by Don DeLillo
“Bad sex. Rote, rote, rote.”
“Of course. I’m surprised to hear you offer these trite responses. Of course rote. We memorize works that serve as guides to conducting a struggle. In committing a work to memory we make it safe from decay. It stands untouched. Children memorize parts of stories their parents tell them. They want the same story again and again. Don’t change a word or they get terribly upset. This is the unchanged narrative every culture needs in order to survive. In China the narrative belonged to Mao. People memorized it and recited it to assert the destiny of their revolution. So the experience of Mao became uncorruptible by outside forces. It became the living memory of hundreds of millions of people. The cult of Mao was the cult of the book. It was a call to unity, a summoning of crowds where everyone dressed alike and thought alike. Don’t you see the beauty in this? Isn’t there beauty and power in the repetition of certain words and phrases? You go into a room to read a book. These people came out of their rooms. They became a book-waving crowd. Mao said, ‘Our god is none other than the masses of the Chinese people.’ And this is what you fear, that history is passing into the hands of the crowd.”
“I’m not a great big visionary, George. I’m a sentence-maker, like a donut-maker only slower. Don’t talk to me about history.”
“Mao was a poet, a classless man dependent on the masses in important ways but also an absolute being. Bill the sentence-maker. I can see you living there actually, wearing the wide cotton trousers, the cotton shirt, riding the bicycle, living in one small room. You could have been a Maoist, Bill. You would have done it better than I. I’ve read your books carefully and we’ve spent many hours talking and I can easily see you blending into that great mass of blue-and-white cotton. You would have written what the culture needed in order to see itself. And you would have seen the need for an absolute being, a way out of weakness and confusion. This is what I want to see reborn in the rat warrens of Beirut.”
George’s wife came in with coffee and sweets on a tray.
“The question you have to ask is, How many dead? How many dead during the Cultural Revolution? How many dead after the Great Leap Forward? And how well did he hide his dead? This is the other question. What do these men do with the millions they kill?”
“The killing is going to happen. Mass killing asserts itself always. Great death, unnumbered dead, this is never more than a question of time and place. The leader only interprets the forces.”
“The point of every closed state is now you know how to hide your dead. This is the setup. You predict many dead if your vision of the truth isn’t realized. Then you kill them. Then you hide the fact of the killing and the bodies themselves. This is why the closed state was invented. And it begins with a single hostage, doesn’t it? The hostage is the miniaturized form. The first tentative rehearsal for mass terror.”
“Some coffee,” George said.
Bill looked up to thank the woman but she was gone. They heard a series of noises in the distance, small blowy sounds gathered in the wind. George stood and listened carefully. Four more soft thuds. He went out to the balcony for a moment and when he came back he said these were small explosive charges that a local left-wing group attached to the unoccupied cars of diplomats and foreign businessmen. They liked to do ten or twelve cars at a time. It was the music of parked cars.
He sat down and looked closely at Bill.
“Eat something.”
“Maybe later. Looks good.”
“Why are you still here? Don’t you have work to do back home? Don’t you miss your work?”
“We don’t talk about that.”
“Drink your coffee. There’s a new model that Panasonic makes and I absolutely swear by it. It’s completely liberating. You don’t deal with heavy settled artifacts. You transform freely, fling words back and forth.”
Bill laughed in a certain way.
“Look. What happens if I go to Beirut and complete this spiritual union you find so interesting? Talk to Rashid. Can I expect him to release the hostage? And what will he want in return?”
“He’ll want you to take the other man’s place.”
“Gain the maximum attention. Then release me at the most advantageous time.”
“Gain the maximum attention. Then probably kill you ten minutes later. Then photograph your corpse and keep the picture handy for the time when it can be used most effectively.”
“Doesn’t he think I’m worth more than my photograph?”
“The Syrians are doing sweeps of the southern suburbs, looking for hostages. Hostages have to be moved all the time. Rashid frankly can’t be bothered.”
“And what happens if I get on a plane right now and go home?”
“They kill the hostage.”
