by Don DeLillo
I contacted a man not affiliated with the college, someone Murray Jay Siskind had told me about. They were fellow boarders in the green-shingled house on Middlebrook. The man was in his fifties, a slight shuffle in his walk. He had thinning hair, a bland face and wore his shirtsleeves rolled up to his forearms, revealing thermal underwear beneath.
His complexion was of a tone I want to call flesh-colored. Howard Dunlop was his name. He said he was a former chiropractor but didn’t offer a reason why he was no longer active and didn’t say when he’d learned German, or why, and something in his manner kept me from asking.
We sat in his dark crowded room at the boarding house. An ironing board stood unfolded at the window. There were chipped enamel pots, trays of utensils set on a dresser. The furniture was vague, foundling. At the borders of the room were the elemental things. An exposed radiator, an army-blanketed cot. Dunlop sat at the edge of a straight chair, intoning generalities of grammar. When he switched from English to German, it was as though a cord had been twisted in his larynx. An abrupt emotion entered his voice, a scrape and gargle that sounded like the stirring of some beast’s ambition. He gaped at me and gestured, he croaked, he verged on strangulation. Sounds came spewing from the base of his tongue, harsh noises damp with passion. He was only demonstrating certain basic pronunciation patterns but the transformation in his face and voice made me think he was making a passage between levels of being.
I sat there taking notes.
The hour went quickly. Dunlop managed a scant shrug when I asked him not to discuss the lessons with anyone. It occurred to me that he was the man Murray had described in his summary of fellow boarders as the one who never comes out of his room.
I stopped at Murray’s room and asked him to come home with me for dinner. He put down his copy of American Transvestite and slipped into his corduroy jacket. We stopped on the porch long enough for Murray to tell the landlord, who was sitting there, about a dripping faucet in the second-floor bathroom. The landlord was a large florid man of such robust and bursting health that he seemed to be having a heart attack even as we looked on.
“He’ll get around to fixing it,” Murray said, as we set out on foot in the direction of Elm. “He fixes everything eventually. He’s very good with all those little tools and fixtures and devices that people in cities never know the names of. The names of these things are only known in outlying communities, small towns and rural areas. Too bad he’s such a bigot.”
“How do you know he’s a bigot?”
“People who can fix things are usually bigots.”
“What do you mean?”
“Think of all the people who’ve ever come to your house to fix things. They were all bigots, weren’t they?”
“I don’t know.”
“They drove panel trucks, didn’t they, with an extension ladder on the roof and some kind of plastic charm dangling from the rearview mirror?”
“I don’t know, Murray.”
“It’s obvious,” he said.
He asked me why I’d chosen this year in particular to learn German, after so many years of slipping past the radar. I told him there was a Hitler conference scheduled for next spring at the College-on-the-Hill. Three days of lectures, workshops and panels. Hitler scholars from seventeen states and nine foreign countries. Actual Germans would be in attendance.
At home Denise placed a moist bag of garbage in the kitchen compactor. She started up the machine. The ram stroked downward with a dreadful wrenching sound, full of eerie feeling. Children walked in and out of the kitchen, water dripped in the sink, the washing machine heaved in the entranceway. Murray seemed engrossed in the incidental mesh. Whining metal, exploding bottles, plastic smashed flat. Denise listened carefully, making sure the mangling din contained the correct sonic elements, which meant the machine was operating properly.
Heinrich said to someone on the phone, “Animals commit incest all the time. So how unnatural can it be?”
Babette came in from running, her outfit soaked through. Murray walked across the kitchen to shake her hand. She fell into a chair, scanned the room for Wilder. I watched Denise make a mental comparison between her mother’s running clothes and the wet bag she’d dumped in the compactor. I could see it in her eyes, a sardonic connection. It was these secondary levels of life, these extrasensory flashes and floating nuances of being, these pockets of rapport forming unexpectedly, that made me believe we were a magic act, adults and children together, sharing unaccountable things.
“We have to boil our water,” Steffie said.
“Why?”
“It said on the radio.”
“They’re always saying boil your water,” Babette said. “It’s the new thing, like turn your wheel in the direction of the skid. Here comes Wilder now. I guess we can eat.”
The small child moved in a swaying gait, great head wagging, and his mother made faces of delight, happy and outlandish masks, watching him approach.
“Neutrinos go right through the earth,” Heinrich said into the telephone.
“Yes yes yes,” said Babette.
9
THEY HAD TO EVACUATE the grade school on Tuesday. Kids were getting headaches and eye irritations, tasting metal in their mouths. A teacher rolled on the floor and spoke foreign languages. No one knew what was wrong. Investigators said it could be the ventilating system, the paint or varnish, the foam insulation, the electrical insulation, the cafeteria food, the rays emitted by microcomputers, the asbestos fireproofing, the adhesive on shipping containers, the fumes from the chlorinated pool, or perhaps something deeper, finer-grained, more closely woven into the basic state of things.
Denise and Steffie stayed home that week as men in Mylex suits and respirator masks made systematic sweeps of the building with infrared detecting and measuring equipment. Because Mylex is itself a suspect material, the results tended to be ambiguous and a second round of more rigorous detection had to be scheduled.
