by Don DeLillo
“We can bring anything we want as long as it’s humble and meatless.”
“Can we not bring this blanket? Can we bring a different blanket? I don’t like this one. It makes me think of dead baby rabbits.”
“It’s been in my family for generations.”
“The way you say some things. I actually believe you. I think you’re serious. Then it hits me that something’s not right. Can I bring my book again?”
“Of course.”
“Can I wear my orange dress that you like so much?”
“You look like an explosion over the desert. Yes, you can wear it.”
“Can I bring my tarot cards with me?”
“Of course you can. Absolutely. It’s a picnic.”
“Thank you, Gary.”
14
MOST LIVES ARE GUIDED by clichés. They have a soothing effect on the mind and they express the kind of widely accepted sentiment that, when peeled back, is seen to be a denial of silence. Their menace is hidden with the darker crimes of thought and language. In the face of death, this menace vanishes altogether. Death is the best soil for cliché. The trite saying is never more comforting, more restful, as in times of mourning. Flowers are set about the room; we stand very close to walls, uttering the lush banalities.
Norgene Azamanian’s name did not seem ridiculous for long. We knew that nothing is too absurd to happen in America. Norgene, the man and the name, soon became ordinary, no less plausible than refrigerators or bibles or the names for these objects. When he died, of injuries sustained in an automobile accident, we repeated certain phrases to each other and dedicated our next game to his memory. A local minister called him a fallen warrior. An article in the school paper quoted the president, Mrs. Tom Wade, as saying that his untimely death at the age of twenty-one would serve as a tragic reminder that our destiny is in the hands of a Being or Force dwelling beyond the scope of man’s reason. Norgene wasn’t a very good football player. But death had overwhelmed even his mediocrity and we conspired with his passing to make him gigantic. For many of us it was a first experience with death. We believed the phrases. He was indeed a fallen warrior; we were unquestionably reminded of our destinies. We took the field on the night of Norgene’s memorial game and played like magnificent young gods, not out to avenge death but only to honor the dead, to remake memory as a work of art. That was the first half. In the second half the whole game fell apart. There were fights, broken plays, every kind of penalty. We still won easily. But the last hour left a bad taste (as the saying goes) in everyone’s mouth.
Several weeks later, sometime between three and six in the morning, Tom Cook Clark shot himself in the head with an ivory-handled Colt .45. Emmett Creed referred to him in a eulogy as one of the best football minds in the country. He was also a molder of young men and a fine interdenominational example to all those fortunate enough to have been associated with him. Creed himself assumed the deceased man’s responsibilities with the quarterbacks. The wake was held at the funeral home in town because there was nowhere in particular to send the body and no family to send it to. Everyone commented on how good the embalmed corpse looked. This became the theme of the wake. We assembled in the anteroom, clinging to walls, avoiding the center of the room for some reason, and we told each other how good the dead man looked, as if he were not dead at all but only waxed and well-dressed as part of some process of rejuvenation and would soon be buzzed awake, thinner than ever and quite refreshed. We reacted to the impact of death in this way, exchanging comical remarks in all seriousness, consoling each other with handshakes and slogans. Major Staley came to pay his respects. The major commanded the Air Force ROTC unit at the school. He saw me and came over. We shook hands, slowly and delicately, foregoing on this special occasion all intimations of virility.
“I understand he was despondent because of ill health,” the major said.
We heard about the collision right away. It happened only about a quarter of a mile from campus. It was about ten at night. State troopers stood on the road, writing in their little books, copying from each other. They identified Norgene from the contents of his wallet. There were three others dead, one a girl (passenger, female, white). Her legs stuck out of the wreck, terribly white, the only white things in all that blood and swirling red light, the only things quiet in the voices and noise. I wondered who she was. I also wondered why her death seemed more wasteful than the others. I kept looking at her legs. Then I went back to my room, thinking about the extra syllable in the fallen warrior’s Christian name, how it had shamed tradition and brought bad luck.
This was Major Staley’s first year here. His father was the school’s most famous alumnus, a three-letter man and a war hero, one of the crew on the Nagasaki mission. The major was about thirty-eight years old. He taught just one course, Aspects of Modern War. Since I wasn’t part of the cadet wing I had taken to seating myself in the last row, a bit of civilian humility. One day I asked the major how many megatons would have to be contained in the warhead of an antimissile missile in order to guarantee interception of an SS-9 missile with multiple warheads.
