by Don DeLillo
We went back inside. I got on my knees and looked in the cabinet space under the sink for some sign of a coffee can. But what sign? Either the coffee can would be there or it wouldn’t. There was no sign involved. I kept at it, determined to conduct an intelligent search. The idea of coffee was overpowering. Finding it and brewing it. Feeling the thick liquid wash down my throat and divide itself into tributaries and attenuated falls. If I could find a clean spoon, the coffee might turn up next. My shirt felt heavy and wet, sticking to my back. There was still hope of locating a trace of sugar somewhere in the room — a lump stuck in the bottom of the box, some brownish fossils to be scraped off the sides of the sugar bowl, assuming the box and sugar bowl existed. Given this or even part of it, I might then find coffee or at least a saucer that might lead to coffee. Signs that serve no purpose are logically meaningless, according to something I’d read once and tried to remember. I had it wrong but that didn’t matter. I was votary and dupe of superstition. If I could find the box of sugar, it would lead me to a clean spoon. Spoon secured, named and agreed on, we pursue the formal concept to its inevitable end, which is coffee. The salesman appeared in the doorway.
“Marks, drachmas, rubles, pounds, shillings, yens. I’ll take anything and everything. The Swiss franc, the French franc, the Bulgarian stotinki. Here, take a brush for a free ten-day home trial. At the end of that time, pay me any way you like. Piasters, pesos, kopecks, bolivars, rupees, dongs. I’m a long-time student of world currency and exchange rates. I bet you don’t know how many puli in the Afghanistan afghani. I bet you can’t guess where the kwacha comes from.”
“You’re talking about thirty years ago,” Fenig said. “These guys are still making brushes?”
There is no need to look for cream, milk or half-and-half (I repeated to myself). Fenig likes his coffee black. There is no need to look for cream, milk or half-and-half.
8
HANES BETURNED one day, minus a few of his soft blond locks, dressed a bit less splendidly than usual. He had few virtues as a messenger but I was convinced Globke’s use of him entailed more serious things. A sort of image-gathering. Maybe Hanes as an image of my public. Or Hanes as Wunderlick-in-exile. He leaned back against the edge of the raised bathtub, tapping his boot heel on the ancient enamel.
“What do they want?” I said.
“Here’s some data from the seventh floor. They thought it should have your immediate attention.”
“What is it?”
“Updated assessments and projections.”
“Of what?”
“I don’t know,” he said. “I just know you’re supposed to look at this column, that column and the other column. The projections are on the overleaf. They want you to be aware of the current status of things. Then you have to sign or initial this memorandum and I have to take everything back to the seventh floor.”
“Stop kicking the tub.”
“There’s a story you’re either doing a concert in England with Watney or you’re making a surprise appearance at one of Watney’s concerts in America.”
“But I’m deceased. I’m deceased, maimed or in Philadelphia.”
“These things aren’t mutually exclusive.”
“You’ve been pondering these matters?”
“I believe in death-in-life,” Hanes said. “One flows through the other. I mean what else is the meaning of a long plane trip spanning continents? What is a three-or four-thousand-mile journey on a 747 except an example of death-in-life? That’s the trip you’re taking for us. I mean it was your choice and you chose it. You’re dead when we want you dead. Then you land and do a make-believe concert. We put you on and take you off. But it was your choice and you chose it. You could have stayed where you were. Things don’t get better just because they get more simple.”
“I thought you carried signatures back and forth. That’s supposed to be your area of competence.”
“I don’t do anything,” he said. “I’m just here — or there. People use me for whatever they want. It’s a way of existing. Everybody has a way and this is mine. It’s no better or worse than anybody else’s.”
His voice was malted milk, pleasant and soporific, an Eastern drawl, but determined to mingle certitude and defeat, as if the first could lead nowhere but to the second. Hanes seemed impatient with the world for not knowing the things he knew. The beauty of surrender. The logic of wistfulness. The old age of youth. As I listened I thought a featureless baggy man was striking me in slow motion with a well-polished stone. I moved to another chair, more supple, nearer the window. Some workers placed a guardrail around an open manhole; one of them attached a danger flag and another began to descend. It was late morning. Hanes gave me a piece of paper, then reassumed his stance at the bathtub. I was completely relaxed, melting into the chair.
