They made arrangements. Lyle stepped out of the booth and headed down Lexington. It was late. A car turned toward him as he moved off the curb. The driver braked, a man in his thirties, sitting forward a bit, head tilted toward Lyle, inquisitively, one hand between his thighs, bunching up fabric and everything beneath it. Clearly a presentation was being made. Lyle, who was standing directly under a streetlight, averted his eyes, looking out over the top of the car as if at some compelling sight in a third-story window across the street, until finally the man drove off.
8
Pammy stepped onto the deck. Ethan was still trying to clear his throat, standing at the rail with a mug of coffee. It was bright and warm, already past noon. Jack was at the other end, stacking firewood. Nasal cavities, sinus membranes. She went inside, poured a cup of coffee and returned to the deck, sitting on the rail, head back, her face on a nearly inclined plane.
"But don't you love it?" Jack said. "Every morning it goes on. The exact same thing. As though nobody else was around. Gagging, hawking, the retcher, Mr. Retch. You think he'd do something.”
"Get quick relief. Breathe easily, freely.”
"Anything, for God, I mean it's, this thing I listen to every morning, every morning, nonstop.”
"I like to hawk," Ethan said. "It's one of the last great hallmarks of a sensuous human presence on the planet. I like to expel phlegm.”
"It's like the subway, two in the morning, you get the pukers.”
"No, no.”
"You get the dry heavers.”
"Hawking is to puking as haiku is to roller derby.”
"How can you be talking in the morning?" Pammy said. "Making these things, similarities, analogies, right after getting up, ratios, regardless of how stupid. I can barely open my mouth to drink.”
"I like to feel the mucus come unstuck.”
She went inside and toasted some bread. Later she walked all the way to Deer Isle village, followed for a quarter of a mile by two large dogs, and bought some postcards and groceries. She was accompanied part of the way back by a girl on a bike, who answered each of Pammy's questions with one or two words before veering onto a bumpy path that led to a pleasant old house. Pammy realized she was smiling at the house, as she'd smiled earlier at the girl and before that at the dogs. She resolved to stop using this cheerful idiot squint.
"Where's Ethan?”
"Stonington, shopping.”
"I just shopped.”
"He wanted fish things.”
"I didn't see him drive past. I guess I was in the market.”
"What do you want to do?”
"The meadow?" she said.
"There's nothing to do.”
They walked along the beach. Jack was barefoot, treading lightly among the rocks, enduring a certain amount of furtive pain, hunched slightly, hands out away from his sides. He was a bit shorter than Pam, the strength in his shoulders and legs easy to discern in the tank top and denim shorts he wore. She followed him around a large projecting rock, trying to judge the slickness of particular stones as she progressed by tentative leaps from one to another, the tide washing by. They walked another hundred yards to a set of wooden stairs that led up to a broad field, the grass waist-high in places. There was a sign: PRIVATE. It was a pastured square, woods on three sides, the bay to the west. Pammy lay back, undoing her shirt. At this hour sunlight reached nearly every part of the meadow.
"I'm no longer dejected.”
"Grass, it stings. It's not like movie grass.”
"We forgot the cheese, fruit, chicken, bread and two kinds of wine.”
"I used to think grass, a picnic," he said.
"I've been secretly dejected. Now it can be told. I wanted an aggressive suntan. I came here seeking just that. A deep bronze effect. Middle-aged ladies have them sometimes. Like your skin is so parched and bronzed it's almost verging on black. That baked-in look. Like you feel tremendously healthy and good but you resemble this creature, like who's this dug-up thing with the weird wrinkles. I wanted to do that once in my life but fool that I am I didn't realize this would not be the place. So I'm going to relax and get over my dejection and just get what's available, a faint pink tinge.”
"Good luck.”
"Get into the grass.”
"It has things.”
"Come on, Laws, sink in, be one, merge.”
"Be one with the grass.”
"The earth, the ground.”
"Earth, creature, touch.”
"Blend," she said.
"Air, trees.”
"Feel wind.”
"Birds, fly, look.”
"Wing, beak.”
"Sound they make, calling.”
"Up in sky.”
"Make sound, talk.”
"White gull, much air for wings to flap.”
"Make fly over broad waters to land of Mamu the bear.”
She sat up to take off her sneakers, then undid her jeans, pushed them off with underwear inside them and slid both away with her feet, a well-executed rejection, coming last out of the shirt, which she arranged beneath her before settling back again, arms at her sides. Jack stood up to undress. She liked seeing him against the sky, defined that way, clear and unencumbered, flesh tones a perfect compensation, a wry layered grade, for that extravagant blue. Trite, she thought. Muscled body against sky. Soft-core fascist image, Ethan would say. But what the hell, folks, it's fun to mythologize.
"Getting out of clothes.”
"Don't you love it?”
"What is it about getting out of clothes, just stepping out?”
"I know," she said.
She lifted one leg, trying to nick Jack's left testicle with her big toe. He covered up in mock horror, squealing. A light breeze.
They lay side by side, beginning to sweat a little, satisfy-ingly, as the day reached its warmest point. She raised up on one elbow, watching him. The grass was a problem, itching, digging in.
It was to be a serene event, easefully pleasant sex between friends. The low-grade tension that existed would be released, softly, in a mutual assuagement, a sweetening, clement beyond the edges of its strangeness, the seeming inconsistencies. The child in Jack was what she would seek, the starry innocent, drifting, rootless, given to visions. It was to be a sympathetic event.
She touched his belly with the back of her hand. Jack looked at her carefully, a testing of intentions, a question being put to both their souls, the armature, the supporting core, of their free discretion. He put his hand to her shoulder and moved it down the length of her arm until it met her own hand. He did not guide as much as accompany her.
It became for a time a set of game-playing moods. They scribbled on each other's body. They touched reverently. They investigated with the thoroughness of people trying to offset years of sensory and emotional deprivation. At last, they seemed to be saying, we are allowed to solve this mystery. This was part of the principle of childlikeness that she had sought to establish as their recognized level of perception. With slightly pious curiosity they handled and planed. It was the working-out of a common notion, the make-believe lover. They were deliberate, trying to match the tempo of their mental inventions, hands seeking a plastic consistency.
This interval would pass, these midafternoon abstractions, the mild loving by touch, the surface contact.
Jack sat leaning to one side, left arm giving support, left leg sprawled, the right flexed. Pammy knelt against his haunch, at the deep hollow formed by his hip and upcurved thigh, one hand in his lap, curled there, motionless, the other grazing his head, the back of Jack's head, the patch, the white sign of something, Jack's tribal secret, his meaning, what made him pristine. Posed almost classically on the grass, he kept his face turned from her. Strange, the unnatural whiteness, a pure grade of chalk, it seemed, ground down and mixed with water, the sort of transforming flaw that raises a thing (to be crude, she thought) in price. She rolled her thumb over the area, one inch square, feeling the hair spring back. It was well-trimmed here, of characteristic texture.
He got to his feet and stood over her, cock-proud Jack, bits of dirt and grass stuck to his lower body.
On his back, he put his thumbs to her nipples. His face was reddish and wet and he appeared to be in some middle state, he appeared to be wondering, he appeared to have forgotten something.
Behind him, on their sides, she reached forward and lifted his leg back over hers. There was a small collapse in format and she settled in under him, taking hold, trying to work in, to cancel all distinction between surfaces.
She straddled his chest again, knees inserted in his armpits. She forced his arms closer to his body and dug in, drove with her knees, off-balance, filling, working in, getting tighter, interlocking.
The aspect and character of these body parts, the names, the liquid friction. Dimly she sought phrases for these configurations.
Prone on her own shirt, she felt his hands pressing on her buttocks, redistributing bulk, spreading them to glide his cock along each side of the indentation. Her shirt somehow was the energizing object here. She forced her pelvis up, countering the pressure of his weight, and put her hand under the shirt, lowering her body onto it then, lightly, her left arm providing leverage, the right hand clutching the shirt, bringing a handful up into her crotch. Jack eased off as her legs closed around the shirt and she rolled on her side, knees tucked up, the shirt hanging out of the crease where her legs were joined.
