by Don DeLillo
She moved closer to him. She didn’t like public affection and even if they were alone on the road it wasn’t her apartment, was it, and it wasn’t even a room in a lodge with a locked door and drawn curtains, once she’d gotten around to drawing the curtains, but she moved a little closer anyway and told him if she’d known he was going to stroke her thigh she wouldn’t have worn thick coarse jeans, would she?
Matt didn’t think he’d ever felt so happy. He was happy when she leaned against him and maybe happier still when she read aloud from the small library he’d amassed in preparation for the trip.
They saw hawks installed on utility poles and she looked them up in the bird book and said they were kestrels—falcons, not hawks, and this made him happier yet.
The landscape made him happy. It was a challenge to his lifelong citiness but more than that, a realization of some half-dreamed vision, the otherness of the West, the strange great thing that was all mixed in with nation and spaciousness, with bravery and history and who you are and what you believe and what movies you saw growing up.
After a while he told her to stop looking at the book and look at the scenery but the scenery was empty spaces and lonely roads and this made her very nervous.
When Nick came back from Minnesota, Matty called him the Jesuit.
His catechism days were well behind him now, Matty’s were, his days of blind belief, and he liked to gibe at his brother’s self-conscious correctness, his attempts at analytical insight. Whatever Nick’s experience in correction and however deftly the jebbies worked him over later in their northern fastness, minting intellect and shiny soul, it was still a brother’s right to heckle and jeer.
Their mother also called him the Jesuit but never so Nick could hear.
They filled the tank and bought charcoal, food and bottled water. They found the office of the refuge manager at the far end of town and Matt went in and received a permit and signed a liability release. This was called a hold harmless form and it basically pointed out that if they were killed and/or injured during live-fire exercises while they were in the refuge, it would be the giddiest sort of childlike illusion for either or both of them and/or their survivors to think for even a minute about receiving compensation.
Fair enough. They were allowed to enter the refuge but placed on notice that air-to-air exercises were set to commence three days from now. Friendly fire. It put a little edge in their schedule.
He told all this to Janet, conscientiously. He told her they weren’t allowed to handle or take possession of any military items found in the area such as fuel drums, flare casings, tow targets, projectiles carrying real or dummy warheads. He told her there were no human inhabitants of the refuge. He told her there was no gas, food, lodging or other facilities. She had a right to know. He told her there were no paved roads or running water.
But he didn’t tell her why this excited him. He didn’t say anything about this because he didn’t understand it, the stark sort of shudder, the leveling out, the sense of knowing he was headed into remote Sonoran waste, where the interplay of terrain and weapons was a kind of neural process remapped in the world, a hollow sort of craving lifted out of the brain stem, or wherever, and painted over with words and sky and diamondback desert.
Janet said, “All right. Go go go go.”
“At’s the spirit.”
“We’re going to do it, let’s do it.”
“At’s what I want to hear.”
They drove south through a white space on the map, headed for the entrance to the refuge, and he recalled something Eric Deming had told him about this part of Arizona, a rumor, a sort of twilight zone story about people known as sensitives, men and women who were psychically gifted—telepathists, clairvoyants, metal-benders.
There was a secret facility near the Mexican border where sensitives were tested and experiments carried out. The idea was that psychic commandos might be able to jam the enemy’s computer networks and weapons systems, perhaps even read the intentions of the defense minister riding in his chauffeured car in the middle of Moscow.
In fact the Russians were thought to be well ahead of us in this endeavor, Eric said, soulful and mystical as they were, and we were desperate to catch up.
Janet said, “There’s something else of course.”
“What do you mean?”
“Besides sheep. We’re not going all this distance to look at sheep.”
“Bighorn sheep. We want to be alone. Undistracted. So we can talk. An extended period. So we can figure things out.”
“What things?”
“You know what things.”
“What things?”
“Do we get married? Do we have kids, children? Do we wait a while? Do we live here, or there, or somewhere in the middle?”
“What else?” she said. “Because I know there’s something else.”
Matt could believe the story about a closed base where sensitives refined their paranormal skills. Thought transfer and remote viewing. Why not believe it? He’d read many an enemy’s mind as a ten-year-old, pushing wood across a game board. This was the supernatural underside of the arms race. Miracles and visions. The final wishful weapon is a middle-aged lady from Decatur who can pinpoint the location of Soviet submarines off the East Coast.
Unreal. This is what disturbed him. It was one of the things he wanted to talk about with Janet.
There were ship ridges, great ship rocks with prows thrust upward, and there were hills that resembled rubble heaps. The land seemed to be in open formation, harsh and scarred, and you could almost read upheaval and convergence. It looked like dinosaur country. They saw white mountains and flesh mountains and slags of glassy matter that turned out to be mountains when they drew near.
It took a long time to get anywhere. There was only the one road, one track, and sections were deep sand and other parts were ruts and gulleys. The sun beat down with a swarming sort of density. They came to flooded stretches where they had to leave the track and maneuver the jeep tenderly around the palo verde and cholla.
He looked up the words. He consulted the books all the time. He drove with a book or two in his lap, or asked Janet to look things up, or asked her to drive so he could read.
