Players

by Don DeLillo

  Later still, in some perfect interpenetration of wine and night air, she drifted through a more congenial region, a nonspace, really, in which immaculate calm prevailed. Between moments of near-sleep she felt her mind alive in the vivid chill. Clarity rang through every sparse remark. When Ethan laughed briefly, an idiot grunt, she felt she knew what tiny neural event had caused that sound. There was total order in the night.

  Then she was sluggish and dumb. She wanted to be in bed but hadn’t the will to get up and go inside. She kept edging into some unstable phase of sleep. Her elbow slipped off the inside of the chair arm, causing her to snap awake. Everything was different after that, a struggle.

  “God, the stars,” Jack said.

  It occurred to Pam that Ethan rarely talked to Jack. He addressed Jack by talking about furniture, movies, the weather. That, plus third person. He said things to Pammy that were meant for Jack. Sometimes he read an item aloud from a newspaper or repeated a phrase spoken by a TV newsman, repeated it in a certain way—meant for Jack, some fragmentary parable. She didn’t think this revealed as much about the two men involved as it did about people living together, their lesions of speech and demeanor. Pammy and Lyle, had their own characteristics, of course. Pammy and Lyle, she thought. We sound like a pompom girl and a physics major. Or chimps, she thought. The names of chimps learning language with multicolored disks. She drank more wine, watching Ethan make a series of preliminary hand flourishes.

  “New places, when they’re really new, really fresh and new, make you more aware of yourself. This can be dangerous.”

  “I want my sleeping bag,” Jack said.

  “All this stuff is flashing your way. It’s like a mirror, ultimately. You end up with yourself minus all the familiar outward forms, the trappings and surroundings. If it’s too new, it’s frightening. You get too much feedback that’s not predetermined.”

  “Want sleep out,” Jack said. “Air, wind.”

  “Fear is intense self-awareness.”

  “Like today, earlier,” Pammy said, “when I thought I had something wrong, I thought me, me, my tissue, my inner body. But it’s easier to die alone. Kids, forget about.”

  “Ground,” Jack said. “Sleep, earth, creature.”

  Ethan ran the side of his index finger along his throat, thoughtfully, and up over the point of his chin, many times—an indication of ironic comments in the offing, or pseudo wisdom perhaps, or even autobiography, which, in his framework of slanting planes, was itself determinedly ironic. They both waited. It was the middle of the night. Water closed around the rocks near shore, audibly, finding lanes.

  “You people here.”

  Jack went inside, returning with a sleeping bag, which he tossed on the deck. Everything was happening slowly now. Jack went around lighting candles. Jack paced, imitating a tiger. Pammy was aware that he was seated again, finally. They drank awhile in silence.

  “I’m slightly lantern-jawed,” she said.

  They seemed to laugh.

  “No, really, people, I’m slightly lantern-jawed. It’s all right. It’s, so what, no problem, long as I accept it.”

  “Pam-mee.”

  “So, you know, so what? When you think of other people’s, what they have to accept type thing. And it’s slight, just hardly noticeable, I know that. So you accept. And you live. You simply everyday live.”

  “She’s not about to blow her cookies, I hope.”

  “Your sleeping bag gets the brunt if I do.”

  “Mercy me.”

  “Blat,” she said.

  Pammy and Jack began a sequence of giddiness here. Everything was funny. She felt lightheaded, never more awake. Where was Ethan? She turned to see his profile, partly shrouded in the blanket, theatrical and grave. It would be dawn soon, maybe an hour or two, unfortunately at their backs somewhere. Jack’s voice grew shrewd and dry. It was the only sound for a time. He paused between remarks, effectively. She laughed at everything he said. It was comical, this matter-of-fact Jack. She began to laugh at the end of pauses, anticipating. There was a spell of quiet. Softest color seeped into Pammy’s awareness, something pared away from the night, a glow of the lowest resolution, as though night itself were being broken down into its optically active parts.

  “You people here,” Ethan said.

  The others laughed.

