by Don DeLillo
“You want an external object. I am trying to understand.”
“It will outlast us. This is the argument I make to them. Something to outlast us. Something to contain the pattern. We barely exist. No one will know it when we die away. What do you think, Axstone?”
I studied him for further details, a mark on the back of the hand, a way of standing, although I had no reason to collect such incidentals beyond an uncertain wish to return a truth to the landscape itself, the name-haunted place.
It was warmer now. I followed him out of the village, hurrying to keep up. A woman, the old one, appeared through an archway on the slope below us, motionless among goats browsing in the thistle-heads, a thousand feet above the sea.
Frank’s car was parked behind mine. He had a black Mazda bearing on its windshield the checkered decal that showed it was rented. Andahl got in and they drove away.
By noon I was checked out, sitting in my car outside the hotel. A merchant ship lay at anchor. Del sat next to me, cleaning the lens of a still camera with a blow-brush. Pieces of equipment were on the floor, above the dashboard, in the open glove compartment. We were talking about Frank’s movies, the two features. A man’s hat came sailing across the street.
“I missed the second one,” I said. “I saw the first when we were living on an island in Lake Champlain. You cross the lake on a little ferry, a canal barge, that runs by a cable strung from one bank to the other.”
“Don’t let him know.”
“What do you mean?”
“He’ll get upset,” she said.
“That I missed one of his movies? He wouldn’t care. Why would he care?”
“He’ll get upset. He’s serious about things like that. He expects things from friends and he can’t understand, it’s beyond belief to him that a friend would not do anything, go anywhere, rob and steal, to see one of his films. He’d do it for them, he expects them to do it for him. He may be hard to get along with at times, especially when his brain is raging, like right now, he’s the incredible deadly manta ray, the killer of the deep, but you know he’d do anything for you, without exception. It’s all part of the same thing.”
“I watched TV, Kathryn went to the movies. That was our private metaphor.”
“Frank is loyal,” she said. “He’s serious about that. He’s got a side people don’t know. He more or less literally saved my life. He has that side. I wouldn’t call it protective exactly. It’s a little deeper. He wanted to show me I could be better than I was. It’s partly because he thought the way I was living was a form of self-indulgence, which is something he hates. But he also wanted to get me out of there. I was hanging around with people on the fringes. They were people with borrowed vans. Everybody had a borrowed van or knew where to get one. I was always crossing a bridge in someone’s borrowed van. I lived with a van painter for a while. We lived in his van. He painted mystical designs on vans and campers. He was after a total design environment, he used to say. Your house, your van, your garage. That was his vision. I was working in television then, a fringe job. TV is the coke medium. The pace is the same. Frank helped me with that. I always half-disgusted him. How I could think so little of myself that I would just go to waste.”
She used lens tissue moistened with alcohol.
“When are you going home?”
“When he’s ready,” she said.
“Where do you live?”
“Oakland.”
“Where does Frank live?”
“He wouldn’t want me to say.”
“He was always like that. Funny. We never knew where he lived. At least I didn’t.”
“He took me to the hospital to see my father dying. I had to be dragged if you can picture how pathetic. Do the hard things. That’s a skill I don’t ever want to learn.”
I saw Volterra’s car in the rearview mirror. He parked behind us, got out, opened the back door of my car, got in without looking at either one of us.
“What did he want?”
“He wanted to talk about books,” I said.
“He wouldn’t tell me why he wanted to see you.”
“It’s just an intuition, Frank, but I think he’s doing all this on his own. I don’t think they know about it. I think he may be a deserter. Or maybe they threw him out. I don’t think people who believe what they believe and do what they do would even remotely consider the idea of being put on film, put in a book.”
“We find out tomorrow,” he said.
“Has he arranged a meeting?”
“I talk to them in the morning.”
“I don’t think they’ll be there.”
“They’ll be there. And they’ll listen to me. They’ll see at once what I want to do and why they ought to be part of it.”
