Mao II

by Don DeLillo

  “Where is he?” she said.

  “Upstairs hiding. But don’t worry. Tomorrow you get your pictures. ”

  “It’s an important shoot for me.”

  “Maybe it will ease the pressure on Bill. Getting some pictures out. He’s felt lately that they’re moving in, getting closer all the time.”

  “All those fairly ordinary people.”

  “Someone sent him a severed finger in the mail. But that was in the sixties.”

  Scott showed her a room off the kitchen where some of Bill’s papers were kept. Seven metal cabinets stood against the walls. He opened a number of drawers and itemized the contents, which included publishing correspondence, contracts and royalty statements, notebooks, old mail from readers—hundreds of sepia-edged envelopes bound in twine. He narrated matter-of-factly. There were old handwritten manuscripts, printer’s typescripts, master galleys. There were reviews of Bill’s novels, interviews with former colleagues and acquaintances. There were stacks of magazines and journals containing articles about Bill’s work and about his disappearance, his concealment, his retirement, his alleged change of identity, his rumored suicide, his return to work, his work-in-progress, his death, his rumored return. Scott read excerpts from some of these pieces. Then they carried their wineglasses out along the hall where there were shelves filled with booklength studies of Bill’s work and of work about his work. Scott pointed out special issues of a number of quarterlies, devoted solely to Bill. They went into another small room and here were Bill’s two books in every domestic and foreign edition, hardcover and soft, and Brita went along the shelves studying cover designs, looking at texts in obscure languages, moving softly, not inclined to speak. They went to the basement, where Bill’s work-in-progress was stored in hard black binders, each marked with a code number and a date for fairly easy retrieval and all set on freestanding shelves against the concrete walls, maybe two hundred thick binders representing drafts, corrected drafts, notes, fragments, recorrections, throwaways, updates, tentative revisions, final revisions. The slit windows high on the walls were shaded with dark material and there were two large dehumidifiers, one at each end of the room. She waited for Scott to call this room the bunker. He never did. And no hint of ironic inflection anywhere in his comments. But she sensed his pride of stewardship easily enough, the satisfaction he took in being part of this epic preservation, the neatly amassed evidence of driven art. This was the holy place, the inner book, long rows of typewriter bond buried in a cellar in the bleak hills.

  There was a back stairway from the kitchen to the second-storey hall and they took Brita’s jacket and bag and equipment case and went up that way. She glimpsed pantry shelves set into the wall and more of Bill’s reader mail, thick boxed files labeled by month and year. She followed Scott through the door and across the hall. This was Brita’s room.

  In the bedroom downstairs Karen sat up watching TV. Scott came in and began undressing.

  “Long day,” she said.

  “Let me tell you.”

  “All that driving, you must be really.”

  He put on pajamas and got into bed and she reached over and turned off the lamp. Then she picked up the remote control and lowered the volume on the TV, touch touch touch, until it was totally off. Scott’s head was flat in the pillow and he was already halfway gone. She was watching the world news of the day. On any given day it was mainly the film footage she wanted to see and she didn’t mind watching without sound. It was interesting how you could make up the news as you went along by sticking to picture only.

  She sees men and boys at first, a swarming maleness, a thickness of pressed-together bodies. Then a crowd, thousands, filling the screen. It looks like slow motion but she knows it isn’t. It is real time with bodies pressed and heaving, like bodies rolling in a sea swell, several arms raised above the crowd. They show bodies at odd angles. They show men standing off to the side somewhere, watching sort of half interested. She sees a great straining knot of people pressed to a fence, forced massively forward. They show the metal fence and bodies crushed against it, arms upflung. They show the terrible slow straining and heaving. What is it called, writhing? The camera is just outside the fence shooting straight in through the heavy-gauge steel wire. She sees men far back actually climbing on top of the mass of bodies, two men crawling on all the heads and shoulders. She sees the crowd pushed toward the fence and people at the fence pressed together and terribly twisted. It is an agony of raised and twisted arms and suffering faces. They show men calmly watching. They show men in shorts and jerseys, soccer players wearing those high stockings they wear, standing in the grass. There are bodies packed solid, filling the screen, and people barely moving at the fence, pressed and forced into one twisted position. She sees a boy in a white cap with a red peak and he has an expression on his face of what a nice day or here I am on my way home from school and they are dying all around him, they are writhing and twisted with open mouths and bloated tongues showing. Soccer is called football abroad. She sees the fence up close and they stop the film and it is like a religious painting, the scene could be a fresco in a tourist church, it is composed and balanced and filled with people suffering. She sees the faces of a woman and a girl and the large hand of a man behind them, the woman’s wet tresses, her arm twisted against the steel strands of the fence, the girl crushed and buckled under someone’s elbow, the boy in the white cap with red peak standing in the midst, in the crush, only now he senses, his eyes are shut, he senses he is trapped, his face is reading desperation. She sees people caught in strangleholds of no intent, arms upflung, faces popping out at her, hands trying to reach the fence but only floating in the air, a man’s large hand, a long-haired boy in a denim shirt with his back to the fence, the face of the woman with the tresses hidden behind her own twisted arm, nails painted glossy pink, a girl or woman with eyes closed and tongue showing, dying or dead. In people’s faces she sees the hopelessness of knowing. They show men calmly looking on. They show the fence from a distance, bodies piling up behind it, smothered, sometimes only fingers moving, and it is like a fresco in an old dark church, a crowded twisted vision of a rush to death as only a master of the age could paint it.