This left and right. Leg, index finger, testicle and breast.
This crossing over. The recomposition of random parts into something self-made. For a time it seemed the essential factors were placement, weight and balance. The meaning of left and right. The transpositions.
Jack, crosslegged, watched. She rubbed the shirt between her thighs repeatedly, knees coming unlocked in the surgical pressure and friction. She opened out toward him, a shade manic, breathing as though in some crosscurrent of exhaustion and need, her eyes empty of intent.
It was no longer an event designed to surprise familiar pleasures. He would cross to her and she would reach out, blankly. They would thread onto each other, her hand at the back of his head. Who were they, stretched this way along each other's length, refitting, going tight, commencing again to function? Her swimmer's body arched against him. Ethan's Jack and Pam. From time to time, weightless, she was able to break through, to study her own involvement, nearly free from panic and the tampering management of her own sense of fitness, of what agrees to observe reason. This lasted but seconds. The rest was dark, a closing over of extraneous themes. She sought release in long tolling strokes. What she felt, the untellable ordeal of this pleasure, would evolve without intervention, a transporting sequence of falling behind and catching up to her own body, its pre-emptive course, its exalted violence of feeling, the replenishments that overwhelm the mortal work of the senses, drenching them in the mysteries of muscles and blood. This ending segment then was "factual," one-track, and she would close, slaked, in a fit of hiccups.
Jack sat in the grass, his eyes following a large bird, cormorant probably, arcing out over the bay, Pammy got dressed, watching Jack, wondering why she was so concerned about him. Did it mean what they'd done had less effect on her than it did on Jack? Did it mean she thought Jack might blab? Did it mean Jack was upset, Jack was already having regrets? Her body was sore nearly everywhere. The earth had hurt. The goddamn ground. She wondered if she'd become too complex to be concerned about someone without listing possible reasons.
"Where's my shoes?”
"You didn't have them.”
"I didn't have them, right.”
"I speak the truth.”
"No shoes," he said.
"Which explains your feet.”
"What, cut?”
"Bruised," she said.
He dressed and then started hopping on one foot while he examined the other. Pammy was on one knee, lacing the second sneaker. It seemed too much effort to get up.
"Which way back?”
"I don't know but we should get moving, I guess.”
"I guess," he said.
"We say what?”
"We were here, if he asks.”
"We took a walk.”
"We look, glaa, like a little messy.”
"There's a windjammer, look.”
"We took a walk to the meadow," he said.
"Can you see it, three masts? Don't worry. We took a walk. That's all.”
"Sure, like this.”
"So your shirt has a couple of wrinkles. No big deal, Jack.”
"Hiccup, hiccup.”
"Which way?”
"We went to the meadow and what? Looked at some boat for all this time?”
"It's not a problem, Jack.”
"Not for you, it's not.”
"Look, we skipped rocks for an hour and a half. We looted a graveyard. Who cares? He's not going to question us. We clubbed baby seals for their pelts.”
"Ethan is responsible for me. He is willing to be that. He accepts.”
"Jack, it's all right.”
"I'm in no mood to start things with Ethan right now. He accepts, whatever it is. My whole life. He is willing to be responsible.”
She realized she'd had that look on her face, briefly, gazing out at the windjammer, that dumb smile. They headed back through the woods, finding the right dirt road only after a period of some confusion, a brief disagreement over landmarks.
After the rain she sat with Ethan by the fire. At this angle, in his deep chair, he appeared to be asleep. She walked away from the light source and opened a side door just enough to thrust her face out into the night. The force of it, the snap of damp pine, was enough to startle her. Points of biolumines-cence were evident nearby, fireflies bouncing on the air, thimblefuls of abdominal light. She noted a faint odor of decomposition, bayside. When she slid the door shut her face grew warm immediately. Awareness washed away in layers and she went back to her chair. Ethan got up just long enough to poke a log apart: rekindling and hiss.
"There's something about your hair tonight. It's very black and shiny. A Japanese quality. The light, the way it hits.”
"To go with my German mouth.”
"It needs a topknot.”
"What's his name, the samurai?”
"You should try that, Ethan. A topknot. Back at the office.”
"I do sort of emit a certain feudal menace.”
He prolonged the word "feudal." Jack came in then. He took off his sweater and tossed it over the back of a chair. He sat on the flagstone hearth that extended about four feet into the room, his gaze directed between his feet. His voice was subdued, blending suggestions of fatalism and studied weariness. He paused often to take deep breaths.
"I saw it again. Out near the car. There's a gap in the trees. It was right there. I don't know, two hundred yards away. It was the same one. It was pulsing. Maybe not as bright this time. Greenish. The same green. I could see from near the car right out over the bay. Blue-green light. But solid behind it. An object. The light glowed and pulsed so it was hard to tell the shape the thing was. But it was solid. I knew it. I said it to myself standing there. I was carefuler this time. Color, shape, I kept my mind on it. I said don't move, keep it in sight. I never moved my head. I don't remember even blinking. Then it dipped a little and glided up and further out over the bay, going south and west, getting smaller. Then the trees blocked my view and I ran down to the water and I still could see it. Just the light, bluish green, getting small, small, small. Nothing solid. But before that it was solid. I told myself. I said it standing there. This is light from an object. There's a thing out there.”
"A turquoise helicopter," Ethan said.
"The way to attack this," Pammy said, "is to make a list of all the rational possibilities. Then see what we can eliminate and what we're left with.”
"But no problem. It's a turquoise helicopter. Turquoise is the Maine state color.”
"That was a police helicopter.”
"Of course. No mystery whatsoever. Patrolling the bay.”
"Patrolling the bay for UFOs.”
"There've been sightings, I understand.”
"I don't care," Jack said.
"And which ties right in with the state motto.”
"Turquoise Forever," she said.
"No, In Turquoise We Trust.”
"But that's only one rational possibility. We have to list many. Or two at any rate. It's the government standard.”
"A turquoise pigeon.”
"No, no, come on, has to be different.”
"A fourteen-ton turquoise pigeon breathing heavily.”
"Go right ahead," Jack said.
"United in Truth, Justice and Turquoise.”
"E Pluribus Turquoise.”
"There's got to be at least one other possibility," she said. "The man here claims he saw it. It's only right we come up with a second interpretation.”
"Saint Elmo's fire.”
"What's that?”
"I'm naming the bloody things. Do I have to explain them too?”
"You didn't explain the turquoise helicopter. I knew right away what you meant.”
"It's an electrical discharge. A phenomenon that takes place before, during or after storms. I don't know-choose two. See, you people don't know the references. Your early years were abortive, Pammy old kid. I could say a shirt with a Mr. B. collar. You've no idea, right? So-and-so's decked out in his Mr. B. collar.”
Jack headed upstairs, reaching for his sweater as he passed the chair, carrying it crumpled, one rust-colored arm brushing the edge of each step as he ascended. It started raining again. Pammy checked a row of paperback books set on a broad shelf between the portable TV and the wall. Mystery, mystery, spy, sex, mystery. The books were old, sepia-toned inside; pages would snap cleanly. Ethan poured a drink and returned to his chair. Proceeding slowly, measuring her steps like an animated toy soldier, heel-walking, she moved to the hearth, sitting where Jack had, a possible token of remorse.
"How upset is he? Is he upset?”
"Jack's whole life he's been made to feel expendable.”
"Small things upset him.”
"He takes things as accusations, diminishments. Then he in turn accuses, often privately, going off to sulk. I think he condemns his surroundings as much as anything. People he sees within that frame. Some places are good, somehow. Others he feels reduced in. He gets no sense of himself, I suppose. I guess there were places all along the line, earlier. Relatives, so on. The people are blurs now.”
"Sometimes you can almost see his mind working. It darts back and forth. You can see he's estimating away in there, working out the advantages.”
"Some people have clandestine mentalities.”
"It darts.”
"Some people are open-natured, generous and humane.”
"Us, for instance.”
"You and me," he said.
