Falling Man Read Free Page A

beginning to look seasoned, not in combat but in the pale rigors of this life, in separation perhaps, in living alone, being a father from a distance.
    He was in bed now and watched her, a few feet away, begin to button her shirt. They slept in the same bed because she could not tell him to use the sofa and because she liked having him here next to her. He didn’t seem to sleep. He lay on his back and talked but mostly listened and this was all right. She didn’t need to know a man’s feelings about everything, not anymore and not this man. She liked the spaces he made. She liked dressing in front of him. She knew the time was coming when he’d press her to the wall before she finished dressing. He’d get out of bed and look at her and she’d stop what she was doing and wait for him to come and press her to the wall.
     
     
     
    He lay on a long narrow table within the closed unit. There was a pillow under his knees and a pair of track lights overhead and he tried to listen to the music. Inside the powerful noise of the scanner he fixed his attention on the instruments, separating one set from another, strings, woodwinds, brass. The noise was a violent staccato knocking, a metallic clamor that made him feel he was deep inside the core of a science-fiction city about to come undone.
    He wore a device on his wrist to produce a detailed image and the sense of helpless confinement made him think of something the radiologist had said, a Russian whose accent he found reassuring because these are serious people who place weight on every word and maybe that’s why he chose classical music to listen to when she asked him to make a selection. He heard her now in his headset saying that the next sequence of noise would last three minutes and when the music resumed he thought of Nancy Dinnerstein, who ran a sleep clinic in Boston. People paid her to put them to sleep. Or the other Nancy, what’s-her-name, briefly, between incidental sex acts, in Portland that time, Oregon, without a last name. The city had a last name, the woman did not.
    The noise was unbearable, alternating between the banging-shattering sound and an electronic pulse of varied pitch. He listened to the music and thought of what the radiologist had said, that once it’s over, in her Russian accent, you forget instantly the whole experience so how bad can it be, she said, and he thought this sounded like a description of dying. But that was another matter, wasn’t it, in another kind of noise, and the trapped man does not come sliding out of his tube. He listened to the music. He tried hard to hear the flutes and distinguish them from the clarinets, if there were clarinets, but he was unable to do this and the only countervailing force was Nancy Dinnerstein drunk in Boston and it gave him a dumb and helpless hard-on, thinking of her in his drafty hotel room with a limited view of the river.
    He heard the voice in his headset saying that the next sequence of noise would last seven minutes.
     
     
     
    She saw the face in the newspaper, the man from Flight 11. Only one of the nineteen seemed to have a face at this point, staring out of the photo, taut, with hard eyes that seemed too knowing to belong to a face on a driver’s license.
     
     
     
    She got a call from Carol Shoup, an executive editor with a large publishing house. Carol had occasional jobs for Lianne, who edited books freelance, working usually at home or in the library.
    It was Carol who’d sent the postcard from Rome, from the Keats-Shelley House, and she was the sort of person who was sure to sing out, on her return, “Did you get my card?”
    Always in a voice that hovered between desperate insecurity and incipient resentment.
    Instead she said softly, “Is this a bad time?”
    After he walked in the door and people began to hear about it, in the days to come, they called her and said, “Is this a bad time?”
    Of course they meant, Are you busy, you must be busy, there must be so much