by Don DeLillo
“Everyone but my wife. She wants to die first.”
“Don’t be so sure,” he said.
We shook hands in front of the library. I thanked him for his honesty.
“That’s what it all comes down to in the end,” he said. “A person spends his life saying good-bye to other people. How does he say good-bye to himself?”
I threw away picture-frame wire, metal bookends, cork coasters, plastic key tags, dusty bottles of Mercurochrome and Vaseline, crusted paintbrushes, caked shoe brushes, clotted correction fluid. I threw away candle stubs, laminated placemats, frayed pot holders. I went after the padded clothes hangers, the magnetic memo clipboards. I was in a vengeful and near savage state. I bore a personal grudge against these things. Somehow they’d put me in this fix. They’d dragged me down, made escape impossible. The two girls followed me around, observing a respectful silence. I threw away my battered khaki canteen, my ridiculous hip boots. I threw away diplomas, certificates, awards and citations. When the girls stopped me, I was working the bathrooms, discarding used bars of soap, damp towels, shampoo bottles with streaked labels and missing caps.
PLEASE NOTE. In several days, your new automated banking card will arrive in the mail. If it is a red card with a silver stripe, your secret code will be the same as it is now. If it is a green card with a gray stripe, you must appear at your branch, with your card, to devise a new secret code. Codes based on birthdays are popular. WARNING. Do not write down your code. Do not carry your code on your person. REMEMBER. You cannot access your account unless your code is entered properly. Know your code. Reveal your code to no one. Only your code allows you to enter the system.
38
MY HEAD WAS BETWEEN HER BREASTS, where it seemed to be spending a lot of time lately. She stroked my shoulder.
“Murray says the problem is that we don’t repress our fear.”
“Repress it?”
“Some people have the gift, some don’t.”
“The gift? I thought repression was outdated. They’ve been telling us for years not to repress our fears and desires. Repression causes tension, anxiety, unhappiness, a hundred diseases and conditions. I thought the last thing we were supposed to do was repress something. They’ve been telling us to talk about our fears, get in touch with our feelings.”
“Getting in touch with death is not what they had in mind. Death is so strong that we have to repress, those of us who know how.”
“But repression is totally false and mechanical. Everybody knows that. We’re not supposed to deny our nature.”
“It’s natural to deny our nature, according to Murray. It’s the whole point of being different from animals.”
“But that’s crazy.”
“It’s the only way to survive,” I said from her breasts.
She stroked my shoulder, thinking about this. Gray flashes of a staticky man standing near a double bed. His body distorted, rippling, unfinished. I didn’t have to imagine his motel companion. Our bodies were one surface, hers and mine, but the delectations of touch were preempted by Mr. Gray. It was his pleasure I experienced, his hold over Babette, his cheap and sleazy power. Down the hall an eager voice said: “If you keep misplacing your ball of string, cage it in a Barney basket, attach some organizer clips to your kitchen corkboard, fasten the basket to the clips. Simple!”
The next day I started carrying the Zumwalt automatic to school. It was in the flap pocket of my jacket when I lectured, it was in the top drawer of my desk when I received visitors in the office. The gun created a second reality for me to inhabit. The air was bright, swirling around my head. Nameless feelings pressed thrillingly on my chest. It was a reality I could control, secretly dominate.
How stupid these people were, coming into my office unarmed.
Late one afternoon I took the gun out of my desk and examined it carefully. Only three bullets remained in the magazine. I wondered how Vernon Dickey had used the missing ammo (or whatever bullets are called by people familiar with firearms). Four Dylar tablets, three Zumwalt bullets. Why was I surprised to find that the bullets were so unmistakably bullet-shaped? I guess I thought new names and shapes had been given to just about everything in the decades since I first became aware of objects and their functions. The weapon was gun-shaped, the little pointed projectiles reassuringly bullet-shaped. They were like childhood things you might come across after forty years, seeing their genius for the first time.
That evening I heard Heinrich in his room, moodily singing “The Streets of Laredo.” I stopped in to ask whether Orest had entered the cage yet.
