by Don DeLillo
I hadn’t seen the shirt in years but easily recalled who had given it to her.
She asked about Cairo. I left my bag at the hotel desk. Up the cobbled streets, jasmine and donkey shit, the conversational shriek of older women. Tap walked on ahead, knowing she had something to tell me.
“We had a strange visit. A figure from the past. Out of absolutely nowhere.”
“Everyone is from the past.”
“Not everyone is a figure,” she said. “This person qualifies as a figure.”
We were taking unnaturally long strides on the broad steps. Some girls sang a song that began with the words one two three.
“Volterra,” I said.
She glanced.
“You’re wearing his shirt. Practically an announcement. Not only that. The moment you started talking I knew you were going to say something about him. I realized the shirt meant more than the season is starting to change.”
“That’s amazing. Because the funny thing is I didn’t even know I had the bloody shirt. Frank left three days ago. I found the shirt this morning. I’d totally forgotten the thing existed.”
“A mock heirloom as I recall. Those were the days when he wasn’t sure what he wanted to look and sound like to others. The young man obsessed by film. What was he doing here? Slow down, I hate this climb.”
“He was passing through. What else? He drops in, he passes through. That’s the way Volterra operates.”
“True enough.”
“He’d been in Turkey. He thought he’d drop in. Brought along his current lady. She kept saying, ‘People with cancer always want to kiss me on the mouth.’ Where does he find them?”
“Too bad. I’d like to have seen him. He was coming here, I was going there.”
“You’re claiming foreknowledge. You knew I was going to say something about him.”
“The old psychic motor is still running. When I saw you in the shirt I thought of him right away. Then Tap walked on ahead in his half-downcast all-knowing manner. You started to say something and it hit me: she’s heard from Frank. How did he know you were here?”
“I wrote once or twice.”
“So he knew we’d separated.”
“He knew.”
“Do you think that’s why he dropped in?”
“Ass.”
“How is he? Does he still sit with his back to the wall in restaurants?”
A man and his small sons were mending a net. Kathryn stopped to exchange greetings in the set manner, the simple questions that brought such satisfying replies, the ceremony of well-being. I stepped between the gathers of yellow mesh and with an effort caught up to Tap.
Volterra came out of an old textile town in New England, a place with a dime store, one or two handsome public buildings in decline. A man in trail boots jerked the lever on a cigarette machine in the entranceway of a diner. Women drove station wagons, sometimes just sitting at the wheel, parked, trying to remember something. It was the last generation of station wagons. His father did odd jobs, the movie theater closed. But there were falls, the sound of rushing water. It was a northern sound, it smelled of the north. There was something pure in it.
His mother had mental problems. Frank was the youngest of four. She was thirty-seven when he was born and she seemed now to be longing for senility. She wanted to sit in a warm corner and let the past fall slowly over her. Confused recollection was a state she felt was earned. It was a gratifying punishment, a sinking away from the life struggle. Her situation was exemplary. Let the children see how God does these things to people.
The dark brick mill ran skeleton shifts, was always on the verge of shutting down. Men wore trail boots, wilderness boots, insulated hunting shoes.
In New York he went to a school for private detectives, working in the stock rooms at Macy’s during the day. The school, called an academy, was located off the lobby of a hotel full of West Indians. It was a crazy and money-wasting idea, he said, but it marked his freedom, it meant New York. You were a stranger and could do these things. Two months later he enrolled in film school at NYU.
He cut news footage for a network affiliate in Providence. After writing a number of unfinished scripts he headed west to do technical films for companies with names like Signetics and Intersil. California was full of technocratic amaze. That’s where the visionaries were, developing an argot, playing galactic war games on the display screens in computer research centers. Kathryn and I lived in Palo Alto then, happily on the fringe of things, sanding our secondhand chairs. She worked for Stanford University, the Center for Information Processing, where she helped students and faculty use computers in their research and course work. I was turning out the usual run of low-paying freelance work, most of it for high technology firms in the area.
I wrote a script for a film that Volterra directed. He was fast and inventive with an offhand manner toward the work and many ideas about film, the state of film, the meaning of film, the language of film. He spent a lot of time with us. We went to the movies and marched against the war. The two things were connected. The flag-tailored kids were connected, the streets were connected, the music, the marijuana. I stopped smoking grass when the war ran down.
He was full of comic sorrows, self-dramatizing impulses, wasted-looking in a way that marked a style more than a set of depressing circumstances, and he seemed most content with himself cursing the chill mist that blew across the hills. He had a narrow face and the feral eyes of a boy absorbed in the task of surviving. The style, the psychological intrigues were elements he played off this deeper thing. When he filled out, later, and grew the second or third of a number of experimental beards, I thought I was still able to detect that early fearfulness of his, the schemer’s flexible logic, whatever it takes to get the edge.
