her daughter’s life, ever discerning, the woman who’d given birth to the word beautiful, for what excites admiration in art, ideas, objects, in the faces of men and women, the mind of a child. All this dwindling to a human breath.
Her mother wasn’t dying, was she? Lighten up, she thought.
She opened her eyes, finally, and the two women looked at each other. It was a sustained moment and Lianne did not know, could not have put into words what it was they were sharing. Or she knew but could not name the overlapping emotions. It was what there was between them, meaning every minute together and apart, what they’d known and felt and what would come next, in the minutes, days and years.
Martin stood before the paintings.
“I’m looking at these objects, kitchen objects but removed from the kitchen, free of the kitchen, the house, everything practical and functioning. And I must be back in another time zone. I must be even more disoriented than usual after a long flight,” he said, pausing. “Because I keep seeing the towers in this still life.”
Lianne joined him at the wall. The painting in question showed seven or eight objects, the taller ones set against a brushy slate background. The other items were huddled boxes and biscuit tins, grouped before a darker background. The full array, in unfixed perspective and mostly muted colors, carried an odd spare power.
They looked together.
Two of the taller items were dark and somber, with smoky marks and smudges, and one of them was partly concealed by a long-necked bottle. The bottle was a bottle, white. The two dark objects, too obscure to name, were the things that Martin was referring to.
“What do you see?” he said.
She saw what he saw. She saw the towers.
5
He entered the park at the Engineers’ Gate, where runners stretched and bent before going out on the track. The day was warm and still and he walked along the road that ran parallel to the bridle path. There was somewhere to go but he was in no hurry to get there. He watched an elderly woman on a bench who was thinking distantly of something, holding a pale green apple pressed to her cheek. The road was closed to traffic and he thought you come to the park to see people, the ones who are shadows in the street. There were runners up to the left, on the track around the reservoir, and others on the bridle path just above him and still more runners on the roadway, men with handweights, running, and women running behind baby strollers, pushing babies, and runners with dogs on leashes. You come to the park to see dogs, he thought.
The road bent west and three girls wearing headsets went rollerblading past. The ordinariness, so normally unnoticeable, fell upon him oddly, with almost dreamlike effect. He was carrying the briefcase and wanted to turn back. He crossed up the slope and walked past the tennis courts. There were three horses hitched to the fence, police helmets clipped to their saddlebags. A woman ran past, talking to someone, miserably, on her cell phone, and he wanted to toss the briefcase in the reservoir and go back home.
She lived in a building just off Amsterdam Avenue and he climbed the six flights to her apartment. She seemed tentative, letting him in, even, strangely, a little wary, and he started to explain, as he had on the telephone the day before, that he hadn’t meant to delay returning the briefcase. She was saying something about the credit cards in the wallet, that she hadn’t canceled them because, well, everything was gone, she thought everything was buried, it was lost and gone, and they stopped talking and then started again, simultaneously, until she made a small gesture of futility. He left the briefcase on a chair by the door and went over to the sofa, saying he could not stay very long.
She was a light-skinned black woman, his age or close, and gentle-seeming, and on the heavy side.
He said, “When I found your name in the briefcase, after I found your name and checked the phone directory and saw you were listed and I’m actually dialing the number, that’s when it occurred to me.”
“I know what you’re going to say.”
“I thought why am I doing this without checking further because is this person even alive?”
There was a pause and he realized how softly she’d spoken inside his jumpy commentary.
“I have some herbal tea,” she said. “Sparkling water if you like.”
“Sparkling water. Spring water. There’s a small bottle in the briefcase. Let me think. Poland Spring.”
“Poland Spring,” she said.
“Anyway if you’d like to check what’s in there.”
“Of course not. No,” she said quietly.
She stood in the entranceway to the kitchen. The small boom of traffic sounded outside the windows.
He said, “See, what happened is I didn’t know I had it. It wasn’t even a case of forgetting. I don’t think I knew.”
“I don’t think I know your name.”
He said, “Keith?”
“Did you tell me this?”
“I think so, yes.”
“The phone call was so out of the blue.”
“It’s Keith,” he said.
“Did you work for Preston Webb?”
“No, one floor up. Small outfit called Royer Properties.”
He was on his feet now, ready to leave.
“Preston’s so sprawling. I thought maybe we just hadn’t run into each other.”
“No, Royer. We’re just about decimated,” he said.
“We’re waiting to see what happens, where we relocate. I don’t think about it much.”
There was a silence.
He said, “We were Royer and Stans. Then Stans got indicted.”
Finally he moved toward the door and then picked up the briefcase. He paused, reaching for the doorknob, and looked at her, across the room, and she was smiling.
“Why did I do that?”
“Habit,” she said.
“I was ready to walk out the door with your property. All over again. Your priceless family heritage. Your cell phone.”
“That thing. I stopped needing it when I didn’t have it.”
