by Don DeLillo
The library was deserted during the break. I entered with a keycard and took a novel by Dostoevsky down from the shelves. I placed the book on a table and opened it and then leaned down into the splayed pages, reading and breathing. We seemed to assimilate each other, the characters and I, and when I raised my head I had to tell myself where I was.
I knew where my father was—in Beijing, trying to wedge his securities firm into the Chinese century. My mother was adrift, possibly in the Florida Keys with a former boyfriend named Raúl. My father pronounced it raw-eel, like a thing you eat with your eyes closed.
In snowfall, the town looked ghosted over, dead still at times. I took walks nearly every afternoon and the man in the hooded coat was never far from my mind. I walked up and down the street where he lived and it seemed only fitting that he was not to be seen. This was an essential quality of the place. I began to feel intimate with these streets. I was myself here, able to see things singly and plainly, away from the only life I’d known, the city, stacked and layered, a thousand meanings a minute.
On the stunted commercial street in town there were three places still open for business, one of them the diner, and I ate there once and stuck my head in the door two or three times, scanning the booths. The sidewalk was old pocked bluestone. In the convenience store I bought a fudge bar and talked to the woman behind the counter about her son’s wife’s kidney infection.
At the library I devoured about a hundred pages a sitting, small cramped type. When I left the building the book remained on the table, open to the page where I’d stopped reading. I returned the next day and the book was still there, open to the same page.
Why did this seem magical? Why did I sometimes lie in bed, moments from sleep, and think of the book in the empty room, open to the page where I’d stopped reading?
On one of those midnights, just before classes resumed, I got out of bed and went down the hall to the sun parlor. The area was enclosed by a slanted canopy of partitioned glass and I unlatched a panel and swung it open. My pajamas seemed to evaporate. I felt the cold in my pores, my teeth. I thought my teeth were ringing. I stood and looked, I was always looking. I felt childlike now, responding to a dare. How long could I take it? I peered into the northern sky, the living sky, my breath turning to little bursts of smoke as if I were separating from my body. I’d come to love the cold but this was idiotic and I closed the panel and went back to my room. I paced awhile, swinging my arms across my chest, trying to roil the blood, warm the body, and twenty minutes after I was back in bed, wide awake, the idea came to mind. It came from nowhere, from the night, fully formed, extending in several directions, and when I opened my eyes in the morning it was all around me, filling the room.
Those afternoons the light died quickly and we talked nearly nonstop, race-walking into the wind. Every topic had spectral connections, Todd’s congenital liver condition shading into my ambition to run a marathon, this leading to that, the theory of prime numbers to the living sight of rural mailboxes set along a lost road, eleven standing units, rusted over and near collapse, a prime number, Todd announced, using his cell phone to take a picture.
One day we approached the street where the hooded man lived. This was when I told Todd about the idea I’d had, the revelation in the icy night. I knew who the man was, I said. Everything fit, every element, the man’s origins, his family ties, his presence in this town.
He said, “Okay.”
“First, he’s a Russian.”
“A Russian.”
“He’s here because his son is here.”
“He doesn’t have the bearing of a Russian.”
“The bearing? What’s the bearing? His name could easily be Pavel.”
“No, it couldn’t.”
“Great name possibilities. Pavel, Mikhail, Aleksei. Viktor with a k. His late wife was Tatiana.”
We stopped and looked down the street toward the gray frame house designated as the place where the man lived.
“Listen to me,” I said. “His son lives in this town because he teaches at the college. His name is Ilgauskas.”
I waited for him to be stunned.
“Ilgauskas is the son of the man in the hooded coat,” I said. “Our Ilgauskas. They’re Russian, father and son.”
I pointed at him and waited for him to point back.
He said, “Ilgauskas is too old to be the man’s son.”
“He’s not even fifty. The man is in his seventies, easy. Mid-seventies, most likely. It fits, it works.”
“Is Ilgauskas a Russian name?”
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Somewhere else, somewhere nearby, but not necessarily Russian,” he said.
We stood there looking toward the house. I should have anticipated this kind of resistance but the idea had been so striking that it overwhelmed my cautious instincts.
“There’s something you don’t know about Ilgauskas.”
He said, “Okay.”
“He reads Dostoevsky day and night.”
I knew that he would not ask how I’d come upon this detail. It was a fascinating detail and it was mine, not his, which meant that he would let it pass without comment. But the silence was a brief one.
“Does he have to be Russian to read Dostoevsky?”
“That’s not the point. The point is that it all fits together. It’s a formulation, it’s artful, it’s structured.”
“He’s American, Ilgauskas, same as we are.”
“A Russian is always Russian. He even speaks with a slight accent.”
“I don’t hear an accent.”
“You have to listen. It’s there,” I said.
I didn’t know whether it was there or not. The Norway maple didn’t have to be Norway. We worked spontaneous variations on the source material of our surroundings.
“You say the man lives in that house. I accept this,” I said. “I say he lives there with his son and his son’s wife. Her name is Irina.”
“And the son. Ilgauskas, so called. His first name?”
“We don’t need a first name. He’s Ilgauskas. That’s all we need,” I said.