He started a filmmaking collective in San Francisco. The group shared all tasks, did two documentaries. The first concerned war protests and the police. The second was a story of the love affair, outside marriage, of a middle-aged woman well known in Hillsborough society. The movie became notorious locally for this reason and well-known on a wider basis for a forty-minute segment detailing an afternoon of sex and conversation. For legal reasons the movie had only fitful distribution and eventually none at all, but people talked about it and wrote about it and there were private screenings for months on both coasts. The running time was two hours, the woman’s lover was Volterra.
Film. This is what there was, to shoot film, cut film, screen it, talk about it.
The collective fell apart when a conglomerate bought rights to the second documentary, changed the title, changed the names, hired stars and re-shot the whole thing as a feature, using a veteran director and four writers. It was one of those strange transferences in which people conspire to lose sight of a central reality. But what was the reality in this case? There were a dozen questions about ethics, manipulation, the woman’s motives. The documentary was edged in politics and hate. Frank was a name in the business.
He would go on to features himself, of course, dropping from sight for long periods, insisting on closed sets when he worked. Long before that he was a force in our lives. He made us think about our modest expectations. His drive to make movies was so powerful we couldn’t help feeling anxious hopes on his behalf. We were involved with Volterra. We wanted to defend him, explain him, make allowances for his obsessions, believe in his ideas for uncompromising films. He provided an occasion for reckless loyalties.
When we told him Kathryn was pregnant he showed an emotion deep enough to confirm our own awe, the remarkableness of what we’d commonly made, this almond curve, detailed and living. We didn’t know we were ready for a child until Frank’s reaction showed us how beside the point readiness can seem to be. Parenthood eventually deepened our sense of moderation, our not-wanting. It was Frank who left us wondering at this way of life but ultimately confirmed in it. This is one of the balances of a stimulating friendship.
There’s no denying his effect on Kathryn.
He stood outside her measures of a person’s worth. He made her laugh, she sparked to him. The sweet mean narrow face, the uncombed hair. He was a genuine talent, a commitment, the one person whose excesses and personas she needed to indulge. It was bracing to have one’s principles challenged. It clarified her vision of things, to be able to defend him to herself, this man who would sit with her in a restaurant on a redwood deck and recount in earnest deadpan detail the methods and bents, the hand-grips, of some woman he’d lately spent a night with. The exception was valid if it was large enough. He had the charm of a vast and innocent ego.
This was before the film about the woman from Hillsborough. Kathryn would refuse to see it.
He liked to turn up unexpectedly and made it hard for people to reach him when they wanted to. He lived in borrowed apartments much of the time. Already he was building tunnels in and out. Our feelings for him were sometimes deflected because of this. Long periods went by. We’d hear he was out of the country, underground, back east. Then he’d show up, hunched against the night, moving through the door in a half prowl, nodding, touched to see us looking much the same.
A glancing love.
“There’s more,” Kathryn said. “He talked with Owen.”
Star fields, ruined time. Nearby a man with a flashlight and donkey hauling garbage in black bags. The hill was empty depth against the streaming night, the medieval sky in Arabic and Greek. We drank dark wine from Paros, too full of night and sky to use the candles.
“I only listened to bits and pieces. It was mostly about the cult. Owen is less vague about them now. They’re a cult pure and simple. They qualify. I don’t like listening to that.”
“I know.”
“He makes an exercise of it. All that speculation. He knows I’m tired of it but in this case I can’t really blame him for going on at such length. Frank was absolutely fascinated. He prompted, he questioned Owen endlessly. They spent seven or eight solid hours talking about the cult. One night here, one at the dig house.”
“Why was Frank in Turkey? Is he doing a movie?”
“He’s hiding from a movie. He left the set, the location, whichever it was. He didn’t say where they were shooting but I know it’s the fourth straight project he’s abandoned. The second one to reach the shooting stage.”
“Where is he now?”
“I don’t know. He took the Rhodes steamer. It stops at two or three islands along the way.”
“Did you see his last film?”
“It was wonderful. Just a great piece of work. All Frank’s. No one else could have done it. It had his tension in it. Do you know? His way of cutting short extravagant things. Oh I loved it.”
“That was about the time we were getting set to wind it up.”
“I Went to that revival house on Roncesvalles. I walked. I low many miles?”
“Past Bathurst.”
“Past Dufferin.”
“Going to the movies. What was I doing?”
“It felt so good to go to a movie alone. Do you know?”
“I think I must have been watching television. What a crucial difference?
“You were working on your list,” she said.
“Your list.”
“I’ve never organized your so-called depravities in my mind. That was your game.”
“True, all true. How broken I must have been, to be watching television. There you were, striding past Dufferin in your boots and padded clothes like some dyke in a modern children’s story.”
“Thank you.”
“To the movies.”
“It felt so good to walk.”
“Not just any movie either.”
“Remember the argument over the ear?”
“The squirrel in the basement. That one tree that flamed in the autumn.”
“How strange to be nostalgic about the end of a marriage.”
I saw him before I heard him, Owen Brademas (his shape) advancing softly up the stairs, knees high as he climbed, heedful, long-limbed, trailing the glow from his flashlight.
