Libra

by Don DeLillo

  “Just you make sure those circulars don’t get up and walk off in this direction. I don’t want them down here. He has his work, we have ours. It amounts to the same thing.”

  “Then you know about it.”

  “We’ll just see how it all works out.”

  “Well what do you know about him?”

  “Not a hell of a lot, personally. He’s working mainly with Ferrie. Ferrie recommended him. He’s a David Ferrie project:”

  “I wonder what that means,” Delphine said.

  Banister smiled and got up. He put his cigarette in the ashtray on the desk. Then he stood behind Delphine’s chair and massaged her shoulders and neck. On the desk was a recent issue of On Target, the newsletter of the Minutemen. A line in italics caught his eye. Even now the crosshairs are centered on the back of your neck. Something in the air. There were forces in the air that men sense at the same point in history. You can feel it on your skin, in the tips of your fingers.

  “What about the fellow who called early this morning?” Delphine said. “He sounded far away in more ways than one.”

  “Did you wire him fifty dollars?”

  “Just like you said.”

  “One of Mackey’s people. New to me. I told him how to contact T-Jay.”

  She put her hand to her hair, looking toward the smoked-glass panel on the office door.

  “Do I get to see my G-man later tonight?”

  He reached across her shoulder for his cigarette.

  “I want you to start a file,” he told her, “before you leave the office. Fair Play for Cuba. Give it a nice pink cover.”

  “What do I put in the file?”

  “Once you start a file, Delphine, it’s just a matter of time before the material comes pouring in. Notes, lists, photos, rumors. Every bit and piece and whisper in the world that doesn’t have a life until someone comes along to collect it. It’s all been waiting just for you.”

  Wayne Elko, an out-of-work pool cleaner, sat on a long bench in the waiting room at Union Station this chilly A.M. in Denver.

  It occurred to Wayne that for some time now he was always arriving or departing. He was never anywhere you could actually call a place. He wasn’t here and wasn’t there. It was like a problem in philosophy.

  Next to him on the bench was his khaki knapsack and an over-the-hill shopping bag from some A&P on the Coast. His life in material things he carried in these two weary pokes.

  He was a long-chance man. This was a term from the real frontier a hundred years ago. For twenty dollars he’d roll your odometer back twenty thousand miles. Took about fifteen minutes. For a hundred dollars he’d set a charge of plastique and blow the car into car heaven if your insurance needs were such. Except he’d probably do it free. Just for the science involved.

  Early light collected at the tall arched windows. The benches were thirty feet long, with high backs, curved backs, nicely polished. Giant chandeliers hung above him. The waiting room was empty except for two or three station familiars, the two or three shadowy men he saw at every stop, living in the walls like lizards. The silence, the arched windows, the wooden benches and chandeliers made him think of church, a church you travel to on trains, coming out of the noise and steam to this high empty place where you could think your quietest thoughts.

  He was asleep ten minutes on the bench when a cop bounced his nightstick off Wayne’s raised knee. It made a sound like he was built of hollow wood. Welcome to the Rockies.

  He got up, took his things, crossed the street and went immediately to sleep on the concrete loading-platform of a warehouse. This time it was trucks that got him up. He wandered an area of refrigerated warehouses with old dual-gauge tracks intersecting on the cobbled streets. At Twentieth and Blake he saw a man swabbing a garbage truck. They had a hundred wrecked cars behind barbed wire and a thousand specks of broken glass every square foot. It was the broken-glass district of Denver. At Twentieth and Larimer he saw some men with a stagger in their gait. Early-rising winos out for a stroll. Baptist Mission. Money to Loan. A guy with a Crazy Guggenheim hat came pitching down the street; might be Indian, Mexican, mix-blood or who knows what, muttering curses in some invented tongue. Made Wayne think of the faces in the Everglades and on No Name Key during his training with the Interpen brigade. All those guys who’d fought for Castro and then crossed over. Dark rage in every face. Fidel betrays the revolution.

