by Don DeLillo
The noise stopped after fifteen long seconds. Grace looked over at him, waiting for some reaction.
“I’ll tell you who I give credit to,” Lomax said.
He clasped his hands behind his head.
“Who are the only ones who believe in what they’re doing? The only ones who aren’t constantly adjusting, constantly wavering—this way, that way. Being pressed. Being forced to adopt new stances.”
“The families,” she said.
“They’re serious. They’re totally committed. The only ones. They see clearly, bullseye, straight ahead. They know what they belong to. They don’t question the premise.”
“Are they still in the running then?”
“They are the running,” Lomax said. “There’s just that old lunk, the art dealer, who’s probably sitting on the film can himself, thinking all he has to do is arrange an auction.”
“What does FCB mean?”
Lomax glanced over at her, a hint of small bitter amusement in his face.
“You’re sure,” he said.
“Tell me, yes, I’m curious.”
He pulled his right hand out from behind his head and used the middle finger to groom first one sideburn, then the other.
“Flat-Chested Bitch,” he said.
Her mouth went tight. Supine, she rolled rightward, swinging her left arm up and over to deliver a roundhouse blow to the area just above his right eye. He folded up, oddly, as though he’d been hit in the groin. Both hands covering his right eye, he turned away from her, his body compact, close to the edge of the bed.
“It’s a joke name,” he said.
The second blow, a hammerlike left, caught him behind the ear. The radio pager began beeping again.
“It doesn’t mean anything,” he said. “It’s just the way we communicate, in abbreviations, in codes sometimes. We give everybody a different kind of name. Some are a lot worse than yours.”
Grace lay back on the bed, listening to the paging device emit its programmed series of noises. Her mouth was still rigid but she was breathing normally, as though spasms of violence were common in her life.
Moll sat in the tub, trying to turn the pages of the early edition of the Times without getting them wet.
Interesting item back near the obits.
Learned today that Senator Lloyd Percival was married last Thursday in Bethesda, Maryland, hours after his divorce became final.
Bride is Dayton (DeDe) Baker, 20, a specimen trainee at the Medical Museum of the Armed Forces Institute of Pathology, Washington, D.C.
Funny but puzzling.
Ceremony performed in the meditation suite of the Stone Hollow Country Club by the Rev. Penny W. Parker, founder of the Humanist Missions.
Jesus.
The story, amid some typographical chaos, went on to quote the Senator, 61, as saying today that he felt “reborn, revitalized—ready to attempt bold new ventures.” He was interviewed with his wife before the couple left for the airport, en route to an undisclosed destination.
The next day at the office, on an impulse, Moll looked for the story in the late city edition. She found that a paragraph had been left out of the earlier version. She filled in the rest by walking down the hall and checking the magazine’s files.
The bride’s father was the late Freeman Reed Baker, a well-known authority on Persian art and culture. He was also the central figure in a scandal involving the disappearance, fifteen years earlier, of rare examples of ancient erotica—carpet-weavings, textiles, metalwork—from a legendary private collection in Isfahan.
I am beginning to understand.
At the time of the apparent theft, Dr. Baker had been special curator of the so-called Forbidden Rooms, a restricted area of the collection.
Very sexy stuff.
He died of natural causes three years ago in eastern Turkey, still under a cloud of suspicion. The treasures have not been recovered.
Back in her cubicle, Moll wondered if Lightborne had seen the story. If so, he’d be saying a mental farewell to Lloyd Precival. The Senator has clearly abandoned fortress Berlin, Nazis in motion, preferring the reassurances of desert stillness. The art of mystics and nomads. Old-fashioned contentments.
6
Selvy found a Sam Browne belt in someone’s foot locker in the long barracks. He put it on. A decent enough fit. He liked the feel of the shoulder strap that extended diagonally across his chest. He thought he might figure out a way to attach the bolo somehow, knowing that the original belt had been designed, by a one-armed British general, to support a sword.
He stood outside the barracks. A clear day. Occasional small whirlwinds in the area. Memory. A playback. He watched a raven soar toward the mountains, wind-assisted, rising at first gradually, a continuous and familiar fact, and then in spasmodic surges, peculiar stages of rapid ascent, wholly without effort and seemingly beyond the limits of what is possible in the physical world—imperceptible transitions that left the watcher trying to account for missing segments of space or time.
Large soaring birds were the only things here that lived without reference to a sense of distance. Or so he imagined, Selvy did. He’d once exchanged stares, at fifteen feet, with a red-tailed hawk that had lighted on a tree stump at the edge of a deserted ranch, perhaps twenty miles from this spot, during exercises with live ammunition. That was how he’d come to believe in the transcendent beauty of predators.
That day was like this one. A morning of startling brightness. Clarity without distracting glare. The sky was saturated with light. Everything was color.
He was twenty yards from the barracks when he realized two cats were at his feet. He stopped and turned. Three more cats moved this way. He knew what it meant. Still more cats came out from under the barracks. They followed him, moving around his feet, mewing. Cats approached from another direction now, the windmill. An image unwinding. After ten paces he crouched down and they were all over and around him, scratching, crying out, at least fifteen cats and kittens, allowing themselves to be petted and rubbed, or just stretching in the sun, purring, or sniffing at his clothes, all of them looking healthy and well fed.
