Falling Man

“Nothing is next. There is no next.”

The devastating nature of the September 11 attacks is illustrated by the characters’ inability to imagine what comes next. Before the towers collapsed, the world was known and understood. Keith and Lianne may not have been happy, but their lives were understandable. In the aftermath of the attacks, that understanding has been obliterated. They cannot plan their futures because they cannot comprehend a world where something like the terrorist attack could be happy. To them, nothing comes next because the very idea of a progression from the previous world into this new form of existence is absurd.

“They call this organic shrapnel.”

The doctors explain to Keith that, during suicide bomb attacks, pieces of flesh become lodged into the victims’ skin and become future irritants. These fragments of flesh are metaphors for the traumatic legacy of terrorism. Like the pieces of flesh, memories and pain are lodged in the victims’ skin and cause problems for years to come. The post-traumatic stress disorder suffered by the characters is a result of the terrorists’ actions, in which small fragments of the terrorists become forever stuck inside the victims for the rest of their lives.

“I walked to Brooklyn when it happened.”

For the people in the immediate area of the attack, the impact was shocking. Keith learns that he was not alone in suffering from such discombobulating effects, as characters struggled to realize where they were or what they were doing. Just as Keith returned to Lianne’s apartment, others went to Brooklyn or other parts of the city. This behavior shows the devastating nature of the attack, which ripped apart the victims’ sense of time and space so much that they were reduced to helpless wanderers, acting on impulse as they tried to navigate a world they no longer understood.

“It was in the language, the inverted letters, the lost word at the end of a struggling sentence.”

Lianne hosts a support group for people who have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s. The stories that the group members write become metaphors for the struggle with post-traumatic stress disorder. For the people living in the aftermath of the attacks, trying to create an identity or a life is like writing with a changing language. The letter, grammar, and syntax of regular life have changed, so stories from the past are written differently from stories in the future. Like the group members, the victims of the attacks are losing their grip on their past and what they know to be real. They are struggling to adapt to their new reality, in which things they once took for granted (such as memories and language) are no longer relatable or fixed.

“I keep seeing the towers in this still life.”

People who live in New York City remember the shape and the image of the towers as a part of their day-to-day life. The attack physically reshaped their city and re-shaped their identities and the way they see the world. The familiar image of the towers has gone, replaced by a negative space that they cannot ignore. The empty part of the skyline is obvious and haunting, causing the victims to seek out the towers in other places. They see the missing towers in art and nature, seeking out the familiar shapes they have lost, trying to return the world to what it was before the attacks.

“The ordinariness, so normally unnoticeable, fell upon him oddly, with almost dreamlike effect.”

Keith no longer has the privilege of living a normal life. There is no “normal” for him and the people like him. Even the things that were once mundane and irrelevant now have a liveliness and importance to them that he cannot ignore. Simply by being normal, these people are seemingly defying the circumstances. Keith craves a return to a world where he can ignore the world around him and take everything for granted because this was also a world without pain and trauma.

“Everything seemed to mean something.”

In the complicated aftermath of the attacks, the characters search for meaning in their lives. Even the simplest and seemingly most innocuous gestures and events take on a new meaning during this search. However, if everything means something, the characters discover that nothing means anything. Their lives have been rocked so significantly by the attacks that this intense search for meaning leads them on false and distracting paths. Everything seems to mean something, but that does not necessarily mean that it does mean something. The characters give substance to the insubstantial from a desperate desire to show that life can be controlled or understood.

“We were apart, now we’re back, or beginning to be back.”

Keith returns to Lianne in a physical and emotional sense. He returns to her apartment, he returns to her bed, and he returns to his role as her husband. Keith’s return is a part of his attempts to deal with the impact of the attacks. He wants to know who he is and what his life means, so he returns to a time and place when he was comfortable or—at the very least—when he was able to define himself in relation to others. Keith continues this comfortable attempt to define himself, explaining to Lianne that their relationship is a fractured reality, like everything else. They were together, then apart, then back together, and possibly apart again. Whether they are together or apart does not matter; instead, their attempts to define themselves relative to one another shows that they are searching for meaning in each other.

“After what happened, so many gone, friends gone, people I worked with, I was nearly gone, nearly dead, in another way.”