  He’d lived with a shifting population of rogue commandos in a boardinghouse on Southwest Fourth Street in Miami. They spent weeks at a time training in the mangrove swamps and went on forays along the Cuban coast in a thirty-five-foot launch, mainly to land agents and shoot at silhouettes. Otherwise they stayed close to the clapboard house, cleaning submachine guns in the backyard. Judo instructors, tugboat captains, homeless Cubans, ex-paratroopers like Wayne, mercenaries from wars nobody heard of, in West Africa or Malay. They were like guys straight out of Wayne’s favorite movie, Seven Samurai, warriors without masters, willing to band together to save a village from marauders, to win back a country, only to see themselves betrayed in the end. First it was Navy jets making reconnaissance runs over No Name Key, snapping little pix of the muddy boys. Next it was five Interpen commandos picked up for vagrancy, courtesy of the Dade County sheriff. Then U.S. customs officers pounced, arresting a dozen men, including Wayne Elko in battle gear and a lampblacked face, just as they were setting out for Cuba in the twin-engine launch.

  JFK had made his deal with the Soviets to leave Castro alone. Incredible. The same man Wayne would have voted for if he’d gotten around to registering. He believed in country, loyalty, mountains and streams. They were all tied together.

  He found a telephone and made a collect call to the New Orleans number T. J. Mackey had given him about a year earlier. He told the woman at the other end he wished to speak to a Mr. Guy Banister.

  “This is Wayne Elko calling. It seems like I have washed up in Denver, Colorado, tell T-Jay, and I am looking for a chance at some employment.”

  Win Everett was in his basement at home, hunched over the worktable. His tools and materials were set before him, mainly household things, small and cheap—cutting instruments, acetate overlays, glues and pastes, a soft eraser, a travel iron.

  He felt marvelously alert, sure of himself, putting together a man with scissors and tape.

  His gunman would emerge and vanish in a maze of false names. Investigators would find an application for a post-office box; a certificate of service, U.S. Marine Corps; a Social Security card; a passport application; a driver’s license; a stolen credit card and half a dozen other documents—in two or three different names, each leading to a trail that would end at the Cuban Intelligence Directorate.

  He worked on a Diners Club card, removing the ink on the raised letters with a Q-tip doused in polyester resin. A radio on a shelf played soothing music. He pressed the card against the warm iron, heating it slowly to flatten the letters. Then he used a razor blade to level the remaining bumps and juts. He would eventually reheat the card and stamp a new name and number on its face with an addressograph plate.

  He’d picked up a certain amount of sleazy tradecraft in his early years as an operations officer. Before that he’d taught in a series of small liberal-arts colleges in the Midwest, places like Franklin, in Indiana, where a perceptive colleague, affiliated somehow or other with CIA, recruited him for covert training. The idea seemed immediately right, a possible answer to the restlessness he’d felt working through his system, a sense that he needed to risk. something important, challenge his moral complacencies, before he could see himself complete. Soon he was taking handy instruction in Flaps & Seals, or how to read other people’s mail without letting them know about it, and remembering now and then those sleepy afternoons at little Franklin College. After some years in Havana and Central America, including duty as chief of station in Guatemala City, he was one of several men assigned to coordinate the training of a Cuban exile brigade. He was in a constant hurry aft
er that. Underwater demolition in Puerto Rico and North Carolina, paratroop maneuvers outside Phoenix, teams to organize in Nicaragua, Miami, Key West.

  He felt sharp now, better than he’d felt in some time, on top of things, alert.

  The young man’s address book would be next. A major project. Once he had a handwriting sample, Win would scratch onto those miniature pages enough trails, false trails, swarming life,. lingering mystery, enough real and fabricated people to occupy investigators for months to come.

  He unscrewed the top of the Elmer’s Glue-All. He used his X-Acto knife to cut a new signature strip from a sheet of opaque paper. He checked the length and width of the strip against the bare space on the back of the credit card. Then he dribbled an even stream of glue over the paper and pressed it lightly on the card. He listened to the radio while the glue dried.

