by Don DeLillo
“We’ve separated the Aryans,” Hardeman said. “And what about the Huns? Certainly the Huns came sweeping out of Central Asia.”
“What color were the Huns?” David said.
“They weren’t light, they weren’t dark.”
“I should have had this conversation with someone else.”
“Sorry.”
“I felt I’d perceived something important and interesting, all on my own, you son of a bitch.”
“Well you probably did. I’m not sure of my facts really.”
“Yes you are.”
“Actually I am.”
“Of course you are.”
“But it’s an interesting premise,” Hardeman said.
“Fuck you.”
We went to dinner in an old mansion near the U.S. embassy. Hardeman was inhaling short Scotches. The perfect part in his hair, the geometric glasses and three-piece suit seemed the achievements of a systematic self-knowledge. This was the finished thing. He was physically compact, worked neatly into well-cut clothes, and nothing attached to him that had not been the subject of meticulous inner testing.
“Karen was saying—listen to this, Lindsay—that you both have to come and stay with us in London, soon as we’re settled.”
“Good. In the spring.”
“In the fall would be better. We have to find a nanny.”
“But you don’t have children,” she said.
“My original kids.”
“I didn’t know you had original kids.”
“My first marriage.”
“I didn’t know,” she said.
“They’ll spend the summer. Karen’s looking forward to finding a nanny.”
David sat quietly, surrounding a beer, still unhappy over the earlier conversation.
“I saw Andreas not too long ago,” I said. “We had a dinner of brains and lower organs.”
“A good man,” Hardeman said. “Bright, analytical.”
“What does he do for the firm?”
“Sales rep. A hard worker. They love him in Bremen. Speaks German well. They tried very hard to talk him into staying.”
I let a silence fall over this last remark. We ordered beer all around. When the food came we examined each other’s dishes. After some discussion Lindsay and I traded plates.
“Have they told you,” Hardeman said, “how Karen used to spend her evenings?”
I said I wasn’t sure. Karen used to spend her evenings sitting on a stool near the right-field line in Fulton County Stadium, Atlanta, Georgia, running down foul balls hit that way by National League stalwarts. She was sixteen years old, a golden girl on grassy turf, hair reaching her waist. He met her six years later in a revolving restaurant.
“I thought it was the left-field line,” David said.
“Right-field.”
“She told me left.”
“Couldn’t have been left. It was left-handed hitters she feared most. Who was active then? You’re the expert. Give us some names.”
David went back to his curry. When we finished the beer, Hardeman ordered another scotch. And when he asked where the men’s room was, I said I was heading that way myself.
The only water was cold. We stood with our backs to each
other. I held my hands under the tap, talking over my shoulder
to Hardeman, who was at the urinal.
“Did I understand you to say that Andreas is leaving the firm?”
“Correct.”
“I thought I understood he was moving on to London with other key people in the region.”
“Not so.”
“He wants to stay in Athens then.”
“I don’t know what he wants.”
“Is he looking for a job, do you know? Has he said anything to you at all?”
“Why would he? We don’t interact at that level. I’m in manufacturing.”
“I’d be interested in finding out what his plans are. It would only take a phone call.”
“Make it,” he said.
“l wonder if you’d do it for me. Not to Andreas. Someone in the sales department or personnel.”
He was finished at the urinal and slowly wheeled in my direction. I turned my head toward the blank wall in front of me.
“Why should I?” he said.
“I’d like to know why he left, who he plans to work for. If he doesn’t have plans for a new job, I’d be interested in knowing why. I’d also like to know if he intends to remain in Athens.” I paused, letting the water run over my hands. “It could be important.”
“Who do you work for?” Hardeman said.
“I’m sure David’s told you.”
“Does he know?”
“Of course he knows. Look, I can’t go into details. I’ll only say Andreas may have a sideline. He may be connected to something besides air cooling systems in Bremen.”
“Andreas was a valuable member of the firm. Why should I involve myself in an unauthorized read-out? We work for the same people. And if he’s chosen to leave, he may also choose to return someday.”
“What do you know about him that may not be in his personnel file? Anything at all. One thing.”
“It’s not his identity I have doubts about.”
“Very funny.”
“I don’t mean it to be. Sure, David’s mentioned political risk insurance. He’s also mentioned the scrambled telexes he occasionally sends your way, unscrambled, which I told him I thought was unconscionable, regardless of content, regardless of friendship. I may not know anything about Andreas’ private life or his politics but I know the firm he’s worked for these last three or four years. What do I know about you?”
What could I say, we were fellow Americans? I felt foolish, staring at the wall, my hands turning in the stream of water. My attempt to learn something was less useful than the dumbest amateur’s because this is what an amateur enjoys, a men’s room meeting with clipped dialogue. I wasn’t even good at clipped dialogue.
He was waiting to wash his hands.
The news that Andreas was not going to London would lurk vaguely in my mind in the days to come like the knowledge of some unpleasantness whose exact nature will not surface when one tries to recall it. Maybe London was his clumsy way of ending the affair with Ann, inventing a distance between them. Maybe the story revolved around her. It was all part of the same thing, that rapt entanglement I’d spoken to her about a couple of days earlier (only to be made fun of). The world is here, the world is where I want to be.
