by Don DeLillo
The desert town was like the land reshaped in blocks, some odd work of the wind as it transports sand. Singh cupped his hands to drink from an earthenware jug. One of the other men hunkered in the dust. From this distance the town was silent most of the time. Owen drank. When it was dark and a wind fell from the hills he watched the ashes stir and blow around the improvised spit. The night sky appeared, the scattershot of blazing worlds.
“Who is the man you’re waiting for?”
“What man?”
“Emmerich said.”
“Atcha. A crazy. Bonkers, you know? Wandering for years in these parts.”
“Is he close to the town? How do you know he’ll head that way?”
Singh laughing. “He is bloody close, yes.”
“How do you know?”
“Just seen him. You just done ate his goat.”
“An old man with a beard, more or less in rags?”
“That him, mon. He keep walking. It don’t do him no good to get no older. He on his last legs for sure. He have to sit down and wait for vulture. Vulture do the business of the desert.”
“You’re waiting, then, until he enters town.”
“You know this. You’re a member now.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Of course you’re a member.”
“No, I’m not.”
“Damn fool. Of course you are.”
This time it was Owen who interrupted, breaking off the narrative to reach down for the booklet I’d left propped against the copper tray, the primer on Kharoshthi. He returned it to its place in the tray. Gradations of brown and gray. Light retreating to ward the far wall. A certain number of objects, a certain placing. He sat looking into his hands.
“What does Singh mean by ‘the world’?” I said.
“Everything, everybody, whatever is said or can be said. Although not these exactly. The thing that encompasses these. Maybe that’s it.”
“What happened next?”
“I’m tired, James.”
“Try to go on.”
“It’s important to get it right, to tell it correctly. Being precise is all that’s left. But I don’t think I can manage it now.”
“You were with them. Did you learn their name?”
He looked up.
“This knowledge has managed to elude me, although I tried my damnedest to pry it out of them, wheedle it out by whatever means. Even after Singh told me I was a member, he wouldn’t tell me the name of the cult.”
“He was taunting.”
“Yes, he began to seek me out to amuse himself, fortify himself.
I was their strength in an odd way and also their observer and tacit critic, the first they’d ever had, which was another indication they were near the end.”
I told Owen about the time I’d spent in the Mani, my meeting with Andahl. I told him about the massive rock on which two words had been painted, then tarred over. Andahl had painted the words, I said. It was his way of breaking clear. I told Owen I thought these words were the cult’s name.
“What words were they?”
“Ta Onómata.”
Looking at me with curious wonder. “Damn it. Damn it, _James.” Beginning to laugh. “You may be right. I think you could be right. It makes an eerie kind of sense, doesn’t it? The Names.”
“I’ve been consistently right about the cult. Andahl, the name, the pattern. And I found them almost as soon as I entered the Mani, although I didn’t know it at first. It scares hell out of me, Owen. My life is going by and I can’t get a grip on it. It eludes me, it defeats me. My family is on the other side of the world. Nothing adds up. The cult is the only thing I seem to connect with. It’s the only thing I’ve been right about.”
“Are you a serious man?”
The question stopped me cold. I told him I didn’t understand what he meant.
“I’m not a serious man,” he said. “If you wanted to compose a mighty Homeric text on my life and fortunes, I might suggest a suitable first line. ‘This is the story of a man who was not serious.’ “
“You’re the most serious man I know.”
He laughed at me and made a gesture of dismissal. But I wasn’t ready to let it go just yet.
“What do you mean then? Do you think I’m not serious because I’ve written insignificant things, miscellaneous things, because I work for a sprawling corporation?”
“You know that’s not what I mean.”
“It’s important for me to have an ordinary job. Paperwork. A desk and daily tasks. In my curious way I try to cling to people and to work. I try to assert a basic right or need.”
“Of course,” he said. “I didn’t mean the question as a challenge. I’m sorry. Forgive me, James.”
We fell into a silence.
“Do you realize what we’re doing?” I said finally. “We’re submerging your narrative in commentary. We’re spending more time on the interruptions than on the story.”
He poured water from the jug.
“I feel like someone in that mob of yours,” I told him. “The mob that grows impatient with the professional teller of tales. Let’s go on with it. Where are the people in the story?”
“It gets harder as we approach the end. I want to delay. I don’t want to get on with it at all.”
“Show us their faces, tell us what they said.”
Emmerich was tracking the victim. He reported that the old man’s wanderings were sometimes predictable. He tended to head west for part of the day, then northeast, then west again, then southeast. Was he describing an hourglass in the sand? At other times he roamed the hills, lived for a day or two with camel herders or one of the wandering tribes, beyond all roads. In sandstorms he sat still, as Emmerich did if he was in the area, his face covered in a head-scarf as the sun paled, the sky vanished, the wind began to keen. The man was very old, his range limited. Time, weather, his faltering gait suggested he would approach Hawa Mandir in less than two days, goatless, hungry, muttering. Bern was vomiting blood. Three or four times a day Owen removed the hatch-cover and spoke to her. She was beyond hunger, he assumed, drifting into a spiral of irreversible attrition. He spoke softly and easily. He always had something to say. Something came to mind the moment he bent to the opening. He was visiting, he was actually chatting. He wanted to soothe her, to bathe her in his human voice. He believed she understood, although there was no sign. He brought her water once a day. She could no longer hold down water but he continued to bring it, easing through the opening and trying to get her to drink from his cupped hands. Her eyes grew daily in their sockets, her face began to fold into her skull. He sat across from her, letting his mind wander. His mind had begun to wander all the time.
