by Don DeLillo
Then somebody said something.
Somebody said, "What am I looking at?"
It was the woman to his left, standing closer now, and she was speaking to him. He was confused by this. The question made him stare harder at the screen. He tried to absorb what she'd said. He tried to deal with the fact that someone was standing next to him. This hadn't happened before, not here. And he tried to adjust to the other thing that hadn't happened, that was sort of never supposed to happen. Being spoken to. This woman standing somehow next to him was changing every rule of separation.
He looked at the screen, trying to consider what he might say. He had a good vocabulary except when he was talking to someone.
Finally he whispered, "The private detective. Man on his back."
It was a constricted whisper and he wasn't sure she'd heard him. But the response was nearly immediate.
"Do I want to know who's stabbing him?"
Again he had to think a moment before he decided on an answer. He decided on the answer no.
He said this, "No," shaking his head to indicate finality, if only to himself.
He waited for some time, watching hand and knife in midframe, isolated, and again it came, the voice nowhere near a whisper.
"I want to die after a long traditional illness. What about you?"
The interesting thing about this experience, until now, was that it was all his. No one knew he was here. He was alone and unacknowledged. There was nothing to share, nothing to take from others, nothing to give to others.
Now this. Out of nowhere, walks into the gallery, stands next to him at the wall, talks to him in the dark.
He was taller than she was. At least there was that. He wasn't looking at her but knew he was taller, somewhat, slightly. Didn't have to look. He sensed it, felt it.
The blond children went moping after their parents and out the door and he imagined them leaving black-and-white behind forever. He watched Janet Leigh's sister and Janet Leigh's lover talking in the dark. He didn't regret the loss of dialogue. He didn't want to hear it, didn't need it. He would not be able to watch the real movie, the other Psycho, ever again. This was the real movie. He was seeing everything here for the first time. So much happening within a given second, after six days, twelve days, a hundred and twelve, seen for the first time.
She said, "What would it be like, living in slow motion?"
If we were living in slow motion, the movie would be just another movie. But he didn't say this.
Instead he said, "I guess this is your first time."
She said, "Everything's my first time."
He waited for her to ask him how many times he'd been here. He was still adjusting to the presence of another person but isn't this what he'd wanted these past days, a movie companion, a woman, someone willing to discuss the film, evaluate the experience?
She told him she was standing a million miles outside the fact of whatever's happening on the screen. She liked that. She told him she liked the idea of slowness in general. So many things go so fast, she said. We need time to lose interest in things.
Either the others could not hear them or did not care. He looked straight ahead. He was certain that the museum would close before the movie reached its actual end, its story end, Anthony Perkins wrapped in a blanket, the eyes of Norman Bates, the face coming closer, the sick smile, the long implicating look, the complicit look at the person out there in the dark, watching.
He was still waiting for her to ask him how many times he'd been here.
Day after day, he'd say. Lost count.
What's your favorite scene, she'd say.
I take it moment by moment, second by second.
He couldn't think of what she might say next. He thought he'd like to leave for a minute, go to the men's room and look in the mirror. Hair, face, shirt, same shirt all week, just look at himself briefly and then wash his hands and hurry back. He worked out the location in advance, men's room, sixth floor, he needed to see himself in the event she stayed until closing time and they left the gallery together and stood in the light. What would she be seeing when she looked at him? But he remained where he was, eyes on the screen.
She said, "Where are we, geographically?"
"The movie starts in Phoenix, Arizona."
He wasn't sure why he'd named both city and state. Was the state necessary? Was he talking to someone who didn't necessarily know that Phoenix is in Arizona?
"Then the locale changes. California, I think. There are road signs and license plates," he said.
A French couple came in. They were French or Italian, intelligent-looking, standing in the faint light near the sliding door. Maybe he'd said Phoenix, Arizona, because the words appeared on the screen after the opening credits. He tried to remember if the name of Janet Leigh's character was part of the opening credits. Janet Leigh as-but the name hadn't registered if he'd seen it at all.
He was waiting for the woman to say something. He remembered in high school when being shorter than the girl he was talking to made him want to fall on the floor and get kicked by passersby.
"Some movies are too visual for their own good."
"I don't think this one," he said. "I think this one is worked out carefully, shot for shot."
