The Angel Esmeralda

by Don DeLillo

  I noticed at once that the girls wore matching jackets. This was new. The picture was sharper and steadier, in color. Then I realized they were seated at a long desk, a news desk, not an ordinary table. Finally the scripts—there were no scripts. They were using a teleprompter, delivering lines at fairly high speed with occasional tactical pauses, well placed.

  “Greece is selling bonds, raising euros.”

  “Markets are calming.”

  “Greece is moving toward a new austerity.”

  “Immediate pressure is relieved.”

  “Greece and Germany are talking.”

  “Votes of confidence. Calls for patience.”

  “Greece is ready to restore trust.”

  “Aid package of forty billion dollars.”

  “How do they say thank you in Greek?”

  “Efharisto.”

  “Say it again, slowly.”

  “F. Harry Stowe.”

  “F. Harry Stowe.”

  They exchanged a fist-bump, deadpan, without looking at each other.

  “The worst may be over.”

  “Or the worst is yet to come.”

  “Do we know if the Greek bailout will do what it is designed to do?”

  “Or will it do just the opposite?”

  “What exactly is the opposite?”

  “Think about markets elsewhere.”

  “Is anyone looking at Portugal?”

  “Everyone’s looking at Portugal.”

  “High debt, low growth.”

  “Borrow, borrow, borrow.”

  “Euro, euro, euro.”

  “Ireland has a problem. Iceland has a problem.”

  “Have we thought about the British pound?”

  “The life and death of the British pound.”

  “The pound is not the euro.”

  “Britain is not Greece.”

  “But is the pound showing signs of cracking? Will the euro follow? Is the dollar far behind?”

  “There is talk about China.”

  “Is there trouble in China?”

  “Is there a bubble in China?”

  “What is the Chinese currency called?”

  “Latvia has the lat.”

  “Tonga has the ponga.”

  “China has the rebimbi.”

  “The rebimbo.”

  “China has the rebobo.”

  “The rebubu.”

  “What happens next?”

  “It already happened.”

  “Does anyone remember?”

  “Market plunges one thousand points in an eighth of a second.”

  “A tenth of a second.”

  “Faster and faster, lower and lower.”

  “A twentieth of a second.”

  “Screens glow and vibrate, phones jump off walls.”

  “A hundredth of a second. A thousandth of a second.”

  “Not real, unreal, surreal.”

  “Who is doing this? Where is it coming from? Where is it going?”

  “It happened in Chicago.”

  “It happened in Kansas.”

  “It’s a movie, it’s a song.”

  I could feel the mood in the room, a pressing intensity, a need for something more, something stronger. I remained detached, watching the girls, wondering about their mother, what she had in mind, where she was leading us.

  Laurie said softly, in a lilting voice: “Who do we trust? Where do we turn? How do we ever get to sleep?”

  Kate said briskly, “Can computer technology keep up with computerized trading? Will long-term doubts yield to short-term doubts?”

  “What is a fat-finger trade? What is a naked short sale?”

  “How many trillions of dollars pledged to bleeding euro economies?”

  “How many zeros is a trillion?”

  “How many meetings deep in the night?”

  “Why does the crisis keep getting worse?”

  “Brazil, Korea, Japan, Wherever.”

  “What are they doing and where are they doing it?”

  “They’re on strike again in Greece.”

  “They’re marching in the streets.”

  “They’re burning banks in Greece.”

  “They’re hanging banners from sacred temples.”

  “Peoples of Europe, rise up.”

  “Peoples of the world, unite.”

  “The tide is rising, the tide is turning.”

  “Which way? How fast?”

  There was a long pause. We watched and waited. Then the news report reached its defining moment, do-or-die, the point of no return.

  The girls recited together:

  “Stalin Khrushchev Castro Mao.”

  “Lenin Brezhnev Engels—Pow!”

