by Don DeLillo
A very heavy girl wearing an orange dress came walking toward us across a wide lawn. There was a mushroom cloud appliquéd on the front of her dress. I recognized the girl; we had some classes together. I let the others walk on ahead and I stood for a moment watching her walk past me and move into the distance. I was wearing a smudge of lampblack under each eye to reduce the sun’s glare. I didn’t know whether the lampblack was very effective but I liked the way it looked and I liked the idea of painting myself in a barbaric manner before going forth to battle in mud. I wondered if the fat girl knew I was still watching her. I had a vivid picture of myself standing there holding my helmet at my side, left knee bent slightly, hair all mussed and the lampblack under my eyes. Her dress was brightest orange. I thought she must be a little crazy to wear a dress like that with her figure.
9
THE THING TO DO, I thought, is to walk in circles. This is demanded by the mythology of all deserts and wasted places. A number of traditions insist on it. I was about a mile beyond the campus. Motion was strange. Motion consisted of sunlight on particular stones. (With the opening of classes I had been brushing up on perimeter acquisition radar, unauthorized explosions, slow-motion countercity war, super-ready status, collateral destruction, crisis management, civilian devastation attack.) All the colors were different shades of one nameless color. Water would have been a miracle or mirage. I took off my shoes and socks and the stones burned. I saw a long bug. I was careful to keep the tallest of the campus buildings in sight. This was a practical measure, nonritualistic, meant to offset the saintly feet. I remembered then to think of Rutherford B. Hayes, nineteenth president, 1877–1881. That took care of that for the day. Each day had to be completed. I avoided a sharp stone. Something sudden, a movement, turned out to be sunlight on paint, a painted stone, one stone, black in color, identifiably black, a single round stone, painted black, carefully painted, the ground around it the same nameless color as the rest of the plain. Some vandal had preceded me then. Stone-painter. Metaphorist of the desert. To complete the day truly I had to remember to think of Milwaukee in flames. I was doing a different area every day. This practice filled me with self-disgust and was meant, eventually, to liberate me from the joy of imagining millions dead. In time, I assumed, my disgust would become so great that I would be released from all sense of global holocaust. But it wasn’t working. I continued to look forward to each new puddle of destruction. Six megatons for Cairo. MIRVs for the Benelux countries. Typhoid and cholera for the Hudson River Valley. I seemed to be subjecting my emotions to an unintentioned cycle in which pleasure nourished itself on the black bones of revulsion and dread. Tidal waves for Bremerhaven. Long-term radiation for the Mekong Delta. For Milwaukee I had planned firestorms. But now I could not imagine Milwaukee in flames. I had never been to Milwaukee. I had never even seen a photograph of the place. I had no idea what the city looked like and I could not imagine it in flames. I put on my socks first, as I had been taught, and then my shoes. I was hungry. Pot roast had been served for lunch and I had eaten only some cereal and fruit. Heading back I kept watching for insects. Buildings rose across the plain. I could see cadets marching quite clearly now, bright blue squadrons on the parade grounds. The thing to do is to concentrate on objects. In the room, when I got there, Bloomberg was occupying his bed, prone, on top of the blanket, hands folded behind his white neck — the lone unsuntanned member of the squad. There were two beds, two chairs, two desks, a window, a closet. His white skin was remarkable. Some dietary law perhaps. An overhead light, two wall lamps. Consume only those foods that do not tint the flesh. A desk lamp, two bureaus, a wastebasket, a pencil, six books, three shoes. Bloomberg himself. Harkness himself or itself.
“Milwaukee is spared,” I said.
10
HOURS LATER, after we had both missed dinner, Bloomberg rolled over on his back. He managed this without taking his hands from their position behind his neck. He used his elbows as levers and brakes, as landing gear. It seemed some kind of test — to move one’s body 180 degrees without changing the relationship among its parts. Finally he settled himself and stared into the ceiling. I was sitting on my own bed, my back against the wall. This placing of bodies may seem inconsequential. But I believed it mattered terribly where we were situated and which way we were facing. Words move the body into position. In time the position itself dictates events. As the sun went down I tried to explain this concept to Bloomberg.
“History is guilt,” he said.