“That’s the memorandum of intent,” he said. “You have to sign it or initial it.”
“Whose intent?”
“The seventh floor wants you to read it and sign it.”
“Can’t be bothered, tell them.”
“You won’t read it?”
“No,” I said.
“Will you sign it then?”
“No.”
“How about initialing? Will you initial it? Then I can take it back up to seven and they can process it. Or whatever they do. I don’t get to seven very often.”
“You didn’t bring any cash this time. Why is that, Hanes?”
“They said you’ve spent it all.”
“Funny. That’s nearly funny.”
“You’ve spent it all, they said.”
“It would take eight men eight lifetimes each to spend the money I’ve earned.”
“What you haven’t spent is tied up. You’ve spent a lot.”
“What’s tied up mean?”
“It’s working. They’ve put it to work.”
“Who exactly?”
“The sixth floor.”
“I don’t want it working,” I said. “I’m the one who works. I want my money to sit quietly. That’s my idea of the value of money. While I work and sweat, I want to think of my money resting in a cool steel-paneled room. It’s stacked in green stacks, very placid and cool, resting up. I realize this isn’t everybody’s approach to money. But it’s my approach and I like it. I envision luminous green stacks. A stainless-steel room. Hundreds of neat green stacks. I don’t like to think of money working. I’m the one who works.”
“Except you don’t seem to be,” Hanes said.
I think I slept then, a shallow drop, one level down. A sound seemed to reach me, murderously well regulated, as of sheets of paper sliding out of a Plexiglas machine. I opened my eyes and Hanes was still there, looking down at me, talking right through my sleep, his world-weary TV voice hovering at perfect modulation.
“I like to masturbate in the men’s room on six,” he said. “Afternoon is best. They’re all drugged from lunch. Sitting in their pastel offices. Droning into the phone. I know I’ll never get to that point. Their point. I’d rather be used than use others. It’s easy to be used. There’s no passion or morality. You’re free to be nothing, I read their mail. I look in all the confidential files. When I deliver personal notes from floor to floor, I read them in the stairwell. I feel I’m free to do these things. The only thing that unfrees me is music. The men’s room on six. I wouldn’t try it on seven. I rarely go to seven. The Glob is moving up there next week. Hell probably take me with him but maybe he won’t. Hell leave me where I am. That’s probably what’ll happen. The underground’s come up with a superdrug. Did you hear about that? The news leaves me cold frankly. Music is the final hypnotic. Music puts me just so out of everything. I get taken beyond every reference that indicates who I am or how I behave. Just so out of it. Music is dangerous in so many ways. It’s the most dangerous thing in the world.”
Late in the day it snowed. The men on the radio went wild with news of heavy snow. They seemed unable to stop talking, station after station, into the
night, bulletins, announcements, news specials. Every station was on alert for more news of the snow. Programs were interrupted. Announcers sounded close to insanity, their voice levels soaring. Snow watch. Snowplows. Heavy snow. Snowstorm. Deep snow. Big white snow. These men had never in their lives reported stories so full of documentation. It was snowing in this place and that place. It was piling up. It was drifting across the by-passes and interchanges. Their voices nearly cracked with unprecedented mad lyricism as they gave their authoritative reports. It was real snow and it was falling now, at this identifiable point in time. Motorists, pedestrians, vehicular traffic, suburban thoroughfares, snow emergency routes, snow removal equipment, sanitation crews, salt spreaders, accumulations, bridges and tunnels and airports. Snow was coming down out of the sky. It was falling on the city and on the countryside. Big white snow.
Then it stopped. Everywhere the snow stopped falling. The announcers tried to calm themselves. Their disappointment wasn’t easy to conceal. Disaster and its various joys had made them hoarse, brought them close to sobs, and now they had to dig themselves out of this massive ecstasy. It was a letdown for everyone. A pre-recorded church service came on and then there was a knock and Fenig appeared at the door, hooded, carrying two paper cups by their shaky handles, his face framed in rising smoke. It was about midnight. I turned off the radio. The house was quiet and no traffic moved on the street. I was beginning to feel completely awake. Fenig seemed tired, bent forward in a chair, slowly knocking his knees together.
“Good coffee,” I said.
“It’s not instant. I never drink instant.”