“They said it was not humane. There was no place that would let him do it officially. He had to go underground.”
“Where is underground?”
“Watertown. Orest and his trainer. They found a public notary there who said he would certify a document that said that Orest Mercator spent so many days incarcerated with these venomous reptiles blah blah blah.”
“Where would they find a large glass cage in Watertown?”
“They wouldn’t.”
“What would they find?”
“A room in the only hotel. Plus there were only three snakes. And he got bit in four minutes.”
“You mean the hotel let them place poisonous snakes in the room?”
“The hotel didn’t know. The man who arranged the snakes carried them up in an airline bag. It was a whole massive deception except the man showed up with three snakes instead of the agreed twenty-seven.”
“In other words he told them he had access to twenty-seven snakes.”
“Venomous. Except they weren’t. So Orest got bit for nothing. The jerk.”
“Suddenly he’s a jerk.”
“They had all this antivenom which they couldn’t even use. The first four minutes.”
“How does he feel?”
“How would you feel if you were a jerk?”
“Glad to be alive,” I said.
“Not Orest. He dropped out of sight. He went into complete seclusion. Nobody’s seen him since it happened. He doesn’t answer the door, he doesn’t answer the phone, he doesn’t show up at school. The total package.”
I decided to wander over to my office and glance at some final exams. Most of the students had already departed, eager to begin the routine hedonism of another bare-limbed summer. The campus was dark and empty. There was a trembling mist. Passing a line of trees, I thought I sensed someone edge in behind me, maybe thirty yards away. When I looked, the path was clear. Was it the gun that was making me jumpy? Does a gun draw violence to it, attract other guns to its surrounding field of force? I walked on quickly toward Centenary Hall. I heard footsteps on gravel, a conspicuous crunch. Someone was out there, on the edge of the parking area, in the trees and the mist. If I had a gun, why was I scared? If I was scared, why didn’t I run? I counted off five paces, looked quickly left, saw a figure moving parallel to the path, in and out of deep shadow. I broke into a shambling trot, my gun hand in my pocket, clutching the automatic. When I looked again, he wasn’t there. I slowed down warily, crossed a broad lawn, heard running, the meter of bounding feet. He was coming from the right this time, all-out, closing fast. I broke into a weaving run, hoping I’d make an elusive target for someone firing at my back. I’d never run in a weave before. I kept my head down, swerved sharply and unpredictably. It was an interesting way to run. I was surprised at the range of possibilities, the number of combinations I could put together within a framework of left and right swerves. I did a tight left, widened it, cut sharply right, faked left, went left, went wide right. About twenty yards from the end of the open area, I broke off the weave pattern and ran as fast and straight as I could for a red oak. I stuck out my left arm, went skidding around the tree in a headlong cranking countermotion, simultaneously using my right hand to pluck the Zumwalt from my jacket pocket, so that I now faced the person I’d been fleeing, protected by a tree trunk, my gun at the ready.
This was about as deft a thing as I�
�d ever done. I looked into the heavy mist as my attacker approached in little thudding footfalls. When I saw the familiar odd loping stride, I put the gun back in my pocket. It was Winnie Richards, of course.
“Hi, Jack. At first I didn’t know who it was, so I used evasive tactics. When I realized it was you, I said to myself that’s just the person I want to see.”
“How come?”
“Remember that time you asked me about a secret research group? Working on fear of death? Trying to perfect a medication?”
“Sure—Dylar.”
“There was a journal lying around the office yesterday. American Psychobiologist. Curious story in there. Such a group definitely existed. Supported by a multinational giant. Operating in the deepest secrecy in an unmarked building just outside Iron City.”
“Why deepest secrecy?”
“It’s obvious. To prevent espionage by competitive giants. The point is they came very close to achieving their objective.”
“What happened?”
“A lot of things. The resident organizational genius, one of the forces behind the whole project, was a fellow named Willie Mink. He turns out to be a controversial fellow. He does some very, very controversial things.”
“I’ll bet I know the first thing he does. He runs an ad in a gossip tabloid asking for volunteers for a hazardous experiment. FEAR OF DEATH, it says.”
