by Don DeLillo
We floated past the Olympic Stadium.
“There’s something to it, you know. This sweeping arrogance. Overthrow, re-speak. What do they leave us with? Ethnic designations. Sets of initials. The work of bureaucrats, narrow minds. I find I take these changes quite personally. They’re a rescinding of memory. Every time another people’s republic emerges from the dust, I have the feeling someone has tampered with my child hood.”
“You can’t prefer Leopoldville to Kinshasa.”
“The Ministry of Slogans. The Ministry of Obscure Dialects.”
“Zimbabwe,” I said. “A drumbeat.”
“A drumbeat. That’s just it, you see.”
“That’s just what?”
“A drumbeat, a drumbeat.”
Our driver eased into a gray line of taxis stretching down the thoroughfare. A woman and maimed child walked along the divide from car to car, begging. The light changed. We were almost to the airport when Charles spoke again.
“I heard about the belly dancing.”
“Yes.”
“An interesting night, was it?”
“Do you know her?”
“I know her husband,” he said, and when he looked at me his jaw was tight and strong and I wondered if we were fixed in some near symmetry of friendships and adulteries. We walked through the doors into the towering noise of the terminal.
Two phone calls.
The first came the night I got back from Kuwait. The phone rang twice, then stopped. A little later it rang again. I hadn’t been able to sleep. It was two in the morning, shutters banging in the wind.
Ann’s voice.
“This will seem strange, I know.”
“Are you all right?”
“Well, yes, but I’ve been putting this off and putting it off.”
“Is Charles still in Beirut?”
“He stayed on. We have friends there. He’s fine. It isn’t Charles, it isn’t me exactly.”
For a moment I thought she wanted to invite herself over. I studied the wooden surface of the table the phone was on. In the stillness before she spoke again I concentrated intently.
“It’s about this man I’ve been seeing. It’s about him actually.”
I waited, then said, “Andreas. This is the man you’re talking about.”
She waited. “How interesting, James. Then you know.” Waited. “Yes, it’s about him I’ve been wanting to speak to you. Did I wake you? How stupid to call at this hour. But it’s been absolutely pressing in on me. I couldn’t sleep. I had to tell you, I finally decided. It may be pure imagination but what if it isn’t, I thought.” Waited. “How interesting, that you know.”
The voice was rough-edged and faint. She would be sitting beneath the African mask, a drink at her right hand.
“We’ve talked about you,” she said. “Every so often he asks. A question about your job one day. A question about your friends, your background, small things, falling more or less naturally into the conversation. At first I barely noticed. It was one subject among many. But lately I’ve begun to think his interest in you may be special. Something enters the conversation. A suspense, I think I’ll call it. There’s a curious silence in his waiting for my responses. And he watches me. I’ve begun to notice how he watches. He’s a watchful man, isn’t he?”
“I like Andreas.”
“He keeps bringing up your job. I’ve told him I haven’t the foggiest idea what you do. All right, he changes the subject. But eventually it comes up again, perhaps a bit more directly the second time, a bit clumsily even. ‘Why is his main office in Washington?’ ‘Andreas, I’ve no idea. Why don’t you ask him?’ Clearly he thinks you’re someone who merits attention.”
“He also thought I was David Keller, didn’t he, at dinner that night. You were right there. He had us mixed up, remember? I was the unscrupulous banker.”
“He mentions something called the Northeast Group.”
“That’s the firm I work for. It’s part of a monster corporation. A wholly owned subsidiary, I think is the phrase.”
“If I might ask, James, what exactly do you do? Not your company but you. When you travel.”
“Generally I do reviews. I examine figures, make decisions.”
“Well, see, that’s so vague.”
“The higher the post, the vaguer the job. The people with specific duties need someone to send their telexes to. I’m a presence.”
“He mentions all the travel you do. He mentions the tiny staff you have in Athens. just a secretary, is this correct? He wonders why your main office is in Washington and not New York. He does his best not to be direct. He rather worms these subjects into the conversation. The more I think about it, the more obvious it all seems. But I didn’t know how to tell you.”
