Chapter 4 Summary
After the separation there was a kind of symmetry: Keith had his weekly six-man poker game downtown and Lianne had her weekly “storyline sessions” in East Harlem for six or so men and women in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. After the towers fell, the card games ended, but Lianne’s sessions have become more intense. A clinical psychologist began the group strictly for morale, and now Lianne is in charge. She talks with them about their lives and then suggests a topic for them to write about, such as remembering their fathers or something they always wanted to do but never did. After twenty minutes of writing, they each share what they have written. There are frightening lapses and unfinished sentences, but they laugh loud and often. Their stories are a mix of real physical details and hazy reminiscence, but each story is authoritatively theirs. “No one knew what they knew, here in the last final minute before it all closed down.” Members write about difficult times and happy memories. Today they all—all but one—want to write about the planes.
Back at the apartment, Keith is opening his mail. Some of it has his name spelled incorrectly, and he corrects the errors with a pen. The error usually involves one letter in his last name, Neudecker. He does not make the corrections for junk mail, and he does not make them in the presence of others. He is careful to conceal that.
Lianne walks across Washington Square toward Grand Central Station to meet her mother’s train. She has not been here lately and is unaccustomed to the tight security, though normal activities—tourists taking photos, commuters in a rush—are also in evidence. As she walks to the information desk to check the gate number, she sees a crowd gathering near the 42nd Street entrance. Outside, a man in a business suit is dangling, upside down, above the street. One leg is bent up, his arms are at his side, and the safety harness is barely visible from under his trousers. Lianne has heard of this performance artist known as Falling Man. He appears, unannounced, in various parts of the city several times a week. He is always suspended from a structure wearing a business suit, tie, and dress shoes. He is depicting those awful moments when people fell or were forced to jump from the burning towers. Traffic has stopped and the crowd is shouting at him as he represents a “collective dread” of a body falling among them all. Ten days after the planes, it is disturbing enough to stop the movement of traffic and people in a bustling city and to send Lianne back into the terminal. Her mother is waiting on the lower landing. She is back home after only a week with Martin; New York is her home.
The briefcase in the closet is not Lianne’s and it is not Keith’s. He has seen it there before, but he only now understands why it is here. Keith had carried it with him out of the tower, and Lianne has cleaned it since then. He is in no hurry to open it but does. Inside the pockets are a CD player with headphones, a small bottle of water, half a chocolate bar, a pen, some cigarettes and a lighter, a toothbrush, and a digital recorder. There is something morbid about looking, but he is detached and remote enough from the event to continue looking. He finds a notebook, an envelope preaddressed to AT&T—with no return address—and a guide to buying used cars. The wallet containing credit cards, money,...
(This entire section contains 1535 words.)
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and a driver’s license are in the other pocket.
Lianne sees the siblings’ mother, Isabel, in line at the bakery. Isabel is concerned about Justin bringing his binoculars to her house. He shares them with her kids, and she is wondering what they are looking at behind the closed door of one room. Lianne suggests the red-tailed hawks, but the woman is sure it has something to do with Bill Lawton and a secret they are keeping.
In the night, Keith is awakened by the sounds of chanting men and music from a lower floor. He hears the chant “Allah-uu, Allah-uu, Allah-uu”: voices in a chorus of praise to God.
Lianne asks Justin about the binoculars. She wonders if there is something she should know about the man the three of them talk about all the time. Justin says nothing and she asks what is so intriguing to them about the view from that room. Still the boy is silent. His mother leans against the door, signaling with her body that she is prepared to wait as long as it takes.
Keith is diligent in his physical therapy. He does it at home, and the repetition and routine are healing the damage he suffered from the tower. The torn cartilage in his wrist is not the real damage that has been done to him, and it is not the MRI or the surgery that will heal him. The mindless repetitions, the counting of seconds, and the routine counteract the chaos and falling structures and voices in the smoke.
When Lianne was twenty-two, her father killed himself shortly after discovering he was suffering from senile dementia. Rather than let nature run its awful course, Jack Glenn made several calls from his cabin in New Hampshire and then shot himself with an old sporting rifle. Lianne did not ask the local police for details, but she wondered if he used the same rifle he had let her grip and aim but not shoot when she was fourteen and visiting her father. She was a city girl, but she remembers him telling her, “the shorter the barrel, the stronger the muzzle blast.” She remembers so well because there was so little between them. She wanted to believe the rifle he used was the same one he had braced against her shoulder that day.
Martin embraces Lianne as she walks through the doorway. He had been in Europe on that day and arrived on one of the first transatlantic flights once they resumed their schedules. While her mother is dressing, the two of them talk about what everyone is talking about right now. Lianne says other people read poems, something beautiful, to bring calm and composure; she reads the newspapers and gets “angry and crazy.” Martin suggests another option: to stand apart from it and measure it coldly, as from a distance, without letting it destroy her. Let it teach her something. He and Nina are going away for a week or two, and Martin mentions Keith. Lianne tells him they are sleeping together, but only technically, and Martin says he will be asking for progress reports. The two men have only talked a couple of times, but Martin likes Keith. Nina enters the room, and Lianne is struck by the transformation in her. Her hair seems whiter and she may be taking too much pain medication, but her mind is fine. She is forgetful, but she is “alert to what is important.”
Martin is an art dealer and collector, and the two of them have known each other for twenty years. Nina lights a cigarette and they begin what appears to be a familiar but heated disagreement about the “holiness” of holy wars. Nina’s position is that the Muslims “attack out of panic.” Martin’s position is that they fear the “disease” of a free society. One side, he says, has the capitol, labor, technology, armies, agencies, laws, police, and prisons. The other has a few men who are willing to die for their cause. They agree that this was not just an attack on one country or several cities; it was an attack on all of them. “We are all targets now.” Lianne is sad to hear two people who are so connected in spirit take such strongly opposing positions, and she leaves the room. As she looks in the mirror, she reflects that Keith is alive, he survived; she wonders what this will mean for her and her son.
In the living room, Martin is looking at several Morandi still life paintings on the wall and her mother has fallen asleep, which her medication makes her do. Lianne looks at her and finds it difficult to see this woman who has shaped so much of her life now settled so completely into a chair. Nina wakes up and they share a look, one in which they each see their connections from past to the present and on into the future.
Martin is rather puzzled as he looks at a still life of common kitchen objects. He thinks he might be disoriented or seeing things where nothing exists. What he sees is the two towers. Lianne joins him at the painting, and she sees the seven or eight objects, one of which is a white wine bottle. Behind it, gray and too smudged and “too obscure to name,” are the two tall objects. When Martin asks what she sees, she tells him she sees what he sees: the two towers.
