by Don DeLillo
“I like a little truth. A little truth is all I ever hope for. Do you know what I mean, Owen? Where are you? Make a noise. I like to stumble upon things.”
I knocked over a glass, enjoying the sound it made rolling on coarse wood. Kathryn snatched it at the edge of the table.
“Talk about stumble,” she said.
“The worst thing about this wine is that you can get to like it.”
A light high on the hill. We waited through a silence.
“Why is the language of destruction so beautiful?” Owen said.
I didn’t know what he meant. Did he mean ordinary hardware—stun grenades, parabellum ammo? Or what a terrorist might carry, some soft-eyed boy from Adana, slung over his shoulder, Kalashnikov, sweet whisper in the dark, with a flash suppressor and folding stock. He sat quietly, Owen did, working out an answer. The way was open to interpretation, broader landscapes. Wehrmacht, Panzer, Blitzkrieg. He would have a patient theory to submit on the adductive force of such sounds, how they stir the chemistry of the early brain. Or did he mean the language of the mathematics of war, nuclear game theory, that bone country of tech data and little clicking words.
“Perhaps they fear disorder,” he said. “I’ve been trying to understand them, imagine how their minds work. The old man, Michael, may have been a victim of some ordering instinct. They may have felt they were moving toward a static perfection of some kind. Cults tend to be closed-in, of course. Inwardness is very much the point. One mind, one madness. To be part of some unified vision. Clustered, dense. Safe from chaos and life.”
Kathryn said, “I have one point to make, only one. I thought of it after James and I talked about the finds in central Crete, human sacrifice, the Minoan site. Is it possible these people are carrying out some latter-day version? You remember the Pylos tablet, Owen. Linear B. A plea for divine intercession. A list of sacrifices that included ten humans. Could this murder be a latter day plea to the gods? Maybe they’re a doomsday cult.”
“Interesting. But something keeps me from thinking they would accept a higher being. I saw them and talked to them. They weren’t god-haunted people, somehow I know this, and if they believed some final catastrophe was imminent they were waiting for it, not trying to prevent it, not trying to calm the gods or petition them. Definitely waiting. I came away with a sense that they were enormously patient. And where’s the ritual in their sacrifice? Old man hammered to death. No sign of ritual. What god could they invent who might accept such a sacrifice, the death of a mental defective? A street mugging in effect.”
“Maybe their god is a mental defective.”
“I talked to them, Kathryn. They wanted to hear about ancient alphabets. We discussed the evolution of letters. The praying man shape of the Sinai. The ox pictograph. Aleph, alpha. From nature, you see. The ox, the house, the camel, the palm of hand, the water, the fish. From the external world. What men saw, the simplest things. Everyday objects, animals, parts of the body. It’s interesting to me, how these marks, these signs that appear so pure and abstract to us, began as objects in the world, living things in many cases.” A long pause. “Your husband thinks all this is bookish drool.”
Our voices in the dark. Kathryn reassures, James issues mild denials. But he wasn’t far wrong. I had trouble enough getting Greek characters straight; picturesque desert alphabets were a little too remote to keep me interested. I didn’t want to become an adversary, however. He’d probably withheld some things, misled us slightly, but I didn’t think these were pieces of strategy so much as instances of personal confusion. And in his present silence I thought I sensed a dreaminess, a drift into memory. Owen’s silences were problems to be worked out. Night is continuous, he’d said. The lulls, the measured respites were part of conversation.
“It’s possible they’ve killed another person,” he said after a while. “Not here, Kathryn. Not anywhere in Greece.”
His turn to reassure. This was considerate, his quickness to ease her fears for Tap’s safety. I could imagine from that point on she would no longer feel so protective and affectionate. He was the friend who brought the bad news.
“I received a letter from a colleague in Jordan. He’s with the Department of Antiquities there. He knows about the cult, I’d written him. He tells me there was a murder two or three months ago which resembles this one in several respects. The victim was an old woman, near death, lingering for some time. She lived in a village at the edge of the Wadi Rum, the great sandstone desert in the southern part of the country.”
Kathryn stood against the white wall. She wanted a cigarette. Twice a year since she’d given them up she wanted a cigarette. I always knew. Moments of helpless tension, an imbalance in the world. They broke the rules, so will I. She used to go through the house groping in dark closets for a lone Salem left faded in some coat pocket.
“They found her outside the mud-brick house where she lived with relatives. She’d been killed with a hammer. I don’t know whether it was a standard claw hammer like the one used here.”
I said, “Is this what you and Frank Volterra talked about for two nights?”
“Partly. Yes, he wanted to talk. To talk and listen.”
“Is that where he’s gone?”
“I don’t know. He seemed to be considering it. Something about the place excited him. I made the trip myself once, some years ago; there are inscriptions, simple graffiti mostly, camel drivers scratching their names on rocks. I described it to him. We talked about it at some length, the idea of these people, this mad scene being played out in a vast beautiful silent place. The man almost frightened me with his attentiveness. To be listened to so closely can be disconcerting. It implies an obligation on the speaker’s part.”
“Frank’s not your everyday tourist. Did you tell him about Donoussa?”