  “What you don’t know is a whole era of things. You’ve been gone right by. It must be solid void to live without the references, although it’s problematical that you even know it, this blank space. I mean a Pete Smith Specialty. Do you even imagine what this conjures up? No idea, have you? What it means when two people might meet, not knowing each other, and then to realize this association in their past, this small thing magnified, the utter dumbness of a Pete Smith Specialty, that narrator’s voice, or tapes of Sin Killer Griffin recorded in some Texas jail. Hearing that’s a footing of sorts, a solid footing. You missed that, see. Because, then, at that time, there wasn’t this Zeitgeist of the Month business. It was all one thing, which you missed completely. Pull My Daisy, Jesus, which wasn’t that long ago, with some of the people still around, but you don’t know it, total nothing. Pull My Daisy at the Ninety-second Street Y. Or Lord Buckley, a whole thing you missed, Lord Buckley doing The Naz. No idea what I’m talking about, right? You missed the references. You missed the Village clubs. All the hanging around. The footing, the solid footing. You don’t know, see, what you don’t know is that your whole own attitudes come from some of these things, which were the basis, the solid rock. What else, who else can I mention? The Naz, I said that. Do you know how the Lone Ranger found Silver?”

  Pammy became giddier. Jack arranged his sleeping bag across the length of a collapsible beach chair and got inside. Outlines of small islands became apparent. Ethan walked across the deck and opened the sliding door.

  Later Jack struggled out of his sweater. A lobster boat appeared at the southern point of one of the islands. Pammy heard the first gull. There was an animal presence in the air, a binding of appetites.

  It was slightly warmer now. She saw Jack’s shirt on the deck. Things caught her eye continually, birds mostly, a small boat now and then, a seal close to shore, its slick head vanishing, reappearing. The binoculars were inside.

  “All right, how many gay friends do I have?”

  “What?” she said.

  “Gay friends.”

  “How many does it take?”

  “But you must have noticed how almost nobody I’m really friendly with is gay. Some, maybe, that I’ve lost touch with but Ethan thinks that are hanging around our building lobby and rooftop. Almost nobody by now.”

  “It only takes one, I thought.”

  “It’s my mind and body,” he said.

  “Ah, point of agreement.”

  She forced herself to remove the blanket and get out of the chair, stiffly. She went inside, found the binoculars and came back out on the deck to look at the seal.

  “I see myself doing a lot of traveling in the near future,” Jack said. “Just place to place. An unsupervised existence. It’s what I should have done a long time ago. I don’t want to be pinned down anymore. Not in one place and not in one kind of life.”

  “He came up here because he thought it’s what you wanted.”

  “He thought wrong.”

  “I think he’s even prepared to make it more or less permanent, although how, financially, he expects to do this, I don’t know.”

  “What are you looking at while I’m talking? I can’t believe, Pam, I’m telling my life and you’re with these binoculars, totally somewhere else.”

  “It’s the seal, except it’s gone, I think.”

  “The seal again, it’s here?”

  “The seal is back, except it’s around that bend again, I think.”

  “Except it’s not a seal,” he said. “It’s a frogman, spying.”

  She lay in bed, shivering a bit, curled away from the source of light. She tried to convince herself she was o
nly seconds from sleep. Moments and episodes passed through her mind.

  Later she woke up and heard Ethan in the kitchen, coughing noisily, bringing up phlegm and spitting it out. The bed was immersed in sunlight. She shed blankets, her body sprawling awake under a lone sheet, unbending to the comprehensive warmth.

  For years she’d heard people saying, all sorts, really, here and there: “Do whatever you want as long as nobody gets hurt.” They said: “As long as both parties agree, do it, whatever.” They said: “Whatever feels right, as long as you both want to do it and nobody gets hurt, there’s no reason not to.” They said: “As long as there’s mutual agreement and the right feeling, no matter who or what.” “Whatever feels right,” they said. They said: “Follow your instincts, be yourself, act out your fantasies.”

  6

  Lyle hadn’t been down here in years, the Lower East Side, that ethnic pantechnicon, streets, people, a history of flawless suffering. The car was parked on a side street near the Manhattan Bridge. Marina leaned forward, arms over the steering wheel, her head resting there, eyes right, watching Lyle. It was nearly dark. Five bottles, thrown from a roof, hit the pavement at ten-second intervals. Marina’s eyes revealed the faintest clue of amusement.

