by Don DeLillo
Bill went for the butter dish, backhanding it across the table.
The lid hit Scott in the face.
This made Bill angrier and he tried to get up and start smashing in earnest.
“I don’t think we want to do this,” Karen said.
She kept him in the chair.
Scott held his left hand to his face. He still had bread crumbs in the other hand.
“Pets are famously therapeutic,” he said.
“Nobody’s hurt, so shut the fuck up.”
“For the old, the lonely, the stark and the raving.”
“Four out of four. Our theme is four.”
Karen put her hand over Bill’s eyes to keep him from seeing anything that might get him madder.
Brita said, “I want someone to tell me this is a rare occurrence.”
A gesture, a look, almost anything might get Bill going uncontrollably.
Scott wiped his hands and face with a napkin and stood behind Brita’s chair, taking her by the arm as she got up and leading her from the room.
Karen took her hands from Bill’s eyes.
“People who love each other, it’s the old dumb story, Bill, which we all know a thousand times over.”
They sat at the table for some minutes.
Then Bill went upstairs to his workroom, where he closed the door and stood by the window in the dark.
Scott wanted Brita to see one last thing before they left. They went out the back door and walked a few yards to a low shed built into an angle of the house. She followed him in, hunched over, and he switched on a light and they stood just inside the door looking at the shelves and compartments Scott had built himself—all filled with photocopies of the final draft, carbons of earlier drafts, carbons of notes and fragments, letters from Bill’s friends and acquaintances, more galleys, more reader mail in boxed and labeled files, more cardboard boxes stuffed with manuscripts and papers.
The shed was insulated and waterproofed. Brita stood bent and silent and looked at the thick binders filled with words and she thought of all the words on all the pages stacked and filed in other parts of the house and she wanted to get out of here, run down the dark road away from this killing work and the grimness of the lives behind it.
They went around to the front of the house and she waited near the porch steps while Scott went in to get her things. She expected to feel the bystander’s separation from a painful scene, the safety and complacence, but it wasn’t working that way. She felt guilty of something, implicated in something, and could not face saying goodbye to Bill.
Scott came out and they walked to the car.
“If you glance back over your left shoulder, you’ll see him watching from his window.”
She looked without thinking but the window was dark and she turned quickly to the front. The night air had force, damp and spiky. When they were in the car and veering off the hard rutted mud onto packed gravel, she looked back again and thought she saw the faintest trace of silhouette centered in the window, man-shaped and dead still, and she kept on looking until the house slipped into distance, lost in trees and shifting perspective, in the spacious power of night.
6
Scott peered into the dark and told his third story of the day, working the wipers periodically to part the soft mist. They talk about people driving erratically. He found Karen walking erratically down the main street of a northeastern Kansas town called White Cloud, population maybe two hundred ten, and he trailed her in the car. She stopped outside a red brick building with boarded windows under a low mean sky. He put the car in a slot, parking head-on, and watched her try to thumbnail a candy out of a sticky package. A farm vehicle rolled on past, steered by a bare-chested kid with a knotted hanky on his head. The street was broad and sandy gray with weeds coming out of the curbstone and old tin canopies leaning off the café and the auto-and-bike repair. She stood there and dislodged the candy but then couldn’t get it unstuck from the individual wrap. A sign jutted from the front of the general store with a mysterious word on it.
Scott wondered a while what there was about this scene that felt familiar. He was driving back east after seeing his sister, who lived nearby with a doctor husband and a baby flown in from Peru. He was glad to shake free of Bill for two weeks because the man had just remembered whiskey and was doing many mumbling riffs deep in the night.
He got out of the car and leaned on the fender, watching her deal with the candy melt in her hand. It was hard candy in theory and in name but would not separate from the wrap, attaching to it in webby strands as she pulled the paper outward.
Is it the heat wave, you think, or second-rate manufacturing methods that can’t compete with the overseas challenge?
She paid no attention.
You think they’d know how to do gumdrops by now.
He took his sunglasses from his breast pocket and worked a fistful of shirtfront out of his pants to clean the glasses with, just to give himself some business in the empty hanging time.
She said, Are you here to deprogram me?
Then he knew what was familiar here. It was like something out of Bill Gray and he should have seen it earlier. The funny girl on the tumbledown street with an undecidable threat in the air, stormlit skies or just some alienating word that opens up a sentence to baleful influence.
If that’s why you’re here, you better forget it real fast, she said, because they tried it and got nowheres with an s at the end.
Soon they were driving through the top end of Missouri, getting acquainted, and in the same car, headed downstate now, he told Brita how she spoke in streaky lines of recollection about her time as a Moonie, although she didn’t use that word herself and wouldn’t let anyone else use it in her presence, ever.
In the van all clothing was the same, dumped in a pile and washed together, then given out so many items per person, never mind original owner or previous wearer. This was the truth of the body common. But it sure gives you a strange feeling, wearing someone else’s socks and another person’s underwear. Gives you the jumps, the cold creeps. Makes you want to walk along a little shriveled inward so you don’t touch the clothes you’re in.
