by Don DeLillo
“Tell me if I’m right,” I said. “You were here the night there was a party here. Whole place full of people. You smoked a pipe. You were the professor of latent history. You talked about that a while. Tell me if I’m right about that.”
“Ill tell you why I was here, Buck. I was here to check on the young lady’s credentials. At that point I didn’t know the product was in your possession. But I did know the identity of Happy Valley’s chief agent. So being I was in town and being I knew about the little shindig through various local sources, I thought I’d drop on by. I wanted to make the young lady’s acquaintance, get the first foothold in the bargaining process. Unhappily, never got to say a word to her. She retired early, faded away in the midst of all that smoke.”
“I remember.”
“Just scouting out the premises. I like to do that, earliest opportunity. Same as I was doing when you and I first met.”
“We met the same night you came to meet Opel.”
“Earlier,” he said. “I knew you’d been in touch with Happy Valley. Wanted to scout out the whole neighborhood, including your place. Just a quick look around, swish-swish, in and out, to get my bearings.”
“When was this?”
“I was the brush salesman. I came around with a sample case and some patter about mutilation and exchange rates.”
“Gaw-damn.”
“An old, a very old routine of mine. Thought I’d dust it off and try it, being I was here in town.”
“I was told you didn’t travel anymore,” I said.
“I’ll tell you how word got out on that. I leaked that particular word. Have to keep people off balance. If you let people maintain their balance, there’s any number of things likely to happen, the likeliest of which is that you lose the edge. Operations of this kind are a matter of balance and edge. I still travel. I like slipping in and out. Like corning to New York four, five times a year.”
“Not me,” Menefee said. “I have to load up on dope every time we come to New York. I stoke myself like a coal-burning engine. New York is too real. It’s just about the realest thing there is in the observable universe.”
“We’re growing a race of giants here,” I said. “This fact isn’t clear yet but will be one day soon. Men, women and children. All giants. Prepared to eat glass and punch their way through concrete.”
“I stoke up, man. I mix me some weird concoctions. That’s the only way I can survive this kind of realness.”
“I like traveling close to the ground,” Dr. Pepper said. “Getting to know the road people. The drifters. The pure products. I can recall Roy Best, a legendary banjo player who was working for a perforating company when I ran across him. Bushwick Perforating, Roy Best. Another legend about that time was Vincent T. Skinner, habitue of the billiard parlors, a whole anthropological culture in itself, Vinny Skinny, sold pool tables door to door because he loved the game, Vincent T. Skinner, froze to death in the middle of summer when he went to sleep in a refrigerated packing house between shifts. Mylon Ware, the mad dog folk singer, a near legend. James Radley, nutritionist, a legend many times over. The semi-legendary disc jockey, Howard Mud Stump Meegan, a man who wore white socks every day of his life because his feet were allergic to colored dyes. Bobby Boy Todd, a free spirit who worked as a dispatcher for a bus company, dispatching buses until he quit to travel, just travel, nothing but travel, spent his days and nights traveling, a free spirit, a legend of travel, married a half-breed girl and on his wedding day fractured both legs riding a kid’s tricycle down a ravine. Why are free spirits always so fucking dumb? Rosalee Dowdy, the comic book queen, a legend and a half. Tristan Bramble, folklorist and musicologist, busted for possession nine times, an important early influence. Earlene Griffin, the r-and-b arranger, a seminal figure. Just last night at the Port Authority Bus Terminal where I hike to hang out when I’m in New York, I ran into Vernon Kliegl and Mary Kliegl, the husband and wife midgets who became legends in the late fifties for department store pilferage. They’re more or less retired now, living on deferred income. Stone drunk when I ran into them. Hanging all over each other. I called them but they were too drunk to hear me. So I followed them toward the down escalator. The down escalator as it turns out was not running at all, out of order, stalled. The Kliegls are standing there on the top step, too drunk to know they’re not moving. The up escalator is working fine and about a hundred people go gliding past the Kliegls before Mary Kliegl realizes they’ve been stationary all this while and begins punching Vernon Kliegl on the arm and chest, demanding to know what the hell is going on. A smile creases my face. I choose this moment to get them off the escalator. Vernon recognizes me right away and we shake hands and start talking about this and that. I’m aware all the while we’re talking that Mary Kliegl is looking up at me and squinting, too drunk to know who I am. She resumes her battering of Vernon’s arm and chest, all the time squealing out at him: ‘Who is that, who is he, do we know him?’ I finally had to cut the conversation short for the sake of Vernon Kliegl’s physical well-being. She wouldn’t even let me explain who I was. Midgets are clannish people.”