“But you’re sitting in the dark.”
I said, “Why were you pointing your light down behind you?”
We spoke almost simultaneously.
“Was I? Didn’t realize. I know the way so well.”
“Darkness makes us sentimental.”
Kathryn brought a glass, I poured some wine. He switched off the light and settled into a chair, stretching.
The storytelling voice.
“I realize finally what the secret is. All these months I’ve wondered what it was I couldn’t quite identify in my feelings about this place. The deep-reaching quality of things. Rock shapes, wind. Things seen against the sky. The clear light before sun down that just about breaks my heart.” Laughing. “Then I realized. These are all things I seem to remember. But where do I remember them from? I’ve been to Greece before, yes, but never here, never to a place so isolated, never these particular sights and colors and silences. Ever since I got to the island I’ve been remembering. The experience is familiar, although that’s not the right way to put it. There are times you do the simplest thing and it reaches you in a way you didn’t think possible, in a way you’d once known but have long since forgotten. You eat a fig and there is something higher about this fig. The first fig. The prototype. The dawn of figs.” Laughing out. “I feel I’ve known the particular clarity of this air and water, I’ve climbed these stony paths into the hills. It’s eerie, this sense. Metempsychosis. It’s what I’ve been feeling all along. But I didn’t know it until now.”
“There’s a generic quality, an absoluteness,” I said. “The bare hills, a figure in the distance.”
“Yes, and it seems to be a remembered experience. If you play with the word ‘metempsychosis’ long enough I think you find not only transfer-of-soul but you reach the Indo-European root to breathe. That seems correct to me. We are breathing it again. T here’s some quality in the experience that goes deeper than the sensory apparatus will allow. Spirit, soul. The experience is tied up with self-perception somehow. I think you feel it only in certain places. This is my place perhaps, this island. Greece contains this mysterious absolute, yes. But maybe you have to wander to find yourself in it.”
“An Indian concept,” Kathryn said. “Or is it? Metempsychosis.”
“A Greek word,” he said. “Look straight up, the universe is pure possibility. James says the air is full of words. Maybe it’s full of perceptions too, feelings, memories. Is it someone else’s memories we sometimes have? The laws of physics don’t distinguish between past and future. We are always in contact. There is random interaction. The patterns repeat. Worlds, star clusters, even memories perhaps.”
“Turn on the lights,” I said.
Again he laughed.
“Am I growing soft-headed? Could be. I’ve reached an age.”
“We all have. But I wish you’d stayed with figs. I understood that.”
He rarely supported his arguments or views. The first sound of contention sent him into deep retreat. Kathryn knew this, of course, and moved protectively to other subjects, always ready to attend to his well-being.
Terror. This is the subject she chose. In Europe they attack their own institutions, their police, journalists, industrialists, judges, academics, legislators. In the Middle East they attack Americans. What does it mean? She wanted to know if the risk analyst had an opinion.
“Bank loans, arms credits, goods, technology. Technicians are the infiltrators of ancient societies. They speak a secret language. They bring new kinds of death with them. New uses for death. New ways to think about death. All the banking and technology and oil money create an uneasy flow through the region, a complex set of dependencies and fears. Everyone is there, of course. Not just Americans. They’re all there. But the others lack a certain mythical quality that terrorists find attractive.”
“Good, keep going.”
“America is the world’s living myth. There’s no sense of wrong when you
kill an American or blame America for some local disaster. This is our function, to be character types, to embody recurring themes that people can use to comfort themselves, justify themselves and so on. We’re here to accommodate. Whatever people need, we provide. A myth is a useful thing. People expect us to absorb the impact of their grievances. Interesting, when I talk to a Mideastern businessman who expresses affection and respect for the U.S., I automatically assume he’s either a fool or a liar. The sense of grievance affects all of us, one way or another.”
“What percentage of these grievances is justified?”
I pretended to calculate.
“Of course we’re a military presence in some of these places,” I said. “Another reason to be targeted.”
“You’re a presence almost everywhere. You have influence everywhere. But you’re only being shot at in selected locales.”
“I think I hear a wistful note. Canada. Is that what you mean? Where we operate with impunity.”
“Certainly you’re there,” she said. “Two-thirds of the largest corporations.”
“They’re a developed country. They have no moral edge. The people who have technology and bring technology are the death dealers. Everyone else is innocent. These Mideast societies are at a particular pitch right now. There’s no doubt or ambiguity. They burn with a clear vision. There must be times when a society feels the purest virtue lies in killing.”
Talking with my wife on a starry night in the Greek archipelago.
“Canadians are stricken by inevitability,” she said. “Not that I defend the capitulation. That’s what it is. Pathetic surrender.”
“We do the wrong kind of killing in America. It’s a form of consumerism. It’s the logical extension of consumer fantasy. People shooting from overpasses, barricaded houses. Pure image.”
“Now you’re the one who sounds wistful.”
“No connection to the earth.”
“Some truth in that, I guess. A little.”