  These names, that exclamation, delivered in rapid singsong, roused the inmates to spontaneous noise. What kind of noise was it? What did it mean? I sat stone-faced, in the middle of it, trying to understand. The girls repeated the lines once, then again. The men yelled and clamored, these flabby white-collar felons, seeming to reject everything they’d believed all their lives.

  “Brezhnev Khrushchev Mao and Ho.”

  “Lenin Stalin Castro Zhou.”

  The names kept coming. It resembled a school chant, the cry of leaping cheerleaders, and the men’s response grew in volume and feeling. It was tremendous, totally, and it scared me. What did these names mean to the inmates? We were a long way from the funny place-names of earlier reports. These names were immense imprints on history. Did the inmates want to replace one doctrine, one system of government with another? We were the end products of the system, the logical outcome, slabs of burnt-out capital. We were also men with families and homes, whatever our present situation. We had beliefs, commitments. It went beyond systems, I thought. They were asserting that nothing mattered, that distinctions were dead. Let the markets crash and die. Let the banks, the brokerage firms, the groups, the funds, the trusts, the institutes all turn to dust.

  “Mao Zhou—Fidel Ho.”

  The aisles, meanwhile, were still and hushed—guards, doctors, camp administrators. I wanted it to be over. I wanted the girls to go home, do their homework, withdraw into their cell phones.

  “Marx Lenin Che—Hey!”

  Their mother was crazy, perverting the novelty of a children’s stock market report. The inmates were confused, stirring themselves into mindless anarchy. Only Feliks Zuber made sense, pumping his fist, feebly, a man who was here for attempting to finance a revolution, able to hear trumpets and drums in that chorus of names. It took a while before the energy in the room began to recede, the girls’ voices becoming calmer now.

  “We’re all waiting for an answer.”

  “Accordingly, analysts say.”

  “Eventually, investors maintain.”

  “Elsewhere, economists claim.”

  “Somewhere, officials insist.”

  “This could be bad,” Kate said.

  “How bad?”

  “Very bad.”

  “How bad?”

  “End-of-the-world bad.”

  They stared into the camera, finishing in a whisper.

  “F. Harry Stowe.”

  “F. Harry Stowe.”

  The report was over but the girls remained onscreen. They sat looking, we sat looking. The moment became uneasy. Laurie glanced to the side and then slid off her chair and moved out of camera range. Kate stayed put. I watched a familiar look slide into her eyes and across her mouth and jaw. This was the look of noncompliance. Why should she submit to an embarrassing exit caused by some dumb technical blunder? She would stare us all down. Then she would tell us exactly how she felt about the matter, about the show itself and the news itself. This is what made me want to get up and leave, to slip unnoticed out of the row and along the wall and into the dusty light of late afternoon. But I stayed and looked and so did she. We were looking at each other. She leaned forward now, placing her elbows on the desk, hands folded at chin level like a fifth-grade teacher impatient with my snickering
and fidgeting or just my stupidity. The tension in the room had mass and weight. This is what I feared, that she would speak about the news, all news all the time, and about how her father always said that the news exists so it can disappear, this is the point of news, whatever story, wherever it is happening. We depend on the news to disappear, my father says. Then my father became the news. Then he disappeared.

  But she only sat and looked and soon the inmates began to get restless. I realized that my hand was covering the lower part of my face, in needless parental disguise. People, a few at a time, then more, then groups, all leaving now, some crouching down as they moved between the rows. Maybe they were being careful not to block the view of others but I thought that most were slinking out, in guilt and shame. Either way, the view stayed the same, Kate on camera, sitting there looking at me. I felt hollowed out but I couldn’t leave while she was still there. I waited for the screen to go blank and finally, long minutes later, that’s what happened, in streaks and tremors.

  The room had emptied out by the time a cartoon appeared, a fat boy rolling down a bumpy hill. Feliks Zuber was still in his seat up front, he and I in lone attendance now, and I waited for him to turn and wave at me, or simply sit there, dead.

