A train went by, southbound again. Why is he doing this, she thought.
He was thinking, not listening. He began to listen as they made their way uptown, talking in brief sprints, and he realized that the kid was using monosyllables again.
He told him, “Cut the crap.”
“What?”
“How’s that for monosyllables?”
“What?”
“Cut the crap,” he said.
“What for? You tell me I don’t talk.”
“That’s your mother, not me.”
“Now I talk, you tell me not to talk.”
He was getting better at this, Justin was, barely pausing between words. At first it was an instructive form of play but the practice carried something else now, a solemn obstinacy, nearly ritualistic.
“Look, I don’t care. You can talk in the Inuit language if you like. Learn Inuit. They have an alphabet of syllables instead of letters. You can speak one syllable at a time. It’ll take you a minute and a half to say one long word. I’m in no hurry. Take all the time you want. Long pauses between the syllables. We’ll eat whale blubber and you can speak Inuit.”
“I do not think I would like to eat whale meat.”
“It’s not meat, it’s blubber.”
“This is the same as fat.”
“Say blubber.”
“This is the same as fat. It is fat. Whale fat.”
Wise-ass little kid.
“The point is that your mother doesn’t like you talking this way. It upsets her. We want to give her a break. You can understand this. And even if you can’t understand it, don’t do it.”
The mixed skies were darker now. He began to think this was a bad idea, trying to meet her coming home. They went east a block, then north again.
There was something else he thought concerning Lianne. He thought he would tell her about Florence. It was the right thing to do. It was the kind of perilous truth that would lead to an understanding of clean and even proportions, long-lasting, with a feeling of reciprocal love and trust. He believed this. It was a way to stop being double in himself, trailing the taut shadow of what is unsaid.
He would tell her about Florence. She would say she knew something was going on but in view of the completely uncommon nature of the involvement, with its point of origin in smoke and fire, this is not an unforgivable offense.
He would tell her about Florence. She would say she could understand the intensity of the involvement, in view of the completely uncommon nature of its origin, in smoke and fire, and this would cause her to suffer enormously.
He would tell her about Florence. She would get a steak knife and kill him.
He would tell her about Florence. She would enter a period of long and tortured withdrawal.
He would tell her about Florence. She would say, After we’ve just renewed our marriage. She would say, After the terrifying day of the planes has brought us together again. How could the same terror? She would say, How could the same terror threaten everything we’ve felt for each other, everything I’ve felt these past weeks?
He would tell her about Florence. She would say, I want to meet her.
He would tell her about Florence. Her periodic insomnia would become total, requiring a course of treatment that includes diet, medication and psychiatric counseling.
He would tell her about Florence. She would spend more time at her mother’s apartment, accompanied by the kid, remaining there well into evening and leaving Keith to wander empty rooms on his return from the office, as in the meager seasons of his exile.
He would tell her about Florence. She would want to be convinced that it was over and he would convince her because it was true, simply and forever.
He would tell her about Florence. She would send him to hell with a look and then call a lawyer.
She heard the sound and looked to her right. A boy in the schoolyard was dribbling a basketball. The sound did not belong to the moment but he wasn’t playing, only walking, taking the basketball with him, absently bouncing it as he walked toward the fence, head up, eyes on the figure above.
Others followed. With the man in full view now, students advanced from the far end of the yard toward the fence. The man had affixed the safety harness to the rail of the platform. The students advanced from every point of the schoolyard to get a closer look at what was happening.
She moved back. She moved the other way, backing into the building that stood on the corner. Then she looked around for someone, just to exchange a glance. She looked for the crossing guard, who was nowhere in sight. She wished she could believe this was some kind of antic street theater, an absurdist drama that provokes onlookers to share a comic understanding of what is irrational in the great schemes of being or in the next small footstep.
This was too near and deep, too personal. All she wanted to share was a look, catch someone’s eye, see what she herself was feeling. She did not think of walking away. He was right above her but she wasn’t watching and wasn’t walking away. She looked at the teacher across the street, whistle pressed in one fist, string dangling, his other hand gripping the strands of the chain-link fence. She heard someone above her, in the apartment building that occupied the corner, a woman at the window.
She said, “What you doing?”
Her voice came from a point somewhere above the level of the maintenance platform. Lianne didn’t look. The street to her left was empty except for a ragged man coming out of the arch-way beneath the tracks, carrying a bicycle wheel in his hand. This is where she looked. Then, again, the woman’s voice.
She said, “I call nine one one.”
Lianne tried to understand why he was here and not somewhere else. These were strictly local circumstances, people in windows, some kids in a schoolyard. Falling Man was known to appear among crowds or at sites where crowds might quickly form. Here was an old derelict rolling a wheel down the street. Here was a woman in a window, having to ask who he was.
Other voices now, from the projects and the schoolyard, and she looked up again. He stood balanced on the rail of the platform. The rail had a broad flat top and he stood there, blue suit, white shirt, blue tie, black shoes. He loomed over the sidewalk, legs spread slightly, arms out from his body and bent at the elbows, asymmetrically, man in fear, looking out of some deep pool of concentration into lost space, dead space.
She slipped around the corner of the building. It was a senseless gesture of flight, adding only a couple of yards to the distance between them, but then it wasn’t so odd, not if he truly fell, if the harness did not hold. She watched him, her shoulder jammed to the brick wall of the building. She did not think of turning and leaving.
They all waited. But he did not fall. He stood poised on the rail for a full minute, then another. The woman’s voice was louder now.
She said, “You don’t be here.”
Kids called out, they shouted inevitably, “Jump,” but only two or three and then it stopped and there were voices from the projects, mournful calls in the damp air.
Then she began to understand. Performance art, yes, but he wasn’t here to perform for those at street level or in the high windows. He was situated where he was, remote from station personnel and railroad police, waiting for a train to come, northbound, this is what he wanted, an audience in motion, passing scant yards from his standing figure.
She thought of the passengers. The train would bust out of the tunnel south of here and then begin to slow down, approaching the station at 125th Street, three-quarters of a mile ahead. It would pass and he would jump. There would be those aboard who see him standing and those who see him jump, all jarred out of their reveries or their newspapers or muttering stunned into their cell phones. These people had not seen him attach the safety harness. They would only see him fall out of sight. Then, she thought, the ones already speaking into phones, the others groping for phones, all would try to describe what they’ve seen or what others nearby have seen and are now trying to describe to them.