by Don DeLillo
It was interesting how she’d made me defend him to myself (as Kathryn used to do, defend him). Not that Del had intended this. I didn’t know what she’d intended. The lie had a violence of its own, a cunning force she might have meant to direct against any or all of us, ironic, ornately motivated. How rich it was, a setting for any number of interpretations. I would have to reflect a long time before I could even begin to see what she had in mind, what complex human urging caused her to invent the story.
The story, if I thought it was true, would only make me want to fix a drink, feeling obscurely pleased.
When I passed the guest room I saw the door was ajar, the lamp still on, and I paused to look inside. In jeans and sleeveless shirt, her feet bare, she knelt on the floor. Her upper body was bent well forward, chest against knees. Her legs were together, but tocks resting on her heels. The arms pointed back along the floor, palms up. A compact gathering of curves. The curve of the head and upper body folded into the curve of the upper legs. The curve of the back and shoulders extended to her hands. The arms repeated the curve of the lower legs. Her head touched the floor. She remained that way for a considerable time. In the morning she told me the exercise was called Pose of a Child.
I joined David, running in the woods. Rains had turned the high grass solid green. We ran along paths on different levels of the hill, moving in and out of sight of each other. His bright clothes flashed through the spindly pines.
Mrs. Helen was patient with my attempts to conjugate difficult verbs. She lectured on the niceties of pronunciation and stress, the correctness of this or that form in a given situation. We sat with our cups of tea, our embossed paper napkins. It seemed to me that the language as she taught it existed mainly as a medium of politeness between people, with odd allowances made for the communication of ideas and feelings. We ate English biscuits and talked about her family. Across the room the telex clattered numbers from Amman.
I found myself scanning the English-language newspapers for stories of assault, suicide and murder. I did the same thing when I went on a ten-day trip, checking the local papers, wherever I happened to be, for items from the daily files of the police. I found myself trying to match the name of the victim with the name of the place where the crime was committed. Initials. The victim’s initials, the first letter of the word or words in the place-name. I don’t know why I did this. I wasn’t looking for the cult, I wasn’t even looking for murder victims especially. Any crime would do, any act that tended to isolate a person in a particular place, just so the letters matched.
Again I stopped drinking, this time in Istanbul. In Athens I went running every day.
THE DESERT
11
In this vast space, which seems like nothing so much as a container for emptiness, we sit with our documents always ready, wondering if someone will appear and demand to know who we are, someone in authority, and to be unprepared is to risk serious things.
The terminal at each end is full of categories of inspection to which we must submit, impelling us toward a sense of inwardness, a sense of smallness, a self-exposure we are never prepared for no matter how often we take this journey, the buried journey through categories and definitions and foreign languages, not the other, the sunlit trip to the east which we thought we’d decided to make. The decision we’d unwittingly arrived at is the one that brings us through passport control, through the security check and customs, the one that presents to us the magnetic metal detector, the baggage x-ray machine, the currency declaration, the customs declaration, the cards for embarkation and disembarkation, the flight number, the seat number, the times of departure and arrival.
It does no good to say, as I’ve done a hundred times, it’s just another plane trip, I’ve made a hundred. It’s just another terminal, another country, the same floating seats, the documents of admission, the proofs and identifications.
Air travel reminds us who we are. It’s the means by which we recognize ourselves as modern. The process removes us from the world and sets us apart from each other. We wander in the ambient noise, checking one more time for the flight coupon, the boarding pass, the visa. The process convinces us that at any moment we may have to submit to the force that is implied in all this, the unknown authority behind it, behind the categories, the languages we don’t understand. This vast terminal has been erected to examine souls.
It is not surprising, therefore, to see men with submachine guns, to see vultures squatting on the baggage vehicles set at the end of the tarmac in the airport in Bombay when one arrives after a night flight from Athens.
All of this we choose to forget. We devise a counter-system of elaborate forgetfulness. We agree on this together. And out in the street we see how easy it is, once we’re immersed in the thick crowded paint of things, the bright clothes and massed brown faces. But the experience is no less deep because we’ve agreed to forget it.
Late in the day I walked with Anand Dass in the streets near my hotel. He looked heavier, moving through the soft air in a Michigan State t-shirt and faded jeans. He kept taking my arm as we crossed streets and I wondered why this seemed so curiously apt. Could these drivers be worse than Greeks? I was woozy from lack of sleep, that was all, and it probably showed.
“Seeing to details. Mainly interviewing people. My boss has already set things in motion.”
“So this is new territory,” he said.
“South Asia and so on. This will be a regional headquarters, separate from Athens once we get it going.”
“But you’re not coming out permanently.”
“Do you need a listener? Someone to talk to about the life and travels of Owen Brademas?”
“This is precisely the fact.” Clutching my forearm and laughing. “The man inspires comment, you know.”
“How many times did you see him?”
