by Don DeLillo
Mrs. Helen was at her desk, getting ready to leave for the day. She’d taken to wearing high-necked blouses or silk scarves to conceal the ridges at her throat. I told her what I’d learned. The bluebird scarf around her neck gave this news a faint poignancy. I said I was leaving the firm without delay and suggested it might be a good idea for her to do the same. Someone might soon turn up, an official of the government, a journalist, a man with a quantity of explosives.
She said to me, “Pĕ pĕ pĕ pĕ pĕ pĕ pĕ.”
But the next day I was back in the office, drinking tea and swiveling slowly in my chair. A look at our files now and then. Maybe that’s all it involved. Data for the analysts. All those finely tuned calculations of ours, the grids of virgin numbers. It seemed almost innocent, really, as I turned it in my mind. Rowser had let them see our facts and figures—figures we’d gathered openly, by and large. But I couldn’t manage to extend the seeming meagerness of the crime to my own blind involvement. Those who engaged knowingly were less guilty than the people who carried out their designs. The unwitting would be left to ponder the consequences, to work out the precise distinctions involved, the edges of culpability and regret. What Rowser received in return for his benefactions I didn’t know or care. Maybe he was an agency regular, maybe just an asset or higher type dupe.
If America is the world’s living myth, then the CIA is America’s myth. All the themes are there, in tiers of silence, whole bureaucracies of silence, in conspiracies and doublings and brilliant betrayals. The agency takes on shapes and appearances, embodying whatever we need at a given time to know ourselves or unburden ourselves. It gives a classical tone to our commonly felt emotions. Drinking tea, spinning in the quiet room. I felt a dim ache, a pain that seemed to carry toward the past, disturbing a number of surfaces along the way. This mistake of mine, or whatever it was, this failure to concentrate, to occupy a serious center—it had the effect of justifying everything Kathryn had ever said about me. Every dissatisfaction, mild complaint, bitter grievance. They were all retroactively correct. It was that kind of error, unlimited in connection and extent, shining a second light on anything and everything. In the way I sometimes had of looking at things as she might look at them, l saw myself as the object of her compassion and remnant love. Yes, she’d decided to feel sorry for me, to forgive me for the current lapse if not the others. This cheered me up considerably.
Sooner or later I would have to pick up the phone and undertake a delicate exchange with Ann Maitland. I called just before noon, a time she was likely to be home, Charles out walking. But there was no answer. They were in Mycenae, I realized, listening to the wind.
In three or four weeks Tap would be out of school. I planned to meet him at my father’s house in Ohio, then drive him back to Victoria, a journey of sufficient distance to test his predilection for riding in automobiles. There I would glimpse my wife, spend more time with Tap, decide what to do next. Some kind of higher typing, a return to the freelance life. But where would I live? What place?
When the telex began to make its noise, I left the office and went walking in the National Gardens among the plantain lilies and perfect palms.
Two days later I saw Ann at the street market near my building, the Friday market. She was hefting a melon, turning it, poking with her thumb.
“You have to press right here, at the underside. This man is angry with me. He likes to do the pressing himself. Listen to him mutter. I am touching his tiny plump early-season melon.”
She handed him the fruit, which he placed on one of the weighing pans of an antique balance. There was a beggar with a Panasonic, playing loud music. We walked slowly down the middle of the street, between the stalls, the men shouting out prices.
“I’ve been wondering something. This is awkward.”
“What have you been wondering?”
“Andreas. Have you seen him?”
“I thought you understood it was over.”
“There’s something I would like to have explained to him.”
“Can’t you do it yourself?”
“This is silly. I don’t know how to get in touch with him. I can’t find him in the phone book.”
“Do you have a phone book? Lucky fellow.”
“I went down to the Hilton. There’s a phone book at the Hilton.”
“I don’t know, James. Maybe the phone isn’t in his name. I’m sure I can remember the number if you’d like to have it.”
“You’re annoyed.”
“You want to talk to Andreas. Why shouldn’t you? But isn’t he in London?”
“I was hoping you could tell me where he is.”
“I thought you understood.”
“People are always saying things are over.”
“But they’re not to be believed. Is that it?”
“Where does he live? Where was he living in Athens when you were seeing him?”
“Can’t you contact him through his firm? That’s the obvious solution. Call London, call Bremen.”
“Where was he living?”
“Not far from the airport. Terrible place. Two concrete slabs on four concrete stilts. A street that disappears into scrub below Hymettus. In summer it’s bleached white. Dust hangs in the air. Two inches of dust on the furniture and floors. I tried once to ask him why he lived there. He went into a Greek male frenzy. Not for me to inquire, plainly.”
“It wouldn’t matter to Andreas where he lived. I don’t think he notices things like that.”
“No, I don’t think he does. What do you know that you’re not telling me?”
The peddler of lottery tickets stood at the end of the street, between the flower sellers and the vendors of clay pots, calling the same urgent word over and over. A summons to buy, to act, to live. The risk was small, the price was low. Times wouldn’t always be this good.
Today, today.
I called the number many times over a two-day period. Four of those times I got an old man whose number contained six digits, or one less than I was dialing. It was the right number as far as it went but it didn’t go far enough. It needed a nine on the end. The other times there was only line noise, a frozen hum.