  I opened my eyes sometime before first light and the dream was still there, hovering, nearly touchable. We can’t do justice to our dreams, reworking them in memory. They seem borrowed, part of another life, ours only maybe and only in the farthest margins. A woman is standing beneath a ceiling fan in a tall shadowy room in Ho Chi Minh City, the name of the city indelibly webbed within the dream, and the woman, momentarily obscured, is stepping out of her sandals and beginning to look familiar, and now I realize why this is so, because she is my wife, very weirdly, Sara Massey, slowly shedding her clothing, a tunic and loose trousers, an ao dai.

  Was this meant to be erotic, or ironic, or just another random package of cranial debris? Thinking about it made me edgy and after a moment I lowered myself from the end of the top bunk, quietly. Norman lay still, wearing a black sleep mask. I dressed and left the cubicle and went across the floor and out into the predawn mist. The guard-post at the camp entrance was lighted, someone on duty to admit delivery vans that would be arriving with milk, eggs and headless chickens from local farms. I cut across to the old wooden fence and ducked between the rails, then stood awhile, staring into the dark, aware of my breathing, surprised by it, as if it were an event that only rarely and memorably takes place.

  I felt my way slowly along a row of trees that lined one side of a dirt path. I moved toward the sound of traffic and reached the highway bridge in ten or twelve minutes. The bridge itself was closed to traffic, with repairwork in perennial progress. I stood at a point roughly midway across and watched the cars speed below me. There was a half moon hanging low and looking strangely submerged in the pale mist. Traffic was steady, coming and going, pickups, hatchbacks, vans, all carrying the question of who and where, this early hour, and splashing the unwordable sound of their passage under the bridge.

  I watched and listened, unaware of passing time, thinking of the order and discipline of the traffic, taken for granted, drivers maintaining a distance, fallible men and women, cars ahead, behind, to the sides, night driving, thoughts drifting. Why weren’t there accidents every few seconds on this one stretch of highway, even before morning rush? This is what I thought from my position on the bridge, the surging noise and sheer speed, the proximity of vehicles, the fundamental differences among drivers, sex, age, language, temperament, personal history, cars like animatronic toys, but that’s flesh and blood down there, steel and glass, and it seemed a wonder to me that they moved safely toward the mystery of their destinations.

  This is civilization, I thought, the thrust of social and material advancement, people in motion, testing the limits of time and space. Never mind the festering stink of burnt fuel, the fouling of the planet. The danger may be real but it is simply the overlay, the unavoidable veneer. What I was seeing was also real but it had the impact of a vision, or maybe an ever-present event that flares in the observer’s eye and mind as a burst of enlightenment. Look at them, whoever they are, acting in implicit accord, checking dials and numbers, showing judgment and skill, taking curves, braking gently, anticipating, watchful in three or four directions. I listened to the air blast as they passed beneath me, car after car, drivers making instantaneous decisions, news and weather on their radios, unknown worlds in their minds.

  Why don’t they crash all the time? The question seemed profound to me, with the first touch of dawn showing to the east. Why don’t they get backended or sideswiped? It seemed inevitable from my elevated perspective—cars forced into the guardrails, nudged into lethal spins. But they just kept coming, seemingly out of nowhere, headlights, taillights, and they would be coming and going all through the budding day and into the following night.

  I closed my eyes and listened. Soon I’d be going back to the camp, sinking into the everydayness of that life. Minimum security. It sounded childlike, a term of condescension and chagrin. I wanted to open my eyes to empty roads and blazing light, apocalypse, the thundering approach of something unimaginable. But minimum security was where I belonged, wasn’t it? The least possible quantity, the lowest degree of restriction. Here I was, a truant, but one who would return. When I looked, finally, the mist was lifting, traffic heavier now, motorcycles, flatbeds, family cars, SUVs, drivers down there peering, the noise and rush, the compelling sense of necessity.

  Who are they? Where are they going?

  It occurred to me then that I was visible from the high- way, a man on the bridge, at this hour, in silhouette, a man standing and watching, and it would be a natural response for the drivers, some of them, to glance up and wonder.