“He stayed with us. Three days. And three letters since. I didn’t know I cared for the man. But I read his letters again and again. My wife was fascinated by him. The worst field director in my experience. This is Owen. He digs like an amateur.”
Under a movie billboard we passed a group of North Americans in saffron robes and running shoes, their heads shaved. They stood by a sound truck handing out booklets. What could I say? They looked deeply surprised in their baldness and blotched skin, amazed to be who they were, to be real and here. The loudspeaker carried flute music and chanting voices through the noise and fumes of the yellow-top taxis.
“What are you teaching?”
“I am teaching the Greeks. I am looking at Hellenistic and Roman influences on Indian sculpture. Not a large subject but interesting. Figures of Buddha. I am getting very interested in figures of Buddha. I want to go to Kabul to see the Buddha of the Great Miracle.”
“You don’t want to go to Kabul, Anand.”
“It’s a transitional Buddha.”
“You know who you sound like.”
“Owen is in Lahore now. I sound just like him, don’t I? Do you go there at all?”
“I go everywhere twice. Once to get the wrong impression, once to strengthen it.”
“Do you want to see him? I’ll give you an address.”
“No. It will only depress me.”
“Let me give you an address. He went to Lahore to learn Kharoshthi script.”
I tried to think of something funny to say. Anand laughed and grabbed my arm and we hurried across the street toward the Gateway of India, where people were gathering as night fell, street musicians, beggars, vendors of fruit drinks and sweets. “Do you have plans then?”
“I find I’m ready to go almost anywhere and just as ready to stay where I am.”
“This is a strange profession. Risk analysis. Your local man will be kept very busy. Believe it.”
“I like the idea of someone saying to me, ‘West Africa.’ Not that I’d necessarily accept. But I like the immensity of it. The immensity of landscape, of possibility. It’s bizarre, how opened up my life has become. ‘Think about
it,’ they’ll say. But there’s nothing to think about. That’s what’s odd.”
We walked through one of the archways and stood above the sea steps. A small girl followed with a baby in her arms. The crowd slowly grew.
“You should spend more time in India.”
“No. Four days. That’s enough.”
“Tomorrow you’ll come to dinner. Rajiv will want to hear about Tap. He received a letter, you know. Written in Ob.” The soft air made me sad.
“And we’ll talk, you and I, about Owen.”
Soft and moist, a hanging heat. People still came, talking, looking out to sea. They stood around the horn player, the man with the hand drums. There were sellers of invisible commodities, names whispered in the dark. Children kept appearing from the edges, silently crossing some margin or dividing line, cradling the shriveled infants. People drifted toward the Gateway from the street along the sea wall, from the inner streets, the edges, to stand in the warm night together and wait for a breeze. The sound of bicycle bells stuck briefly to the air.
Everything clings.
She came at me with the potato peeler, wearing my L.L. Bean chamois cloth shirt, forest green, with long tuck-in tails. I stood there half embarrassed. It was in her face, absolutely, that she would kill me. A rage that will astonish me forever. I evaded the lunge, then stood thoughtfully against the cabinet, my hands tucked into my pants, thumbs showing, like a quarterback on a cold day, waiting to rehuddle.
Ann and Lindsay came down the steps of the British Council, carrying sacks of apples and books. I hailed them from a parkside table in the square. We ordered coffee and watched stooped-over people call their destinations into the windows of passing cabs.
Lindsay carried fiction, Ann biography. I lifted an apple from one of the bags and took a lusty bite. It made them smile and I wondered if they interpreted the act as I’d instinctively meant it, meant it in a totally unformed way. To be back again among familiar things and people, alive to the levels of friendship a man enjoys with married women of a certain kind, the wives he is half in love with. Somewhere in the theft and biting of an apple there are elements of innocent erotic wishfulness and other things hard to name.
“There’s a new wall slogan I’ve been seeing,” Lindsay said.
“With a date attached?”
“Greece is risen,” Ann said. “And the date is the date the colonels took power. Sometime in sixty-seven.”
“Four twenty-one. Or twenty-one four, as they do it here.”
“Then there’s the other side of the argument. Was it three weeks ago? Someone killed the head of the riot police.”
“I must have missed that,” I said.
“They killed his driver too. Another date. Charles said the assassins left a calling card. November seventeen. Students against the dictatorship. That was seventy-three, I think.”
“David’s in Turkey again.”
This distracted remark, a remark that seemed to drift away from us, so softly spoken and bare, a remark that Lindsay made as an automatic response to talk of violence, prompted us to change the subject. I told them about a letter I’d received from Tap. He liked the sound the water made in the shower when it hit the plastic lining of the shower curtain. That was the letter. Lindsay said David’s kids sent videotapes. She also said she had a class to teach and hurried off after the first cup of coffee.
We knew what we wanted to discuss but waited a long moment, allowing Lindsay’s departure to become complete. A crouched man jogged alongside a taxi, answering the driver’s hand-twisting gesture with the name of some district to the north.
“I saw him yesterday,” Ann said. “He called and we had a drink.”
