Americana

by Don DeLillo

  There was a phone ringing in the corridor. Nobody bothered to pick it up. Then another one began ringing. I walked slowly around my office, stretching as I went. I tried to remember whether Burt or Kirk had ever acted in an office film, one of those dull morality tales about power plays and timid adulteries. I noticed a memo on my desk. I knew immediately, from the brevity of the message, that it was another of the strange memos that had been appearing at irregular intervals for over a year. I picked it up and read it.

  To: Tech Unit B

  From: St. Augustine

  And never can a man be more disastrously in death than when death itself shall be deathless.

  Nobody knew who sent these memos. Investigations had been made, people questioned, but nothing came of it. Whoever sent them had to overcome two difficulties. He had to get into the multilith room and run off enough copies for our entire sub-section without being discovered. And he had to distribute the memos, one by one, to every desk and office in the area. The multilith operators had been cleared of any suspicion and so had all the mailboys. No one had ever seen these particular memos delivered; they simply appeared, either in the morning or the early afternoon. This was the first of the St. Augustines. Previous memos had borne messages from Zwingli, Lévi-Strauss, Rilke, Chekhov, Tillich, William Blake, Charles Olson and a Kiowa chief named Satanta. Naturally the person responsible for these messages became known throughout the company as the Mad Memo-Writer. I never referred to him that way because it was much too obvious a name. I called him Trotsky. There was no special reason for choosing Trotsky; it just seemed to fit. I wondered if he was someone I knew. Everybody seemed to think he was probably a small grotesque man who had suffered many disappointments in life, who despised the vast impersonal structure of the network and who was employed in our forwarding department, the traditional repository for all sex offenders, mutants and vegetarians. They said he was most likely a foreigner who lived in a rooming house in Red Hook; he spent his nights reading an eight-volume treatise on abnormal psychology, in small type, and he told his grocer he had been a Talmudic scholar in the old country. This was the consensus and maybe it had a certain logic. But I found more satisfaction in believing that Trotsky was one of our top executives. He made eighty thousand dollars a year and stole paper clips from the office.

  I sat at my desk and with a ballpoint pen traced the outline of my left hand on a blank piece of note paper. Then I called Sullivan but she didn’t answer the phone. I walked around the office some more and looked out into the corridor. Many of the girls were back at work, unhooding their typewriters and storing squalid Kleenex in the bottom drawers of their desks where it would rest with old love letters, rag dolls, and pornographic books their bosses had given them in the spirit of the new liberalism, and also to see if anything would happen. I closed the door. Then I unzipped my pants and took out my cock. I walked around the office like that for a while. It felt good. I put it back and then filed Trotsky’s memo in the folder that held all of his other work as well as some poems I had written in the office from time to time and some schizograms from girls I knew. (HELLO FROM THE SCENIC COAST OF NEBRASKA.) I opened the door. Binky was at her desk. She took a sandwich and a paper container out of a white bag. The sandwich, when she unwrapped it, looked wet and gummy. There was something very touching about that moment.

  “Welcome back to the big rock candy mountain.”

  “Hi,” she said. “I spent two solid hours at goddamn Saks without buying a thing. And now I’m about to eat a Coca-Cola sandwich. Merry Christmas.”

  “Trotsky struck again.”

  “I saw it,” she said. “I still think it’s you.”

  She knew that would flatter me. Often she said things that seemed intended to do me some good. I never knew why. In many ways Binky was a good friend to me and I used to wonder what would happen if I tried, in the jargon of the day, to complicate our relationship. Once, working late in the office, she removed her shoes while taking dictation. The sight of a woman taking off her shoes has always stirred me, and I kissed her. That was all, a kiss between paragraphs, but maybe it wasn’t mere tenderness which made me do it, nor a desire to challenge the blandness of our attachment. Maybe it was just another of my ego-moments. It was only several days before that I had learned about Binky and Weede.

  “Come on in,” I said.

  She brought her lunch with her and we sat on the sofa.

  “Phelps Lawrence just got bounced,” she said.

  “I heard.”

  “There’s a rumor that Joyner’s next.”

