Mao II

by Don DeLillo

  “Anything that’s animated I love it.”

  “You don’t care what I say.”

  “Speak Swahili.”

  “There’s a curious knot that binds novelists and terrorists. In the West we become famous effigies as our books lose the power to shape and influence. Do you ask your writers how they feel about this? Years ago I used to think it was possible for a novelist to alter the inner life of the culture. Now bomb-makers and gunmen have taken that territory. They make raids on human consciousness. What writers used to do before we were all incorporated.”

  “Keep going. I like your anger.”

  “But you know all this. This is why you travel a million miles photographing writers. Because we’re giving way to terror, to news of terror, to tape recorders and cameras, to radios, to bombs stashed in radios. News of disaster is the only narrative people need. The darker the news, the grander the narrative. News is the last addiction before—what? I don’t know. But you’re smart to trap us in your camera before we disappear.”

  “I’m the one they’re trying to kill. You’re sitting in a room making theories.”

  “Put us in a museum and charge admission.”

  “Writers will always write. Are you crazy? Writers have long-range influence. You can’t talk about these gunmen in the same breath. I have to steal another cigarette. You’re no good for me, this is obvious. You have a look on your face, I don’t know, like a bad actor doing weariness of the spirit.”

  “I am a bad actor.”

  “Not for me or my camera. I see the person, not some idea he wants to make himself into.”

  “I’m all idea today.”

  “I definitely don’t see it.”

  “I’m playing the idea of death. Look closely,” he said.

  She didn’t know whether she was supposed to find this funny.

  He said, “Something about the occasion makes me think I’m at my own wake. Sitting for a picture is morbid business. A portrait doesn’t begin to mean anything until the subject is dead. This is the whole point. We’re doing this to create a kind of sentimental past for people in the decades to come. It’s their past, their history we’re inventing here. And it’s not how I look now that matters. It’s how I’ll look in twenty-five years as clothing and faces change, as photographs change. The deeper I pass into death, the more powerful my picture becomes. Isn’t this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? It’s like a wake. And I’m the actor made up for the laying-out. ”

  “Close your mouth.”

  “Remember they used to say, This is the first day of the rest of your life. It struck me just last night these pictures are the announcement of my dying.”

  “Close your mouth. Good, good, good, good.”

  She finished the roll, reloaded, reached for her cigarette, took a drag, put it down, then moved toward him and touched a hand to his face, tilting it slightly left.

  “Stay now. Don’t move. I like that.”

  “See, anything you want. I do it at once.”

  “Touching Bill Gray.”

  “Do you realize what an intimate thing we’re doing?”

  “It’s in my memoirs, guaranteed. And you’re not cloddish by the way.”

  “We’re alone in a room involved in this mysterious exchange. What am I giving up to you? And what are you investing me with, or stealing from me? How are you changing me? I can feel the change like some current just under the skin. Are you making me up as you go along? Am I mimicking myself? And when did women start photographing men in the first place?”

  “I’ll look it up when I get home.”

  “We’re getting on extremely well.”

  “Now that we’ve changed the subject.”

  “I’m losing a morning’s work without remorse.”

  “That’s not the only thing you’re losing. Don’t forget, from the moment your picture appears you’ll be expected to look just like it. And if you meet people somewhere, they will absolutely question your right to look different from your picture.”

  “I’ve become someone’s material. Yours, Brita. There’s the life and there’s the consumer event. Everything around us tends to channel our lives toward some final reality in print or on film. Two lovers quarrel in the back of a taxi and a question becomes implicit in the event. Who will write the book and who will play the lovers in the movie? Everything seeks its own heightened version. Or put it this way. Nothing happens until it’s consumed. Or put it this way. Nature has given way to aura. A man cuts himself shaving and someone is signed up to write the biography of the cut. All the material in every life is channeled into the glow. Here I am in your lens. Already I see myself differently. Twice over or once removed.”

  “And you may think of yourself differently as well. It’s interesting how deep a picture takes you. You may see something you thought you’d kept hidden. Or some aspect of your mother or father or children. There it is. You pick up a snapshot and there’s your face in half shadow but it’s really your father looking back at you.”

  “You’re preparing the body all right.”

  “Chemicals and paper, that’s all it is.”

  “Rouging my cheeks. Waxing my hands and lips. But when I’m really dead, they’ll think of me as living in your picture.”

  “I was in Chile last year and I met an editor who’d been sent to prison after his magazine did caricatures of General Pinochet. The charge was assassinating the image of the general.”

  “Sounds perfectly reasonable.”

  “Are you losing interest? Because I sometimes don’t realize the way a session becomes mine. I get very possessive at a certain point. I’m easy and agreeable on the edges of the operation. But at the heart, in the frame, it’s mine.”