In the middle of the night she heard the trees, that sound of wave action caused by high winds. There was someone in the living room, a fire. She got out of bed. Jack was sitting on the sofa, hands cupped behind his neck. She opened the door a bit wider and tilted her head in a certain way. Conciliation. Permission to enter his presence. He continued to grip his neck as though about to do a sit-up. She sat on the bed. When he passed, half an hour later, on his way upstairs, she was at the door. It was her instinct that touch makes anything possible. The slightest contact. She put her hand to his forearm. Barest touch. Enough, she thought, to restore their afternoon.
"Inside.”
"He'll hear.”
"Is everything all right?”
"Why wouldn't it be?”
"Jack, inside.”
"He'll hear, I said.”
"I want you naked.”
"Forget, no, we can't.”
"He won't know, Jack.”
"Where will I be?”
"Jack, let's fuck?”
"Where will I be then?”
Over the next few days she noticed that Jack's sentences never quite ended, the last word or words opening out into a sustained noise that combined elements of suspicion, resentment and protest. This, his New York voice, with variations, effectively replaced the factual near-neutrality he'd established in his report on the UFO.
She went shopping for antiques with Ethan. Jack hadn't wanted to come. To fill this gap she found something to laugh at everywhere, handling stoneware, flint glass with barely suppressed hysteria. Ethan, trying to respond helpfully, stretched one side of his mouth, exposing a gold tooth, and sent air down his nostrils, little sniffles of mirth. When they returned Jack was behind the counter in the kitchen, washing a glass.
"What's in the larder?" Ethan said.
"Lard, that's what the fuck's in the larder-fucking lard.”
She watched Jack through binoculars come up along the path from the beach. Tree branches smudged the foreground. She lowered the glasses when he got within earshot.
"Is Mamu the bear angry?" she said.
She listened, in bed, to sounds, weak cries, coming from their room, indistinct whimpers. A car passed on the dirt road. It was getting colder but she was past the point of exercising sufficient will to get out of bed and go over to the closet, where blankets were stacked. She was ten minutes past the point, approximately.
Ethan made a mild joke about the white circles around her eyes, a result of Pammy having left her sunglasses on while lounging on the deck most of the previous afternoon. Jack chimed in. This became the theme that day. White Eyes.
Masked Marvel. Bagels amp; Lox. She didn't think it was worth a whole day.
When the man at an ice cream stand asked what flavor, she said: "Escargot." Neither Jack nor Ethan laughed. Their turn to team up.
She played tennis with Ethan. He slammed his racket against the mesh fence, refused to answer when she asked if he'd hurt his knee. Pammy was inspired to remember West Fourteenth Street, that smelly gymlike floor, the salving triviality of tap-dancing.
Ethan began using stock phrases to get laughs, the same ones over and over. "Body stocking." "Training bra." "Hostess Twinkies." "Hopatcong, New Jersey." "Starring Maria Montez, Jon Hall and Sabu.”
They took the long drive out to Schoodic Point. Jack sat in the back seat, making a birdlike sound, his mouth pursed slightly, upper lip twitching. On a straightaway near Ellsworth, Ethan turned from the wheel and swung his right arm in a wide arc, hitting Jack on the side of the head.
"He knows I hate that sound.”
They stood on the stark granite shelving, watching surf beat straight up on impact. The sky to the east was going dark, a huge powdery stir, as of sediment. Ethan made his way down to a point nearer the sea. She couldn't take the wind anymore. It came in stinging and wet, forcing her to adjust her stance occasionally, pit her weight against the prevailing blast. She went back up to the car. About twenty minutes later Jack followed. She could see lobster boats making for home through racks of whitecaps.
"Spray, my God.”
"Did you really see it?”
"What?" he said.
"The UFO.”
"Twice.”
"I believe you.”
"I'm going this time. I should have done it years ago. This is no life.”
"You keep saying Ethan. Ethan's willing to be responsible for your life.”
"Not this time. I'm not saying it, notice. I didn't even mention his name.”
Obviously she'd begun to distrust her affection for Ethan and Jack. A place was being hollowed out, an isolated site, and into it would go the shifting allegiances of the past week, the resentments surfacing daily, all the remarks tossed off, minor slights she couldn't seem to forget, and the way they tested each other's vulnerability, the moment-to-moment tong wars. It occurred to her that this was the secret life of their involvement. It had always been there, needing only this period of their extended proximity to reveal itself. Disloyalty, spitefulness, petulance.
She watched Ethan come up over the rail. His nylon wind-breaker seemed about to be torn from his chest. The sea was an odd color in places, though beautiful, the whitish green of apples.
It wasn't that bad, really. Close quarters too long. That was all it was. Tong wars, my God. It wasn't nearly that. Everybody's involvement with everybody had a secret life. Misgivings, petty suspicions. Don't be so dramatic, so final. It would fix itself, easily, in weeks. They were friends. She would have them to look forward to again. Aside from the thing with Jack. That might take longer to fix.
Through wailing traffic, a summer of parched machines, she looked across Route 3 to a miniature golf course, catching glimpses of three boys walking over a small rise, shouldering their clubs. It was decided Jack would go looking for a service station, a repairman, a telephone, whichever turned out to be more accessible. Jack didn't favor this arrangement. Jack favored tying a handkerchief to the door handle and waiting for someone to stop. He and Ethan stood behind the car, arguing. Pammy sat on the fender, eyes narrowed against random velocities, the chaos and din of heavy trucks. The boys were meticulous and solemn, measuring out hand spans, precise club lengths, clearly influenced by what they'd seen on television or at the country club. They deliberated endlessly, hunkered down like tribesmen. The course had windmills, covered bridges, all the suspect pleasures of reduced scale. Something about the hour, the late-day haze and traffic fumes, or the vehicles themselves, intervening, some trick of distance made space appear to be compacted, the boys (from Pammy's viewpoint) isolated cleanly from the sprawl around them, the mess of house trailers, tombstones and fast-food outlets. It was near sunset, an antique light falling over the course. She felt she could watch indefinitely, observe, without being seen. One of the players reached for his ball, bending from the waist, mechanically, leg up, leg down, an abstract toy. She felt at ease here, fender-sitting, despite the noise and stutter-motion and crude landscape. The voices of her friends edged in at times, piping cries, small against the headlong grieving stream. She had a history of being happy in odd places.
9
Lyle set things out on his dresser. When the phone rang he didn't want to answer it. He'd already fixed in his mind certain time spans. There were boundaries to observe, demarcating shades of behavior. Some faint static could disturb the delicate schedule he'd established, a closed structure of leave-taking and destination.
Driver's license, traveler's checks, credit cards, note pads (2), keys, wrist watch, road map, street map, ballpoint pen, wallet, U.S. dollars (4,000), Canadian dollars (75), cigarettes, matches, chewing gum.
It turned out to be Kinnear, surprisingly. Deprived of all but phonetic value, J. was no less a regulating influence, a control of sorts, providing standards of technique that Lyle was never slow to note. It was a good connection and his voice was warm and persuasive and distinctly pitched, a tone of countless small detonations, as from a stereo speaker, right there at Lyle's ear, reasonable, so close.
"I've been thinking about certain aspects of your involvement, Lyle-i.e., the Exchange, our friend Marina, whatever plan or plans may be in effect. It occurred to me that you mightn't be able to shake loose so very easily. Let me say: don't let it reach the point where either way you turn there's pure void, there's sheer drop-off. You let it get too far, it will literally happen, this business about being George's successor, with the same depressing results. Remember, George thought he was associated with money manipulators, illegal banking combines. You have the advantage. You also have a clear way out. I don't have to say more than that. Marina's capable. She can get the thing to the point where either way you turn, Lyle.”
"I never intended it to get there.”
"You saw the basement. George didn't. Take advantage.”
"I knew how far.”
"These things really go off, Lyle, when they're put together properly. It accomplishes nothing. It's another media event. Innocent people dead and mutilated. Toward what end? Publicize the movement, that's all. Media again. They want coverage. Public interest. They want to dramatize.”
"I never thought of reaching the point where either way I turned.”