“Very good, Jack. A little ad in some rinky-dink newspaper. He interviews the respondents in a motel room, testing them for emotional integration and about a dozen other things in an attempt to work up a death profile for each person. Interviews in a motel. When the scientists and the lawyers find out about this, they go slightly berserk, they reprimand Mink, they put all their resources into computer testing. Berserk official reaction.”
“But that’s not the end of it.”
“How right you are. Despite the fact that Mink is now a carefully observed person, one of the volunteers manages to slip through the screen of watchfulness and begins a program of more or less unsupervised human experimentation, using a drug that is totally unknown, untested and unapproved, with side effects that could beach a whale. An unsupervised well-built human.”
“Female,” I said.
“Very correct. She periodically reports to Mink in the very motel where he originally did his interviewing, sometimes arriving in a taxi, sometimes on foot from the shabby and depressing bus terminal. What is she wearing, Jack?”
“I don’t know.” “A ski mask. She is the woman in the ski mask. When the others find out about Mink’s latest caper, there is a period of prolonged controversy, animosity, litigation and disgrace. Pharmaceutical giants have their code of ethics, just like you and me. The project manager is kicked out, the project goes on without him.”
“Did the article say what happened to him?”
“The reporter tracked him down. He is living in the same motel where all the controversy took place.”
“Where is the motel?”
“In Germantown.”
“Where’s that?” I said.
“Iron City. It’s the old German section. Behind the foundry.”
“I didn’t know there was a section in Iron City called Germantown.”
“The Germans are gone, of course.”
I went straight home. Denise was making check marks in a paperback book called Directory of Toll-Free Numbers. I found Babette sitting by Wilder’s bed, reading him a story.
“I don’t mind running clothes as such,” I said. “A sweatsuit is a practical thing to wear at times. But I wish you wouldn’t wear it when you read bedtime stories to Wilder or braid Steffie’s hair. There’s something touching about such moments that is jeopardized by running clothes.”
“Maybe I’m wearing running clothes for a reason.”
“Like what?”
“I’m going running,” she said.
“Is that a good idea? At night?”
“What is night? It happens seven times a week. Where is the uniqueness in this?”
“It’s dark, it’s wet.”
“Do we live in a blinding desert glare? What is wet? We live with wet.”
“Babette doesn’t speak like this.”
“Does life have to stop because our half of the earth is dark? Is there something about the night that physically resists a runner? I need to pant and gasp. What is dark? It’s just another name for light.”
“No one will convince me that the person I know as Babette actually wants to run up the stadium steps at ten o’clock at night.”
“It’s not what I want, it’s what I need. My life is no longer in the realm of want. I do what I have to do. I pant, I gasp. Every runner understands the need for this.”
“Why do you have to run up steps? You’re not a professional athlete trying to rebuild a shattered knee. Run on plain land. Don’t make a major involvement out of it. Everything is a major involvement today.”
“It’s my life. I tend to be involved.”
“It’s not your life. It’s only exercise.”
“A runner needs,” she said.
“I also need and tonight I need the car. Don’t wait up for me. Who knows when I’ll be back.”
I waited for her to ask what mysterious mission would require me to get in the car and drive through the rain-streaked night, time of return unknown.
She said, “I can’t walk to the stadium, run up the steps five or six times and then walk all the way back home. You can drive me there, wait for me, drive me back. The car is then yours.”
“I don’t want it. What do you think of that? You want the car, you take it. The streets are slippery. You know what that means, don’t you?”
“What does it mean?”
“Fasten your seat belt. There’s also a chill in the air. You know what a chill in the air means.”
“What does it mean?”
“Wear your ski mask,” I told her.
The thermostat began to buzz.
I put on a jacket and went outside. Ever since the airborne toxic event, our neighbors, the Stovers, had been keeping their car in the driveway instead of the garage, keeping it facing the street, keeping the key in the ignition. I walked up the driveway and got in the car. There were trash caddies fixed to the dashboard and seat-backs, dangling plastic bags full of gum wrappers, ticket stubs, lipstick-smeared tissues, crumpled soda cans, crumpled circulars and receipts, ashtray debris, popsicle sticks and french fries, crumpled coupons and paper napkins, pocket combs with missing teeth. Thus familiarized, I started up the engine, turned on the lights and drove off.