  3

  Brita unpacked the quartz light and screwed it into the top of the portable stand. She was nervous and kept a soft patter going. Bill stood against the wall waiting. He wore work pants and an old sweater, a thick-bodied man with a battered face and smoky hair combed straight back in wide tracks, going faintly yellow at the fringes. She felt the uneasy force, the strangeness of seeing a man who had lived in her mind for years as words alone—the force of a body in a room. She almost could not look at him. She looked indirectly, trying to conceal her glances in flurries of preparation. She thought he might have settled into an oldness, into ways of gesture and appearance that were deeper than his countable years. He watched her handle the equipment, looking past her into another moment somewhere. Already she sensed he was disappearing from the room.

  “I’m going to bounce light off this wall and then you can go stand over there and I’ll get my camera and stand over here and that’s all there is to it.”

  “Sounds ominous.”

  There was a typewriter on a desk and sheets of oversized sketch paper taped to the walls and the lower half of one of the windows. These were charts, master plans evidently, the maps of his work-in-progress, and the sheets were covered with scrawled words, boxes, lines connecting words, tiny writing in the boxes. There were circled numbers, crossed-out names, a cluster of stick-figure drawings, a dozen other cryptic markings. She saw notebooks stacked on the radiator cover. There were drifts of paper on the desk, a mound of crumpled butts in the ashtray.

  “There’s something about writers. I don’t know why but I feel I ought to know the person as well as the work and so ordinarily I try to schedule a walk beforehand, just to chat with the person, talk about books, family, anything at all. But I understand you’d rather not go on and on with
this, so we’ll work quickly.”

  “We can talk.”

  “Are you interested in cameras? This is an eighty-five-millimeter lens.”

  “I used to take pictures. I don’t know why I stopped. One day it just ended forever.”

  “I guess it’s true to say that something else is ending forever.”

  “You mean the writer comes out of hiding.”

  “Am I right that it’s thirty years since your picture has appeared anywhere?”

  “Scott would know.”

  “And together you decided the time has come.”

  “Well it’s a weariness really, to know that people make so much of this. When a writer doesn’t show his face, he becomes a local symptom of God’s famous reluctance to appear.”

  “But this is intriguing to many people.”

  “It’s also taken as an awful sort of arrogance.”

  “But we’re all drawn to the idea of remoteness. A hard-to-reach place is necessarily beautiful, I think. Beautiful and a little sacred maybe. And a person who becomes inaccessible has a grace and a wholeness the rest of us envy.”

  “The image world is corrupt, here is a man who hides his face.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “People may be intrigued by this figure but they also resent him and mock him and want to dirty him up and watch his face distort in shock and fear when the concealed photographer leaps out of the trees. In a mosque, no images. In our world we sleep and eat the image and pray to it and wear it too. The writer who won’t show his face is encroaching on holy turf. He’s playing God’s own trick.”

  “Maybe he’s just shy, Bill.”

  Through the viewfinder she watched him smile. He looked clearer in the camera. He had an intentness of gaze, an economy, and his face was handsomely lined and worked, embroidered across the forehead and at the corners of the eyes. So often in her work the human shambles was remade by the energy of her seeing, by the pure will that the camera uncovered in her, the will to see deeply.

  “Shall I tell you something?”

  “Go ahead.”

  “I’m afraid to talk to writers about their work. It’s so easy to say something stupid. Don’t drop your chin. Good, that’s better, I like that. There’s a secret language I haven’t learned to speak. I spend a great deal of time with writers. I love writers. But this gift you have, which for me is total delight, makes me feel that I’m an outsider, not able to converse in the private language, the language that will mean something to you.”

  “The only private language I know is self-exaggeration. I think I’ve grown a second self in this room. It’s the self-important fool that keeps the writer going. I exaggerate the pain of writing, the pain of solitude, the failure, the rage, the confusion, the helplessness, the fear, the humiliation. The narrower the boundaries of my life, the more I exaggerate myself. If the pain is real, why do I inflate it? Maybe this is the only pleasure I’m allowed.”

  “Raise your chin.”

  “Raise my chin.”

  “Frankly I didn’t expect such speeches.”

  “I’ve been saving it up.”

  “I expected you to stand here a few minutes and then get restless and walk off.”

  “One of my failings is that I say things to strangers, women passing by, that I’ve never said to a wife or child, a close friend.”

  “You talk candidly to Scott.”

  “I talk to Scott. But it becomes less necessary all the time. He already knows. He’s at my brainstem like a surgeon with a bright knife.”