And she was selling peanuts on the street, which she couldn’t help feeling was a personal comedown after flowers. A guilty and dangerous thought. And her peanut team was made up of fairly purposeless sisters, roaming the land without the rooted point of view that their unison prayers affected the lives of every single person on the planet.
And she often thought of her husband, Kim, who was attached to a mission in England, the husband she didn’t know. The separation would end in six months but only if each of them brought three new members into the church.
She believed deeply in Master and still thought of herself as a seeker, ready to receive what was vast and true. But she missed simple things, parents’ birthdays, a rug underfoot, nights when she didn’t have to sleep in a zipped bag. She began to think she was inadequate to the strict plain shapes of churchly faith. Head pains hit her at the end of the day. They came with a shining, an electrochemical sheen, light from out of nowhere, brain-made, the eerie gleam of who you are.
Scott took her to a motel and listened to her talk for much of the night. She peed with the door open and he thought, How fantastic. No sex however just yet. She talked in ten-minute spasms. She could not sleep or was afraid to. He kept going to the machine in the corridor to get her soft drinks and came back expecting to find her gone, a curtain blowing through the open window, except the curtains were too heavy to blow and the windows didn’t open anyway.
Then action, bodies moving through the night. Because just as she was beginning to doubt and fear and mind-wander, she stepped out of the van on a cloud-banded evening and three men detached themselves from a playground wall and approached, two strangers and her tank-top cousin Rick, a football player with a clean-shaven head except for one wavy lock right on top, dyed y’know like parrot-green. The other guys wore suits and showed a certain wear
y expertise. Frankly it’s hard to know what to say to people who come off a wall in a nameless town and your own bulging cousin has a look that’s unreadable.
They stuffed her in a car and took her to a motel room, where her father sat waiting in a fire-retardant chair, oddly in his stocking feet. There was a lot of emotional talk, tabloid-type reassurances about love and mother and home, and she listened craftily, moved and bored more or less together, and Daddy cried a little and kissed her and put on his shoes and then left with Rick, who’d put his hand in her panties when they were ten, a memory that hung between them like the musky scent of a sniffed finger, and here was Scott in his own motel marveling at the underwear theme that coursed through this young woman’s life.
Brita sat with her head back on the padded rest and her eyes closed, hearing his voice go louder when he turned her way.
The two men deprogrammed her eighteen hours a day for eight days. They cited case histories. They repeated key phrases. They played tapes and showed movies on the wall. The shades were drawn all the time and the door stayed locked. No clocks or watches anywhere. They left when she slept or tried to sleep and a local churchwoman arrived and sat in a chair with a headset on, listening to songs of the humpbacked whales.
In these quiet moments of near sleep she sometimes loved her parents and was stirred by the drama of abduction.
You were brainwashed.
You were programmed.
You have the transfixed gaze.
Other times she hated everyone involved and thought it was the logical brutal extension of parent-child, locked in a room and forced to listen to rote harangues. Of course this is what they said the church had been doing to her all along.
Her mother called and they had a normal practical chat about getting enough to eat and we are sending clothes.
The head pains came more often and there were nightmares now. She began to develop a sense that she was only passing through. She couldn’t figure out exactly who it was that lived in this body. Her name had broken down to units of sound and it struck her as totally strange. She wanted to get back to her sisters and leaders. Everything outside the church was Satan-made. What does the church teach? Be children again. If you have theories, put them away. If you have knowledge, abandon it for the open heart of the child.
Programmed.
Brainwashed.
Indoctrinated.
When she tried a good-natured escape, sort of ambling dumbly out the door, they slammed her against the wall. Their hands were all over her and she thought they would tear her clothes away just to enjoy the noise of ripped Korean acrylic and so Scott moved closer in the darkened room, showing gentle concern, the tender recompense of the other side of the male equation, but no sympathetic sex just yet, bud.
They rode in silence for a while.
Brita said, “I didn’t quite get that business about a husband. If I ever met anyone who didn’t seem married.”
“Mass-married. Married in a public ceremony involving thousands of others. Bill calls it millennial hysteria. By compressing a million moments of love and touch and courtship into one accelerated mass, you’re saying that life must become more anxious, more surreal, more image-bound, more prone to hurrying its own transformation, or what’s the point? You take marriage, the faith of the species, the means of continuation, and you turn it into catastrophe, a total implosion of the future. Quoting Bill. But I think he’s all wrong.”
They drove across Iowa and Illinois and Scott looked at the doubled landscape of his original journey in search of Bill and his return with a character out of Bill’s fiction. They saw a horse galloping on the highway, empty-saddled. Karen had her blood pressure taken at a mobile clinic because she liked to feel the puffy tension of the cuff tightening on her arm.
You have the transfixed gaze.
But if being deprogrammed meant getting back home to a quiet room and a bed and regular meals, then maybe for the time being, because her parents loved her and she didn’t want to do another winter in the van, she might just let them bend her mind a little.