“I don’t know anything about it. Only that a young girl was killed. My assistant heard it from someone.”
“Also a hammer,” l said.
“Yes. A year ago.”
A claw hammer. Is this what he’d meant when he talked about the language of destruction? Simple hand tool of iron and wood. He liked the sound of the words apparently, or the look of them, the way they were bonded perhaps, their compact joinder, like the tool itself, the iron and wood.
If you think the name of the weapon is beautiful, are you implicated in the crime?
I poured more wine, suddenly tired, feeling drumheaded and dumb. It didn’t seem logical, the hangover preceding the drunk, or concurrent with it. Owen said something about madness or sadness. I tried to listen, realizing Kathryn was gone, inside somewhere, sitting in the dark or in bed already, wanting us to take these murders somewhere else. I would go down the hill with him in the small beam of his flashlight, watch him ride off on the undersized machine, legs crowding the handlebars. Then to my hotel, one flight up, the room at the end of the hall.
Owen was talking again.
“In this century the writer has carried on a conversation with madness. We might almost say of the twentieth-century writer that he aspires to madness. Some have made it, of course, and they hold special places in our regard. To a writer, madness is a final distillation of self, a final editing down. It’s the drowning out of false voices.”
The custom in warm weather is to hang curtains in doorways. The solid finish of the village yields to human needs. Surface shapes are cunningly disturbed. The wind blows, houses open to the passerby. There’s no clear feeling of mysterious invitation. Only of stillness moved inside, stillness darkened, the grain of the inner day.
The rooms are plain and square, immediate, without entranceways or intervening spaces, set at street level, so close to us as we walk in the narrow passage that we feel uneasy about intruding. The Greek in conversation crowds his listener and here we find the same unboundaried exercise of life. Families. People clustered, children everywhere, old women in black sitting motionless, rough hands folded in sleep. The bright and vast and deep are everywhere, sun-cut clarity, t
he open sea. These modest rooms mark out a refuge from eternal things. This is the impression we have, Tap and I, a sense of modesty, of nondescriptness, only glimpsing as we pass, careful not to appear too curious.
Above the stepped streets there were occasional open spaces, stronger wind. I followed Tap past a large well with a conical iron cap. A woman with an open umbrella sat on a mule, waiting. Cats moved along the walls, watched from roof ledges, cankerous, lame, mangy, some of them minute, the size of a woolen glove. Climbing. The sea appeared, the ruined windmill to the east. We paused to catch our breath, looking down on a church with an openwork belfry of some patchy rose-pink hue, a rude and pretty touch in all the layered white. A single small church might press together half a dozen surfaces in unexpected ways, sea waved, domed, straight-edged, barrel-vaulted, a sensuous economy of shapes and arrangements and cross-influences. We heard the hoarse roar of a donkey, an outsized violent sound. The heat felt good.
I showed Tap a postcard my father had sent. It had a picture on it of the Ranchman’s Café in Ponder, Texas. My father had never been to Texas as far as I knew. He lived in a small house in Ohio with a woman named Murph.
Tap had received the same kind of postcard. In fact almost all my father’s communications for two or three years had been in the form of postcards showing the Ranchman’s Café.
The message on his card, Tap said, was the same as the message on mine. He didn’t seem surprised by this.
A distant lazy drone. Cicadas. We’d seen them come whirring out of olive trees to sail into walls, dropping in a dry stunned rustle. The wind began to gather force.
Tap led me to an unpaved area of houses with courtyards, the upper limit of the village. There were tall gateways here, some of them located a fair distance in front of the houses to which they belonged. Seen from certain angles these gateways framed a barren hilltop or the empty sky. They were artless arrangements, free of the texts they put before us, material cleanly broken from the world.
We climbed a rock path that worked around a shoulder of land and curled out of sight of the village. A whitewashed chapel across a defile, abrupt in brown earth. We were high up now, in the sweep of the wind and sea, stopping frequently to find fresh perspectives. I sat at the edge of a narrow stand of pine, wishing we’d brought water. Tap wandered into a rocky field just below. The wind came across the defile with a sound that changed levels as the current increased in speed and reached the trees, rushing, from a pure swift surge of air to something like a voice, an urgent emotion. Tap looked up at me.
Ten minutes later I got to my feet and walked out into the sun. The wind had died. I saw him standing fifty yards away in the steep field. He was absolutely still. I called to him, he didn’t move. I walked that way, asking what was wrong, calling the words out across the immense silence around us, the drop-off into distances. He stood with his knees slightly flexed, one foot forward, head down, his hands at belt level, held slightly out from his body. Arrested motion. I saw them right away, lustrous black bees, enormous, maybe a dozen, bobbing in the air around him. At twenty yards I heard the buzzing.
I told him not to worry, they wouldn’t sting. I moved in slowly, as much to reassure Tap as to keep the bees from getting riled. Burnished, black-enameled. They rose to eye level, dropped away, humming in the sun. I put my arm around him. I told him it was all right to move. I told him we would move slowly up toward the path. I felt him tense up even more. His way of saying no, of course. He was afraid even to speak. I told him it was safe, they wouldn’t sting. They hadn’t stung me and I’d walked right through them. All we had to do was move slowly up the slope. They were beautiful, I said. I’d never seen bees this size or color. They gleamed, I told him. They were grand, fantastic.