“And photograph his corpse.”
“It’s better than nothing,” George said.
Brita watched the in-flight movie and listened to some brawling jazz on the earphones. The movie seemed subjective, slightly distracted, the screen suspended in partial darkness and specked and blotched by occasional turbulence and the sound track strictly optional. She thought movies on planes were different for everybody, little floating memories of earth. She had a magazine on her food tray with a soft drink and peanuts and she flipped pages without bothering to look at them. A man across the aisle talked on the telephone, his voice leaking into her brain with the bass line and drums, all America unreeling below.
She was thinking that she’d let Karen stay in her apartment and look after her cat and she didn’t even know the girl’s last name.
She was thinking that everything that came into her mind lately and developed as a perception seemed at once to enter the culture, to become a painting or photograph or hairstyle or slogan. She saw the dumbest details of her private thoughts on postcards or billboards. She saw the names of writers she was scheduled to photograph, saw them in newspapers and magazines, obscure people climbing into print as if she carried some contagious glow out around the world. In Tokyo she saw a painting reproduced in an art journal and it was called Skyscraper III, a paneled canvas showing the World Trade Center at precisely the angle she saw it from her window and in the same dark spirit. These were her towers, standing windowless, two black latex slabs that consumed the available space.
The man on the phone was saying, “One o’clock your time tomorrow. ”
Interesting. Brita had a one o’clock appointment the next day with a magazine editor who’d been pressing her for a meeting and she suspected that he’d heard about a certain set of pictures. She was thinking that she would have to develop those rolls of film. But it troubled her, the memory of Bill’s face in the last stages of the morning. There was some terrible brightness in the eye. She’d never seen a man lapse so wholly into his own earliest pain. She thought there were lives that constantly fell inward, back to first knowing, back to bewilderment, and this was the reference for every bleakness that passed across the door.
An attendant took her empty cup.
She was thinking that she felt guilty about Scott. It was a case of misdirected sex, wasn’t it, and all the time they were together she was the woman naked from the bath looking down at the writer chopping wood. Strange how images come between the physical selves. It made her sad for Scott. She tried to call him once, looking at upstate maps and making an effort to remember road signs and finally calling information in several counties. But there was no Scott Martineau listed or unlisted and Bill Gray did not exist at any level and Karen had no last name.
The face on the screen belonged to an actor who lived in her building. He owed her a hundred and fifty dollars and three bottles of wine and she realized for the first time that she’d never get paid, seeing his face in the half light, with jazz racing in her brain.
She was thinking that one of the writers she’d tried to photograph in Seoul had nine years left in his sentence for subversion, arson and acting like a communist. They wouldn’t let her see him and she became angry and cursed the bas
tards. Shameless artistic ego, all wrong, but she thought it was important to get his face on a strip of film, see his likeness rise to the ruby light in the printing room seven thousand miles from his cell.
She’d entrusted her home, her work, her wine and her cat to a ghost girl.
The child at the end of the row raised the shade and she was thinking that she didn’t want to look at the magazine in front of her because she might see something from her life in there. She was strapped in, sealed, five miles aloft, and the world was so intimate that she was everywhere in it.
He stepped off the curbstone and took about seven strides and when he heard the car braking he had time to take one step in reverse and turn his head. He saw worry beads dangling from the rearview mirror of a car coming the other way and then the first car hit him. He walked sideways in a burlesque quickstep, arms pumping, and went down hard, striking his left shoulder and the side of his face. He tried to get up almost at once. People came to help him, a small crowd collecting. Already there was a clamor of blowing horns. He got to his knees, feeling stupid, holding up a hand in reassurance. Someone lifted him under the shoulder and he stood up nodding. He dusted off his clothes, feeling his left hand burn but refusing to look just yet. He smiled tightly at the faces, watching them recede. Then he turned and went back to the sidewalk and looked for a place to sit. People walked around him and the sun beat down. He closed his eyes and faced up into it. Traffic was moving now but in the distance they still leaned on their horns, raising a wail, a lingering midday awe. The sun was a mercy on his face.
