by Don DeLillo
Micklewhite’s door was open. The frame and edge of the door had been splintered. I looked into the room. She was sitting on a sofa watching television. I knocked on the door frame and she looked up.
“I told them go scratch your ass with a broken bottle. Go scratch your heinie, I told them. I wasn’t afraid of them. Them or nobody else. Breaking in my door like that and coming in here to smack me around. I don’t take that. Don’t come in here and give me that. I ain’t afraid of you punks and bums. I told them, mister. I don’t take smacking around. You want to rob me, one thing. Smack me around, whole different thing. My husband was here, they’d see. He’d of cut them up good. I’m telling you, mister. Good thing for them he’s dead and buried.”
“How many?” I said.
“There was four come in here and some more out in the hall that never even made it in. Smash, they come right through the door. Then when they got out of here they went upstairs, the whole bunch. I heard them on three, making noise with the mister up on three. Breaking through the door, smash. Crazy people. Say nothing, do nothing, take nothing. Crumbums, I told them, go scratch your heinie.”
“Did they hurt you?”
“It was him that stopped them,” she said. “They seen him there and that stopped them cold. He was right there on the chair and when they seen that, they went charging upstairs, taking over the whole building. They came in here to smack me around. Then they seen him on the chair and they went flying out. Good thing for them I got no more husband. He was good and sneaky in a fight. He was just a skinny-melink but he made up for it with sneaki-ness. Little as he was he’d sneak-fight bigger men right into the crash ward. He’d jap them when they weren’t ready. He’d go for the family jewels. That was the only thing in the world he was good at. Japping bigger men. He put many a bigger man out of commission. Sneakiest s.o.b. you’d ever want to meet.”
I stepped into the room. Her son was on a chair in the corner. His own special chair, it seemed. No upholstery. Wood frame, binding, springs, two bed pillows. He wasn’t sitting or reclining; he was stored there, his head slowly rolling side to side, arms and legs stunted. Because of his disfigurement, everything about him was pervasively real and I was struck by a panic that went far beyond what my eyes had registered. His face seemed to have the consistency of pounded mud. The head was full of bulges and incurvatures, scant of hair, a soft curious object that seemed to belong in a greenish jar. Useless pair of club-hands. Arms about three-quarters normal size. Legs perhaps less than that. The boy was unforgettable in the sheer organic power of his presence. Standing before him was like witnessing the progress of some impossible mutation, bird to brown worm, but of course he’d been merely deposited there, wet, white and unchanging, completely stagnant, and I began to feel that I myself was the other point of the progression. The sense of shock and panic hadn’t left me yet and I understood why the marauders were not eager to browse in this particular room. One felt nearly displaced by the hint of structural transposition; he was what we’d always feared, ourselves in radical divestment, scrawled across the dark. Instead of leaving I went closer, drawn into what I felt was his ascendancy, the helpless strength of his entrapment in tepid flesh, in the reductions of being. I lowered myself to one knee and sought to trace some sightline or bearing in his pale stare. With my left hand I raised his head, finding nothing in the eyes beyond a rhythmic blink. I must have seemed a shadow to him, thin liquid, incidental to the block of light he lived in. For the first time I began to note his embryonic beauty. The blank eyes ticked. The mouth opened slightly, closing on loomed mucus. I’d thought the fear of being peeled to this limp circumstance had caused my panic, the astonishment of blood pausing in the body. But maybe it was something else as well, the possibility that such a circumstance concludes in beauty. There was a lure to the boy, an unsettling lunar pull, and I moved my hand over the moist surface of his face. Beauty is dangerous in narrow times, a knife in the slender neck of the rational man, and only those who live between the layers of these strange days can know its name and shape. When I took my hand from his face, the head resumed its metronomic roll. I was still afraid of him, more than ever in fact, but willing now to breathe his air, to smell the bland gases coming off him, to work myself into his consciousness, whatever there was of that. It would have been better (and even cheering) to think of him as some kind of super-crustacean or diabolic boiled vegetable. But he was too human for that, adhering to me as though by suction or sticky filaments. Mouth opened and closed. Eyes blinked at precise intervals. Head moved from side to side. Micklewhite adjusted the sound on her TV set.
“Careful, he bites,” she said.
