by Don DeLillo
First published in Great Britain 1983 by
The Harvester Press Limited.
This Picador edition published 1987
by Pan Books Ltd, Cavaye Place, London SW10 9PG
9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1
© Don DeLillo 1982
ISBN 0 330 29751 1
Printed and bound in Great Britain by
Cox & Wyman Ltd, Reading
This book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, re-sold, hired out or otherwise circulated without the publisher’s prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser
To Barbara
The author gratefully acknowledges the support of the John Simon Guggenheim Memorial Foundation. A printed shout from the housetops goes as well to Atticus Lish, in fond appreciation.
THE ISLAND
1
For a long time I stayed away from the Acropolis. It daunted me, that somber rock. I preferred to wander in the modern city, imperfect, blaring. The weight and moment of those worked stones promised to make the business of seeing them a complicated one. So much converges there. It’s what we’ve rescued from the madness. Beauty, dignity, order, proportion. There are obligations attached to such a visit.
Then there was the question of its renown. I saw myself climbing the rough streets of the Plaka, past the discos, the handbag shops, the rows of bamboo chairs. Slowly, out of every bending lane, in waves of color and sound, came tourists in striped sneakers, fanning themselves with postcards, the philhellenes, laboring uphill, vastly unhappy, mingling in one unbroken line up to the monumental gateway.
What ambiguity there is in exalted things. We despise them a little.
I kept putting off a visit. The ruins stood above the hissing traffic like some monument to doomed expectations. I’d turn a corner, adjusting my stride among jostling shoppers, there it was, the tanned marble riding its mass of limestone and schist. I’d dodge a packed bus, there it was, at the edge of my field of vision. One night (as we enter narrative time) I was driving with friends back to Athens after a loud dinner in Piraeus and we were lost in some featureless zone when I made a sharp turn into a one-way street, the wrong way, and there it was again, directly ahead, the Parthenon, floodlit for an event, some holiday or just the summer sound-and-light, floating in the dark, a white fire of such clarity and precision I was startled into braking too fast, sending people into the dashboard, the backs of seats.
We sat there a moment, considering this vision. It was a street in decline, closed shops and demolition, but the buildings at the far end framed the temple perfectly. Someone in the back seat said something, then a car came toward us, horn blowing. The driver stuck an arm out the window to gesture. Then his head appeared, he started shouting. The structure hung above us like a star lamp. I gazed a moment longer and backed out of the street.
I asked Ann Maitland, who sat alongside, what the man had called me.
“Masturbator. It’s standard. A Greek will never say anything he hasn’t already said a thousand times.”
Her husband Charles reprimanded me for not knowing the word. To Charles it was a mark of one’s respect for other cultures to know the local terms of abuse and the words for sex acts and natural wastes.
We three were in the front seat. Behind were David Keller and his new young wife Lindsay and a man named Stock, a Swiss or Austrian located in Beirut, here to do business with David.
There was always someone at dinner who was in town to do business with one of the regulars. They tended to be heavyset men, these guests, northern, raw. Eager faces, strong accents. They drank too much and left in the morning.
With Ann’s help I worked out our location and headed toward the Caravel, where Stock was staying.
“Isn’t it awful?” Lindsay said. “I haven’t been to the Acropolis. Two and a half months, is it, David?”
“Shut up. They’ll think you’re an idiot.”
“I’m waiting for my curtains.”
I told her she wasn’t the only one who hadn’t been there and tried to explain why I’d been slow to make the pilgrimage.
Charles Maitland said, “The thing is there, isn’t it? Climb the hill. Unless it’s some sort of perverse celebrity you’re angling for. The man who turns his back to the peerless summit.”
“Is that a trace of envy I hear? Grudging admiration?”
“Climb the hill, James. The thing is right there. It looms. It’s close enough to knock you sideways.”
He had a way of feigning gruff impatience. It was a role he found himself comfortable in, being the eldest among us.
“That’s just it,” I said. “That’s the point.”
“What do you mean?” Ann said.
“It looms. It’s so powerfully there. It almost forces us to ignore it. Or at least to resist it. We have our self-importance. We also have our inadequacy. The former is a desperate invention of the latter.”
“I didn’t know you were so deep,” she said.
“I’m not normally.”
“You’ve clearly studied the matter.”
“The bloody thing has been there for millennia,” Charles said. “Climb the hill, have your look and then descend at an even pace, step by step, placing one foot ahead of the other.”
“Is it really that easy?”
I was beginning to enjoy myself.
“I think you ought to grow a beard or shave your head,” Ann said. “We need a physical demonstration of your commitment to these deep ideas. I’m not sure you’re altogether serious. Give us something to believe in. A shaved head would do wonders for this group.”
I drove past a sidewalk full of parked cars.
“We need a Japanese monk,” she said to Charles, as if this were an answer they’d been seeking.
“Shave your head,” Charles told me wearily.
“This is why your car is too small for six,” Ann said. “It’s Japanese. Why didn’t we take two cars? Or three?”
David Keller, a husky blond Nebraskan of forty or so, said to me earnestly, “Jim, I think what our friends are trying to point out to you, boy, is that you’re a fool, running a fool’s errand, in a fool’s world.”