“Maybe. But he was alone when you found him. He’s still alone. Anything outside the cult is meaningless to them. They’re locked in. They’ve invented their own meaning, their own perfection. The last thing they want is an account of their lives.”
“What’s your stake in all this?”
“I’m going home,” I told him. “I saw Andahl in his pixie boots. I can go home now. If you’re confused by my presence here, so am I. But I’m leaving and I’m not coming back.”
“What do you do in Athens? What’s your job?”
“You still think I’m here to write about you.”
“What’s your job?” he said.
“I’m called a risk analyst.”
Del said, “A likely story.” Sighting through the viewfinder.
“It’s a mass of organized guesswork. Political risk insurance. Companies don’t want to be caught short.”
I was talking with my head turned toward Del.
“It sounds vague,” she said. “It sounds vague, Frank. What do you think?”
He sat in the middle of the back seat. The play in her voice got him off course. The urgency he’d brought with him, the sense of imperative purpose, began slowly to dissolve, and with it his suspicion. He sat back, thinking. A day’s wait.
“How will you do it?” she said.
She’d joined him at precisely the right moment in his meditations. He answered immediately.
“Two people from Rome. That’s all I need. Kids I know. They bring the equipment on the car ferry from Brindisi. Drive down here from Patras. We go to work. I don’t necessarily want to shoot twenty-two hours of film, then work it back on the editing table. We shoot whatever’s here. I don’t care if I end up with half an hour. Whatever the yield. It won’t matter anyway. The coterie toads are all lined up. They’re ready to turn. My time has come. I’ve sensed it the last eighteen months. People give off a musty smell. Whole projects reek. You can’t believe how much pleasure it’ll give them. A few seconds of pure pleasure. A platonic orgasm. Then they’ll forget it completely. Once you fail, you’re okay again. And this is the time. It’s possible to sense these things. I sense these things across fucking oceans.”
“You’ll give them something to bury you for,” I said.
“I’ll go beyond the bounds. They can bury me or not. Some people will see it right away. They’ll know exactly what I’m doing, frame by frame. The rest don’t matter.”
Maybe it would happen the way he believed it would. He’d meet them in a ruined tower near the sea. Strange faces in a ring. There is time and there is film time. It was a natural extension, the barest of transferals, to make the crossing, to leap into the frame. Film was implied in everything they did.
But there was Andahl. He’d introduced an element of motivation, of attitudes and needs. The cult’s power, its psychic grip, was based on an absence of such things. No sense, no content, no historic bond, no ritual significance. Owen and I had spent several hours building theories, surrounding the bare act with desperate speculations, mainly to comfort ourselves. We knew in the end we’d be left with nothing. Nothing signified, nothing meant.
Andahl etched an almost human face on this hard blank surface. How could he still be one o
f them? He wanted something. He’d attempted to draw me in, slipping bits of information to me, withholding others temporarily. He was maneuvering toward some further contact.
He’d told me those words on the rock were put there by someone leaving. The apostate manages his own escape by revealing a secret of the organization, breaking its hold on him. He was the one who’d painted the words—the words that may have been more than a reference to what they did, that may have been their name. Someone else blotted them out. It was possible they were looking for him.
All he wanted from us was a chance to explain. These meetings were a way of turning himself toward the air of worldly reason, of conventional sense and its manipulations. He was raising a call for human pity and forgiveness.