I didn’t want to be the victim of a misunderstanding.
I took a taxi to the address Ann had given me. I climbed an exterior staircase to the second floor of the building, looked through the dusty windows. Abandoned. On the first floor a woman with a small child in her arms listened to my fragmentary questions about the man who used to live upstairs. When I was finished, she gave me the classic look, the raised brows, tutting lips. Who knows, who cares?
So I sat on my terrace, watching the light change, hearing remotely the ram’s horn lament of the day’s fourth and final rush hour. I had no plans. I would not be leaving the country for three weeks. I wanted to get up early, run in the woods, study my Greek (now that I had the time), sleep through the empty afternoons, fade into the spaces. I would avoid people, stop drinking, write letters to old friends. These were not plans but only private forms, outlines for a human figure. I would sit and watch.
Was it clear to him that any data passed on to the CIA, to their Foreign Assessment Center, to the Iraq or Turkey or Pakistan desk, was not related in any way to affairs in Greece? Did he understand that we were simply based here and did not gather local information? Of course he understood. The questions had to take a different form. Who was he? How far would he go to make his point? What was his point?
A silence seemed to fall. I watched a glow appear behind the mountain, a shower of light, brick orange, climbing. Then the topmost arc of the moon showed over the ridge-line. It rose in degrees, fully illuminated, a calculus-driven model of pure ascent. Soon it was free of the mountain’s dark mass, beginning to vault toward the west, to silver and glint, a cold object now, away from the earth-blood, the earth-burn, but beautiful, hard, bright.
The phone rang twice, then stopped.
She had the kind of fair skin that seemed to admit light, alm
ost to provide a passage for light. Maybe it was her guileless manner that heightened the impression of such open texture—that and her stillness, the way she collected whatever was in the air, gathered objectively, our conversation, our world complaints. I re member how she turned her head once, moving into a patch of sun, her left ear going incandescent, the edge and outer whorls, light penetrating finely, and how I thought this moment was the I one that would come back to me when I wanted to think of Lindsay years from now, the haze that rimmed her downy lobe.
I told her I’d be seeing Tap soon. We climbed the street named after Plutarch, slowly, bending to the effort. The sky above Lycabettus resembled an island sky today, saturated with color, blue deeps and soundings. This island sense was enhanced by the whitewashed chapel at the top of the hill, the tending presence, not so much surrounded by the sky as adhering to it, belonging to it.
“Will you be seeing Kathryn too?”
“If she’s not living in a hole somewhere up the coast.”
“Does she write to you?”
“Occasionally. Usually in a rush of some kind. The last lines are always scrawled. Even in Tap’s letters I don’t feel her presence. Shouldn’t there be a feeling of her presence behind them? It occurred to me just recently that she doesn’t read his letters anymore. In a way his letters told me more about things, essential things, than hers did. We exchanged some sense of ourselves through him. A mysterious sense, an intuition. But I don’t feel her presence anymore. It’s another connection closed down.”
“You don’t feel her presence but you still love her.”
“I make too much of love. This is because I’ve never been massively seized by it. It was never an obsessive thing for me, an obsessive tracking of someone or something. You can break clear of obsessions. Or they just dissolve. But this happened slowly. It grew around me. It covered everything, it became everything. I’ll tell you what the shock is. To live apart is the shock, the seizure. This is what I register daily and obsessively.”
“In novels lately the only real love, the only unconditional love I ever come across is what people feel for animals. Dolphins, bears, wolves, canaries.”
We both laughed. We wondered if this was a sign of some modern collapse. Love deflected, love that could not work when it was given to a man or a woman. Things had to work. Only small children and animals in the wild could provide the conditions in which a person’s love might find a means to perfect itself, might not be thwarted, dismissed, defeated. Love was turning mystical, we thought.
“When are you two going to have children?”
“We’re our own children.”
She smiled in the private way she had, the slowly deepening way, amused perhaps to have hit upon a truth. She’d only meant to make a small joke but had found something in the sentence that made her want to think about it.
“Seriously. You ought to have children.”
“We will. We want to.”
“When does he get back?”
“Tomorrow afternoon.”
“Where is he?”
“It’s written down somewhere. Cities, hotels, airlines, flight numbers, times of arrival and departure.”
We walked under the locust trees, fifty yards away from the place where the street becomes stepped, climbing in four or five levels toward the pale crags.
“This is the conversation we were supposed to have on Rhodes,” I said.
“When he went swimming?”
“He left us on the beach. There was a deep pause. We were meant to talk importantly about things.”
“I couldn’t think of anything. Could you?”
“No.”
“That was the one day it didn’t rain,” she said.
“When we all squeezed together on my balcony, passing David’s flask.”
“Oh that plummy sunset.”
We decided we’d walked far enough. There was a small narrow shop, a grocery store that offered little more than yogurt, butter, pyramid cartons of processed German milk. Two chairs and a small metal table stood on the sidewalk, waiting for us.
“You ought to make the visit a permanent one,” she said. “Stay there, see what happens.”
“It rains.”