“I don’t think I have anything in the house to eat in case you’re hungry.”
“It’s not hunger that gnaws at me, Bucky. It’s a strange kind of fatigue. I get this way from not working. I can’t get any work done. But it’s not really fatigue. It’s non-fatigue, worse in every way. I’ve had an unproductive eight hours at the typewriter and I haven’t sold a thing in almost two weeks. There’s no worse feeling than the feeling you get from being unproductive. I jabbed away at that machine all day and nothing happened. Same few sentences. Where’s your sugar?”
“I don’t know. Maybe in that cupboard. But I doubt it.”
“Never mind, I’ll drink it bitter. I threw my sugar away because it had a little shriveled corpse in it. Roach-family type thing. You get any down here?”
“I haven’t noticed.”
“I’ve written millions of words,” he said. “Every one of them is in that trunk upstairs. I’ve got copies of everything I’ve written since the beginning. Do you want to know when the beginning was? Before you were born. I had my first story published before you were born. When were you born, just out of curiosity?”
“A few weeks from now twenty-six years ago.”
“I had my first story published before you were born.”
“But nothing lately.”
“But nothing lately and that’s what counts. It’s really fatiguing. All day at the typewriter to type the same few sentences. Were they mediocre sentences? I frankly don’t know the answer to that. My response to that has to be that I honestly and truly do not know. Maybe I’ll know tomorrow. Maybe never.”
“You haven’t been pacing,” I said.
“I haven’t been pacing.”
“At least I haven’t noticed.”
“I haven’t been pacing and that’s because it hasn’t worked lately. I have to change my routine. I have to make an alteration in my format. These things are tricky things. The market’s out there spinning like a big wheel, full of lights and colors and aromas. It’s not waiting for me. It doesn’t care about me. It ingests human arms and legs and it excretes vulture pus. But I understand that. I’m attuned to that.”
“Do you hear anything?”
“No,” he said.
“Hear that?”
“It’s just the kid. Downstairs. The retarded boy. Micklewhite. Her deformed kid.”
“What’s he doing?”
“Dreaming.”
“I’ve never heard a sound like that.”
“That’s the way she says he dreams. That’s the sound that comes out when he’s having a dream. Good thing it’s not too loud.”
“You were saying something,” I said.
“The big wheel.”
“I don’t remember that.”
“The big wheel’s spinning out there, full of lights and bright colors and crazy sounds.”
“Right, the market.”
“Fame,” he said. “It won’t happen. But if it does happen. But it won’t happen. But if it does. But it won’t.”
“You never know.”
“It won’t happen. But if it does.”
“What if it does? What then?”
“I’ll handle it gracefully. Ill be judicious. Ill adjust to it with caution. I won’t let it destroy me. Fame. The perfect word for the phenomenon it describes. Amef. Efam. Mefa.”
“When do you sleep?” I said.
“I sleep when sleep is feasible. When it’s no longer productive to write. I’m working in a whole new area. I guess that’s why it’s coming so slow. Pornographic children’s literature. But serious. Not some kind of soft-core material in a comic vein. Serious stuff. Filthy, obscene and brutal sex among little kids.”
“Is there a market?”
“I think this may be the only untapped field in all of literature. Although you never know for sure. Maybe there’s somebody working away right now, trying to pre-empt a corner of the market. Once you pre-empt, you’re good for years. Send them bird shit wrapped in cellophane, they’ll buy it. So I may be too late. There are people typing away all over the place, trying to wedge themselves into little corners of the market. But to get to your question, the answer is yes. Everything is marketable. If no present market exists for certain material, then a new market automatically develops around the material itself. My own brand of porno kid fiction is pretty specific. It has no adults. It is sexy-brutal in a new kind of way. It panders to the lowest instincts. It is full of cheap thrills. It has elements of primeval fear and terror. It has titless little girls saying bad words. It has an Aristotelian substratum.”
“If you know this much about it, why can’t you get started?”
“I know too much about it,” he said.
“No room for discovery.”