“I’ve been getting to know this mountain,” Frank said. “The other day I was going on foot up a narrow trail above one of the villages. There was a house up there, looked uninhabited. I peer into every structure that looks uninhabited. In my uniquely dumbfuck way I figure sooner or later I’ll come across them. This was before Andahl had set up the meeting. I was scouring the hills, scouring the valleys. Now I’m on this trail when suddenly I hear behind me the sound of goat-bells. Here they come, without exaggeration, eighty-five goats, scrambling up the trail behind me, coming fast, for goats. On either side of the trail we find orchards of prickly pear. Whole fields of the stuff. I pick up the pace. I’m not running yet. I don’t want to embarrass myself by running. The idea is to make it over the rise where the terrain opens up and there is plenty of room for the goats to graze without trampling me. But what happens? Fifty yards from the end of the trail I hear a pounding driving hell-bent noise. Donkeys and mules, a whole train of them, galloping down the trail at me. A guy is sitting on the lead mule. He’s the muleteer, a reckless-looking bastard, a real Maniot, sitting side-saddle, reaching back to swat his mule on the rump with a long switch. And he’s uttering what I took to be the muleteer’s traditional cry, it sounds like the cry of a Venetian boatman poling around a sharp bend. A barbaric vowel sound. A thousand-year-old cry. I had the definite impression it was meant to urge the mules on. The goats meanwhile are jumping up my ass. They’re in a frenzy of hoofs and curved horns, piling up on top of each other. Like some massive rut, the peak of the rutting cycle. And the donkeys and mules are bearing down. It’s their only run of the week. All week they’ve plodded under heavy loads. Now they finally have a chance to run, to get loose, feel free, the wind in their manes, if they had manes, and there I was, in their path, the goats piling up behind me.” He paused thoughtfully. “l didn’t know whether to shit or go blind.”
He would never finish the story. Del started laughing and couldn’t stop. I hadn’t imagined she could laugh at all but his last remark sent a light to her face, almost broke it apart in a kind of whimpering mirth. Soon Frank was laughing too. They seemed to take their good feeling beyond the story he’d been telling. She sat facing the windshield, making that helpless sound. Their laughter had points of contact, found each other like instruments in a brass quintet, communicating subtle and lovely things. Frank reached over the seat and put his hands on her breasts, awkwardly, clutching tight. His delight had to find something to grasp, to adhere to, some part of her. He narrowed his eyes, showed clenched teeth. It was his old hungry look, hungry for the limit of things. Eventually he settled back in his seat, hands clasped behind his neck. I needed Kathryn to help me see him complete, feel what we’d all felt together, years ago.
The water beyond the jetty was blowing white. They got out of the car, camera equipment slung over Del’s shoulders. Frank nodded to me. They said goodbye, standing on the sidewalk, and I drove north, out of town, seeing at once the summit of Taygetus, well ahead, as I’d seen it with Tap from the other side when I first came down to the Mani, a wide reach above the hills and orchards, snow-gold in the climbing sun.
Dick and Dot, the Bordens, greeted me at the door. In the living room a few people stood holding drinks. Before the others arrived, Dick said, he wanted to show me something, and led me down a long hall to the study. The floor was layered with rugs. There were rugs hanging on the walls and rugs draped across the sofa and chairs. He showed me rugs rolled up in closets and rugs wedged under the desk. He walked me around the room, talking about the acquisition of particular rugs. Visits to dealers in Dubai, to warehouses in Lahore, to Turkish weaving areas. The color in this prayer kilim comes from the roots of certain grasses. You can tell children worked on this Bokhara because the knots aren’t banged down tightly. Dot came in to ask what I wanted to drink, then joined us briefly, happy to trade voices with her husband, to recite stories about bargaining for rugs over jasmine tea, getting rugs through customs, photographing rugs for insurance purposes. Investments, she said. Supply was getting scarce, value was bound to increase, they were buying all they could. War, revolution, ethnic uprisings. Future value, future gain. And in the meantime look how lovely. When she left, Dick got down on his knees to lift the edges of rugs arranged in layers on the floor. Hexagons. Stylized flying birds. Palmette stars. He threw back the edges to show more, the mellow colors of an old kilim made by nomadic weavers, a double prayer-niche that allowed both young and old to pray. He threw back entire rugs to show the full surfaces of what lay beneath, the patterns multiplying inward. He was not thinking of investments now. There were grids and arabesques, gardens in silk and wool. He pointed out multiple backgrounds, borders with formal Kufic lettering, things drawn together in crowded surfaces, a contained and intricate rapture, the desert universe made shapely and complete. He bobbed his smallish, round and almost hairless head, speaking in a soft hypnotic singsong. Geometry, nature and God.
