by Don DeLillo
“Your friends already envy you.”
“I’ll be unbearably sad at the train station. Our good friends standing on the platform. No one will believe I’m actually going. My uncle and aunt will be so unhappy. ‘Marinochka, it’s like a trip into space.’ I can’t bear to think about it.”
“They’ll weep with envy, I bet.”
“I want them to throw flowers when our train pulls out. White narcissus petals floating down. The air must be full of flowers.”
She imagined ahead. The train station, the border, the ship. But that was as far as she could go. There was nothing collecting in her mind that looked like a picture of a home.
Her husband sat at the kitchen table, writing.
He wrote “The Kollective,” a painstaking essay of more than forty handwritten pages on life in Russia, life in Minsk, the hardfisted discipline of the radio plant. He compiled statistics and asked Marina a hundred questions about food prices, customs, etc. He wanted to examine the subject of control, the Communist Party’s domination of every aspect of Soviet life.
He wrote “The New Era,” a brief account of the destruction of the Stalin monument in Minsk.
He made notes for an essay on “the murder of history”—the terrible march of Soviet communism. Deportations, mass exterminations, the prostitution of art and culture, “the purposeful curtailment of diet in the consumer slighted population of Russia.”
Marina cried, leaving Minsk. A man at the train station stood watching, half hidden in the crowd. She saw him briefly through the window. Was it her former boyfriend Anatoly, with the unruly blond hair, who’d once proposed to her, whose kisses made her reel, or was it the KGB?
When their train approached the Polish border, Lee took his diary pages, his essay pages, all his notes, and began stuffing them in his pants and shirt. He had pages nestled ridiculously in his crotch. Two Soviet customs men came aboard and Marina drew their attention to the baby. The agents gave their luggage a quick look and wished them good fortune.
Aboard the SS Maasdam he kept on writing. Rotterdam to New York. He wrote speeches he might one day deliver as a man who’d lived for extended periods under the capitalist and communist systems.
He wrote a forward to “The Kollective.”
He wrote a sketch titled “About the Author.” The author is the son of an insurance man whose early death “left a far mean streak of indepence brought on by negleck.”
The women on the ship were American and European, up-to-date, carefully tailored. Marina seemed a girl in their company, small, shabby-looking, lugging a baby swaddled Russian-style in bands of linen. She sat in their third-class stateroom. Except for mealtimes she was almost always there.
“Should I learn English now?” she said.
Early morning, June 13—June, his daughter’s name—he stood on deck and watched the south rim of Manhattan appear at the edge of the sea, an arc of broad buildings crowded in the mist. He was seeing what Leon Trotsky saw near the end of his second foreign exile, 1917, the skyline of the New World. All the time he was in Russia he’d barely thought of Trotsky. But now he could feel the man’s spirit. Trotsky was the seeker of asylum. Thrown out of Europe. Hounded by secret police. Crossing the ocean to Wall Street on a rusty Spanish steamer.
Lee was worried that the police would be waiting for him on the Hoboken docks. Here comes the defector with his beggar wife and beggar child. He had answers ready for them, two sets of answers he’d drafted and memorized in the ship’s library. If he sensed he could get by as an innocent traveler, those were the answers he’d give, friendly and nonpolitical. But if the authorities were hostile, if they tried to put him on the defensive, if they had information about his activities in Moscow, he was prepared to be defiant and scornful. He would make an issue of his right to certain beliefs. Stand up to them, mock them, look right in their squeezed policemen’s eyes and tell them who you are.
A tugboat moved through the harbor dawn, and bridges emerged, piers, highway lights along the Hudson.
If they could only make it to Texas, things would be all right.
PART TWO
Somebody will have to piece me together....
JACK RUBY
Testimony
15 July
The woman knew some ways to disappear. You could be alone in a room with her and forget she was there. She fell into stillness, faded into things around her. T-Jay liked to imagine this was a skill she’d been refining for years.
