by Don DeLillo
“I wonder,” he said, “if you might oblige a writer by answering a question or two. See, I’m doing a passage in a book that requires specialized medical knowledge and as I need a little guidance I wonder if I could trouble you for half a minute.”
They looked all right. They looked friendly enough, undismayed, not deeply interrupted.
“A writer,” the woman said to the others.
There was a heavy man with a beard who looked closely at Bill while the other two were looking at each other to decide whether this was going to be funny or bothersome.
“Would we have heard of you?” the bearded vet said with a trace of skepticism in his voice.
“No, no. I’m not that kind of writer.”
No one seemed perturbed by this remark even though Bill wasn’t sure what he meant. The remark satisfied them if anything, set the terms for a quiet and relaxed exchange among anonymous travelers.
Bill looked at his empty glass, then tried to find a waiter somewhere, his glance extending to other restaurants down along the promenade.
“But mightn’t we have read something you’ve written?” the woman said. “Possibly at an airport, where the names don’t always register sharply.”
The other two looked at her approvingly.
“No, I don’t think so. Probably not.”
She was small and broad-faced, pleasantly so, he thought, with brown bangs and a mouth that pushed forward when she spoke.
“What sort of thing is it you write?” the second vet said.
“Fiction.”
The one with the beard nodded carefully.
“I’m doing a passage, see, where no amount of digging through books can substitute for half a minute’s chat with an expert.”
“Did they ever make a movie?” the woman said.
“Right. Are any of your books also movies?” the second vet said.
“They’re just books, I’m afraid.”
The other man smiled faintly, looking at Bill out of the full beard.
“But presumably as an author you make appearances,” the woman said.
“You mean on television?” the second vet said.
“I often think, you know, there’s another one.”
Bill gestured to a passing waiter, raising his glass, but it wasn’t clear if the waiter saw him or knew what he was drinking. The colored lights were on and a few people stood on a top-floor balcony of the white building just beyond the far row of palms.
Bill squatted by the table and shifted his gaze among the vets as he spoke.
“All right. My character is hit by a car on a city street. He is able to walk away unassisted. Bruises on his body. Feels twinges and aches. But he’s generally okay.”
“You do understand,” the woman said, “that we diagnose and treat diseases and injuries suffered by animals and animals only.”
“I know this.”
“Not people,” the second vet said.
“And I’ll happily take my chances.”
Bill jumped up and went after a waiter, draining the already empty glass and handing it to the man and slowly pronouncing the name of the brandy. Then he came back and squatted by the table.
“So then over a period of days my character begins to experience deeper symptoms, mainly an intense and steady pain at the side of his abdomen.”
Another waiter arrived with more wine for the vets.
“And he wonders whether he has an internal injury and which organ and how serious and how disabling and so forth. Because he wants to make a journey.”
“Is he pissing blood then?” the bearded man said.
“No blood in his urine.”
“If you make him piss blood you can do a nice little bit with a kidney. We might help you there.”
“I don’t want blood in his urine.”
“Readers all that squeamish?” the woman said.
“No, you see the pain is frontal.”
“What about the spleen?” the second fellow said.
Bill thought a moment and couldn’t help asking, “Does a dog have a spleen?”
This was very funny to the others.
“If they don’t,” the bearded vet said, “I’ve made a nice career doing splenectomies on furry midgets.”
He had a big chesty laugh that Bill liked. Bill’s first wife despised him for liking doctors because she thought he was contriving to outlive her.
“Let me add one thing,” Bill said. “My character has a tendency to drink.”
“Then his spleen might indeed be enlarged,” the second vet said. “And a large spleen is easier to damage and might bleed and bleed and cause quite considerable pain.”
“But the spleen is on the left side,” Bill said. “My character feels pain on the right side.”
“Did you tell us this?” the woman said.
“Maybe I forgot.”
“Why not change it to the left side and do the spleen?” the bearded vet said. “It would actually bleed nonstop, I expect. Might be a nice little bit you could do with that.”
The waiter came with the brandy and Bill held up a hand to request a formal pause while he drank the thing down.
“But, see, I need the right side. It’s essential to my theme.”
He sensed they were pausing to take this in.
“Can it be upper right side?” the second man said.
“I think we can do that.”
“Can we give him some pain when he takes a deep breath?”
“Pain on breathing. Don’t see why not.”
“Can we make his right shoulder hurt?”
“Yes, I think we can.”
“Then it’s absolutely solved,” the woman said.
The bearded vet poured the wine.
“Lacerated liver.”
“Hematoma.”
“Local swelling filled with blood.”
“Doesn’t show externally.”
A waiter came with Bill’s dinner and put it on the other table. They all watched it for a moment. Then Bill went to the table and got the plate and utensils and squatted at the vets’ table, cutting up his meat.
“So it’s the liver that’s dealing out this misery. As he sort of suspected. What do I do with him next? What does he think and feel?”
The woman looked at the second vet.
“Feel faint?”
“I should think.”
“No blood to head,” she said to Bill.
“What else?”
“His blood pressure’s falling and his abdominal cavity may be on the verge of acute infection.”
“But he wants to take a trip,” Bill said.