“What else does he mention?”
“He mentions a book you wrote on military strategy.”
“Ghost-wrote. All I did was organize some facts. How the hell does he know about that?”
“That’s it, you see.”
“I wrote a lot of things, a dozen subjects.”
“I think he’s read the book.”
“Then he knows more than I do. I can’t remember a word of it. It was grammar and syntax to me. Why didn’t he mention it? I saw him a week ago.”
“Something enters the conversation when we talk about you.” Waiting. “Do you hear the wind?”
“He can’t be gathering information for someone. Nobody’s that amateurish. And there’s nothing to gather. What is there to gather?”
“Maybe I’m wrong,” she said. “We’ve talked about other people as well. Sometimes at length. I could be imagining.”
“I like Andreas. There’s a size to him. There’s a force. He has deep feelings and deep suspicions and he should have them, why shouldn’t he, when you consider events, when you consider history. I can’t see what he’d be up to, doing this. He’s with a multinational. They’re based in Bremen or Essen or someplace.”
“Bremen.”
“It doesn’t add up.”
“Well, then, I’m imagining?
“Unless he has friends on one of the left-wing papers here. Maybe he’s playing amateur spy. The Communist papers like to print the names of foreign correspondents they think are tied to U.S. intelligence.”
“It doesn’t seem like him.”
“No, it doesn’t.”
“What do I want to say? He’s so human?”
“Yes.”
“He is, you know. He has large feelings, as you say, but they pass very easily into a gentleness, a sympathy. How I would hate to think I was being used.”
“It’s not that way,” I said. “If he wanted information, he couldn’t possibly expect to get it without my finding out.”
“Unless he thought I wouldn’t tell you.”
“But you have.”
“Isn’t it awful? He thought I’d be so smitten.”
“It’s not that way. There’s an explanation. He said he’d call. I won’t even try to get in touch. I’ll wait for him to call.”
“He mentioned several other things in connection with your activities.”
“My activities? Do I have activities? I thought it was his activities we were concerned about.”
“The more I reflect, the more I think I’m imagining.”
“He said he’d call. I’ll give him every chance to explain before I bring it up. When will you see him again?”
“He said he’d call. But he hasn’t.”
“He will. What about Charles? What about the job in Beirut?”
“I don’t think so,” she said.
“Were you willing to go back?”
“There?” She sounded surprised that I would ask.
“Then why would he bother seeing about a job?”
“To take taxis across the Green Line. To light up in a bloody great smile when Israeli jets break the sound barrier. He loves the roar, the boom. To pretend to be unaffected when the guns start firing round the co
rner. That’s why he went.”
The worn voice began to acquire a certain disregarding impetus. Soon it would fall into monologue, an inner speech that did not need a context or listener.
“To sit there with his beer, chatting with a colleague as the mortars rain down or whatever they do. Absolutely unmoved. I think he lived for such moments. They were the high points of Lebanon, as demonstrations were the high points of Panama when we were there. During the worst of the anti-American demonstrations he’d put on his Union Jack lapel badge and go walking right into it. How I came to hate that badge. He truly felt he couldn’t be harmed, wearing it. And so he sits in someone’s office in Beirut when the militiamen are active. To betray no sign of emotion. To chat. What’s the point of getting excited, he liked to say to me. Truly believing there is good sense in this. As if getting excited had something to do with deciding to get excited, making a conscious decision to get excited. They’re out there hurling grenades, firing rockets. What’s the point of getting excited? What’s the point?”
The second call came from Del Nearing moments before I left for the office. She was in a phone booth off the main square in Argos, the Peloponnese, waiting for the Athens bus. She just thought I’d like to know.
We sat in the living room.
“Whose furniture?”
“Rented,” I said.
“What do you have to eat?”
“Nothing. We’ll go out.”
“When?”
“Eight-thirty, nine.”