“You drive, David. You’re too drunk to talk. Lindsay knows what I mean.”
“You don’t want to climb it because it’s there,” she said.
“Lindsay cuts to the heart of things.”
“If it weren’t there, you’d climb it.”
“This woman has a gift,” I said.
“We met on a plane,” David said. “Somewhere over the ocean. Middle of the night. Local time.” He was drawing everything out. “She looked so great. In her Pan Am flight socks. You just wanted to hug her, you know? Like an elf. Her hair kind of delectably frazzled. You wanted to give her a brownie and a glass of milk.”
When I pulled up at the Caravel we realized Stock was asleep. We got him out easily enough. Then I dropped the others and went home.
I was living in a residential area that curls around the lower slopes of Lycabettus Hill. Most of the people I knew were here or nearby. The deep terraces spill over with lantana and jasmine, the views are panoramic, the cafés full of talk and smoke into the early hours. Americans used to come to places like this to write and paint and study, to find deeper textures. Now we do business. I poured myself some soda water and sat outside awhile. From the terrace the city stretched to the gulf in smoky vales and rises, a seamless concrete village. Rare nights, for whatever atmospheric reasons, you could hear planes taking off down by the water. The sound was mysterious, full of anxious gatherings, a charged rumble that seemed a long time in defining itself as something
besides a derangement of nature, some onrushing nameless event.
The phone rang twice, then stopped.
I flew a lot, of course. We all did. We were a subculture, business people in transit, growing old in planes and airports. We were versed in percentages, safety records, in the humor of flaming death. We knew which airline’s food would double you up, which routes connected well. We knew the various aircraft and their configurations and measured this against the distances we were flying. We could distinguish between bad-weather categories and relate them to the guidance system of the plane we were on. We knew which airports were efficient, which were experiments in timelessness or mob rule; which had radar, which didn’t; which might be filled with pilgrims making the hadj. Open seating never caught us by surprise and we were quick to identify our luggage on the runway where that was the practice and we didn’t exchange wild looks when the oxygen masks dropped during touchdown. We advised each other on which remote cities were well maintained, which were notable for wild dogs running in packs at night, snipers in the business district at high noon. We told each other where you had to sign a legal document to get a drink, where you couldn’t eat meat on Wednesdays and Thursdays, where you had to sidestep a man with a cobra when you left your hotel. We knew where martial law was in force, where body searches were made, where they engaged in systematic torture, or fired assault rifles into the air at weddings, or abducted and ransomed executives. This was the humor of personal humiliation.
“It is like the Empire,” said Charles Maitland more than once. “Opportunity, adventure, sunsets, dusty death.”
Along some northern coast at sundown a beaten gold light is waterborne, sweeping across lakes and tracing zigzag rivers to the sea, and we know we’re in transit again, half numb to the secluded beauty down there, the slate land we’re leaving behind, the peneplain, to cross these rainbands in deep night. This is time totally lost to us. We don’t remember it. We take no sense impressions with us, no voices, none of the windy blast of aircraft on the tarmac, or the white noise of flight, or the hours waiting. Nothing sticks to us but smoke in our hair and clothes. It is dead time. It never happened until it happens again. Then it never happened.
I took a boat in two stages to Kouros, an obscure island in the Cycladic group. My wife and son lived there in a small white house with geraniums in olive oil cans on the roof edge and no hot water. It was perfect. Kathryn was writing reports on the excavation at the south end of the island. Our boy, who was nine, was working on a novel. Everyone is writing away. Everyone is scribbling.
When I got there the house was empty. Nothing moved in the streets. It was a hundred degrees, four o’clock, relentless light. I crouched on the roof, hands clasped above my eyes. The village was a model of irregular geometry, the huddled uphill arrangement of whitelime boxes, the street mazes and archways, small churches with blue talc domes. Laundry hung in the walled gardens, always this sense of realized space, common objects, domestic life going on in that sculpted hush. Stairways bent around houses, disappearing.
It was a sea chamber raised to the day, to the detailing light, a textured pigment on the hills. There was something artless and trusting in the place despite the street meanders, the narrow turns and ravels. Striped flagpoles and aired-out rugs, houses. Joined by closed wooden balconies, plants in battered cans, a willingness to share the oddments of some gathering-up. Passageways captured the eye with one touch, a sea green door, a handrail varnished to a nautical gloss. A heart barely beating in the summer heat, and always the climb, the small birds in cages, the framed approaches to nowhere. Doorways were paved with pebble mosaics, the terrace stones were outlined in white.
The door was open. I went inside to wait. She’d added a rush mat. Tap’s writing table was covered with lined sheets. It was my second visit to the house and I realized I was scrutinizing the place, something I’d done the first time as well. Was it possible to find in the simple furniture, in the spaces between the faded walls, something about my wife and son that had been hidden from me during our life together in California, Vermont and Ontario?
We make you wonder you are the outsider in this group.