“Completely out of the question,” the second vet said.
“What sort of trip?” the woman said.
“An ocean voyage. A cruise or passage. Not very long or trying.”
Bill poured some wine into his glass and looked from face to face.
“Completely and totally implausible,” the bearded vet said.
“No, we can’t have it,” the woman said. “Can’t let him do it. Stretches the limits. Absolutely no.”
Bill drank his wine, caught up in the fun.
“But if he only feels faint? No blood to head? This is why people go on cruises.”
“Sorry, no,” the woman said.
The bearded vet said, “If you give him the symptoms we’ve agreed upon, the only plausible recourse is a doctor.”
“Or you’ll simply have to send him into a coma.”
Bill finished cutting his meat before taking the first bite. He stood up and looked for a waiter. The air had a clear and happy tang.
“No offense, people, but we’re not talking about a parakeet. This is an otherwise healthy human being.”
“Otherwise healthy. That’s a cute touch.”
“The trouble with healthy humans, otherwise or not, is that they don’t let their doctors do the jobs they’re trained to do.”
“Animals first, last and always,” the woman said, gripping th
e edge of the table and pushing forward in her chain
Bill caught a waiter’s attention and waved his empty glass, pointing into it with the other hand. The bearded vet poured the wine.
“All right,” Bill said, “I’m ready to make my character yield to professional advice and wisdom. What exactly would a doctor do if someone in this condition showed up in his office?”
“He’d call a bloody ambulance, wouldn’t he?” the bearded vet said.
They were having a great time. The second vet got a chair from Bill’s table and dragged it over and Bill sat down and ate another piece of meat. The waiter arrived with brandy and they ordered more wine.
They decided to go to a nightclub along the coast, a place where Lebanese in large numbers took their exile and longing. Bill sat jammed in a corner of the taxi feeling muddled and blurred. Muzzy. This was a word he hadn’t heard or thought of in many years. The vets were trying to get the driver to improvise a verse for Kataklysmos, an important local feast in memory of the flood.
The club was large and crowded. A middle-aged woman with a hand mike moved among the tables singing laments in Arabic and French. Bill sat drinking at the end of a banquette packed solid with the three original vets and two others found wandering outside. The original woman let him lay a bent hand on her loamy thigh. A champagne cork shot out of a bottle about every forty seconds. Bill thought he saw his book across the room, obese and lye-splashed, the face an acid spatter, zipped up and decolored, with broken teeth glinting out of the pulp. It was so true and real it briefly cleared his muzziness. Couples stood clinging on the dance floor and a champagne bottle exploded in someone’s face, the man standing in a creamy flash of blood and foam and looking down at the damage to his suit. There were fashion references everywhere, women wearing skull jewelry and several young bravos in camouflage sunglasses and pieces of militia gear. Arguments spread around the room, the champagne came sluicing with a bang and Bill thought there was a two-hearted mood in the air, a reflectiveness at the center of the noise and babble, a yearning for home that had a secret hidden inside it, the shared awareness that they did not want to escape the war, that the war was pulling them into it and they were here to join hands and death-dance willingly past the looted hotels and the fields of tumbled stonework. And he looked at the weird little man in whiteface going up on the small stage to sing “Mack the Knife” in Louis Armstrong’s voice, a perfect chilling imitation of the famous sweet-potato growl, and Bill hated hearing that sound coming out of a fold-up body that lives in a suitcase, it was awful, it was damn scary, but the vets were fascinated, not a whisper or blink, it was the shark song they’d been waiting for all night, the cataclysmic verse.
It hurt to breathe. He moved his hand along the woman’s thigh. There was something about her hair being cut straight across the forehead that made him think he was feeling up a teacher in a storeroom filled with the new-penny freshness of school supplies. Oh God make her let me do it to her. Later in the men’s room Bill and the bearded vet walked right past each other without a word or sign. Seemed natural enough in the episodic course of a long night among strangers in a distant city. It felt to Bill that a life had come and gone since the segment on the promenade with a sea breeze and colored bulbs.
When he woke up on the hotel bed he was in his shorts, still wearing his socks and one shoe. It took him a while to figure out where he was. Once he had this settled he tried to recall how he’d made it back. He had no memory of leaving the nightclub. It frightened him, it made him see himself banging into walls, stagger-drunk in the dark somewhere. The danger of the world is immense. He saw it now, how dumb and lucky he’d been, testing that peril. There was one cigarette in the pack. He took off his shoe and had a smoke. Strange to think of himself in lost time, managing any number of delicate maneuvers, shuffling, trailing the hash of a lifespan. It frightened and humbled him but also made him feel darkly charmed.
He remembered the important things, how the boy who ate grasshoppers opened his mouth to show part of a wing and an eye and the juices of the chomped-up body leaking through his teeth.
He went into the bathroom to spit. He hawked it up and spat it out. He urinated. He shook the last drop of pee off his dick. This was his life. He put the cigarette on the glass shelf and washed his face. He dried himself and went to sit at the edge of the bed, smoking intently, studying the cigarette in his hand, what a sweet idea, a small roll of finely cut tobacco enclosed in a wrapper of thin paper, meant to spring a pleasure in the head. Funny how he’d never noticed.
