by Don DeLillo
After class Myna invited Zapalac to our picnic that afternoon. I collected my mail and went to my room. Bloomberg was silently asleep, curled about the pillow in a dream. There was a letter in my father’s handwriting. It concerned my trip home at Christmastime, still about a month away.
Flying is easy if you keep alert and know what you’re doing. When you get to the Midland-Odessa airport, go straight to the ticket counter of the airline you’re flying. If the airport there is too small to have separate ticket counters, go to the single all-purpose counter. All right, you’re at the counter now. You hand the person the ticket and you put your suitcase on the weight machine. (Carry your ticket in the inside left pocket of your jacket. That’s the best place because you’re right-handed and you’ll be able to reach it easier. It’s also safe from anybody with ideas on their mind. They go looking for credit cards to steal mostly. You don’t have one yet.) The airline employee will write on your ticket and stamp some things on it purely for airline use and then he’ll give you back the ticket and tell you the gate number to go to. Go at once to that gate. If you fool around and start exploring the airport or wandering off somewhere like you always do, you’re going to miss your plane. So head for the gate right off the bat and avoid headaches later on. If you have trouble finding the gate, ask someone in authority. That usually means uniformed personnel. When you find the gate, you give your ticket to the man on duty and he sends you aboard the plane. (Your luggage is already on.) Try to get a window seat so you can look out. Don’t go to the bathroom until after the plane takes off. Follow similar procedures to the above-mentioned at the Dallas and NYC airports. We’ll be at the airport in Saranac Lake to meet you when you land. If there’s any foul-up, I’m telling your Aunt Helen where we’ll be. So if you don’t see us, call your Aunt Helen and she’ll know where we are. She’s staying home that day on purpose. Don’t forget to ask her about her wisdom tooth. And be sure you carry some kind of identification in case of a crash.
For some reason the letter was signed by my mother (Love, Mom). I put it away and got the dictionary. It was time to add a new word to my vocabulary. My word for the day was apotheosis. I looked out the window and repeated to myself the word and its meaning. I used it in three different sentences. I liked the word. It was a particularly beautiful word to be memorizing while looking across the smoldering flannel plain to the tender seam of earth and sky. It was a word lavish with sunlight, with the gods’ gladsome songs, the golden power of the sun. I got a blanket and went out to meet Myna.
We ate some fruit and discussed Mexico. She seemed serious about going. She wanted to live in a house that jutted out over a high crag, a house with gardens inside and out. We’d grow our own food, get high whenever we wanted, and read the lives of the saints to each other through the terrifying nights. Zapalac joined us then, loudly, dropping to the blanket as if expecting a sudden burst of small-arms fire. His face split into a warm smile, teeth creamy and even, a filament of spittle fluttering between upper and lower sets.
“I’m glad to be here,” he said. “With me it’s a constant and never-ending race to get from someplace of no particular distinction to someplace where you were better off before you got there. But this is different. A real, an actual picnic.”
“We do it a lot,” Myna said. “It’s nice to get away, even a few yards.”
“This whole place, no exaggeration, is close to unbelievable. From the first day I arrived I figured any minute now the word will go out and everybody will wake up one morning and get out of bed and put on a uniform, an actual military uniform, because everybody will know that the word is out, everybody but me, and they’ll see me walking around in my frayed two-button suit that I’ve worn since high school with moths circling me like vultures ever since and they’ll stand me up at a very choice spot against the nearest wall and let me have it. Granted I’m a little bit paranoid. But I’ve got a nose for terror. I can sense it. I can hear the engines revving. Still, I like it better here than in the Midwest where I was teaching last and where I came across nothing but insanely neat, well-groomed and punctual Republicans. It nearly killed me, the sight of them all, because I get a lift out of, if anything, the confusions, the potential for disorganization in things and people. But my wife is from the Midwest, my wife-to-be if we ever get to see each other again in order to get married, meaning who knows when they’ll put on their uniforms and feed me to the dingo dogs out there or whatever they’re called, and she’s just like the rest of them so I think a certain amount of unpredictability is going to be introduced into her life that she didn’t know was lurking on the back steps. Those people know their place. They’re masters of the categories of things. They’ve been raised to believe everything they’re told by their elders. They do things in alphabetical order. They know their place. They’ve known it since early childhood. Drummed into them by respectable parents. The same people who are ripping up the forests with their engines, their money-building machines. But imagine. To respect your elders. It’s remarkable, isn’t it?”
“I never forget that they’re the enemy,” Myna said.
“Gary Harkness — is that your name?”
“Right.”
“A football player.”
“That’s right.”