“Your toothbrush,” he said. “Your pack of cigarettes.”
“God, no, my guilty secret. But I’m down to four a day.”
She waved him back to the sofa with a broad arc of the arm, a traffic cop’s sweeping command to get things going.
She served tea and a plate of sugar cookies. Her name was Florence Givens. She placed a kitchen chair on the other side of the coffee table and sat at a diagonal.
He said, “I know everything about you. A sonic toothbrush. You brush your teeth with sound waves.”
“I’m gadget crazy. I love those things.”
“Why do you have a better voice recorder than I had?”
“I think I’ve used it twice.”
“I used mine but then never listened. I liked to talk into it.”
“What did you say when you talked into it?”
“I don’t know. My fellow Americans,” he said.
“I thought everything was lost and gone. I didn’t report a lost driver’s license. I didn’t do anything, basically, but sit in this room.”
An hour later they were still talking. The cookies were small and awful but he kept nipping into them, unthinkingly, eating only the first baby bite and leaving the mutilated remains to litter the plate.
“I was at my screen and heard the plane approach but only after I was thrown down. That’s how fast,” she said.
“Are you sure you heard the plane?”
“The impact sent me to the floor and then I heard the plane. I think the sprinklers, I’m trying to recall the sprinklers. I know I was wet at some point, all through.”
He understood that she hadn’t
meant to say this. It sounded intimate, to be wet all through, and she had to pause a moment.
He waited.
“My phone was ringing. I was at my desk now, I don’t know, just to sit, to steady myself, and I pick up the phone. Then we’re talking, like hello, it’s Donna. It’s my friend Donna. I said, Did you hear that? She’s calling from home, in Philadelphia, to talk about a visit. I said, Did you hear that?”
She went through it slowly, remembering as she spoke, often pausing to look into space, to see things again, the collapsed ceilings and blocked stairwells, the smoke, always, and the fallen wall, the drywall, and she paused to search for the word and he waited, watching.
She was dazed and had no sense of time, she said.
There was water somewhere running or falling, flowing down from somewhere.
Men ripped their shirts and wound them around their faces, for masks, for the smoke.
She saw a woman with burnt hair, hair burnt and smoking, but now she wasn’t sure she’d seen this or heard someone say it.
Times they had to walk blind, smoke so thick, hand on the shoulder of the person in front.
She’d lost her shoes or kicked them off and there was water like a stream somewhere, nearby, running down a mountain.
The stairwell was crowded now, and slow, with people coming from other floors.
“Someone said, Asthma. Now that I’m talking, it’s coming back a little bit. Asthma, asthma. A woman like desperate. There were panic faces. That’s when I think I fell, I just went down. I went down five or six steps and hit the landing, like stumble-falling, and I hit hard.”
She wanted to tell him everything. This was clear to him. Maybe she’d forgotten he was there, in the tower, or maybe he was the one she needed to tell for precisely that reason. He knew she hadn’t talked about this, not so intensely, to anyone else.
“It was the panic of being trampled even though they were careful, they helped me, but it was the feeling of being down in a crowd and you will be trampled, but they helped me and this one man I remember, helping me get to my feet, elderly man, out of breath, helping me, talking to me until I was able to get going again.”
There were flames in elevator shafts.
There was a man talking about a giant earthquake. She forgot all about the plane and was ready to believe an earthquake even though she’d heard a plane. And someone else said, I been in earthquakes, a man in a suit and tie, this ain’t no earthquake, a distinguished man, an educated man, an executive, this ain’t no earthquake.
There were dangling wires and she felt a wire touch her arm. It touched the man behind her and he jumped and cursed and then laughed.
The crowd on the stairs, the sheer force of it, hobbling, crying, burnt, some of them, but mostly calm, a woman in a wheelchair and they carried her and people made room, bending into single file on the stairs.
Her face held an earnest appeal, a plea of some sort.
“I know I can’t sit here alive and safe and talk about falling down some stairs when all that terror, all those dead.”
He didn’t interrupt. He let her talk and didn’t try to reassure her. What was there to be reassuring about? She was slumped in the chair now, talking into the tabletop.
“The firemen racing past. And asthma, asthma. And some people talking said bomb. They were trying to talk on cell phones. They went down the stairs hitting numbers.”
This is where bottles of water were passed up the line from somewhere below, and soft drinks, and people were even joking a little, the equity traders.
This is where the firemen went racing past, going up the stairs, into it, and people got out of the way.
This is also where she saw someone she knew, going up, a maintenance man, a guy she used to joke with whenever she saw him, going up right past her, carrying a long iron implement, like something to pry open an elevator door, maybe, and she tried to think of the word for the thing.
He waited. She looked past him, thinking, and it seemed important to her, as if she were trying to recall the man’s name, not the name of the tool he was carrying.
Finally he said, “Crowbar.”
