Americana

by Don DeLillo

  “Why?”

  “Because of the Oriental. Because of the old man standing at the edge of the group of extras who were crowding around the winner’s circle both times, first when the beauty queen refused to kiss number six and then when she did kiss him. Both times he was there, this small shrunken old man, this Oriental. Who was he? Who hired him? How did he get into the crowd? Nobody knew. But he was there all right and Nix Olympica spotted him. All the other extras were young healthy gleaming men and women. It’s a commercial for mouthwash; you want health, happiness, freshness, mouth-appeal. And this sick-looking old man is hovering there, this really depressing downbeat Oriental. Look, I love the business. I thrive on it. But I can’t help wondering if I’ve wasted my life simply because of the old man who ruined the mouthwash commercial. On a spring evening some years ago, during the time when my wife was very ill, when she was nearing the very end, I walked up a street in the upper Thirties and turned right onto Park Avenue and there was the Pan Am Building, a mile high and half-a-mile wide, every light blazing, an impossible slab of squared-off rock hulking above me and crowding everything else out of the way, even the sky. It looked like God. I had never seen the Pan Am Building from that particular spot and I wasn’t prepared for the colossal surprise of it, the way it crowded out the sky, that overwhelming tier of lights. I swear to you it looked like God the Father. What was the point I was trying to make?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “Neither do I. I guess that’s what comes of trying to preempt the truth.”

  “What is the role of commercial television in the twentieth century and beyond?”

  “In my blackest moods I feel it spells chaos for all of us.”

  “How do you get over these moods?” I said.

  “I take a mild and gentle Palmolive bath, brush my teeth with Crest, swallow two Sominex tablets, and try desperately to fall asleep on my Simmons Beautyrest mattress.”

  “Thank you.”

  * * *

  I took a shower and then called the network and asked for myself, wondering what would happen if I answered.

  “Mr. Bell’s office,” Binky said.

  “This is Charles of the Ritz. Our lipstick of the month is salmon purée.”

  “David, where the hell are you?”

  “Give me ten seconds. It’ll come to me.”

  “Come on now, don’t fool around, Mr. Denney is furious. There’s a whole crew standing by at the reservation and they can’t do a thing until you get there. Now where are you?”

  “About fifteen hundred miles from where I’m supposed to be.”

  “I don’t believe it. You’re crazy. You’ll get fired.”

  “Tell Weede to send Harris Hodge out there. He’s young and willing. He can handle it. I’ve been hearing good things about him.”

  “It’s your project, David. You’ve got to be there.”

  “I’m not going to Arizona, Binky. At least not right now. I’d rather be there than here. But I’ve got to do this thing I’m doing.”

  “What thing?”

  “The only reason I called was to let you know I’m all right. I thought you might worry if you didn’t hear anything.”

  “I am worried, David. What thing?”

  “I’m crossing the swamp. Listen, how’s Warburton?”

  “He died,” she said.

  “I guess I’ve known it for the last couple of days. I hope he’ll be buried in England. Did Freddy Fuck-Nuts write a memo?”

  “Who’s that?”

  “Weede,” I said. “Did he write a memo about Ted War-burton?”

  “You shouldn’t call him crappy names. Up to now he’s been very good about your not showing up in Arizona. He’s been backing you all the way. He told Livingston there must have been some unavoidable delay. An accident or something. David, I’ll have to tell him you called and that you’re not planning to go out there.”

  “What did the memo say? Did it say that Ted was a trusted friend and longtime associate and that no man is an island?”

  “Something like that, I guess.”

  “Warburton was Trotsky,” I said.

  “David, no.”

  “Don’t tell anyone. Let them figure it out for themselves, the bastards. No more memos. That was the only thing that made that place worthwhile anyway.”

  “Do you need any money?”

  “I have enough traveler’s checks for ten days or so. I won’t be here any longer than that.”

  “Will you be coming back to New York?”

  “I don’t know, Bink.”

  “What will you do for money?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t thought about it.”

  “What about your apartment?”

  “I haven’t thought about it.”

  “Aren’t you going to let me know where you are and what you’re doing? I promise I won’t tell anyone.”

  “It’s okay, Binky. Everything’s fine. I’ll miss you. You and Trotsky’s memos. The only things that made that place worthwhile.”

  “Thanks a whole hell of a lot,” she said.

  * * *

  The old man came for the TV set. Then Carol Deming arrived wearing black pants, a black sweater and no makeup. I gave her a business kiss on the cheek, a gesture she acknowledged by smiling blankly at the camera. She sat in the armchair, her legs tucked up under her, and took another look at the script. Adjusting the tripod, I spoke to her from a directorial crouch. She bit her bent thumb, starlet in. the enchanted light. The camera and tape recorder were cabled and ready to sync.

  “Now the first part of this has to be simple, direct, wide open. In the second part you begin to draw back. I want to feel as though I’m listening to a stranger in a fog. The two women are very different. Maybe you’ve seen Persona. There are two women, a nurse and a patient, very different, who slowly begin to merge, to almost drift through each other’s personalities and reappear with something added or subtracted, I’m not sure which, but a great movie, unparalleled, about the nature of diminishing existence. I’m getting off the point.”