The two girls and Babette, Wilder and I went to the supermarket. Minutes after we entered, we ran into Murray. This was the fourth or fifth time I’d seen him in the supermarket, which was roughly the number of times I’d seen him on campus. He clutched Babette by the left bicep and sidled around her, appearing to smell her hair.
“A lovely dinner,” he said, standing directly behind her. “I like to cook myself, which doubles my appreciation of someone who does it well.”
“Come any time,” she said, turning in an effort to find him.
We moved together into the ultra-cool interior. Wilder sat in the shopping cart trying to grab items off the shelves as we went by. It occurred to me that he was too old and too big to be sitting in supermarket carts. I also wondered why his vocabulary seemed to be stalled at twenty-five words.
“I’m happy to be here,” Murray said.
“In Blacksmith?”
“In Blacksmith, in the supermarket, in the rooming house, on the Hill. I feel I’m learning important things every day. Death, disease, afterlife, outer space. It’s all much clearer here. I can think and see.”
We moved into the generic food area and Murray paused with his plastic basket to probe among the white cartons and jars. I wasn’t sure I understood what he was talking about. What did he mean, much clearer? He could think and see what?
Steffie took my hand and we walked past the fruit bins, an area that extended about forty-five yards along one wall. The bins were arranged diagonally and backed by mirrors that people accidentally punched when reaching for fruit in the upper rows. A voice on the loudspeaker said: “Kleenex Softique, your truck’s blocking the entrance.” Apples and lemons tumbled in twos and threes to the floor when someone took a fruit from certain places in the stacked array. There were six kinds of apples, there were exotic melons in several pastels. Everything seemed to be in season, sprayed, burnished, bright. People tore filmy bags off racks and tried to figure out which end opened. I realized the place was awash in noise. The toneless systems, the jangle and
skid of carts, the loudspeaker and coffee-making machines, the cries of children. And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension.
“Did you tell Denise you were sorry?”
“Maybe later,” Steffie said. “Remind me.”
“She’s a sweet girl and she wants to be your older sister and your friend if you’ll let her.”
“I don’t know about friend. She’s a little bossy, don’t you think?”
“Aside from telling her you’re sorry, be sure to give her back her Physicians’ Desk Reference. ”
“She reads that thing all the time. Don’t you think that’s weird?”
“At least she reads something.”
“Sure, lists of drugs and medicines. And do you want to know why?”
“Why?”
“Because she’s trying to find out the side effects of the stuff that Baba uses.”
“What does Baba use?”
“Don’t ask me. Ask Denise.”
“How do you know she uses anything?”
“Ask Denise.”
“Why don’t I ask Baba?”
“Ask Baba,” she said.
Murray came out of an aisle and walked alongside Babette, just ahead of us. He took a twin roll of paper towels out of her cart and smelled it. Denise had found some friends and they went up front to look at the paperback books in spindly racks, the books with shiny metallic print, raised letters, vivid illustrations of cult violence and windswept romance. Denise was wearing a green visor. I heard Babette tell Murray she’d been wearing it fourteen hours a day for three weeks now. She would not go out without it, would not even leave her room. She wore it in school, when there was school, wore it to the toilet, the dentist’s chair, the dinner table. Something about the visor seemed to speak to her, to offer wholeness and identity.
“It’s her interface with the world,” Murray said.
He helped Babette push her loaded cart. I heard him say to her, “Tibetans believe there is a transitional state between death and rebirth. Death is a waiting period, basically. Soon a fresh womb will receive the soul. In the meantime the soul restores to itself some of the divinity lost at birth.” He studied her profile as if to detect a reaction. “That’s what I think of whenever I come in here. This place recharges us spiritually, it prepares us, it’s a gateway or pathway. Look how bright. It’s full of psychic data.”
My wife smiled at him.
“Everything is concealed in symbolism, hidden by veils of mystery and layers of cultural material. But it is psychic data, absolutely. The large doors slide open, they close unbidden. Energy waves, incident radiation. All the letters and numbers are here, all the colors of the spectrum, all the voices and sounds, all the code words and ceremonial phrases. It is just a question of deciphering, rearranging, peeling off the layers of unspeakability. Not that we would want to, not that any useful purpose would be served. This is not Tibet. Even Tibet is not Tibet anymore.”
He studied her profile. She put some yogurt in her cart.
“Tibetans try to see death for what it is. It is the end of attachment to things. This simple truth is hard to fathom. But once we stop denying death, we can proceed calmly to die and then go on to experience uterine rebirth or Judeo-Christian afterlife or out-of-body experience or a trip on a UFO or whatever we wish to call it. We can do so with clear vision, without awe or terror. We don’t have to cling to life artificially, or to death for that matter. We simply walk toward the sliding doors. Waves and radiation. Look how well-lighted everything is. The place is sealed off, self-contained. It is timeless. Another reason why I think of Tibet. Dying is an art in Tibet. A priest walks in, sits down, tells the weeping relatives to get out and has the room sealed. Doors, windows sealed. He has serious business to see to. Chants, numerology, horoscopes, recitations. Here we don’t die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think.”
