by Don DeLillo
He'd walked nearly to the stage door when he realized Danko was not with him. This he understood. The man was back there somewhere dancing, beyond the reach of his wars and corpses, his mind snipers firing at first light.
He went stride for stride with Torval to the car. The rain had stopped. This was good. This was clearly what it should have done. The street carried a shimmer of sodium lamps and a mood of slowly unfolding suspense.
"Where is he?"
"Decided to stay inside," Eric said. "Good. We don't need him."
"Where is she?"
"Sent her home."
"Good."
"Good," Torval said. "It's looking good."
There was someone camped in the limo. She sat tilted on the banquette, nodding off, all plastic and rags, and Torval rousted her out. She did a little dance of twisting free and remained there in aggregate, a standing heap of clothes, bundled possessions and sandwich bags for alms looped over her belt.
"I need a gypsy. Anybody here read palms?"
One of those unused voices that sound outside the world.
"What about feet?" she said. "Read my feet."
He searched his pockets for money, feeling a little foolish, a little chagrined, having made and lost sums that could colonize a planet, but the woman was moving up the street on shoes with flapping soles and there were no bills or coins in any case to find inside his pants, or documents of any kind.
The car crossed Eighth Avenue, out of the theater district, out of the row of supper clubs and lounges, beyond the retail atriums now, beyond the airline offices and auto showrooms and into the local, the mixed, the mostly unnoticed blocks of dry cleaner and schoolyard, just an inkling here of the old brawl, the old seethe and heat of Hell's Kitchen, the rake of fire escapes on old brick buildings.
Traffic was scant but the car kept to the daylong draggy pace. This is because Eric was in his seat talking through the open window to Torval, who walked alongside the automobile.
"What do we know?"
"We know it's not a group. It's not an organized terror cell or international kidnappers with ransom demands."
"It's an individual. Do we care?"
"We don't have a name. But we have a phone call. The complex is analyzing voice data. They've made certain assessments. And they're projecting a course of action on the part of the individual."
"Why can't I work up any curiosity on the subject?"
"Because it doesn't matter," Torval said. "Whoever it is, that's who it is."
Eric agreed with this, whatever it meant. They moved down the street between rows of garbage cans set out for collection and past the gaunt hotel and the synagogue for actors. There was muddy water in the street, deepening as they proceeded, three, four inches now, the residue of the water-main break earlier in the day. Workers in dayglo vests and high boots were still in the area, under floodlights, and Torval high-stepped through generations of muck, making a splash with each bitter stride until the river diminished to an inch of standing water.
There were police barricades just ahead, blocking access to Ninth Avenue. At first Torval believed this was related to the flooded streets. But there were no clean-up crews on the other side of the avenue. Then he thought the president's motorcade was on the way downtown to some official function after finally shaking free of midtown traffic. But there was music in the distance and people beginning to gather, too many, too young, with headsets attached, to account for a presidential drive-by. Finally he talked to one of the cops at the barricades.
There was a funeral on the way.
Eric got out of the car and stood near the bicycle shop on the corner, with Torval planted nearby. An enormous man approached through the gathering crowd, broad, meaty, solemn, wearing pale linen slacks and a black leather shirt, sleeveless, with platinum accessories here and there. It was Kozmo Thomas, who managed a dozen rappers and had once owned a stable of racehorses in partnership with Eric.
They did the handclasp and half hug. "Why are we here?"
"You ain't heard?"
Eric said, "What?"
Kozmo batted himself in the chest, reverently. "Brutha Fez."
"What?"
"Dead."
"No. What. Can't be."
"Dead. Died. Early today."
"I don't know this?"
"Funeral's been in progress all day. The family wants to give the city a chance to pay respect. The record label wants an exploitation event. Big and loud. Street to street. Right through the night."
"I don't know this? How can this be? I love his music. I have his music in my elevator. I know the man."
