The Angel Esmeralda

by Don DeLillo

  “My name’s Jerold.”

  “Very good,” he said.

  The camp was not enclosed by stone walls or coiled razor wire. The only perimeter fencing was a scenic artifact now, a set of old wooden posts that supported sagging rails. There were four dormitories with bunk-bed cubicles, toilets and showers. There were several structures to accommodate inmate orientation, meals, medical care, TV viewing, gym work, visits from family and others. There were conjugal hours for those so yoked.

  “You can call me Jerry,” I said.

  I knew that Sylvan Telfair had been denied a special detention suite with audiovisual systems, private bath, smoking privileges and a toaster oven. There were only four of these in the camp and the man seemed, in bearing alone, in his emotional distance and discreet pain, to be entitled to special consideration. Stuck in the dorms, I thought. This must have seemed a life sentence wedged into the nine years he’d brought with him from Switzerland or Liechtenstein or the Cayman Islands.

  I wanted to know something about the man’s methodology, the arc of his crimes, but I was reluctant to ask and he was certain not to answer. I’d been here only two months and was still trying to figure out who I wanted to be in this setting, how I ought to stand, sit, walk, talk. Sylvan Telfair knew who he was. He was a long-striding man in a wellpressed jumpsuit and spotless white sneakers, laces knotted oddly behind the ankles, a man formally absent from his slightest word or gesture.

  The traffic noise was a ripple at the treetops by the time we reached the edge of the camp complex.

  When I was in my early teens I came across the word phantasm. A great word, I thought, and I wanted to be phantasmal, someone who slips in and out of physical reality. Now here I am, a floating fever dream, but where’s the rest of it, the dense surround, the thing with weight and heft? There’s a man here who aspires to be a biblical scholar. His head is bent severely to one side, nearly resting on his left shoulder, the result of an unnamed affliction. I admire the man, I’d like to talk to him, tilting my head slightly, feeling secure in the depths of his scholarship, the languages, cultures, documents, rituals. And the head itself, is there anything here more real than this?

  There’s another man who runs everywhere, the Dumb Runner he’s called, but he’s doing something obsessive and true, outside the margins of our daily protocols. He has a heartbeat, a racing pulse. And then the gamblers, men betting surreptitiously on football, engaged all week in the crosstalk of point spreads, bunk to bunk, meal to meal, Eagles minus four, Rams getting eight and a half. Is this virtual money they’re betting? Stand near them when they talk and it’s real, touchable, and so are they, gesturing operatically, numbers flashing neon in the air.

  We watched TV in one of the common rooms. There was a large flat screen, wall-mounted, certain channels blocked, programs selected by one of the veteran inmates, a different man each month. On this day only five places were occupied in the eighty or so folding chairs in the arched rows. I was here to see a particular program, an afternoon news broadcast, fifteen minutes, on a children’s channel. One segment was a stock market report. Two girls, earnestly amateurish, reported on the day’s market activity.

  I was the only one watching the show. The other inmates sat half dazed, heads down. It was a matter of time of day, time of year, dusk nearly upon us, the depressive specter of last light stirring at the oblong windows high on one wall. The men sat distanced from each other, here to be alone. This was the call to self-examination, the second-guessing of a lost life, no less compelling than the believer’s call to prayer.

  I watched and listened. The girls were my daughters, Laurie and Kate, ten and twelve. Their mother had told me, curtly, over the phone, that the kids had been selected to appear on such a program. No details available, she said, at the present time, as if she were reporting, herself, from a desk in a studio humming with off-camera tensions.

  I sat in the second row, alone, and there they were, sharing a table, speaking about fourth-quarter estimates, first one girl, then the other, a couple of sentences at a time, credit quality, credit demand, the tech sector, the budget deficit. The picture had the quality of online video, user-generated. I tried to detach myself, to see the girls as distant references to my daughters, in jittery black and white. I studied them. I observed. They read their lines from pages held in their hands, each looking up from the page as she yielded to the other reader.