“I knew he’d get in touch.”
“He’s been away. Tried to call me apparently. He was in London.”
“See? Business. That’s all.”
“Yes. They’re moving there. The whole region apparently?”
“I thought it might be that.”
“So I suppose that will be the end of that. A relief actually. Doubly so.”
“Also a reversal.”
“Yes, I’m the one who’s supposed to be dragged off to yet another distant posting. Torn from the arms of love. I’m almost overwhelmed by relief. Go to London, go to Sydney. What a surprise it is, to feel this way. Why is it I have to discover these things as I go along? As events wheel about me like buzzards? Why don’t I know, in advance, just once, how I’ll feel about a certain thing? I hate surprises. I’m too old. I want to wear a housecoat for the rest of my life.”
“It’ll take more than that.”
“Shut up.”
“You’ll need to thicken your ankles and wear slippers without backs or sides. You’ll need to be blowzy. Thirty pounds heavier. A little bloated, a little unkempt.”
“My inner nature,” she said. “Wearing flip-flops. It’s perfect.”
“Standing around ruddy-faced, all your weight on one leg, your hip jutting out.”
“Don’t look at my hands. I have old fingers.”
“It was all conversation. That’s all. He’s a decent man. His flaws are part of a moral seriousness. Even when he was being completely unreasonable, I had to admire him for it and like him for it. Maybe he had some private suspicions he wanted cleared up. That’s all. Talk. His true mission in life.”
“Did you tell Charles about us?”
“Yes.”
“I thought you might have.”
“It wasn’t an easy position I was in. It never has been. I wanted to shock him a little. Make it real to him, dispel the fog he was disappearing into. I didn’t like knowing something he didn’t know about his own wife.”
“Anyway, that’s that.”
“We need Lindsay to help us understand all this. She wouldn’t have to comment. Only sit and gaze.”
“Already I begin to see what an odd match we were.”
“Happens all the time.”
“ ‘What do they see in each other?’ “
“But isn’t there something rich and living in all these entanglements, the way we’ve mingled our lives, all of us, chaotically or not?”
“Thank God for books,” she said.
Biography. It was time I was getting to the office. We said goodbye at the corner, taking each other’s hands in the way people do who want to press gladness into the flesh at the end of an uncertain time. Then I crossed the street and headed west.
Silent. The rotor wash. The rippling trees. Dust spinning around them. Their hair and clothes blowing. The frenzy.
The room with its stone hearth, marble font, its ferns and fan palms and village rugs was devised by Lindsay to make her husband feel he had put behind him, at least for a time, all airports and travel. At regular intervals she apologized for the size of the place. The marble balustrade on the terrace, the glass wall producing a sunset, the ship painting from Hydra still unhung in a corner. Too large, she’d say, letting her hands swing out. Too long, too tall, too grand. Not one of life’s pressing dilemmas, we reply. But we have to remember that queasiness of this kind has always been a form of middle-class grace, especially when it arises from a feeling of privilege that is binding, privilege that does not allow easy denial, and Lindsay had arrived here, the new young wife, some weeks after David found the apartment. The place made her uneasy. It made her feel, among other things, that whatever risks David ran in places like Lebanon and Turkey were connected to the size of this room.
He was playing his collection of Pacific jazz records, a nice relic of the fifties with their original cover paintings, the odd cello and flute. Roy Hardeman showed up, here for two days of meetings and wearing new glasses, oversized and squarish. We decided we’d have one more drink and go to dinner. An early night, Lindsay said. We needed an early night.
Hardeman’s attitude, as uninvited guest, was one of temporary deference, a studious waiting for the host, the hostess, the good friend to approach some topic that might give him a chance to reason and spea
k competitively. He didn’t have to wait long.
David said, “I keep reading about tribes or hordes or peoples who came sweeping out of Central Asia. What is it about Central Asia that makes us want to say that people came sweeping out of it?”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“Why don’t we say the Macedonians came sweeping out of Europe? They did. Alexander in particular. But we don’t say that. Or the Romans or the Crusaders.”
“Do you think it’s a racist term?” Hardeman said.
“White people established empires. Dark people came sweeping out of Central Asia.”
“What about the Aryans?” Hardeman said. “We don’t say the Aryans came sweeping out of Central Asia. They filtered down, they migrated or they simply arrived.”
“Exactly. This is because the Aryans were light-skinned. Light-skinned people filter down. Dark people come sweeping out. The Turks came sweeping out. The Mongols. The Bactrians. They came in waves. Wave after wave.”
“All right. But your original premise is that Central Asia is a place out of which people come sweeping. Now is it only dark people who come sweeping out of Central Asia or is it simply that Central Asia is a place out of which people of any color might come sweeping, with the exception of the Aryans? Are we talking about race, language or geography?”
“l think there’s something about Central Asia that makes us want to say that people came sweeping out of it but there is also the fact that these people tend to be dark-skinned. You can’t separate the two things.”
