Mao II

by Don DeLillo

  He knew it was evening by the war noise. In the early weeks it began at sundown. First the machine-gun clatter, then car horns blowing. It’s interesting to think of traffic jams caused by war. Everything is normal in a way. All the usual cursing complaints.

  The boy had him lie on his back with legs bent up and he beat the bottoms of the prisoner’s feet with a reinforcing rod. The pain made it hard for him to sleep and this stretched and deepened time, gave it a consciousness, a quality of ingenious and pervasive presence.

  He thought of the no-shirt man caught on the wire. His memories didn’t extend past the moment of abduction. Time started there except for small dim snatches, summer flashes, compact moments in a house somewhere.

  But even with authorities, what do authorities know, did he really expect authorities to learn important things from the length and width of a brick even if there were bricks to count and measure and there weren’t, or meaningful sounds that barely petered through the walls.

  There was no sequence or narrative or one day that leads to another. He saw a bowl and spoon at the edge of his foam mattress but the boy continued to feed him by hand. Sometimes the boy forgot to replace the hood after mealtime. This made the prisoner anxious.

  The mortars came next, a sound of dust in the heavy crumple of the shells, slow-motion dust, dust specks colliding by the millions.

  It was hard to think about women except desperately and incompletely. If they could send him a woman, just once, for half a second, so he could set eyes on her.

  The only meaningful sound he heard was the VCR on the floor above. They were looking at videos of the war in the streets. They wanted to see themselves in their scuffed khakis, the vivid streetwise troop, that’s us, firing nervous bursts at the militia down the block.

  The ants and baby spiders transported time in its vastness and discontent and when he felt something crawling on the back of his hand he wanted to speak to it, explain his situation. He wanted to tell it who he was because this was now a matter of some confusion. Cut off from people whose voices were the ravel of his being, growing scant and pale because there was no one to see him and give him back his body.

  The boy forgot to replace the hood after meals, he forgot the meals, the boy was the bearer of randomness. The last sense-making thing, the times for meals and beatings, was in danger of collapse.

  If they could send a woman wearing stockings who might whisper the word “stockings.” This would help him live another week.

  Then what he was waiting for, the sound-flash of the big Grad rockets sliding off multibarreled launchers, twenty thirty maybe forty at a time in the incandescent dusk of a major duel across the Green Line.

  He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, place it in the world.

  He refused to exercise or count bricks or make up bricks that he might measure and count. He talked aloud to his father early in the morning, after the war died down. He told his father where he was, how positioned, how tied to a pipe, where in present pain, how in spirit, but with assurances that he was hopeful of rescue as they say on the instruction tape of Western man.

  He tried to make them up, women in nets and straps, but could only manage drifting images, half finished.

  There was something about the sound of launched rockets that induced a cortical flash, the brainlight under the hood that meant the Christians and the Muslims, that meant the sky was glowing, the city banded in rhapsodies of light and fire all the way to morning, when men came out of stifling shelters in their underwear to sweep away the rubble and buy bread.

  There was no one to remind him who he was. The days were not connected. The prisoner sensed the vanish of the simplest givens. He began to identify with the boy. As all his voices fled he thought he might be somewhere in the boy.

  He tried to repeat the old stories, sex with a shadowy woman on a passenger jet crossing the ocean at night (and it has to be night and it has to be water) or encounters in unexpected places with women in tight things, crisscrossed with black straps, sealed for his unsealing, but he couldn’t seem to do it, braced and cinctured, women stuck fast in the middle of a thought.

  No one came to interrogate him.

  He looked through the missing door and there were kids playing in the rubble and a gun at the side of his neck and he kept telling himself I am riding in a car with a missing door.

  The old stories tried and true. Sex with a shadowy woman on a stairway in an empty building on a rainy day. The more banal, the more commonplace, the more predictable, the triter, the staler, the dumber, the better. The only thing he didn’t have time for was originality. He wanted the same junior fantasies the boy had, sucking on the images that would trail them into middle age, into the final ruin, those sad little picture-stories so dependable and true.

  The food was usually takeout, coming in a bag with Arabic letters and a logo of three red chickens standing in a row.

  No, he didn’t hate the boy, who had scrappy hands and chewed-up fingers and was not the author of his lonely terror. But he did hate him, didn’t he, or did he, or not?

  Soon, though, he felt these talks with his father were a form of exercise, of self-improvement, and he stopped talking, he let this last voice flee, he said okay and fell to mumbling.

  He thought of the no-shirt man on the razor wire and saw him turning neon in the gorgeous dawn of the war.

  In the beginning, what?

  In the beginning there were people in many cities who had his name on their breath. He knew they were out there, the intelligence network, the diplomatic back-channel, technicians, military men. He had tumbled into the new culture, the system of world terror, and they’d given him a second self, an immortality, the spirit of Jean-Claude Julien. He was a digital mosaic in the processing grid, lines of ghostly type on microfilm. They were putting him together, storing his data in starfish satellites, bouncing his image off the moon. He saw himself floating to the far shores of space, past his own death and back again. But he sensed they’d forgotten his body by now. He was lost in the wavebands, one more code for the computer mesh, for the memory of crimes too pointless to be solved.