He knew the man. The sadness, the plangency of this remark was echoed in the music itself, the gawwali model of devotional rhythms and improvisations, over a thousand years old, growing louder now as the funeral cortege came down the avenue, which had been cleared of extraneous traffic and parked cars.
"What, they shot him?"
First the squad of motorcycles, city police in wedge formation. Two private security vans followed, flanking a police cruiser. It was so completely clear, another dead rapper, the protocol of the rap star who goes down humming in a spatter of gunshots after he fails to pay feudal tribute in the form of respect or money or women to some skittish individual. This was the day, was it not, for influential men to come to sudden messy ends.
Kozmo was looking askance.
" Fez been having cardiac problems for years. Since high school. Been seeing specialists, been seeing faith healers. Heart just wore out. This ain't a thug down some alley. The man never been breathalyzed, barely, since he was seventeen."
Then came the flower cars, ten of them, banked with white roses rippling in the breeze. The hearse came next, an open car with Fez lying in state at the rear in a coffin angled upward to make the body visible, asphodels everywhere, fleshy pink, the flowers of Hades, where souls of the dead come to find meadowy rest.
The dead man's amplified voice sounded from farther back in the procession, singing in slow hypnotic syncopation, accompanied by harmonium and hand drums.
"Hope you're not disappointed."
"Disappointed."
"That our man here wasn't shot. Hope he didn't let you down. Natural causes. That's a letdown."
Kozmo jabbed a thumb back over his shoulder.
"What happened to your stretch? Letting a fine machine degrade in public. That's a scandal, man."
"Everything's a scandal. Dying's a scandal. But we all do it."
"I'm hearing voices in the night. Because I know it can't be you that's saying this."
Scores of women walked alongside the limousines, in headscarves and djellabas, hands stained with henna, and barefoot, and wailing. Kozmo struck his chest again and so did Eric. He thought his friend was impressive in repose, wearing a full beard and a white silk caftan with hood folded back and the iconic red fez on his head, stylishly tilted, and how affecting it was for the man to be lying in the spiral of his own vocal adaptations of ancient Sufi music, rapping in Punjabi and Urdu and in the blackswagger English of the street.
Gettin' shot is easy Tried it seven times Now I'm just a solo poet Workin' on my rhymes
The crowd was large and hushed, deepening along the sidewalks, and people in nightclothes watched from tenement windows. Four of Fez 's personal bodyguards accompanied the hearse, slow-marching, one off each point of the car. They were in Western dress, dark suits and ties, polished oxfords, with combat shotguns held at port arms.
Eric liked that. Bodyguards even in death. Eric thought yes.
Then came the breakdancers, in pressed jeans and sneakers, here to affirm the history of the deceased, born Raymond Gathers in the Bronx, once a breaker of some fame. These were his contemporaries, six men ranged across the six lanes of the avenue, in their mid-thirties now, back in the streets after all these years to do their windmills and reels, their impossible axial headspins.
"Ask me do I love this shit," said Kozmo.
But the energy and daz
zle brought something melancholy to the crowd, more regret than excitation. Even the younger people seemed subdued, over-respectful, as the breakers wheeled on their elbows and flared their bodies parallel to the ground, running in horizontal frenzy.
Grief should be powerful, Eric thought. But the crowd was still learning how to mourn a singular rapper such as Fez, who mixed languages, tempos and themes.
Only Kozmo was alive and popping.
"Me being big as I am, and a retro-nigger, I have to love what I'm seeing. Because this is something I could never dream of doing in my thinnest day on earth."
Yes, they spun on their heads, bodies upright and legs spread slightly, and one of the breakers had his hands cuffed behind his back. Eric thought there was something mystical about this, well beyond the scan of human encompassment, the half-crazed passion of a desert saint. How lost to the world he must be, here in the grease and tar of Ninth Avenue.
Family and friends came next, in thirty-six white stretch limousines, three abreast, with the mayor and police commissioner in sober profile, and a dozen members of Congress, and the mothers of unarmed blacks shot by police, and fellow rappers in the middle phalanx, and there were media executives, foreign dignitaries, faces from film and TV, and mingled throughout were figures of world religion in their robes, cowls, kimonos, sandals and soutanes.