  Who is he? What is he doing there?

  He is Jerold Bradway, I thought, and he is breathing the fumes of free enterprise forever.

  THE STARVELING

  When it started, long before the woman, he lived in one room. He did not hope for improved circumstances. This was where he belonged, single window, shower, hotplate, a squat refrigerator parked in the bathroom, a makeshift closet for scant possessions. There is a kind of uneventfulness that resembles meditation. One morning he sat drinking coffee and staring into space when the lamp that extended from the wall rustled into flame. Faulty wiring, he thought calmly, and put out his cigarette. He watched the flames rise, the lampshade begin to bubble and melt. The memory ended here.

  Now, decades later, he sat watching another woman, the one he lived with. She was at the kitchen sink, washing her cereal bowl, using a soapy bare hand to scour the edges. They were divorced now, after five or six years of marriage, still sharing an apartment, hers, a third-floor walk-up, sufficient space, sort of, tiny barking dog next door.

  She was still lean, Flory, and a little lopsided, the soft brownish blond tones only now beginning to fade from her hair. One of her brassieres hung from the doorknob on the closet. He looked at it, wondering how long it had been there. It was a life that had slowly grown around them, unfailingly familiar, and there was nothing much to see that had not been seen in previous hours, days, weeks and months. The brassiere on the doorknob was a matter of months, he thought.

  He sat on his cot at the other end of the narrow flat, listening to her talk idly about her new job, temporary, doing traffic reports on the radio. She was an actor, occupationally out of work, and took what came her way. Hers was the only living voice he attended to in the course of most days, an easy sort of liquid cadence with a trace of Deep South. But her broadcast voice was a power tool, all bursts and breathless medleys, and when it was possible, when he happened to be here, which was rare, during the daylight hours, he turned on the radio and listened to the all-news station where she had a narrow slot every eleven minutes, reporting on the routine havoc out there.

  She spoke fantastically fast, words and key phrases expertly compressed into coded format, the accidents, road repairs, bridges a
nd tunnels, the delays measured in geologic time. The BQE, the FDR, always the biblical Cross Bronx, ten thousand drivers with deadened eyes waiting for the gates to open, the seas to part.

  He watched her approach now, slantwise, her body language of determined inquiry, head flopped left, eyes advancing through levels of scrutiny. She stopped at a distance of five feet.

  “Did you get a haircut?”

  He sat thinking, then reached back to run his thumb over the back of his neck. A haircut was a hurried few moments in a well-scheduled day, submitted to in order to be forgotten.

  “I think so, absolutely.”

  “When?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe three days ago.”

  She took a step to the side, approaching once again.

  “What’s wrong with me? I’m just now noticing,” she said. “What did he do to you?”

  “Who?”

  “The barber.”

  “I don’t know. What did he do to me?”

  “He emasculated your sideburns,” she said.

  She touched the side of his head, honoring the memory, it seemed, of what had been there, her hand still wet from the cereal bowl. Then she danced away, into a jacket and out the door. This is what they did, they came and went. She had to hurry to the studio, in midtown, and he had a movie to get to, ten-forty a.m., walking distance from here, and then another movie somewhere else, and somewhere else after that, and then one more time before his day was done.

  It was a dense white summer day and there were men in orange vests jackhammering along the middle of the broad street, with concrete barriers rimming the raw crevice and every moving thing on either side taking defensive measures, taxis in stop-and-start pattern and pedestrians sprinting across the street in stages, in tactical bursts, cell phones welded to their heads.

  He walked west, beginning to feel the flesh in his step, the width of chest and hips. He’d always been big, slow and strong and he was bigger and slower now, all those fistfuls of saturated fat that he pushed into his face, irresistibly, sitting slumped over the counter in diners or standing alongside food carts. He didn’t eat meals, he grabbed meals, he grabbed a bite and paid and fled, and the aftertaste of whatever he absorbed lingered for hours somewhere in the lower tracts.