Falling Man (25 page)

He was avoiding Terry Cheng. He didn’t want to talk to him, or listen, or watch his cigarette burn down.

The lucky jack did not fall.

He didn’t listen to what was said around him, the incidental bounce of dialogue, player to player. A fresh deck rose to the tabletop. He was gutted by fatigue at times, in a near feral state, eyes sweeping the table before the cards were dealt.

He used to think about Florence Givens every day. He still did, most days, today, in a taxi, staring at a billboard. He’d never called. He’d never thought of crossing the park again to see her, talk a while, find out how she was doing. He’d thought of it in a remote way, like landscape, like thinking of going back to the house where you grew up and walking along the back lanes and across the high meadow, the kind of thing you know you’ll never do.

It was finally who he was that counted, not luck or naked skill. It was strength of mind, mental edge, but not just that. There was something harder to name, a narrowness of need or wish, or how a man’s character determines his line of sight. These things would make him win but not too much, not winnings of such proportions that he’d slip into someone else’s skin.

The dwarf is back, Carlo, and he is happy to see this, watching the man take a seat two tables away. But he doesn’t look around the room for a sign of Terry Cheng so they might trade wry smiles.

Men in stylized yawns with arms raised, men staring into dead space.

Terry might be in Santa Fe or Sydney or Dallas. Terry might be in his room dead. It took Terry two weeks to understand that the fixture on the wall at one end of the long room, marked SHEER and BULK, was designed to operate the curtains at the other end of the room, to open and close the sheer inner curtain or the bulky outer. Terry had tried to open the curtains once by hand and then realized it didn’t matter, open or closed. There was nothing out there he needed to know.

He’d never told Lianne about the walks across the park. His experience with Florence was brief, maybe four or five encounters over a period of fifteen days. Is that possible, only that? He tried counting the times, sitting in a taxi at a stoplight, staring at a billboard. It all ran together now, with only the faint grain of something felt and held. He saw her in the tower as she’d described it, in forced march down the stairwell, and thought he saw himself at times, in split instants, unshaped, a false memory or too warped and fleeting to be false.

The money mattered but not so much. The game mattered, the touch of felt beneath the hands, the way the dealer burnt one card, dealt the next. He wasn’t playing for the money. He was playing for the chips. The value of each chip had only hazy meaning. It was the disk itself that mattered, the color itself. There was the laughing man at the far end of the room. There was the fact that they would all be dead one day. He wanted to rake in chips and stack them. The game mattered, the stacking of chips, the eye count, the play and dance of hand and eye. He was identical with these things.

He set the resistance level way up. He stroked hard, arms and legs but mostly legs, trying not to collapse his shoulders, hating every stroke. Sometimes there was no one else in the place, maybe somebody on a treadmill watching TV. He always used the rowing machine. He rowed and showered and the showers smelled of mildew. He stopped going after a while but then went back, setting the level higher still, wondering only once why this was a thing he had to do.

He was looking at five-deuce off-suit. He thought for a moment he might get up and leave. He thought he might walk out and get the first plane, pack and go, get a window seat and lower the shade and fall asleep. He folded his cards and sat back. By the time a fresh deck floated up he was ready to play again.

Forty tables, nine players a table, others waiting at the rail, screens high on three walls showing soccer and baseball, strictly atmospheric.

SHEER and BULK.

He didn’t want to listen to Terry Cheng at his conversational ease, in his new persona, chatting away by the blue waterfall, three years after the planes.

Older men with chapped faces, eyelids drawn down. Would he know them if he saw them in a diner, eating breakfast at the next table? Long lifetimes of spare motion, sparer words, call the bet, see the raise, two or three such faces every day, men nearly unnoticeable. But they gave the game a niche in time, in the lore of poker face and dead man’s hand, and a breath of self-esteem.

The waterfall was blue now, or possibly always was, or this was another waterfall or another hotel.

You have to break through the structure of your own stonework habit just to make yourself listen. There it is, the clink of chips, the toss and scatter, players and dealers, mass and stack, a light ringing sound so native to the occasion it lies outside the aural surround, in its own current of air, and no one hears it but you.