They brought in Junette, a former sister, carried off by parents, deprogrammed, turned against the church, now used to soften others to the message. She wore the great stain of experience. Karen watched her rush into the room pretending to show deep empathy is the word but actually feeling superior and aloof. They went on with it anyway, falling into their scripted roles of sisterly and intimate, with three weepy embraces. The men waited outside, their shadows mingled on the drawn curtain. Junette tore down Master’s teaching. She read letters from disaffected members in the important voice of the dead. Karen saw her teeth needed work, the spaces plugged with yellowish deposits. The famous tartar problem, of tartar and plaque. She was sitting craftily inside her own head, looking out at buttery Junette.
Maybe you know the feeling of being deeply, as they say, conflicted, like you wanna stay but you wanna go, and they bring in a person you’d like to stab in the neck with something jagged.
They stopped at a motel in mid-Ohio and the mood turned uneasy. They were tired and untalkative. Scott knew she was wondering why she was here at all, traveling with a stranger, some suspiciously helpful fellow, who is he anyway, and sitting in a room that was identical to the brown box where they tried to turn her mind inside out like a paper favor at a party. The same room repeats itself in a crosscountry chain and he’s going to make me stop at every one.
So he told her about Bill, everything he knew, the man, the work, the murk, his own deep involvement. She didn’t say anything but seemed to be trying to listen, to recall another world, the place of language and solitude and wet sedge meadows.
They went out for a real dinner in a restaurant with tasseled menus and a footbridge to the main room. She looked at him for the first time. In other words took him in retroactively, absorbing the accidental wonder of the past day and a half as it registered on his face. They went back to the room. The time was still not right for the sex of compassionate rescue, the sex of self-effacement, and he wondered if he was doing something wrong. She talked and slept and then woke him up to talk some more.
They told her, The trouble with postcult is that you lose your link to the fate of mankind.
They said, We know you’re a good person who’s just going through a rough adjustment while your parents are waiting and praying and writing a steady stream of checks for your emotional rescue.
They forced her to agree that the church had made a drone of her. She chanted, Made me a drone, made me a drone. That night she got out of bed in a glow of tingling light and tried to say something to the woman with the headset but could not speak and found herself some time later on her hands and knees on the toilet floor, vomiting foods of many nations.
They told her, Okay you are going to a deprogramming center where the lost and wan and wounded of many sects and movements are gathered for humane counseling.
Rick arrived with clothes and spending money and a box of specialty foods packed in impressive crinkly straw and they all drove to the airport. Karen found a cancer coloring book in the door pocket and leafed through. When they got out of the car she saw a policeman and decided to stroll over and tell him she’d been kidnapped. She pointed to the perpetrators, who looked—what is the word that sounds like it means calm and assured but actually means you are baffled? They looked nonplussed. Also guilty, which they were, including the cousin with the slash of green hair. So a multivoice discussion starts on the sidewalk outside the terminal with the normal airport scramble all around. One of the men tried to tell the officer about state conservatorship laws, which entitled them—and Karen was running, gone, through the terminal, down some stairs, feeling light and swift and young, hand-paddling through the crowds, then out a lower-level door and into a taxi, softly saying, Downtown.
She didn’t know what city the downtown area belonged to but when she got there she put fifty dollars aside and spent the rest on a Greyhound ticket—ridin’ the dog—and got off three
hours later in White Cloud, a name in the sky, where Scott found her walking zigzag on a nearly empty street.
Brita said, “I have an Eve Arnold photograph of White Cloud, Kansas. It shows the main street, I’m fairly certain, and a structure that could be the brick building where Karen was standing when you approached her and there is definitely a tractor or combine or some other high-wheeled farm machine in the picture.”
“But we’re not there, she and I.”
“And there’s the small sign you mentioned on one of the stores with the funny word on it, the Indian word or whatever, and in a way the whole picture, the wide sky and wide street, everything so lonely and eloquent and commonplace at the same time, it all flows into the strange word on that sign.”
“I remember now. Ha-Hush-Kah. A Bill Gray touch. It’s a Bill Gray place. It really is.”
They drove on these same roads finally, going the other way of course, and she asked questions about Bill. Scott realized this was the first time she’d said more than ten words about anything outside herself. He didn’t know whether Bill would let her stay. It turned out the subject never came up in so many words. They walked in and talked to Bill about the trip and he seemed to take to Karen. His eyes showed a detached amusement that meant there are some things that just have to happen before we know how smart or dumb they are.
After she read Bill’s novels she moved from the old sofa into Scott’s bed and it felt to him as though she’d been there always.
Bill lay smoking in bed, the ashtray resting on his chest. Every time he did this he thought of old rummies in single-residence brownstones expiring in the slow smoke of mattress fires.
Karen came in wearing her briefs and an oversized T-shirt.
“Feeling any better, Mr. Bill?”
She climbed on the bed, straddling Bill near the midsection, her upper body vertical, hands on her thighs.
Light folding in from the hallway.
