by Don DeLillo
Best not to speak of the girls.
Then I spoke of them, quietly, in six or seven words. There was a long pause. He had a round face, Norman, with a squat nose, his bushy hair going gray.
“You never said this, Jerry.”
“Just between us.”
“You never say anything.”
“Just to you. No one else. It’s true,” I said. “Kate and Laurie. I sit and watch them and it’s hard to understand how any of this happened. What are they doing there, what am I doing here? Their mother writes the reports. She didn’t tell me this but I know it’s her. She’s masterminding the whole thing.”
“What’s she like, their mother?”
“We’re legally separated.”
“What’s she like?” he said.
“Fairly smart, like in a cutting-edge way. Sneaky sort of pretty. You have to pay attention to see it.”
“You still love her? I don’t think I ever loved my wife. Not in the original meaning of the word.”
I didn’t ask what he meant by that.
“Did your wife love you?”
“She loved my walls,” he said.
“I love my kids.”
“You love their mother too. I can sense it,” he said.
“From where, the lower bunk? You can’t even see my face.”
“I’ve seen your face. What’s to see?”
“We fell apart. We didn’t drift apart, we fell apart.”
“Don’t tell me I’m not right. I sense things. I read into things,” he said.
I looked into the ceiling. It had rained for several hours and I thought I could hear traffic noise on the wet highway, cars racing beneath the overpass, drivers leaning into the night, trying to read the road at every flex and bend.
“I’ll tell you what it’s like. It’s like they’re playing a game,” he said. “All those names they’re saying. The Hang Seng in Hong Kong. That’s funny to a kid. And when kids say it, it’s funny to us. And I’ll make you a bet. Plenty of kids are watching that report and not because it’s on a kids’ channel. They’re watching because it’s funny. What the hell’s the Hang Seng in Hong Kong? I don’t know. Do you know?”
“Their mother knows.”
“I’ll bet she does. She also knows it’s a game, all of it. And all of it’s funny. You’re lucky,” he said. “Terrific kids.”
Happy here, that was Norman. We’re not in prison, he liked to say. We’re at camp.
Over time the situation in the Gulf began to ease. Abu Dhabi provided a ten-billion-dollar bailout and relative calm soon moved into the Gulf and across the digital networks to markets everywhere. This brought on a letdown in the common room. Even as the girls showed improvement in their delivery and signs of serious preparation, the men stopped coming in large numbers and soon there was only a scatter of us, here and there, sleepy and reflective.
We had TV but what had we lost, all of us, when we entered the camp? We’d lost our appendages, our extensions, the data systems that kept us fed and cleansed. Where was the world, our world? The laptops were gone, the smartphones and light sensors and megapixels. Our hands and eyes needed more than we could give them now. The touch screens, the mobile platforms, the gentle bell reminders of an appointment or a flight time or a woman in a room somewhere. And the sense, the tacit awareness, now lost, that something newer, smarter, faster, ever faster, was just a bird’s breath away. Also lost was the techno-anxiety that these devices routinely carried with them. But we needed this no less than the devices themselves, that inherent stress, those cautions and frustrations. Weren’t these essential to our mind-set? The prospect of failed signals and crashed systems, the memory that needs recharging, the identity stolen in a series of clicks. Information, this was everything, coming in, going out. We were always on, wanted to be on, needed to be on, but this was history now, the shadow of another life.
Okay, we were grown-ups, not bug-eyed kids in tribal bondage, and this was not an Internet rescue camp. We lived in real space, unaddicted, free of deadly dependence. But we were bereft. We were pulpy and slumped. It was a thing we rarely talked about, a thing that was hard to shake. There were the small idle moments when we knew exactly what we were missing. We sat on the toilet, flushed and done, staring into empty hands.
I wanted to find myself in front of the TV set for the market report, weekdays, four in the afternoon, but could not always manage. I was part of a work detail that was bused on designated days to the adjacent Air Force base, where we sanded and painted, did general maintenance, hauled garbage and sometimes just stood and watched as a fighter jet roared down the runway and lifted into the low sun. It was a beautiful thing to see, aircraft climbing, wheels up, wings pivoting back, the light, the streaked sky, three or four of us, not a word spoken. Was this the time, more than a thousand other moments, when the measure of our ruin was brought to starkest awareness?
“All of Europe is looking south. What do they see?”
“They see Greece.”
“They see fiscal instability, enormous debt burden, possible default.”
“Crisis is a Greek word.”
“Is Greece hiding its public debt?”
“Is the crisis spreading at lightning speed to the rest of the southern tier, to the euro zone in general, to emerging markets everywhere?”
“Does Greece need a bailout?”
“Will Greece abandon the euro?”
“Did Greece hide the nature of its debt?”
“What is Wall Street’s role in this critical matter?”
“What is a credit default swap? What is a sovereign default? What is a special-purpose entity?”
“We don’t know. Do you know? Do you care?”
“What is Wall Street? Who is Wall Street?”
Tense laughter from pockets in the audience.
“Greece, Portugal, Spain, Italy.”
“Stocks plunge worldwide.”
“The Dow, the Nasdaq, the euro, the pound.”
