by Don DeLillo
Peter said to his mother across a forkful of spinach pie, “Is he doing one of his comic bits, do you think? Will he juggle oranges next?”
She wasn’t listening.
“How happy he is to be wrong,” Peter said. “It’s his special provenance. He loves to return to it. Of course he knows how deeply he misconstrues. This is part of the joy of the thing. The whole point is to pretend not to know. As some people protect their inexperience or fear, this man protects his knowledge of the true situation. It’s a way of spreading guilt. His innocence, other people’s guilt. There’s a proportional relation. This is the theme of his life, pretending not to know. Keeps him going, absolutely.”
He was addressing himself to me. Charles gazed past the traffic as though none of this had anything to do with him or was at worst an extension of the discourse on mathematics.
“l look forward to their retirement. They want to live in California, you know. We’ll see each other on American holidays. Charlie will drink Miller Lite and watch the Super Bowl. We’ll have cranberry sauce on Thanksgiving. My dear mother will finally get her tour of movie stars’ homes. All the stars she’s ever heard of are long dead, of course, whether she knows it or not. While she was in the jungles, the marshes and the hill stations, all the neon lights went out, one by one.”
They were feeling happy again. Peter took a sip of his mother’s wine, then directed another look my way, a different one, quizzical, mock angry.
“Who are you anyway,” he said, “that I should tell you our secrets?”
While we laughed I wondered if I would ever see these two people in quite the same way. Peter had altered them not only by what he’d said but by a simple physical extension of the local figure they made. He was the apex, the revelation of full effect. He knew his mother’s affairs, his father’s weaknesses, and I felt in a sense he’d stolen these things from me. I wanted to forget him, the jut of his face, its curious outdatedness, the voice with its self-referring note of complaint. I was afraid my romance with Ann Maitland would end, my word-romance, the pleasant distant speculative longing.
Ann and Peter decided to go for a walk. We watched them cross to the small park, where they waited for a break in traffic.
“There they go,” Charles said. “The twenty-four hours of my life. A.M. and P.M.”
“Has he ever told you what he’s doing?”
“In mathematics? Something awesome, I gather. He expects to be burnt out by the time he’s twenty-five. We’ll see how he adapts to that.”
There was an antique air of celibacy about Peter. It had the stubborn force of some vow a boy might make when he is fourteen, high-minded, his life suddenly come to a powerful hesitancy—a pledge which the man in his scrupulous carved space might well decide to honor. I had one of my sentimental thoughts. He would meet a woman one day soon and be immediately transformed. The apparatus of complaint would fall away. His cleverness would be shamed by the power of love.
My secretary, Mrs. Helen, had glazed yellow hair and the overpolite manner of someone who wishes the atmosphere was a little less casual. A delicate scent of dusting powder hung about her comings and goings. She liked to fuss over tea and Greek verbs, which she was helping me with, and had a fondness for anything British, near British or aspiring to British.
She thought Owen Brademas was one of these. He’d been in the office earlier looking for me and although she’d invited him to wait he said he had some things to do and would return.
I read the telexes and made check marks in the appropriate boxes on several option memos. Mrs. Helen described her infant grandson’s tiny hands. She called me Mr. Oxtone.
She was versed in the total range of social codes and usages. She advised me on the correct replies in Greek to everyday greetings or to inquiries about my health and she suggested phrases I might utter to someone celebrating his name day, someone else who was ill. On food and drink she was firm, insisting there was a proper order in which I might consume the coffee, the water and the crystal of rich preserves I was likely to be offered in someone’s home. There was even a correct place to set the spoon once I’d finished using it.
She practiced a demon neatness around the office. She was twice divorced, once widowed, and referred to these separate events with roughly equal good humor.
When Owen showed up I saw why she thought he might be British or might at least aspire to that station. He wore a wide brimmed velour hat, a wool scarf looped twice around the neck and trailed over one shoulder, a belted corduroy jacket, worn shiny, with elbow patches and leather buttons. He resembled, if not a Briton per se, then a British actor working down to the level of his character, a jaded expatriate in a nameless country.
“Just the man I want to see.”
“Couldn’t pass through town without saying hello, James.”
“I need to have a theory confirmed.”
We went to an ouzerí nearby, an old crowded smoky room with a high ceiling and posters on the columns and walls advertising English tea biscuits and Scotch whiskey. We drank and talked for three hours.
“Where have you been?”
“l stayed on the island for a time. Then I traveled in the Peloponnese. Took buses, walked, caught colds.”
“Where exactly?”
“The southern Peloponnese. The middle tit.”
“The Mani.”
“Do you know it?”
“Only by reputation,” I said. “What are you doing in Athens?”
“I want to take another look at the epigraphic collection in the
National Museum. A place that interests me. It’s a library of stones in effect. A huge room with shelves down both long walls, shelves down the middle, four levels high.”
“Shelves full of stones.”
