by Don DeLillo
A small child with a funny hat squatting bare-ass to crap in the snow.
Then there is a pause and the steady keening noise of the soundtrack fades away. The screen fills with a numb gray sky and the camera slowly levels and the first impressive image is repeated.
Troops come striding out of the mist.
But this time the shot is prolonged and the men keep coming and there are wounded among them, limping figures, bloodied faces, a few men helmeted, most wearing black knit caps.
Sound resumes, realistic now, explosions somewhere, aircraft flying low, and the men begin to advance more warily, weapons held tight to bodies. They move past a mound of burning tires into city streets, buildings collapsed, wreckage everywhere. I watch them walking over shattered stonework and there are isolated shouts soon overwhelmed by the concentrated discharge of weapons.
It looks and sounds like traditional war, men in arms, and I recall the warped nostalgia that Stenmark had talked about, all the world wars embedded in these images, a soldier with a cigarette in his mouth, a soldier asleep in his bunker, a bearded soldier with a bandaged head.
Sounds of local gunfire and the men take cover, searching out the source, firing back, and the soundtrack flows into the action, loud, close, voices calling, and I have to step back from the screen even as the camera becomes more intimately involved, creeping along the terrain for close-ups of men’s faces, young and not so young, fingers gripping triggers, bodies edged against the frame of a ruined structure. It’s quick and clear and magnified, a sense of something impending, and all I’m able to do is watch and listen, a sudden clutter of sound and image, the camera sways and jitters and then finds a man standing in the hulk of a wrecked car, rifle sweeping the area. He fires several times, upper body flinching in rhythm. He ducks down and waits. We all wait. The camera scans the area and it is empty debris and light rain and then the single figure is back in sight, kneeling on the driver’s seat and firing once out of the shattered side window. Periods of near silence and the camera remains angled on the crouched man, who wears a headband, no helmet, and then the firing resumes from various quarters and the picture jumps and the man is hit. This is what I think I see. The camera loses him and catches only traces of muddled background. The noise becomes intense, rapid firing, a voice repeating the same word, and then he is back, wandering out into the open, without his rifle, camera steadying, and he is hit again and goes to his knees and I’m reciting these words to myself as I watch. He is hit again and goes to his knees and there is a distinct image of the figure, khaki field jacket, jeans and boots, spiky hair, he is three times life size, here, above me, shot and bleeding, stain spreading across his chest, young man, eyes shut, surpassingly real.
It was Emma’s son. It was Stak.
He topples forward and the camera spins away and that’s who it was, the son, the boy. Battle tanks approaching now and I need to see him again because even though there is no doubt, it happened too fast, it was not enough. A dozen tanks in lazy array rolling over sandbag barriers and I stand here waiting. Why would they show it again? But I have to wait, I need to see it. The tanks move along a road that bears a sign with Cyrillic and Roman characters. Konstantinovka. There is a crude drawing of a skull above the name.
Stak in Ukraine, a self-defense group, a volunteer battalion. What else could it be? I keep looking and waiting. Did the recruiters know his age or even his name? He’s a native son come home. Birth name, acquired name, nickname. All I know is Stak and maybe this is all there is to know, the kid who became a country of one.
I have to stay until the screen goes dark. I have to wait and see. And if they send an escort for me, the escort will have to wait. And if Stak doesn’t reappear, then let the picture fade, the sound die, the screen roll up, the entire hall go dark. The other halls empty out, an orderly flow of people, but this hall goes dark and I stand here with my eyes shut. All the times I’ve done this before, stand in a dark room, motionless, eyes shut, weird kid and grown man, was I making my way toward a space such as this, long cold empty hall, doors and walls in matching colors, dead silence, shadow streaming toward me.
Once the dark is total, I will simply stand and wait, trying hard to think of nothing.
- 9 -
I see a taxi parked three or four feet from the sidewalk and then a man in the gutter on his knees, shoes off, set behind him, and he is bowing, head to the pavement, and it takes me a moment to understand that he is the driver of the taxi and that the direction is Mecca, he is bowing toward Mecca.
• • •
On weekends, now and then, I stay in a guest room in my father’s townhouse, with kitchen privileges. The young man who deals with these matters, one of the corporate effigies, discusses details in the contemporary pattern of declarative sentences that slither gradually upward into questions.
• • •
Sometimes I think I go to museums just to hear the languages spoken by visitors to the galleries. Once I followed a man and woman from the limestone grave markers in fourth-century B.C. Cyprus all the way to Arms and Armor, waiting for them to resume talking to each other so I could identify the language, or try to, or make a dumb guess. The thought of approaching them to ask, politely, was outside my range.