The dust powdered the hood and windshield and the sun seemed nearly upon them, burning down so squarely and vastly he wanted to laugh in shitface fear.
“I know you can’t tell me about your job.”
“I can tell you some things. I work with safing mechanisms, they’re called. Timers, batteries, switches, actuators. Electromechanical locks. I run endless computer tests. I drink instant coffee and look at cross-section details of great finned weapons on my screen. Then a bunch of guys in California or Nevada or someplace will take a warhead and rocket-launch it into a hardened target at fifteen hundred miles an hour.”
“To test your calculations.”
“Splat. Not just mine of course. But, yes, that’s the idea.”
“You make weapons safer. Safer to handle and use.”
“That’s right.”
“Then what’s the problem? It’s not exactly criminal activity.”
“No but it’s weapons work. It’s what I wanted. I wanted this and more. But now I’m feeling unsure about it.”
“It’s important work, Matthew. We need the best people to do this work.”
They were camped just yards from the track. He made a charcoal fire and they emptied cans of pork and beans into a pan. They put on sweaters and sat on a blanket.
She said, “What would you do if you left?”
“I’m not sure. Get a doctorate maybe. I know some people who work in think tanks. I’d want to talk to them. Sound them out.”
She gave him a sour look. The term made her unhappy—think tank—and he didn’t blame her. Passive, mild, middle-aged, ivory-towerish. People rustling papers in redoubts of social strategy. Situation reports, policy alternatives, statistical surveys.
He got the flashlight and led her to a sp
ot where she might pee. The moon was nearly full. He waited while she lowered her jeans and squatted, more or less in one motion, and she looked at him and smiled, a dirty sort of smirk, a dirty-face girl with mucky drawers—didn’t we do this once before, in another life? He played the light around them and softly sang the names of bushes and shrubs to the sound of Janet piddling. She laughed and peed in spurts. They thought they heard a coyote and she struggled into her jeans laughing.
They set up the dome tent and got into their mummy-shaped camp bags, nicely lined with flannel, and they realized the coyote was Wolfman Jack on the transistor radio, a howling disc jockey vectored into the desert from some bandit station below the border.
Don’t put no badmouth on me, baby, we gon rock tonight. Da Wolfman sending Little Richard to climb in your face from out of the glory days of the marcel pompadour and the glass suit. Richard don’t need no dry cleaner. He got his Windex wid him.
The sleeping bag had stretch straps that made it possible for you to roll over on your side, if that was your preference, and when Little Richard started bending notes in his primal falsetto, Matty thought he was in bed in the Bronx, a fifteen-year-old capable of trading his brother’s old fielder’s glove for three or four raunchy rock-and-roll singles, which he played when his mother was out.
Janet called him Matthew. This was her way of separating him from family history, the whole dense endeavor of Mattiness, the little brother and abandoned son and chessboard whiz and whatever else was in the homemade soup.
He’d told Janet the story, how Nick believed their father was taken out to the marshes and shot, and how this became the one plot, the only conspiracy that big brother could believe in. Nick could not afford to succumb to a general distrust. He had to protect his conviction about what happened to Jimmy. Jimmy’s murder was isolated and pure, uncorrupted by other secret alliances and criminal acts, other suspicions. Let the culture indulge in cheap conspiracy theories. Nick had the enduring stuff of narrative, the thing that doesn’t have to be filled in with speculation and hearsay.
Of course Matt thought his brother was guilty of emotional delusion. But when Janet agreed too readily, dismissing Nick’s version, he cut her off quick. He defended Nick. He told her how he himself had thought their father was dead, originally. Not a runaway, a dropout, the grievously weak man who takes a powder. Dead somewhere in untranslated space. And even if he was a little kid at the time. Even if he did the sad-funny fruitcake thing of going to the Loew’s Paradise to see the soul of his faithful departed father drift across the starry ceiling. Even if he was unable to make a studied judgment, he told her, consider the episode itself, the journey he’d made to a movie house through strange neighborhoods, alone, at the age of six. The power of an event can flow from its unresolvable heart, all the cruel and elusive elements that don’t add up, and it makes you do odd things, and tell stories to yourself, and build believable worlds.
Who the hell was Janet to ridicule his brother?
There were scar lines in the distance, deep arroyos, and stands of tall saguaro on the south slopes of mountains.
The track was white sand and then red dirt, it was cracked playa, drained and baked, and then it turned abruptly to mineral green dust and then again to sand and finally stony rubble.
Janet liked to drive aggressively whatever the surface. The jeep bucked and jumped, leaning badly at times, and when the track went narrow in thick bush she had to tell him to get his dangling arm back inside before the thorny acacia cut him up.
“I don’t think you should leave your job out of conscience. Conscience works both ways,” she said. “You have duties and obligations. If you’re not willing to do this work, the next person may be less qualified.”
“How hot do you think it is?”
“Never mind how hot. Too hot to be here. You have special training and a certain kind of skill.”
“At some point we have to decide whether to turn around and go back out the way we came in.”
“Or what?”
“Or keep going into bighorn country and exit the refuge somewhere in the northwest sector before the exercises start.”