Raising his head now, turning. Did I expect relief, chagrin? As I held him close he gave me a look that spoke some final disappointment. As if I could convince him, stung twice before. As if I could take him out of his fear, a thing so large and deep as fear, by prattling on about the beauty of these things. As if I could tell him anything at all, fake father, liar.
We held that inept stance a moment longer. Then I took his arm and led him through the field.
Kathryn and I had dinner on the harborfront with Anand Dass. She knew what was in the kitchen and gave our orders to a boy who stood with his arms crossed on his chest, nodding as she listed the items. The food and supply boat was docked nearby, a single-masted broad-beamed vessel with mystical eyes painted on the bow. No one wanted to talk about the cult.
“It was flawless. A perfect flight. I mean it, those Japanese, they impress me. When I learned they have their own security at the Athens airport, I knew I would send him JAL.”
“You go to the States soon,” I said.
“The whole family, we converge, what an event,” he said.
“Even my sister is coming.”
“Do you come back in the spring?”
“Here? No. The University of Pennsylvania takes over the whole operation. I’ll be back in India by then.”
Kathryn passed the bread around.
“In any case I’m not interested in underwater work,” he said.
“Outside my frame.”
“What do you mean?” I said.
He looked at Kathryn. She said to me, “They’re going to concentrate on the submerged ruins. They’ll alternate. Next season, underwater work. Following year, back to the trenches.”
“This is new,” I said.
“Yes.”
“But I don’t think we’ll ever alternate,” Anand said. “I think we’re finished for the season, the decade, the century, whatever.” He had a strong laugh. People stood along the quay, talking in last light. I leaned back in the chair and watched Kathryn eat.
The argument was long and detailed, with natural pauses, and moved from the street to the terrace, into the house, finally up onto the roof. It was full of pettiness and spite, the domestic forms of assault, the agreed-upon reductions. This seemed the point, to reduce each other and everything else. What marriage is for, according to her. Our rage was immense but all we could show for it, all we could utter, were these gibes and rejoinders. And that we did poorly. We weren’t able to take advantage of the clear openings. It didn’t seem to matter who got the better of it. The argument had an inner life, a force distinct from the issues. There were surges, hesitations, loud voices, laughter, mimicry, moments in which we tried to remember what we wanted to say next, a pace, a range. After a while this became our only motive, to extend the argument to its natural end.
It began on the way up to the house.
“Bitch. You knew.”
“I’ve been trying to find an alternative.”
“This means no England.”
“We could still go to England.”
“I know you.”
“What do you know?”
“You want to dig.”
“I didn’t want to tell you the plan had broken down until I had some kind of alternative.”
“When will you tell me about the alternative? When the alternative breaks down?”
“Shut up, ass.”
“I know what this means.”
“l don’t know what it means. How could you?”
“I know how you think.”
“What does it mean? I don’t know what it means.”
“You won’t go to England.”
“Good. We won’t go to England.”
“That whole thing was based on your coming back here.”
“We could go anyway. We could work out a plan for the summer while we’re there.”
“But you won’t.”
“Why won’t we?”
“Because you won’t. It’s too obvious and simple. It lacks intrepidness. It was intrepid when you came up with it originally.
It is now obvious and simple and dull.”
“You want to see the Elgin marbles.”
“It’s a fallback. You hate that.”
“You’
re a fallback.”
“What are you?”
“You want to see the Elgin marbles but you won’t go to the Acropolis. You want to see the rip-off, the imperialist swag in its proper surroundings.”
“Hopeless. How the hell did I ever imagine I could come here?”
“Swag. I got that from Tap.”
“I hate this climb.”
“You keep saying.”
“I’m not the man—never mind.”
“You never were. You’re not the man you never were.”
The argument had resonance. It had levels, memories. It referred to other arguments, to cities, houses, rooms, those wasted lessons, our history in words. In a way, our special way, we were discussing matters close to the center of what it meant to be a couple, to share that risk and distance. The pain of separation, the fore-memory of death. Moments of remembering her, Kathryn dead, odd meditations, pity the sad survivor. Everything we said denied this. We were intent on being petty. But it was there, a desperate love, the conscious hovering sum of things. It was part of the argument. lt was the argument.
We walked the rest of the way in silence and she went in to check on Tap, who was sleeping. Then we sat on the terrace and began immediately to whisper at each other.
“Where will he go to school?”
“Back on that, are we?”
“Back on that, back on that.”
“He’s way ahead of them. He can start a little later if necessary.
But it won’t be necessary. We’ll work it out.”
“He’s not so way ahead. I don’t think he’s way ahead.”
“You distrust his writing. Something in you recoils from that. You think he ought to be diagramming sentences.”
“You’re crazy, you know that? I’m beginning to see.”
“Admit it.”
“Why did it take me so long to see what you are.”
“What am I?”
“What are you.”
“You enjoy telling me that you know how I think. How do I think? What am I?”
“What are you.”
“I feel things. I have self-respect. I love my son.”