Don DeLillo: Falling Man (2007)

1 It was not a street anymore but a world, a time and

space of falling ash and near night. He was walking north through rubble and mud and
there were people running past holding towels to their faces or jackets over their heads.
They had handkerchiefs pressed to their mouths. They had shoes in their hands, a
woman with a shoe in each hand, running past him. They ran and fell, some of them,
confused and ungainly, with debris coming down around them, and there were people
taking shelter under cars.

The roar was still in the air, the buckling rumble of the fall. This was the world now.
Smoke and ash came rolling down streets and turning corners, busting around corners,
seismic tides of smoke, with office paper flashing past, standard sheets with cutting
edge, skimming, whipping past, otherworldly things in the morning pall.

He wore a suit and carried a briefcase. There was glass in his hair and face, marbled
bolls of blood and light. He walked past a Breakfast Special sign and they went running
by, city cops and security guards running, hands pressed down on gun butts to keep the
weapons steady.

Things inside were distant and still, where he was supposed to be. It happened
everywhere around him, a car half buried in debris, windows smashed and noises
coming out, radio voices scratching at the wreckage. He saw people shedding water as
they ran, clothes and bodies drenched from sprinkler systems. There were shoes
discarded in the street, handbags and laptops, a man seated on the sidewalk coughing up
blood. Paper cups went bouncing oddly by.

The world was this as well, figures in windows a thousand feet up, dropping into free
space, and the stink of fuel fire, and the steady rip of sirens in the air. The noise lay
everywhere they ran, stratified sound collecting around them, and he walked away from
it and into it at the same time.

[…]

In time he heard the sound of the second fall. He crossed Canal Street and began to see
things, somehow, differently. Things did not seem charged in the usual ways, the
cobbled street, the cast-iron buildings. There was something critically missing from the
things around him. They were unfinished, whatever that means. They were unseen,
whatever that means, shop windows, loading platforms, paint-sprayed walls. Maybe this
is what things look like when there is no one here to see them.

He heard the sound of the second fall, or felt it in the trembling air, the north tower
coming down, a soft awe of voices in the distance. That was him coming down, the
north tower.

The sky was lighter here and he could breathe more easily. There were others behind
him, thousands, filling the middle distance, a mass in near formation, people walking
out of the smoke. He kept going until he had to stop. It hit him quickly, the knowledge
that he couldn't go any farther.

He tried to tell himself he was alive but the idea was too obscure to take hold. There
were no taxis and little traffic of any kind and then an old panel truck appeared,
Electrical Contractor, Long Island City, and it pulled alongside and the driver leaned
toward the window on the passenger's side and examined what he saw, a man scaled in
ash, in pulverized matter, and asked him where he wanted to go. It wasn't until he got in
the truck and shut the door that he understood where he'd been going all along.

***

3
[…]

The first cop told him to go to the checkpoint one block east of here and he did this and
there were military police and troops in Humvees and a convoy of dump trucks and
sanitation sweepers moving south through the parted sawhorse barriers. He showed
proof of address with picture ID and the second cop told him to go to the next
checkpoint, east of here, and he did this and saw a chain-link barrier stretching down the
middle of Broadway, patrolled by troops in gas masks. He told the cop at the checkpoint
that he had a cat to feed and if it died his child would be devastated and the man was
sympathetic but told him to try the next checkpoint. There were fire-rescue cars and
ambulances, there were state police cruisers, flatbed trucks, vehicles with cherry
pickers, all moving through the barricades and into the shroud of sand and ash.

He showed the next cop his proof of address and picture ID and told him there were cats
he had to feed, three of them, and if they died his children would be devastated and he
showed the splint on his left arm. He had to move out of the way when a drove of
enormous bulldozers and backhoes moved through the parted barricades, making the
sound of hell machines at endless revving pitch. He started over again with the cop and
showed his wrist splint and said he needed only fifteen minutes in the apartment to feed
the cats and then he’d go back uptown to the hotel, no animals allowed, and reassure the
children. The cop said okay but if you're stopped down there be sure to tell them you
went through the Broadway checkpoint, not this one.