  Who knew him now?

  There was no one who knew him but the boy. First his government abandoned him, then his employer, then his family. And now the men who’d abducted him and kept him sealed in a basement room had also forgotten he was here. It was hard to say whose neglect troubled him most.

  Bill sat in a small apartment above a laundromat about a mile east of Harvard Square. He wore a sweater over his pajamas and an old terry-cloth robe over the sweater.

  His daughter Liz made dinner and talked to him through a serving hatch stacked with magazines and play scripts.

  “It’s impossible to save a nickel so I don’t even think about moving out of here. I’m at the point where I feel lucky to at least be doing something I like.”

  “And never mind the little miseries.”

  “But watch out for the big ones.”

  “Last time I was here.”

  “Right.”

  “You look a lot better, kid.”

  “Last time was a crisis. Which I see you found your robe and pajamas. Always leaving things, Daddy.”

  “I take after you.”

  He was barefoot, reading a newspaper.

  “And let someone know you’re coming for God’s sake. I could have met you at the airport.”

  “Spur of the moment. I figured you were working.”

  “Monday’s off.”

  “I’ll bet you’re good at your job.”

  “Tell them. I’m going to be like thirty any minute and I’m still trying to lose the word ‘assistant.’ ”

  “Now, look, about the inconvenience. I’m out of here tomorrow. ”

  “The sofa’s yours as long as you want it. Stay a while. I’d like you to.”

  “You know me.”

  “We’re all going to Atlanta for Memorial Day. I’ll be able to report on the
rare visit of the Mythical Father.”

  “You’ll ruin their weekend.”

  “Why don’t you ask me how they’re doing?”

  “I don’t give a damn.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I’ve reached a long-distance agreement with those two about the value of not giving a damn. ESP. We’re in perfect unspoken communication.”

  He put down one section of the paper and started on another.

  “They’re interested in what you’re doing,” she said.

  “What am I doing? I’m doing what I always do. How could anyone be interested in that?”

  “You’re still a popular subject. Except with Mother of course. She doesn’t want to hear about it.”

  “Neither do I, Lizzie.”

  “But it comes up. We’re like little brown doggies gnawing and pulling at the same spitty rag.”

  “Report that my drinking is completely under control.”

  “What about your remoteness?”

  “What about it?” he said.

  “Your anger. The airspace we weren’t allowed to enter when you were brooding. What about your vanishing act?”

  “Look, why even bother with me if you really believe I was all that difficult?”

  “I don’t know. Maybe I’m a coward. I can’t bear the thought that bad feelings might harden between us and I’ll grow old always regretting. And maybe it’s because there are no kids in my future. I don’t have to live my life as a history lesson in how not to be like my father. There won’t be anyone I can fuck up the way you did the job on Sheila and Jeff.”

  She put her head into the opening between the rooms, showing a sly smile.

  “We don’t think your behavior had anything to do with writing. We think the Mythical Father used writing as an excuse for just about everything. That’s how we analyze the matter, Daddy. We think writing was never the burden and the sorrow you made it out to be but as a matter of fact was your convenient crutch and your convenient alibi for every possible failure to be decent.”

  “What does a stage manager do anyway?”

  Her smile widened and she looked at him as if he’d made the one remark that might prove he loved her.

  “I remind the actors where they’re supposed to fall in the death scene.”

  Gail came out of the bedroom and got a jacket from the closet.

  Bill said, “Am I chasing you out of here? Stay around and referee. An Old Testament sandstorm is falling on my head.”

  “I have my hypnotist tonight. He’s my last hope of taking off pounds.”

  “I tell her try not eating,” Liz said.

  “She says it like it’s common sense. I have an outside range of maybe eight days’ strict diet and then something comes on automatic and I know I’m cleared of blame and guilt.”

  “Talk to my father. Writers have discipline.”

  “I know. I envy that. I could never do it. Sit down day after day.”

  “Army ants have discipline,” Bill said. “Don’t ask me what writers have.”

  Gail went out and the two of them sat down to dinner. He had his daughter figured for the senior dyke in this tandem, the decision-maker and stancher of wounds. He tried being impressed. He poured the wine he’d bought after he left the taxi and went wandering in the area looking for familiar streets and houses because he realized he had no idea what the name of her street was and couldn’t find her address or phone number in his wallet and wondered how the hell he expected to get into the apartment even if he knew where she lived and finally spotted a phone and called information and she was not only listed but home.

  “Now, look, I’m trying to remember what else I might have left behind last time.”

  “Gail wears your robe.”

  “Hypnosis. It could be the answer to everything.”

  “You left a billfold with traveler’s checks and passport. Look surprised, Daddy.”

  “I’ve been wondering where the hell.”

  “You knew where it was. That’s why you’re here, isn’t it?”

  “I’m here to see you, kid.”

  “I know.”

