by Don DeLillo
“Great big game,” he said. “I’m after small things. Tiny little things. Less of white father watching me run. Prefer to sit still.”
He did a curious thing then: untied his shoelaces. I took a moment to scan the walls for tape-remnants. Poster of Wittgenstein, I thought. Maybe that’s what he’d had up there, or almost had. Dollar ninety-eight poster of philosopher surrounded by Vienna Circle. Two parts to that man’s work. What is written. What is not written. The man himself seemed to favor second part. Perhaps Taft was a student of that part.
“You have to admit that football represents a tremendous opportunity,” I said. “There’s money at the end of all this. And what money can’t buy.”
“You mean the crowd.”
“The everything,” I said. “The sense of living an inner life right up against the external or tangible life. Of living close to your own skin. You know what I mean. Everything. The pattern. The morality.”
“Maybe I crave the languid smoky dream,” he said, slowly and softly, with barely evident self-directed humor, dressing the words in black satin. “That’s living close to yourself too. You talk about bringing the inside close to the outside. I’m talking about taking the whole big outside and dragging it in behind me. What’s the word they use in northern parts of Africa for that stuff they smoke? Not that I’m planning any kind of holy weed mysticism. I’m too hard edged for that. But there are rewards in contemplation. A new way of life requires a new language.”
“All right then, damn it. Money aside. Metaphysics aside. It becomes a question of pursuing whatever it is you do best. It’s a damn shame to waste talent like yours. It almost goes against some tenuous kind of equilibrium or master plan. Some very carefully balanced natural mechanism. I’m serious about that.”
“If I don’t play football, the bobcat will become extinct in Wyoming.”
“You’re an athlete, Taft.”
“So are you, Gary. But I’m not going to talk you out of quitting if you want to quit.”
“As an athlete I have serious lapses. I don’t play football as much as drift in and out of cloud banks of action and noise. I’m not a one-hundred-percent-in-the-American-grain football player. I tend to draw back now and again in order to make minor discoveries that have no bearing on anything. I conduct spurious examinations. I bullshit myself.”
“Gary, you’re a credit to your race.”
He looked down at the newspaper. I took this as an indication that we had reached the end of the introductory phase. I went to the window and stretched. A two-part yawn elongated the faint reflection of my face. There was little movement to be seen on the campus. It wasn’t quite dark yet. A man (perhaps a woman) stared at me from a window of the nearest building. It disturbed me that I couldn’t be sure of the person’s sex. It’s always interesting to stand by a window and exchange looks with an unknown woman in another building. But in this case I couldn’t be sure whether I was looking at a man or woman. Therefore it seemed dangerous to get interested. It was definitely much too delicate a matter to involve myself with at the present time. I went back to the chair and sat down. Hunched forward I studied my shoes. I thought of going down to the equipment room to check out the rumor about new uniforms. According to the rumor, the coaching staff had decided on a few slight design changes for next season’s uniform. At this very moment people were probably crowding into Billy Mast’s room or Randy King’s room to talk about the rumor, to embellish it, to swim and play in it. I could go down to the equipment room, check things out, then rush up to Billy Mast’s room with whatever information or misinformation I had managed to gather. Then we could all discuss it for an hour or so. I wondered whether the designation CAPT or CO-CAPT would be included on my uniform below the right shoulder or above the number 44 on my back. I hoped the rumor turned out to be true. At the very least I hoped we’d get new headgear. I didn’t like the old helmets much. I’d be satisfied with new headgear and with the designation CO-CAPT above my number.
“Here’s the way I have it figured,” I said. “I have it figured that you came here because of Creed, because he convinced you that he could make a complete football player out of you. Or more than that. It was more, wasn’t it? There was something in Creed that appealed to you. Not appealed to you — hit you, struck you as being important. He conveyed some kind of message that caught you just right, the same message I got, the sense of some awful kind of honesty that might flow back and forth between you. There’s something chilling about Creed. He seems always to be close to a horrible discovery about himself. He’s one of those men who never stops suffering, am I right, and he takes you in on it. If you’re in his presence at all, you’re almost sure to perceive that he’s in some kind of pain. He allows you to get fairly close to it, not all the way but fairly close. And this is what makes you trust him or at least relate to him if you’re even slightly sensitive to the man’s reality, to that awful honesty he conveys. Am I right or not?”