Singh rubbed the stones together.
“Lovely day, what? Coolish, or would you say warmish? Depends, doesn’t it?”
He made quote marks in the air, raising the index and middle finger of each hand to set off the words coolish and warmish. He studied one of the stones. Atcha. Okay.
“What is his name?” Owen said.
“Hamir Mazmudar.”
“Does it mean anything?”
Singh laughed wildly, pounding the stones together. When Emmerich arrived he was gray with blown sand. He looked at Singh and pointed toward the distant fields. A figure came out of the millet, moving slowly toward town. Large birds turned in the darkening sky. Owen watched the pale moon rise. The moon was his proper body, sad and dashed.
“But he’s not so far gone.”
“Sick man,” Emmerich said.
“Not so sick. He walks for days on end.”
“His memory is gone.”
“It was all we could do,” Singh said, “to find out the bloke’s proper name.”
“Once your memory goes, you’re an empty body.”
“There’s no point anymore, is there?”
“You’re a receptacle for your own waste,” Emmerich said.
“From the sigmoid flexure to the anal canal.”
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br /> “You know the program. You know how it has to end.”
“You recognize?
“You see the rightness of it,” Singh said.
“It reaches you, doesn’t it?”
“It’s valid.”
“It’s true to the premise, isn’t it? It follows logically upon the premise.”
“It’s clean, you know? Nothing clings to the act. No hovering stuff.”
“It’s a blunt recital of the facts,” Emmerich said. “We can put it that way if you like.”
“What would you like?”
“lt’s sound, it’s binding.”
“It’s utterly bloody right. I mean we’re bloody ‘ere, ain’t we? No use ‘anging about, is there? Time we nipped into town, i’n it?”
Emmerich stripped, poured water from a brass pot over his face and body, then put on a coarse shirt, loose drawstring pants, an old tribal surcoat and round felt cap. Singh came out of his silo. The smoke of cooking fires hung over the town. He went with Emmerich to the bin where the other two men were enclosed. He did not look at Owen or speak to him. English was the binding tongue of the subcontinent. The ancient Arabs wrote on bones. Singh emerged in clothes that belonged to the others, a striped robe and dark sash under a military tunic. He looked princely and insane. Emmerich followed him toward the darkening town, the one color, formed and ordered. Hakara is the name of the Sanskrit h. Makara is the m.
Owen entered one of the silos and sat in the dark. It was the smallest of the structures, five feet high, and he watched the night sky rapidly deepen, stars pinching through the haze. That was the universe tonight, a rectangle two and a half feet high, three feet long. At the lower edge of the opening he could see a narrow band of earth losing its texture to the night. Council Grove and Shawnee. The old storage elevators were frame construction until they switched to silos, see the Greek, a pit for storing grain, about the mid-1920s he thought it was. Lord the machines were wonderful, the combines and tractors, those stark contraptions flailing and bumping through the bluestem grass. He was lonely for machines. The boxy little Fords and Chevrolets. The dry goods delivery truck. The cross-country buses, a hundred and twenty horsepower. HORN OK PLEASE. He was a waterboy in the fields with a straw hat, that’s what they wore, and sturdy overalls. It is necessary to remember correctly. This is the earth we dream and childishly color. The spaces. The solitary church standing in weeds. The men in overalls, with wind-beaten faces, clear-eyed, gathered outside a feed store. We want to get it right.
An enclosed wooden stairway juts out from the side of the feed store. Someone peers up. Beyond a line of raked cirrus come the towering brown combers of a midsummer rain, flat-based mounds of cloud with multiple summits. There’s an element of suspense in the air. The air is charged and dense. The men in overalls stand watching. There’s always a period of curious fear between the first sweet-smelling breeze and the time when the rain comes cracking down.
It is Owen who is peering skyward. He moves away from the cluster of silent men. Late again. They would be waiting at home. On the porch of an old frame house the woman sits in an arrow back chair as the first heavy drops hit the street, raising dust in gauzy mare’s-tails. Poker-faced, retaining a grudging faith in the life beyond. The life beyond would not be easy or pleasurable as she saw it. These things were not part of her system of beliefs. But it would be just, it would be consistent with moral right, it would offer a recompense for these days and years of getting by, scraping together, finding and losing homes. She limped, his mother, and he never knew why.
The man comes out to wait, just washed, clean-shirted, a rubbing of earth, nonetheless, plainly evident in the seams of his face and hands, hard earth, irremovable. He stands looking toward the noise of the storm, one shoulder higher than the other, a way of standing and walking, common enough among men who plowed and stooped and carried posts and dug post-holes. Owen thought it was related in some way to his mother’s limp.