  “A little gasoline, you have a political act.”

  “As it is, what?”

  “Public nuisance,” she said.

  “Who’s the target, I wonder.”

  “The bottle is the target. They’re breaking the bottle.”

  “That’s Zen,” he said.

  “Whatever works, we try.”

  “The bottle is the target, master.”

  “So, Zen, why not?”

  Marina was about seven years his senior, Lyle estimated, and was showing today, for the first time, an inclination to be at ease, not quite so rigorous in her convictions, or less disposed, at any rate, to locate every exchange inside an absolute structure.

  “Where will J. go?”

  “Not far enough,” she said. “It’s not easy, disappearing, when your previous cover places and routes are closed off to you. J. has no money. He can’t have friends, many, anyway, who’d be willing to help him.”

  “What happens, terrorist discipline?”

  She continued to look right at him, saying nothing. This disappointed Lyle. He’d been trying to get her to talk about aspects of Kinnear’s situation, past and present. The experiment, as J. had called it, obviously wasn’t a case of penetration in the conventional sense. Still, Lyle believed there was an element of premeditation involved. J. had planted himself; he’d infiltrated, at a conscious level, long before he decided to contact Burks or whatever agency it was that Burks represented. His “selective” disclosure of information merely confirmed the material existence of the space he’d chosen to occupy, the complex geography, points of confluence and danger. Lyle found these speculations absorbing and hoped that Marina would provide factual data to round out his concept. Fitting human pieces into gaps on the board. Such activity was thrilling. It was possible Kinnear had been an agent, in spirit, for twenty years. He’d functioned simultaneously on two levels. Counterpoise. His life was based on forces tending to produce equilibrium. Everything had a delayed effect. He could not act without considering entire sets of implications. Ended now. Collapsed inward. Possibly he’d worked it that close to the edge intentionally.

  “Is J. homosexual?”

  She didn’t know.

  “Is he likely to turn completely, sign on the dotted line?”

  Gesture of indifference.

  “Will he be killed, if and when?”

  “Forget all doubts.”

  “Yes, he will be killed.”

  “It’s not an urgent matter,” she said. “We have other things to occupy us.”

  She moved back from the steering wheel and toward Lyle, awkwardly, her right leg somehow in the way, preventing the effect she sought, a forceful intimacy, the exchange of intense commitments. Finally she put both hands to his face. The contact was such that it produced a cross-channeling, a lane of immediate reciprocity. Her eyes were fixed, a little mad—the wrong effect again. It was interesting, always, being touched by a woman, the first time, whose mind you know runs on different lines from your own, who lives by another map, entirely.

  “Are we close to something?”

  “Getting there,” she said.

  “Do we have a Vilar?”

  “We have someone willing.”

  “Is it possible he can get instructions from your brother?”

  “You mean to prepare.”

  “Because I’d hate for anything to detonate before it was supposed to.”

  “Vilar is in total closed confinement. He tried to kill himself several times. They have him under twenty-four-hour surveillance. Vilar will kill himself rather than remain in prison. It’s a matter of time, nothing else. It’s the act he has rehearsed all his life. Death before pig justice. This is the destiny of one’s class.”

  She returned to her part of the front seat and looked out the side window at the rubble across the street. Three more bottles struck the pavement, about half a block away, again at ten-second intervals.

  “But you have someone.”

  “Definitely.”

  “He does bombs?”

  “He does passports,” she said.

  It was dark. A group of men and boys stood down at the far corner, laughing. Three of them disengaged and headed up toward the car, teenagers, one holding a bottle between his legs, duck-walking.

  “So then I wait.”

  “Very soon, Lyle.”

  “We do it the same way, is that it? I let your man come onto the floor as my guest. He leaves the thing. Middle of the night, it goes.”

  “You two will talk.”

  “Who is he?”

  “Not yet,” she said.

  “Did you ever dream you’d find another George so easily?”

  “It’s a quality of Americans.”

  “What is?”

  “Just as Englishmen never cease being schoolboys, Americans are doomed to perform heroic deeds.”

  “An ironic saying, he interjected,” Lyle said.

  “Which illness is worse I leave for you to decide.”