• • •
I sit before a screen in a cubicle of frosted plexiglass marked Compliance and Ethics Officer. I’ve adapted well here, not just in terms of my day-to-day disposition but in the context of the methods I’ve developed to perform the requisite duties and conform to the indigenous language.
• • •
Beggar in wheelchair, dressed normally, clean shaven, no stained paper cup, gloved hand thrust into the street swarm.
• • •
There’s the wide-ranging dynamic of my father’s corporate career and there’s the endland of the Convergence and I tell myself that I’m not hiding inside a life that’s a reaction to this, or a retaliation for this. Then, again, I stand forever in the shadow of Ross and Artis and it’s not their resonant lives that haunt me but their manner of dying.
• • •
When I ask myself why I requested an occasional overnight visit to the townhouse, I think at once of the building where Emma lives, in this general area, or where she used to live, and I take frequent walks in the neighborhood, expecting to see nothing, learn nothing, but feeling an immanence, the way in which a painful loss yields a shadow presence, and in this case, on her street, I sense a possibility that I haven’t even tried to understand.
• • •
In my local market I never forget to check the expiration dates on bottles and cartons. I reach into the display of objects, of packaged goods, and lift an item from the last rank because that’s where the freshest sliced bread is placed, or milk, or cereal.
• • •
Women tall and taller. I look for the woman in a formal pose standing on a street corner with or without a sign in an obscure alphabet. What is there to see that I haven’t seen, what lesson is there to be learned from a still figure in the midst of crowds? In her case it may be an issue of impending threat. Individuals have always done this, haven’t they? I think of it as medieval, a foreboding of some kind. She is telling us to be ready.
• • •
Sometimes it takes an entire morning to outlive a dream, to outwake a dream. But I haven’t been able to recall a single faint instant of dreamtime since my return. Stak is the waking dream, the boy soldier looming onscreen, about to come crashing down on top of me.
• • •
I go walking, looking, and it is stalled and moaning traffic and it is foreign money soaring into the penthouse towers that outclimb the zoning laws.
• • •
I like the idea of working in school surroundings, knowing that at some point the idea will dissolve into the details. A van arrives very early Monday, already carrying two employees who live in Manhattan, and we travel to a small community in Connecticut where the college is located, a modest ca
mpus, students of middling promise. We remain until Thursday afternoon, when we are driven back to the city, and it’s interesting how we find new ways, the three of us, to talk about nothing.
• • •
The long soft life is what I feel I’m settling into and the only question is how deadly it will turn out to be.
But do I believe this or am I searching for effect, a way to balance the ease of my everydayness?
• • •
I enter the room with the monochrome paintings, recalling the final words that Ross managed to speak. Gesso on linen. I try to absolve the term of its meaning and to think of it as a fragment of some beautiful lost language, unspoken for a thousand years. The paintings in the room are oil on canvas but I tell myself that I will visit museums and galleries and search for paintings designated gesso on linen.
• • •
I walk for hours, dodging a splotch of dogshit now and then.
• • •
Emma and I, lovers upon a time. My smartphone remains at my hip because she is out there somewhere, in the digital wilderness, and the ringtone, rarely heard, is her implied voice, an instant away.
• • •
I eat sliced bread because I can make it last longer by refrigerating it, which doesn’t work with Greek or Italian or French bread. I eat thick crusty bread in restaurants, dining mostly alone by choice.
All of this matters even if it’s not supposed to matter. The bread we eat. It makes me wonder who my forebears were, but only briefly.
• • •
I know I’m supposed to resume the smoking habit. Everything that has happened drives me in that direction, theoretically. But I don’t feel reduced by my abstinence, as I did in the past. The craving is gone and maybe this is what reduces me.
• • •
There is an elegant lamp hanging from the ceiling in the guest room of the townhouse and I turn it on and turn it off and every time I do this, inescapably, I find myself thinking of the term pendant light.
• • •
On the street, going nowhere special, I check my wallet and keys, I check the zipper on my pants to make sure that it’s fastened securely from beltline to crotch or vice versa.
• • •
The relief is not commensurate with the fear. It lasts a limited time. You worry for days and then months and finally the son arrives and he is safe and you forget how you could not concentrate on another subject or situation or circumstance in all that time because now he’s here, so let’s eat dinner. Except that he’s not here, is he? He’s somewhere near a road sign reading Konstantinovka, in Ukraine, his place of birth and death.
• • •
Languages, sirens all the time, beggar in a bundled mass, man or woman, awake or asleep, alive or dead, hard to tell even when I approach and drop a dollar in the dented plastic cup.
Two blocks farther on I tell myself that I should have said something, determined something, and then I change the subject before it gets too complicated.
• • •
I sit in my cubicle in the administrative offices at the college and cross things off lists. I don’t erase the items, I click the strikethrough check box and run a line through each item on the screen that needs to be eliminated. Lines and items. Over time the lines through the items mark my progress in a readily visible way. The instant of the strikethrough is the best part, with childlike appeal.