In his memory he was a character in a story, a colored light. The bin was perfect, containing that part of his existence, enclosing it whole. There was recompense in memories too. Recall the bewilderment and ache, the longing for a thing that’s out of reach, and you can begin to repair your present condition. Owen believed that memory was the faculty of absolution. Men developed memories to ease their disquiet over things they did as men. The deep past is the only innocence and therefore necessary to retain. The boy in the sorghum fields, the boy learning names of animals and plants. He would recall exactingly. He would work the details of that particular day.
The church is fifteen miles out of town. The only structure visible. Seeing it from a distance he doesn’t react the way he would to a farmhouse, say, with its sprung cluster of trees set against the open sky. Small groupings of objects, breaking the deep plane of the land, this house and barn, these cottonwoods and sheds and stone walls, seem to beat against the distances, the endless dusty winds, resourceful and brave. The church is different, a lone building with a decaying gray facade, pitched roof, steeple without a bell. There are no boundaries, no trees or stream. It has no telling effect. It is lost in the sky behind it.
A couple of old motorcars sit in the weeds, World War I vintage, skimpy, with treadless tires. In time the Pontiac hearse comes off the dirt road, jouncing, four-door, a once grand but now mud-spattered vehicle, gravely dented, too ramshackle and complaining to transport the dead. Rain is gunning down on the fenders and roof. (In his memory he is at the church, waiting, as well as inside the car, crammed between the door and a woman who smells of sour milk.) The doors open and people begin edging out, including the mother, father and the boy, the squinting boy of ten or so, already growing out of his clothes, growing toward the world unwillingly. He stands by the car door, waits for the lady and an old man to emerge, then shuts the door and turns toward the church, pausing in the rain before he follows the others in.
The benches are old, the altar a plain table partly stripped of varnish. A woman holds an infant, facing out, against her breasts. There is an imprint on the wall that marks the absent upright piano. The man who will preach today is young and dark-haired and has about him a hard-set radiance. He is here to determine things, to get these people right with God. Even if he were dressed in farm clothes and seated on one of the benches, it would be easy to tell him apart from the others. The marginal farmers, the migrant workers, the odd-jobs men, the invalids, the half-breeds, the widowed, the silent, the blank. Less than thirty people present today, some of them having come on foot. They seem the off-lineage of some abrupt severance or dispossession. There is something emptied-out and loose-jointed about them. Owen notices the undiscerning gazes and draws a simple moral. Hardship makes the world obscure.
These early memories were a fiction in the sense that he could separate himself from the character, maintain the distance that lent a pureness to his affection. How else could men love themselves but in memory, knowing what they know? But it was necessary to get the details right. His innocence depended on this, on the shapes and colors of this device he was building, this child’s model of a rainy day in Kansas. He had to remember correctly. The resolute young man strokes the air as he speaks, then cuts it with emphatic gestures. In this room of bare wood and dying light he is a power, a stalking force. They are here to wrestle with each other, he says. They will get right, see the light and yield, not to him but to the Spirit. When we talk about the fallen wonder of the world, we don’t mean the forests and the plains and the animals. We don’t mean the scenery, do we? He tells them they will talk as from the womb, as from the sweet soul before birth, before blood and corruption.
There are many silences in his discourse. All the promises are spaced. He is building a suspense, an expectancy. Gusts of rain are washing through the wheatfields of the high plains. Let me hear that beautiful babbling brook, he says. And he watches them, urging silently now. Someone mumbles something, a man in the front row. Sky is opened, the preacher says. Rain is coming down.
Do whatever your tongue finds to do. Seal the old language and loose the new.
The boy is spellbound by the young man’s intensity and vigor. It is startling, compelling. He listens to the clear voice, watches the man roll up his shirt-sleeves and shoot a hand in this and that direction, touching people, squeezing their flesh, shaking them hard. Owen’s mother is saying Jesus Jesus Jesus, softly, in her seat, in awe, exalted. There is a stirring up front, an arm flying into the air. The preacher turns, walking toward the altar, talking along with the man, exhorting. He does not rush, he does not raise his voice. The noise and hurry are in Owen’s mind. The preacher turns again to face the congregation, watches the man in the front row get to his feet. Owen’s father gets to his feet.
Get wet, the preacher says. Let me hear that babbling brook. What am I talking about but freedom? Be yourself, that’s all it is. Be free in the Spirit. Let the Spirit knock you free. You start, the Spirit takes over. Easiest thing in the world. That’s all it is. jump in, get wet. I can hear the Spirit in you, I can hear the Spirit driving. Let it move and shake you. Get ready, it’s round the bend, it’s turning the corner, it’s running the rapids, it’s coming like nobody’s business. I want to hear that beautiful babbling brook.
A silence. The sense of expectation is tremendous. The boy is chilled. Time seems to pause whenever the preacher does. When he speaks, everything starts again, everything moves and jumps and lives. Only his voice can drive the meeting forward.
Time to get wet, he says. Get wet time.