“Many hundreds of stones, numbered. Parts of columns, walls, tablets, memorial reliefs. All inscribed, of course. A few letters in some cases are all that remain. Others with words, longer fragments. The Greeks made an art of the alphabet. They gave their letters a symmetry and a sense that something final had been made out of the stick figures of various early forms. Modern. The stones come in many sizes and shapes. No one is ever there. The caretaker follows me at a tactful distance. There is a table and a lamp. You take a stone from the shelf, put it on the table, then sit down and read what is inscribed, study the shapes.”
He smiled, tipping his chair back against a column. I felt this was the picture he wanted to leave with me. A man in a room full of stones, reading.
“I went to Jerusalem with Volterra,” I said.
“Jerusalem.”
“Did you know that?”
“No, I didn’t.”
“I came back with some questions for you.”
“Fine,” he said. “Do my best.”
“They don’t concern the trip. They concern what I think I learned there, what I heard.”
“This is the theory you want me to confirm.”
“That’s right.”
“Fine,” he said.
“First the old man on the island.”
“The murder.”
“The mentally deficient old man. His body wasn’t found in the village where he lived. It was found in another village on another part of the island.”
“This is correct.”
“Do you happen to know the old man’s name? I don’t.”
“He was called Michaeli. I kept hearing the name all that week.”
“What was his last name?”
We were looking at each other. His face showed a melancholy easement, a deliverance almost. The noise of conversation grew around us.
“His full name was Michaelis Kalliambetsos.”
“We both know the name of the village,” I said. “Mikro Kamini.”
“This is correct.”
“What does all this men?”
“I wouldn’t look for meaning, James.”
“They found a man whose initials matched the first letter of each word in a particular place-n
ame. They either led him to this place or waited for him to wander there on his own. Then they killed him.”
“Yes. This seems to be what happened.”
“Why?”
“The letters matched.”
“That’s no answer.”
“I wouldn’t look for answers,” he said.
“What would you look for, Owen? You said once you were trying to understand how their minds work. Pattern, order, some sort of unifying light. Is this what we’re supposed to come away with?”
He stared up at the unused loft, still tipped in his chair, holding the whiskey glass against his chest.
“What about the other island?” I said. “And there was the woman in the Wadi Rum.”
“I don’t know the details of these crimes. Hammers. This is all I know.”
“There was a murder in a Christian village in Syria. Some men lived in caves nearby. One of them tried to speak Aramaic. The initials of the victim were cut into the knife they used to slash him to death. Do you know anything about this?”
“I don’t know the victim’s name but l think I can tell you that his first and last names began with the same letter, and it was an M.”
“How do you know this?”
“The village is called Malula. It lies below vast protrusions of bedrock. I was there thirty years ago. There are inscriptions in the caves.”
“You’ve been keeping up to date. Been talking to them, haven’t you? What else do you know?”
“James, why attack me? Don’t you know helplessness when you see it? Look at the man who’s long since given up on himself. The man who hands himself over to the nearest mob. For what, I’m not certain.”
“Someone has to show an anger.”
“Consider that you’ve done the job. What else do I know about the cult? Basically what you know.”
“Do we assume these initials on the knife were in Aramaic? The cult seems to be intent on using the local language. I gather no one writes Aramaic these days.”
“I’m sure they used whatever older script they knew about or were able to find. The Aramaic M of eight hundred B.C. was a jagged letter, a forked lightning bolt, say. By the fourth century it had resolved itself into a graceful curve, bringing to mind the Arabic form, although this was still a long way off. Whatever version they engraved on the weapon, it was an M or double M.”
“Why did they use a knife, not a hammer?”
“A different unit or group. Possibly the weapon is irrelevant. They use what they can find. I don’t know.”
“No one has ever mentioned victims’ initials on the hammers that were found.”
“A different group, different practices.”
A silence. I kept waiting for him to say something about my discovery. I’d been elated, after all, when the notion came to me in that Roman theater of some alphabetic link between the victim’s name and the place where he or she was killed. A terrible elation. A knowledge bounded by emptiness and fear. What did I expect, congratulations?
I told Owen about Vosdanik, his references to holy men, myth and history; to the ancient custom of scratching an enemy’s name on a piece of pottery, then smashing it; to the excavation where he’d first heard of the cult; to religious visions and the language Jesus spoke.
“Nothing applies,” Owen said.
He knew about the vast excavation near the Sea of Galilee. It was at Megiddo, he said, which is thought to have been the biblical Armageddon. Allusive, suggestive. (I am alpha and omega.) Almost everything Vosdanik had said, almost any referential clue you might follow to the cult’s origin or purpose would seem to signify something, to have a sense, a content. Owen dismissed it all. They weren’t repeating ancient customs, they weren’t influenced by the symbolism of holy books or barren places, they weren’t making a plea to Egyptian or Minoan gods, or a sacrifice, or a gesture to prevent catastrophe.
But they weren’t the products of their own reveries either, the mass murderers we’ve come to know so well, the mass communicators, working outward from some private screen, conscious of an audience they might agreeably excite.