Four news choppers passed overhead.
"He liked having his clergy nearby," Kozmo said. "He showed up in my office once with an imam and two white boys from Utah in suits. He was always excusing himself so he could pray"
"He lived in a minaret for a while, in Los Angeles."
"I heard that."
"I went to visit once. He built it next to his house and then moved out of the house and into the minaret."
The dead man's voice was louder now as the sound truck approached. His best songs were sensational and even the ones that were not good were good.
Behind his voice the handclapping of the chorus became intense, driving Fez into improvised rhythms that sounded reckless and unsustainable. There were great howls of devotion, whoops and street shouts. The clapping spread from the recorded track to the people in the limos and the crowd on the sidewalks and it brought a clear emotion to the night, a joy of intoxicating wholeness, he and they, the dead and provisionally living.
A line of elderly Catholic nuns in full habit recited the rosary, teachers from the grade school he'd attended.
His voice was going ever faster, in Urdu, then slurry English, and it was pierced by the shrill cries of a female member of the chorus. There was rapture in this, fierce elation, and something else that was inexpressible, dropping off the edge, all meaning exhausted until nothing was left but charismatic speech, words sprawling over themselves, without drums or handclaps or the woman's pitched cries.
The voice fell into silence finally. People thought the event was over now. They were shaking and drained. Eric's delight in going broke seemed blessed and authenticated here. He'd been emptied of everything but a sense of surpassing stillness, a fatedness that felt disinterested and free.
Then he thought about his own funeral. He felt unworthy and pathetic. Never mind the bodyguards, four versus three. What set of elements might be configured that could possibly match what was happening here? Who would come to see him laid out? (An embalmed term in search of a matching cadaver.) Men he'd crushed, to nourish their rancor. Those he'd presumed to be wallpaper, to stand over him and gloat. He would be the powdered body in the mummy case, the one they'd all lived long enough to mock.
It was dispiriting, then, to think about this collection of mourners. Here was a spectacle he could clearly not command. And the funeral wasn't over yet.
Because here came the dervishes, turning to the faint call of a single flute. They were lean men in tunics and long flared skirts, with topaz caps, brimless, cylindrical, tall. They spun, they turned slowly with arms wide and heads titled slightly.
Now the voice of Brutha Fez, hoarse and unaccompanied, moving slowly through a plainsong rap Eric hadn't heard before.
Kid used to think he was wise to the system Prince of the street always do things his way But he had a case of conventional wisdom Never say nothing the others don't say
The young breakdancer who invites the peril of the street, his arrests and beatings, the panhandling dances on subway platforms, his shame in verse after verse, women shiny in tights, unaffordable, and then the moment of disclosure.
Thread of dawn that wakes the East To the cry of souls unfolding
His embrace of Sufi tradition, the struggle to become another kind of panhandler, a beggar for rhymes, singing his anti-matter rap (as he called it) and learning languages and customs that seemed natural to him, not sealed in mystery and foreignness, a blessing embedded in the skin.
O God O Man living high at last Sucking the titmilk of prayer and fast
Wealth, honor in a hundred countries, armored cars and bodyguards, shiny women, yes, again, everywhere now, another blessing of the flesh, women veiled and bluejeaned, clutching the bedposts, painted women and plain, and he sang a little sorrowfully of this and of the voice in a visionary dream that spoke to him of a failing heart.
Man gave me the news in a slanted room And it felt like a sliver of icy truth
Felt my sad-ass soul flying out of my mouth My gold tooth splitting down to the root
There were twenty dervishes in the street and they were the archetype, perhaps, the early and sacred model, maybe, of the posse of breakdancers, only rightside-up. And Fez 's final words could find no beauty in dying young.
