by Don DeLillo
I’d found myself thinking of Orest and his snakes and wanted a chance to talk to him further.
We sat in a blood-red booth. Orest gripped the tasseled menu with his chunky hands. His shoulders seemed broader than ever, the serious head partly submerged between them.
“How’s the training going?” I said.
“I’m slowing it down a little. I don’t want to peak too soon. I know how to take care of my body.”
“Heinrich told me you sleep sitting up, to prepare for the cage.”
“I perfected that. I’m doing different stuff now.”
“Like what?”
“Loading up on carbohydrates.”
“That’s why we came here,” Heinrich said.
“I load up a little more each day.”
“It’s because of the huge energy he’ll be burning up in the cage, being alert, tensing himself when a mamba approaches, whatever.”
We ordered pasta and water.
“Tell me, Orest. As you get closer and closer to the time, are you beginning to feel anxious?”
“What anxious? I just want to get in the cage. Sooner the better. This is what Orest Mercator is all about.”
“You’re not nervous? You don’t think about what might happen?”
“He likes to be positive,” Heinrich said. “This is the thing today with athletes. You don’t dwell on the negative.”
“Tell me this, then. What is the negative? What do you think of when you think of the negative?”
“Here’s what I think. I’m nothing without the snakes. That’s the only negative. The negative is if it doesn’t come off, if the humane society doesn’t let me in the cage. How can I be the best at what I do if they don’t let me do it?”
I liked to watch Orest eat. He inhaled food according to aerodynamic principles. Pressure differences, intake velocities. He went at it silently and purposefully, loading up, centering himself, appearing to grow more self-important with each clump of starch that slid over his tongue.
“You know you can get bitten. We talked about it last time. Do you think about what happens after the fangs close on your wrist? Do you think about dying? This is what I want to know. Does death scare you? Does it haunt your thoughts? Let me put my cards on the table, Orest. Are you afraid to die? Do you experience fear? Does fear make you tremble or sweat? Do you feel a shadow fall across the room when you think of the cage, the snakes, the fangs?”
“What did I read just the other day? There are more people dead today than in the rest of world history put together. What’s one extra? I’d just as soon die while I’m trying to put Orest Mercator’s name in the record book.”
I looked at my son. I said, “Is he trying to tell us there are more people dying in this twenty-four-hour period than in the rest of human history up to now?”
“He’s saying the dead are greater today than ever before, combined.”
“What dead? Define the dead.”
“He’s saying people now dead.”
“What do you mean, now dead? Everybody who’s dead is now dead.”
“He’s saying people in graves. The known dead. Those you can count.”
I was listening intently, trying to grasp what they meant. A second plate of food came for Orest.
“But people sometimes stay in graves for hundreds of years. Is he saying there are more dead people in graves than anywhere else?”
“It depends on what you mean by anywhere else.”
“I don’t know what I mean. The drowned. The blown-to-bits.”
“There are more dead now than ever before. That’s all he’s saying.”
I looked at him a while longer. Then I turned to Orest.
“You are intentionally facing death. You are setting out to do exactly what people spend their lives trying not to do. Die. I want to know why.”
“My trainer says, ‘Breathe, don’t think.’ He says, ‘Be a snake and you’ll know the stillness of a snake.’ ”
“He has a trainer now,” Heinrich said.
“He’s a Sunny Moslem,” Orest said.
“Iron City has some Sunnies out near the airport.”
“The Sunnies are mostly Korean. Except mine’s an Arab, I think.”
I said, “Don’t you mean the Moonies are mostly Korean?”
“He’s a Sunny,” Orest said.
“But it’s the Moonies who are mostly Korean. Except they’re not, of course. It’s only the leadership.”
They thought about this. I watched Orest eat. I watched him pitchfork the spaghetti down his gullet. The serious head sat motionless, an entryway for the food that flew off the mechanical fork. What purpose he conveyed, what sense of a fixed course of action pursued absolutely. If each of us is the center of his or her existence, Orest seemed intent on enlarging the center, making it everything. Is this what athletes do, occupy the self more fully? It’s possible we envy them for a prowess that has little to do with sport. In building toward a danger, they escape it in some deeper sense, they dwell in some angelic scan, able to leap free of everyday dying. But was Orest an athlete? He would do nothing but sit—sit for sixty-seven days in a glass cage, waiting to be publicly bitten.
“You will not be able to defend yourself,” I said. “Not only that but you will be in a cage with the most slimy, feared and repulsive creatures on earth. Snakes. People have nightmares about snakes. Crawling slithering cold-blooded egg-laying vertebrates. People go to psychiatrists. Snakes have a special slimy place in our collective unconscious. And you are voluntarily getting into an enclosed space with thirty or forty of the most venomous snakes in the world.”
“What slimy? They’re not slimy.”
“The famous sliminess is a myth,” Heinrich said. “He’s getting into a cage with Gaboon vipers with two-inch fangs. Maybe a dozen mambas. The mamba happens to be the fastest-moving land snake in the world. Isn’t sliminess a little besides the point?”
“That’s my argument exactly. Fangs. Snakebite. Fifty thousand people a year die of snakebite. It was on television last night.”