“Crowbar,” she said, thinking about it, seeing it again.
Keith thought he’d also seen the man, going up past him, a guy in a hard hat and wearing a workbelt with tools and flash-lights and carrying a crowbar, bent end first.
No reason ever to remember this if she hadn’t mentioned it. Means nothing, he thought. But then it did. Whatever had happened to the man was situated outside the fact that they’d both seen him, at different points in the march down, but it was important, somehow, in some indeterminate way, that he’d been carried in these crossing memories, brought down out of the tower and into this room.
He leaned forward, elbow braced on the coffee table, mouth pressed against his hand, and he watched her.
“We just kept going down. Dark, light, dark again. I feel like I’m still on the stairs. I wanted my mother. If I live to be a hundred I’ll still be on the stairs. It took so long it was almost normal in a way. We couldn’t run so it wasn’t some kind of running frenzy. We were stuck together. I wanted my mother. This ain’t no earthquake, making ten million dollars a year.”
They were moving out of the worst of the smoke now and this is when she saw the dog, a blind man and a guide dog, not far ahead, and it was like something out of the Bible, she thought. They seemed so calm. They seemed to spread calm, she thought. The dog was like some totally calming thing. They believed in the dog.
“We, finally, I don’t know how long we had to wait, it was dark wherever we were but then we came out and passed some windows and saw the plaza where it’s a bombed-out city, things on fire, we saw bodies, we saw clothes, pieces of metal like metal parts, things just scattered. This was like two seconds. I looked two seconds and looked away and then we went through the underground concourse and up into the street.”
This was all she said for a time. He went over to the chair by the door and found her cigarettes in the briefcase and took one out of the pack and put it in his mouth and then found the lighter.
“In the smoke all I could see was those stripes on the firemen’s coats, the bright stripes, and then some people in the rubble, all that steel and glass, just injured people sitting dreaming, they were like dreamers bleeding.”
She turned and looked at him. He lit the cigarette and walked over and handed it to her. She took a drag, closing her eyes and exhaling. When she looked again, he was back across the table, seated on the sofa, watching her.
“Light one up for yourself,” she said.
“Not for me, no.”
“You quit.”
“Long time ago. When I thought I was an athlete,” he said. “But blow some my way. That would be nice.”
After a while she began to speak again. But he didn’t know where she was, somewhere back near the beginning, he thought.
He thought, Wet all through. She was wet all through.
There were people everywhere pushing into the stairwell. She tried to recall things and faces, moments that might explain something or reveal something. She believed in the guide dog. The dog would lead them all to safety.
She was going through it again and he was ready to listen again. He listened carefully, noting every detail, trying to find himself in the crowd.
Her mother had said it clearly, years earlier.
“There’s a certain man, an archetype, he’s a model of dependability for his male friends, all the things a friend should be, an ally and confidant, lends money, gives advice, loyal and so on, but sheer hell on women. Living breathing hell. The closer a woman gets, the clearer it becomes to him that she is not one of his male friends. And the more awful it becomes for her. This is Keith. This is the man you’re going to marry.”
This is the man she marries.
He was a hovering presence now. There drifted through the rooms a sense of someone who has earned respectful attention. He was not quite returned to hi
s body yet. Even the program of exercises he did for his postsurgical wrist seemed a little detached, four times a day, an odd set of extensions and flexions that resembled prayer in some remote northern province, among a repressed people, with periodic applications of ice. He spent time with Justin, taking him to school and picking him up, advising on homework. He wore a splint for a while, then stopped. He took the kid to the park to play catch. The kid could toss a baseball all day and be purely and inexhaustibly happy, unmarked by sin, anyone’s, down the ages. Throw and catch. She watched them in a field not far from the museum, into the sinking sun. When Keith did a kind of ball trick, using the right hand, the undamaged one, to flip the ball onto the back of the hand and then jerk the arm forward propelling the ball backwards along the forearm before knocking it into the air with his elbow and then catching it backhanded, she saw a man she’d never known before.
She stopped at Harold Apter’s office in the East 80s on her way to 116th Street. She did this periodically, dropping off photocopies of her group’s written pieces and discussing their situations in general. This is where Dr. Apter saw people for consultation, Alzheimer patients and others.
Apter was a slight man with frizzed hair who seemed formulated to say funny things but never did. They talked about the fade of Rosellen S., the aloof bearing of Curtis B. She told him she would like to increase the frequency of the meetings to twice a week. He told her this would be a mistake.
“From this point on, you understand, it’s all about loss. We’re dealing inevitably here with diminishing returns. Their situation will grow increasingly delicate. These encounters need space around them. You don’t want them to feel there’s an urgency to write everything, say everything before it’s too late. You want them to look forward to this, not feel pressed or threatened. The writing is sweet music up to a point. Then other things will take over.”
He looked at her searchingly.
“What I’m saying is simple. This is for them,” he said.