His hair was mussed, suit jacket dusty and stained, ready to come apart at the shoulder seams. He leaned into the table, square-jawed, sleepy-looking.
“If we isolate the stray thought, the passing thought,” he said, “the thought whose origin is unfathomable, then we begin to understand that we are routinely deranged, everyday crazy.”
We loved the idea of being everyday crazy. It rang so true, so real.
“In our privatest mind,” he said, “there is only chaos and blur. We invented logic to beat back our creatural selves. We assert or deny. We follow M with N.”
Our privatest mind, we thought. Did he really say that?
“The only laws that matter are laws of thought.”
His fists were clenched on the tabletop, knuckles white.
“The rest is devil worship,” he said.
We went walking but did not see the man. The wreaths were mostly gone from the front doors and the occasional bundled figure scraped snow off a car’s windshield. Over time we began to understand that these walks were not casual off-campus rambles. We were not looking at trees or boxcars, as we normally did, naming, counting, categorizing. This was different. There was a measure to the man in the hooded coat, old stooped body, face framed in monkish cloth, a history, a faded drama. We wanted to see him one more time.
We agreed on this, Todd and I, and collaborated, in the meantime, on describing his day.
He drinks coffee black, from a small cup, and spoons cereal out of a child’s bowl. His head practically rests in the bowl when he bends to eat. He never looks at a newspaper. He goes back to his room after breakfast, where he sits and thinks. His daughter-in-law comes in and makes the bed, Irina, although Todd did not concede the binding nature of the name.
Some days we had to wrap scarves around our faces and speak in muffled voices, only our eyes exposed to the street an
d the weather.
There are two schoolchildren and one smaller girl, Irina’s sister’s child, here for reasons not yet determined, and the old man often passes the morning fitfully watching TV cartoons with the child, though not seated beside her. He occupies an armchair well away from the TV set, dozing now and then. Mouth open, we said. Head tilted and mouth hanging open.
We weren’t sure why we were doing this. But we tried to be scrupulous, adding new elements every day, making adjustments and refinements, and all the while scanning the streets, trying to induce an appearance through joint force of will.
Soup for lunch, every day it’s soup, homemade, and he holds his big spoon over the soup bowl, the old-country bowl, in a manner not unlike the child’s, ready to plant a trowel and scoop.
Todd said that Russia was too big for the man. He’d get lost in the vast expanse. Think about Romania, Bulgaria. Better yet, Albania. Is he a Christian, a Muslim? With Albania, he said, we deepen the cultural context. Context was his fallback word.
When he is ready for his walk, Irina tries to help him button his parka, his anorak, but he shakes her off with a few brusque words. She shrugs and replies in kind.
I realized I’d forgotten to tell Todd that Ilgauskas reads Dostoevsky in the original. This was a feasible truth, a usable truth. It made Ilgauskas, in context, a Russian.
He wears trousers with suspenders, until we decided he didn’t; it was too close to stereotype. Who shaves the old man? Does he do it himself? We didn’t want him to. But who does it and how often?
This was my crystalline link, the old man to Ilgauskas to Dostoevsky to Russia. I thought about it all the time. Todd said it would become my life’s work. I would spend my life in a thought bubble, purifying the link.
He doesn’t have a private toilet. He shares a toilet with the children but never seems to use it. He is as close to being invisible as a man can get in a household of six. Sitting, thinking, disappearing on his walk.
We shared a vision of the man in his bed, at night, mind roaming back—the village, the hills, the family dead. We walked the same streets every day, obsessively, and we spoke in subdued tones even when we disagreed. It was part of the dialectic, our looks of thoughtful disapproval.
He probably smells bad but the only one who seems to notice is the oldest child, a girl, thirteen. She makes faces now and then, passing behind his chair at the dinner table.
It was the tenth straight sunless day. The number was arbitrary but the mood was beginning to bear in, not the cold or the wind but the missing light, the missing man. Our voices took on an anxious cadence. It occurred to us that he might be dead.
We talked about this all the way back to campus.
Do we make him dead? Do we keep assembling the life posthumously? Or do we end it now, tomorrow, the next day, stop coming to town, stop looking for him? One thing I knew. He does not die Albanian.
The next day, we stood at the end of the street where the designated house was located. We were there for an hour, barely speaking. Were we waiting for him to appear? I don’t think we knew. What if he came out of the wrong house? What would this mean? What if someone else came out of the designated house, a young couple carrying ski equipment toward the car in the driveway? Maybe we were there simply to show deferential regard, standing quietly in the presence of the dead.
No one emerged, no one went in, and we left feeling unsure of ourselves.
Minutes later, approaching the railroad tracks, we saw him. We stopped and pointed at each other, holding the pose a moment. It was enormously satisfying, it was thrilling, to see the thing happen, see it become three-dimensional. He made a turn into a street at a right angle to the one we were on. Todd hit me on the arm, turned and started jogging. Then I started jogging. We were going back in the direction we’d just come from. We went around one corner, ran down the street, went around another corner and waited. In time he appeared, walking now in our direction.