“I’d have to put that whole subject in historical perspective,” Taft said.
“I’m anxious. I’m eager to hear it.”
“When it became known that I was leaving Columbia, a whole bunch of people started coming around. An aggregation. Just a whole bunch of them. Prospectors. Canny little men. Appraisers. All with wrinkles around their eyes and friendly enough smiles that you could see them put the brakes to. They came from all over. They came from the swamps, from the mountains, from the plains, from the lakes. In ten days I heard every variation on every regional accent you can imagine. And it was football all the way. It was facilities, plant, tradition, pride, status. It was which conference is best. It was intersectional rivalry and postseason games. Those people could talk football for six hours straight, ten hours, one whole complete weekend. All but Creed. Those people were all the same, compilers of digits, body counters. Friendly enough. But all in that area.”
“Then Big Bend walked in.”
“Creed was too much. He was part Satan, part Saint Francis or somebody. He offered nothing but work and pain. He’d whisper in my ear. He’d literally whisper things in my ear. He’d tell me he knew all the secrets but one — what it was like to be black. We’d teach each other. We’d work and struggle. At times he made it sound like some kind of epic battle, him against me, some kind of gigantomachy, two gods at war. Other times he’d sweet-talk me — but not with prospects of glory. No, he’d tell me about the work, the pain, the sacrifice. What it might make of me. How I needed it. How I secretly wanted it. He was going to work me into the ground. He was going to teach me how to get past my own limits. Mind and body. He stressed that more than once. Mind and body. And it would be all work, pain, fury, sweat. No time for nonessential things. We would deny ourselves. We would get right down to the bottom of it. We would find out how much we could take. We would learn the secrets.”
“He sold you on pain and sacrifice,” I said. “You have to give the man credit for a novel approach. He knew his quarry. He knew how to get you, Taft. No brothers down here. No sisters. No sporting press to record your magic. No cameras. He got you on pain. He knew just what he was doing. I give the man credit. He got you on self-denial, on being alone, on geography.”
“Don’t make it sound so unnatural, Gary. This place isn’t as bad as all that. There are counterbalances of one kind or another.”
“I know,” I said. “I’m very aware of that. But tell me how it ended. Did you and Creed teach each other? Did you get down to the bottom of it? Does he know you’re through with football?”
“I continue to instruct myself in certain disciplines. So in that sense I’m still working my way down to the bottom of it. Creed knows I’m not playing football anymore. He’s known for quite a while. He said he was expecting it. I told him I knew he was. We were in that room of his. He’s so inside himself, that man. I don’t think he sees any need for mobility. I mean whatever it is, it’ll come to him. I think that’s the way he sees it. It’ll come or it won’t. I doubt he cares
very much. But I’m feeling better about things now that I’m through with football. It was time to cut it loose. I feel better every day.’
“What did you teach each other?”
“That kind of question gets us into areas where it’s hard to avoid sounding ridiculous. In short we taught each other nothing. That summarizes it pretty neatly, I think. And now it’s almost time to face Mecca.”
“You’re staying here, I assume. Football or no football. There are so many arguments against this place that I assume you’re staying.”
“I’ve got this room fixed up just the way I want it.”
“Of course. This room. Absolutely.”
“I’m not being evasive, Gary. Or keeping traditional distances. I want you to take me literally. Everything I’ve said is to be taken literally. I’ve got this room fixed up just the way I want it. It’s a well-proportioned room. It has just the right number of objects. Everything is exactly where it should be. It took me a long time to get it this way. Before I came here, I told Creed there was one condition. I room alone. I had to have that, I told him. I guess everybody thought they kept me separated in the name of racial sensitivity. But that wasn’t it at all. It was my idea from the beginning. It was the only demand I ever made of Creed. I room alone.”
“Two clocks,” I said.
“Only a seeming excess. They correct each other. Between them, a balance is arrived at, a notion of how much space has to be reconstructed. Space meaning difference between disagreeing hands.”
“Three gray pencils in an ex-marmalade jar on a small, probably oak desk.”
“A certain play of shapes. The words on the old marmalade jar. The fact that pencils diminish with use. Affinity of materials.”
“A radio.”