“It’s also the placement of bodies. What men say is relevant only to the point at which language moves masses of people or a few momentous objects into significant juxta-position. After that it becomes almost mathematical. The placements take over. It becomes some sort of historical calculus. What you and I say this evening won’t add up to much. We’ll remember only where we sat, which way our feet pointed, at what angle our realities met. Whatever importance this evening might have is based on placements, relative positions, things like that. A million pilgrims face Mecca. Think of the power behind that fact. All turning now. And bending. And praying. History is the angle at which realities meet.”
“History is guilt. It’s mostly guilt.”
“What are you doing here, Anatole?”
“I’m unjewing myself.”
“I had a hunch. I thought to myself Anatole’s being here has some spiritual import. It must be a hard thing to do. No wonder you’re so tense.”
“I’m not tense.”
“You didn’t even go down to dinner tonight. You’re too tense to eat. It’s quite obvious.”
“I’m trying to lose weight,” he said. “I’m like a bridge. I expand in hot weather. Creed wants to get me down to two seventy-five.”
“Where are you now?”
“An even three.”
“Don’t you sweat it off in the grass drills or when we scrimmage?”
“I expand in this weather.”
“Anatole, how do you unjew yourself?”
“You go to a place where there aren’t any Jews. After that you revise your way of speaking. You take out the urbanisms. The question marks. All that folk wisdom. The melodies in your speech. The inverted sentences. You use a completely different set of words and phrases. Then you transform your mind into a ruthless instrument. You teach yourself to reject certain categories of thought.”
“Why don’t you want to be Jewish anymore?”
“I’m tired of the guilt. That enormous nagging historical guilt.”
“What guilt?”
“The guilt of being innocent victims.”
“Let’s change the subject.”
“Also the predicate and the object,” he said.
He did not modify his expression. He seemed sublimely sad, a man engaged in surviving persistent winters at some northernmost point of the compass. I thought that winter must be his season, as it was mine, and it did not seem strange that we had come to this place. Even now, long before the snows, there was some quality of winter here, converse seasons almost interspersed, a sense of brevity, one color, much of winter’s purity and silence, a chance for reason to prevail.
“Anatole, do you ever think of playing pro ball?”
“I’m not quick enough. I don’t have quick feet. Tweego keeps after me about my feet. He says I’d be the best pass-blocker in the country if I had quick feet.”
“I’d like to play pro ball,” I said. “That would really be tremendous.”
“You could make it, Gary.”
“I don’t have the speed. I’ll never be big enough to go inside time after time, twenty-five or thirty times a game. And I don’t have the speed to turn the corner. Up there you need overdrive. It would be tremendous if I could make it. It’s tremendous just thinking about it.”
“There are Jews in those big cities,” Bloomberg said.
The window was open and there was a breeze. We were speaking very slowly, almost drunkenly. Our words seemed to rise toward the ceiling. The air was light and sweet. The wo
rds we spoke did not seem particularly ours; although we said nothing remarkable, the words surprised me at times. It may have been my hunger that accounted for these feelings.
“What’s it like to weigh three hundred pounds?”
“It’s like being an overwritten paragraph.”
“They should get you a larger bed.”
“I don’t mind the bed. Everything is fine here. Things are going very well. I’m glad I came. It was good thinking. It showed intelligence. The bed is perfectly all right.”
“Does the silence bother you?”
“What silence?” he said.
“You know what I mean. The big noise out there.”
“Out over the desert you mean. The rumble.”
“The silence. The big metallic noise.”
“It doesn’t bother me.”
“It bothers me,” I said.
I was enjoying myself immensely. I was drunk with hunger. My tongue emitted wisdom after wisdom. Our words floated in the dimness, in the room’s mild moonlight, weightless phrases polished by the cool confident knowledge of centuries. I was eager for subjects to envelop, timeless questions demanding men of antic dimension, riddles as yet unsolved, large bloody meat-hunks we might rip apart with mastiff teeth. Nothing unromantic would suffice. Detachment was needed only for the likes of astrophysics, quantum mechanics, all painstaking matters so delicate in their refracted light that intellects such as ours would sooner yield to the prudish machine. There was no vulgarity in the sciences of measurement, nothing to laugh at, to drink to, to weep about like Russians guzzling vodka and despairing of God a hundred years ago in books written by bearded titans. Bloomberg and I needed men, mass consciousness, great vulgar armies surging dumbly across the plains. Bloomberg weighed three hundred pounds. This itself was historical. I revered his weight. It was an affirmation of humanity’s reckless potential; it went beyond legend and returned through mist to the lovely folly of history. To weigh three hundred pounds. What devout vulgarity. It seemed a worthwhile goal for prospective saints and flagellants. The new asceticism. All the visionary possibilities of the fast. To feed on the plants and animals of earth. To expand and wallow. I cherished his size, the formlessness of it, the sheer vulgar pleasure, his sense of being overwritten prose. Somehow it was the opposite of death.