"The whole plan was and is stupid. A lot of ridiculous theatrics and it's just childishly, stupidly worked out. Imagine being so lacking in resources and strategies mat you have to base a major operation on this tentative alliance, this weak, weak, weak relationship with someone who works for the very entity that's the target and who stands to lose everything and gain nothing from the whole affair. If there'd been any way I could have prevented what happened to George, I'd have done so at any and all cost.”
"I'm aware.”
"We'll talk more when you get here," Kinnear said. "We'll talk about New Orleans. Things happened you wouldn't believe. I worked on Camp Street for a while. I'll give you one guess who came looking for office space at five four four Camp. His Fair Play for Cuba period. And who kept turning up at a bar called the Habana, It gets more interesting than that. Mazes, covert procedures. Strange, strange, strange relationships and links. We'll talk.”
Marina, when she picked him up outside the old Fillmore East, 3 p.m., barely looked his way. She drove east, saying nothing. They'd entered a new phase, it appeared. Lyle, in a T-shirt and old trousers, carrying only four or five dollars and no ID but wearing his watch, hung his right arm out the window, feeling drowsy. She parked behind a Mister Softee truck. They walked several blocks and through a vacant lot and then one more block, past milling children and men playing cards at a table on the sidewalk, to a five-story tenement building. A man with a German shepherd sat on the stoop. The dog barked as they approached and the man, shirtless, a huge lump on his shoulder, hooked four fingers onto the animal's collar as Marina and Lyle went past. Another dog, this one in a second-floor apartment, started barking as they mounted the steps. Shat ap. Packing cacksacker. On four, Marina took out a set of keys. They climbed the last flight.
The apartment was furnished sparely. Lyle stood by the window, looking out at a large ailanthus tree. When Marina started speaking he turned toward her and sat on the window sill. There were several cardboard boxes nearby, filled with hub caps and automobile batteries. A yard or so of bright orange material, nylon perhaps, stuck out of a knapsack. A man emerged from the bedroom and walked between Lyle and Marina on his way to the toilet. He was young and moved quickly, making a point of not looking at Lyle as he went by.
"In prison there's nothing that can't drive a person to self-destruction. This is the purpose of jails. Vegetables not cooked right. No TV for twenty-four hours. Things like that are enough. Everything is broken down. All your strength and will. You have to be dependent on the environment to give you an awareness of yourself. But the environment is set up to do just the reverse. The exact reverse.”
(It was roughly here that the young man crossed the room.)
"Lyle, we have to be honest. Now if never again. I want you to know about my brother. In his life there has always been an element of madness. I use that word instead of a more clinical one because I don't want to be evasive. I want to give it as forcefully as I can. To those who knew him, there was never any certainty that it wouldn't come at a given moment. Violence, rage, threats of suicide, actual attempts. You had to be prepared to kill him, or love him, or stay away. There was nothing else. Rafael was ready to die. This is the single most important thing about him. Everything around him, all of life, all of people, was an attack on his spirit, his weakness. I witnessed some of this, previews of his death. To be his comrade, or his sister, you had to be willing to accept the obligations that went with it. His behavior, everything he was and did, this was your duty to accept as your own life. He had to know you accepted it. I saw blood more than once.”
The toilet flushed. Then the door opened and the man crossed the room again, touching Marina's hand this time as he walked past her. Lyle estimated height and weight.
"It's important to know this about Vilar because in a way everything we're doing here, or about to do, comes from him, originates with his plans, his philosophy of destruction. I've talked of one aspect only. He was brilliant too. He had university degrees, he could discuss ideas in any company. And he could manufacture bombs. He was an angel with explosives.”
"And you?”
"I'm less interesting," she said.
"I doubt it.”
"I wanted you to hear the truth. In the past I've been guilty of sanctifying my brother. I have no doubt that on the floor of Eleven Wall that day with George, there were elements of self-destruction. About myself, there's little to reveal. I'm determined to use this chance we have. To cause serious damage at the Exchange, at this one place of all places in the world, will be a fantastic moment.”
"Attack the idea of their money.”
"Do you believe in the value of that?”
"I do, actually. The system. The secret currents. Make it appear a little less inviolable. It's their greatest strength, as you said, or your brother, and to incapacitate it, even briefly, would be to set loose every kind of demon.”
"To announce terrible possibilities.”
"I believe that," he said.
She called the other man by name, Luis. He stood in the doorway, an elaborate leather band on his wrist. He had the same look Lyle had seen on the faces of a thousand young Latins in New York, boys standing outside supermarkets waiting to deliver groceries, or edging through the rhythmic quake of subways, one car to the next-a secret energy, a second level of knowledge well-nourished by suspicion, and therefore negative and tending to resist, and dangerous. It was present in his eyes, the complex intelligence of street life. You learn to take advantage. You make them pay for being depressed by your existence.
"He wants to use propane.”
"I picked up tanks," Luis said. "They're very small. Good size for what we want. I found out about the powders. We have a good mix. Then we add propane in these tanks.”
"He wants a fireball.”
"When the thing goes, you get a fireball from the propane. Cause more damage that way. All he has to do is get me inside and show me a place to conceal it good. It's exact. I'm making it so it's exact. No loose ends, man.”
"How big will the whole thing be?" Lyle said. "You can't walk out on the floor with a shopping bag.”
"Hey, I'm telling you. The right size. Just for what we want.”
"He has a touch, Luis.”
"We'll rip out that place's guts. Hey, you know the sound fire makes when it shoots out of something?”
"Sucking air," Lyle said.
"All he has to do is get me inside.”
"Luis has hands. Right, Luis?”
"It's a little different, bombs. I'm taking my time.”
"You should see what he does, Lyle. Credit cards, a master. Sometimes he gets moody, though. We're working on that.”
"I go to the library. Whatever you want to make, once you know how to use the library, it's right there. I go to Fortieth Street. Science up the ass they got. Technology, all you want.”
"Luis has a parachute.”
"I wondered.”
"Where did you get it? Tell Lyle.”
"I stole it in Jersey off some nice lady, she had it in her car.”
"Orange and sky blue.”
"I saw it sticking it out there," Lyle said.
"A radio and a blanket came with it.”
"Common thief," she said.
"A little more time, I would of had the engine block.”
"When people come up, he tells them he's with the government. They see the parachute, he says CIA. He tells them he has to keep it nearby, it's in the manual.”
"CIA, man.”
"The manual has a whole page on how to care for your parachute.”
"I say, Hey man I can't go with you tonight if you're taking all those people because then there's no room in the car for my parachute.”
"He has to keep it nearby at all times.”
"It's in the manual.”
Luis stepped out the window and onto the fire escape. Lyle leaned out, watching him climb the metal ladder to the roof. He felt sleepy. Ninety minutes from now he would have to be back at the apartment picking up his things.
"When do we do it?”
"Two days at most we'll be set.”
"How old is he?”
"Thirty-two," she said.
"He looks younger, much.”
"He's developed a manner. A dozen ways. He's very quick, he slips away. You never know he's gone until you look for him. Don't believe what he says necessarily. He likes to make up a character as he goes along. He doesn't necessarily want you to trust him or respect him. I think he likes to appear a little stupid when he doesn't know someone. It's a strategy.”
"He refers to me in the third person.”
"His manner.”
"Even when he's looking right at me.”
"Luis has lived here half his life. To you, he seems one thing. To us, another. Your view of our unit is a special perception. An interpretation, really. You see a certain cross-section from a certain angle. And everything was colored by J., who occupied only a small and routine area of the whole operation. Of course you couldn't know this.”
"How many others are there?”
"You know what you have to know.”
"No more, no less.”
"Obviously," she said.
"A good policy, I guess.”
"It's clearly the way.”
"Do I believe Luis when he says he's making a bomb by looking things up at the library?”
"I don't think I'd believe that, Lyle, no.”
"His manner again. A technique.”
"Luis traveled with my brother to Japan and the Middle East. He's acquired a number of skills along the way.”
"Plus a parachute.”
"The parachute you can believe. I would believe the parachute.”