He stood at the window eating grapes from a paper bag torn open down the side. Norfolk was a foreign city. It was where trainees from the Farm came to practice the dark arts. Break-ins, dead drops, surveillance exercises, audio penetrations. Newport News and Richmond were also designated foreign. Baltimore was foreign off and on. But T-Jay wasn’t here to supervise a break-in and grade the fellows on technique.
She sat on the bed dealing two hands of five-card draw and playing both hands. She was Formosan, she said, and looked young enough to be a war orphan in a public service ad. This was his third visit to the narrow room. She wore a T-shirt stenciled USS Dickson, which he hadn’t noticed her putting on. Her nakedness was un-striking, so natural it seemed involuntary. He could easily believe she lived that way.
He watched her crash a magazine against the wall, trying to bat a horsefly. Seconds later he forgot her again.
The thing that hovers over every secret is betrayal. Sooner or later someone reaches the point where he wants to tell what he knows. Mackey didn’t trust Parmenter. There were a thousand career officers like Parmenter. Their strongest conviction is lunch. He didn’t trust Frank Vásquez. Frank had spied on fellow exiles at Mackey’s direction in the months before the invasion. Frank was hard to figure. He had the heart of a chivato, a bleating little goat-face spy, but he was also quietly determined once he had an object in mind. Mackey didn’t trust David Ferrie. Ferrie knew that weapons for the operation were being supplied by Guy Banister. He probably also knew that Banister had offered to channel cash from the New Orleans rackets to maintain the team of shooters. The larger the secret, the less safe it was with someone like Ferrie. There were others who would have to be recruited. Eventually one of them would reach the point. He knew how they thought, these men who float through plots devised by others. They want to give themselves away, in whispers, to someone standing in the shadows.
He drew a chair up to the bed and played one of the poker hands. Why did he have the feeling he was spoiling her fun? She had short chopped hair and narrow hips and a casual, almost dismissive manner, a kind of body slang that T-Jay took to be her free adaptation of the local style. She walked like a girl shooting a cart down a supermarket aisle.
“I ought to teach you gin rummy. It’s a better game for two to play.”
“Why, you coming back?”
“I might.”
“You might not.”
“I might not.”
“So why do I learn?” she said.
He liked the idea that whores were profound. He was respectful of whores. They were quick in their perceptions—it was a quick business—and he sometimes had the feeling they could tell him things about himself that he’d missed completely. They had access to the starker facts. This made him wary and respectful.
She took his right hand and placed it against hers, palms touching. He didn’t get the point at first. Then he realized she was comparing the size of their hands. The difference made her laugh.
“What’s funny?”
She told him his hand was funny.
“Why mine? Why not yours?” he said. “If the difference is great, maybe you’re the funny one, not me.”
“You’re the funny one,” Lu Wan said.
She matched left hands now and fell sideways to the bed laughing. Maybe she thought they were two different species. One of them was exotic and it wasn’t her.
The beer was warm now. He shook the bottle and looked at her.
“Stores close,” she said.
It was Everett who’d made the leap. Everett took the once-bold idea of assassinating Castro and turned it over in his mind, finding it unworkable and crude. He struck a countermeasure that made better sense on every level. It was original, spare and clean. The man we really want is JFK. Mackey gave him every credit. Everett was a complex and passionate man who could think economically. All over Langley and Miami they were still formulating plans to hit Fidel. It was an industry like wood pulp or shoes. Everett had seen the logic in staying home. The idea had power and second sight. Of course Everett did not plan to shoot Kennedy in the strict sense. Only to lay down fire in the street. He wanted a surgical miss.
The second leap was Mackey’s. He made it after hearing Everett’s plan, driving alone toward the Louisiana border, his sunglasses on the dash in the softfall of evening light, two years to the day after Pigs. They had to take it one more step. Everett’s obsession was scattered in technique. The plan grew too twisty and deep. Everett wanted mazes that extended to infinity. The plan was anxious, self-absorbed. It lacked the full heat of feeling. They had to take it all the way. It was a revelation to him that in the moment he saw what had to be done, feeling the crash of air on the hood of the car, he felt the oddest goddamn sympathy for President Jack.