“Fantastic,” Zapalac said. “What I wouldn’t give to be an ace quarterback for the Denver Broncos. I love sports. I love football. I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don’t need substitutes because we’ve got the real thing. Football is discipline. It’s team love. It’s reason plus passion. The crowds are fantastic. They jump and scream. Hockey, I love hockey. Basketball, too much sweating goes on where you can see it. It’s a sweating sport, an armpit sport. But football, I love football. I’m crazy for it. I wallow in it.”
“The real needs of man,” I said.
“Fantastic,” he said.
“Have an orange,” Myna said.
“What you were saying earlier about what scares you. Where the true danger is. Something about patriotic manifestations.”
“Let me just simply mention flag-waving and the insane repetitive ritualizing that goes on every time a flag is hiked up a pole or some veterans of Gettysburg come hobbling along with their medals, their stickpins, their poppies, their flags, their hats, their banners, their bumper stickers, or some simple sports event where you look up suddenly and there’s sixteen thousand Shriners and Masons with their comical Turkish hats and they’re covering every inch of the playing field with, in the middle of them all, three hundred and eighty-five high school girls dressed in red, white and blue who are prostrating themselves on the cold earth as they assume the shape of an American flag being dragged through yak dung by syphilitic foreign students and off to the side there’s some crippled television personality in a wheelchair and pulleys singing the national anthem as the cystic fibrosis child of the month poses in the nude for the cover of Life. I tend to worry about such spectacles.”
“Back in my hometown I took a walk one morning and I kept seeing the same word everywhere I went. Store windows. Leaflets in the street. Advertising space on walls. I kept seeing it for about two weeks. MILITARIZE. It was everywhere — printed, written, scribbled, chalked on walls. I didn’t know what it was all about.”
“I would have gone into hiding,” Zapalac said. “That kind of word, I would have taken food and water and gone into the mountains.”
“I would have gone to Mexico,” Myna said. “Here, eat this orange, Zap.”
“That kind of word, I don’t hang around to find out what it all means. I’m a little guy. I look slightly Oriental. I look a little bit Mexican. I’ve been taken for an Iraqi and I’ve been taken for a Jew. I don’t trust a place where that kind of i-z-e word appears. I-z-e words make me nervous. I go underground. I go into the mountains.”
“I’d go running to Canada or Mexico,” Myna said. “I’d buy a big house and let everybody stay there who’s running away from the i-z-e people. We’d
eat chili and nectarines. We’d take care of each other.”
“But if you want to know the truth,” Zapalac said, “I don’t worry about my size at all except as it relates to my inability to gain ace quarterback status with the Denver Broncos. I really want that job. I think about it a lot.”
“Size is a big factor,” I said.
“Regrettably.”
“Tall quarterbacks are in demand because they can peer over the curvature of the earth in order to spot their receivers.”
“Fantastic,” he said. “From now on, you’re my personal bodyguard. When the oilmen and sheriffs form their inevitable posse and come riding after me with thundering hoofbeats, be there in full battle regalia. I’ve got a class to get to now. Thanks for the orange and try not to be afraid.”
Myna ate bean sprouts and drank a can of Afro-Cola. I stuck to fruit. She was wearing her orange dress appliquéd with white atomic mushroom. A beetle moved across the edge of the blanket and I got to my feet and stood off to the side until it was gone. Myna looked at me.
“I hate sudden movements,” I said. “It startled me for just a second. I didn’t know what it was.”
“My brother used to eat them,” she said.
“Oh my God.”
“Sit down and relax, Gary. Listen to this idea I’ve got. Vera half-got it, kind of, and I got the rest. It’s for your last game. It’s a scientific experiment. An audio-visual-sensory-type thing.”
“What is it?”
“Smoke some dope before the game.”
“They’d kill me.”
“Tell what’s-his-thing not to give you the ball. The big jerk. The one who calls the plays.”
“Hobbs.”
“Tell him not to give you the ball. You could just stand off to the side and observe what it all looks like. I bet it would look wild, Gary. All that running and the colors. Would it be speeded up or slowed down? Would your sensory parts function in terms of football or dope? You wouldn’t have to carry the ball.”
“Ball or no ball, I’d get killed. I’d have no coordination. I’d just stand there and get hit. They’d kill me. They’d tear me to pieces.”
“I guess you’re right. It’s better not to take chances. But it would have been tremendous to observe all that action from close up and being high.”
“There’s no tension in our relationship,” I said.
“Where did that come from? What do you mean? Now don’t talk that way, Gary. You know the way I am when it comes to us. I’m too emotional to just sit here and talk about our relationship. That’s a horrible word anyway.”