“We promised ourselves an early night,” Lindsay said. Hardeman ordered another drink. He described the house he was renting in Mayfair. He spoke slowly but very clearly and his sentences began to extend into an elaborate and self-conscious correctness, a latticework of clauses, pure grammar. Drunk.
He and I shared the back seat in David’s car. We hadn’t gone two blocks when he dropped off to sleep. It was like the death of a machine-tooled part. At a red light David looked at me in the rearview mirror.
“I have an idea. Are you ready for this? Because it’s one of the great ideas of my career. Maybe the greatest. I started thinking about it during dinner when I saw how much he was drinking. It came to me then. And it’s developing, refining itself even as we sit here waiting for the light to change. I think we can bring it off, boy, if we’re cunning enough, if we really want to do it.” “We’re cunning enough,” Lindsay said, “but we don’t want to do it.”
The idea was to put Hardeman on a plane to some distant city. There was a flight at 3:50 A.M. to Tehran, for instance, on KLM. He wouldn’t need a visa to get on the plane. He would only need a visa to get out of the terminal once he was there. This was beyond our purview, David said. All we wanted to do was send him somewhere. We’d need his passport, which David was certain he’d be carrying, and a ticket, which David would purchase with one of his credit cards.
We passed my building. A moment or two later we passed their building. Lindsay stared into the window on her side.
/> “Once we have the ticket,” David said, “we come back out to the car and get him on his feet and walk him between us into the terminal. We get him a seat in the nonsmoking area, which I’m sure he’ll appreciate upon reflection, and then we face our biggest problem, which is how to get him through passport control.”
Lindsay began to laugh, a little warily.
“By this time he is probably semiconscious. He can walk but can’t think. lf we stick the boarding pass, ticket and passport in his fist, it’s possible he can make it past the booth through habit alone. But what happens then? We can’t follow him through passport control. It’s too much to expect that he’ll look at the boarding pass and walk automatically to the right gate.”
I told him there was a simple solution. We were on the airport road, doing a hundred kilometers, and he looked at me in the mirror, briefly, to make sure I was serious.
“Breathtakingly simple,” I said. “All we have to do is buy two tickets. One of us takes him through the entire process, right to his seat on the plane.”
Lindsay thought this was very funny. It could work after all. There was a huskiness in her laugh, the slightly surprised dawning of the idea that she was mean enough to want it to work. “Then the one who accompanies him simply turns around and goes down the ramp and gets back on the shuttle bus, feigning illness. They’ll cancel the ticket. It won’t cost a dime.”
David whispered, “Of course, of course.”
I felt all along we wouldn’t do it. It was too grand, too powerful. And as many times as I’d traveled with a visa, I didn’t know whether he was right about that. I thought they examined visas at the airline counter before issuing boarding passes. But David kept on driving, kept on talking, and Lindsay began to sag in her seat as if to hide from the enormity of it all. Tehran. They would think he’d come to hold a service for the hostages.
In the end we couldn’t even get him out of the car. He kept hitting his head, falling away from us, limbs floppy. It was interesting to see the concentration in David’s face. He viewed the formless Hardeman as a problem in surfaces, how and where to grip. He tugged at him, he wrestled. The door-opening was small and oddly shaped and David’s considerable bulk was a problem in itself. He tried kneeling on the front seat and scooping Hardeman out to me. He tried a number of things. He was completely involved in the idea, the vision. He wanted to send this man to another place.
The figure appeared in a blizzard, moving toward the house from the other side of the park, a skier in bright banded colors coming in diagonal stride, the only clear shape in that dead-even light, a world without shadow, a winter’s worth of snow on the streets and cars and laid over the park benches and the bird bath in the yard, the skier digging in, working across that dreamlike space, red-hooded, masked.
You can’t walk down Bay Street and pick out the Americans from the Canadians. They are alien beings in our midst, waiting for a signal. This is the science-fiction theme (SF for semi-facetious). They’re in the schools, teaching our children, subtly and even unintentionally promoting their own values—values they assume we share. The theme of the corruption of the innocent. Their crime families have footholds in our cities—drugs, pornography, legitimate businesses—and their pimps from Buffalo and Detroit work both sides of the border, keeping the girls in motion. The theme of expansionism, of organized criminal infiltration. They own the corporations, the processing plants, the mineral rights, a huge share of the Canadian earth. The colonialist theme, the theme of exploitation, of greatest possible utilization. They are right next to us, sending their contaminants, their pollutants, their noxious industrial waste into our rivers, lakes and air. The theme of power’s ignorance and blindness and contempt. We are in the path of their television programs, their movies and music, the whole enormous rot and glut and blare of their culture. The theme of cancer and its spread.
I stood in the window as she removed the skis and carried them up the steps. The sight of her cutting through that blown snow, appearing out of the invisible city around us, the craft and mystery of it filled me with deep delight.