This was what Todd wanted, to see him head on. We moved toward him. He seemed to walk a sort of pensive route, meandering with his thoughts. I pulled Todd toward the curb with me so that the man would not have to pass between us. We waited for him to see us. We could almost count off the footsteps to the instant when he would raise his head. It was an interval drawn taut with detail. We were close enough to see the sunken face, heavily stubbled, pinched in around the mouth, jaw sagging. He saw us now and paused, one hand gripping a button at the front of his coat. He looked haunted inside the shabby hood. He looked misplaced, isolated, someone who could easily be the man we were in the process of imagining.
We walked on past and continued for eight or nine paces, then turned and watched.
“That was good,” Todd said. “That was totally worthwhile. Now we’re ready to take the next step.”
“There is no next step. We got our close look,” I said. “We know who he is.”
“We don’t know anything.”
“We wanted to see him one more time.”
“Lasted only seconds.”
“What do you want to do, take a picture?”
“My cell phone needs recharging,” he said seriously. “The coat is an anorak, by the way, definitely, up close.”
“The coat is a parka.”
The man was two and a half blocks from the left turn that would put him on the street where he lived.
“I think we need to take the next step.”
“You said that.”
“I think we need to talk to him.”
I looked at Todd. He wore a fixed smile, grafted on.
“That’s crazy.”
“It’s completely reasonable,” he said.
“We do that, we kill the idea, we kill everything we’ve done. We can’t talk to him.”
“We’ll ask a few questions, that’s all. Quiet, low key. Find out a few things.”
“It’s never been a matter of literal answers.”
“I counted eighty-seven boxcars. You counted eighty-seven boxcars. Remember.”
“This is different and we both know it.”
“I can’t believe you’re not curious. All we’re doing is searching out the parallel life,” he said. “It doesn’t affect what we’ve been saying all this time.”
“It affects everything. It’s a violation. It’s crazy.”
I looked down the street toward the man in question. He was still moving slowly, a little erratically, hands folded behind his back now, where they belonged.
“If you’re sensitive about approaching him, I’ll do it,” he said.
“No, you won’t.”
“Why not?”
“Because he’s old and frail. Because he won’t understand what you want.”
“What do I want? A few words of conversation. If he shies away, I’m out of there in an instant.”
“Because he doesn’t even speak English.”
“You don’t know that. You don’t know anything.”
He started to move away and I clutched his arm and turned him toward me.
“Because you’ll scare him,” I said. “Just the sight of you. Freak of nature.”
He looked straight into me. It took time, this look. Then he pulled his arm away and I shoved him into the street. He turned and started walking and I caught up with him and spun him around and struck him in the chest with the heel of my hand. It was a sample blow, an introduction. A car came toward us and veered away, faces in windows. We began to grapple. He was too awkward to be contained, all angles, a mess of elbows and knees, and deceptively strong. I had trouble getting a firm grip and lost a glove. I wanted to hit him in the liver but didn’t know where it was. He began flailing in slow motion. I moved in and punched him on the side of the head with my bare hand. It hurt us both and he made a sound and went into a fetal crouch. I snatched his cap and tossed it. I wanted to wrestle him down and pound his head into the asphalt but he was too firmly set, still making the sound, a determined hum, science fiction. He unfolded then, flushed and wil
d-eyed, and started swinging blind. I stepped back and half circled, waiting for an opening, but he fell before I could hit him, scrambling up at once and starting to run.
The hooded man was about to move out of sight, turning into his street. I watched Todd run, long slack bouncy strides. He would have to go faster if he expected to reach the man before he disappeared into the gray frame house, the designated house.
I saw my lost glove lying in the middle of the street. Then Todd running, bareheaded, trying to skirt areas of frozen snow. The scene empty everywhere around him. I couldn’t make sense of it. I felt completely detached. His breath visible, streams of trailing vapor. I wondered what it was that had caused this thing to happen. He only wanted to talk to the man.
HAMMER AND SICKLE
We walked across the highway bridge, thirty-nine of us in jumpsuits and tennis sneakers, with guards front and back and at the flanks, six in all. Beneath us the cars were blasting by, nonstop, their speed magnified by our near vantage and by the sound they made passing under the low bridge. There’s no word for it, that sound, pure urgency, sustained, incessant, northbound, southbound, and each time we walked across the overpass I wondered again who those people were, the drivers and passengers, so many cars, the pressing nature of their passage, the lives inside.
I had time to notice such things, time to reflect. It’s a killing business, reflection, even in the lowest levels of security, where there are distractions, openings into the former world. The inmate soccer game at the abandoned high school field across the highway was a breezy departure from the daily binding and squeezing of meal lines, head counts, regulations, reflections. The players rode a bus, the spectators walked, the cars zoomed beneath the bridge.
I walked alongside a man named Sylvan Telfair, tall, bald, steeped in pathos, an international banker who’d dealt in rarefied instruments of offshore finance.
“You follow soccer?”
“I don’t follow anything,” he said.
“But it’s worth watching under the circumstances, right? Which is exactly how I feel.”
“I follow nothing,” he said.