The meltemi started blowing, the nagging summer wind. I stood by the window, waiting for them to appear. White water flashed outside the bay. Cats slipped out of hidden places in the rough walls and moved stretching into alleyways. The first of the air booms came rolling across the afternoon, waves from some distant violence, making the floor tremble slightly, window frames creak, causing plaster dust to trickle between abutting walls with an anxious whispering sound. Men were using dynamite to fish.
Shadows of empty chairs in the main square. A motorcycle droning in the hills. The light was surgical, it was binding. It fixed the scene before me as a moment in a dream. All is foreground, wordless and bright.
They arrived from the site on a motor scooter. Kathryn had a bandanna around her head and wore a tank top over baggy fatigue pants. It was in its way a kind of gritty high fashion. Tap saw me at the window and ran back to tell his mother, who didn’t quite catch herself from looking up. She left the scooter at the edge of a stepped street and they came up toward the house single file.
“I stole some yogurt,” I said.
“So. Look who’s here.”
“I’ll pay you back a little at a time. What are you up to, Tap? Helping your mom revise the entire history of the ancient world?”
I grabbed him under the arms and lifted him to eye level, making a noise that exaggerated the strain involved. l was always making lionlike noises, rough-housing with my kid. He gave me one of his tricky half smiles and then put his hands squarely on my shoulders and said in his small monotone, “We had a bet when you would come. Five drachmas.”
“I tried to call the hotel, tried to call the restaurant, couldn’t get through.”
“I lost,” he said.
I gave him a sideways toss and put him down. Kathryn went inside to heat pots of water that she would add to their baths. “I liked the pages you sent. But your concentration fell off once or twice. Your hero went out in a blizzard wearing his rubbery Ingersoll.”
“What’s wrong with that? It was the heaviest thing he had. That was the point.”
“I think you meant Mackintosh. He went out in a blizzard wearing his rubbery Mackintosh.”
“I thought a Mackintosh was a boot. He wouldn’t go out with one Mackintosh. He’d wear Mackintoshes.”
“He’d wear Wellingtons. A Wellington is a boot.”
“Then what’s a Mackintosh?”
“A raincoat.”
“A raincoat. Then what’s an Ingersoll?”
“A watch.”
“A watch,” he said, and I could see him store these names and the objects they belonged to, for safekeeping.
“Your characters are good. I’m learning things I didn’t know.”
“Can I tell you what Owen says about character?”
“Of course you can tell me. You don’t have to ask permission, Tap.”
“We’re not sure you like him.”
“Don’t be cute.”
He bobbed his head like a senile man in the street having a silent argument with himself. In his miscellany of gestures and expressions, this one meant he was feeling a little sheepish.
“Come on,” I said. “Tell me.”
“Owen says ‘character’ comes from a Greek word. It means ‘to brand or to sharpen.’ Or ‘pointed stake’ if it’s a noun.”
“An engraving instrument or branding instrument.”
“That’s right,” he said.
“This is probably because ‘character’ in English not only means someone in a story but a mark or symbol.”
“Like a letter of the alphabet.”
“Owen pointed that out, did he? Thanks a lot, Owen.”
Tap laughed at my tone of pre-empted father.
“You know something?” I said. “You’re beginning to look a little Greek.”
“No, I’m
not.”
“Do you smoke yet?”
He decided he liked this idea and made smoking gestures and talking gestures. He spoke a few sentences in Ob, a coded jargon he’d learned from Kathryn. She and her sisters spoke Ob as children and now Tap used it as a kind of substitute Greek or counter-Greek.
Kathryn came out with two handfuls of pistachio nuts for us. Tap cupped his hands and she let one set slowly run out, raising her fist to lengthen the spill. We watched him smile as the nuts clicked into his hands.
Tap and I sat cross-legged on the roof. Narrow streets ran down to the square, where men sat against the walls of buildings, under the Turkish balconies, looking wine-stained in the setting sun.
We ate our nuts, putting the shell remnants in my breast pocket. Above the far curve of the village was a ruined windmill. The terrain was rocky, dropping steeply to the sea. A woman stepped laughing from a rowboat, turning to watch it rock. The broad motion made her laugh again. There was a boy eating bread at the oars.
We watched a deliveryman, powdered white, carry flour sacks on his head into the bakery. He had an empty sack folded over the top of his head to keep flour out of his hair and eyes and he looked like a hunter of white tigers, wearing the skins. The wind was still blowing.
I sat inside with Kathryn while the boy took his bath. She kept the room dark, drinking a beer, still in her tank top, the bandanna loose around her neck now.
“So. How’s the job coming? Where have you been spending time?”
“Turkey,” I said. “Pakistan now and then.”
“I’d like to meet Rowser sometime. No, I wouldn’t.”
“You’d hate him but in a healthy way. He’d add years to your life. He has a new thing. It’s a briefcase. Looks and feels like a briefcase. Except it has a recording device, a device that detects other recording devices, a burglar alarm, a Mace-spraying device and a hidden tracing transmitter, whatever that is.”
“Do you hate him in a healthy way?”
“I don’t hate him at all. Why should I hate him? He gave me the job. The job pays well. And I get to see my family. How would I get to see my little expatriate family if it weren’t for Rowser and his job and his risk assessments?”