Florence has lost many friends and colleagues, not just those who died during the attacks. The people who have been emotionally changed by the events also seem dead and gone. Florence feels this ebb and flow in a real way, feeling as though she is slipping away from people in a way she cannot control. Keith is important to her because they share a real firsthand experience of the attacks that few other people can share. Florence does not and cannot explain the reality of her experience of the terrorist attack. She likes being with Keith because she does not have to explain this to him; he understands because he experienced it. At the same time, the arrival of a new person in her life shows her that the attack’s aftermath is not just a process of losing people. She can also meet new people and reach out to the rest of the world. Keith understands Florence and shows her that life is not only about losing people.

“We have our own ruins. But I don’t think I want to see them.”

Ruins in other countries are tourist destinations that appeal to people in other countries. They are an example of historical intrigue and worldliness, something for cultured people to enjoy while traveling around the world. Now, however, the people of the United States of America have ruins of their own. The spot where the towers once stood is just another example of a historical ruin for the characters in the novel, but these ruins are different. These ruins are painful to look at, reminding the characters of what they have lost. The mention of ruins forces Nina to think about how people must feel when examining ruins in their own country, people for whom these tourist sites might hold significant emotional meaning. To Nina and Martin, ruins are symbols of imperial decline and reference a world that is very much consigned to the past. Thinking about the site of the ruins in New York is painful for Nina because it forces her to think of her country as an empire in decline, reminding her that the United States might not be as unique or exceptional as she once took it to be.

“The truth was mapped out in slow and certain decline.”

The impact of the attacks on the World Trade Center is to reveal to the characters in the novel that the country is enduring some sort of decline. However, they do not want to admit that this is true. The decline, when they think about it, is “mapped out” and “slow and certain” (74). The evidence is clear, but they needed the devastating impact of the attack to make this reality obvious. Like the Alzheimer’s diagnosis for the therapy group members, the decline is inevitable but only becomes apparent when the worst effects are realized. The attack, in this sense, is like the group members who lose their memories and are found wandering the streets. The decline has been happening, but the tragedy is needed to bring it into sharp relief.

“Easy names were the ones that killed her.”

Lianne discovers that there are no easy answers in a more complicated and fractured world. Instead, the pursuit of identity and understanding is fraught with danger and misunderstanding. Even seemingly easy things, like remembering names or trying to relate to another person, can reveal a profound sadness that may not have existed before. The hidden depths and secrets are more pronounced, more difficult to navigate, and an increasingly important part of day-to-day life.

“It was not an affair. There was sex, yes, but not romance.”

Keith knows that his relationship with Florence is complicated, but he does not know enough about himself to know why. He can barely even define the relationship, especially in the context of his past affairs. Previously, Keith’s sexual relationships involved lust and desire. He felt sexual attraction to the women with whom he had affairs. However, sex with Florence is not like the meaningless sex of his past. The time Keith spends with Florence involves a profound intimacy that he can never quite replicate and can never quite comprehend. The shared understanding and emotional empathy that they find in one another is beyond the scope of Keith’s understanding. He understands sex but cannot explain the lack of associated romance when reflecting on why his affair with Florence is meaningful.

“She would take the pages home, the things they wrote, and place them with the earlier pages, hole-punched and fitted in the rings, numbering several hundred now.”

Lianne runs therapy sessions in which a group of people who have been diagnosed with Alzheimer’s disease shares their writing with one another. Lianne collects these stories and organizes them in a folder. For Lianne, the act of organization has meaning. By organizing the stories of people whose memories are becoming unreliable, Lianne can exercise agency. Though the world may be chaotic and uncontrollable, Lianne can satisfy her desire for organization and stability by taking the members’ stories and storing them forever. She takes the fleeting memories and gives them the appearance of permanence, using her organization to add a solidity and a rigidity to a vague and indefinable world.

“There was nothing outside the game but faded space.”

Poker is a means of escapism for Keith, providing him with a controllable and fixed system to distract him from the “faded space” (109) away from the table. The terrorist attack was so shocking and discombobulating that he cannot trust the world any longer, so he seeks out a game with clear rules in which human interactions take place without the pressure of emotional commitment. When the world outside seems to be made up of nothing but meaningless chaos, the game of poker is a comforting, governable space.

“Some people are lucky. They become who they are supposed to be.”