“I was just fooling around. Probing for a sense of definition. How’s your book coming along?”
“This book is an unbelievable book. I don’t know what else to say. Do you want to hear what it’s all about?”
“I don’t think so.”
“It’s the last part of a trilogy by Tudev Nemkhu, that Mongolian I mentioned once before. It’s a whole total experience, Gary. I’ll just tell you one or two little things about it.”
“How little?”
“These half-mollusk creatures called nautiloids inhabit a tiny planet in a galaxy not too far from here. The planet has just one ocean. It’s a big round circle of liquid and gases. That’s where the nautiloids live. The rest of the planet is barren except for one small mountain. There’s no surface life whatsoever. There’s just the nautiloids in the ocean. The nautiloids, who are about twice human-size, communicate with each other through some intricate ESP number system that the author spends almost two chapters on but that’s way over my head but still tremendous to read if only because it kills me to think how anybody could think of this thing. I forgot to tell you, Gary. There’s a thick hard foam that encases the planet about fifty miles above the surface. So anyway one day without warning there’s a disturbance in the nautiloids’ system of communication. Their numerical language gets all garbled. They can’t communicate properly and they get very disoriented and panic-stricken Some of them start coming up out of the ocean. Then more of them come up. They crawl over the land. They’re all in a state of panic. Then one of them goes into a fantastic spasm and breaks out of its shell. At the very second this happens, the thick foam around the planet also breaks. Then there’s silence everywhere. Oh, I forgot to tell you. The mountain is completely uneroded. It’s triangular in shape. And because of its strange configuration, if you were to walk completely around it you would always see the same flat plane in the shape of a triangle. So the nautiloids go back to the ocean. All but the one that broke out of its shell. It stays there on the ground until finally something comes pouring through the break in the planet’s outer crust. It’s powdery black light. It’s a form of electromagnetic radiation that’s semi-black and has weird texture. The author spends dozens of pages on this part. So then the light becomes sort of infused into the complex brain apparatus of the nautiloid. The creature’s form begins to change. The black light continues to wash over the creature for what we would call many centuries but what in cosmic terms is just an eyelash blinking. The creature’s body becomes incredible. Tudev Nemkhu almost doesn’t even want to describe it. Finally he does it but only in terms of chemical formulas, mathematical equations and statements from formal logic which I think are all supposed to be really true and documented and not just made up. So there’s this creature that’s been formed of the landscape itself through the power of this black light. It’s almost an abstract being. It’s barren of features or really of any kind of distinguishing elements. I guess it’s hard for people with arms and legs to conceive of this thing. The thing is visible but not really describable except in scientific terms. But it’s not just a blob or a bunch of protons. It’s a mass of equations and formulas rendered into some kind of tangible form. The thing’s shape changes a million times every millionth of a second. That gives you some idea. And its brain is slowly evolving into phases of light and nonlight.”
“What does that mean?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “But then everything begins to double. Within the thing’s brain mechanism there are now two landscapes perceived by two mechanisms. The thing sees itself seeing what is outside it being seen by itself. As Tudev Nemkhu explains it, this duplication results in the making of words. Each likeness is a word rather than a thing. When the word is imprinted on the thing’s original mechanism, the likeness that was the word’s picture instantaneously disappears. The thing’s brain keeps on producing likenesses and then delivering words into its own circuitry. The thing perceives everything into itself. It duplicates perceptions and then reduplicates the results. The author finally gives the thing a name. The thing becomes monadanom — the thing that’s everything. It keeps making likenesses to make words. The words have no meaning. They’re just fragments of cosmic language. So everything is existing inside this complex brain apparatus that was formerly based on a numerical system and that now is guided by phases of light and nonlight, or something pretty much like that. And this duplication goes on and on for what we would call millenniums until suddenly without warning one of the words erases itself. The brain didn’t order this and doesn’t comprehend it. The word just erased itself. It no longer exists. There is no record of it.”
“What about the triangular mountain?” I said.
“That’s as far as I’ve gotten. I guess the mountain turns up again in the ending. I forgot to tell you one other thing. The thick foam around the planet is an organic self-healing thing. The crack is slowly closing up again.”
“Monadanom,” I said.
“That’s right.”
“And this guy’s a Mongolian.”
“That’s right, Gary. But he writes in German instead of Mongol. The translation leaves a lot to be desired. Which reminds me. Vera wants a sample of your handwriting.”
“What for?”
“Vera’s into psychographology and character analysis. It’s all related to early Mayan forms of astrology. Esther’s into bottled water.”
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