He worked his way through the frozen zone, south and west, passing through smaller
checkpoints and detouring around others. There was a Guard troop in battle jackets and
sidearms and now and then he saw a figure in a dust mask, man or woman, obscure and
furtive, the only other civilians. The streets and cars were surfaced in ash and there were
garbage bags stacked high at curbstones and against the sides of buildings. He walked
slowly, watching for something he could not identify. Everything was gray, it was limp
and failed, storefronts behind corrugated steel shutters, a city somewhere else, under
permanent siege, and a stink in the air that infiltrated the skin.

He stood at the National Rent-A-Fence barrier and looked into the haze, seeing the
strands of bent filigree that were the last standing things, a skeletal remnant of the tower
where he'd worked for ten years. The dead were everywhere, in the air, in the rubble, on
rooftops nearby, in the breezes that carried from the river. They were settled in ash and
drizzled on windows all along the streets, in his hair and on his clothes.

[…]

[…] Two Hasidic men stood outside a shop with a broken window. They looked a
thousand years old. When he approached his building he saw workers in respirators and
protective body suits scouring the sidewalk with a massive vacuum pump.

The front doors were blown in or kicked in. It was not looters, he thought. He thought
that people had taken desperate shelter, taken cover wherever they could when the
towers came down. The entrance hall reeked of garbage uncollected in the basement. He
knew that the electricity had been restored and there was no reason not to take the
elevator but he climbed the nine flights to his apartment, pausing on floors three and
seven to stand at the near end of the long corridors. He stood and listened. The building
seemed empty, it felt and sounded empty. When he entered his apartment he stood a
while, just looking around. The windows were scabbed in sand and ash and there were
fragments of paper and one whole sheet trapped in the grime. Everything else was the
same as it had been when he walked out the door for work that Tuesday morning. Not
that he'd noticed. He'd lived here for a year and a half, since the separation, finding a
place close to the office, centering his life, content with the narrowest of purviews, that
of not noticing.

But now he looked. Some light entered between splashes of window grit. He saw the
place differently now. Here he was, seen clear, with nothing that mattered to him in
these two and a half rooms, dim and still, in a faint odor of nonoccupancy. There was
the card table, that was all, with its napped green surface, baize or felt, site of the
weekly poker game. […]

This was the last time he would stand here. There were no cats, there were only clothes.
He put some things in a suitcase, a few shirts and trousers and his trekking boots from
Switzerland and to hell with the rest. This and that and the Swiss boots because the
boots mattered and the poker table mattered but he wouldn't need the table, two players
dead, one badly injured. A single suitcase, that was all, and his passport, checkbooks,
birth certificate and a few other documents, the state papers of identity. He stood and
looked and felt something so lonely he could touch it with his hand. […]

[…] He walked down to the lobby, smelling the garbage coming closer with every step
he took. The men with the vacuum pump were gone. He heard the drone and grind of
heavy machinery at the site, earthmoving equipment, excavators that pounded concrete
to dust, and then the sound of a klaxon that signaled danger, possible collapse of a
structure nearby. He waited, they all waited, and then the grind began again.

He went to the local post office to pick up his undelivered mail and then walked north
toward the barricades, thinking it might be hard to find a taxi at a time when every
cabdriver in New York was named Muhammad.

***

7
[…]

Every time she saw a videotape of the planes she moved a finger toward the power
button on the remote. Then she kept on watching. The second plane coming out of that
ice blue sky, this was the footage that entered the body, that seemed to run beneath her
skin, the fleeting sprint that carried lives and histories, theirs and hers, everyone's, into
some other distance, out beyond the towers.

The skies she retained in memory were dramas of cloud and sea storm, or the electric
sheen before summer thunder in the city, always belonging to the energies of sheer
weather, of what was out there, air masses, water vapor, westerlies. This was different, a
clear sky that carried human terror in those streaking aircraft, first one, then the other,
the force of men's intent. He watched with her. Every helpless desperation set against
the sky, human voices crying to God and how awful to imagine this, God's name on the
tongues of killers and victims both, first one plane and then the other, the one that was
nearly cartoon human, with flashing eyes and teeth, the second plane, the south tower.

He watched with her one time only. She knew she'd never felt so close to someone,
watching the planes cross the sky. Standing by the wall he reached toward the chair and
took her hand. She bit her lip and watched. They would all be dead, passengers and
crew, and thousands in the towers dead, and she felt it in her body, a deep pause, and
thought there he is, unbelievably, in one of those towers, and now his hand on hers, in
pale light, as though to console her for his dying.