  Did it seem crazy, a market report for kids? There was nothing sweet or charming about the commentary. The girls were not playing at being adult. They were dutiful, blending occasional definitions and explanations into the news, and then Laurie’s eyes showed fleeting panic in her remarks about the Nasdaq Composite—a mangled word, a missing sentence. I took the report to be a tentative segment of a barely noticed show on an obscure cable channel. It wasn’t any crazier, probably, than most TV, and anyway who was watching?

  My bunkmate wore socks to bed. He tucked his pajama legs into the socks and lay on his bunk, knees up and hands folded behind his head.

  “I miss my walls,” he said.

  He had the lower bunk. This was a matter of some significance in the camp, top or bottom, who gets what, like every prison movie we’d ever seen. Norman was senior to me in age, experience, ego and time served and I had no reason to complain.

  I thought of telling him that we all miss our walls, we miss our floors and ceilings. But I sat and waited for him to continue.

  “I used to sit and look. One wall, then another. After a while I’d get up and walk around the apartment, slowly, looking, wall to wall. Sit and look, stand and look.”

  He seemed to be under a spell, reciting a bedtime story he’d heard as a child.

  “You collected art, is that it?”

  “That’s it, past tense, collected. Major museum quality.”

  “You’ve never mentioned this,” I said.

  “I’ve been here how long? They’re somebody else’s walls now. The art is scattered.”

  “You had advisers, experts on the art market.”

  “People used to come and look at my walls. Europe, Los Angeles, a Japanese man from some foundation in Japan.”

  He sat quietly for a time, remembering. I found myself remembering with him. The Japanese man took on facial features, a certain size and shape, portly, it seemed, pale suit, dark tie.

  “Collectors, curators, students. They came and looked,” he said.

  “Who advised you?”

  “I had a woman on Fifty-seventh Street. There was a guy in London, Colin, knew everything about the Postimpressionists. A dear sweet man.”

  “You don’t really mean that.”

  “It’s something people say. One of those expressions that sound like someone else is talking. A dear sweet man.”

  “A loving wife and mother.”

  “I was happy to have them look. All of them,” he said. “I used to look with them. We’d go picture to picture, room to room. I had a house in the Hudson Valley, more paintings, some sculpture. I went there in the autumn for the fall colors. But I barely looked out the windows.”

  “You had the walls.”

  “I couldn’t take my eyes off the walls.”

  “And then you had to sell.”

  “All of it, every last piece. Pay fines, pay debts, pay legal fees, provide for family. Gave an etching to my daughter. A snowy night in Norway.”

  Norman missed his walls but he was not unhappy here. He was content, he said, unstuck, unbound, remote. He was free of the swollen needs and demands of others but mostly disentangled from his personal drives, his grabbiness, the lifelong mandate to accrue, expand, construct himself, to buy a hotel chain, make a name. He was at peace here, he said.

  I lay on the top bunk, eyes closed, listening. Throughout the building men in their cubicles, one talking, one listening, both silent, one sleeping, tax delinquents, alimony delinquents, insider traders, perjurers, hedge-fund felons, mail fraud, mortgage fraud, securities fraud, accounting frau
d, obstruction of justice.

  Word began to spread. By the third day most of the chairs in the common room were occupied and I had to settle for a place near the end of the fifth row. On screen the girls were reporting on a situation rapidly developing in the Arab Emirates.

  “The word is Dubai.”

  “This is the word crossing continents and oceans at the shocking speed of light.”

  “Markets are sinking quickly.”

  “Paris, Frankfurt, London.”

  “Dubai has the worst debt per capita in the world,” Kate said. “And now its building boom has crumbled and it can’t pay the banks what it owes them.”

  “It owes them fifty-eight billion dollars,” Laurie said.

  “Give or take a few billion.”

  “The DAX index in Germany.”

  “Down more than three percent.”

  “The Royal Bank of Scotland.”

  “Down more than four percent.”

  “The word is Dubai.”