“You’d probably need in excess of a two-meg warhead to get the kind of x-ray pulse-intensity you’re talking about.”
I was fascinated by the way the state troopers copied from each other’s little books. One trooper stood writing, another at his shoulder writing what the first one wrote. They checked each other out until it was apparent that they had reached an accord. It was a safeguard against errors and stray facts. There couldn’t possibly be a mistake if they all had the same information.
In my room that night, before falling asleep, I tried to imagine where Tom Cook Clark came from, what he thought, what kind of life he led. I don’t know what made me think of him that particular night. (At that point, of course, he was still alive.) I tried to understand who he was and what made him whoever he Was when he seemed no more than a face, a hat, a certain way of talking. He existed (then). I lay in bed thinking of him as I had thought of only several others in my entire life, all casual acquaintances, blanks more or less. I could guess nothing about him. I could imagine nothing. I could invent nothing. Why did he remain so blank? It made me feel stupid and weak. Perhaps the man had a need to live in another man’s mind. His existence might be threatened if he could not be brought to life in perhaps the only mind that had ever tried to reconstruct him. It was strange that he would kill himself in a matter of weeks. Maybe the failure was mine, the ill health mine, that blank life a kind of notebook in need of somebody else’s facts, those facts a mass of jargon for the military mind, this jargon resembling clichés passed from mourner to mourner in the form of copied notes. But it was just another of my philosophic speculations, to think his life depended on what my mind could make of him, existence turning on a wheel, numerical, nonbuddhist, the notes comforting the notebook, numbers covering the words used to cover silence. He was a scholarly man, I thought (in the anteroom of the funeral home), remembering that he smoked a pipe and did not use profanity.
“Given three warheads per missile and an accuracy factor of a quarter mile, they’d need four to five hundred of the SS-nine classification to achieve first-strike destruction capability of ninety-five percent relative to what we could hit back with in terms of Minuteman counter capacity,” the major added.
Billy Mast, who roomed two doors away from me, worked every night at memorizing a long poem in a language he’d never read before, never spoken, never even heard except in one or two movies. Billy got extremely high marks in everything. Scholastically he ranked in the ninety-ninth percentile. In several of his classes, prorated scoring systems were devised according to the standards he set. Every night he did more work on the elegy. I’d visit him sometimes just to hear the sounds he made, his guttural struggle against those grudging consonants. He liked to hit his desk with both hands as he recited. Billy’s course in the untellable was restricted to ten students. Knowledge of German was a prerequisite for being refused admis
sion.
Closing my eyes, finally, on the night of the accident, I wanted to dream that I put my hand between the dead girl’s legs. Arousals of guilt had considerable appeal to me, particularly on waking. I liked to lie in bed, viewing after-images of morbid sex and trying to apportion guilt between the conscious mind and the unconscious. But that night’s sleep turned out to be a restless one, empty of remembered dreams.
15
“WHO WAS THE GREATER MAN?” Bloomberg said. “You get just one try. Sir Francis Drake or the prophet Isaiah? Take your time answering. It’s not as obvious as it seems.”
“How can you compare them?” Andy Chudko said. “They were in two different fields.”
“The answer seems obvious only at first. Be very careful.”
“I don’t think it seems obvious at all,” Chudko said.
I stood in the doorway. Bloomberg and Andy Chudko occupied the beds. Anatole was supine, two pillows beneath his head, hands folded on his chest. Chudko sat on my bed, facing the doorway, his right foot (extended to infinity) at a 45-degree angle to the door (when closed). I noted other angles, elevations, intervals, and then situated myself carefully on the chair by the window, between the beds, facing past both men toward the open doorway, toward the corridor or trade route. Chudko’s head and torso met without benefit of a neck. His whole body in fact seemed welded, part joined to part in bursts of heat and pressure. His silver guitar was on the other chair, the chair by the door.
“I don’t understand you, Bloomers. Gary, you room with this guy. What do you make of him?”
“Our next secretary of defense.”
“My roommate will be glad to hear that I’m off my diet as of an hour ago. I think he’ll rejoice in that.”
“I do. I definitely approve.”