Here’s Terry slouching down a side aisle at three a.m. and they barely share a glance and Terry Cheng says, “Have to get back to my coffin by sunup.”

The woman from wherever she’s from, in the black leather cap, Bangkok or Singapore or L.A. She wears the cap slightly tilted and he knows they’re all so neutralized by the steady throb of call and fold that there’s very little happening, table-wide, in the popular art of fantasy fuck.

One night he sat in his room doing the old exercises, the old rehab program, bend of the wrist toward the floor, bend of the wrist toward the ceiling. Room service ended at midnight. Midnight TV showed soft-core films with naked women and penis-less men. He was not lost or bored or crazy. Thursday tournament started at three, sign-ups at noon. Friday tournament started at noon, sign-ups at nine.

He was becoming the air he breathed. He moved in a tide of noise and talk made to his shape. The look under the thumb at ace-queen. Along the aisles, roulette wheels clicking. He sat in the sports book unaware of scores or odds or point spreads. He watched the miniskirted women serving drinks. Out on the Strip a dead and heavy heat. He folded eight or nine hands in a row. He stood in the sportswear shop wondering what he might buy for the kid. There were no days or times except for the tournament schedule. He wasn’t making enough money to justify this life on a practical basis. But there was no such need. There should have been but wasn’t and that was the point. The point was one of invalidation. Nothing else pertained. Only this had binding force. He folded six more hands, then went all-in. Make them bleed. Make them spill their precious losers’ blood.

These were the days after and now the years, a thousand heaving dreams, the trapped man, the fixed limbs, the dream of paralysis, the gasping man, the dream of asphyxiation, the dream of helplessness.

A fresh deck rose to the tabletop.

Fortune favors the brave. He didn’t know the Latin original of the old adage and this was a shame. This is what he’d always lacked, that edge of unexpected learning.

She was only a girl, always a daughter, and her father was drinking a Tanqueray martini. He’d let her add a twist of lemon, giving her comically detailed instructions. Human existence, that was his subject this evening, on the deck of somebody’s beat-up house in Nantucket. Five adults, the girl on the fringes. Human existence had to have a deeper source than our own dank fluids. Dank or rank. There had to be a force behind it, a principal being who was and is and ever shall be. She loved the sound of that, like chanted verse, and thought of it now, alone, over coffee and toast, and something else as well, the existence that hummed in the words themselves, was and is, and how the chill wind died at nightfall.

People were reading the Koran. She knew of three people doing this. She’d talked to two and knew of another. They’d bought English-language editions of the Koran and were trying earnestly to learn something, find something that might help them think more deeply into the question of Islam. She didn’t know whether they were persisting in the effort. She could imagine herself doing this, the determined action that floats into empty gesture. But maybe they were persisting. They were serious people perhaps. She knew two of them but not well. One, a doctor, recited the first line of the Koran in his office.

This Book is not to be doubted.

She doubted things, she had her doubts. She took a long walk one day, uptown, to East Harlem. She missed her group, the laughter and cross talk, but knew all along this wasn’t just a walk, a matter of old times and places. She thought of the resolute hush that fell over the room when members took up pens and began to write, oblivious to the clamor around them, rap singers down the hall, barely school age, polishing their lyrics, or workers drilling and hammering on the floor above. She was here to look for something, a church, near the community center, Catholic, she thought, and it may have been the church that Rosellen S. used to go to. She wasn’t sure but thought it might be, made it be, said it was. She missed the faces. Your face is your life, her mother said. She missed the forthright voices that began to warp and fade, lives that dwindled into whisper.

She had normal morphology. She loved that word. But what’s inside the form and structure? This mind and soul, hers and everyone’s, keep dreaming toward something unreachable. Does this mean there’s something there, at the limits of matter and energy, a force responsible in some way for the very nature, the vibrancy of our lives from the mind out, the mind in little pigeon blinks that extend the plane of being, out beyond logic and intuition.