  She finished the roll and went to her case for another. Bill stood by the desk shaking a cigarette out of the pack. There was mud crust and bent weed stuck to his shoes. He didn’t seem to be putting across his own picture, his idea of what he wanted to look like or who he wanted to be for the next hour or two. It was clear he hadn’t bothered to think it out. She liked the feel of the room with him in it. It was his room in a way in which this wasn’t his house. She asked him to stand near one of the wall charts and when he didn’t object she moved the lamp and adjusted focus and started shooting. He smoked and talked. He thought he was suffering like the rest of them. They all thought they were bungling and desolate and tormented but none of them ever wanted to do anything else but write and each believed that the only person who might possibly be worse off was another writer somewhere and when one of them mixed too many brandies and little violet pills or placed the nozzle of a revolver just behind the ear, the others felt both sorry and acknowledged.

  “I’ll tell you what I don’t exaggerate. The doubt. Every minute of every day. It’s what I smell in my bed. Loss of faith. That’s what this is all about.”

  Space was closing in the way it did when a session went well. Time and light were narrowed to automatic choices. Bill stood before the odd notations on his chart and she knew she had everything she might want or need. Here was the old, marked and melancholy head, the lost man of letters, and there was the early alphabet on the wall, the plan of his missing book in the form of lopsided boxes and felt-tipped scrawls and sets of directional signs like arrows scratched out by a child with a pencil in his fist. And he was animated, leaning and jabbing as he talked. His hands were blunt and nicked. There was a doggedness to him, a sense of all the limits he’d needed to exceed, getting on top of work that always came hard. She was trying to place him in context, fit the voice and body to the books. The first thing she’d thought, entering the room, was wait a minute, no, this can’t be him. She’d expected someone lean and drawn, with eyes like hex signs on an Amish barn. But Bill was slowly beginning to make sense to her, to look reasonably like his work.

  “I’m forced to steal one of your cigarettes,” she said. “I’ve been giving up cigarettes for twenty-five years and I’ve made a lot of progress in that time. Okay? But then I see the little glisten of the package.”

  “Tell me about New York,” he said. “I don’t get there anymore. When I think of cities where I lived, I see great cubist paintings.”

  “I’ll tell you what I see.”

  “That edginess and density and those old brownish tones and how cities age and stain in the mind like Roman walls.”

  “Where I live, okay, there’s a rooftop chaos, a jumble, four, five, six, seven storeys, and it’s water tanks, laundry lines, antennas, belfries, pigeon lofts, chimney pots, everything human about the lower island—little crouched gardens, statuary, painted signs. And I wake up to this and love it and depend on it. But it’s all being flattened and hauled away so they can build their towers. ”

  “Eventually the towers will seem human and local and quirky. Give them time.”

  “I’ll go and hit my head against the wall. You tell me when to stop.”

  “You’ll wonder what made you mad.”

  “I already have the World Trade Center.”

  “And it’s already harmless and ageless. Forgotten-looking. And think how much worse.”

  “What?” she said.

  “If there was only one tower instead of two.”

  “You mean they interact. There is a play of light.”

  “Wouldn’t a single tower be much worse?”

  “No, because my big complaint is only partly size. The size is deadly. But having two of them is like a comment, it’s like a dialogue, only I don’t know what they’re saying.”

  “They’re saying, ‘Have a nice day.’ ”

  “Someday, go walk those streets,” she said. “Sick and dying people with nowhere to live and there are bigger and bigger towers all the time, fantastic buildings with miles of rentable space. All the space is inside. Am I exaggerating?”

  “I’m the one who exaggerates.”

  “This is strange but I feel I know you.”

  “It is strange, isn’t it? We’re managing to have a real talk while you bob and weave with a camera and I stand here looking stiff and cloddish.”

  “I don’t usually talk, you see. I ask a question and let the writer talk, let the tension
drain out a little.”

  “Let the fool babble on.”

  “All right if you put it that way. And I listen only vaguely as a rule because I’m working. I’m detached, I’m working, I’m listening at the edges.”

  “And you travel all the time. You seek us out.”

  “You’re dropping your chin,” she said.

  “You cross continents and oceans to take pictures of ordinary faces, to make a record of a thousand faces, ten thousand faces.”

  “It’s crazy. I’m devoting my life to a gesture. Yes, I travel. Which means there is no moment on certain days when I’m not thinking terror. They have us in their power. In boarding areas I never sit near windows in case of flying glass. I carry a Swedish passport so that’s okay unless you believe that terrorists killed the prime minister. Then maybe it’s not so good. And I use codes in my address book for names and addresses of writers because how can you tell if the name of a certain writer is dangerous to carry, some dissident, some Jew or blasphemer. I’m careful about reading matter. Nothing religious comes with me, no books with religious symbols on the jacket and no pictures of guns or sexy women. That’s on the one hand. On the other hand I know in my heart I’m going to die of some dreadful slow disease so you’re safe with me on a plane.”

  She inserted another roll. She was sure she already had what she’d come for but a hundred times in her life she thought she had the cluster of shots she wanted and then found better work deep in the contact sheets. She liked working past the feeling of this is it. Important to keep going, obliterate the sure thing and come upon a moment of stealthy blessing.

  “Do you ask your writers how it feels to be painted dummies?”

  “What do you mean?”

  “You’ve got me talking, Brita.”