Let me be who I was Unrhymed fool That's lost but living
Now music filled the night, ouds, flutes, cymbals and drums, and the dancers whirled, counterclockwise, faster with every turn. They were spinning out of their bodies, he thought, toward the end of all possessions.
The chorus chanting vigorously now Because whirl is all. Whirl is the drama of shedding everything. Because they are spinning into communal grace, he thought. And because someone is dead tonight and only whirl can appease their grief.
He believed these things. He tried to imagine a kind of fleshlessness. He thought of the whirlers deliquescing, resolving into fluid states, into spinning liquid, rings of water and fog that eventually disappear in air.
He began to weep as the follow-up security detail went past, a police van and several unmarked cars. He wept violently. He pummeled himself, crossing his arms and beating his fists on his chest. The press buses came next, three of them, and unofficial mourners on foot, many resembling pilgrims, all races and styles of belief and manner of dress, and he rocked and wept as mourners in cars went by, an improvised continuum, eighty, ninety cars in slack ranks.
He wept for Fez and everyone here and for himself of course, yielding completely to enormous body sobs. Others were weeping nearby. There was a wave of breastbeating and flailing. Then Kozmo wrapped an arm around him and drew him in. It did not seem strange that this was happening. When people die, you weep. The greater the figure, the more widespread the lamentation. People pulled their hair, wailing the dead man's name. Eric slowly grew still. In the leather and flesh of Kozmo's enveloping bulk, he felt the beginnings of thoughtful acceptance.
There was one thing more he wanted from this funeral. He wanted to see the hearse pass by again, the body tilted for viewing, a digital corpse, a loop, a replication. It did not seem right that the hearse had come and gone. He wanted it to reappear at intervals, proud body open to the night, to replenish the sorrow and wonder of the crowd.
He was tired of looking at screens. Plasma screens were not flat enough. They used to seem flat, now they did not. He watched the president of the World Bank address a chamber of tense economists. He thought the image could be crisper. Then the president of the United States spoke from his limo in English and Finnish. He knew a little Finnish. Eric hated him for that. He knew they would figure it out eventually, how he'd made it happen, one man, bereaved and tired now. He co
ded the screens into their hatches and cabinets, restoring the interior of the car to its natural grandness of scale, with sightlines unobstructed and his body isolated in space, and he felt a sneeze begin to develop in his immune system.
The streets emptied fast, barricades loaded into trucks and hauled away. The car moved forward now, with Torval seated up front.
He sneezed and then felt a sense of incompleteness. He realized that he always sneezed twice, or so it seemed in retrospect. He waited and it came, rewardingly, the second sneeze.
What causes people to sneeze? A protective reflex of the nasal mucous membranes, to expel invasive materials.
The street was dead. The car moved past the Spanish church and the cluster of scaffolded brownstones. He poured a brandy and felt hungry again.
There was a restaurant ahead, on the south side of the street. He saw it was Ethiopian and imagined a chunk of spongy brown bread dragged through lentil stew. He imagined yebeg wat in berber sauce. It was too late for the place to be open but there was a dim light back toward the kitchen and he had the driver stop the car.
He wanted yebeg wat. He wanted to say it, smell it and eat it.
What happened next happened fast. He stepped onto the sidewalk and a man approached running and struck him. He raised an arm in defense, Eric did, too late, and threw a blind punch, maybe grazing the man on the head or shoulder. He felt the sludge, the sort of mush of blood and matter on his face. He could not see. His eyes were coated with the stuff but he heard Torval nearby, their rustles and grunts as the two men skirmished.
He took a handkerchief out of his pocket and stood on the curbstone wiping his face, cautiously, in the event an eyeball had been dislodged. He was able to see that Torval had the man bent over the trunk of the limo, forearm locked behind his head.
"Subject reduced," Torval said into his lapel.
Eric smelled and tasted something. First there was the handkerchief, soured by his own secretions of the testes and seminal vesicles and various other glands, collected earlier in the day when he'd used the square of cloth to clean himself after one or another expulsion of fluid. But he was confused about the taste on his tongue.