  “This debt-ridden city-state is asking banks to grant six months’ freedom from debt repayments.”

  “Dubai,” Laurie said.

  “The cost of insuring Dubai’s debt against default has increased one, two, three, four times.”

  “Do we know what that means?”

  “It means the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down, down, down.”

  “Deutsche Bank.”

  “Down.”

  “London—the FTSE One Hundred Index.”

  “Down.”

  “Amsterdam—ING Group.”

  “Down.”

  “The Hang Seng in Hong Kong.”

  “Crude oil. Islamic bonds.”

  “Down, down, down.”

  “The word is Dubai.”

  “Say it.”

  “Dubai,” Kate said.

  The old life rewrites itself every minute. In four years I’ll still be here, puddling horribly in this dim waste. The free future is hard to imagine. I have trouble enough tracing the shape of the knowable past. This is no steadfast element, no faith or truth except for the girls, being born, getting bigger, living.

  Where was I when this was happening? I was acquiring meaningless degrees, teaching a freshman course in the dynamics of reality TV. I changed the spelling of my first name to Jerold. I used my index and middle fingers to place quote marks around certain ironic comments I made and sometimes used index fingers only, setting off a quotation within another quotation. It was that kind of life, self-mocking, and neither the marriage nor the business I briefly ran seems to have happened in any fixed consideration. I’m thirty-nine years old, a generation removed from some of the inmates here, and I don’t remember knowing why I did what I did to put myself in this place. There was a time in early English law when a felony was punishable by removal of one of the felon’s body parts. Would this be an incentive to modern memory?

  I imagine myself being here forever, it’s already forever, eating another meal with the political consultant who licks his thumb to pick bread crumbs off the plate and stare at them, or standing in line behind the investment banker who talks to himself aloud in beginner’s Mandarin. I think about money. What did I know about it, how much did I need it, what would I do when I got it? Then I think about Sylvan Telfair, aloof in his craving, the billion-euro profit being separable from the things it bought, money the coded impulse, ideational, a kind of discreet erection known only to the man whose pants are on fire.

  “The fear continues to grow.”

  “Fear of numbers, fear of spreading losses.”

  “The fear is Dubai. The talk is Dubai. Dubai has the debt. Is it fifty-eight billion dollars or eighty billion dollars?”

  “Bankers are pacing marble floors.”

  “Or is it one hundred and twenty billion dollars?”

  “Sheiks are gazing into hazy skies.”

  “Even the numbers are panicking.”

  “Think of the prominent investors. Hollywood stars. Famous footballers.”

  “Think of islands shaped like palm trees. People skiing in a shopping mall.”

  “The world’s only seven-star hotel.”

  “The world’s richest horse race.”

  “The world’s tallest building.”

  “All this in Dubai.”

  “Taller than the Empire State Building and the Chrysler Building combined.”

  “Combined.”

  “Swim in the pool on the seventy-sixth floor. Pray in the mosque on the one hundred and fifty-eighth floor.”

  “But where is the oil?”

  “Dubai has no oil. Dubai has debt. Dubai has a huge number of foreign workers with nowhere to work.”

  “Enormous office buildings stand empty. Apartment buildings unfinished in blowing sand. Think of the blowing sand. Dust storms concealing the landscape. Empty storefronts in every direction.”

  “But where is the oil?”

  “The oil is in Abu Dhabi. Say the name.”

  “Abu Dhabi.”

  “Now let’s say it together.”

  “Abu Dhabi,” they said.

  It was Feliks Zuber, the oldest inmate at the camp, who’d chosen the children’s program for viewing. Feliks was here every day now, front row center, carrying with him a sentence of seven hundred and twenty years. He liked to turn and nod at those nearby, making occasional applause gestures without bringing his trembling hands into contact, a small crumpled man, looking nearly old enough to be on the verge of outliving his sentence, tinted glasses, purple jumpsuit, hair dyed death black.

