Falling Man Read Free Page B

going on, should I call back, can I do something, how is he, will he stay for a while and, finally, can we have dinner, the four of us, somewhere quiet?
    It was strange, how terse she became, and uninformative, coming to hate the phrase, marked as it was by nothing more than its own replicating DNA, and to distrust the voices, so smoothly funereal.
    “Because if it is,” Carol said, “we can talk whenever.”
    She didn’t want to believe she was being selfish in her guardianship of the survivor, determined to hold exclusive rights. This is where he wanted to be, outside the tide of voices and faces, God and country, sitting alone in still rooms, with those nearby who mattered.
    “Which, by the way,” Carol said, “did you get the card I sent?”
    She heard music coming from somewhere in the building, on a lower floor, and took two steps to the door, moving the telephone away from her ear, and then she opened the door and stood there, listening.
     
     
     
    Now she stood at the foot of the bed and watched him lying there, late one night, after she’d finished working, and asked him finally and quietly.
    “Why did you come here?”
    “That’s the question, isn’t it?”
    “For Justin, yes?”
    This was the answer she wanted because it made the most sense.
    “So he could see you were alive,” she said.
    But it was also only half the answer and she realized she needed to hear something beyond this, a broader motive for his action or intuition or whatever it was.
    He thought for a long moment.
    “It’s hard to reconstruct. I don’t know how my mind was working. A guy came along in a van, a plumber, I think, and he drove me here. His radio had been stolen and he knew from the sirens that something was going on but he didn’t know what. At some point he had a clear view downtown but all he could see was one tower. He thought one tower was blocking his view of the other tower, or the smoke was. He saw the smoke. He drove east a ways and looked again and there was only one tower. One tower made no sense. Then he turned uptown because that’s where he was going and finally he saw me and picked me up. By this time the second tower was gone. Eight radios in three years, he said. All stolen. An electrician, I think. He had a water bottle he kept pushing in my face.”
    “Your apartment, you knew you couldn’t go there.”
    “I knew the building was too close to the towers and maybe I knew I couldn’t go there and maybe I wasn’t even thinking about that. Either way, that’s not why I came here. It was more than that.”
    She felt better now.
    “He wanted to take me to the hospital, the guy in the van, but I told him to bring me here.”
    He looked at her.
    “I gave him this address,” he said for emphasis, and she felt better still.
     
     
     
    It was a simple matter, outpatient surgery, a ligament or cartilage, with Lianne in the reception area waiting to take him back to the apartment. On the table he thought of his buddy Rumsey, briefly, just before or after he lost sensation. The doctor, the anesthetist, injected him with a heavy sedative or other agent, a substance containing a memory suppressant, or maybe there were two shots, but there was Rumsey in his chair by the window, which meant the memory was not suppressed or the substance hadn’t taken effect yet, a dream, a waking image, whatever it was, Rumsey in the smoke, things coming down.
     
     
     
    She stepped into the street thinking ordinary thoughts, dinner, dry cleaning, cash machine, that’s it, go home.
    There was serious work to do on the book she was editing, for a university press, on ancient alphabets, deadline approaching. There was definitely that.
    She wondered what the kid would make of the mango chutney she’d bought, or maybe he’d had it already, had it and hated it, at the Siblings’, because Katie talked about it once, or someone did.
    The author was a Bulgarian writing in English.
    And there was this, the taxis in broad