by Don DeLillo
“What do you mean?”
“It’s theirs,” he said. “Don’t make it yours.”
They wrote about the planes. They wrote about where they were when it happened. They wrote about people they knew who were in the towers, or nearby, and they wrote about God.
How could God let this happen? Where was God when this happened?
Benny T. was glad he was not a man of faith because he would lose it after this.
I am closer to God than ever, Rosellen wrote.
This is the devil. This is hell. All that fire and pain. Never mind God. This is hell.
Omar H. was afraid to go out on the street in the days after. They were looking at him, he thought.
I didn’t see them holding hands. I wanted to see that, Rosellen wrote.
Carmen G. wanted to know whether everything that happens to us has to be part of God’s plan.
I am closer to God than ever, am closer, will be closer, shall be closer.
Eugene A., in a rare appearance, wrote that God knows things we don’t know.
Ashes and bones. That’s what’s left of God’s plan.
But when the towers fell, Omar wrote.
I keep hearing they were holding hands when they jumped.
If God let this happen, with the planes, then did God make me cut my finger when I was slicing bread this morning?
They wrote and then read what they’d written, each in turn, and there were remarks and then exchanges and then monologues.
“Show us the finger,” Benny said. “We want to kiss it.”
Lianne encouraged them to speak and argue. She wanted to hear everything, the things everybody said, ordinary things, and the naked statements of belief, and the depth of feeling, the passion that saturated the room. She needed these men and women. Dr. Apter’s comment disturbed her because there was truth in it. She needed these people. It was possible that the group meant more to her than it did to the members. There was something precious here, something that seeps and bleeds. These people were the living breath of the thing that killed her father.
“God says something happens, then it happens.”
“I don’t respect God no more, after this.”
“We sit and listen and God tells us or doesn’t.”
“I was walking down the street to get my hair cut. Somebody comes running.”
“I was on the crapper. I hated myself later. People said where were you when it happened. I didn’t tell them where I was.”
“But you remember to tell us. That’s beautiful, Benny.”
They interrupted, gestured, changed the subject, talked over each other, shut their eyes in thought or puzzlement or in dismal re-experience of the event itself.
“What about the people God saved? Are they better people than the ones who died?”
“It’s not ours to ask. We don’t ask.”
“A million babies die in Africa and we can’t ask.”
“I thought it was war. I thought it was war,” Anna said. “I stayed inside and lit a candle. It’s the Chinese, my sister said, who she never trusted with the bomb.”
Lianne struggled with the idea of God. She was taught to believe that religion makes people compliant. This is the purpose of religion, to return people to a childlike state. Awe and submission, her mother said. This is why religion speaks so powerfully in laws, rituals and punishments. And it speaks beautifully as well, inspiring music and art, elevating consciousness in some, reducing it in others. People fall into trances, people literally go to the ground, people crawl great distances or march in crowds stabbing themselves and whipping themselves. And other people, the rest of us, maybe we’re rocked more gently, joined to something deep in the soul. Powerful and beautiful, her mother said. We want to transcend, we want to pass beyond the limits of safe understanding, and what better way to do it than through make-believe.
Eugene A. was seventy-seven years old, hair gelled and spiked, a ring in his ear.
“I was scrubbing the sink for once in my life when the phone rings. It’s my ex-wife,” he said, “that I haven’t talked to in like seventeen years, is she even alive or dead, calling from somewhere I can’t even pronounce it, in Florida. I say what. She says never mind what. That same voice of no respect. She says turn on TV.”
“I had to watch at a neighbor,” Omar said.
“Seventeen years, not one word. Look what has to happen before she finally gets it in her head to call. Turn on TV, she tells me.”
The cross talk continued.
“I don’t forgive God what He did.”
“How do you explain this to a child whose mother or father?”
“You lie to children.”
“I wanted to see that, the ones that were holding hands.”
“When you see something happening, it’s supposed to be real.”
“But God. Did God do this or not?”
“You’re looking right at it. But it’s not really happening.”
“He has the big things that He does. He shakes the world,” said Curtis B.
“I would say to someone at least he didn’t die with a tube in his stomach or wearing a bag for his waste.”
“Ashes and bones.”
“I am closer to God, I know it, we know it, they know it.”
“This is our prayer room,” Omar said.
No one wrote a word about the terrorists. And in the exchanges that followed the readings, no one spoke about the terrorists. She prompted them. There has to be something you want to say, some feeling to express, nineteen men come here to kill us.
She waited, not certain what it was she wanted to hear. Then Anna C. mentioned a man she knew, a fireman, lost in one of the towers.
All along Anna had been slightly apart, interjecting only once or twice, matter-of-factly. Now she used hand gestures to help direct her story, sitting hard and squat in a flimsy folding chair, and no one interrupted.