There was fruit juice in the refrigerator. He drank some and handed her the bottle. She wiped her mouth with her hand, then drank and wiped her mouth again. A ship’s horn sounded on the river. He took the bottle and put it down and she slipped out of the T-shirt. He put a knee to the edge of the bed, watching her pass imperceptibly into a second skin. All trace of personality was gone. He’d never known a woman who phased so completely into her body. She had a body that could reshape itself, roll itself into a straw ball, make sex a little mystery of sun-glint and shadow. He had a hand on the bedpost. They were screwing on top of a magazine and the pages stuck to her, rattling hard.
In stages, through a marriage, a career of sorts as a roving paramilitary, a fall from official grace, he had become a man with no fixed address. To a certain way of thinking, this was the stuff of paramount despair. He was getting on to forty, loose in the world, nothing to show for the time and risk. Yet here he was, starting up his car for the long drive south and feeling a curious edge of contentment, feeling charged with advantage. He had Jack Kennedy’s picture stuck in his mind and nobody even knew he was out here, a man they used to pay to teach other men the fundamentals of deadly force.
Win Everett was in his daughter’s room listening to her read from a book of stories with pop-up figures. Mary Frances left these story sessions to him. She was impatient with Suzanne’s actressy moods and thought the child ought to be learning to read, not deliver lines. Win followed every word. His face changed as the girl’s did, shifting through emotions and roles.
It was uncanny how these tales affected him, gave him a sense of what it was like to be a child again. He found he could lose himself in the sound of her voice. He searched her face, believing he could see what she saw, line by line, in the grave and fateful progress of a tale. His eyes went bright. He felt a joy so strong it might be measured in the language of angelic orders, of powers and dominations. They were alone in a room that was itself alone, a room that hung above the world.
Later he sat downstairs turning the pages of a magazine. He knew he’d become remote from the cutting edge of the operation. He used Parmenter to talk to Mackey. They both used Mackey to find out what was going on at 544 Camp Street. He was wary of Oswald. He only wanted to know selective things. He was putting too much distance between himself and the others. Did he expect his themes to develop in the field through otherworldly means? He was making the same mistakes the Senior Study Effort had made before the Cuban invasion. He didn’t know if he could pull himself out. He half wanted to lose control. He wanted a way out of fear and premonition.
Plots carry their own logic. There is a tendency of plots to move toward death. He believed that the idea of death is woven into the nature of every plot. A narrative plot no less than a conspiracy of armed men. The tighter the plot of a story, the more likely it will come to death. A plot in fiction, he believed, is the way we localize the force of the death outside the book, play it off, contain it. The ancients staged mock battles to parallel the tempests in nature and reduce their fear of gods who warred across the sky. He worried about the deathward logic of his plot. He’d already made it clear that he wanted the shooters to hit a Secret Service man, wound him superficially. But it wasn’t a misdirected round, an accidental killing, that made him afraid. There was something more insidious. He had a foreboding that the plot would move to a limit, develop a logical end.
Lancer is going to Miami.
Mary Frances moved past the doorway. Then she ran water in the kitchen. He heard her looking for something on the back stairway. He heard the kitchen radio. He waited for her to pass by the porch window with the watering can. It was an old metal can, gray and dented, and he waited to hear her walk across the porch. He listened carefully. She was still in the kitchen. That was all right. As long as he knew where she was. She had to be close and he had to know where she was. Those were the two inner rules.
He heard an old familiar voice on the kitchen radio, some voice from the old days of radio, couldn’t quite recall the man’s name, but famous and familiar, with laughter in the background, and he sat very still as if to draw out the moment, struck by the complex emotion carried on a voice from another era, tender and shattering, a three-line joke that brings back everything.
He turned another page.