  “I think I need these pictures more than you do. To break down the monolith I’ve built. I’m afraid to go anywhere, even the seedy diner in the nearest little crossroads town. I’m convinced the serious trackers are moving in with their mobile phones and zoom lenses. Once you choose this life, you understand what it’s like to exist in a state of constant religious observance. There are no halfway measures. All the movements we make are ritual movements. Everything we do that isn’t directly centered on work revolves around concealment, seclusion, ways of evasion. Scott works out the routes of simple trips I occasionally make, like doctor’s visits. There are procedures for people coming to the house. Repairmen, deliverymen. It’s an irrational way of life that has a powerful inner logic. The way religion takes over a life. The way disease takes over a life. There’s a force that’s totally independent of my conscious choices. And it’s an angry grudging force. Maybe I don’t want to feel the things other people feel. I have my own cosmology of pain. Leave me alone with it. Don’t stare at me, don’t ask me to sign copies of my books, don’t point me out on the street, don’t creep up on me with a tape recorder clipped to your belt. Most of all don’t take my picture. I’ve paid a terrible price for this wretched hiding. And I’m sick of it finally. ”

  He spoke quietly, looking away from her. He gave the impression he was learning these things for the first time, hearing them at last. How strange they sounded. He couldn’t understand how any of it had happened, how a young man, inexperienced, wary of the machinery of gloss and distortion, protective of his work and very shy and slightly self-romanticizing, could find himself all these years later trapped in his own massive stillness.

  “Are you fading at all?”

  “No.”

  “I forget how weary all this concentrated effort can make a person. I have no conscience when it comes to work. I expect the subject to be as single-minded as I am.”

  “This isn’t work for me.”

  “We make pictures together after all.”

  “Work is what I do to feel bad.”

  “Why should anyone feel good?”

  “Exactly. When I was a kid I used to announce ballgames to myself. I sat in a room and made up the games and described the play-by-play out loud. I was the players,
the announcer, the crowd, the listening audience and the radio. There hasn’t been a moment since those days when I’ve felt nearly so good.”

  He had a smoker’s laugh, cracked and graveled.

  “I remember the names of all those players, the positions they played, their spots in the batting order. I do batting orders in my head all the time. And I’ve been trying to write toward that kind of innocence ever since. The pure game of making up. You sit there suspended in a perfect clarity of invention. There’s no separation between you and the players and the room and the field. Everything is seamless and transparent. And it’s completely spontaneous. It’s the lost game of self, without doubt or fear.”

  “I don’t know, Bill.”

  “I don’t know, either.”

  “It sounds like mental illness to me.”

  He laughed again. She took pictures of him laughing until the roll was finished. Then she loaded the camera and moved him away from the quartz lamp and started shooting again, using window light now.

  “Incidentally. I bring a message from Charles Everson.”

  Bill hitched up his pants. He seemed to look past her, frisking himself for signs of cigarettes.

  “I ran into him at a publishing dinner somewhere. He asked how my work was going. I told him I’d probably be seeing you.”

  “No reason you shouldn’t mention it.”

  “I hope it’s all right.”

  “The pictures will be out one day.”

  “Actually the only message I bring is that Charles wants to talk to you. He wouldn’t tell me what it’s all about. I told him to write you a letter. He said you don’t read your mail.”

  “Scott reads my mail.”

  “He said that what he had to tell you couldn’t be seen or heard by anyone else. Far too delicate. He also said he used to be your editor and good, good friend. And he said it was distressing not to be able to get in touch with you directly.”

  Bill looked for matches now, clearing papers off the desktop.

  “How’s old Charlie then?”

  “The same. Soft, pink and happy.”

  “Always new writers, you see. They sit in their corner offices and never have to worry about surviving the failed books because there’s always a new one coming along, a hot new excitement. They live, we die. A perfectly balanced state.”

  “He told me you’d say something like that.”

  “And you waited to tell me about him. Didn’t want to spring it on me prematurely.”

  “I wanted my pictures first. I didn’t know how you’d react to news from out there.”

  He struck the match and then forgot it.

  “Do you know what they like to do best? Run those black-border ads for dead writers. It makes them feel they’re part of an august tradition.”

  “He simply wants you to call him. He says it’s a matter of some importance.”

  He swiveled his head until the cigarette at the corner of his mouth came into contact with the flame.

  “The more books they publish, the weaker we become. The secret force that drives the industry is the compulsion to make writers harmless.”

  “You like being a little bit fanatical. I know the feeling, believe me. But what is more harmless than the pure game of making up? You want to do baseball in your room. Maybe it’s just a metaphor, an innocence, but isn’t this what makes your books popular? You call it a lost game that you’ve been trying to recover as a writer. Maybe it’s not so lost. What you say you’re writing toward, isn’t this what people see in your work?”

  “I only know what I see. Or what I don’t see.”

  “Tell me what that means.”

  He dropped the match in an ashtray on the desk.

  “Every sentence has a truth waiting at the end of it and the writer learns how to know it when he finally gets there. On one level this truth is the swing of the sentence, the beat and poise, but down deeper it’s the integrity of the writer as he matches with the language. I’ve always seen myself in sentences. I begin to recognize myself, word by word, as I work through a sentence. The language of my books has shaped me as a man. There’s a moral force in a sentence when it comes out right. It speaks the writer’s will to live. The deeper I become entangled in the process of getting a sentence right in its syllables and rhythms, the more I learn about myself. I’ve worked the sentences of this book long and hard but not long and hard enough because I no longer see myself in the language. The running picture is gone, the code of being that pushed me on and made me trust the world. This book and these years have worn me down. I’ve forgotten what it means to write. Forgotten my own first rule. Keep it simple, Bill. I’ve lacked courage and perseverance. Exhausted. Sick of struggling. I’ve let good enough be good enough. This is someone else’s book. It feels all forced and wrong. I’ve tricked myself into going on, into believing. Can you understand how that can happen? I’m sitting on a book that’s dead.”