Levi Blackwater was here.
At the Mines, back then, he’d been an unwelcome presence in most gatherings of men. An ordinary boy from Ohio, named out of Genesis, he’d served as technical adviser to ARVN forces in the relatively early days of U.S. involvement. Out on a reconnaissance patrol, he’d been captured by the Vietcong, and tortured, and had come to love his captors. Eight months inside a prison building in a VC base camp in a mangrove thicket. Fish heads and rice. They strung him up by the feet. They held his head under water. They cut off two of his fingers.
The more they tortured him, the more he loved them. They were helping him. He considered it help.
At the Mines he cooked and worked in the laundry and did odd jobs. The men knew his history and stayed away from him. Selvy was an exception. He went to Levi for lessons in meditation.
Moll was suspicious of quests. At the bottom of most long and obsessive searches, in her view, was some vital deficiency on the part of the individual in pursuit, a meagerness of spirit.
She sat in the dark, listening to Odell fiddle with the projector.
Even more depressing than the nature of a given quest was the likely result. Whether people searched for an object of some kind, or inner occasion, or answer, or state of being, it was almost always disappointing. People came up against themselves in the end. Nothing but themselves. Of course there were those who believed the search itself was all that mattered. The search itself is the reward.
Lightborne wouldn’t agree. Lightborne wanted a marketable product, she was sure. He wasn’t in it for the existential lift.
Odell turned on a lamp and approached the screen in order to make sure it would be parallel to the strip of film itself when it moved through the projector gate. While he was doing this, Moll glanced over at Lightborne.
“What was it doing when you arrived?” he said.
“Was that rain or sleet? I need new boots. I’d like to find something with some lining this year. This is a bad year, they’re saying, looking long range.”
He’d been making the same nervous small talk ever since Moll walked in. Twice now Odell had turned on the light to make a last-minute adjustment somewhere. Both times Lightborne had immediately started talking. In the dark he was silent. He chewed his knuckles in the dark.
Once more Odell turned off the lamp. Moll began to feel that special kind of anticipation she’d enjoyed since childhood—a life in the movies. It was an expectation of pleasure like no other. Simple mysteries are the deepest. What did it mean, this wholly secure escape, this credence in her heart? And how was it possible that bad, awful, god-awful movies never seemed to betray the elation and trust she felt in the seconds before the screen went bright? The anticipation was apart from what followed. It was permanently renewable, a sense of freedom from all the duties and conditions of the nonmovie world.
She felt it even here, sitting in a hard straight chair in a shabby gallery before a small screen. She felt it despite her knowledge of the various dealings, procedures and techniques that surrounded the acquisition of the film.
A two-dimensional city would materialize out of the darkness, afloat in various kinds of time, all different from the system in which real events occur. Yet we understand it so readily and well. They connect to us, all the city’s spatial and temporal codes, as though from a place we knew before.
“I had the phone turned off,” Lightborne said. “A temporary measure. To mute out the sound of certain voices.”
He started to say something else but his voice drifted off and the only sound that remained was the running noise of motion picture film winding through the transport mechanism of the black projector.
A bare room/black and white.
Plaster is cracked in places. On other parts of the wall it is missing completely. The lights in the room flicker.
Three children appear. A girl, perhaps eleven, carries a chair. Two younger children, a boy and a very small girl, drag in a second chair between them.
The children set the chairs on the floor and walk out of camera range.
There is a disturbance. The picture jumps as though the camera has been jarred by some brief violent action.
A blank interval.
Again the room. The camera setup is the same.
A fourth child appears, a girl. She walks across the room and climbs onto one of the chairs, sitting primly, trying to suppress a bashful smile.
The boy and oldest girl carry in two more chairs. A woman appears, very drawn, moving toward the seated child. The lights flicker. Another girl appears; she notices the camera and walks quickly out of range.
The boy and oldest girl carry in two more chairs.
The camera is immobile. It does not select. People pass in and out of its viewing field.
The woman sits next to the small girl, absently stroking the child’s hand. The woman is blond and attractive, clearly not well. She appears weak. It is even possible to say she is emotionally distressed. The oldest girl stands next to her, speaking. The woman slowly nods.
The boy carries in another chair. Three more adults appear, a man and two women. They stand about awkwardly, the man trying to work out a seating arrangement. The boy and oldest girl carry in two more chairs.
The once bare room is crowded with chairs and people.
The lights flicker overhead.
“What do you think?” Lightborne said.
“I don’t know what to think.”
“You know who it could be? Magda Goebbels.”
“The first woman?” Moll said.
“Those could be her children. I’m saying ‘could be.’ I’m trying to supply identities. Make a little sense out of this.”
“Do you think it’s the bunker?”
“It could be the doctor’s former room. Hitler’s quack doctor was allowed to leave. Goebbels took over his room.”
“The three others,” Moll said.