  She was smiling. The three boys passed in front of the car, looking in, and crossed over to the empty lot. She seemed to be waiting for Lyle to get out of the car. A man wearing outsized pants and a T-shirt full of holes approached the car on the driver’s side. Marina said something in Spanish. Then she looked at Lyle. The man had recently vomited. Not taking her eyes off Lyle, she said something else and the man walked off.

  “The bottle is the target,” Lyle said. “I keep telling myself, as a soothing reminder.”

  “We’ll talk soon.”

  “I’m getting out, is that it?”

  “Yes.”

  “And walking.”

  “One foot, then the other.”

  “Maybe you can drop me at Canal Street, if you’re going that way, or anywhere near Lower Broadway.”

  “This is better, right here.”

  “Or Chinatown,” he said. “Maybe you haven’t been there lately. Interesting part of the city.”

  When he got home he emptied the contents of his pockets onto the dresser. Wallet, keys, ballpoint pen, memo pad. Transit tokens on the right side of the dresser. Pennies and other change on the left. He ate a sandwich and took a drink up to the roof. Four elderly people sat at one of the tables. Lyle went over to the parapet. Noise from the streets rose uncertainly tonight, muffled, an underwater density. Air conditioners, buses, taxicabs. Beyond that, something obscure: the nonconnotative tone that appeared to seep out of the streets themselves, that was present even when no traffic moved, the quietest sunups. It was some innate disturbance of low frequency in the grain of the physical city, a ghostly roar. He held his glass out over the edge of the low protective wall. The other people had been silent since he’d appeared on the roof. He dropped the glass from right ha
nd to left. There was that soft fraction of a second when neither hand touched glass. He resolved to do it five more times, extending the distance between hands each time, before allowing himself to go back downstairs.

  He was in bed when Kinnear called.

  “This has to be brief, Lyle.”

  “I’m awake, but barely.”

  “What’s your situation?”

  “Marina is more or less set on locating you. I don’t think she has a clue at the moment as to where you might be, at least that I’m aware of. She still wants to do the Exchange.”

  “What’s your situation, dollars and cents?”

  “You need?”

  “I’m looking ahead.”

  “What do you need?”

  “Don’t know for sure. There are several variables. Just want to determine if you’d be willing to aid and abet.”

  “I should, what, draw out something now and wait to hear?”

  “Draw out fifteen hundred now, good idea, in case the whole thing materializes over the weekend, which could mean trouble getting funds.”

  “What, U.S. dollars?”

  “Good point.”

  “There’s an exchange place near my bank.”

  “No, stick to U.S.”

  “Will you be able to change over easily?”

  “U.S. will be fine, Lyle.”

  “Are you in how much of a hurry?”

  “Like now, zip.”

  The next day Lyle was paged on the trading floor and given a telegram, originating locally, with three words on it—NINE ONE FIVE—and the teletyped name DISINFO.

  The day after that he experienced what at first he thought might be some variation of déjà vu. He’d finished lunch and stood at the door of a corner restaurant, able to see, at a severe angle, the lean elderly man who frequently appeared outside Federal Hall holding a hand-lettered political placard over his head for the benefit of those gathered on the steps. He, Lyle, was cleaning his fingernails, surreptitiously, using a toothpick he’d taken from a bowl near the cash register inside the restaurant. The paradox of material flowing backward toward itself. In this case there was no illusion involved. He had stood on this spot, not long ago, at this hour of the day, doing precisely what he was doing now, his eyes on the old man, whose body was aligned identically with the edge of a shadow on the façade of the building he faced, his sign held at the same angle, it seemed, the event converted into a dead replica by means of structural impregnation, the mineral replacement of earlier matter. Lyle decided to scatter the ingredients by heading directly toward the man instead of back to the Exchange, as he was certain he’d done the previous time. First he read the back of the sign, the part facing the street, recalling the general tenor. Then he sat on the steps, with roughly a dozen other people, and reached for his cigarettes. Burks was across the street, near the entrance to the Morgan Bank. People were drifting back to work. Lyle smoked a moment, then got up and approached the sign-holder. The strips of wood that steadied the edges of the sign extended six inches below it, giving the man a natural grip. Burks looked unhappy, arms folded across his chest.