“Not that we don’t want you back.”
“She purposely chose a rainy place.”
“How big the world is. They keep telling us it’s getting smaller all the time. But it’s not, is it? Whatever we learn about it makes it bigger. Whatever we do to complicate things makes it bigger. It’s all a complication. It’s one big tangled thing.” She began to laugh. “Modern communications don’t shrink the world, they make it bigger. Faster planes make it bigger. They give us more, they connect more things. The world isn’t shrinking at all. People who say it’s shrinking have never flown Air Zaire in a tropical storm.” I didn’t know what she meant by this but it sounded funny. It sounded funny to her too. She had to talk through her laughter. “No wonder people go to school to learn stretching and bending. The world is so big and complicated we don’t trust ourselves to figure out anything on our own. No wonder people read books that tell them how to run, walk and sit. We’re trying to keep up with the world, the size of it, the complications.”
I sat there and watched her laugh. She wore the same jade dress she’d gone swimming in, that summer night by the sea.
I was not a happy runner. I did it to stay interested in my body, to stay informed, and to set up clear lines of endeavor, a standard to meet, a limit to stay within. I was just enough of a puritan to think there must be some virtue in rigorous things, although I was careful not to overdo it.
I never wore the clothes. The shorts, tank top, high socks. just running shoes and a lightweight shirt and jeans. I ran disguised as an ordinary person, a walker in the woods.
The ground cover was starting to pale in the dryness and heat. I listened to myself breathe, finding a narrative cadence in the sound, a commentary on my progress. I had to break stride crossing gulleys and then push and surge to make it up the inclines. These changes in rhythm were part of my unhappiness. I had to duck under the branches of smaller trees.
It was 7:00 AM. I was on one of the higher trails, near the paved road that curves up to the outdoor theater. Two shots sounded down below. I slowed down but kept moving, my arms still crooked at my waist. I thought I would go to the end of the path, ease into a turn, jog back the other way on the same path, walk down to the street and go home for toast and coffee. A third shot sounded. I dropped my hands to my sides, walking along the path now, looking down through the well-spaced pines. Light fell with particular softness, an amber haze in the trees.
I saw dust rising at the end of a long draw down near the path that runs above the street. I was waiting for some mechanism to take control, to tell me what to do. A man came out of the scattered dust, scrambling uphill, trying to run right up the middle of the shallow draw, slipping on the rocks and debris washed down into it or dumped there, newspapers, garbage. I backed away, keeping my eyes on him, backed slowly toward a set of steps that led up to a scenic lookout just off the road. I didn’t want to take my eyes off him. The moment I turned he would see me, I thought.
He had a pistol in his right hand, gripping it not at the stock but around the trigger-guard and barrel, like something he might throw. l crouched at the base of the steps. He came up over the rise, breathing hard, a medium-sized man, barely twenty, in rolIed-up jeans and sandals. When he saw me I stood straight up, I shot up, and then went motionless, fists clenched. He looked at me as though he wanted to ask directions. He leaned away from me, distracted, holding the gun out from his hip, arm bent. Then he ran to the right, hurrying through the brush at the edge of the paved road. I could hear the scratching sound his pants made in contact with the spiny foliage. Then I heard him breathing, running downhill, following the road as it dips around to the north and reaches street level.
I went to the edge of the slope. There was a clear line of sight between the lowest branches
and the floor of the woods. I saw someone move, a figure close to the ground. I felt a ringing pain at my elbow. I must have banged it on something.
I went down the slope, moving from tree to tree, using the trees for whatever cover they provided and to check my rate of descent. I wanted to be conscientious. I felt an unspecified sense of duty. There was a right and wrong to all this and it involved the details of actions and perceptions. The tree bark was rough and furrowed, scaly to the touch.
It was David Keller. He tried to raise himself to a sitting position. His back was covered with dust, the shirt, the neck and head. Pine needles clung to the shirt. He was breathing heavily. The sound of men breathing, the human noise, men running in the streets.
I spoke his name and moved slowly into his field of vision, edging around, careful not to startle him. He was sitting several yards from the path, among a half dozen fairly large stones, and he was using one of them as a hand grip, arranging himself less painfully. A rust fungus spotted the stones. At first I thought it was blood. The blood was spreading over his left shoulder, drip ping down on his wrist and thigh.
“Two of them,” he said.
“I saw one.”
“Where were you?”
“Running. Up there.”
“Are you all right?”
“He ran out the other way.”
“Did you get a look at him?”
“He wore sandals, “ I said.
“They waited too long. They wanted me point-blank. They were trying to be disciplined, I think. They held off, they waited. But I saw him, I saw the gun and I fucking ran right at him. I went right at him. Surprised the hell out of both of us. I went as fast as I could. I just went, I was angry, I was in a rage. I just saw the gun and charged. I think he fired once. That was the one that hit me. I was just about on top of him by the time he squeezed it off. Then the other one steps out and fires. I’m all over the first one, his gun is trapped somewhere under us. The other one was up there about fifteen feet, right by those trees. He fires one more. The first one wriggles out and takes off running. He leaped the ditch and went right off that wall. Lost his gun. It’s in the ditch, I think.”