Several minutes passed. The taxed amosphere grew a shade more serene. Lyle moved from the window to a chair nearer Marina. The stress of truth-telling became less pronounced, of performances, strategies, assurances. Luis by leaving didn't hurt matters. He would be careful, Lyle would, not to ask the precise nature of her relationship with Luis. You know only what you have to know. First principle of clandestine life.
"What happens to you?”
"I vanish," he said.
"They'll know he was your guest. You had a visitor that day. You brought him on the floor.”
"I'm gone.”
"Of course there's another way. No need for Luis to set foot inside the Exchange. You bring the package in. You leave it. This way you can't be identified with a second party.”
"Middle of the night, it goes.”
"This is cleaner, obviously.”
"No second party.”
"Think about it," she said.
He studied her face, an instant of small complications. Her eyes measured reference lines, attempting to get a more sensitive bearing on the situation. To the commitment she sought, endlessly, the tacit pledging of one's selfhood, he sensed a faint exception being made. Not all agendas called for rigid adherence to codes. There were other exchanges possible, sweeter mediations.
"J. said you and George.”
"True.”
"It was part of his least convincing scenario. He told me you'd been to bed with George.”
A short time passed. It was decided they would have sex. This happened without words or special emanations. Just the easing sense Marina had loosed into the air of possibilities other than death. She seemed to take it as a condition. Sex: her body for his risk. Not quite a condition, perhaps. Equation would be closer. It was old-fashioned, wasn't it? A little naïve, even. He hadn't seen it that way himself (he didn't know how he saw it, really) but he was satisfied to let her interpretation guide them toward each other.
The bedroom was fairly dark, getting only indirect light. He thought her gravely beautiful, nude. She touched his arm and he recalled a moment in the car when she'd put her hands to his face, bottles hitting the pavement, and the strangeness he felt, the angular force of their differences. Nothing about them was the same or shared. Age, experience, wishes, dreams. They were each other's stark surprise, their histories nowhere coinciding. Lyle realized that until now he hadn't fully understood the critical nature of his involvement, its griev-ousness. Marina's alien reality, the secrets he would never know, made him see this venture as something more than a speculation.
She had a thick waist, breasts set wide apart. Bulky over all, lacking deft lines, her legs solid, she had a sculptural power about her, an immobile beauty that made him feel oddly inadequate-his leanness, fair skin. It wasn't just the remote tenor of her personality, then, that brought him to the visible edge of what he'd helped assemble, to the pressures and consequences. Her body spoke as well. It was a mystery to him, how these breasts, the juncture of these bared legs, could make him feel more deeply implicated in some plot. Her body was "meaningful" somehow. It had a static intensity, a "seriousness" that Lyle could not interpret. Marina nude. Against this standard, everything else was bland streamlining, a. collection of centerfolds, assembly line sylphs shedding their bra-lettes and teddy pants.
They were both standing, the bed between them. Light from the air shaft, a stray glare, brought a moment of definition to her strong clear face. She was obviously aware of the contemplative interest she'd aroused in him. She put her hands to her breasts, misunderstanding. Not that it mattered. Her body would never be wrong, inexplicable as it was, a body that assimilated his failure to understand it. He nourished her by negative increments. A trick of existence.
She knelt on the edge of the bed. He watched the still divisions her eyes appeared to contain, secret reproductions of Marina herself. He tried helplessly to imagine what she saw, as though to bring to light a presiding truth about himself, some vast assertion of his worth, knowledge accessible only to women whose grammar eluded him. The instant she glanced at his genitals he felt an erection commence.
In bed he remembered the man on the roof. Such things are funny. Trapped in the act of having sex. It exposes one's secret feeling of being involved in something comically shameful. Luis in the doorway with a pump-action shotgun. It's funny. It exposes one's helplessness. He wondered what "pump-action" meant and why he'd thought of it and whether it had multilevel significance.
All this time they were making love. Marina was spacious, psychologically, an elaborate settling presence. At first she moved easily, drawing him in, unwinding him, a steadily deepening concentration of resources, gripping him, segments, small parts, bits of him, dashes and tads. She measured his predispositions. She even struggled a little, attaching him to his own body. How this took place he couldn't have said exactly. Marina seemed to know him. Her eyes were instruments of incredibly knowing softness. At her imperceptible urging he felt himself descend, he felt himself occupy his body. It made such sense, every pelvic stress, the slightest readjustment of some fraction of an inch of flesh. He braced himself, listening to the noises, small clicks and strains, the moist slop of their pectorals in contact. When it ended, massively, in a great shoaling transit, a leap of decompressing force, they whispered in each other's ear, wordlessly, breathing odors and raw heat, small gusts of love.
Lyle dressed quickly, watching her, recumbent, the soft room growing dim about her body. There was a noise on the roof, concussion, someone jumping down from a higher roof or ledge. His hand circled her ankle.
"Does Luis raise pigeons up there or maybe hides explosives in a chimney.”
"We get a fireball," she said.
"Whoosh.”
He hailed a cab on Avenue C. At the apartment he changed and was out again in fifteen minutes, having already packed. He was well ahead of schedule, as anticipated, and was now operating from an interior travel plan, the scheme within the scheme, something he did as a matter of course when traveling, being a believer in margins, surplus quantities. He rode out to La Guardia, relieved to be clear of the apartment, where he was subject to other people's attempts to communicate. The cabdriver drank soup from a styrofoam cup.
Lyle paid for his ticket, using a credit card, watching as the woman at the console entered various sets of information. He'd thought of traveling under an assumed name but decided there wasn't reason enough and wished to avoid appearing ridiculous to anyone who might be interested in his movements. He checked his bag and went looking for a place to get a drink. It was early evening by now and across the runways Manhattan's taller structures were arrayed in fields of fossil resin, that brownish-yellow grit of pre-storm skies. The buildings were remarkable at this distance not so much for boldness, their bright aspiring, as for the raddled emotions they called forth, the amber mood, evoking as they did some of the ache of stunning ruins. Lyle kept patting his body-keys, tickets, cash, et cetera.
He found a cocktail lounge and settled in. The place was absurdly dark, as though to encourage every sort of intimacy, even to strangers groping each other. Airports did this sometimes, gave travelers a purchase on what remained of tangible comforts before their separation from the earth. Piano music issued from a speaker somewhere. Lyle had two drinks, keeping an eye on his watch. Five minutes before boarding he went to a phone booth and dialed the number Burks had given him. To the man who answered he gave his own phone number by way of identification. Then he reported Marina's address and where her car was parked and provided a physical description of Luis (Ramirez) and a general idea of what kind of explosive device he was putting together. The man told Lyle to stay by his phone. They'd be in touch.
The 727 set down at the airport in Toronto. He told the man in the customs booth he was visiting friends-two or three days. Then he rented a car and drove toward the lake, deciding to spend the night at a motel called Green Acres. Looking over one of the maps he'd brought and the street index attached to it, he came across the names Parkside, Bay-view, Rosedale, Glenbrook, Forest Hill, Mt. Pleasant, Mead-owbrook, Cedarcrest, Thornwood, Oakmount, Brookside, Beechwood, Ferndale, Woodlawn, Freshmeadow, Crestwood, Pine Ridge, Willowbrook and Greenbriar.
In the morning he drove southwest, about sixty-five miles, to a place called Brantford. He put the car in a parking lot and walked around. Stores, a movie theater or two, a monument of some kind. The town was a near-classic, so naturally secure in its conventions that he suspected J. had chosen it partly for (anti) dramatic effect. Another of his bittersweet maneuvers. To Lyle, enmeshed in a psychology of stealth, Brantford's clean streets and white English-speaking population took on an eerie quality, an overlay of fantasy. It was more familiar than the street he lived on in New York. He'd come all this way, border-crossing, to encounter things he'd known at some collective level, always. Common themes. Ordinary decencies. He could enjoy the joke, even if it was at his expense, more or less, and even if it wasn't a joke.