“We thought we knew this setting. The mass killer in his furnished room, in his century, feeding Gaines-burgers to a German shepherd. The news is full of settings, isn’t it, James? You said it yourself one night. Men firing from highway overpasses, attic rooms. Unconnected to the earth. By which I think you meant nonpolitical in the broad sense. Murders that drift away from us. What waste.”
We know those gaunt families whose night scoutings remind us so much of our childhood games. We know the stocking strangler, the gunman with sleepy eyes, the killer of women, the killer of vagrant old men, the killer of blacks, the sniper, the slasher in tight leather, the rooftop sodomist who hurls children into the narrow alley below. These things are in the literature, along with the screams of victims in some cases, which their murderers have thought instructive to put on tape.
Here, he said, we have a set of crimes that take us beyond all this. There is a different signature here, a deeper and austere calculation. The murders are so striking in design that we tend to overlook the physical act itself, the repeated pounding and gouging of a claw hammer, the blood mess washing out. We barely consider the victims except as elements in the pat tern.
There is nothing in the literature, there is nothing in the folk lore. And what a remarkable use for their humane impulses these cultists have found. Dispatching the feeble-minded outcast, the soon-to-die-anyway. Or is their choice of victims meant to be a statement that these acts are committed outside the accepted social structure, outside the easeful routines we ourselves inhabit, and should be paid scant mind. What has been lost? Think of it as an experiment in what the solitary mind does with its honed devices.
But this isn’t human nature as we might study it in some prowling boy found living alone in the jungle. The cult is made up of people who were educated at some point in their lives. They read, they converse with each other. They’re not totally cut off, are they?
So we talked, so we argued, taking roles, discarding them, the social theorist, the interrogator, the criminologist.
He reset his chair squarely on the floor as though to demonstrate something (I’m imagining this), demonstrate what it was we were trying to do in all this talk, set a premise for the act, put it at some fixed level with regard to the earth. But the next thing he said came out of nowhere or out of the wave forms of another occasion. Past moments had a way of surfacing in his face, in delayed recognitions, and he simply entered the spoken thought.
“I’ve always believed I could see things other people couldn’t. Elements falling into place. A design. A shape in the chaos of things. I suppose I find these moments precious and reassuring because they take place outside me, outside the silent grid, because they suggest an outer state that works somewhat the way my mind does but without the relentlessness, the predeterminative quality. I feel I’m safe from myself as long as there’s an accidental pattern to observe in the physical world.”
I asked him whether he had been feeling this need for a very long time, the need to be safe from himself. The question surprised him. He seemed to believe everyone felt it, all the time. When he was a boy, he said, the safe place was church, by a river, among cottonwoods, in the shade of the long afternoons. The choir loft extended across the back wall, the pews were narrow and hard. The minister gestured, sang and orated in the open promotional manner of a civic leader, sweat-stained and pink, a large man with white hair, booming by the river. Light fell across the pews with the mysterious softness of some remembered blessing, some serious happy glimpse of another world. It was a memory of light, a memory you could see in the present moment, feel in the warmth on your hands, it was light too dense to be an immediate account of things, it carried history in it, it was light filtered through dusty time. Christ Jesus was the double-edged name, half militant, half loving, that made people feel so good. The minister’s wife talked to him often, a narrow woman with freckled
hands.
When things went bad and they moved to the tallgrass prairie, his parents joined a pentecostal church. There was nothing safe about this church. It was old, plain, set in the middle of nowhere, it leaked in wet weather, let in everything but light. A congregation of poor people and most of them spoke in tongues. This was an awesome thing to see and hear. His father fell away to some distant place, his mother clapped and wept. People’s voices variously hummed and racketed, a hobbling chant, a search for melody and breath, bodies rising, attempts to heal a brokenness. Closed eyes, nodding heads. Standers and kneelers. The inside-outness of this sound, the tumbling out of found words, the arms raised, the tremble. What a strangeness to the boy in his lonely wanting, his need for safety and twice-seen light.
“Did you speak also?” I said.
His eyes in their familiar startledness, their soft awe, grew attentive now, as though he’d stopped to analyze what he was feeling and what it meant. No, he hadn’t spoken. He’d never spoken. He didn’t know the experience. Not that it was an experience confined to some narrow category, the rural poor, the dispossessed. Many kinds of people knew the experience. Dallas executives spoke in tongues in gospel meetings in the shimmering tinfoil Hyatt. Catholics knew the experience, and middle-class blacks of the charismatic renewal, and fellowships of Christian dentists. Imagine their surprise, these tax-paying people, he said, these veterans of patio barbecues, when they learned they were carriers of ecstasy.
But there was no reason it had to be carried out in a religious context. It was a neutral experience. You learn it, he said, or fail to learn it. It is learned behavior, fabricated speech, meaningless speech. It is a life focus for depressed people, according to the clinical psychologists.
He measured what he was saying like a man determined to be objective, someone utterly convinced of the soundness of a proposition but wondering in a distant way (or trying to remember) whether anything has been left out.
