Falling Man Read Online Free PDF

woman reading on a bench, in the lotus position. Lianne used to read haiku, sitting crosslegged on the floor, in the weeks and months after her father died. She thought of a poem by Bashō, or the first and third lines. She didn’t remember the second line. Even in Kyoto—I long for Kyoto. The second line was missing but she didn’t think she needed it.
    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 running flurries. She was headed to the information desk to check the gate number when something caught her eyes out near the approach to 42nd Street.
    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, unannounced, in various parts of the city, suspended from one or another structure, always upside down, wearing a suit, a tie and dress shoes. He brought it back, of course, those stark moments in the burning towers when people fell or were forced to jump. He’d been seen dangling from a balcony in a hotel atrium and police had escorted him out of a concert hall and two or three apartment buildings with terraces or accessible rooftops.
    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 openness of it, something we’d not seen, the single falling figure that trails a collective dread, body come down among us all. And now, she thought, this little theater piece, disturbing enough to stop traffic and send her back into the terminal.
    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.”
    Lianne took the bag and they rode the escalator up to the main concourse, steeped in dusty light slanting through the high lunettes. A dozen people were grouped around a guide near the staircase to the east balcony, gazing at the sky ceiling, the gold-leaf constellations, with a guardsman and his dog standing alongside, and her mother could not help commenting on the man’s uniform, the question of jungle camouflage in midtown Manhattan.
    “People are leaving, you’re coming back.”
    “Nobody’s leaving,” her mother said. “The ones who leave were never here.”
    “I have to admit, I’ve thought of it. Take the kid and go.”
    “Don’t make me sick,” her mother said.
    Even in New York, she thought. Of course she was wrong about the second line of the haiku. She knew this. Whatever the line was, it