  “Joyner started it,” I said. “It’s part of his survival kit. If he’s not careful it’s going to blow up in his face one of these days.”

  “Jody thinks it’s the beginning of a purge. There’s been a rash of confidential memos. She thinks Stennis might be forced to resign. But keep it quiet. She made me promise not to breathe a word.”

  “I’ve noticed all the closed doors. Sometimes I think they close their doors just to frighten us. Everybody knows closed doors mean secret discussions and secret discussions mean trouble. But maybe they’re in there watching guitar lessons on Channel 31.”

  “Grove Palmer is getting a divorce,” Binky said.

  Suddenly I realized that I hadn’t brushed my teeth after lunch. I kept some toothpaste and a toothbrush in my office and always brushed my teeth after a lunch that included a few drinks. The washroom after lunch was always full of men brushing their teeth and gargling with mouthwash. There were times when I thought all of us at the network existed only on videotape. Our words and actions seemed to have a disturbingly elapsed quality. We had said and done all these things before and they had been frozen for a time, rolled up in little laboratory trays to await broadcast and rebroadcast when the proper time-slots became available. And there was the feeling that somebody’s deadly pinky might nudge a button and we would all be erased forever. Those moments in the washroom, with a dozen men sawing away at their teeth, were perhaps the worst times of all. We seemed to be no more than electronic signals and we moved through time and space with the stutter and shadowed insanity of a TV commercial.

  “What’s happening with your Navaho project?” Binky said.

  “Quincy keeps jamming up the works. I’m going to talk to Weede and see if I can get to work on it alone. But don’t mention it to anybody.”

  “David,” she said.

  “What?”

  “They may drop ‘Soliloquy.’”

  “Are you sure?”

  “The person who told me said the crappy sponsor wasn’t interested in renewing.”

  “Why not?”

  “The person didn’t say.”

  “There’s always the Navahos,” I said.

  “David, I think it’s the third or fourth best show on TV.”

  “Soliloquy” was a series I had worked out on my own. It was the first major thing I had done since joining Weede’s group—a small, elite and experimental unit put together for the purpose of developing new concepts and techniques. The rest of the network despised us because of our relative freedom and because of the industry prizes we had won for our warcasts, which were done independently of the news division. “Soliloquy” had won nothing. Each show consisted, very simply, of an individual appearing before the camera for an hour and telling his life story. I wanted to ask her what else Weede had said about the series. But that wouldn’t have been fair. She had already taken a chance in telling me as much as she had. Just then Weede went by my office, moving swiftly, head down, body tilted forward as if on skis. He always came back to the office at least half an hour after Binky on Thursday afternoons; this maneuver, obviously, was an attempt to avoid suspicion. I liked to think that he walked around the block five times during that half-hour, or stood in a phone booth in the lobby and pretended he was talking to someone, moving his lips over the mouthpiece, perhaps actually speaking, carrying on a normal businesslike conversation with the dial tone. And he always walked by my office ve
ry quickly, then tried to avoid me for the rest of the day. He must have possessed an extraordinarily complex sense of guilt. I think he was afraid of me on those Thursdays. But on Friday morning he would come looking for me, breathing smoke and vengeance, as if I were the engineer of his guilt.

  Binky went back to her desk. I loosened my tie and rolled up my sleeves. I had managed to deceive myself into believing that people would be deceived into believing that a man so untidy (in an atmosphere so methodically spruce) must be driving himself mercilessly. The phone rang. It was Wendy Judd, a girl I had dated in college. She was living in New York now, having traveled for a year right after she divorced her husband, one of the top production people at either Paramount or Metro.

  “I’m dying, David.”

  “Don’t generalize, Wendy.”

  “New York is vicious. Listen, before I forget, can you come to a dinner party tomorrow night? Come alone. You’re the only one who can save me.”

  “You know I go bowling with the fellas on Friday night, Wendy.”

  “David, please. This is no time for jokes.”

  “Our team is called the Steamrollers. We play the Silver Jets for the all-league title tomorrow. Winner gets a cup with a naked Greek bowling ace embossed on the side.”