Martin and Lianne talk about Nina, their conversation spreading to the ideas of fate and destiny. Martin believes that some lucky people get to become “who they are supposed to be” (112), which suggests that he believes that fate and destiny exist and that those who realize their predestined fates are the luckiest ones. Though the comment is about Nina, Martin’s ability to sympathize with the terrorists prompts the question of whether he believes the September 11 attackers to be lucky. They became who they were supposed to be, while their victims seem not to have been as lucky at all. Martin’s philosophy is nuanced and complicated, but he adheres to it rigidly, even when doing so forces him to ask tough questions about himself.

“Every time he boarded a flight he glanced at faces on both sides of the aisle, trying to spot the man or men who might be a danger to them all.”

For Keith, flying becomes like a game of poker. When he takes his seat, he examines the faces of the other passengers and tries to determine whether they are a threat. Keith is not scared of flying because he has become emotionally detached from the world. Everything has become a game to him, in which the only thrill he can enjoy is to evaluate and assess others as though he were gambling at a poker table. This behavior is an example of how Keith uses the game of poker as a framework of emotional control, allowing him to understand and comprehend situations that seem beyond his control by reimagining them along certain parameters. Flying is not a danger for Keith; instead, he comes to see flying as a game of poker in which he gambles against the other passengers.

“She kept using the word unremarkable. She loved the word.”

Lianne’s life has been dramatically changed by her proximity to the September 11 attacks and the ensuring social upheaval. After years of chaos and confusion, the doctor’s diagnosis classifying her as unremarkable is a relief. She craves a boring, uninteresting part of her life, something she does not need to worry about. However, her experiences meant that she does not entirely trust her capacity to be unremarkable. She repeats the word unremarkable like a mantra, but she already distrusts the diagnosis. Whatever the doctor says, however much she loves the word, she cannot envision an unremarkable world nor her place in it.

“The cards fell randomly, no assignable cause, but he remained the agent of free choice.”

Poker is an inherently random game, as the cards are dealt in an unknowable fashion each round. However, Keith can exercise a degree of control over this game. The game is a system in which he knows all the rules. The cards may be random, but he knows the contents of the deck, and he knows the parameters of the game. There will never be a new and unexpected card. Unlike real life, in which the September 11 attacks have illustrated to Keith that he does not know the parameters and that he has no control over anything, poker allows him to indulge his need to be the “agent of free choice” (121), providing him with a fantasy world in which he exercises control over his life.

“She wanted to be safe in the world and he did not.”

Though they reunited after the September 11 attacks, Keith and Lianne’s lives remain incompatible. The fundamental difference between them is that she craves a world in which she can be safe and secure while Keith does not. These different reactions to the past trauma mean that they navigate the future in different, divergent ways. For example, Lianne stays at home and refuses to fly, while Keith boards airplanes every few days to sit at poker tables and enjoy as much mediated risk as possible. They are different people, dealing with their pain in different ways, which means that they are unlikely to find a way to reunite their lives.

“His falls were said to be painful and highly dangerous due to the rudimentary equipment he used.”

Like many people struggling with traumatic memories, Falling Man punishes himself to bring meaning into his life. His performances are physically painful recreations of a tragic event. This self-flagellation allows Falling Man to empathize with a seemingly impossible emotional state, putting him (and his audiences) into the mindset of the person who jumped from the World Trade Center rather than burn to death inside. The desire to recreate this pain and the need to relive this emotional turmoil as a form of performance art illustrates the complicated ways the characters attempt to navigate trauma. All the characters deal with their trauma differently, but none seems satisfied with the results.

“The money mattered but not so much.”

Keith plays poker and does not make as much money as he used to make when he worked as a lawyer. Money does not mean much to him in the aftermath of the terrorist attack. The money did not make him happy, nor did it protect him from the pain during and after the attacks. Instead, he views the money he loses as a payment in exchange for having control over a system. He happily loses money to enjoy the feeling of playing poker, as he prefers this to his normal, unpredictable life. Furthermore, the prospect of losing money would give Lianne a reason to be angry at Keith. He would welcome her rightful anger, revealing his self-loathing in the wake of the attacks and his desire for someone to validate his negative view of himself.

“This Book is not to be doubted.”

Lianne repeats a line from the Koran like a religious mantra, even though she does not believe in Islam. She repeats the phrase not because she believes but because she takes power from not believing. By repeating the statement, she is performing an act of defiance. She is repudiating the statement by repeating it and harboring doubts simultaneously, turning the book’s words to her own end. Her repetition of the phrase is an attempt to exercise agency against a force or religion that she does not fully understand but believes has hurt her.