There was no date set for the President’s trip. But it is definitely going to happen, said Parmenter. He wants to go to Florida because the state voted Republican in 1960 and because the whole South is pissing blood over his civil-rights program. Cape Canaveral, Tampa, Miami. There’ll be a motorcade in Miami.
Mary Frances was in the doorway wearing rubber gloves, a scrub brush in her hand.
“Something odd lately? I don’t know.”
“What?” he said.
“Suzanne? Although it’s probably nothing.”
“It’s not like you.”
“Worry over nothing.”
“She’s all right. She’s fine. She’s a healthy child.”
“With a morbid streak.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t know. Lately she seems.”
“What?”
“She’s always going off with Missy Tyler. They practically hide from me at times. I don’t know, it’s just, I think she’s so preoccupied lately, so inner, and I wonder if there’s something unhealthy there.”
“Missy’s the skinny little redhead.”
“Adopted. They hide in corners and whisper solemnly. There’s a kind of mood that descends whenever Missy’s here. Very sort of haunted-house. Awestruck. Something walks the halls. I get the feeling it’s me. I’m a very suspicious presence in this house. The girls hush up when they hear me coming.”
“They have their own world. She’s dreamy,” he said.
“She listens to a Dallas disc jockey named the Weird Beard.”
“What does he play?”
“It’s not what he plays. He plays top forty. It’s what he says between records.”
“Example.”
“Impossible to duplicate. He just like, here I am, on and on. It’s a completely other language. But she is fixed to the radio.”
“Inka dinka dink.”
“I know. It’s not like me. Most of my worrying makes sense.”
“She read to me for forty minutes nonstop and it was remarkable, remarkable.”
“ ‘Please, Daddy, I want to read some more.’ ”
“Are you handling plutonium with those gloves?”
“ ‘Daddy, Daddy, please.’ ”
He went upstairs, moving slowly in his light and silent way. Miami has an impact, a resonance. City of exiles, unhealed wounds. The President wants a motorcade because the polls show he is losing popularity by t
he minute. Appear among the multitudes in his long blue Lincoln, men on motorcycles to trim the crowds, men in sunglasses dangling from the sides of the follow-up car. Lancer stands to wave. It is necessary to wing a bystander or Secret Service man in order to validate our credentials. This is how we show them it is real. Plots. The ancients shared in nature by echoing the violence of a windstorm or thunder squall. To share in nature is the oldest human trick. A thought for bedtime.
The watering can was gritty metal with an ugly snub spout.
He found Suzanne awake when he looked inside. There was a cloth-and-vinyl toy at the end of the bed, a football player they’d named Willie Wonder, with padded shoulders and polished chino pants. Win turned the key at Willie’s back and sent him on a broken-field run the length of the bed. He broadcast the run in an urgent voice, described missed tackles and downfield blocks, added the roar of the crowd, became the official who signaled touchdown when the toy spun backwards into a pillow. Suzanne showed a pleasure that seemed to start at her feet and creep up her body and into her eyes, making them large and bright.
If he could only keep surprising her, she would have a reason to love him forever.
Mackey drove across a drawbridge over the Miami River. The tires wailed on the iron grid. A white sloop moved upriver in the dark, a little mystery of grace and stealth. Two blocks south of the bridge he saw the first Volveremos bumper sticker. Empty streets. His hands sticking to the wheel.
He parked on a sidestreet and walked around the comer to a vast car lot. It took him ten minutes to find Wayne Elko stupidly sprawled in the back seat of a red Impala. The top was down and Wayne was gazing into the night.
“How did I get in here so easy?”
“T-Jay.”
“You’re the watchman, I hear.”
“Where’d you come from?”
“I drove nearly a thousand miles just to see you, Wayne.”
“I about gave you up.”
Mackey leaned against the car and looked off toward the street as if the sight of the bedraggled Wayne Elko, in bare feet, with clothes and other possessions strewn about, was a little too bleak to take in right now.