His hands were set flat on the table. All through the narrative there was no change in his expression. I knew those people were out there. The pure so-called products. Found dead near railroad tracks or shipped in bulk to the warehouses of the certifiably insane. Pepper nevertheless seemed to be reciting for mere exercise. Maybe he was giving this particular identity a workout, stretching its muscles, adding a furlong to its distance. To my ear there were no defects in the unstressed delivery of his voice.
“What happens now?” I said.
“Eventually I want to package the stuff in twenty-five-milligram green capsules. Mean green beans. Too early to work out pricing.”
“But you don’t have the sample. Hanes has it.”
“That’s why I’m here, Buck. Hanes won’t be able to unload the product easy as all that. Hanes doesn’t know about balance and edge. The kid’s untried and untested, a pissy little babe among the timber wolves. He doesn’t have any up-top connections and he doesn’t know what it’s like out there, although by this time he’s maybe finding out. He’ll be back is my guess. He can’t stay out there indefinitely without putting himself in grave danger. This whole business qualifies as high risk. If he survives at all, back here is the first place he’ll come. I’m all but convinced of that. Hell put the thing back where he got it from. That’s the first instinct of the trapped man. Meanwhile I’ll be close by. Ill be keeping an eye on things. I’ll be in touch.”
“I may not be here,” I said.
“Buck, I want this product badly. This may be my last venture in the field of drugs and drug abuse. I crave new frontiers. There’s a craving in my breast for the uncharted spaces and territories of the human mind. Energy. I want to tap untapped fields of energy. Dope is okay. Dope is the power of the earth, the use of earth products to dig deeper into the earthen parts of the mind. But energy is the power of the universe. I want to tap that power. I see masses of people changing their energy patterns by controlling bio-rhythms from the basic frequencies of the universe. Stereo electrodes. Control of internal changes. I envision abuses, of course. I envision mail-order ads in the rear extremities of men’s magazines. Cures cancer in seconds I Adds inches to your cock! But that kind of booshit’s inevitable and I can’t take time to worry about it, much as it grieves me in the professional sense. I’m already semi-involved in a process I call the process of centrifugalism. Stereo electrodes. Blood-pressure impactors. What I call the auto-domination of the inner mind.”
“I’ve got problems right now that don’t have anything to do with you or Hanes or the universe.”
“I want to end this phase of my career with a technical and merchandising feat that goes beyond the legendary. You and I, friend, are the only two people in positions of trust. Once the product is returned, we’ll go into deep consultation. Where there’s money to be made and legends to be created, I don’t leave anyt
hing to chance and it strikes me as boding well for the future of our partnership that you’ve been wooed by other agencies of the underground without releasing the product. But accept a word of caution. This operation is fraught with danger. Bohack is not a man to be trifled with. He’s an edgy gent with all kinds of deliveries. Some reasonable. Some not so.”
“Who the hell is Bohack?”
“Pffff.”
“What?” I said.
“He laughed,” Menefee said. “That’s the way he laughs. Pffff. Pffff-pffff. It took me months before I caught on. For months I thought he was blowing loose threads off my shirt.”
In his toxic glee Menefee repeatedly bumped his chin on the edge of the table. Finally he told me that Bohack was the name of the man who commanded one of Happy Valley’s two camps. As both men rose I heard the pneumatic drill jabbing into stone. Then Dr. Pepper took a pair of glasses from the inside pocket of his suit coat. With a disposable tissue he rubbed the lenses, held them to the light and then carefully fitted the glasses over his ears and nose. They were dark glasses with heavy black frames. A touch of comic paranoia, I thought. One disguise covering another. The touring clown doubly self-effaced.
19
OPEL AND I made love once in the anechoic chamber in the mountains. I thought of this as I lay in bed, unable to sleep. What were we like then, in that time and space, unburdened of the weight of outer sound? We were like angels harboring each other in the notion of desireless-ness, dazed in our acquiescence to this drift through subatomic matter. The love of minds should last beyond lives. Maybe it does, each mind a dice-toss of neutron stars, invisible except to theory, pulling at cold space to find its lover. Opel never returned to the chamber because the wedge-shaped baffles made her think of bats hanging in a cave.
I took the number of steps necessary to get from the bed to the door. No one was there. I picked up a magazine and tried to read a column of print, getting to the second line before I had to stop because of the pressure behind my eyes. Molten water dripped from the pipe connected to the radiator, bleaching the wood floor. It was almost daylight, snow on the way, the phone squatting on the stacked phone books, the firemen breathing in the firehouse. I went to the door again. A young black woman stood in the hall, legs well apart, hands on hips. She was arrayed in burnishings and pleated streaks, and there was a trim glitter about her, a commercial grace, evident in the seamless way she shifted weight to orchestrate a sort of stylish body violence. I stood there in old shorts and dirty toenails. Azarian came up the stairs then. We went inside, where he took a chair and I got into bed. The woman remained in the open doorway. For the first time in three days I felt it was possible to sleep.