“If he has a heart attack, we blame him. Eats, overeats, no exercise, no common sense. That’s what I told the wife. Or he dies of cancer. Smoked and couldn’t stop. That was Mike. If it’s cancer, then it’s lung cancer and we blame him. But this, what happened, it’s way too big, it’s outside someplace, on the other side of the world. You can’t get to these people or even see them in their pictures in the paper. You can see their faces but what does it mean? Means nothing to call them names. I’m a name-caller from before I was born. Do I know what to call these people?”
Lianne suspected what this was. It was a response defined in terms of revenge and she welcomed this, the small intimate wish, however useless in a hellstorm.
“He dies in a car crash or walking across the street, hit by a car, you can kill the person in your mind a thousand times, the driver. You couldn’t do the actual thing, in all honesty, because you don’t have the wherewithal, but you could think it, you could see it in your mind and get some trade-off from that. But here, with these people, you can’t even think it. You don’t know what to do. Because they’re a million miles outside your life. Which, besides, they’re dead.”
There was religion, then there was God. Lianne wanted to disbelieve. Disbelief was the line of travel that led to clarity of thought and purpose. Or was this simply another form of superstition? She wanted to trust in the forces and processes of the natural world, this only, perceptible reality and scientific endeavor, men and women alone on earth. She knew there was no conflict between science and God. Take one with the other. But she didn’t want to. There were the scholars and philosophers she’d studied in school, books she’d read as thrilling dispatches, personal, making her shake at times, and there was the sacred art she’d always loved. Doubters created this work, and ardent believers, and those who’d doubted and then believed, and she was free to think and doubt and believe simultaneously. But she didn’t want to. God would crowd her, make her weaker. God would be a presence that remained unimaginable. She wanted this only, to snuff out the pulse of the shaky faith she’d held for much of her li
fe.
He began to think into the day, into the minute. It was being here, alone in time, that made this happen, being away from routine stimulus, all the streaming forms of office discourse. Things seemed still, they seemed clearer to the eye, oddly, in ways he didn’t understand. He began to see what he was doing. He noticed things, all the small lost strokes of a day or a minute, how he licked his thumb and used it to lift a bread crumb off the plate and put it idly in his mouth. Only it wasn’t so idle anymore. Nothing seemed familiar, being here, in a family again, and he felt strange to himself, or always had, but it was different now because he was watching.
There were the walks to school with Justin and the walks back home, alone, or somewhere else, just walking, and then he picked up the kid at school and it was back home again. There was a contained elation in these times, a feeling that was nearly hidden, something he knew but only barely, a whisper of self-disclosure.
The kid was trying to speak in monosyllables only, for extended stretches. This was something his class was doing, a serious game designed to teach the children something about the structure of words and the discipline required to frame clear thoughts. Lianne said, half seriously, that it sounded totalitarian.
“It helps me go slow when I think,” Justin said to his father, measuring each word, noting the syllable count.
It was Keith as well who was going slow, easing inward. He used to want to fly out of self-awareness, day and night, a body in raw motion. Now he finds himself drifting into spells of reflection, thinking not in clear units, hard and linked, but only absorbing what comes, drawing things out of time and memory and into some dim space that bears his collected experience. Or he stands and looks. He stands at the window and sees what’s happening in the street. Something is always happening, even on the quietest days and deep into night, if you stand a while and look.
He thought of something out of nowhere, a phrase, organic shrapnel. Felt familiar but meant nothing to him. Then he saw a car double-parked across the street and thought of something else and then something else again.
There were the walks to and from school, the meals he cooked, something he’d rarely done in the past year and a half because it made him feel like the last man alive, breaking eggs for dinner. There was the park, every kind of weather, and there was the woman who lived across the park. But that was another matter, the walk across the park.
“We go home now,” Justin said.
She was awake, middle of the night, eyes closed, mind running, and she felt time pressing in, and threat, a kind of beat in her head.
She read everything they wrote about the attacks.
She thought of her father. She saw him coming down an escalator, in an airport maybe.
Keith stopped shaving for a time, whatever that means. Everything seemed to mean something. Their lives were in transition and she looked for signs. Even when she was barely aware of an incident it came to mind later, with meaning attached, in sleepless episodes that lasted minutes or hours, she wasn’t sure.
They lived on the top floor of a redbrick building, four-storied, and often now, these past days, she walked down the stairs and heard a certain kind of music, wailing music, lutes and tambourines and chanting voices sometimes, coming from the apartment on the second floor, the same CD, she thought, over and over, and it was beginning to make her angry.
She read stories in newspapers until she had to force herself to stop.
But things were ordinary as well. Things were ordinary in all the ways they were always ordinary.
A woman named Elena lived in that apartment. Maybe Elena was Greek, she thought. But the music wasn’t Greek. She was hearing another set of traditions, Middle Eastern, North African, Bedouin songs perhaps or Sufi dances, music located in Islamic tradition, and she thought of knocking on the door and saying something.
She told people she wanted to leave the city. They knew she wasn’t serious and said so and she hated them a little, and her own transparency, and the small panics that made certain moments in the waking day resemble the frantic ramblings of this very time of night, the mind ever running.