  The length of his sentence impressed the rest of us. It was a term handed down for his master manipulation of an investment scheme involving four countries and leading to the collapse of two governments and three corporations, with much of the money channeled in the direction of arms shipments to rebels in a breakaway enclave of the Caucasus.

  The breadth of his crimes warranted a far more stringent environment than this one but he’d been sent here because he was riddled with disease, his future marked in weeks and days. Men were sometimes sent here to die, in easeful circumstances. We knew it from their faces, mainly, the attenuated range of vision, the sensory withdrawal, and from the stillness they brought with them, a cloistered manner, as if bound by vows. Feliks was not still. He smiled, waved, bounced and shook. He sat on the edge of his chair when the girls delivered news of falling markets and stunned economies. He was a man watching an ancient truism unfold on wide-screen TV. He would take the world with him when he died.

  The soccer field was part of a haunted campus. A grade school and high school had been closed because the county did not have the resources to maintain them. The antiquated buildings were partly demolished now, a few wrecking machines still there, asquat in mud.

  The inmates were glad to keep the field in playable condition, chalking the lines and arcs, planting corner flags, sinking the goals firmly in the ground. The games were an earnest pastime for the players, men mostly middle-aged, a few older, two or three younger, all in makeshift uniforms, running, standing, walking, crouching, often simply bending from the waist, breathless, hands on knees, looking into the scuffed turf where their lives were mired.

  There were fewer spectators as the days grew colder, then fewer players. I kept showing up, blowing on my hands, beating my arms across my chest. The teams were coached by inmates, the games refereed by inmates, and those of us watching from the three rows of old broken bleacher seats were inmates. The guards stood around, here and there, watching and not.

  The games became stranger. Rules were invented, broken and abridged, a fight started now and then, the game going on around it. I kept waiting for a player to be stricken, a heart attack, a convulsive collapse. The spectators rarely cheered or moaned. It began to feel like nowhere, men moving in the dreamy distance, linesmen sharing a cigarette. We walked across the bridge, watched the game, walked back across the bridge.

  I thought about soccer in history, the inspiration for wars, truces, rampagin
g mobs. The game was a global passion, spherical ball, grass or turf, entire nations in spasms of elation or lament. But what kind of sport is it that disallows the use of players’ hands, except for the goalkeeper? Hands are essential human tools, the things that grasp and hold, that make, take, carry, create. If soccer were an American invention, wouldn’t some European intellectual maintain that our historically puritanical nature has compelled us to invent a game structured on anti-masturbatory principles?

  This is one of the things I think about that I never had to think about before.

  The notable thing about Norman Bloch, my bunkmate, was not the art that used to hang on his walls. What impressed me was the crime he’d committed. This was itself a kind of art, conceptual in nature, radical in scale, a deed so casual and yet so transgressive that Norman, here a year, would be spending six more years in the camp, the bunk, the clinic, the meal lines, in the squalling noise of the hand dryers in the toilets.

  Norman did not pay taxes. He did not file quarterly reports or annual returns and he did not request extensions. He did not backdate documents, establish trusts or foundations, open secret accounts or utilize the ready mechanisms of offshore jurisdictions. He was not a political or religious protester. He was not a nihilist, rejecting all values and institutions. He was completely transparent. He just didn’t pay. It was a kind of lethargy, he said, the way people avoid doing the dishes or making the bed.

  I brightened at that. Doing the dishes, making the bed. He said he didn’t know exactly how long it was since he’d last paid taxes. When I asked about his financial advisers, his business associates, he shrugged, or so I imagined. I was in the top bunk, he was in the bottom, two men in pajamas, passing the time.

  “Those girls. Pretty amazing,” he said. “And the news, especially the bad news.”

  “You like the bad news.”

  “We all like the bad news. Even the girls like the bad news.”

  I thought of telling him that they were my daughters. No one here knew this and it was better that way. I didn’t want the men in the dorm looking at me, talking to me, spreading the word throughout the camp. I was learning how to disappear. It suited me, it was my natural state, day by day, to be phantasmal again.