“I don’t know. They could be secretaries, the women. The man, almost anything. A chauffeur, a stenographer, a valet, a bodyguard.”
“Magda Goebbels, you think.”
“I’m saying ‘could be.’ This isn’t what I expected. I wasn’t looking for this at all.”
Nothing much had happened thus far but Moll found something compelling about the footage she was watching. It wasn’t like a feature film or documentary; it wasn’t like TV newsfilm. It was primitive and blunt, yet hypnotic, not without an element of mystery.
Faces and clothing were immediately recognizable as belonging to another era. This effect was heightened by the quality of the film itself, shot with natural lighting. Bleached grays and occasional blurring. Lack of a sound track. Light leaks in the camera, causing flashes across the screen. The footage suggested warier times—dark eyes and fussy mouths, heavy suits, dresses in overlapping fabric, an abruptness and formality of movement.
Four adults and five children, all seated, fill the screen. They face the camera head-on. Time passes.
“What’s that jump?”
“It could be the shelling,” Lightborne said.
“That’s the second time.”
“The Russians are a quarter of a mile away. Nuisance fire. In an all-out bombardment, they wouldn’t be able to film. Aside from the steady concussion, the place would be full of smoke and dust.”
The blond woman slowly rises and walks off camera.
“She knows what happens.”
“What do you mean?” Moll said.
“The children.”
“What happens?”
“Goebbels has them poisoned.”
Another room.
This one, although small and narrow and with an incomplete look about it, contains a writing desk, sofa and chairs. The walls are paneled. There’s a picture in a circular frame over the writing desk.
A woman sits in one of the chairs, facing an open door that leads to another room. She turns the pages of a magazine. There’s a trace of self-consciousness in the way she does this. Finally she decides to look directly at the camera, smiling pleasantly. This puts her at ease.
From her next reaction, it is clear that someone in the adjoining room is speaking to her.
She sits with her legs crossed, paying no attention to the magazine pages she continues to turn. A light-haired woman in her early thirties, she wears a dark tailored suit, a bracelet, and what appear to be expensive shoes. She has a small worried mouth (even in her present good humor) and a somewhat shapeless nose. Two distinct shadow lines make her cheeks look puffy.
She gestures toward the open door.
“Where are we?” Moll said.
“Still in the bunker. It’s not inconsistent, the two rooms. See that picture over the desk? If we could see it from a better angle, being in a circular frame, that could be his portrait of Frederick the Great, which would make this room his living room.”
“Whose living room?”
“It’s a possibility. It could be. And through that open door, that’s his bedroom. Whoever’s shooting this film, it could be he’s shooting one room, he’s stopping, he’s walking over to the next room.”
“Editing in the camera,” Moll said.
“We’re getting everything. What do you think? We’re getting the one and only take of each scene.”
“It’s certainly unprofessional. But I can’t say I mind.”
“Those kids and those others are sitting in the first room waiting for the camera to come back. Maybe that’s why the thing seems so real. It’s true. It’s happening. I didn’t look for this at all.”
Another woman enters the room. The blond woman from the first sequence. Magda Goebbels—if Lightborne’s speculation is correct.
She hands the younger woman a flower. Expression of delighted surprise. It’s a white boutonniere. The woman takes it into the next room.
Visual static. Flash frames.
&
nbsp; “What are we looking at?”
“I don’t know,” Lightborne said.
“If that’s Frau Goebbels standing there, who’s the woman who just disappeared?”
“That shouldn’t be hard to answer.”
“I want to hear you say it.”
“You know as well as I.”
“Who is she?”
“It’s real,” Lightborne said. “I believe it. It’s them.”
The routine persisted.
In the late morning sun, Selvy placed the bolo knife on a bench in the littered compound. Seating himself on an overturned crate, he began working with oil and whetstone on the base of the blade. A snowy tom rolled in the dirt nearby. Directly ahead the spare land extended to the bottom of an enormous butte, its sloping sides covered with rockfall.
He saw it as memory, as playback. The border of appearances. Within is perfect color, the sense of topography as an ethical schematic. Landscape is truth.
When he looked up, ten minutes into his sharpening, he saw Levi Blackwater approaching from the southeast. Had to be him. There had always been something physically off-center about Levi. Nothing so distinct as a limp or even an ungainliness of stride. The right shoulder sagged a bit. Maybe that was it. And the head tilted. And the right arm hung slightly lower. All apparent as he drew nearer.
He was a tall man, balding, and wore the same old field cap with ventilating eyelets. He was pale, he was sickly white, as always. Soft baby skin. A little like skin that’s been transplanted from another part of the body. He stood smiling now. That knowing smile. Dust devils spinning fifty, sixty yards away.
“I came in to feed the cats.”
Only Levi could speak of traveling to this remote site as “coming in.”
“Where are you when you’re out?”
Levi kept smiling and stood in profile, turning his head left toward the barest stretch of desert. He came forward to shake hands. It was the right hand that lacked two fingers, severed by his captors. Selvy had forgotten the directness of Levi’s manner of looking at people.