“Feet retain the qualities they possessed at birth,” Bloomberg said. “They’re either quick or they’re slow and there’s nothing you can do about it. Tweego knows this. But he keeps after me anyway.”
“Tweego is half-man, half-pig. All Creed’s assistants have their piggish aspects but Tweego heads the list. He’s fully half-pig. Tweego, Vern Feck and Hauptfuhrer. Mythology chose to ignore the species.”
“I respect Tweego in a way. He thinks in one direction, straight ahead. He just aims and fires. He has ruthlessness of mind. That’s something I respect. I think it’s a distinctly modern characteristic. The systems planner. The management consultant. The nuclear strategist. It’s a question of fantastic single-mindedness. That’s something I genuinely respect.”
“It’s all angles,” I said. “The angle at which great masses collide. The angle at which projectiles are aimed. The angle at which blunt instruments strike a particular surface. Consider our respective positions.”
“Go ahead, I’m listening.”
“Consider the placements. Foot to hip. Knee to ear. Angles within angles. Interrelationships. The angle of incidence. The angle of reflection. Of course I’m just beginning to formulate this concept.”
“Where do you do your thinking, Gary?”
“I’ve been spending time in the desert lately. You can evolve theories out there. The sun’s heat purifies the thinking apparatus. Which reminds me. Why are you so white, Anatole? I’ve been reluctant to ask.”
“I stay out of the sun whenever possible because I don’t like to peel. I hate the whole process. Let’s just say that my awareness of reptilian antecedents is unnaturally vivid.”
“I like to peel,” I said. “I like to reach behind me and strip the skin off my back. Or have it stripped off for me. A girl I knew in Coral Gables used to do it. Slowly peel the skin right off my back. She was Jewish.”
“Did she make sounds while she did it?”
“Noises,” I said. “She made noises.”
Bloomberg shifted on the bed.
“I’m hungry,” he said. “They had chicken for dinner. Fried chicken, mixed vegetables and corn bread. They had peach pie for dessert.”
“Anatole, I think you should forget your diet. You’d be a better football player at two seventy-five. But a greater man at three hundred plus.”
“It’s possible but not probable. I base my notion of probability on a given number in a given pattern expressing the likelihood of the occurrence of a sequentially ordered set of events, such as the ratio of the number of coordinate elements that would produce the set of events to the total number of elements considered possible.”
“I look forward to these talks of ours, chaplain.”
At Logos there existed both Army and Air Force ROTC. I belonged to neither. But I had received permission to audit AFROTC courses. Geopolitics — one hour a week. History of air power — one hour a week. Aspects of modern war — one hour a week.
11
BOBBY LUKE WAS SITTING on the front steps of Staley Hall, the living quarters for the football team. It was another hot and empty afternoon; everybody else was indoors; the campus seemed deserted. I sat a few feet away from Bobby, spreading my arms along the top step. He looked my way with a slight grin, his eyes nearly shut I stretched my legs and gazed out at the distant parade grounds. Nothing moved out there and the heat rolled in. The night before, we had opened against a school called Dorothy Hamilton Hodge. Taft Robinson gained 104 yards rushing in the first half and we left the field leading 24-0. Creed didn’t use his reserves until there were only five minutes left in the game. By that time we had eight touchdowns; apparently he wanted to make news. Since Dorothy Hamilton Hodge was considered a typical opponent (with one exception), it was obvious that we’d have a winning season. We were better than any of us had imagined and it just seemed a question of how many points we’d score, how few we’d give up, and how many records would fall to Taft Robinson. The exception was West Centrex Biotechnical, an independent like us and a minor power in the area for years. The previous season they had swept through their schedule without the slightest hint of defeat, yielding an occasional touchdown only as a concession to the law of averages. The game with Centrex, which would be our seventh, was already shaping up as the whole season for us. If we could beat them, Creed’s face would be back in the papers, we’d get small-college ranking, and the pro scouts would come drifting down for a look at the big old country boys. Bobby glanced up now. A side door of the science building had opened. A girl stepped out, stood for a moment with her arms folded, then went back in.