  “Does Scott know you feel this way?”

  “Scott. Scott’s way ahead of me. Scott doesn’t want me to publish.”

  “But this is completely crazy.”

  “No, it’s not. There’s something to be said.”

  “When will you finish?”

  “Finish. I’m finished. The book’s been done for two years. But I rewrite pages and then revise in detail. I write to survive now, to keep my heart beating.”

  “Show someone else.”

  “Scott is smart and totally honest.”

  “He’s only one opinion.”

  “Any judgment based strictly on merit is going to sound like his. And how it hurts when you know the verdict is true. And how you try to evade it, twist it, disfigure it. And word could get out. And once that happens.”

  “You finish, you publish and you take what comes.”

  “I will publish.”

  “It’s simple, Bill.”

  “It’s just a question of making up my mind and going ahead and doing it.”

  “And you’ll stop redoing pages. The book is finished. I don’t want to make a fetish of things are simple. But it’s done, so you stop. ”

  She watched him surrender his crisp gaze to a softening, a bright-eyed fear that seemed to tunnel out of childhood. It had the starkness of a last prayer. She worked to get at it. His face was drained and slack, coming into flatness, into black and white, cracked lips and flaring brows, age lines that hinge the chin, old bafflements and regrets. She moved in closer and refocused, she shot and shot, and he stood there looking into the lens, soft eyes shining.

  4

  Scott told her a story at lunch about his days of wandering, ten years ago, sick and broke in Athens and trying to cadge yankee dollars from tourists so he could get on one of those amphetamine buses that take you to the Himalayas in about a hundred hours of nonstop terror, through wars and mountain passes, but he was getting nowhere. He walked into the main square and saw some people gathered on the steps of a nice-looking old hotel with a European name he couldn’t recall.

  “Grande Bretagne.”

  Right. There was a film crew and some men who looked like government officials and fifty or sixty people just passing by and Scott went over there and saw a man on the top step who wore a khaki field jacket and checkered headscarf, a short guy with a scratchy beard, and it was Yasir Arafat and he was waving at the people on the sidewalk. When a hotel guest came out the door, Arafat smiled and nodded and people in the crowd smiled in response. Then Arafat said something to an official and the man laughed and everyone on the sidewalk smiled some more. Scott realized he was smiling broadly. He could feel the smile stretching across his face and he looked at the people around him and they looked back smiling and it was clearly agreed they all felt good together. And Arafat smiled again, talking to officials, overgesturing for the camera, pointing toward the entrance and then moving that way. Everyone applauded now. Someone shook Arafat’s hand and there was more applause. He lets a stranger shake his hand. Scott smiled and applauded, he saw the
men on the steps applaud. When Arafat went inside, the people on the sidewalk smiled and clapped one last time. They wanted to make him happy.

  “Did you get to the Himalayas?”

  “I got to Minneapolis. I went back to school for a year but then I dropped out again and fell into another spiral of drugs and nonbeing. There was nothing very special about it, even to me. I was a salesperson for a while in a heavily carpeted shoestore. Somebody gave me Bill’s first novel to read and I said, Whoa what’s this? That book was about me somehow. I had to read slowly to keep from jumping out of my skin. I saw myself. It was my book. Something about the way I think and feel. He caught the back-and-forthness. The way things fit almost anywhere and nothing gets completely forgotten.”

  “Yes. Sentences with built-in memories.”

  “When I read Bill I think of photographs of tract houses at the edge of the desert. There’s an incidental menace. That great Winogrand photo of a small child at the head of a driveway and the fallen tricycle and the storm shadow on the bare hills.”

  “It’s a beautiful picture.”

  “Finish eating. I’ll show you the attic.”

  “Why don’t you want him to publish?”

  “It’s his call. He does what he wants. But he’ll tell you himself the book falls short. Woefully short. Bill has been working on and off for twenty-three years on this book. He quits it, then returns. He rewrites it, then puts it aside. He starts something new, then comes back to it. He takes a trip, he returns, he resumes work, goes away, comes back, works every single day for three years, he puts it aside, picks it up, smells it, weighs it, rewrites it, puts it aside, starts something new, goes away, comes back.”

  “Sounds like total.”

  “It is. The work has burnt him out. He’s burnt out. Bill has always had to struggle for every word. Bill walks five feet from his desk and doubt hits him like a hammer in the back. He has to go back to his desk and find a passage he knows will reassure him. He reads it and he’s reassured. An hour later, sitting in the car, he feels it again, the page is wrong, the chapter is wrong, and he can’t shake the doubt until he gets back to his desk and finds a passage he knows will reassure him. He reads it and he’s reassured. He’s been doing this all his life and now he’s run out of reassuring passages.”