He’d removed his pants, or someone had, without taking off his left shoe. What serene traces of queerness spelt out across the night. He wanted this smoke to last about four more drags and saw it didn’t have but two and felt a mood come upon him of soulful loss.
He slept for some hours. It appeared to be early evening when he got up. He called downstairs and they gave him the name and address of a doctor he might talk to. He got dressed, feeling altogether fine, ready to forget the doctor, then thinking better of it, then ready to forget again, feeling hungry, always a sign of resurgence.
He decided he would see the doctor. Before walking out the door, he called the shipping office on an impulse. They told him the ferry was running again.
He patted himself down for passport, wallet and traveler’s checks. He dropped his things in the bag and went down to check out. At the shipping office he stood in a line of exactly three people, himself included. He looked at posters of sunsets and tawny coasts. A man came in with cups of coffee and glasses of cold water on a round metal tray that was suspended from wire struts. It felt like a moment with a history. The clerk made a gesture and they each took a cup and stood around talking.
“Now how far is it to the port of Junieh?”
The clerk said, “Roughly in kilometers maybe two hundred forty. ”
“And from Junieh to Beirut, what do I do?” Bill said.
“Taxi distance. Take a taxi.”
“Will they overcharge me?”
“Of course. ”
“What about the holes in the boat? All repaired?”
A round of amusement here, the others sharing some joke without a word or glance.
“Don’t worry about the holes.”
“All repaired?” Bill said.
“The holes are well above the waterline.”
“We don’t speak about the holes,” another customer said.
“The holes are but details,” the clerk said.
Bill sniffed the grounds at the bottom of his cup, trying to outfox the pain, maneuver past it.
“Now what about the truce? Does it look serious this time?”
“They’re all serious. You can’t look at a cease-fire and say this one lasts, that one has no chance. They’re all serious and they never last.”
“But does the truce affect the safety of the ferry? Do the terms of a truce include gunboats at sea?”
“The sea is nothing,” the clerk said.
“We don’t speak about the sea,” the other customer said.
“The sea is a detail compared to the land.”
He paid for his ticket with traveler’s checks and the clerk asked him if he had a visa. Bill did not. The clerk asked him if he had a waiver from the State Department and Bill had never heard of such a thing.
“Never mind. There is always a way.”
“What’s the way?” Bill said.
“When you get to Junieh you go to passport control and you will see a man from the Lebanese Forces. Always there is someone. He has a uniform, a rubber stamp and an ink pad. Tell him you’re a writer.”
“Okay, I’m a writer.”
“Tell him you would like press credentials. Maybe he suggests some money will change hands. Then he stamps something on a piece of paper and you are now under the protection of the main Christian militia.”
“And I don’t need a visa to get into the country.”
“You are completely free to enter.”
“If you are willing to pay to get into a city like Beirut, I don’t think you care how much.”
He stood on deck and was surprised to see them come aboard, easily a hundred people, some with children, with infants pouched in sleep across a breast or shoulder. The gulls rocked high in the burning light. He thought it was touching and brave and these people were dear to him, families, cartons, shopping bags, babies, the melodious traffic of a culture.
He thought he ought to formulate a plan, maybe something along the following lines.
Take a taxi from Junieh to Beirut. Bargain with the driver. Pretend to know the area and the fastest route and the standard price for the trip. Find a hotel in Beirut and ask the manager to hire a car and driver. Bargain with the driver. Speak knowledge-ably about the layout of the city and try to give the impression you’ve done this many times. Show him your map. He had a map he’d bought after picking up his boat ticket but it was odd that he’d been forced to go to three shops before finding a map of Beirut, as if the place no longer qualified, or had consumed all its own depictions. Show him your map. Go to the southern slums, and this is where Bill’s plan grew soft and dim but he knew he would eventually walk into the headquarters of Abu Rashid and tell them who he was.
Bill has never walked into a place and told them who he is. They were still boarding. The light was the kind that splits the sky, a high sulfur spearhead fading into night. He went to find his compartment, which consisted of three wire hangers and a bunk. He grew dizzy again and lay down, his forearm over his face to keep the light out. The boat whistle sounded, making him think it was nice, inside the pain, that boats still have whistles that seem to call a song. He thought he was resting well, having a good rest. He thought the pages he’d done showed an element of conflict, the wrong kind of exertion or opposition, a stress in two directions, and he realized in the end he wasn’t really thinking about the prisoner. Who is the boy, he thought.
It was writing that caused his life to disappear.
No blood to head.
He thought of the time, when was it.
Can you wait two shakes.
He fell away from the pain and tried not to return.
He thought of the time, when was it, sitting in a taxi on the way to Idlewild it was called then and the driver said, “I was born,” right, and the point is that we were going to get there about two and a half hours before flight time due to some typical personal mixup and the driver said, “I was born under the old tutelage the earlier the better,” and he told himself at the time be sure to remember this line to recite to a friend or use in a book because these were the important things, born under the old tutelage, and it made his heart shake to hear these things in the street or bus or dime store, the uninventable poetry, inside the pain, of what people say.