“You live like me,” she said. “Hard to believe I’ll be home in a day or two. I actually enjoyed the bus trip here. The bus was going somewhere. I knew where it was going.”
“You lost weight.”
“California. I need to tone up my orgasm. What is this I’m drinking, Jim? Jeem, I should say.” I took this to be her pronunciation of the Arabic letter jim. “Did you have a nice day at the office, Jeem? Is this marble floor real marble, Jeem?”
She wore boots, jeans and a sweatshirt with the arms cut off. Her feet rested on the coffee table. She was drinking kumquat brandy, which I’d been trying to get rid of for months.
“Where is Frank?” I said.
“Where is Frank. All right, since you’re buying me dinner and letting me spend the night. Is that all right with you, Jeem? I spend the night? Separate rooms? Just so I don’t have to go to another hotel?”
“Of course.”
“Well, he’s still there. He’s crisscrossing the mountain. Andahl didn’t show up where he was supposed to. There was no meeting, no sign of him or them or anyone. The first week Frank kept saying he’d give it one more day. Pathetic. I really wanted to stay. I tried very hard. One more day, one more day. He started exploring the area north of the towers. Up where the range broadens and you lose the sea. Terrible roads, no roads at all. Rusty oak trees, gunshots all the time. I began to feel there was something deeply wasteful in all this. But what can you say to Frank once he’s in? First I went with him. Then I stayed in the hotel. The second week he didn’t say much of anything and neither did I. He kept finding another dirt track, another village. Asking people, making gestures, pointing to names on the map. I felt there was something dead, there was an emptiness at the center of all this. I tried to explain but I didn’t know how and he wasn’t listening anyway. So I just thought to hell with it. Let the man do what he has to. And I went to see about getting myself on out of there.”
“I wonder about Andahl, if they found him, if he decided to disappear.”
“Nazi backpackers. That’s all they are.”
“I think about the movie now and then. I see it at times. As Frank described it. Strong images. That landscape. He’ll never find them, we’ll never know if he was right.”
“You mean that it works as a film, the way they live?”
“Yes, that it fits the screen. I do see it at times, powerfully.”
“Film. Why do I want to throw up when I hear the term ‘personal film’? ‘He does personal films.’ ‘He makes personal statements.’ ‘He has a personal vision.’ “
“I knew they wouldn’t meet him. How could people like that be interested in somebody’s film, somebody’s book?”
“You were right. They were true to themselves.”
I noted the dry tone. I told her it was strange, how right I’d been. I’d been right all along. I figured out the pattern. I figured out Andahl was a runaway. I told Frank the cultists wouldn’t appear and they hadn’t appeared.
She looked at me in the dimness.
“What pattern?” she said.
“The way they work. The whole mechanism. The whole point. It’s the alphabet.”
“But you didn’t tell F rank.”
“No, I didn’t.”
“You kept it to yourself.”
“That’s right.”
We sat there. I liked watching the large room turn dark as evening deepened. She didn’t say anything. I thought she must be cold, being bare-armed, the heat only beginning to rise through the building. The phone rang twice.
“I’m not sure what was behind it,” I said. “I guess Kathryn. Whatever there was between them.”
“What was there between them?”
“I’m sure he talked about us, all three of us. You would know better than I.”
“All these years you’ve nursed this thing? Not letting either of them know you suspected an affair, or whatever you suspected? A night? An afternoon?”
“I let her know. She knows.”
“But when you had a chance to get back at him, you took it. You knew something he didn’t know, something important to him. How did it make you feel, Jeem, keeping the secret?”
“That’s part of it. The secret. It meant something to me, discovering the secret. I wasn’t in a hurry to pass it on. I felt this knowledge was special. It had to be earned. It was too important to be given away. He had to earn it. Owen Brademas wouldn’t tell him either. He only hinted to Frank. It would have been easy to tell him. But he didn’t tell him. The knowledge is special. Once you have it, you find yourself protective of it. It confers a cult hood of its own.”
We sat quietly for a while.
“All right. Do you want me to tell you what there was between them, what went on, if anything?”