  “Christ, I can’t make a move.”

  “It’s all right. I don’t spend my time obsessing over Daddy’s motives.”

  “Only his negligence.”

  “Well there’s that of course.”

  “Actually I wasn’t even around when you were born. Ever hear about that?”

  “Only just recently.”

  “I was at Yaddo.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a retreat, a place where writers go for some ordinary fucking peace and quiet. In fact this is the institution’s motto, engraved on a frieze over the entranceway. The u in ‘fucking’ comes out as a v, in accordance with classical precedent.”

  He looked up from his food to see if she was smiling. She seemed to be thinking about it. He helped her clean up and then called Charles Everson in New York.

  Charlie said, “Your man Scott showed up not long after you left. I was in the boardroom for a luncheon meeting. He apparently raised something of a ruckus in the lobby. Tried to get up to our offices. Security finally called up and asked me to speak to him. He wanted to know where you were. Of course I couldn’t tell him because I didn’t know.”

  “You still don’t.”

  “This is true, Bill.”

  “You didn’t say anything about our London chat.”

  “London is the last thing I’d tell anyone. But he’s not an easy fellow to pacify. I finally had to go down there and talk to him. First I convinced security to produce the guard who accompanies special guests. Then the guard convinced Scott that he took you up and he took you down and you weren’t lying dead in the elevator. Eternally riding. A warning to us all.”

  They talked about arrangements.

  Then Bill said, “He’ll call you. He’ll keep calling. Not a word.”

  “I haven’t revealed a thing about you to a single soul in twenty-five years, Bill. I keep the faith.”

  When Gail came back they played rummy for a while. The women wanted to go to sleep and Bill tried to keep them going with card tricks. The wine was gone. He read for an hour and made up the sofa, recalling how cramped it was. Then he found a scratch pad and a pencil and made notes for some revisions on his novel.

  Scott came out of the bathroom with toothpaste on a brush. He looked at Karen, who was sitting up in bed watching TV. He stared, waiting for her to see him. There were times she became lost in the dusty light, observing some survivor of a national news disaster, there’s the lonely fuselage smoking in a field, and she was able to study the face and shade into it at the same time, even sneak a half second ahead, inferring the strange dazed grin or gesturing hand, which made her seem involved not just in the coverage but in the terror that came blowing through the fog.

  He stared until she turned and saw him.

  “Then where is he?” she said.

  “I’ll figure it out. It’s been a long time since he was a step ahead of me. Bastard.”

  “But where could he go?”

  “Somewhere that makes sense only to him. But if it makes sense to him, I’ll eventually figure it out.”

  “But how can you be sure he’s not sick or hurt?”

  “I went in the building and talked to them. We had an actual scuffle, some bumping and pushing. They have security at the level of war is imminent. Anyway it’s clear to me he just walked out the door.”

  “Well then I think he’s with Brita.”

  Scott stood with the toothbrush held level across his chest.

  “He’s not with Brita. Why is he with Brita?”

  “Because why else would he stay in New York?”

  “We don’t know he stayed there. We don’t even know for sure why he went there. He told me it was just a visit with Charles Everson. Everson told me they talked about the new book. No, he hasn’t been in touch with Brita or I’d know it. The phone bill came the other day. The calls
would be itemized.”

  “Maybe she called him.”

  “No, he’s got something deeper. He’s down deeper somewhere. ”

  “He’s running away from his book again.”

  “The book is finished.”

  “Not to him.”

  “He never left without telling me where he was going. No, he’s down deeper this time.”

  He went in and brushed his teeth. When he came out he stared at her until she realized he was looking.

  “We need to do lists,” he said.

  “But if he’s not here.”

  “All the more reason. We need to give his workroom a good going-over. ”

  “He doesn’t like us in there.”

  “He doesn’t like me in there,” Scott said. “I believe there are times in the night when he definitely consents to your presence. In the night or in the late afternoon when I’m out buying the onions for the stew.”

  “Or the cucumbers for the salad.”

  “The workroom needs to be cleaned and organized. So when he gets back he can find things for a change.”

  “He’ll call us in a day or two and we can ask him if it’s okay.”

  “He won’t call.”

  “I’m hopeful he’ll call.”

  “If there was something he wanted to call us about, he’d still be here, living amongst us.”

  He got into bed, turning up the collar of his pajama shirt.

  “Let’s give him a chance to call,” she said. “That’s all I’m saying. ”

  “He’s got some deep and dire plan and it doesn’t include us.”

  “He loves us, Scott.”

  She watched the set at the foot of the bed. There was a woman on an exercise bike and she wore a gleaming skintight suit and talked into the camera as she pedaled and there was a second woman inserted in a corner of the screen, thumb-sized, relaying the first woman’s monologue in sign language. Karen studied them both, her eyes sweeping the screen. She was thinboundaried. She took it all in, she believed it all, pain, ecstasy, dog food, all the seraphic matter, the baby bliss that falls from the air. Scott stared at her and waited. She carried the virus of the future. Quoting Bill.