I went upstairs to see Fenig. The door was almost off, leaning from the lower hinge. He was seated at his typewriter, looking into the keys. Bandages, tape and gauze were all over the floor. He tapped out a few characters, then turned toward the door and gave me a small wave. His face was full of bruises. There were bloodstains all over his clothes. Both brows were puffed up, his lower lip cut open, thick with dried blood. He hadn’t applied bandages or gauze to his wounds, at least not in exposed areas. I stood there watching him type a line or two, very slowly, his fingers merely pecking at the keys prior to each actual assault, the moment in which the words moved through his hands and found the page. He looked my way a second time.
“Magazines keep folding. It’s not so good. I’ve spent a lot of time lately worrying about whether or not I’ve lost the essential spark. It’s not me I should have been concerned about. It’s the market. The market is getting smaller every day. The bright lights are dimming. The sounds and echoes are fading. The great elliptical arc is spinning ever slower.”
“Did they take anything?” I said.
“They just cuffed me around and stomped me a little bit. I was lucky. They were in the room probably only sixty seconds. They made a lot of noise coming up the stairs and a lot of noise going back down the stairs. I think that was the biggest part of their operation. The idea of taking over a building. The idea of breaking and entering. The idea of domination. It could have been a whole lot worse. I was lucky. I can’t get over how lucky I was. I know people who’d give almost anything to be as lucky as I was.”
“Do you want me to help you clean up this mess?”
“You mean the bandages and stuff. I’m the one who flung the bandages and stuff. They didn’t do that. I’m the one who did that. After they left I got all this stuff out of my medicine chest. The Band-Aid plastic strips. The safety gauze. The nonstick sterile pads. The first-aid tape. The absorbent cotton. I got it all out. I laid it out on the table and looked at it. I looked especially hard at the tan bandages with the clever little air vents. Then I swept the whole thing right off the table. What good’s gauze and cotton against the idea of domination? What good’s a sterile compress against the idea of domination? So I’ll bleed. So I’ll experience discomfort for a few days. I don’t think about that because right now, as I sit in this chair talking to you, I’m in the midst of work on a whole new genre. Finance. Financial writing. Books and articles for millionaires and potential millionaires. The floodgates are opened and the words are pouring out. Financial literature. Handled right it’s a goddamn gold mine, relatively speaking.”
My own door had not been touched. I went inside and turned on the radio. It was cold in the room. There was an airline bag near the door, accidentally left behind by Watney’s manservant. The phone rang. It was Azarian in Los Angeles, saying his people were very anxious to bid. I hung up. On the radio several men were conversing in an unfamiliar language. I looked in the trunk for an extra blanket. The package containing the mountain tapes was gone. I had to work my way up and down several mental steps before I arrived at this conclusion. I knew at once that something was missing from the trunk. I realized it was the brown package. I thought the package contained the drug. Then I remembered Hanes had the package with the drug. The second package contained the tapes. The second package was gone. I stood in a corner o
f the room, near the window, crossing and uncrossing my arms, finally wedging my hands in my armpits for warmth. I knew I’d never be able to reproduce the complex emotional content of those tapes, or remember a single lyric.
After a while I went over to the door, picked up Watney’s airline bag and unzippered it. Inside were several hundred bubble gum cards. Watney’s picture was on each one of them. A funny enough sight. But not what I needed at the moment.
There was no extra blanket. I put Opel’s coat over my shoulders, placed the one available blanket over the coat and then settled into a chair and waited for the first line of light to appear across the window, bringing sleep with no dreams.
18
I PICKED UP the telephone and listened to the dial tone, music of a dead universe. The sound fascinated me. Ever since the phone had been put back in working order, I had fallen into the habit of lifting the receiver from time to time and simply listening. Source of pleasure and fear never before explored. It was always the same, silence endowed with acoustical properties.
I dialed the numbers of Globke’s office, his home, his car. Nobody knew where he was. His wife spoke to me about the stillness at the center of a thing in motion. In the background, as she talked, I heard my own voice, revolving at thirty-three and a third, second cut on side one of third album.
A man wearing a gendarme’s cape appeared at the door. He was small and pallid, almost lost in the cape and long boots, and in his eyes was a frenzy he seemed to be trying to pass off as alertness. He gestured toward the bathroom.
“What’s in there?”
“Everything that’s not in here.”
“My name isn’t important. Menefee. It happens to be Menefee but that’s not important. What’s important is the person I’m clearing for. I’m here to clear. I’m here to make the area secure before you and the person in question conduct your undisclosed business. We have procedures we’ve developed over a long period of time. Can I use your phone?”
As he dialed he stood between me and the telephone. Talking to the person at the other end he buried his head in the cape. Merely listening he turned slightly and glanced my way every few seconds, as if verifying a description.
“Change of plan,” he said. “We don’t go there. He comes here.”