“The place where words are recycled. The place where villages are burned. That’s my Indochina. I listen only at certain times of day for certain periods of time. When time’s up, I bring it into silence. It’s almost a ceremony.”
“Small mark on wall left by tape.”
“I believe in static forms of beauty,” he said. “I like to measure off things and then let them remain. I try to create degrees of silence. Things in this room are simple and static. They’re measured off carefully. When I change something slightly, everything changes. The change becomes immense. My life in here almost resembles a certain kind of dream. You know the way objects in dreams sometimes acquire massive significance. They resound somehow. It’s easy to fear objects in dreams. It gets like that in here at times. I seem to grow smaller at times and the room appears almost to lengthen. The spaces between objects become a little bit frightening. I like the colors in here, the way they never move, never change. The room tone changes though. There’s a hum at times. There’s a low roar. There’s a kind of dumb brute chant. I think the room tone changes at different times of day. Sometimes it’s oceanic and there’s other times when it’s just barely there, a sort of small pulse in an attic. The radio is important in this regard. The kind of silence that follows the playing of the radio is never the same as the silence that precedes it. I use the radio in different ways. It becomes almost a spiritual exercise. Silence, words, silence, silence, silence.”
“My roommate wets the bed,” I said. “It’s a little hard for me to evolve any kind of genuine stasis under the circumstances. Somehow pee is inimical to stasis. Although I wouldn’t want to have to prove it phenomenologically, if that’s the word I want.”
“I can see your difficulty.”
“What about books, Taft? How do they enter into the scheme? I have a problem in that regard. I like to read about mass destruction and suffering. I spend a lot of time reading stuff that concerns thermonuclear war and things that pertain to it. Horrible diseases, fires raging in the inner cities, crop failures, genetic chaos, temperatures soaring and dropping, panic, looting, suicides, scotched bodies, arms torn off, millions dead. That kind of thing.”
“I like to read about the ovens,” Taft said.
“What do you mean, the ovens? Are you serious?”
“Atrocities. I like to read about atrocities. I can’t help it. I like to read about the ovens, the showers, the experiments, the teeth, the lampshades, the soap. I’ve read maybe thirty or forty books on the subject. But I like kids best. Putting the torch to kids and their mamas. Smashing kids in the teeth with your rifle butt. Laying waste to villages full of kid. Firing into ditches full of kids, infants, babies, so forth. That’s my particular interest. Atrocities in general with special emphasis on kids.”
“I can’t bear reading about kids.”
“I can’t either, Gary.”
“The thought of children being tortured and killed.”
“It’s the worst thing there is. I can’t bear it. But I’ve read maybe eight books on it so far. Thirty or forty on the ovens and eight on the kids. It’s horrible. I don’t know why I keep reading that stuff.”
“There must be something we can do,” I said.
“It’s getting to be time to turn toward Mecca. The black stone of Abraham sits in that shrine in old Mecca, the name of which I’ll have to look up again because I keep forgetting it. Not that it matters. A name’s a name. A place could just as easily be another place. Abraham was black. Did you know that? Mary the mother of Jesus was black. Rembrandt and Bach had some Masai blood. It’s all in the history books if you look carefully enough. Tolstoy was three-eighths black. Euclid was six-fifths black. Not that it means anything. Not that any of it matters in the least. Lord, I think I’m beginning to babble.”
He took off the dark glasses and pinched the bridge of his nose in true weariness. His eyes were shut. He began to laugh quietly into the newspaper between his knees, preparing in his own way for whatever religious act was scheduled to follow.
I went downstairs to see what I could find out about the rumor concerning new uniforms. There was nobody around and no sign of uniforms, new or old. I decided to walk over to Zapalac’s office, which was located in a cinder-block structure only a hundred yards away. I didn’t bother getting a coat. It wasn’t very cold and I took my time walking over there. The building was full of small dark rooms, all unoccupied. The walls of Zapalac’s office were covered with posters, printed slogans, various symbols of this or that movement. His scarf was there but he wasn’t.
In my room at five o’clock the next morning I drank half a cup of lukewarm water. It was the last of food or drink I would take for many days. High fevers burned a thin straight channel through my brain. In the end they had to carry me to the infirmary and feed me through plastic tubes.
