Falling Man Read Online Free

Falling Man
Book: Falling Man Read Online Free
Author: Don DeLillo
Tags: Retail, USA, American Literature
Pages:
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ranks, three or four deep, speeding toward her from the traffic light one block down the avenue as she paused in midcrossing to work out her fate.
    In Santa Fe she’d come across a sign on a shop window, for ethnic shampoo. She was traveling in New Mexico with a man she used to see during the separation, a TV executive, flauntingly well-read, teeth lasered lime white, a man who loved her longish face and sort of lazy-lithe body, he said, down to the knobby extremities, and the way he examined her, finger tracing the twists and ridges, which he named after geologic eras, making her laugh, intermittently, for a day and a half, or maybe it was just the altitude at which they were screwing, in the skies of the high desert.
    Running toward the far curb now, feeling like a skirt and blouse without a body, how good it felt, hiding behind the plastic shimmer of the dry cleaner’s long sheath, which she held at arm’s length, between her and the taxis, in self-defense. She imagined the eyes of the drivers, intense and slit, heads pressed toward steering wheels, and there was still the question of her need to be equal to the situation, as Martin had said, her mother’s lover.
    There was that, and Keith in the shower this morning, standing numbly in the flow, a dim figure far away inside plexiglass.
    But what made her think of this, ethnic shampoo, in the middle of Third Avenue, which was a question probably not answerable in a book on ancient alphabets, meticulous decipherments, inscriptions on baked clay, tree bark, stone, bone, sedge. The joke, at her expense, is that the work in question was typed on an old manual machine with textual emendations made by the author in a deeply soulful and unreadable script.
     
     
     
    The first cop told him to go to the checkpoint one block east of here and he did this and there were military police and troops in Humvees and a convoy of dump trucks and sanitation sweepers moving south through the parted sawhorse barriers. He showed proof of address with picture ID and the second cop told him to go to the next checkpoint, east of here, and he did this and saw a chain-link barrier stretching down the middle of Broadway, patrolled by troops in gas masks. He told the cop at the checkpoint that he had a cat to feed and if it died his child would be devastated and the man was sympathetic but told him to try the next checkpoint. There were fire-rescue cars and ambulances, there were state police cruisers, flatbed trucks, vehicles with cherry pickers, all moving through the barricades and into the shroud of sand and ash.
    He showed the next cop his proof of address and picture ID and told him there were cats he had to feed, three of them, and if they died his children would be devastated and he showed the splint on his left arm. He had to move out of the way when a drove of enormous bulldozers and backhoes moved through the parted barricades, making the sound of hell machines at endless revving pitch. He started over again with the cop and showed his wrist splint and said he needed only fifteen minutes in the apartment to feed the cats and then he’d go back uptown to the hotel, no animals allowed, and reassure the children. The cop said okay but if you’re stopped down there be sure to tell them you went through the Broadway checkpoint, not this one.
    He worked his way through the frozen zone, south and west, passing through smaller checkpoints and detouring around others. There was a Guard troop in battle jackets and sidearms and now and then he saw a figure in a dust mask, man or woman, obscure and furtive, the only other civilians. The streets and cars were surfaced in ash and there were garbage bags stacked high at curbstones and against the sides of buildings. He walked slowly, watching for something he could not identify. Everything was gray, it was limp and failed, storefronts behind corrugated steel shutters, a city somewhere else, under permanent siege, and a stink in the air that
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