He thought about this. He thought about the shower scene. He thought about watching the shower scene with her. That might be interesting, together. But because it had been shown the day before, and because each day's screening was discontinued when the museum closed, the shower scene would not be part of today's viewing. And the curtain rings. Was he completely sure there are six rings spinning on the curtain rod when Janet Leigh in her dying fall pulls the shower curtain down with her? He wanted to watch the scene again, to reaffirm the curtain rings. He'd counted six, he was sure of six, but he needed to reaffirm.
Such second thoughts go on and on and the situation intensified the process, being here, watching and thinking for hours, standing and watching, thinking into the film, into himself. Or was the film thinking into him, spilling through him like some kind of runaway brain fluid?
"Have you been looking at other things in the museum?"
"Came straight here," she said, and that's all she said, disappointingly.
He could tell her things about the story and characters but maybe that could wait for later, with luck. He thought of asking what she did. Like two people learning a language. What do you do? I don't know, what do you do? This was not the kind of conversation they ought to be having here.
He wanted to think of them as two like souls. He imagined them staring at each other for a long moment, here in the dark, a frank and open look, a truthful look, strong and probing, and then they stop staring and turn and watch the film, without a word passing between them.
Janet Leigh's sister is coming toward the camera. She is running into darkness, a beautiful thing to see, decelerated, the woman running, shedding background light as she comes, face and shoulders faintly shaped, total dark falling in around her. This is what they ought to talk about here, if they talk, when they talk, light and shadow, the image on the screen, the room they're in, talk about where they are, not what they do.
He tried to believe that the tension in his body alerted her to the drama of the scene. She would sense it, next to him. This is what he thought. Then he thought about combing his hair. He wasn't carrying a comb. He would have to smooth down his hair with his hands once he got in front of a mirror, wherever and whenever, unnoticeably, or some reflecting surface on a door or pillar.
The French couple changed position, moving across the room to the west wall. They were a positive presence, attentive, and he was sure they would talk about the experience for hours afterward. He imagined the cadence of their voices, the pattern of stress and pause, talking through dinner in a restaurant recommended by friends, an Indian place, a Vietnamese place, Brooklyn, remote, the harder to get to, the better the food. They were outside him, people with lives, it was a question of actuality. This w
oman, the one next to him, as he regarded her, was a shadow unfolding from the wall.
"You're sure this isn't a comedy?" she said. "I mean, just looking at it."
She was watching the tall spooky house looming over the low motel, the turreted house where Mother sometimes sits by the bedroom window and where Norman Bates assumes the vesture of cross-dressing hell.
He thought about this, about Norman Bates and Mother.
He said, "Can you imagine yourself living another life?"
"That's too easy. Ask me something else."
But he couldn't think of something else to ask. He wanted to dismiss the idea that the film might be a comedy. Was she seeing something he had missed? Did the slow pulse of projection reveal something to one person and conceal it from another? They watched the sister and the lover talk to the sheriff and the wife. He wondered if he could work the conversation around to dinner, although there was no conversation right now.
Maybe we could get a bite nearby, he would say.
I don't know, she'd say. I might have to be somewhere in half an hour.
He imagined turning and pinning her to the wall with the room emptied out except for the guard who is looking straight ahead, nowhere, motionless, the film still running, the woman pinned, also motionless, watching the film over his shoulder. Museum guards should wear sidearms, he thought. There is priceless art to protect and a man with a gun would clarify the act of seeing for the benefit of everyone in the room.
"Okay," she said, "gotta go now." He said, "You're leaving."
It was a flat statement, you're leaving, spoken reflexively, stripped of disappointment. He hadn't had time to feel disappointed. He checked his watch for no reason. It was something to do rather than stand there dumbly. In theory it gave him time to think. She was already moving toward the door and he hurried after her, but quietly, eyes averted from anyone who might be watching. The door slid open and he was behind her, out into the light and onto the escalator, floor to floor, and then across the lobby and through the revolving door to the street.
He caught up to her, careful not to smile or touch, and said, "What about doing this sometime at a real movie with seats to sit on and people on the screen who laugh and cry and shout?"
She paused to listen, half turning toward him, middle of the sidewalk, bodies pushing past.
She said, "Would that be an improvement?"
"Probably not," he said, and this time he smiled. Then he said, "Do you want to know something about me?"
She shrugged.
"I used to multiply numbers in my head when I was a kid. A six-digit number times a five-digit number. Eight digits times seven digits, day and night. I was a pseudo genius."
She said, "I used to read what people were saying on their lips. I watched their lips and knew what they were saying before they said it. I didn't listen, I just looked. That was the thing. I could block out the sound of their voices as they said what they were saying."