He was almost whispering now and I tried to get up closer without ramming my cart into Babette’s. I wanted to hear everything.
“Supermarkets this large and clean and modern are a revelation to me. I spent my life in small steamy delicatessens with slanted display cabinets full of trays that hold soft wet lumpy matter in pale colors. High enough cabinets so you had to stand on tiptoes to give your order. Shouts, accents. In cities no one notices specific dying. Dying is a quality of the air. It’s everywhere and nowhere. Men shout as they die, to be noticed, remembered for a second or two. To die in an apartment instead of a house can depress the soul, I would imagine, for several lives to come. In a town there are houses, plants in bay windows. People notice dying better. The dead have faces, automobiles. If you don’t know a name, you know a street name, a dog’s name. ‘He drove an orange Mazda.’ You know a couple of useless things about a person that become major facts of identification and cosmic placement when he dies suddenly, after a short illness, in his own bed, with a comforter and matching pillows, on a rainy Wednesday afternoon, feverish, a little congested in the sinuses and chest, thinking about his dry cleaning.”
Babette said, “Where is Wilder?” and turned to stare at me in a way that suggested ten minutes had passed since she’d last seen him. Other looks, less pensive and less guilty, indicated greater time spans, deeper seas of inattention. Like: “I didn’t know whales were mammals.” The greater the time span, the blanker the look, the more dangerous the situation. It was as if guilt were a luxury she allowed herself only when the danger was minimal.
“How could he get out of the cart without my noticing?”
The three adults each stood at the head of an aisle and peered into the traffic of carts and gliding bodies. Then we did three more aisles, heads set forward, weaving slightly as we changed our sightlines. I kept seeing colored spots off to the right but when I turned there was nothing there. I’d been seeing colored spots for years but never so many, so gaily animated. Murray saw Wilder in another woman’s cart. The woman waved at Babette and headed toward us. She lived on our
street with a teenage daughter and an Asian baby, Chun Duc. Everyone referred to the baby by name, almost in a tone of proud proprietorship, but no one knew who Chun belonged to or where he or she had come from.
“Kleenex Softique, Kleenex Softique.”
Steffie was holding my hand in a way I’d come to realize, over a period of time, was not meant to be gently possessive, as I’d thought at first, but reassuring. I was a little astonished. A firm grip that would help me restore confidence in myself, keep me from becoming resigned to whatever melancholy moods she thought she detected hovering about my person.
Before Murray went to the express line he invited us to dinner, a week from Saturday.
“You don’t have to let me know till the last minute.”
“We’ll be there,” Babette said.
“I’m not preparing anything major, so just call beforehand and tell me if something else came up. You don’t even have to call. If you don’t show up, I’ll know that something came up and you couldn’t let me know.”
“Murray, we’ll be there.”
“Bring the kids.”
“No.”
“Great. But if you decide to bring them, no problem. I don’t want you to feel I’m holding you to something. Don’t feel you’ve made an ironclad commitment. You’ll show up or you won’t. I have to eat anyway, so there’s no major catastrophe if something comes up and you have to cancel. I just want you to know I’ll be there if you decide to drop by, with or without kids. We have till next May or June to do this thing so there’s no special mystique about a week from Saturday.”
“Are you coming back next semester?” I said.
“They want me to teach a course in the cinema of car crashes.”
“Do it.”
“I will.”
I rubbed against Babette in the checkout line. She backed into me and I reached around her and put my hands on her breasts. She rotated her hips and
I nuzzled her hair and murmured, “Dirty blond.” People wrote checks, tall boys bagged the merchandise. Not everyone spoke English at the cash terminals, or near the fruit bins and frozen foods, or out among the cars in the lot. More and more I heard languages I could not identify much less understand, although the tall boys were American-born and the checkout women as well, short, fattish in blue tunics, wearing stretch slacks and tiny white espadrilles. I tried to fit my hands into Babette’s skirt, over her belly, as the slowly moving line edged toward the last purchase point, the breath mints and nasal inhalers.
It was out in the parking lot that we heard the first of the rumors about a man dying during the inspection of the grade school, one of the masked and Mylex-suited men, heavy-booted and bulky. Collapsed and died, went the story that was going around, in a classroom on the second floor.
10
TUITION AT THE COLLEGE-ON-THE-HILL is fourteen thousand dollars, Sunday brunch included. I sense there is a connection between this powerful number and the way the students arrange themselves physically in the reading areas of the library. They sit on broad cushioned seats in various kinds of ungainly posture, clearly calculated to be the identifying signs of some kinship group or secret organization. They are fetal, splayed, knock-kneed, arched, square-knotted, sometimes almost upside-down. The positions are so studied they amount to a classical mime. There is an element of over-refinement and inbreeding. Sometimes I feel I’ve wandered into a Far Eastern dream, too remote to be interpreted. But it is only the language of economic class they are speaking, in one of its allowable outward forms, like the convocation of station wagons at the start of the year.