He crossed a large square and waited outside the modern city hall. About ten minutes after the designated time, he saw a figure half a block away, recognizing the walk, the fluid stride, as familiar, the body itself, familiar, its set of identifying lines and verges. Seconds passed, however, before he realized who it was, coming toward him through a group of children playing a game, that it was Rosemary Moore, her skirt swinging in the breeze. Of course, he thought. Ambiguity, confusion, disinformation. A learning process. Techniques, elaborate strategies.
He decided to offer a warm smile. Took her hand in his. Kissed her cheek. She brushed a lock of hair from her forehead and suggested a place for lunch.
"Just the two of us," he said.
"If that's all right.”
"Sure, absolutely, why not.”
They walked down a hill to a restaurant called the Iron Horse, a converted train depot. It was dark inside. At the next table four men discussed a shipment of gypsum, speaking the flat language of industrial cultures, a deflated tone, unmodulated, fixed in its stale plane. The waitresses wore trainmen's caps and abbreviated bib outfits. Rosemary took off her sunglasses finally, prompting Lyle to lean toward her, surveying intently.
"Really you, is it?”
"Yes, it is.”
"Call me Lyle. Use names.”
"I quit my job.”
"You quit your job.”
"I'll have to find something, I guess.”
"Job-hunting.”
"I have to see.”
"Seeking employment," he said.
"I'd like to get something more interesting this time. I sat at that desk.”
"Fly, go back to flying.”
"That was awful. You wait on people. I hated it after a while.”
It continued through a couple of drinks. He spoke and listened on one level, observing from another. The curiously stirring monotony of it. The liquor and dim lighting. The unvarying sounds from the next table-ladings and capacities. The waitresses coming out of dark pockets on the floor, all legs, all pussy and ass. The surface context, a landscape unaccountably familiar, the sanity of a clear afternoon.
"J. wants to know did you have trouble with the money part.”
"No," he said. "But tell him I'm let down, frankly. Tell J.”
"It's a precaution. He couldn't be sure type thing.”
"Do I give you the money?”
"If it's all right.”
"Can I at least call him?”
"He's not at that number anymore. He's at a different number.”
"Have another drink," he said.
"I shouldn't.”
"Have another drink.”
"If you tell her to make it weak.”
"You'll be with J. indefinitely, I take it.”
"I don't know. I still have my apartment, at least two months to go. I may go back and look for a job. I have to see.”
"Do I get to talk to him at all? He said we'd talk.”
"He promises.”
"He wants me to stay in the area?”
"He said not to go back right away.”
"So he'll call.”
"You're supposed to give me a number.”
"I'll have to find a motel. What happens, you come with me?”
"All right," she said.
"Did he tell you to do that?”
"Why does it matter?”
"Use names.”
"You have to give me the phone.”
"He didn't tell you to suggest that, going to a motel with me?”
"He said a number, let him give you a number to reach him at.”
"Where is he, nearby?”
She nodded. They smoked awhile in silence and then ordered something to eat. The place had emptied out by the time they finished lunch.
"You've been with him for a while then, I take it.”
"I guess, sort of.”
"You impress me. I'm impressed.”
"Why?”
"One more drink," he said.
"Maybe one.”
"He buys a new identity, is that it?”
"He knows someone who can get him whatever he has to have.”
"What else?”
"He practices looking different.”
"Practices looking different how?”
"In front of a mirror," she said.
"I love it.”
"He stretches his mouth. It's gotten so he does it an awful lot lately. It's very macabre if you're walking by.”
"Stretching exercises.”
"He wants to do his chin next.”
They drove half an hour before finding a motel, He checked the road map, not certain where they were. Rosemary sat on a corner of the bed, handbag in her lap. He had the map spread over a small desk, his back to her, and he was taking off his shirt as he tried to retrace the route they'd taken.
"When do you have to be back?”
"Whenever.”
"Where-where we met?”
"Right there is fine.”
"Take down the phone number while we're at it. I want to be sure to hear from him. Tell J. that. I was let down. But as long as I hear soon, within a day or two, then that's all right. The money's in a black leather billfold in my jacket. Why don't you count out thirty-five hundred while I'm doing this? Tell J. a day or two. Two at the most. Because I don't know what happens next.”
Eventually he turned toward her, beginning to remove the rest of his clothes. He could see himself across the room, angling in and out of view, in the mirror over the dresser. The light coloring. The sandy hair. The spaces in his gaze. It was a body of effortless length, proportional, spared bunching and sags. Nice, the understated precision of his movements, even to the tugging of a sock. And the satisfactions of moderate contours. Of mildness. Hairless chest and limbs. Middling implement of sex. Interesting, his formal apartness. The distance he'd perfected. He could see it clearly, hands and stance, the median weave of coarse hair, gray eyes eventually steadied on themselves.
She went into the bathroom to undress.
He liked motels, their disengaging aspect, the blank autonomy they offered, an exemption from some vague imperative, perhaps the need to verify one's status.
When Rosemary came out, ten minutes later, she had a plastic phallus harnessed to her body.
10
A dog sniffed out hidden riches, circling a grassy patch of earth, again and again, making sure, ascertaining place. The gulls were startling, so large at this distance, landing on mounds of garbage, wings beating. She watched them scatter when a second police cruiser pulled up at the edge of the dump. The dog's circles became smaller, more urgent. It was zeroing in, snout down, a little crazy with anticipation. She'd stationed herself at a point where Jack's body was hidden from view by the bulldozer that customarily leveled out the mounds. Smoke rose from charred areas, fitfully. That acrid, acrid smell. She'd stationed herself. She'd chosen carefully. The dog walked off, long gray animal, a corn cob in its mouth.
The gulls stood in garbage, bodies occasionally extended, wings flapping. There were cans of Ajax and Campbell's soup. Maxwell House, Pepsi-Cola, Heinz ketchup, Budweiser. She hated the way gulls walked. They were ugly on the ground, this close, chesty and squat. Burnt garbage. Stinging, bitter, caustic.
Jack was sitting crosslegged. She knew this from the first conditional glimpse. That stump was Jack. While still in the car she'd taken another look that lasted perhaps two full seconds. His head was slumped forward and black and he was badly withered. She wouldn't have known it was Jack except for the note he'd left, telling them where he was, advising them to be prepared. After that second look she was diligent in keeping a large object between herself and Jack's body. First the car and now the bulldozer. He was shriveled and discolored, burned right through, down to muscles, down to tendons, down to nerves, blood vessels, bones. His arms were in front of him, hands crossed at about the same place his ankles were crossed. This had seemed ceremonial, the result of research on his part. She did think that. She thought fifty different things, all passing through each other, illustrated breezes. She recalled wondering whether he'd had to exercise will power to keep his body in that position during the time it took for the fire to negate all semblance of conscious choice. The gulls beat their wings, screeching.
She saw Ethan disengage himself from three policemen and a civilian, this last apparently being the man who operated the bulldozer. Pammy assumed he'd found the body and called the police. Ethan walked over to her. He was chewing gum. There was a strange menace about him, the slackness of his body. He seemed to be walking right into the ground, getting smaller as he approached, more dangerous somehow, as though he no longer possessed the binding force, the degree of concentration, that keeps people from splintering.
"Yeah, it was gasoline," he said. "There's a large tin over on its side right nearby.”
"Burned.”
"He set himself on fire.”
"He poured it over him.”
"Yeah, and lit it.”
She held Ethan by the shirt, twisting the fabric in her fists. An ambulance arrived and the gulls scattered again. Ethan looked off into the trees, thinking of something. Not intently, however. He might have been trying to recall the sequence of events in an anecdote. Or something he was supposed to do, perhaps. Some errand or small task. The men were out of the ambulance. Pammy didn't want to think about the mechanics of what happened next or even hear voices in the distance, or sounds, whatever sounds would have to be made. Several gulls started to leave the ground, rising on their scraggy feet, wings rippling, stirring up air. She let go of Ethan's shirt and turned toward the woods, her hands over her ears.