She wanted to disbelieve. She was an infidel in current geopolitical parlance. She remembered how her father, how Jack’s face went bright and hot, appearing to buzz with electric current after a day in the sun. Look around us, out there, up there, ocean, sky, night, and she thought about this, over coffee and toast, how he believed that God infused time and space with pure being, made stars give light. Jack was an architect, an artist, a sad man, she thought, for much of his life, and it was the kind of sadness that yearns for something intangible and vast, the one solace that might dissolve his paltry misfortune.

But this was crap, wasn’t it, night skies and divinely inspired stars. A star makes its own light. The sun is a star. She thought of Justin night before last, singing his homework. This meant he was bored, alone, in his room, making up monotone songs of addition and subtraction, presidents and vice-presidents.

Others were reading the Koran, she was going to church. She took a taxi uptown, weekdays, two or three times a week, and sat in the nearly empty church, Rosellen’s church. She followed others when they stood and knelt and she watched the priest celebrate the mass, bread and wine, body and blood. She didn’t believe this, the transubstantiation, but believed something, half fearing it would take her over.

She ran along the river, early light, before the kid was awake. She thought of training for the marathon, not this year’s but next, the pain and rigor of it, long-distance running as spiritual effort.

She thought of Keith with a call girl in his room, having automated teller sex.

After mass she tried to hunt down a taxi. Taxis were scarce here and the bus took forever and she wasn’t ready yet to take the subway.

This Book is not to be doubted.

She was stuck with her doubts but liked sitting in church. She went early, before mass began, to be alone for a while, to feel the calm that marks a presence outside the nonstop riffs of the waking mind. It was not something godlike she felt but only a sense of others. Others bring us closer. Church brings us closer. What did she feel here? She felt the dead, hers and unknown others. This is what she’d always felt in churches, great bloated cathedrals in Europe, a small poor parish church such as this one. She felt the dead in the walls, over decades and centuries. There was no dispiriting chill in this. It was a comfort, feeling their presence, the dead she’d loved and all the faceless others who’d filled a thousand churches. They brought intimacy and ease, the human ruins that lie in crypts and vaults or buried in churchyard plots. She sat and waited. Soon someone would enter and walk past her into the nave. She was always the first, always seated toward the rear, breathing the dead in candlewax and incense.

She thought of Keith and then he called. He said he’d be able to get home for a few days in a week or so and she said okay, good.

She saw the gray that was beginning to seep into her hair at the scalp. She would not stain it away. God, she thought. What does it mean to say that word? Are you born with God? If you never hear the word or observe the ritual, do you feel the breath alive inside you, in brain waves or pounding heart?

Her mother had a mane of white hair at the end, the body slowly broken, haunted by strokes, blood in the eyes. She was drifting into spirit life. She was a spirit woman now, barely able to make a sound that might pass for a word. She lay shrunken in bed, all that was left of her framed by the long straight hair, frosted white in sunlight, beautiful and otherworldly.

She sat in the empty church waiting for the pregnant woman to enter or maybe the old man who always nodded to her. One woman, then the other, or one woman and then the man. They’d established a pattern, these three, or nearly so, and then others entered and the mass began.

But isn’t it the world itself that brings you to God? Beauty, grief, terror, the empty desert, the Bach cantatas. Others bring you closer, church brings you closer, the stained glass windows of a church, the pigments inherent in the glass, the metallic oxides fused onto the glass, God in clay and stone, or was she babbling to herself to pass the time?

She walked home from church when there was time but otherwise tried to find a cab, tried to talk to the driver, who was in the twelfth hour of his shift and wanted only to finish without dying.

She stayed away from the subway, still, and never stopped noticing the concrete bulwarks outside train stations and other possible targets.

She ran early mornings and came home and stripped and showered. God would consume her. God would de-create her and she was too small and tame to resist. That’s why she was resisting now. Because think about it. Because once you believe such a thing, God is, then how can you escape, how survive the power of it, is and was and ever shall be.