The living room was crowded when we got back. I was drinking raki for no good reason. David introduced me to a man named Roy Hardeman. I looked at the wall-hangings, the silk calligraphy. They have a tendency to crowd together in doorways, leaving the cinema for instance. A woman’s voice. One thing I will say for the English, we don’t block exits. Lindsay stood across the room, laughing. What was it about our lives that year we were together that made us so ready to laugh? We were always laughing, it seemed, as if impelled by some quality of the sky on clear nights, the mountains around us, the sea at the foot of Syngrou Street. Hardeman said something. He was a small correct American who stood with his legs together, feet slightly parted. Based in Tunis, David said. Travels widely in North Africa, Western Europe. The pinched face of a killer executive. Dot moved toward me with a bottle three-quarters full. I realized why the name seemed familiar. Refrigeration systems. He was the man who hadn’t showed up the night David and Lindsay went swimming in their clothes. A sandstorm in Cairo, someone had said. But who? Dick went down the hall with three Armenians from Tehran, here to get Canadian visas. I asked David if he’d gone to Frankfurt. He paused to wonder. Charles Maitland entered, full of chummy belligerence. Ann, behind him, looked nervous, over-alert. We were all standing, a stylized fatigue, a form of waking collapse that we agreed to undergo together.
Drink and banter made us hungry and someone got together a group of seven or eight for dinner. Sometime later we were down to four, sitting in a club in the Plaka watching a belly dancer named Janet Ruffing, the wife of the operations head at the Mainland Bank. David was astonished. He leaned over to confer with Lindsay. Roy Hardeman had gone across the room to make a phone call, wincing in the noise of drums, flute, amplified guitar and bouzouki. That curious bird-footed stance.
“I heard some of them were taking lessons,” Lindsay said, “but I didn’t think it would get this far. This is quite far.”
“Does Jack Ruffing know?”
“Of course he knows.”
“I don’t think he knows,” David said.
Hardeman came back to the table and David explained who the dancer was. Everybody seemed to know Jack Ruffing.
“Does Jack know?” Hardeman said.
“I don’t think he knows.”
“Hadn’t someone better tell h
im? Look, I asked an associate to join us for a little last-minute give-and-take. I’m leaving a day sooner than I’d planned.”
“I wonder if she gets paid,” Lindsay said.
Polychrome sateen. Finger cymbals and scarlet lips. We studied her wandering pelvis, watched her lean and toss and vibrate. She was all wrong, long and slender, a white-bodied bending reed, but the cheerfulness of her effort, the shy pleasure she found, made us, made me, instantly willing to overlook the flat belly and slim hips, the earnest mechanics in her movements. What innocence and pluck, a bank wife, to dance in public, her navel fluttering above a turquoise sash. I ordered another drink and tried to recall the word for well-proportioned buttocks.
When the dance ended Lindsay went looking for her in a room at the top of the stairs. The musicians took a break, the three men at the table listened to the noise in the street, the motorcycles, the music from discos and nightclubs.
“Like to dedicate this medley of tunes to the deposed shah of Iran,” David said, looking into his glass. “I run in the woods every day.”
“Good country hardball,” Hardeman said.
“How is Karen?”
“She likes it there. She really likes it.”
“Lindsay likes it here.”
“She rides,” Hardeman said.
“Only keep her out of the desert.”
“I have at romance with the desert. That’s right, of all people. The desert winds have stirring names.”
“Lindsay thinks a lot of Karen.”
“I’ll tell her. That’s good to know. She’ll be pleased.”
“We may be there in March.”