  He was in a constant hurry then. Fort Gulick in the Canal Zone. Trax Base in Guatemala. Things were quieter now. He had time to turn the pages of all the books he’d been meaning to read.

  After the address book came the false names. He looked forward to coming up with names. He removed excess glue from the back of the card with one of Suzanne’s school erasers. Then he turned off the radio, turned off the light, climbed the old plank stairs.

  His gunman would appear behind a strip of scenic gauze. You have to leave them with coincidence, lingering mystery. This is what makes it real.

  He checked the front door. The days came and went. Bedtime again. Always bedtime now. He went around turning off lights, checked the back door, checked to see that the oven was off. This meant all was well.

  Someday this operation would be studied at the highest levels of intelligence in Langley and the Pentagon.

  He turned off the kitchen light. He began to climb the stairs, felt compelled to double-check the oven, although he was certain it was off. Astonish them. Create coincidence so bizarre they have to believe it. Create a loneliness that beats with violent desire. This kind of man. An arrest, a false name, a stolen credit card. Stalking a victim can be a way of organizing one’s loneliness, making a network out of it, a fabric of connections. Desperate men give their solitude a purpose and a destiny.

  The oven was off. He made an effort to register this fact. Then he went upstairs, hearing soft music on the bedroom radio.

  This kind of man. A self-watcher, a man who lives in random space. If the world is where we hide from ourselves, what do we do when the world is no longer accessible? We invent a false name, invent a destiny, purchase a firearm through the mail.

  Lancer is going to Honolulu.

  At one level he operated well. He felt alert, marvelously sharp, very much on top of things. The address book was next. We want a spectacular miss.

  A voice on KDNT said that an eight-nation committee of the Organization of American States has charged Cuba with promoting Marxist subversion in our hemisphere. The island is a training center for agents. The government has begun a new phase of encouraging violence and unrest in Latin America.

  He didn’t need these reminders. He didn’t need announcers telling him what Cuba had become. This was a silent struggle. He carried a silent rage and determination. He didn’t want company. The more people who believed as he did, the less pure his anger. The country was noisy with fools who demeaned his anger.

  He put on his pajamas. He seemed to be in pajamas all the time now. The day wasn’t half done and it was time to go to bed again. Mary Frances was asleep. He switched off the radio, switched off the lamp. He spoke inwardly to whatever force was out there, whatever power ruled the sky, the endless hydrogen spirals, the region of all night, all souls. He said simply, Please let me sleep but not dream.

  Dreams sent terrors you could not explain.

  In Moscow

  He opened his eyes to the large room. There were high walls, old plush chairs, a heavy rug with a stale odor hanging close. He got out of bed and walked to the window. Hurrying people, long lines for buses. He washed and shaved. He put on a white shirt, gray flannel trousers, the dark narrow tie, the tan cashmere sweater, and stood in his bare feet at the window once more. Muscovites, he thought. After a while he put on his socks and good shoes and the flannel suit coat. He looked in the gilt mirror. Then he sat in one of the old chairs in the lace-curtained room and crossed one leg carefully over the other. He was a man in history now.

  Later he would print in his Historic Diary a summary of these days and of the weeks and months to follow. The lines, mainly in block letters, wander and slant across the page. The page is crowded with words, top to bottom, out to either edge, crossed-out words, smudged words, words that run together, attempted corrections and additions, lapses into script, a sense of breathlessness, with odd calm fragments.

  He told his Intourist guide, a young woman named Rimma, that he wanted to apply for Soviet citizenship.

  She is flabbergassed, but aggrees to help. Asks me about myself and my reasons for doing this. I explaine I am a communist, ect. She is politly sym. but uneasy now. She tries to be a friend to me. She feels sorry for me I am someth. new.

  On his twentieth birthday, two days after his arrival, Rimma gave him a Dostoevsky novel, in Russian, and she wrote on a blank page: “Great congratulations! Let all your dreams come true!”