“No,” I said.
“You’d rather nurse it along.”
“I’d rather not know. Simple as that.”
After dinner we returned to sit in the same chairs. I left the hall light on. She described her apartment, how it seemed these past months to be the only settled thing in her life, the only stillness. Small, furnished sparely, in soft light, waiting. A woman’s things. She might have been the woman who comes walking into that room across the courtyard, the serene space l had watched from my balcony. Maybe this is why I went to sit on the sofa, leaning toward Del to hold her face in my hands, framing the perfect features, the wide mouth and tilted eyes, the cropped hair tailing over her ears.
“You like me, Jeem? Maybe you think I give you good time. Tell me what you like. You like dirty, you like filthy? What we do, Jeem? Say to me in little words. I don’t do all the words. Some words I can do, some I don’t like to do so much. They are very big, these words, hard to do. But some men like. You must tell me, Jeem. We do big words or little words?”
“I thought all the words were little.”
“You are funny man, Jeem. They did not tell me this in the mountains.”
“He won’t stay two days,” I said. “The search is as good as over.”
“Why this is, Jeem?”
“You’re not there anymore. You go, he goes. He’ll do a certain amount of serious bitching and moaning. Then he’ll give in to it. He’ll give in to knowing he has to have you with him. That’s when he’ll pack and leave.”
“I think I must be real woman, if it is true what you say.”
Deadpan, a humorless voice. The moment was false. It had a specious feel to it. I realized I’d approached her, touched t
he edges of her face, moved my thumbs across her lips (listening to the whorish voice) not for the touch itself or because I wanted something simple from her, the scant body folded in mine. Her voice went on, mocking both of us. I sat back in the sofa, my feet on the table at a right angle to hers, my hands folded behind my neck. She folded her hands behind her neck.
I’d wanted to strike at Volterra. Sex with his woman. How primally satisfying. I didn’t tell her this. She would be unsurprised, prone to make a joke, invent another voice as I’d invented voices during the week of the 27 Depravities. But it pained me to be silent. I always want to confess to women.
Completing your revenge. Hiding it even from yourself at times. Not willing to be seen taking your small mean everyday revenge.
She had one last thing to say before we went to our separate beds. If there was something I hadn’t told Volterra, there was also something he had kept from me.
“He had no plans to shoot in sequence except for the ending. The ending would be the last thing he’d shoot. He told me how he’d do it. He wanted a helicopter. He wanted the cult members and their victim arranged for the murder. The pattern has been followed to this point, the special knowledge you talk about. The old shepherd is in place and the murderers are in place, with sharpened stones in their hands. Frank shoots down from as close in as the helicopter can safely get. He wants the wind blast, the blast from the rotor blades. They murder the old man. They kill him with stones. Cut him, beat him. The dust is flying, the bushes and scrub are flattened out by the rotor. No sound in this scene. He wants the wind blast only as a visual element. The severe angle. The men clutched together. The turbulence, the silent rippling of the bushes and stunted trees. I can quote him almost word for word. He wants the frenzy of the rotor wash, the terrible urgency, but soundless, totally. They kill him. They remain true to themselves, Jeem. That’s it. It ends. He doesn’t want the helicopter gaining altitude to signal the end is here. He doesn’t want the figures to fade into the landscape. This is sentimental. It just ends. It ends up-close with the men in a circle, hair and clothes blowing, after they finish the killing.”
I stayed in the living room for a while after she went to bed. I thought of Volterra in the mountains, hunched in his khaki field jacket, the deep pockets full of maps, the sky massing behind him. Sentimental. I didn’t believe a word she’d said. He wouldn’t follow it that far. He’d followed other things, gone the limit, abused people, made enemies, but this hovering was implausible to me, his camera clamped to the door frame. The aerial master, the filmed century. He wouldn’t let them kill a man, he wouldn’t film it if they did. We have to draw back at times, study our own involvement. The situation teaches that. Even in his drivenness he would see this, I believed.