“But where are the walkouts, the work stoppages, the job actions?”
“Look at Greece. Look in the streets.”
“Riots, strikes, protests, pickets.”
“All of Europe is looking at Greece.”
“Chaos is a Greek word.”
“Canceled flights, burning flags, stones flying this way, tear gas sailing that way.”
“Workers are angry. Workers are marching.”
“Blame the worker. Bury the worker.”
“Freeze their pay. Increase their tax.”
“Steal from the worker. Screw the worker.”
“Any day now, wait and see.”
“New flags, new banners.”
“Hammer and sickle.”
“Hammer and sickle.”
Their mother had the girls delivering lines in a balanced flow, a cadence. They weren’t just reading, they were acting, showing facial expression, having serious fun. Screw the worker, Kate had said. At least their mother had assigned the vulgar line to the older girl.
Was the daily market report becoming a performance piece?
All day long the story passed through the camp, building to building, man to man. It concerned a convict on death row in Texas or Missouri or Oklahoma and the last words he’d spoken before an individual authorized by the state injected the lethal substance or activated the electric current.
The words were, Kick the tires and light the fire—I’m going home.
Some of us felt a chill, hearing the story. Were we shamed by it? Did we think of that man on the honed edge of his last breath as more authentic than we were, a true outlaw, worthy of the state’s most cruelly scrupulous attention? His end was officially sanctioned, an act welcomed by some, protested by some. If he’d spent half a lifetime in prison cells, in solitary confinement and finally on death row for one or two or multiple homicides, where were we and what had we done to be placed here? Did we even remember our crimes? Could we call them crimes? They were loopholes, evasions, wheedlin
g half-ass felonies.
Some of us, less self-demeaning, simply nodded at the story, conveying simple credit to the man for the honor he’d brought to the moment, the back-country poetry of those words. By the third time I heard the story, or overheard it, the prison was located decisively in Texas. Forget the other places—the man, the story and the prison all belonged in Texas. We were somewhere else, watching a children’s program on TV.
“What’s this business about hammer and sickle?”
“Means nothing. Words,” I said. “Like Abu Dhabi.”
“The Hang Seng in Hong Kong.”
“Exactly.”
“The girls like saying it. Hammer and sickle.”
“Hammer and sickle.”
“Abu Dhabi.”
“Abu Dhabi.”
“Hang Seng.”
“Hong Kong,” I said.
We went on like that for a while. Norman was still murmuring the names when I shut my eyes and began the long turn toward sleep.
“But I think she means it. I think she’s serious. Hammer and sickle,” he said. “She’s a serious woman with a point to make.”
I stood watching from a distance. They passed through the metal detector, one by one, and moved toward the visitors’ center, the wives and children, the loyal friends, the business partners, the lawyers who would sit and listen in a confidential setting as inmates stared at them through tight eyes and complained about the food, the job assignments, the scarcity of sentence reductions.
Everything seemed flat. The visitors on the footpath moved slowly and monochromatically. The sky was barely there, drained of light and weather. Families were bundled and wan but I didn’t feel the cold. I was standing outside the dormitory but could have been anywhere. I imagined a woman walking among the others, slim and dark-haired, unaccompanied. I don’t know where she came from, a photograph I’d once seen, or a movie, possibly French, set in Southeast Asia, sex beneath a ceiling fan. Here, she was wearing a long white tunic and loose trousers. She belonged to another setting, this was clear, but there was no need for me to wonder what she was doing here. She’d come up out of the drowsy mind or down from the flat sky.
There was a name for the outfit she was wearing and I nearly knew it, nearly had it, then it slipped away. But the woman was there, still, in pale sandals, the tunic slit on the sides, with a faint floral design front and back.
The ceiling fan turned slowly in the heavy heat, a thought I didn’t want or need, but there it was, more thought than image, going back years.
Who was the man she was here to see? I was expecting no visitors, didn’t want them, not even my daughters, not right for them to see me here. They were two thousand miles away in any case, and otherwise engaged. Could I place the woman in my immediate presence, face to face across a table in the large open space that would soon be filled with inmates, wives and kids, a guard at an elevated desk, keeping watch?
One thing I knew. The name of her outfit was two words, brief words, and it would make me feel the day was worthwhile, the full week, if I could remember those words. What else was there to do? What else could I think about that might yield a decent measure of completion?
Vietnamese—the words, the tunic, the trousers, the woman.
Then I thought of Sylvan Telfair. He was the inmate she was here to see, a man of worldwide address. They’d met in Paris or Bangkok. They’d stood on a terrace in the evening, sipping wine and speaking French. He was refined and assured and at the same time somewhat reticent, a man to whom she might be attracted, even if she was my idea, my secret silken vision.
I stood watching, thinking.
By the time the words came to me, much later in the day, ao dai, I’d lost all interest in the matter.