“Snatch,” Bobby said.
The sky roared for a second. I looked up and saw it finally, a fighter, sunlight at its wingtips, climbing, lost now in the middle of the clear day. Bobby tried to spit past his shoes but didn’t make it, hitting the left pants leg. Saliva hung there, glistening, full of exuberant bubbles. Bobby hummed a bit. I listened, trying to pick out a tune of some kind. Bobby was a strange sort of kid, lean but strong, a very sleepy violence radiating from his sparse body. He was famous for saying he would go through a brick wall for Coach Creed. Young athletes were always saying that sort of thing about their coaches. But Bobby became famous for it because he said pratically nothing else. He was simply a shy boy who had little to say. Even the brick-wall remark was reserved for close friends in situations that called for earnestness above all else. We had all heard about it though, how often he used it, and I tried to figure out exactly what it meant to him. Maybe he had heard others use it and thought it was a remark demanded by history, a way of affirming the meaning of one’s struggle. Maybe the words were commissioned, as it were, by language its
elf, by that compartment of language in which are kept all bits of diction designed to outlive the men who abuse them, all phrases that reduce speech to units of sound, lullabies processed through intricate systems. Or maybe the remark just satisfied Bobby’s need to be loyal to someone. Creed had done plenty to command respect but little or nothing to merit loyalty, a much more emotional quality. He kept to himself, using his assistants to temper and bend us, coming down from the tower only to correct a correction, living alone in a small room off the isometrics area — a landlocked Ahab who paced and raged, who was unfolding his life toward a single moment. Coach wanted our obedience and that was all. But Bobby had this loyalty to give, this eager violence of the heart, and he would smash his body to manifest it. Tradition, of course, supported his sense of what was right. The words were old and true, full of reassurance, comfort, consolation. Men followed such words to their death because other men before them had done the same, and perhaps it was easier to die than admit that words could lose their meaning. Bobby stopped humming now and tried to spit past his shoes again. The sun was directly overhead. Sunlight covered everything. I smelled casual sweat collecting under my arms and soon the soreness in my body began to ease just slightly. Two girls left the administration building and walked slowly across campus toward the women’s dormitory. It took about ten minutes and we watched them all the way.
“Gash,” Bobby said.
In time I let my head ease back on the top step and I closed my eyes. I was moving into the biblical phase of the afternoon, the peak of my new simplicity. A verity less than eternal had little appeal. I prepared myself to think of night, desert, sorrowful forests, of the moon, the stars, the west wind, baptismal mist and the rich myrrh of harvested earth. Instead I thought of tits. I thought of flaming limbs, a moody whore’s mouth, hair the color of bourbon. Quietly I sweated, motionless on the steps. A girl in a cotton dress on a bed with brass posts. A ceiling fan rubbing the moist air. Scent of slick magazines. She’d be poorborn, the dumbest thing in Texas, a girl from a gulf town, movie-made, her voice an unlaundered drawl, fierce and coarse, fit for bad-tempered talking blues. I listened to Bobby hum. I had forgotten to add a new word to my vocabulary that day and I resolved to do it before nightfall. I tried to get back to the girl again. It was a different one this time, roundish, more than plump, almost monumental in her measureless dimensions. She removed her tessellated blue-green sweater. It was all happening in a Mexico City hotel. I heard Bobby stir. The girl became the hotel itself, an incredible cake of mosaic stone. I continued to perspire quietly. Women came and went, a few I’d known, some more magical than that, not memories and therefore absurdly sensual, exaggerated by cameras. It was wonderful to sit in one’s own sweat and feel it bathe the tight muscles, tickling at this or that crevice, and to grow slightly delirious in the terrible sun and think of a woman’s body (women in warm climates), someone to know when the room at the back of the house is damp and black until she is in it, the round one now, a quite unlikely woman to take you through this first silent winter, body of perfect knowledge, the flesh made word. Then I heard Bobby Luke scratching at his belly or neck.