“I’ve seen my mistake,” Bloomberg said. “I thought I would become more efficient if I ate less. I thought the discipline of dieting would be good for me, It would make me quicker in body and therefore quicker in mind. It would give me a sense of physical definition and therefore of spiritual awareness. This was all wrong. I thought I would feel better if I weighed less. I thought I would have more respect for myself. I thought I’d gain in self-assurance and in the general loftiness of my ideals. None of this happened. It was all part of the Jewish thing, you see. I thought the self-control of dieting would lead to the self-control needed to unjew myself. But it didn’t work out that way. As I lost weight, as I continued to struggle against food and its temptations, I began to lose the idea of myself. I was losing the idea of my body, who it belonged to, what exactly it was, where all the different parts of it were located, what it looked like from different angles and during the various times of the day and evening. I was losing the most important part of my being. Obesity. What I had considered self-control was really self-indulgence. To make me pretty. To give me quick feet. I realize now that these things aren’t important, that they’re nothing compared with my individual reality. I dropped to two-ninety, then to two eighty-two. My self-awareness started to fade. It was a terrible shedding of the skin. I was losing more and more of myself. I was losing more of the old body and more of the newly acquired mind. If this disappearance were to continue, I would soon be left with only one thing. Gentlemen, I allude to my Jewishness. This is the subsoil, as it were, of my being. It would be the only thing left and I would be, in effect, a fourteen-year-old Jewish boy once more. Would I start telling silly jokes about my mother? Would I put some of that old ghetto rhythm in my voice — jazz it up a little? Would the great smelly guilt descend on me? I don’t want to hear a word about the value of one’s heritage. I am a twentieth-century individual. I am working myself up to a point where I can exist beyond guilt, beyond blood, beyond the ridiculous past. Thank goodness for America. In this country there’s a chance to accomplish such a thing. I want to look straight ahead. I want to see things clearly. I’d like to become single-minded and straightforward in the most literal sense of those words. History is no more accurate than prophecy. I reject the wrathful God of the Hebrews. I reject the Christian God of love and money, although I don’t reject love itself or money itself. I reject heritage, background, tradition and birthright. These things merely slow the progress of the human race. They result in war and insanity, war and insanity, war and insanity.”
I got up and closed the door. Then I returned to the chair by the window. I turned it around and sat with my arms over the back of the chair. I faced the closed door. Bloomberg raised his right arm, maintaining that position — body supine, one arm bent across his chest, second arm in the air — for the length of the ensuing narration. He appeared mad, an imprisoned prophet or a figure in a very old painting, a man about to die, his last word spoken to a finger tip of light.
“As the world’s ranking authority on environmental biomedicine, I have been asked to lend the weight of my opinion to yet another tense seminar on the future of the earth. My friends, there is nothing to fear. Soon we’ll harvest the seas, colonize the planets, control every aspect of the weather. We’ll develop nuclear reactors to provide the English-speaking world with unlimited energy, safely and cheaply. Our radio astronomers will communicate with beings at the very ends of the universe. We’ll build hydraulic robots to make automation obsolete. We’ll manufacture plastic lungs and brains. We’ll reprogram human cells with new genetic information to wipe out inherited disease. Obsolescence itself will become obsolete. We’ll recycle everything. Shoes to food. Candles to paper. Rocks to light bulbs. The philosophical question has been asked: what will become of death? Gentlemen, I have the answer right here. The sealed envelope please.”
Andy Chudko looked at me. He got up, took the guitar from the chair by the door and then opened the door and left, closing it behind him. Bloomberg began to speak again. I was sorry Chudko hadn’t left the guitar. In some obscure way, its presence would have been a comfort.
16
THE MOTEL was about two miles from campus. I walked out there along the edge of the road. Fragments of glass flared in the sun. I passed a number of dead animals, just scraps of fur now, small pieces of flesh completely macadamized, part of the highway. Finally I reached the motel. It was a gray building, barely distinguishable from the land around it. Major Staley had been staying there since the school year began. I didn’t know what kind of car the major drove so I went into the office and got his room number from an old woman half-asleep over a bowl of Shredded Wheat. The major had a towel in his hands when he came to the door. He was wearing his uniform trousers and shirt, the shirt unbuttoned and outside the pants, sleeves rolled up around the forearms. Some blue ROTC manuals were stacked on a table. Above the bed was a three-dimensional picture of mountains.
*
“Wife and kids are still up in Colorado. I sure as hell miss them. I hope to have them down here real soon now. Our house should be ready in ten days. I’ve lived in more places than a stray cat.”