We were grouped, clustered, massed, paired, men everywhere, living in swarms, filling every space, arrayed across the limits of vision. I liked to think of us as men in Maoist self-correction, perfecting our social being through repetition. We worked, ate and slept in mechanized routine, weekly, daily, hourly, advancing from practice to knowledge. But these were the musings of idle time. Maybe we were just tons of assimilated meat, our collected flesh built into cubicles, containered in dormitories and dining halls, zippered into jumpsuits in five colors, classified, catalogued, this color for that level of offense. The colors struck me as a kind of comic pathos, always there, brightly clashing, jutting, crisscrossing. I tried not to think of us as circus clowns who’d forgotten their face paint.
“You consider her your enemy,” Norman said. “You and her, blood enemies.”
“I don’t think that’s true.”
“It’s only natural. You think she’s using the girls against you. This is what you believe, down deep, whether you admit it or not.”
“I don’t think that’s the case.”
“That has to be the case. She’s attacking you for the mistakes you made in business. What was your business? How did it get you here? I don’t think you ever said.”
“It’s not interesting.”
“We’re not here to be interesting.”
“I ran a company for a man who acquired companies. Information got passed back and forth. Money changed hands. Lawyers, traders, consultants, senior partners.”
“Who was the man?”
“He was my father,” I said.
“What’s his name?”
“He died quietly before the fact.”
“What fact?”
“The fact of my conviction.”
“What’s his name?”
“Walter Bradway.”
“Do I know that name?”
“You know his brother’s name. Howard Bradway.”
“One of the hedge-fund musketeers,” he said.
Norman was searching his memory for visual confirmation. I pictured what he was picturing. He was picturing my uncle Howie, a large ruddy man, barechested, in aviator glasses, with a miniature poodle huddled in the crook of his arm. A fairly famous image.
“A family tradition. Is that it?” he said. “Different companies, different cities, different time frames.”
“They believed in right and wrong. The right and wrong of the markets, the portfolios, the insider information.”
“Then it was your turn to join the business. Did you know what you were doing?”
“I was defining myself. That’s what my father said. He said people who have to define themselves belong in the dictionary.”
“Because you strike me as somebody who doesn’t always know what he’s doing.”
“I pretty much knew. I definitely knew.”
I could hear Norman unraveling the improvised cellophane wrap on his little jar of fig spread and then using his finger to rub the stuff across a saltine cracker. On visitors’ days his lawyer smuggled a jar of Dalmatian fig spread into the camp, minus the metal cap. Norman said he liked the name, Dalmatia, Dalmatian, the Balkan history, the Adriatic, the large spotted dog. He liked the idea of having food of that particular name and place, all natural ingredients, and eating it on a standard cafeteria cracker, undercover, a couple of times a week.
He said that his lawyer was a woman and that she concealed the fig spread somewhere on her body. This was a throwaway line, delivered in a monotone and not intended to be believed.
“What’s your philosophy of money?”
“I don’t have one,” I said.
“There was the year I made a shitpile of money. One year in particular. We could be talking, total, easy nine figures. I could feel it adding years to my life. Money makes you live longer. It seeps into the bloodstream, into the veins and capillaries. I talked to my primary-care physician about this. He said he had an inkling I could be right.”
“What about the art on your walls? Make you live longer?”
“I don’t know about the art. Good question, the art.”
“People say great art is immortal. I say there’s something mortal in it. It carries a glimpse of death.”
“All those g
orgeous paintings, the shapes and colors. All those dead painters. I don’t know,” he said.
He lifted his hand toward my bunk, up and around, with a splotch of fig preserves on half a cracker. I declined, but thanks. I heard him chewing the cracker and sinking into the sheets. Then I lay waiting for the final remarks of the day.
“She’s talking directly to you. You realize this, using the girls.”
“I don’t think so, not even remotely.”
“In other words this never occurred to you.”
“Everything occurs to me. Some things I reject.”
“What’s her name?”
“Sara Massey.”
“Good and direct. I see her as a strong woman with roots going back a long way. Principles, convictions. Getting revenge for your illegal activities, for the fact you got caught, maybe for joining your father’s business in the first place.”
“How smart I am not to know this. What grief it spares me.”
“This sneaky-pretty woman in your words. She’s reminding you what you did. She’s talking to you. Abu Dhabi, Abu Dhabi. Hang Seng, Hong Kong.”
All around us, entombed in cubicles, suspended in time, reliably muted now, men with dental issues, medical issues, marital issues, dietary demands, psychic frailties, sleep-breathing men, the nightly drone of oil-tax schemes, tax-shelter schemes, corporate espionage, corporate bribery, false testimony, medicare fraud, inheritance fraud, real estate fraud, wire fraud, fraud and conspiracy.
They started arriving early, men crowding the common room, some carrying extra folding chairs, snapping them open. There were others standing in the side aisles, a spillover of inmates, guards, kitchen staff, camp officials. I’d managed to squeeze into the fourth row, slightly off-center. The sense of event, news in high clamor, all the convergences of emotional global forces bringing us here in a wave of complex expectation.
A cluster of rain-swept blossoms was fixed to one of the high windows. Spring, more or less, late this year.
There were four common rooms, one for each dorm, and I was certain that all were packed, inmates and others collected in some odd harmonic, listening to children talk about economic collapse.
Here, as time approached, Feliks Zuber rose briefly from his seat up front, raising a weary hand to quiet the settling crowd.