There was something at stake in these sentences he wrote about the basement room. They held a pause, an anxious space he began to recognize. There’s a danger in a sentence when it comes out right, a sense that these words almost did not make it to the page. He forgot to shave or leave his clothes in the laundry bag for the maid or he left his clothes but did not fill out the itemized slip. He came back to the room and looked at his clothes in the plastic bag and wondered whether they were clean or dirty. He took them out and held them to the light and saw bloodstains here and there and put them back in the bag to await the disposition of the maid. The work had a stunned edge, a kind of whiteness. He put antiseptic cream on his scraped hand and took warm baths to ease the scattered aches. Even if he’d remembered to shave, he could have done only half his face. A crescent stain extended from his left eye to his jaw and it was shiny and ripe and looked impressively living. He smoked and wrote, thinking he might never get it right but feeling something familiar, something fallen into jeopardy, a law of language or nature, and he thought he could trace it line by line, the shattery tension, the thing he’d lost in the sand of his endless novel.
He learned how to pronounce the word Metaxa, with the accent on the last syllable, and the harsh taste of the brandy began to make sense.
In London there were doctors nearby when he ate breakfast. Here he had priests buying apples in the market. He went into a church in the Plaka and saw a curious set of metal emblems strung beneath an icon of some armor-clad saint. The objects depicted body parts mainly but there were soldiers and sailors embossed on some of the badges, there were naked babies and Volkswagens, there were houses, cows and donkeys. Bill decided these things were votive tokens. If you had an ear infection or heart trouble you requested supernatural aid by buying a ready-made emblem with a heart on it or an ear or a breast, they had breasts, Bill saw, if you had cancer, and then you simply placed the thing near the appropriate saint. The idea extended to a thousand conditions or calamities that might strike your loved ones or your possessions and it made good sense in principle, it made your appeal specific and dynamic, it inspired a democracy of icons, but he thought he might like to go into a shop and buy a token for the whole man and hang it near the appropriate saint. They had saints for everything from smallpox to animal attacks but he doubted there was a patron of the whole man, body, soul and self, and he also had a peculiar twinge deep in his right side, a pang he liked to call it, that he doubted they’d found a saint for, or designed a medal he might buy in a store.
George said, “We have to see a doctor, don’t we?”
“It’s all right.”
“But your face. Don’t we have to see a doctor for this? Let me call.”
“It’s healing normally. Gets better every day.”
“Did you get the driver’s name?”
“I don’t want his name.”
“He hit you, Bill.”
“It wasn’t his fault.”
“Let me call someone. You should report this. Don’t we have to talk to someone for a thing like this?”
“Get me a drink, George.”
They talked into early evening. Then they sat on the terrace watching the streetlights come on, a thousand cars a minute racing toward the gulf in tailing red streamers, the mortal sadness of an ordinary dusk. George’s daughter came out and slouched against the rail, an unhappy girl in jeans.
“I worry about you, Bill.”
“Do me a favor. Don’t.”
“Why have you involved yourself in this?”
“It was your idea.”
“But you’ve come along so readily.”
“True enough.”
“Let me call someone for your face. Jasmine, get the little book with the phone numbers.”
“It’s late. I’ll see a doctor in the morning.”
“This is a promise,” George said.
“Yes. ”
“And it won’t be in Beirut. The airport is closed again due to heavy fighting. I’ve been in touch with Rashid. He could arrange to get out by boat and then fly here from Cyprus but now sea travel is also very dangerous and I don’t think he wants to come here anyway. This is deeply disappointing. I was looking forward to working with you on this.”
“And Jean-Claude?”
“Who is that?”
“That’s the hostage, George.”
“Don’t tell me his name.”
“You know his name.”
“Slipped my mind. Forgotten. Gone forever.”
The girl stood behind her father, hands on his shoulders, softly, miserably massaging.
“How will they kill him?”