*
“There’s a kind of theology at work here. The bombs are a kind of god. As his power grows, our fear naturally increases. I get as apprehensive as anyone else, maybe more so. We have too many bombs. They have too many bombs. There’s a kind of theology of fear that comes out of this. We begin to capitulate to the overwhelming presence. It’s so powerful. It dwarfs us so much. We say let the god have his way. He’s so much more powerful than we are. Let it happen, whatever he ordains. It used to be that the gods punished men by using the forces of nature against them or by arousing them to take up their weapons and destroy each other. Now god is the force of nature itself, the fusion of tritium and deuterium. Now he’s the weapon. So maybe this time we went too far in creating a being of omnipotent power. All this hardware. Fantastic stockpiles of hardware. The big danger is that we’ll surrender to a sense of inevitability and start flinging mud all over the planet.”
*
“We’re talking about a one-megaton device. All right, you’re standing nine miles from ground zero. If it’s a clear day, you ge
t second-degree burns. Guaranteed. One hundred megs, you may as well forget it. If you were seventy-five miles out, you’d still get second-degree. Depending on the variables, your house might even ignite. That’s just the first flash. After that comes the firestorm, like Tokyo, like Hamburg, like Dresden, like Hiroshima. Structurally the older cities in the U.S. are very susceptible to firestorms. Building density is high and combustible material per building is high. Tucson might escape a firestorm. New York, Baltimore, Boston — forget it. Nagasaki didn’t get too much burn. They had a low density and the wind was blowing right. Hamburg was something else. Hamburg was a hot place to be. Over a thousand degrees Fahrenheit if you can imagine what that’s like. They found bodies naked except for shoes. That was heat that did that, not fire. Heat disintegrated the clothes. They found bodies shrunken, dry as paper. That was the intense heat. The other thing in a firestorm is carbon monoxide.”
*
“I’ve had a checkered career at best.”
*
“I think what’ll happen in the not-too-distant future is that we’ll have humane wars. Each side agrees to use clean bombs. And each side agrees to limit the amount of megatons he uses. In other words we’ll get together with them beforehand and there’ll be an agreement that if the issue can’t be settled, whatever the issue might be, then let’s make certain we keep our war as relatively humane as possible. So we agree to use clean stuff. And we actually specify the number of megatons; let’s just say hypothetically one thousand megs for each side. So then what we’ve got is a two-thousand-megaton war. We might go further and say we’ll leave your cities alone if you leave ours alone. We make it strictly counterforce. So right off the bat you avoid the fallout hazard and millions of bonus kills, or deaths from fallout. And at the same time you eliminate city-trading and punishing strikes against the general population. Of course the humanistic mind crumbles at the whole idea. It’s the most hideous thing in the world to these people that such ideas even have to be mentioned. But the thing won’t go away. The thing is here and you have to face it. The prospect of a humane war may be hideous and all the other names you can think of, but it’s still a prospect. And as an alternative to all the other things that could happen in the event of war, it’s relatively acceptable. My fellow coliberals are always the first to jump all over me when I talk about something like humane warfare. But the thing has to be considered. People close their minds. They think nuclear war has to be insensate, both sides pushing all the buttons and the whole thing is over in two hours. In reality it’s likely to be very deliberate, very cautious, a kind of thing that’s almost fought in slow motion. And the limited humane variant is the most acceptable. Negotiations could easily take that turn. A war may have to be fought; it may be unavoidable in terms of national pride or to avoid blackmail or for a number of other reasons. And negotiations, whatever remains of negotiations, whatever talking is still going on, this could easily lead both countries to the humane war idea as the least damaging kind of thing in the face of all the variants. So they hit our military and industrial targets with any number of bombs and missiles totaling one thousand megatons and we do the same to them. There’d be all sorts of controls. You’d practically have a referee and a timekeeper. Then it would be over and you’d make your damage assessment. The sensing devices go to work. The magnetic memory drums are tapped. The computers figure out damage and number of casualties. Recovery time is estimated. We wouldn’t be the same strong industrial society after one thousand megs but our cities would still be standing and the mortality rate would be in the fairly low percentiles, about eight to twelve percent. With no fallout in the atmosphere, or a relatively minimum amount, we’d have no problems with environmental stress, with things like temperature changes, erosion, droughts, insect devastation, and we’d avoid the radiation diseases by and large, the infections, the genetic damage. So we’d get going again relatively soon. It wouldn’t be nearly as bad as most people might expect. On the other hand this entire concept is full of flaws.”