"As a kid."
"As a kid," she said.
He looked directly at her.
"If you'll give me your phone number, I could call you sometime."
She shrugged okay. That was the meaning of the shrug, okay, sure, maybe. Although if she saw him on the street an hour from now, she probably wouldn't know who he was or where she'd met him. She recited the number quickly and then turned and walked east into the midtown glut.
He went into the crowded lobby and found a cramped space on one of the benches. He put his head down to think, to duck away from it all, the sustained pitch of voices, languages, accents, people in motion carrying noise with them, lifetimes of noise, a clamor bouncing off the walls and ceiling and it was loud and surrounding, making him cower down. But he had her phone number, this is what mattered, the number was securely in mind. Call her when, two days, three days. In the meantime sit and think about what they'd said, what she looked like, where she might live, how she might spend her time.
That's when the question came to mind. Did he ask her name? He didn't ask her name. He made the inner gesture of reproving himself, a finger-wagging cartoon of teacher and child. Okay, this is another matter he would be able to think about. Think about names. Write down names. See if you can guess the name from the face. The face had brightened slightly when he talked about the numbers he did in his head as a kid. Not brightened but sort of loosened, her eyes showing interest. But the story wasn't true. He did not multiply large numbers in his head, ever. This was something he said sometimes because he thought it would help explain him to others.
He sneaked a look at his watch and did not hesitate, crossing to the ticket area and paying full price. Should be half adult, considering the hour, or free, should be free. He blinked at the ticket in his hand and hurried to the sixth floor, two steps at a time on the escalator, everybody going the other way. He entered the dark gallery. He wanted to bathe in the tempo, in the near static rhythm of the image. The French couple was gone. There was one person and the guard and then him, here for the last less-than-an-hour. He found his place at the wall. He wanted complete immersion, whatever that means. Then he realized what it means. He wanted the film to move even more slowly, requiring deeper involvement of eye and mind, always that, the thing he sees tunneling into the blood, into dense sensation, sharing consciousness with him.
Norman Bates, scary bland, is putting down the phone. He will turn off the light in the motel office. He will move along the stepped path to the old house, several rooms lighted, dark sky beyond. Then a series of camera shots, varying angles, he remembers the sequence, he stands at the wall and anticipates. Real time is meaningless. The phrase is meaningless. There's no such thing. On the screen Norman Bates is putting down the phone. The rest has not happened yet. He sees in advance, afraid that the museum will close before the scene ends. The announcement will sound throughout the museum in all the languages of the major museum nations and Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates will still be going up the stairs to the bedroom, where Mother is lying long dead.
The other person walks out the tall door. There is only him and the guard now. He imagines all motion stopping on the screen, the image beginning to shudder and fade. He imagines the guard removing the sidearm from his holster and shooting himself in the head. Then the screening ends, the museum closes down, he is alone in the dark room with the body of the guard.
He is not responsible for these thoughts. But they're his thoughts, aren't they? He returns his attention to the screen, where everything is so intensely what it is. He watches what is happening and wants it to happen more slowly, yes, but he is also mind-racing ahead to the moment when Norman Bates will carry Mother down the stairs in her white bedgown.
It makes him think of his own mother, how could it not, before she passed on, two of them contained in a small flat being consumed by rising towers, and here is the shadow of Norman Bates as he stands outside the door of the old house, the shadow seen from inside, and then the door begins to open.
The man separates himself from the wall and waits to be assimilated, pore by pore, to dissolve into the figure of Norman Bates, who will come into the house and walk up the stairs in subliminal time, two frames per second, and then turn toward the door of Mother's room.
Sometimes he sits by her bed and says something and then looks at her and waits for an answer.
Sometimes he just looks at her.
Sometimes a wind comes before the rain and sends birds sailing past the window, spirit birds that ride the night, stranger than dreams.
Acknowledgment
24 Hour Psycho, a videowork by Douglas Gordon, was first screened in 1993 in Glasgow and Berlin. It was installed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the summer of 2006.
About the Author
DON DELILLO, the author of fifteen novels, including Falling Man, White Noise and Libra, has won many honors in this country and abroad, including the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work a
nd the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his novel Underworld, which was named one of the three best novels of the last twenty-five years by The New York Times Book Review. In 2008, he received the National Arts Club's Medal of Honor for Outstanding Achievement in Literature. He has also written three plays.
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