• • •
I think of the few moments we spent looking at ourselves in the mirror, Emma and I, and it was first person plural, a blended set of images. And then my sad damning failure to tell her who I was, to narrate the histories of Madeline and Ross, and Ross and Artis, and the still-life future of father and stepmother in cryonic suspension.
I waited too long.
I’d wanted her to see me in an isolated setting, outside the forces that made me.
• • •
Then I recall the taxi driver kneeling in the gutter slime, turned toward Mecca, and I try to reconcile the firm placement of his world into the scatterlife of this one.
• • •
Sometimes I think of the room, the scant roomscape, wall, floor, door, bed, a monosyllabic image, all but abstract, and I try to see myself sitting in the chair and that’s all there is, highly detailed, this thing and that thing and the man in the chair, waiting for his escort to knock on the door.
• • •
The restoration, the scaffolding, the building facade hidden behind great white sweeps of protective sheathing. The bearded man who stands beneath the scaffold shouting at everyone who walks past and it’s not words or phrases we hear but sheer sound, part of the noise of taxis, trucks and buses except that it issues from a human.
• • •
I think of Artis in the capsule and try to imagine, against my firm belief, that she is able to experience a minimal consciousness. I think of her in a state of virgin solitude. No stimulus, no human activity to incite response, barest trace of memory. Then I try to imagine an inner monologue, hers, self-generated, possibly nonstop, the open prose of a third-person voice that is also her voice, a form of chant in a single low tone.
• • •
On public elevators I direct a blind gaze precisely nowhere, knowing that I’m in a sealed box alone with others and that none of us is willing to offer a face open to inspection.
• • •
I’m standing at a bus stop when Emma calls. She tells me what happened to Stak, using the least number of words. She tells me that she has quit her job at the school and given up her apartment here and will stay with the boy’s father and I can’t remember whether they were divorced or separated, not that it matters. The bus comes and goes and we talk a while longer, quietly, in the manner of near strangers, and then we assure each other that we’ll talk again.
I don’t tell her that I saw it happen.
- 10 -
This was a crosstown bus, west to east, a man and woman seated near the driver, a woman and boy at the rear of the bus. I found my place, midway, looking nowhere in particular, mind blank or nearly so, until I began to notice a glow, a tide of light.
Seconds later the streets were charged with the day’s dying light and the bus seemed the carrier of this radiant moment. I looked at the shimmer on the back of my hands. I looked and then listened, startled by a human wail, and I swerved from my position to see the boy on his feet, facing the rear window. We were in midtown, with a clear view west, and he was pointing and wailing at the flaring sun, which was balanced with uncanny precision between rows of high-rise buildings. It was a striking thing to see, in our urban huddle, the power of it, the great round ruddy mass, and I knew that there was a natural phenomenon, here in Manhattan, once or twice a year, in which the sun’s rays align with the local street grid.
I didn’t know what this event was called but I was seeing it now and so was the boy, whose urgent cries were suited to the occasion, and the boy himself, thick-bodied, an oversized head, swallowed up in the vision.
Then there is Ross, once again, in his office, the lurking image of my father telling me that everybody wants to own the end of the world.
Is this what the boy was seeing? I left my seat and went to stand nearby. His hands were curled at his chest, half fists, soft and trembling. His mother sat quietly, watching with him. The boy bounced slightly in accord with the cries and they were unceasing and also exhilarating, they were prelinguistic grunts. I hated to think that he was impaired in some way, macrocephalic, mentally deficient, but these howls of awe were far more suitable than words.
The full solar disk, bleeding into the streets, lighting up the towers to either side of us, and I told myself that the boy was not seeing the sky collapse upon us but was finding the purest astonishment in the intimate touch of earth and sun.
I went back to my seat and faced forward. I didn’t need heaven’s light. I had the boy’s cries of wonder.
About the Author
© Joyce Ra
vid
Don DeLillo is the author of fifteen previous novels, one story collection and three stage plays. His novels include White Noise, Libra, Underworld and Falling Man, and he has won many honors in this country and abroad, most recently the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
MEET THE AUTHORS, WATCH VIDEOS AND MORE AT
SimonandSchuster.com
Authors.SimonandSchuster.com/Don-DeLillo
Also by Don DeLillo
NOVELS
Americana
End Zone
Great Jones Street
Ratner’s Star
Players
Running Dog
The Names
White Noise
Libra
Mao II
Underworld
The Body Artist
Cosmopolis
Falling Man
Point Omega
STORIES
The Angel Esmeralda
PLAYS
The Day Room
Valparaiso
Love-Lies-Bleeding
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