George Rowser stepped out of the elevator at the Hilton in Lahore, looking pale and rumpled. He put his briefcase down, setting it between his feet, then used both hands to adjust his glasses, raising the hands toward his face, fingers extended, palms turned toward each other, in a gesture that started out as a blessing of multitudes. When he saw me in a lobby chair he walked toward the coffee shop, pigeon-toed. We ordered Kipling burgers and fresh fruit juice. Gatherings of more than six people were forbidden.
“Why am I here, George?”
“Where were you?”
“Islamabad.”
“So I wanted to talk. It’s not as though you were on the other side of the world.”
“Couldn’t we talk on the phone?”
“Be smart,” he said. “In addition to which, this city has architecture. Go look at the public buildings. What would you call this architecture? Gothic, Victorian—what else, Punjabi? Why do I have the impression you know things like this?”
“Maybe it’s Moghul. Or Moghul-influenced. I don’t know really.”
“Whatever, it’s a nice blend. A very happy blend. Who were the Moghuls?”
“They came sweeping out of Central Asia.”
Four or five ballpoint pens stuck out of the breast pocket of his suit coat. His briefcase was under the table, upright, wedged between his calves. I waited for him to tell me what he wanted to talk about.
“I’m getting a remote ignition device put in my car. They stick a thing on the trunk. I can start the car while I’m in the kitchen boiling an egg.” He looked out into the lobby. “If it blows up, the egg tastes that much better.”
“Nice. What about tear gas ducts?”
“I do defensive measures only. Are you kidding? The parent would be upset if they found out I was loading a vehicle with incapacitators. Not that it matters anymore.”
“What do you mean?”
“I’m seriously thinking I may resign, Jim.”
The fact that he used my name seemed almost as important as the statement that preceded it. Was he saying one thing or two?
“Choice? Or are they forcing you out?”
“There are pressures,” he said. “Developments no one could have foreseen. Never mind details. I think it may be time, that’s all. I need a change. We all need a change now and then.”
“What kind of pressures? From the parent?”
A little bored. “The parent is a collector. They acquire companies, they adjust, they seek a balance. We’re one of the companies, that’s all. They look at the profit curve. That’s all they know from.”
“What do they see when they look at this curve?”
“What they lose one year in insurance they gain in consumer products or manufacturing. They diversify to minimize risk. You and I work at risk but not in the same sense the parent knows the word. The parent knows the word in a limited sense.”
“What did Iran do to us?”
“Limited coverage. Plus reinsurance. But we got hurt like everybody else. Who could predict? I don’t know anyone who predicted. A haunting failure. They’re still straggling onto the beach in Greece. Like the Lebanon thing earlier. We picked the right place for our headquarters. That’s one thing we did.”
Hamburgers for dinner. This was Rowserlike. Skip lunch, bolt dinner, go to bed, remembering to secure all systems.
“What’s happening in your life, George, outside the Northeast Group?”
“l have to wear white socks. My doctor says I’m allergic to dye.”
“Tension. You ought to change your wardrobe completely. You look like an assistant principal of the 1950s in a high school on the wrong side of town. Get one of those knee-length shirts the men wear here. And some loose trousers.”
“They’re throwing away their London suits to wear traditional things. You know what that means, don’t you?”
“Our lives are in danger.”
“How’s your burger?” he said.
He suggested we get a car and driver and take a ride before dark. There was a mausoleum he wanted to see. I watched him go to the desk to make arrangements. He walked in a block of heavy air, a personal zone in which movement was difficult, breathing slightly labored. Every space he inhabited seemed en closed. There was a basic containment or frustration. His compulsive secrecy, the taking of endless precautions would explain some of this, of course. Then there were his numbers, the data he collected and sorted and studied endlessly. This took up the rest of his space.
The Mall in Lahore is a broad avenue running roughly east and west, built by, named by the British. Vehicles rush into it with the cartoonish verve of objects possessing human traits, so individualistic, so seemingly intent on playing merry hell with the boulevard’s stately pretensions. Cycle rickshaws, horse-drawn taxis, minicabs painted pink, fuchsia, peacock blue, trucks and cars and scooters, bicycles weaving in and out of bullock carts, vendors wheeling massive arrangements of nuts, fruits and vegetables, buses leaning under the rooftop weight of trussed-up bundles, furniture and other objects.
What we see, Owen Brademas might say, is the grand ordering imperial vision as it is overrun by the surge and pelt of daily life.
Then there was the guard at the entrance to the local office of the Mainland Bank. An elderly turbaned fellow with enormous drooping mustache, a tunic and pajama pants, a curved dagger in his sash and a pair of pointed slippers. A relative of the doorman at the Hilton. The outfit seemed intended to register in people’s minds the hopeful truth that colonialism was a tourist ornament now, utterly safe to display in public. The foreign bank he guarded was a co-survivor of the picturesque past, exerting no more influence than the man himself. The man had a single task, David told me once. To lower the steel shutters at the first sign of a demonstration.
We passed some of the buildings Rowser had referred to, the high court, the museum, and headed north.
“Tanker loadings at Kharg are down to two a week.”
“Maintenance.”