“Who comes here?” I said.
“Dr. Pepper.”
“He’s going to be disappointed.”
“Don’t tell me anything,” Menefee said. “I’m only here to clear. I make things secure. I work with details, not sum totals. I don’t want to be made a party to any information that has sum totals involved in it. This job is tough enough. Handling details for a man like Dr. Pepper is like the ultimate in nerve-rackingness. We run up and down the country, in and out of hotels, motels, airplanes, taxi-cabs. Seeing people, fleeing people. Making deals, turning wheels. Dr. Pepper is a master of many things. People think he restricts his genius to dope and matters related to dope. Dope-related matters. Not so. The man shows his genius in an unspecified number of ways, each and every day, north and south, in lake country or mountain terrain, talking to the makers and shakers or just ambling along a country road laying a gentle rap on some backpacker who’s into penance and mortification. But the man’s a stickler for detail and this makes my work tough as can be. Soon’s we get something all set up he contacts me in some devious way and changes eight details out of a possible eleven. You could say the man’s hyper-secretive. You could use adjectives like eerie and uncanny and you’d be right on the mark. He’s got disguises, he’s got surprises. He doesn’t trust a soul, least of all me. He’s all the time devising tests to determine my loyalty. The man’s a master of regional accents, a master of total recall, a master of surreptitious-ness. Every time I meet some stranger somewhere I automatically assume it’s Dr. Pepper in disguise probing at my loyalty. But the man’s an aw-thentic genius. I’m grateful to him. I had two years of crisis sociology at the University of California at Santa Barbara in Santa Barbara, California. Ruined my head just about. Dr. Pepper took me out of the world of terminology and numbers and classifications and provided access to new kinds of awareness. Centrifugalism and overloads. Brain-patching. Electrode play areas.”
He stopped talking abruptly and I became aware of a jackhammer beating into the street about half a block to the west. I sat at the small table near the sink. Menefee remained by the door, his body yielding to an occasional mild twitch, his face reflecting a mental concentration so intense I thought his eyeballs might suddenly click backward in their sockets in order to peer into the depths of his mind, leaving curdled sludge and pink drippings for my own eyes to gaze upon. Slowly he moved across the door, opened it an inch and looked into the hall. Then he billowed back toward the middle of the room, followed by the man himself, Dr. Pepper, a figure of ordinary size, wearing ordinary and somewhat out-of-date clothing, all in all no less common than a clam on a paper plate. Menefee made clearing motions with his hands and after the door was locked, the shade drawn and the introductions made, we crowded around the table, Pepper and I seated on identical straight-backed chairs and facing each other, Menefee between us in the low-slung canvas chair, leaning forward, his face at table level.
“The product isn’t here,” I said.
“I’ve been apprised of that,” Dr. Pepper said. “This courier they hired is off somewhere trying to deal on his own. Predictable. At the very least semi-predictable. This Happy Valley bunch is not what you’d call a heads-up collection of people. They’ve got initiative to spare but they lack keenness. First they tell me to expect two people with the product. Then there’s an unforeseeable delay. In my lexicon there’s only one kind of delay. Strategic delay. But I let it pass without comment although I’m satisfied in my own mind, see, that this bunch lacks the necessary keenness. You hone yourself. I’ve honed myself over the years. I’ve dealt with the quickest minds and the quickest intellects. That’s how I’ve acquired my own quickness. I’ve dealt with people who know which deck is the marked deck. I call these people the makers and shakers. You hone yourself. You cut away the glut. So then what do they tell me? They tell me the messenger is now bargaining agent with full bargaining powers. I replace the phone with a smile. A smile creases my face. Lack of judgment, I conclude. Lack of experience. In other words Happy Valley is not to be trusted. Their leadership is not to be trusted. Their hirelings and minions are not to be trusted. Other agencies of the underground are to be viewed with a jaundiced eye in the light of past performance. U.S. Guv is to be viewed with two such eyes in light of the fact that they’re the victims of this rip-off. I have one word for U.S. Guv. Booshit. That word is booshit. What is U.S. Guv? It’s a bunch of rich men playing golf. It’s big business, big army and big government all visiting each other in company planes for the sole purpose of playing golf and talking money. So who does that leave in positions of trust? Friend, it leaves you and me.”