  “How do you want me to sit, David?”

  “Just the way you’re sitting. I want the whole chair. Look directly at the camera. Very little voice. Keep the acting invisible. Then we’ll cut and do part two.”

  “I’m scared.”

  “We all are.”

  “But I think I know what you want.”

  “Begin,” I said.

  “He had to borrow from his father at the beginning but after a while we were really on our own. It was a fun-type marriage. We had lots of friends and we were always calling them up on the spur of the moment and inviting them over. Whenever we ran out of things to say to each other we just picked up the telephone and called friends. If they couldn’t come over we went to the movies. We went to the movies three or four times a week. We saw Breathless whenever it came back, at least half a dozen times. He loved it. I don’t remember anything else we saw. We used to shop together for clothes and sometimes I’d buy things for him and sometimes he’d buy things for me. We liked to be seen together. We were invited everywhere and we always went. On weekends we discovered the city together. It was fabulous. Then came the period when he began to do strange things. He hit me once. He asked me to watch him do that thing that boys do. Out at the Hamptons he disappeared for twelve hours. When he came back he said he had been on a trip through the ages of man, meeting himself along the way. We called up our friends a lot during this period. We called up more and more friends and invited them over. I bought a lot of hats. I wanted a baby. I saw him in Rockefeller Center with a girl with a green raincoat. They were watching the skaters. She must have been freezing.”

  Carol went to the window and checked over the script. Without a word she tossed the pages to the floor, lit a cigarette and returned to the armchair, sitting this time with bare feet up on the chair, knees high and angled wide and with her back slumped, face framed by the knees, exhaling smoke out of that body-hut into the
waiting eye of the camera. I began to shoot. Carol paused, most intelligently, for ten full seconds, contained in smoke, before beginning.

  “His sense of insult was overwhelming. If someone used an obscene word in my presence, he demanded an immediate apology. He always got it, of course, his reputation being what it was. He was prepared to kill, quite literally to kill, in order to avenge the honor of someone he loved. He was always swearing on his mother’s grave. In his company of men, there was no greater promise or proof of honor than to swear on your mother’s grave. You could borrow any amount of money, get any favor, if you swore on your mother’s grave to repay the debt. He told me about a friend of his called Mother Cabrini. Cabrini got a lot of mileage out of his mother’s grave until it was learned that his mother was not dead. Telling this, he managed to be both outraged and amused. They were all children, of course, but not in the same way the rest of us are children. We have learned not to be afraid of the dark but we’ve forgotten that darkness means death. They haven’t forgotten this. They are still in the hills of Sicily or Corsica or wherever they came from. They obey their mothers. They don’t go into a dark cellar without expecting to be strangled by a zombie. They bless themselves constantly. And us, what do we do? We watch television and play Scrabble. So there it is, children of light and darkness. There are only several ways to die and I’ve just named two. I could no longer bear the way I was dying and so I decided to take my chances with him. We made love for the first time in the back seat of his Cadillac in somebody’s driveway at ten o’clock in the evening somewhere between Boston and New York. I was not quite a virgin at the time and this upset him. He couldn’t understand how a nineteen-year-old girl from a good family and so forth. We lived together, on and off. He’d go away on one of his business trips and I’d wonder how much the nature of his job meant to our relationship. I couldn’t help suspecting I had manufactured the whole thing, my need for him, simply to avoid what I considered to be the alternatives. This is one of my very annoying traits. I can’t sit back and let something grow of its own momentum and eventually reveal its truth or horror. I must probe from the outset. But there it is, take it or leave it, and I’d be alone in bed wondering whether I needed him at all, whether anyone would have done, anyone who spent his nights close to violent death. There must be a limit to the need to defeat boredom. In defeating it, I may have gone beyond the limit. I needed death in order to believe I was living, an atmosphere of death much more real and personal than anything the newspapers can offer. I didn’t want him to get out of the business. I think I would have left him if he had. There we were then, the child of darkness and the child fleeing the light, him with his Sicilian knife shining in a cave and me with my hand between my legs at four in the morning, anticipating his bloody return. How many nights did I pass in dwelling over the beauty of his death? Gunned down in Utica, the hired assassin. Spinning in a blood-stunned barber chair. The prospect put me in something like heat. I used to imagine my quiet splendid sorrow. His would have been the most beautiful of deaths, filling me with life. He was tall and very handsome, very much a leading man of the nineteen thirties. He moved the way a proud, an almost overbearingly proud animal might move, an animal that is all sex and death. He was afraid of the dark. He lifted weights to keep in shape, he said, but really for the vanity of his body. Often he came to the dinner table in his underwear. He blessed himself when he passed a church. He believed in ghosts and devils. He tried never to use bad language in my presence and he was shocked and delighted when I used it. He went to the racetrack often and lost heavily. He bought me a mink coat and took me to the Copa. He was everything to me, a man no more than a philosophy, and it’s strange, isn’t it, that someone like me, with my upbringing and education and presumably well-trained intellect, would have such a very significant thing in common with this man. It was his instinct that death is without meaning unless it is met violently.”