For a while she held her breath. During this period she could hear, or feel, right under each hand, where it covered her ear, a steady pressuring subroar, oceanic space, brain-deadened, her own coiled shell, her chalky encasement for the world of children, all soft things, the indulgent purr of animals sunning. When she let out her breath, the roar was still there. She'd thought the two were related.
She concentrated on objects. Her hands were clasped behind her neck. There was a reason for this but she didn't want to know what it was. She studied the mossy rocks.
It was driving in on her. It was massing. She felt if she untensed her body something irrevocable, something irrevocable and lunatic, something irrevocable, totally mad, would happen. Nothing had a name. She'd declared everything nameless. Everything was compressed into a block. She fought the tendency to supply properties to this block. That would lead to names.
Ethan came back after a while. They walked toward the car. The ambulance and one of the police cars were gone. He asked her to take his car back to the house. He would go with the policeman. The other man had climbed into the bulldozer and was sitting there, smoking.
"They're very nice. They couldn't have been nicer.”
"You'll be gone how long?”
"They'll take me back as soon as we're finished up. Unless you don't want to go there. You can come with us.”
"Ethan, what did Jack do?”
"I don't know.”
"I mean what did he do?”
At the house she cleaned up. She put things in their original places. She wanted everything to be the way it was when she arrived. The phone rang. It was Lyle. She told him about Jack, beginning a long and at times nearly delirious monologue. She lapsed into accounts of recent dreams. She tried to speak through periods of yawning that were like seizures, some autonomic flux of the nerve apparatus. Lyle calmed her down eventually. He summarized what had happened in short declarative sentences. This seemed to help, breaking the story into coherent segments. It eased the surreal torment, the sense of aberration. To hear the sequence restated intelligibly was at that moment more than a small comfort to her. It supplied a focus, a distinct point into which things might conceivably vanish after a while, chaos and divergences, foes of God.
"Will you be all right?”
"Yes.”
"Will Ethan be back soon?”
"I think so.”
"It won't be so bad when you're not alone. He'll be there in a little while. And I'll be seeing you very soon. It'll be a little easier when you're back in the city. There'll be people.”
"I know.”
"Tell Ethan we'll have lunch when he gets back. Call me, tell him. We'll make a lunch date.”
"All right.”
"Actually I'm not in New York right now. I'm in a motel in a foreign country, believe it or not. Canada anyway. Just a business thing. Nothing special. But I'm leaving right after I hang up. I'll be home in a matter of hours.”
"I guess I'll leave tomorrow, depending.”
"Don't call the apartment," he said. "I'm not answering the phone for a while.”
She had tea waiting when Ethan came back. They sat outside. He wore nothing over his short-sleeved shirt despite the chill. Pammy wondered whether it would be all right to get him a sweater. She decided finally it might be taken as an imposition of sorts, a subtle belittling of his distress. What comfort, really, would warm clothing give him now? It occurred to her that people unconsciously honored the processes of the physical world, danced fatalistically with nature whenever death took someone close to them. She believed Ethan wanted to feel what was here. If it rained, he wouldn't move. If she draped a sweater over his shoulders, he might well shrug it off. We are down to eating and sleeping, if that. Rudiments, she thought. Whatever the minimum. That's what we're down to. She watched color spread across the sky beyond the Cam-den Hills. A sunset is the story of the world's day. They spun back away from it, upended like astronauts, but snug in their seats, night-riding, as the first stars pinched into view.
"They don't have a good burn center here if Jack had lived," he said. "They would have had to rush him to Baltimore, which is ridiculous, considering how remote we are.”
"Don't you mean Boston?”
"There's nothing in Boston that's comparable to what's available in Baltimore. They would have had to get him to Bangor first, either there or Bar Harbor. Then on a plane either to Boston or New York, I would imagine. Then from there to Baltimore. So even if he'd lived.”
"Ethan, the only thing is time. That's the only thing that can alleviate. Time is change. After a period of time it won't be so bad. That's the only thing you can believe right now. That's what you have to concentrate on. Time will make it easier to bear.”
"The consolations of time.”
"That's right. That's it. The only thing.”
"The healing hand of time.”
"Are you making fun?”
"My time is your time.”
"Because I don't think this is funny.”
"I see myself as an old man," he said. "I hobble to the store for cream cheese and a peach. I buy single items only. One sweet roll, one peach, one bottle of celery tonic. 'How much is that cucumber, young fella? No, the other one.' I stand in a corner of the store and take out my little change purse, seeing if I have enough.”
"Stop, really.”
"I'm all alone. There's no one to help me shop. I buy stale bread to save money. Kids race between the shopping carts, knocking me off-balance. They barely notice. Their mothers say nothing. I'm practically invisible. I go to a corner of the store and count my change, my few bills, repeatedly folded, folded repeatedly. I buy one onion, a single stick of margarine.”
"This could be my father," she said, "which isn't in the least amusing to me.”
"Six eggs minimum.”
"People live like that.”
"I hobble down the wide aisles. My body is too ancient to be offensive. All the odors have gone bland on me. I don't even have the pleasure of smelling myself in bed. They tell me six eggs minimum. I say I'm too weak to break the carton. All I can do is lift one out. Six minimum. That's the rule. I live alone. All my friends are dead, Jack in particular, adorable useless Jack. I stand in a corner of the store and bring up phlegm. I'm very secretive and clever about this. I hawk, secretively. I've learned how to do it so it's not too loud. I feel the phlegm bobbling around at the back of my mouth. I hawk some more. A phlegmy old man. This isn't funny," he said. "I wouldn't laugh if I were you.”
She decided not to fly back. It was an eleven-hour bus ride. Watching a small boy come up die aisle to use the toilet, Pammy smiled, close to tears, her face developing cracks around the eyes and becoming lustrous, showing complex regret. The dead elms along the road brought a graver response. She'd never seen them in such numbers, silenced by blight, dark rangy things, their branches arched. It was startling, all this bareness, and the white frame houses, sometimes turreted or capped by a widow's walk, and the people who lived there, how different the dead elms made them seem, more resonant; deepened by experience, a sense about them of having lived through something, although she knew she was projecting this, seeing them only in glimpses, piano teachers (a sign in the window), dealers in pewter and marine antiques. She was eager to be back in the apartment, closed away again, spared the need to react tenderly to things. These were commonplace moments, no more, simple enough to have gone unnoticed at other times. Sloping lawns. A drowsy fern in a bay window. She wanted to be spared these fragments of coastal noon, garbled eyeblinks, so perishable and affecting. And Ethan's strange delineation of the evening before, his deadpan novella. Spared that, too.
So she wasn't unhappy about stepping out onto Eighth Avenue at ten or so in the evening, part of the morbid bazaar that springs up outside the bus terminal every summer night, spreading through the wetness and stench. Restless men sorted among the miscellany. Pigments, styles, dialects, persuasions. Sets of eyes followed her to the corner. Immediately east, west and south were commercial streets, empty and dark now, a ray system of desolation, perhaps a truer necropolis, the outlying zone to which all bleak neon aspires.
Her taxi rocketed east, the back half about to be jettisoned, it seemed. The apartment was serene. Objects sat in pale light, reborn. A wicker basket she'd forgotten they had. A cane chair they'd bought just before she left. Her memory in things.
She couldn't fall asleep. The long ride was still unraveling in her body, tremors and streaks. She turned on the black-and-white TV, the one in the bedroom. An old movie was on, inept and boring, fifties vintage. There was a man, the hero, whose middle-class life was quietly coming apart. First there was his brother, the black sheep, seriously in debt, pursued by grade-B racketeers. Phone calls, meetings, stilted dialogue. Then there was his wife, hospitalized, apparently dying of some disease nobody wanted to talk about. In a series of tediously detailed scenes, she was variously brave, angry, thoughtful and shrill. Pammy couldn't stop watching. The cheapness was magnetic. She experienced a near obliteration of self-awareness. Through blaring commercials for swimming pool manufacturers and computer trainee institutes, she remained in the chair alongside the bed. As the movie grew increasingly maudlin, she became more upset. The bus window had become a TV screen filled with serial grief. The hero's oldest boy began to pass through states of what the doctor called reduced sensibility. He would sit on the floor in a stupor, either unable to speak or refusing to, his limbs immobile. Phone calls from the hero's brother increased. He needed money fast, or else. Another hospital scene. The wife recited from a love letter the hero had written her when they were young.
