Falling Man

Shortly after their separation, Keith and Lianne found different activities to occupy their time. Keith hosted weekly six-man poker games in his apartment while Lianne organized fiction-based therapy sessions for people with early diagnoses of Alzheimer’s disease. While the attack on the towers ends Keith’s poker games, Lianne continues to attend the therapy sessions, and they take on a new “measure of intensity” (21). Lianne hosts a short conversation at each session and then gives the attendees a writing prompt. They write for 20 minutes and then share their stories. Though the stories varied before, the attendees now want to “write about the planes” (22).

Keith returns to Lianne’s apartment with his mail. Lianne meets her mother at Grand Central Station and is surprised by the heavy police presence. She sees a crowd gathered around a street artist; the man is dangling from the side of a building, dressed in a suit, and posing his body to replicate a famous photograph of a man who committed suicide by jumping from a high floor in the World Trade Center rather than dying inside during the September 11 attacks. This performance artist has become famous around New York and is named Falling Man.