Falling Man Read Online Free PDF Page A

and memory that the act of writing allows. They laughed loud and often. They worked into themselves, finding narratives that rolled and tumbled, and how natural it seemed to do this, tell stories about themselves.
    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 connection—radio programs, cousins named Luther, two of them, and a dress her mother wore to somebody’s wedding, and they listened to her read in a half whisper, one arm missing, and Benny in the next chair closed his eyes and rocked all through the telling. This was their prayer room, said Omar H. They summoned the force of final authority. No one knew what they knew, here in the last clear minute before it all closed down.
    They signed their pages with first name and first letter of last name. This was Lianne’s idea, maybe a little affected, she thought, as if they were characters in European novels. They were characters and authors both, able to tell what they wished, cradle the rest in silence. When Carmen G. read her pieces she liked to embellish them with phrases in Spanish to seize the auditory core of an incident or an emotion. Benny T. hated to write, loved to talk. He brought pastry to the meetings, large jellied bladders that no one else would touch. The noise echoed in the hallway, kids playing piano and drums, others on roller skates, and the voices and accents of the adults, their polyglot English floating through the building.
    Members wrote about hard times, happy memories, daughters becoming mothers. Anna wrote about the revelation of writing itself, how she hadn’t known she could write ten words and now look what comes pouring out. This was Anna C., a broad-bodied woman from the neighborhood. Nearly all of them were from the neighborhood, the eldest being Curtis B., eighty-one, a tall taciturn man with a prison history and a voice, in his readings, that had the resonance of entries in the Encyclopaedia Britannica, a collection he’d read front to back in the penitentiary library.
    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