“No room for discovery and I spent too much time making and taking notes. My energy is pretty much sapped. But the theme lives in my mind. The central motivating force is there. The thrust is a genuine thrust. Little kids sucking and being sucked, fucking and being fucked. No grownups anywhere in sight. Kids obsessed by their magical abilities and appetites. Kids and only kids. Without grownups there’s a purity, I feel. The thing is kept pure. Tremendous sadism in evidence. Really vicious stuff. All rendered in terms of the classical forms of reversal, recognition and the tragic experience. But I’ll tell you what the clincher is.”
“Okay.”
“Their organs are extremely sensitive. Small maybe but developed way beyond our own spigots and drains. I plan to hint that this sensitivity is present in all children. A freshness. An innocence. Kaleidoscopic sex organs. Capable of wild fiery pleasure. What we’d all be capable of if we were as pure and sex-obsessed as these children of mine. They’re obsessed beyond belief. I can’t wait to start writing. But that’s not the real clincher. The real clincher lies in another direction.”
“Which direction?”
“I’m trying to remember,” he said. “All this coffee I’ve been drinking is beginning to affect my concentration. We’re all junkie dope fiends one way or another. I’m firmly convinced of that. With me it’s caffeine. But I don’t use instant. I never use instant. I wouldn’t drink that stuff for anything. I’d drink tea first and I hate tea. But the clincher is the writing style itself. That’s it, that’s it. I’m doing it like I’d do a second-grade reader. Simplest style imaginable. Easily understood by any seven-year-old kid. In other word
s I’m not just writing pornography about kids. I’m writing pornography for kids. A fantastic concept in my opinion. I have no doubt there’s enough marginally weird people who’ll buy books like this for their own kids. Most people will get the books for themselves, for their cataleptic wives and so on. But there’s that book-buying minority that’s just weird enough to give their kids pornography for Christmas. I have no doubt of this. I think the son of a bitchll sell. It’s my genre and all I have to do is get it down on paper and I pre-empt a corner of the market. I’d like to bang out five quick genre pieces and market them right away. Then I’ll get to work on a novella-length piece. Then I’ll start a novel. After that I’ve got a one-acter I want to do about a stockbroker who moonlights as a pimp. Some writers presume to be men of letters. I’m a man of numbers.”
“The boy’s dreaming again,” I said.
Alone now I listened to the sound from below. It lasted more than a moment this time, part of the room’s ambient noise, microlife humming in floor cracks, in the air itself. Maybe nature had become imbecilic here, forcing its pain to find a voice, this moan of interrupted gestation. I had never heard a sound so primal. It expressed the secret feculent menace of a forest or swamp, or of a simple plant arching in kitchen sunlight. There seems a fundamental terror inside things that grow, things that trade chemicals with the air, and this is what the boy’s oppressive dreams brought reeking to the surface, the beauty and horror of wordless things. I could almost feel the sound under my feet. In the stillness it seemed extremely near, within the room, a dewclaw’s mossy flesh touching my ankle. I put on my lumber jacket (symbol of all that’s old and wholesome) and ran some tap water, whatever was available, just to hear another noise. Finally everything was quiet and I went to bed. Fenig began pacing then, three steps east, three west, river to river. I slept for a while, very lightly, my surroundings part of the sleep, shaping it in mounds and squares. With my eyes open now I concentrated on various objects within my field of vision. I could barely make out the two candles standing over the sink. The indistinctness of these objects made them seem denser; they were more forcefully present in the near darkness. I slept deeply then, apprehending only myself as object. It was slightly less dark when I woke up, perhaps four in the morning, the room seeming to tremble in the malarial light of that hour. There was no longer any sound of pacing. I turned on my side. Opel was standing in a corner of the room, barefoot, removing her clothes. I lay there watching her, putting her together in my mind as she performed the small acts my eyes could only serialize. I nearly laughed at the way she lost interest in each item of clothing as she took it off, tossing it on the floor or against the legs of a chair, never watching it go, her hands already engaged in the next expert rejection. Her hair was longer now, scattered over one shoulder and deflected at the point of her breast. She had tanned unevenly and her skin was a mass of rash borders and overlapping seasons. No motion she made seemed less than perfect or other than the only motion possible and I wondered at women in their nakedness, how unpreoccupied they are with it, while men either cringe or trumpet. Sniffling she took a handful of tissues from a suitcase and approached on her toes over the cold floor. I moved back in the little bed, making some room, and raised the covers high for her entrance.
