Photographed being outfitted with a safety harness, an associate trying to shield him from the camera.

Photographed with bloody face in hotel lobby.

Dangling from parapet of tenement in Chinatown.

All his falls were headfirst, none announced in advance. The performance pieces were not designed to be recorded by a photographer. Those pictures that exist were taken by people who happened to be at the site or by a professional alerted to the event by a passerby.

He studied acting and dramaturgy at the Institute for Advanced Theatre Training in Cambridge, Massachusetts. His training included a three-month residency at the Moscow Art Theatre School.

Dead at 39. No sign of foul play. Suffered from a heart ailment and high blood pressure.

He worked without pulleys, cables or wires. Safety harness only. And no bungee cord to absorb the shock of longer falls. Just an arrangement of straps under the dress shirt and blue suit with one strand emerging from a trouser leg and extending back to a secure structure at the top of the fall.

Most charges dismissed. Fines and warnings issued.

She came across another burst of foreign languages, many words decorated with acute accents, circumflexes and other marks whose names she couldn’t think of.

She looked into the screen waiting for a sound in the street, car brakes, car alarm, that would get her out of the room and back into bed.

His brother, Roman Janiak, a software engineer, assisted with most jumps, becoming visible to onlookers only when it was unavoidable. Plans for a final fall, according to him, did not include a safety harness.

She thought it could be the name of a trump card in a tarot deck, Falling Man, name in gothic type, the figure twisting down in a stormy night sky.

There is some dispute over the issue of the position he assumed during the fall, the position he maintained in his suspended state. Was this position intended to reflect the body posture of a particular man who was photographed falling from the north tower of the World Trade Center, headfirst, arms at his sides, one leg bent, a man set forever in free fall against the looming background of the column panels in the tower?

Free fall is the fall of a body within the atmosphere without a drag-producing device such as a parachute. It is the ideal falling motion of a body that is subject only to the earth’s gravitational field.

She did not read further but knew at once which photograph the account referred to. It hit her hard when she first saw it, the day after, in the newspaper. The man headlong, the towers behind him. The mass of the towers filled the frame of the picture. The man falling, the towers contiguous, she thought, behind him. The enormous soaring lines, the vertical column stripes. The man with blood on his shirt, she thought, or burn marks, and the effect of the columns behind him, the composition, she thought, darker stripes for the nearer tower, the north, lighter for the other, and the mass, the immensity of it, and the man set almost precisely between the rows of darker and lighter stripes. Headlong, free fall, she thought, and this picture burned a hole in her mind and heart, dear God, he was a falling angel and his beauty was horrific.

She clicked forward and there was the picture. She looked away, into the keyboard. It is the ideal falling motion of a body.

The preliminary finding is death from natural causes, pending an autopsy and toxicological report. Suffered from chronic depression due to a spinal condition.

If this photograph was an element in his performances he said nothing about it when questioned by reporters after one of his arrests. He said nothing when asked whether anyone close to him had been lost in the attacks. He had no comments to make to the media on any subject.

Suspended from the railing of a roof garden in Tribeca.

Dangling from a footbridge over the FDR Drive.

MAYOR SAYS FALL MAN MORONIC.

He turned down an invitation to fall from the upper reaches of the Guggenheim Museum at scheduled intervals over a three-week period. He turned down invitations to speak at the Japan Society, the New York Public Library and cultural organizations in Europe.

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

His body was discovered by his brother, Roman Janiak, a software engineer. The Saginaw County medical examiner’s office reports this was an apparent coronary event, tests pending.

His training included formal classes six days a week in both Cambridge and Moscow. Graduating actors gave a showcase presentation in New York for casting directors, artistic directors, agents and others. David Janiak, as a Brechtian dwarf, assaulted another actor, seemingly trying to rip the man’s tongue out of his mouth during what was supposed to be a structured improvisation.

She clicked forward. She tried to connect this man to the moment when she’d stood beneath the elevated tracks, nearly three years ago, watching someone prepare to fall from a maintenance platform as the train went past. There were no photographs of that fall. She was the photograph, the photosensitive surface. That nameless body coming down, this was hers to record and absorb.

Early in 2003 he began to reduce the number of performances and tended to appear only in remote parts of the city. Then the performances stopped.

He injured his back so badly in one of the falls that he had to be hospitalized. Police arrested him at the hospital for obstructing vehicular traffic and creating a hazardous or physically offensive condition.

Plans for his final jump at some unforeseen future time did not include a harness, according to his brother Roman Janiak, 44, who spoke to a reporter shortly after he identified the body.

Students at the Institute create their own movement vocabulary and maintenance program to follow throughout their careers. Study includes psychophysical exercises, Meyerhold’s biomechanics, Grotowski training, Vakhtangov’s plasticity training, individual and partner acrobatics, classical and historical dance, style and genre explorations, Dalcroze eurythmics, impulse work, slow motion, fencing, armed and unarmed stage combat.

It is not immediately known what brought David Janiak to a motel outside the small town more than five hundred miles from the site of the World Trade Center.

She looked into the keyboard. The man eluded her. All she knew was what she’d seen and felt that day near the schoolyard, a boy bouncing a basketball and a teacher with a whistle on a string. She could believe she knew these people, and all the others she’d seen and heard that afternoon, but not the man who’d stood above her, detailed and looming.

She went to sleep finally on her husband’s side of the bed.

There were rare moments between hands when he sat and listened to the sounds around him. It surprised him every time to find what an effort it takes to hear what is always there. The chips were there. Behind the ambient noise and stray voices, there was the sound of tossed chips, raked chips, forty or fifty tables of people stacking chips, fingers reading and counting, balancing the stacks, clay chips with smooth edges, rubbing, sliding, clicking, days and nights of distant hiss, like insect friction.

He was fitting into something that was made to his shape. He was never more himself than in these rooms, with a dealer crying out a vacancy at table seventeen. He was looking at pocket tens, waiting for the turn. These were the times when there was nothing outside, no flash of history or memory that he might unknowingly summon in the routine run of cards.

He walked down the wide aisle hearing the mutter of stickmen at the dice tables, a shout now and then from the sports book. Sometimes a hotel guest wheeling a suitcase wandered through, looking lost in Swaziland. In the off-hours he talked to dealers at empty blackjack tables, always the women, waiting in some zone of purged sensation. He might play a while, sitting and talking, making a point of not getting interested in the woman herself, just her conversation, fragments of life outside, her car trouble, her daughter Nadia’s riding lessons. He was one of them in a way, casino staff, passing some forgettable social moments before the action starts again.