  “Come early,” she said. “You can help me toss the salad. We’ll talk over old times.”

  “There are no old times, Wendy. The tapes have been accidentally destroyed.”

  “Eightish,” she said, and hung up.

  Outside, the girls were hammering at their little oval keys. I went for a walk. Everybody was busy. All the phones seemed to be ringing. Some of the girls talked to themselves while typing, muttering shit whenever they made a mistake. I went around to the supply area. The cabinets were the same color as troops in the field. Hallie Lewin was in there, leaning over a bottom drawer. There is no place in the world more sexually exciting than a large office. It is like a fantasy of some elaborate woman-maze; wherever you go, around corners, into cubicles, up or down the stairwells, you are greeted by an almost lewd tableau. There are women standing, sitting, kneeling, crouching, all in attitudes that seem designed to stun you. It is like a dream of jubilant gardens in which every tree contains a milky nymph. Hallie saw me and smiled.

  “I heard Reeves Chubb got canned,” I said.

  “Really? I had no idea he was in trouble.”

  “Don’t breathe a word.”

  “Of course not.”

  “Hallie, you’ve got the sweetest little ass I’ve ever seen.”

  “Why thank you.”

  “Not a word about Reeves now.”

  “I promise,” she said.

  I went around toward Weede Denney’s office. On the way I saw Dickie Slater, the sixty-five-year-old mailboy, standing behind Jody Moore’s desk rubbing his groin. When he saw me he grinned, man to man, and kept rubbing. Jody was on the phone, speaking Portuguese for some reason. I turned a corner and saw James T. Rice running down a hallway at top speed. I had no idea what I wanted to say to Weede. I was upset about the series being dropped and I felt venomous. In similar situations I usually reacted as a child might react after he has been disappointed or rebuked, with a child’s petty genius for reprisal. I told bizarre and pointless lies. I broke my typewriter. I stole things from the office. I wrote snake-hissing memos to my subordinates. Once, after an idea of mine had been criticized by a senior vice-president named Livingston, I went back to my office, blew my nose several times, and that night sneaked up to Livingston’s office and put the soiled handkerchief in the top drawer of his desk.

  Weede was standing in the middle of his office, deep in thought, one hand absently grooming his bald head. He looked at me carefully.

  “Can’t talk to you now, Dave; wires are burning up; see you first thing in the morning.”

  On the way back to my office I stopped at Binky’s desk to talk some more but she looked busy. I went inside and dialed Sullivan’s number again. She was there.

  “Utah,” I said.

  “Hello, David.”

  “Montana, Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona.”

  “I didn’t see you leave last night. You abandoned me to all those keening necrophiles.”

  “Steamboat Springs, the Sawtooth Mountains, Big Timber, Aztec, Durango, Spanish Fork, Monument Valley.”

  “I hear America singing,” she said, but not as if she meant it.

  “I know a guy with a camp trailer. He’s living in Maine somewhere. We can pick him up and then all head west in the camper.”

  “All I need is an hour’s notice.”

  “Blasting through New Mexico in the velvet dawn.”

  “I’m late for an appointment,” Sullivan said.

  I tried to get some work done. It was dark now and I went to the window. Looking south, from as high as we were, I could see the stacked lights extending almost the entire length of Manhattan, and that delicate gridiron tracery in the streets. I opened the window slightly. The whole city was roaring. In winter, when the darkness always comes before you expect it and all those lights begin to pinch through the stale mist, New York becomes a gigantic wedding cake. You board the singing elevator and drop an eighth of a mile in ten seconds flat. Your ears hum as you are decompressed. It is an almost frighteningly impersonal process and yet something of this kind seems necessary to translate you from the image to what is actually impaled on that dainty fork.

  I strolled around to Carter Hemmings’ office. He was at his desk, smelling the nicotine on his fingers. When he saw me he tried to neutralize the flow of panic by standing up, absurdly, and spreading his arms wide, an Argentinian beef baron welcoming a generalissimo to his villa.

  “Hey Dave,” he said. “What’s happening, buddy?”

  “I understand Mars Tyler got the sack,” I said.

  “No kidding. No kidding. Jesus.”