I ran a red light when I crossed Middlebrook. Reaching the end of the expressway ramp, I did not yield. All the way to Iron City, I felt a sense of dreaminess, release, unreality. I slowed down at the toll gate but did not bother tossing a quarter into the basket. An alarm went off but no one pursued. What’s another quarter to a state that is billions in debt? What’s twenty-five cents when we are talking about a nine-thousand-dollar stolen car? This must be how people escape the pull of the earth, the gravitational leaf-flutter that brings us hourly closer to dying. Simply stop obeying. Steal instead of buy, shoot instead of talk. I ran two more lights on the rainy approach roads to Iron City. The outlying buildings were long and low, fish and produce markets, meat terminals with old wooden canopies. I entered the city and turned on the radio, needing company not on the lonely highway but here on the cobbled streets, in the sodium vapor lights, where the emptiness clings. Every city has its districts. I drove past the abandoned car district, the uncollected garbage district, the sniper-fire district, the districts of smoldering sofas and broken glass. Ground glass crunched under the tires. I headed toward the foundry.
Random Access Memory, Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome, Mutual Assured Destruction.
I still felt extraordinarily light—lighter than air, colorless, odorless, invisible. But around the lightness and dreaminess, something else was building, an emotion of a different order. A surge, a wil
l, an agitation of the passions. I reached into my pocket, rubbed my knuckles across the grainy stainless steel of the Zumwalt barrel. The man on the radio said: “Void where prohibited.”
39
I DROVE TWICE AROUND THE FOUNDRY, looking for signs of some erstwhile German presence. I drove past the row houses. They were set on a steep hill, narrow-fronted frame houses, a climbing line of pitched roofs. I drove past the bus terminal, through the beating rain. It took a while to find the motel, a one-story building set against the concrete pier of an elevated roadway. It was called the Roadway Motel.
Transient pleasures, drastic measures.
The area was deserted, a spray-painted district of warehouses and light industry. The motel had nine or ten rooms, all dark, no cars out front. I drove past three times, studying the scene, and parked half a block away, in the rubble under the roadway. Then I walked back to the motel. Those were the first three elements in my plan.
Here is my plan. Drive past the scene several times, park some distance from the scene, go back on foot, locate Mr. Gray under his real name or an alias, shoot him three times in the viscera for maximum pain, clear the weapon of prints, place the weapon in the victim’s staticky hand, find a crayon or lipstick tube and scrawl a cryptic suicide note on the full-length mirror, take the victim’s supply of Dylar tablets, slip back to the car, proceed to the expressway entrance, head east toward Blacksmith, get off at the old river road, park Stover’s car in Old Man Treadwell’s garage, shut the garage door, walk home in the rain and the fog.
Elegant. My airy mood returned. I was advancing in consciousness. I watched myself take each separate step. With each separate step, I became aware of processes, components, things relating to other things. Water fell to earth in drops. I saw things new.
There was an aluminum awning over the office door. On the door itself were little plastic letters arranged in slots to spell out a message. The message was: NU MISH BOOT ZUP KO.
Gibberish but high-quality gibberish. I made my way along the wall, looking through the windows. My plan was this. Stand at the edges of windows with my back to the wall, swivel my head to look peripherally into rooms. Some windows were bare, some had blinds or dusty shades. I could make out the rough outlines of chairs or beds in the dark rooms. Trucks rumbled overhead. In the next to last unit, there was the scantest flicker of light. I stood at the edge of the window, listening. I swiveled my head, looked into the room out of the corner of my right eye. A figure sat in a low armchair looking up at the flickering light. I sensed I was part of a network of structures and channels. I knew the precise nature of events. I was moving closer to things in their actual state as I approached a violence, a smashing intensity. Water fell in drops, surfaces gleamed.