“The group broke up,” Azarian said. “As a group we no longer exist. We officially broke up.”
“Who’s the nice lady?”
“Security,” he said. “Her name’s Epiphany Powell. Maybe you’ve heard of her. She used to sing, she used to model, she used to act. Now she’s doing security. The group broke up. We no longer exist as a group. Of course there wasn’t any real hope once you left. Still and all it’s frightening. Nobody was really prepared for it. But it happened. We no longer exist in the old sense.”
“As of when?”
“I heard it on the radio coming in from the airport. When I left L.A., things were still in flux. Nothing was decided to the point where we could come out and say we’ve reached a decision. But I guess we broke up because I heard it on the radio. It sounded pretty official. Who has final word in these matters?”
“The radio,” I said.
“A lot of it was my doing,” he said. “I got heavily involved in black music. Not performing or producing. Just listening. That old showcase stuff with everybody in shiny clothes and pomaded hair. Brushed drums, piano, sax breaks. ‘Baby don’t you know that I love you so.’ I’m into that sound, Bucky, and I can’t get out. After all these years I realize that’s the only sound I really love. So I neglected the band and now we no longer exist as a group. The little dance routines they do. Hands flashing out, feet gliding, bodies whirling so smoothly. Romantic soul music done by immortal groups. The Infatuations. The Tailfins. The Splendifics. ‘It’s a hurtin’ pain you give me, babe, but I’m fightin’ for my love.’ It’s all love and sorrow, Bucky, and it just about destroys me emotionally. The crude dumb emotion, it’s so incredibly beautiful. Sorrowful ballads with occasional falsetto passages. And even when I’m just listening to records I can see them moving on stage, doing the little whirls and gliding steps, flashing out their hands. Shiny bright hair. Custom tuxedos. Fantastic teeth and fingernails. And the cheap emotion behind the lyrics just wrecks me. The Motelles. The Vanities. The Willows. The Renditions. The Flairs. Nate Pearce and the Hydromatics. ‘Baby can’t you see how you’re upsettin’ me, shoo-eee, shoo-eee.’ Everything is there, Bucky. There’s nothing else I want or need.”
“Where’s Globke? Have any idea?”
“We haven’t been in touch at all. Globke? Not at all.”
“Where’s Hanes?” I said.
“I never talk to Hanes. Globke’s office boy? I never talk to him.”
“I’m almost ready to make a move. But I need a certain item.”
“Bucky, the people I front for are a business-oriented group. They know how to handle the item in question. They’re not a bunch of knife-wielding dope fiends. They don’t stockpile explosives. They’re a force in the community. They’re known on the street and they’re known in the smoke-filled rooms and the corner offices.”
“But are they known in the ladies’ lounge? Are they known in the organ lofts and the prehistoric caves?”
“You said you’re ready to make a move. Move into what?”
“The claustrophobia of vast spaces. Noise, echoes, noise. Not knowing which is which. People flaming out in the four-dollar seats.”
“Are you afraid?”
“It’s the only thing to do,” I said. “Absolutely necessary to make the move. I’m betraying an idea I only half understand. But it’s necessary. I’m betraying this room and these objects. But it has to be done. In that sense I’m afraid. I feel immense and heavy. I feel as though I’m being towed out of a hangar.”
“There’s nothing more frightening than the immensity and weight of blackness,” Azarian said. “It’s just so incredibly heavy. Getting into it is like sinking into tons of funky cement in order to arrive at some historical point where you can see who you are and who they are and how you’ve been historicized by the journey. Blackness has a hard firm smell all its own. It’s like walking into a room in one of the Arab nations and all these guys in burnooses and sandals are standing around in the dimness and they’re all smoking hashish and saying things you don’t understand and everything smells of hash and unfamiliar feet and the tremendous intense weight of strange centuries. Centuries we never experienced. I don’t know how I can make you feel the weight and heaviness. The smell that’s both metallic and organic. The slowness of everything. The indifference of the black experience to the person who’s trying to seek it out. It’s the weightiest of all trips. I guarantee you. It’s intense beyond belief. It’s harder than the hardest drugs.”
“The product isn’t here. I don’t know where it is. Happy Valley doesn’t know where it is either. There’s no business to be done.”
“They’ll give you first of all a bonus. Second a percentage. Third the option to invest You get the bonus no matter how marketable the product turns out to be. They’re putting pressure on me, Bucky. I’d like to resolve this thing.”