  Things happened fast after that. He had no time to work out meanings, fall back on old attitudes and positions. The secret he’d carried through the Marine Corps for over a year, his plan to defect, was the most powerful knowledge in his life up to this point. Now, in the office of some bald-head official, he tried to explain what it meant to him to live in the Soviet Union, at the center of world struggle.

  The man looked past Oswald to the closed door of his office.

  “USSR is only great in literature,” he said. “Go home, my friend, and take our good wishes with you.”

  He wasn’t kidding either.

  I am stunned I reiterate, he says he shall check and let me know.

  They let him know the same day. The visa of Lee H. Oswald would expire at 8:00 P.M. He had two hours to leave the country. The police official who called with this news did not seem to know Oswald had talked to a passport official earlier in the day. Lee tried to explain that the first official had not given a deadline, had held out hope that his visa might be extended. He could not recall the man’s name or the department he belonged to in the Ministry of Internal Affairs. He began to describe the man’s office, his clothing. He felt a rush of desperation. The second official didn’t know what he was talking about.

  It was this blankness that caused his terror. No one could distinguish him from anyone else. There was some trick he hadn’t mastered which might easily set things right. Other people knew what it was; he did not. Other people got along; he could not. He’d come so far on his own. Le Havre, Southampton, London, Helsinki—then by train across the Soviet border. He’d made plans, he’d engineered a new life, and now no one would take ten minutes to understand who he was. A zero in the system. He sat near the window looking at the open suitcase on the rack across the room, some of his things still unpacked.

  I am shocked!! My dreams!

  He was a foreigner here. There was no profit in discontent. He could not apply his bitterness. It was American-made and had no local standing. For the first time he realized what a dangerous thing he’d done, leaving his country. He struggled against this awareness. He hated knowing something he didn’t want to know. He opened the door and looked into the hallway. The woman who handed out room keys sat at a small desk near the elevator. She turned to look at him. He went back inside.

  7:00 P.M. I decide to end it. Soak rist in cold water to numb the pain.

  He stood at the sink, left shirtsleeve rolled up. He stopped freezing his wrist long enough to prop a clean blade against the razor case. Warm water was running in the tub.

  Hidell prepares to make his maker, ha ha.

  Was there something funny about this? He didn’t think so. They were always trying to g
et him to leave places he didn’t want to leave. The cold water would numb the pain. That was step one. The warm water would make the blood flow easily. That was two. He would barely have to nick the skin. Gillette sponsors the World Series on TV—they use a talking parrot. He loosened his tie with his free hand.

  My fondes dreams are shattered

  He imagined Rimma coming at eight o’clock to find him dead. Hurried calls to officials at their homes. He watched the tub fill. Any reason why it had to be filled? He wasn’t getting in, was he? Only plunging the cut wrist. Soviet officials call American officials. Always being the outsider, always having to adjust. He turned off the cold water, picked up the razor blade and sat on the floor next to the tub.

  Then slash my left wrist.

  But why was it funny? Why was he watching himself do it without a moan or cry? The first line of blood came seeping out, droplets running down in sequence from the careful slit. He wasn’t here to escape personal pressures. He wasn’t a guy with a problem marriage. He had solid convictions, practical experience in the world. He flopped his left arm over the rim of the tub.

  somewhere, a violin plays, as I watch my life whirl away.

  How do they measure cuts here, in centimeters? Hurried calls to Texas. It’s me, Mother, lying in a pool of blood in the Hotel Berlin. He looked at the water going cloudy pink. I taught myself Berlitz. My Russian is still bad but I will work on it harder. I won’t answer questions about my family but I will say this for publication. Emigration isn’t easy. I don’t recommend it to everyone. It means coming to a new country, always being the outsider, always having to adjust. I am not the total idealist. I have had a chance to watch the American military in action. If you’ve ever seen the naval base at Subic Bay, you know what I mean. Machines of war across the whole horizon. Foreign peoples exploited for profit. He closed his eyes after a while, rested his head on the rim of the tub. Go limp. Let them do what they want.