“Go home, Bill, and do your work. I enjoy these talks but there’s no longer any reason for you to be here. And think about what I told you. A word processor. The keyboard action is effortless. I promise you. This is something you dearly need.”
He went to his room and tried to get some sleep. There was a line he kept repeating to himself that had the mystery and power he’d felt nowhere else but in the shared past of people who had loved each other, who lived so close they’d memorized each other’s warts and cowlicks and addled pauses, so the line was not one voice but several and it spoke a more or less nonsensical theme, it was a line for any occasion or none at all, mainly meant to be funny but useful also in grim times to remind them that words stick even as lives fly apart.
Measure your head before ordering.
It was the line that says everything. All the more appropriate and all the funnier because outsiders did not understand and all the better finally because there was nothing to understand.
At six in the morning he was walking the streets, checked out, hobbling. Every ten paces he looked back for a taxi. He had this one pair of pants he’d been wearing since New York and it was smeared at the knees with blood from his scraped hand and he still had Charlie’s tight old tweed jacket and Lizzie’s overnight bag and the razor he’d bought in Boston, although he wasn’t using it, and the shoes he’d bought the day before the razor, finally broken in.
He was in a residential area now, completely lost. A man in an undershirt dragged three garbage bags across the street. A clean light soaked into the shaggy bark of a eucalyptus and it was a powerful thing to see, the whole tree glowed, it showed electric and intense, the branches ran to soft fire, the tree seemed revealed. The man dumped the bags at the corner and came back across the street and Bill nodded t
o him and walked on, hearing a garbage truck work up the hill.
He kept looking back for a taxi.
12
She carried many voices through New York. She talked to people in the park, telling them about a man from far away who had the power to alter history. The networks of inhabited boxes became elaborate. The nights were warm and people were drawn to the park from places all around. They were textured with soot. A woman carried her things in a cluster of plastic bags, the neck of one bag tied to the neck of another and the woman in full trudge dragging the bags behind her with a trusty length of twine. Karen saw how pigeons and squirrels took on ratlike qualities. You saw them go right into tents after food. The pigeons were permanently afoot and the squirrels crouched and bobbed and waited, going boldly into paper bags left standing at the feet of people on the benches. The original rats arrived with night, silent and gliding.
People come out of houses, gather in dusty squares and go together, streams of people calling out a word or name, marching to some central place where they join many others, chanting.
There was Omar in his dope-dealing crouch. A couple of times he helped her carry bottles to the store so she could redeem them. Once they went to an art gallery and stood looking at a large construction that meandered along a wall. She counted metal, burlap, glass, there was clotted paint on the glass, a ledge of weathered wood, there were flashlight batteries and postcards of Greece. Karen looked at a food-crusted spoon that was stuck to the burlap. She thought she might like to touch it, just to touch, for the sake of putting a hand to something that is one of a kind. So she reached over and touched it, then checked around to see if anyone looked askance. On a further whim she lifted slightly. The spoon came off the burlap with a Velcro swish. She was stunned to learn it was detachable. She looked at Omar with her mouth fixed in that slight protrusion and her eyes large and serious. He did a face of exaggerated awe, walking back and forth. In other words a series of open-mouth antics with a strutting component. She held the spoon in her hand, standing totally frozen. She didn’t know when she’d been so scared. The thing came right off the painting. A real spoon with impacted food that was also real. She tried to smell the food, careful not to move the spoon too quickly and cause further horrible dislodgement. Omar strutted toward the door like a trombonist at a funeral, making the actual motions. She didn’t think the spoon would restick to the burlap and there was no place nearby to set it down. The room was totally bared down, walls, floor and artworks. She decided to follow Omar with the spoon held openly so someone could spot it and she could then return it with a muttered apology, which she envisioned completely, setting the spoon carefully on the desk near the door. But no one said anything and then she was out on the street and it was still in her hand, complete with crusted food, and she was even more frightened than before. She’d left the premises with part of an artwork in her possession. Omar strutted and gleamed. She watched him gait away down the street past mannequins in black kimonos with elbows jutting.