She thought of her father. She carried her father’s name. She was Lianne Glenn. Her father had been a traditional lapsed Catholic, devoted to the Latin mass as long as he didn’t have to sit through it. He made no distinction between Catholics and lapsed Catholics. The only thing that mattered was tradition but not in his work, never there, his designs for buildings and other structures, situated in mostly remote landscapes.
She thought she might adopt a posture of fake civility, as a tactic, a means of answering one offense with another. They heard it mainly on the stairs, Keith said, going up and down, and it’s only music anyway, he said, so why not just forget it.
They didn’t own, they rented, like people in the Middle Ages.
She wanted to knock on the door and say something to Elena. Ask her what the point is. Adopt a posture. This is retaliation in itself. Ask her why she’s playing this particular music at this highly sensitive time. Use the language of the concerned fellow tenant.
She read newspaper profiles of the dead.
When she was a girl she wanted to be her mother, her father, certain of her schoolmates, one or two, who seemed to move with particular ease, to say things that didn’t matter except in the way they were said, on an easy breeze, like birdflight. She slept with one of these girls, they touched a little and kissed once and she thought of this as a dream she would wake from in the mind and body of the other girl.
Knock on the door. Mention the noise. Don’t call it music, call it noise.
They’re the ones who think alike, talk alike, eat the same food at the same time. She knew this wasn’t true. Say the same prayers, word for word, in the same prayer stance, day and night, following the arc of sun and moon.
She needed to sleep now. She needed to stop the noise in her head and turn on her right side, toward her husband, and breathe his air and sleep his sleep.
Elena was either an office manager or a restaurant manager, and divorced, and living with a large dog, and who knew what else.
She liked his facial hair, the hair was okay, but she didn’t say anything. She said one thing, uninteresting, and watched him run his thumb over the stubble, marking its presence for himself.
They said, Leave the city? For what? To go where? It was the locally honed cosmocentric idiom of New York, loud and blunt, but she felt it in her heart no less than they did.
Do this. Knock on the door. Adopt a posture. Mention the noise as noise. Knock on the door, mention the noise, use the open pretense of civility and calm, the parody of fellow-tenant courtesy that every tenant sees as such, and gently mention the noise. But mention the noise only as noise. Knock on the door, mention the noise, adopt a posture of suave calm, openly phony, and do not allude to the underlying theme of a certain kind of music as a certain form of political and religious statement, now of all times. Work gradually into the language of aggrieved tenancy. Ask her if she rents or owns.
She turned on her right side, toward her husband, and opened her eyes.
Thoughts from nowhere, elsewhere, someone else’s.
She opened her eyes and was surprised, even now, to see him there in bed, next to her, a flat surprise by this time, fifteen days after the planes. They’d made love in the night, earlier, she wasn’t sure when, two or three hours ago. It was back there somewhere, a laying open of bodies but also of time, the only interval she’d known in these days and nights that was not forced or distorted, hemmed in by the press of events. It was the tenderest sex she’d known with him. She felt some drool at the corner of her mouth, the part that was mashed into the pillow, and she watched him, faceup, head in distinct profile against the wan light from the streetlamp.
She’d never felt easy with that term. My husband. He wasn’t a husband. The word spouse had seemed comical, applied to him, and husband simply didn’t fit. He was something else somewhere else. But now she uses the term. She
believes he is growing into it, a husbandman, even though she knows this is another word completely.
What is already in the air, in the bodies of the young, and what is next to come.
The music included moments of what sounded like forced breathing. She heard it on the stairs one day, an interlude consisting of men breathing in urgent rhythmic pattern, a liturgy of inhale-exhale, and other voices at other times, trance voices, voices in recitation, women in devotional lament, mingled village voices behind hand drums and hand claps.
She watched her husband, face empty of expression, neutral, not very different from his waking aspect.
All right the music is beautiful but why now, what’s the particular point of this, and what’s the name of the thing like a lute that’s played with an eagle’s quill.
She reached a hand to his beating chest.
Time, finally, to go to sleep, following the arc of sun and moon.
She was back from an early-morning run and stood sweating by the kitchen window, drinking water from a one-liter bottle and watching Keith eat breakfast.
“You’re one of those madwomen running in the streets. Run around the reservoir.”
“You think we look crazier than men.”
“Only in the streets.”
“I like the streets. This time of morning, there’s something about the city, down by the river, streets nearly empty, cars blasting by on the Drive.”
“Breathe deeply.”
“I like running alongside the cars on the Drive.”
“Take deep breaths,” he said. “Let the fumes swirl into your lungs.”
“I like the fumes. I like the breeze from the river.”
“Run naked,” he said.
“You do it, I’ll do it.”
“I’ll do it if the kid does it,” he said.
Justin was in his room, a Saturday, putting last touches, last pokes of color onto a portrait he’d been doing, in crayon, of his grandmother. Either that or drawing a picture of a bird, for school, which reminded her of something.