Dr. Pepper wore a small fedora with the brim turned down. His suit was a couple of sizes too large, an aged gray outfit over a narrow gray and white tie and a dingy white shirt with frayed collar. He appeared to be in his late forties. His face was blank, tending toward narrowness, and his eyes were dark and still. Although at first he seemed unremarkable in every way, I began to note touches of professionalism about him. His deadpan expression was classically intact, put together from a strip of silent film, frame by frame. His speech was flat and rickety, hard-working in its plainness, the voice of an actor delivering monologues from a rocking chair. Of course I had the advantage of knowing who he was. Also I was fairly certain I’d seen him before and heard either that voice or an approximation. Perhaps the oddest thing about Dr. Pepper was that he didn’t wear glasses. He had the kind of face that needed glasses to be complete, old rimless spectacles worn low on the nose, but the absence of this final detail only confirmed his elusiveness and skill; one was inclined to fill in the face, provide a finish to the comic proposition. A single thing connected all others — the invisible manneris
ms, the craft, the tiìghtfisted humor — and this one threading element was danger. Dr. Pepper had lived among dangerous men, worked in hazardous circumstances, and his eccentricity, his distance from the axis, had its origins in the basic machine-like pressures that bear on a man who is unable to think or live in accordance with the central themes of the law. Even his appearance, ordinary as it was, suggested some acquaintance with illegality. More than anything else he looked like a man released from prison in 1947 in Joliet, Illinois. It would have been difficult to say what crime he’d been convicted for. He had the gift of putting distance between himself and his applauders. My own tenuous guesses would have included child-molesting, embezzlement, the defrauding of widows.
“I’ll tell you, Buck. This stuff they’ve come up with is not the kind of product a man like me is likely to dismiss. I give them points for initiative. I have sources and these sources confirm what I’ve long suspected. This isn’t some kind of rinky-dink schoolboy caper. No way, manner, shape or form. This is a weighty affair we’re involved in here. This drug is some kind of extreme substance. This is a pressing matter and deserves our closest attention.”
“I’ve figured that out for myself,” I said. “Everybody in the free world wants to bid. There’s a group on the Coast wants to bid. They’re very anxious to bid. There’s a group in Europe also wants to bid, also very anxious. That’s Watney’s group. Great Britain and Europe. I haven’t heard from the Japanese yet. Of course Hanes may have heard. He’s out there with the product.”
“Watney first swam into my ken in Boston,” Dr. Pepper said. “Sure, Watney and that crowd of his. I was bumping into a whole lot of crank behavior about then. There was a man there that could imitate a sewing machine. There was a pair of girls, Lenore and Doreen, they come up from right off the street, quack-quack, sisters they were, Lenore’s the fat one, see, and they’re trying to sell me a radio that gets Perth, Australia. I’d just finished manufacturing and dealing off I won’t say how many dollars worth of shiny black capsules in bulk, posing as my own sales manager. There were any number of stunts being pulled that night. The sewing machine guy was being hypnotized by a cousin of Watney’s that was making his first trip here and refused to leave the hotel for fear of being lashed to the fender of a car and taken north for resale to a lumber operation. At that time in Boston stories of abduction in the night were rife. There was a guy there as I recall, Montaldo, a promoter and manager who on the side controlled the entire orchid business north of Braintree right up to the border, for whatever that’s worth. Watney himself was tripping in a unique and interesting manner. There was a kitchenette in the place, just the bare essentials, and Watney takes an egg and places it whole and intact on a frying pan, no fire going, no heat coming up, and he stands there waiting for a fried egg to appear and he just can’t understand why it won’t. Nobody knew who I was. I was drifting through the suite, witness to any number of propositions. The equipment man for some local group, name of Mulderick, I recall, he.’s selling credit cards, driver’s licenses, army discharge papers, transcripts from Harvard Business School. A kid with his arm in a cast tells me the cast has a secret compartment for transporting dope and offers me the plans for twenty dollars. I’m diverted by all these signs of enterprise. I find it an occasion of mild diversion with the sole and single exception of the hypnotism routine which I can tell is being done without any real feel for the subject, which is a subject I happen to know something about, being the recipient of one of the few legitimate degrees in hypnotology ever given out by an accredited college in this country. Watney by this time has placed a call to his house outside London and finds himself in the regrettable situation of not being at home to answer the telephone. He’s trying to call himself, ding-ding, and nobody’s picking up the phone. The result is fear and dread. He sits on the floor weeping real tears into the phone. Oh, it’s a crisis of no small proportion. The guy is in the grip of blackest anxiety. Absolute terror in his eyes. Oh, he’s terror-stricken, no doubt about it, ding-ding-ding in his ear. This was Watney when he first swam into my ken, long before he picked up the shield of the businessman.”