Ten minutes after he said this, they saw objects in the distance and he put the binoculars on them. They appeared to be tanks and jeeps, some trucks as well, but they were flimsy somehow, unbulky and perfunctory, showing squared-off contours and a cheap gleam—simulated tactical targets.
“I want us to be together,” she said. “You know how much I want a home and family. I want to have a child. I’ve always wanted these things. I want to be safe, Matthew.”
He reached over and fingered some loose hair at the nape of her neck.
“You want to be safe. This is the woman who works half the night treating injured people,” he said. “Shocks to the body. One emergency after another.”
“There’s nothing unsafe about that. That’s completely safe to me. It’s the thing I do best and I want to keep on doing it. And you should do the thing you do best. That’s what safe is.”
“If I keep this job, how do we live together?”
“We’ll do it. We’ll work it out,” she said.
The air went taut and the light took a chlorine edge and then it was raining hard. They couldn’t see a thing and sat parked on a rise. The storm seemed to originate ten feet above them. They sat there waiting and they talked.
Matt could tell her anything. It was completely easy with her. She knew him before he was born. She could finish a thought he’d only barely started. She had no shaded spaces in her, none of the silences and disguises that can be fascinating, yes, but not for a guy like him, he thought.
They heard name-saying birds such as whippoorwills and phoebes. After the rain the heat came blowing back and he scanned with the glasses for birds of prey. They hung in the burning air, fantailed and soaring and great, and he went scrambling for the book when he spotted a large dark bird nested in the arm-crotch of a tall saguaro.
It was a golden eagle, immature, and he gave Janet the binoculars and took them back and couldn’t stop talking. He talked and laughed and looked at the books. He talked less to Janet than to the bird. He checked the book a number of times to confirm for the bird’s benefit that it was an eagle, an eaglet, with a bit of flashing on the wings and a wash of honey-gold at the hindneck.
Janet was not caught up in this. He glanced at her and found a complex plea in her eyes. She was asking him something but he wasn’t sure what it was. He put the glasses back on the bird. The bird was a flick of the dial to her. You turned on the TV in the nurses’ lounge and saw giraffe heads bobbing on the veldt. This was her nature preserve, a cramped room with a couple of sofas and chairs, where she sat and yakked with the night staff about coffee prices and unsafe streets and the burn victim with the smell you can’t describe—this was the handgrip, the safehold she needed to live.
But the look she’d given him was not about what she needed or where she preferred to be. She wanted him to understand something about himself.
Every defeat was a death inside the chest, his little bird-boned thorax. Basically dead at eleven, that was him. Good riddance to little wooden rooks. How many years did it take him to get over the game?
It was Fischer-Spassky that brought him back, and only briefly at that, two years ago, in Iceland, halfway between Washington and Moscow, where they played twenty-one games, Bobby and Boris, a summer’s rousing theater of black and white.
Matt checked the newspapers and watched TV. He rooted for Bobby, the gangly boorish boy now pushing thirty. He identified with the public tantrums, all the rude demands, the strokes of unwholesomeness that Bobby consistently delivered, the open show of bitterness when he lost.
If the American’s eventual victory didn’t begin to redeem Matt’s own sulky youth, at least it edged the game out of the private migraine of abnormal introversion and into the mingled thing out there, the everyday melee of competing states and material forces.
You need a makeshift word
to describe the process. De-ego’d. This is what the game did to Matt. So let our Bobby rant. He was only showing what is always there beneath the spatial esthetics and the mind-modeling rigor of the game, beneath the forevisional bursts of insight—an autoworld of pain and loss.
He told her about mountains hollowed out in New Mexico. These were storage sites for nuclear weapons. He told her about the gouged mountain in Colorado where huge wall screens could display the flight track of a missile launched from a base in Siberia. He knew a few things about Obyekt, the Installation, built by slave labor in a remote part of the USSR, and he told her about it—a center for bomb design.
People went willingly to these places, scientists eager to meet some elemental need. Or was it just a patriotic duty or the standard challenge of doing serious work in physics or mathematics? He thought they went in search, on impulse, almost recklessly, to locate some higher condition.
“You make it sound like God,” she said.
He told her what he could about the Pocket. The Pocket was just a cozy donut-dunk in a vast hidden system. A system predicated on death from the sky. He told her about the emergency networks, underground shelters carved out of mountains in Virginia and Maryland where leaders could keep the government running during a major war. He told her about accidents in the Soviet Union, rumored explosions and fires at nuclear plants, and the sense of excitement he felt, the thrill of devastation in the enemy barrens, and his subsequent shame.
You make it sound like God. Or some starker variation thereof. Go to the desert or tundra and wait for the visionary flash of light, the critical mass that will call down the Hindu heavens, Kali and Shiva and all the grimacing lesser gods.
“Maybe I stayed a Catholic too long. Should have got out when I was ten.”
He thought about the sensitives, preparing for psychic war, and he thought about the penitentes, men in black hoods dragging heavy wooden crosses through the desert, a hundred years ago, or fifty years, and lashing themselves with sisal and hemp, all that Sister Edgarish stuff, and speaking fabricated words—the maunder of roaming holy men.