  “There’s a big purge on. The tumbrels are clattering through the streets.”

  “Sit down,” he said. “I’ll get Penny to order some coffee.”

  “Can’t spare the time, Carter. All the circuits are overloaded. How’s that laser beam project shaping up? They’re starting to put pressure.”

  “I’m trying to hammer it into workable form, Dave.”

  “Have a good time with B.G. last night?”

  “I didn’t know you knew her, Dave.”

  “Slightly,” I said.

  “Beautiful girl. But we didn’t really hit it off. Dinner. Then I took her home.”

  “Weede was talking about you during lunch today. He’s a curious man, Weede. Sometimes given to rash judgments. Better get cracking on that laser beam thing. I’ll be in early tomorrow to take a look at it. Weede’ll be in early tomorrow too. We’re all coming in very early tomorrow. Have a nice evening, Carter. Say hello to your wife for me.”

  “Dave, I’m not married.”

  I went back to my office. Binky was in there trying to straighten out my files. It was almost time to leave. I fixed my tie and buttoned my shirtcuffs. In the corridor all the phones were ringing. I wondered who Trotsky was.

  3

  People leaned into the traffic, scouting for cabs. Thousands of men hurried toward Grand Central, moving in broken strides, dodging, marching down deep corridors, emptying into chambers, the warm trains waiting, long darkness, newsprint on every finger, the fight against sleep. I liked to walk home from the office because it made me feel virtuous.

  The crowds didn’t begin to thin out until I got south of Forty-second Street, and traffic was bad all the way. Below Forty-second, people were able to choose their own pace and yet here the faces seemed gray and stricken, the bodies surreptitious in the scrawls of their coats, and it occurred to me that perhaps in this city the crowd was essential to the individual; without it, he had nothing against which to scrape his anger, no echo for grief, and not the slightest proof that there were others more lonely than he. It was just a passing thought. I got home, turned on the TV, undressed, and got in the shower. />
  I was living then in an apartment overlooking Gramercy Park. My ex-wife lived in the same building. The arrangement wasn’t as strange as it may sound—it wasn’t even an arrangement. While married we had lived in a larger apartment on the other side of the park. From a friend I learned of the vacancy across the way and it seemed sensible to move in since my wife had just left me and there was no need for such a large place and no point in paying the higher rent. She lived in the Village for a while, taking ballet lessons, courses at the New School, instructions in macrobiotic nutrition; she also joined a film society and began going to an analyst. She invited me down to dinner one evening and said finally, over coffee, that her new life wasn’t working out too well. The activities were not very involving and her gentlemen friends seemed able to discuss nothing more important than their season tickets to hockey games, football games and the Philharmonic. She missed Gramercy Park, she said; it was one of the last civilized spots in an ever-darkening city. Some time later an apartment became available in my building. I told her about it and she took it sight unseen.

  She was a pretty girl, blond, with small breasts and a cheerleader’s bounce. Meredith Walker was her name. We had met at a country club dance in Old Holly, the Westchester town where I was raised. I was nineteen then, home from college for summer vacation. Merry had been living in the town for only a few months. Her father was an Air Force major who had been assigned to head an ROTC detachment at a small college nearby. She said the family had been moving from place to place all her life. She was eighteen and didn’t know what it was to have a home. I can remember that night well, a perfect August night with a warm wind raking the tops of the big oaks, with lawn sprinklers hissing and the silver couples standing near the trees, the men in white dinner jackets and their girls in chiffon and silk, each couple sculpted in the dim light, almost motionless, and the distances between them absolutely right so that the whole scene obeyed an abstract calculus of perspective and tone, as if arranged for the whim of a camera. A girl walked across the grass, then quickly whirled, shrieking, as the spray from a lawn sprinkler touched her arm. The laughter of her friends on the warm night was like a knife-chime on delicate glass and it seemed to take a long time to reach us. Merry and I were standing on the veranda. There were fireflies and music, a lazy samba, a foxtrot. Merry looked beautiful. We talked quietly and held hands. Once again, as on so many occasions in my life, I was stirred by the power of the image.