Falling Man

They wrote for roughly twenty minutes and then each, in turn, read aloud what he or she had written. Sometimes it scared her, the first signs of halting response, the losses and failings, the grim prefigurings that issued now and then from a mind begi

Rosellen S. saw her father walk in the door after a disappearance lasting four years. He was bearded now, head shaved, one arm missing. She was ten when this happened and she described the event in a run-on convergence, an intimacy of clean physical detail and dreamy reminiscence that had no seeming co

They signed their pages with first name and first letter of last name. This was Lia

Members wrote about hard times, happy memories, daughters becoming mothers. A

There was one subject the members wanted to write about, insistently, all of them but Omar H. It made Omar nervous but he agreed in the end. They wanted to write about the planes.

When he got back uptown the apartment was empty. He sorted through his mail. His name was misspelled on a couple of pieces of mail, this was not unusual, and he snatched a ballpoint pen from the mug near the telephone and made the corrections on the envelopes. He wasn’t sure when he’d started doing this and didn’t know why he did it. There was no reason why. Because it wasn’t him, with the name misspelled, that’s why. He did it and then kept doing it and maybe he understood at some snake-brain level of perception that he had to do it and would keep doing it down the years and into the decades. He did not construct this future in clear terms but it was probably there, humming under the skull. He never corrected the spelling on mail that was out-right third-class indiscriminate throwaway advertising matter. He almost did, the first time, but then did not. Junk mail was created for just this reason, to presort the world’s identities into one, with his or her name misspelled. In most other cases he made the correction, involving one letter in the first syllable of his last name, which was Neudecker, and then slit open the envelope. He never made the correction in the presence of someone else. It was an act he was careful to conceal.

She walked across Washington Square Park behind a student saying hopefully into his cell phone. It was a bright day, chess players at their tables, a fashion shoot in progress under the arch. They said hopefully. They said oh my god, in delight and small awe. She saw a young woman reading on a bench, in the lotus position. Lia

Half an hour later she was in Grand Central Station to meet her mother’s train. She hadn’t been here lately and was not accustomed to the sight of police and state troopers in tight clusters or guardsmen with dogs. Other places, she thought, other worlds, dusty terminals, major intersections, this is routine and always will be. This was not a considered reflection so much as a flutter, a downdraft of memory, cities she’d seen, crowds and heat. But the normal order was also in evidence here, tourists taking pictures, commuters in ru

There were people clustered near the entrance, on both sides, others pushing through the doors but seemingly still engaged by something happening outside. She made her way out onto the crowded sidewalk. Traffic was building, a few horns blowing. She edged along a storefront and looked up toward the green steel structure that passes over Pershing Square, the section of elevated roadway that carries traffic around the terminal in both directions.

A man was dangling there, above the street, upside down. He wore a business suit, one leg bent up, arms at his sides. A safety harness was barely visible, emerging from his trousers at the straightened leg and fastened to the decorative rail of the viaduct.

She’d heard of him, a performance artist known as Falling Man. He’d appeared several times in the last week, una

Traffic was barely moving now. There were people shouting up at him, outraged at the spectacle, the puppetry of human desperation, a body’s last fleet breath and what it held. It held the gaze of the world, she thought. There was the awful ope

Her mother was waiting at the gate, on the lower level, leaning on her cane.

She said, “I had to get out of there.”

“I thought you’d stay another week at least. Better there than here.”

“I want to be in my apartment.”

“What about Martin?”

“Martin is still there. We’re still arguing. I want to sit in my armchair and read my Europeans.”

Lia