Pammy was awash with emotion. She tried to fight it off, knowing it was tainted by the artificiality of the movie, its plain awfulness. She felt it surge through her, this billowing woe. Her face acquired a sheen. She ran her right hand over the side of her head, fingers spread wide. Then it came, on-rushing, a choppy sobbing release. She sat there, hands curled at her temples, for fifteen minutes, crying, as the wife died, the boy recovered, the brother vowed to regain his self-respect, the hero in his pleated trousers watched his youngest child ride a pony.
Movies did that to people, awful or not. She got up finally and went into the kitchen. Her face looked recently finished; an outer surface of raw tissue. She supposed she'd been building up to this. There were baffled pleasures everywhere, whole topographies rearranged to make people react to a mass-market stimulus. No harm done succumbing to a few bogus sentiments. She craved a roast beef sandwich, a cold beer. Nothing here but envelopes of soup.
It was after midnight but there was an all-night delicatessen around the corner. She got dressed and went downstairs, surprised to find the streets anything but empty. The newsstand was still doing business, the deli, the bagel noshery, the pizza-souvlaki joint, the bars, the ice cream store, the hamburger place. It was still warm and people were in shirtsleeves and shorts and denims and tank tops and sandals and house slippers. Some elderly men and women sat outside their apartment building in beach chairs, gesturing, munching olives and nuts. Everyone was eating. Wherever she looked there were mouths moving, people handling food, passing it around, cartons of French fries, sugar cones with double scoops, and talking, hollering, tissue paper drifting in the light air. An average street. Nowhere special. Not a theater in sight to account for all these people. All eating. Oral New York. Declaiming through the slush of mouthfuls of food. Lapping and crunching. Perennial ranter. The babble king of cities. Pammy had to stand in line. The counterman licked his mustache and rolled his eyes.
She emerged with a small bag of groceries. The ghost engines droned everywhere-down sewers, under basement stairways, in air conditioners and cracks in the pavement. All these complicated textures. Clownish taxis bearing down.
Sodium-vapor lamps. The city was unreasonably insistent on its own fibrous beauty, the woven arrangements of decay and genius that raised to one's sensibility a challenge to extend itself. Silhouettes of trees on rooftops. Garbagemen at midnight rimming metal cans along the pavement. And always this brassy demanding, a soul that imposes and burdens and defrauds, half mad, but free with its tribal bounty, sized to immense design.
She walked beneath a flophouse marquee. It read: transients. Something about that word confused her. It took on an abstract tone, as words had done before in her experience (although rarely), subsisting in her mind as language units that had mysteriously evaded the responsibilities of content. Tran-zhents. What it conveyed could not itself be put into words. The functional value had slipped out of its bark somehow and vanished. Pammy stopped walking, turned her body completely and looked once more at the sign. Seconds passed before she grasped its meaning.
THE MOTEL
It's never quite still, is it? Room static. Inherent nuance and hum. And the woman in the bed. Her even breathing. He doesn't know for a fact that she's asleep. He's never seen her sleeping really. He suspects she does it fitfully. Something about her, an aspect of her willingness to carry out designs, to be utilized, suggests a resistance to the implicating riches of deep sleep. He finds it hard to imagine her reaching a final depth, that warm-blooded slumbrous culmination, the point where sleep becomes the tidal life of the unconscious, a state beyond dreaming. To watch a woman at this stage of sleep, throbbing, obviously in touch with mysteries, never fails to worry him a little. They seem at such times to embody a mode of wholeness, an immanence and unit truth, that his feelings aren't equal to.
He's barefoot and shirtless, stretched in a chair. He wears pants with the belt unfastened. The room is dark. He wonders about the tendency of motels to turn things inward. They're a peculiar invention, powerfully abstract. They seem the idea of something, still waiting to be expressed fully in concrete form.
Isn't there more, he wants to ask. What's behind it all? It must be the traveler, the motorist, the sojourner himself who provides the edible flesh of this concept. Inwardness spiraling ever deeper. Rationality, analysis, self-realization. He spends a moment imagining that this vast system of nearly identical rooms, worldwide, has been established so that people will have somewhere to be afraid on a regular basis. The parings of our various searches. Somewhere to take our fear. He laughs briefly, a nasal burst.
The phone will ring and he will be told to go somewhere. He will be given detailed instructions. The number is known. It has been communicated. Certain assurances have been given. It's just a matter of time. He'll get impatient again, no doubt. He'll resolve to leave. But this time the phone will ring and the voice will give instructions of a detailed nature.
He makes the speech sound m, prolonging it, adding a hint of vibrato after a while. Then he laughs again. First light appears, a sense of it, wholly mental perhaps. He doesn't want day to come, particularly. He makes the sound, not moving his lips, expressionless.
We watch him stand by the bed. The woman has made three visits in the two days he's had the room. She's on her stomach now, one arm up on the pillow, the other by her side. Although he's always known her limits, the unvarying sands of her being, he questions whether his own existence is any more entire. Maybe this amounts to an appreciation of sorts. That the lock of bodies should yield a measure of esteem strikes him as incongruous in this case. He notes her paleness. Downy gloss along her lower spine. She knows things. She isn't deadened to the core. She knows his soul, for instance.
(In that moment, wearing her white plastic toy, that odd sardonic moment, so closely bordering on cruelty, a playlet of brute revelation, she let him know it was as an instrument, a toy herself, that she appeared. Dil-do. A child's sleepy murmur. It was as collaborators that they touched, as dreamers in a sea of pallid satisfaction.)
Her complicity makes it possible for him to remain. He stares at the hollows in her buttocks. Dark divide. The ring of flesh that's buried there. We see him walk to the desk, where he gets the map with the street index attached. He takes it to the chair, stretching his frame.
The idea is to organize this emptiness. In the index he sees Briarfield, Hillsview, Woodhaven, Old Mill, Riverhead, Manor Road, Shady Oaks, Lakeside, Highbrook, Sunnydale, Grove Park, Knollwood, Glencrest, Seacliff and Greenvale. He finds these names wonderfully restful. They're a liturgical prayer, a set of moral consolations. A universe structured on such coordinates would have the merits of substance and familiarity. He becomes a little giddy, blinking rapidly, and lets the map slip to the floor.
After a while he takes off his pants. Careful not to disturb the woman, with whom he is not ready to exchange words or looks, he eases onto the bed. Upper body propped by an elbow, he reclines on his side, facing the telephone. Instinct tells him it will shortly ring. He decides to organize his waiting. This will help pull things into a systematic pattern or the illusion of a systematic pattern. Numbers are best for this. He decides to count to one hundred. If the phone doesn't ring at one hundred, his instinct has deceived him, the pattern has cracked, his waiting has opened out to magnitudes of gray space. He will pack and leave. One hundred is the outer margin of his passive assent.
When nothing happens, he lowers the count to fifty. At fifty he will get up, get dressed, put his things together and leave. He counts to fifty. When nothing happens, he lowers the count to twenty-five.
There's a splatter of brightness at one edge of the window. Minutes and inches later, sunlight fills the room. The air is dense with particles. Specks blaze up, a series of energy storms. The angle of light is direct and severe, making the people on the bed appear to us in a special framework, their intrinsic form perceivable apart from the animal glue of physical properties and functions. This is welcome, absolving us of our secret knowledge. The whole room, the motel, is surrendered to this moment of luminous cleansing. Spaces and what they contain no longer account for, mean, serve as examples of, or represent.
The propped figure, for instance, is barely recognizable as male. Shedding capabilities and traits by the second, he can still be described (but quickly) as well-formed, sentient and fair. We know nothing else about him.
About the Author
Don DeLillo, who was born in 1936 in New York, is the author of nine highly acclaimed novels including Great Jones Street, Players, Ratner's Star, Running Dog, and The Names (all available in Vintage Contemporaries editions).