  * * *

  Sullivan tapped a few ashes from her cigarette into the salad she was tossing.

  “We used to sit around our quarters after a strike,” Brand said. “There’d be Thaw, Hoppy, Bookchester and this kid Eldred Peck who went to some obscure college down South where he wrote his master’s thesis on the swastika in history. You know, tracing it way back to the early Buddhists, way back almost to the dawn of man. That was his favorite phrase. The dawn of man. And Eldred invented this game we’d play sitting around our quarters after a strike. Except it wasn’t a game really. It was really a peculiar form of conversation, almost a religious chant. It even had a name. It was called Godsave. Eldred always started it off. He was younger than any of us and he had hair that was more white than blond, so white it was almost pink, a thin skinny kid who almost disappeared every time he put on his G-suit. Godsave the 94 women and children I vaporized this morning, he’d say. And we’d all follow in turn. Godsave the blind monk I incinerated with nape, Hoppy’d say. Godsave the nursery school I reduced to fine ash. Godsave the old folks’ home I expunged with a 750-pounder. Godsave the 328 librarians I strafed into Swiss cheese. Godsave the team of neutral observers I burned to a crisp. Godsave the interdenominational missionary group on their 17-day excursion who never knew what hit them. After about a month Eldred refined the chanting. He made it more orthodox, more rigid; he purified it. He made us recite the same words every time. Each man had his own chant and it was the only one he was allowed to use and we’d go through the group in order, Eldred first, then Bookchester, Thaw, Hoppy and me, repeating the godsaves sometimes for two hours or more, the same five lines, one for each of us. Godsave the testaments of the increasingly real world. Godsave the poor bastards on our own side who get ubiquitized into all-pervasive spiritual flotsam by our well-intentioned bombs. Godsave our loved ones at home and may their vaginas expand and flourish. Godsave the dawn of man, which is once again imminent in the cyclic time-reversal mode. Godsave God. That was my chant. Godsave God. It was like a religious ceremony but full of ironies you don’t find in most religions. And sometimes we laughed all through the chanting. Eldred was a strange kid. He was something like the way I am now. But he was way ahead of his time. He anticipated the comeback of the real world. Things become more real in proportion to the unreality of individual lives. The world has never been more real than it is now. I didn’t learn that at Yale. I learned it from Eldred. The sky devoured him. He was the first to get it. But that wasn’t the end of the godsaves. All we did was drop his chant and change Thaw’s. Godsave Eldred Peck and his little pink pecker. Then Bookchester and Thaw got it on the same day. Hostile aircraft. Bad guys. Godsave God, I chanted that night. But Hoppy just slopped down his beer.”

  “Would you like me to roll one?” Sullivan said.

  “Thank you, lady. But I think maybe later.”

  We ate lunch and then Sullivan and Brand decided to walk into town and find a place where they might buy a chess set. I was slightly annoyed at this because I didn’t know the game at all. After they left I watched Pike tilt back his head and swallow, face cracking as the whisky burned its way down.

  “We can leave for Colorado in a week or so if you like.”

  “What for?” he said.

  “You want to confront a cougar before you die, don’t you? No iron bars in the way. We’ll go up into the Rockies.”

  “Pass me that ashtray.”

  “You want to go, don’t you? That’s why you came along in the first place, isn’t it?”

  “In Baltymore once I saw all manner of beast and fowl without leaving my room. I was blast-ass drunk for two, three weeks. Who needs the Rocky Mountains? This life isn’t so big that it won’t fit inside a bottle.”

  “Sully told me once that you saved her life. Did she mean that literally?”

  “She means everything literally. Don’t kid yourself about that lady. She means everything literally.”

  “How did you save her life?” I said.

  “She had a fly eating her brain. This tiny fly had got stuck in her ear and
then somehow crawled into her head. The buzzing was driving her nuts. Then it started eating her brain. She could hear the chewing in there. So we went up to her studio and I performed delicate brain surgery despite my unsteady hands. That fly was just a baby fly when it got in there but by the time I opened up her head and got it out after all the eating it did it was about the size of a good-size snail.”

  “Who pays for all the liquor you drink? I can’t believe you’ve made that much money in your whole life.”

  “Take off, Jack.”

  “Name’s Dave.”

  “Jack. Jackoff. Jackass. Jackdaw. Jackal. Jackal feeding on dead cougar. Jackal B. DeMille. What do you know about making movies?”

  “I’ve spent twenty-eight years in the movies,” I said.

  * * *

  Austin Wakely was a fledgling actor and there was no mission he would not undertake to please the ego of the camera. He had been given only four hours to learn his lines but he professed to be never readier. I played with the tape recorder’s giant dials.

  “You know, this interview technique isn’t anything new.”

  “I’m inventing the primitive,” I said. “The others, in their anxiety, were merely stumbling upon certain pseudo-archaic forms. I myself did something of the sort for a TV show of my own devising. But that was TV.”

  “Can you pan with that tripod?”

  “Not tonight.”

  “Don’t you have a lavalier mike I can wear?”

  “Nope.”