“Everything was on television last night,” Orest said.
I admired the reply. I guess I admired him too. He was creating an imperial self out of some tabloid aspiration. He would train relentlessly, speak of himself in the third person, load up on carbohydrates. His trainer was always there, his friends drawn to the aura of inspired risk. He would grow in life-strength as he neared the time.
“His trainer is teaching him how to breathe in the old way, the Sunny Moslem way. A snake is one thing. A person can be a thousand things.”
“Be a snake,” Orest said.
“People are getting interested,” Heinrich said. “It’s like it’s starting to build. Like he’s really going to do it. Like they believe him now. The total package.”
If the self is death, how can it also be stronger than death?
I called for the check. Extraneous flashes of Mr. Gray. A drizzling image in gray shorts and socks. I lifted several bills from my wallet, rubbing hard with my fingers to make sure there weren’t others stuck to them. In the motel mirror was my full-length wife, white-bodied, full-bosomed, pink-kneed, stub-toed, wearing only peppermint legwarmers, like a sophomore leading cheers at an orgy.
When we got home, I found her ironing in the bedroom.
“What are you doing?” I said.
“Listening to the radio. Except it just went off.”
“If you thought we were finished with Mr. Gray, it’s time to bring you up to date.”
“Are we talking about Mr. Gray the composite or Mr. Gray the individual? It makes all the difference.”
“It certainly does. Denise compacted the pills.”
“Does that mean we’re all through with the composite?”
“I don’t know what it means.”
“Does it mean you’ve turned your male attention to the individual in the motel?”
“I didn’t say that.”
“You don’t have to say it.
You’re a male. A male follows the path of homicidal rage. It is the biological path. The path of plain dumb blind male biology.”
“How smug, ironing handkerchiefs.”
“Jack, when you die, I will just fall to the floor and stay there. Eventually, maybe, after a very long time, they will find me crouching in the dark, a woman without speech or gesture. But in the meantime I will not help you find this man or his medication.”
“The eternal wisdom of those who iron and sew.”
“Ask yourself what it is you want more, to ease your ancient fear or to revenge your childish dopey injured male pride.”
I went down the hall to help Steffie finish packing. A sports announcer said: “They’re not booing—they’re saying, ‘Bruce, Bruce.’ ” Denise and Wilder were in there with her. I gathered from the veiled atmosphere that Denise had been giving confidential advice on visits to distant parents. Steffie’s flight would originate in Boston and make two stops between Iron City and Mexico City but she wouldn’t have to change planes, so the situation seemed manageable.
“How do I know I’ll recognize my mother?”
“You saw her last year,” I said. “You liked her.”
“What if she refuses to send me back?”
“We have Denise to thank for that idea, don’t we? Thank you, Denise. Don’t worry. She’ll send you back.”
“What if she doesn’t?” Denise said. “It happens, you know.”
“It won’t happen this time.”
“You’ll have to kidnap her back.”
“That won’t be necessary.”
“What if it is?” Steffie said.
“Would you do it?” Denise said.
“It won’t happen in a million years.”
“It happens all the time,” she said. “One parent takes the child, the other parent hires kidnappers to get her back.”
“What if she keeps me?” Steffie said. “What will you do?”
“He’ll have to send people to Mexico. That’s the only thing he can do.”
“But will he do it?” she said.
“Your mother knows she can’t keep you,” I said. “She travels all the time. It’s out of the question.”
“Don’t worry,” Denise told her. “No matter what he says now, he’ll get you back when the time comes.”
Steffie looked at me with deep interest and curiosity. I told her I would travel to Mexico myself and do whatever had to be done to get her back here. She looked at Denise.
“It’s better to hire people,” the older girl said helpfully. “That way you have someone who’s done it before.”
Babette came in and picked up Wilder.
“There you are,” she said. “We’re going to the airport with Steffie. Yes we are. Yes yes.”
“Bruce, Bruce.”
The next day there was an evacuation for noxious odor. SIMUVAC vehicles were everywhere. Men in Mylex suits patrolled the streets, many of them carrying instruments to measure harm. The consulting firm that conceived the evacuation gathered a small group of computer-screened volunteers in a police van in the supermarket parking lot. There was half an hour of self-induced gagging and vomiting. The episode was recorded on videotape and sent somewhere for analysis.
Three days later an actual noxious odor drifted across the river. A pause, a careful thoughtfulness, seemed to settle on the town. Traffic moved more slowly, drivers were exceedingly polite. There was no sign of official action, no jitneys or ambulettes painted in primary colors. People avoided looking at each other directly. An irritating sting in the nostrils, a taste of copper on the tongue. As time passed, the will to do nothing seemed to deepen, to fix itself firmly. There were those who denied they smelled anything at all. It is always that way with odors. There were those who professed not to see the irony of their inaction. They’d taken part in the SIMUVAC exercise but were reluctant to flee now. There were those who wondered what caused the odor, those who looked worried, those who said the absence of technical personnel meant there was nothing to worry about. Our eyes began to water.
About three hours after we’d first become aware of it, the vapor suddenly lifted, saving us from our formal deliberations.
36
NOW AND THEN I thought of the Zumwalt automatic hidden in the bedroom.
The time of dangling insects arrived. White houses with caterpillars dangling from the eaves. White stones in driveways. You can walk at night down the middle of the street and hear women talking on the telephone. Warmer weather produces voices in the dark. They are talking about their adolescent sons. How big, how fast. The sons are almost frightening. The quantities they eat. The way they loom in doorways. These are the days that are full of wormy bugs. They are in the grass, stuck to the siding, hanging in the air, hanging from the trees and eaves, stuck to the window screens. The women talk long-distance to the grandparents of the growing boys. They share the Trimline phone, beamish old folks in hand-knit sweaters on fixed incomes.
What happens to them when the commercial ends?
I got a call myself one night. The operator said, “There’s a Mother Devi that wishes to talk collect to a Jack Gladney. Do you accept?”
“Hello, Janet. What do you want?”
“Just to say hello. To ask how you are. We haven’t talked in ages.”
“Talked?”
“Swami wants to know if our son is coming to the ashram this summer.”
“Our son?”
“Yours, mine and his. Swami regards the children of his followers as his children.”
“I sent a daughter to Mexico last week. When she gets back, I’ll be ready to talk about the son.”
“Swami says Montana will be good for the boy. He will grow out, fill out. These are his touchy years.”
“Why are you calling? Seriously.”
“Just to greet you, Jack. We greet each other here.”
“Is he one of those whimsical swamis with a snow-white beard? Sort of fun to look at?”
“We’re serious people here. The cycle of history has but four ages. We happen to be in the last of these. There is little time for whimsy.”
Her tiny piping voice bounced down to me from a hollow ball in geosynchronous orbit.
“If Heinrich wants to visit you this summer, it’s all right with me. Let him ride horses, fish for trout. But I don’t want him getting involved in something personal and intense, like religion. There’s already been some kidnap talk around here. People are edgy.”
“The last age is the Age of Darkness.”
“Fine. Now tell me what you want.”
“Nothing. I have everything. Peace of mind, purpose, true fellowship. I only wish to greet you. I greet you, Jack. I miss you. I miss your voice. I only wish to talk a while, pass a moment or two in friendly reminiscence.”
I hung up and went for a walk. The women were in their lighted homes, talking on the phone. Did swami have twinkling eyes? Would he be able to answer the boy’s questions where I had failed, provide assurances where I had incited bickering and debate? How final is the Age of Darkness? Does it mean supreme destruction, a night that swallows existence so completely that I am cured of my own lonely dying? I listened to the women talk. All sound, all souls.
When I got home I found Babette in her sweatsuit by the bedroom window, staring into the night.
Delegates to the Hitler conference began arriving. About ninety Hitler scholars would spend the three days of the conference attending lectures, appearing on panels, going to movies. They would wander the campus with their names lettered in gothic type on laminated tags pinned to their lapels. They would exchange Hitler gossip, spread the usual sensational rumors about the last days in the führerbunker.
It was interesting to see how closely they resembled each other despite the wide diversity of national and regional backgrounds. They were cheerful and eager, given to spitting when they laughed, given to outdated dress, homeliness, punctuality. They seemed to have a taste for sweets.
I we
lcomed them in the starkly modern chapel. I spoke in German, from notes, for five minutes. I talked mainly about Hitler’s mother, brother and dog. His dog’s name was Wolf. This word is the same in English and German. Most of the words I used in my address were the same or nearly the same in both languages. I’d spent days with the dictionary, compiling lists of such words. My remarks were necessarily disjointed and odd. I made many references to Wolf, many more to the mother and the brother, a few to shoes and socks, a few to jazz, beer and baseball. Of course there was Hitler himself. I spoke the name often, hoping it would overpower my insecure sentence structure.
The rest of the time I tried to avoid the Germans in the group. Even in my black gown and dark glasses, with my name in Nazi typeface over my heart, I felt feeble in their presence, death-prone, listening to them produce their guttural sounds, their words, their heavy metal. They told Hitler jokes and played pinochle. All I could do was mutter a random monosyllable, rock with empty laughter. I spent a lot of time in my office, hiding.
Whenever I remembered the gun, lurking in a stack of undershirts like a tropical insect, I felt a small intense sensation pass through me. Whether pleasurable or fearful I wasn’t sure. I knew it mainly as a childhood moment, the profound stir of secret-keeping.
What a sly device a handgun is. One so small in particular. An intimate and cunning thing, a secret history of the man who owns it. I recalled how I’d felt some days earlier, trying to find the Dylar. Like someone spying on the family garbage. Was I immersing myself, little by little, in a secret life? Did I think it was my last defense against the ruin worked out for me so casually by the force or nonforce, the principle or power or chaos that determines such things? Perhaps I was beginning to understand my ex-wives and their ties to intelligence.
The Hitler scholars assembled, wandered, ate voraciously, laughed through oversized teeth. I sat at my desk in the dark, thinking of secrets. Are secrets a tunnel to a dreamworld where you control events?
