The Names

by Don DeLillo

  In the bin, the inverted lunar urn, he wondered about the uses of ecstasy, see the Greek, a displacing, a coming out of stasis. That’s all it was. A freedom, an escape from the condition of ideal balance. Normal understanding is surpassed, the self and its machinery obliterated. Is this what innocence is? Is it the language of innocence those people spoke, words flying out of them like spat stones? The deep past of men, the transparent word. Is this what they longed for with that terrible holy gibberish they carried through the world? To be the children of the race? Sleep. The sleep of tired children, the great white-sheeted wave. It began to fold over him. He was exhausted, he closed his eyes. A little more, a little longer. It was necessary to remember, to dream the pristine earth.

  His father stands erect, eyes closed, the noise running out of him, strangely calm and measured. Owen sees the preacher come close. His eyes are bright and queer. He has powerful forearms, high-veined, dark-veined. There are voices and rejoicing, a rash of voices, movement here and there. This speech is beautiful in its way, inverted, indivisible, absent. It is not quite there. It passes over and through. There are occasional prompting comments by the preacher, his reflections on what he sees and hears. He speaks conversationally of these tremendous things.

  Those were plain and forthright people, thought the man crouched in the dark. Those were people who deserved better. All they had to reconcile them to exhaustion and defeat was that meager place in the wind. Those were honest people, struggling to make a way, full of the heart’s own goodness and love.

  The clouds are neon-edged. The light is metallic, falling across the rangeland, the plainweave fields, the old towns in their scrupulous ruin.

  Bless them.

  “Bless them.”

  He sat in the small room, motionless, looking toward a wall. The eyes were still involved in that old and recollected business, the head tilted toward his right shoulder. There was a strange radiance in his face, the slightest separation of the man from his condition, the full acceptance, the crushing belief that nothing can be done. Motionless. The telling had merged with the event. I had to think a moment to remember where we were.

  “You stayed in the silo through the night.”

  “Yes, of course. Why would I come out, to watch them kill him? These killings mock us. They mock our need to structure and classify, to build a system against the terror in our souls. They make the system equal to the terror. The means to contend with death has become death. Did I always know this? It took the desert to make it clear to me. Clear and simple, to answer the question you asked earlier. All questions are answered today.”

  “Is this what the cult intended all the time, this mockery?”

  “Of course not. They intended nothing, they meant nothing. They only matched the letters. What beautiful names. Hawa Mandir. Hamir Mazmudar.”

  The twig broom. The muted colors of the pillows and rugs. The angles of arranged objects. The floorboard seams. The seam of light and shade. The muted colors of the water jug and wooden chest. The muted colors of the walls.

  We sat watching the room go dark. I judged the amount of time that had to pass before he would be ready to recite the ending, before the stillness would yield. This is what I was learning from the objects in the room and the spaces between them, from the conscious solace he was devising in things. I was learning when to speak, in what manner.

  “Try to finish,” I said softly.

  Two blood-covered stones were found near the body on the outskirts of the fifteenth-century town, at first light, by a woman fetching water or by boys on their way to the fields. By this time three men would be trekking west, leaving behind a comatose woman and two other men, one dead, one merely sitting still. Eventually a constable would make his way along the rough path to the storage bins, and then a subdivisional officer, to question the one conscious person. He would be sitting in the dust, blue-eyed and sparsely bearded, without documents or money, and he would probably try to speak to them in some dialect of northwest Iran.

  The trekkers dispersed without a word in the wild country before the border. The one in Western clothes, carrying a small pack, had imprinted in his passport a visa which would not expire for some months. It included the stamp of the second secretary, Embassy of Pakistan, Athens, Greece, and carried above the stamp an example of this gentleman’s handsomely scripted initials.

  It was interesting how he’d chosen to finish, impersonally, gazing as if from a distance on these unknowable people, these figures we distinguish by their clothing. There would be no further commentary and reflection. This was fitting. I had no trouble accepting this. I didn’t want to reflect further, with or without Owen. It was enough to see him sit there, owl-eyed, in the room he’d been arranging all his life.

  The alleys were full of people and noise. Bare bulbs were arrayed on strings over tiers of nuts and spices. I paused every few feet to see what was here, nutmeg and scarlet mace, burlap bags of coriander seeds and chilies, rock salt in crude chunks. I lingered at the trays of dyestuffs and ground spices, heaped in pyramids, colors I’d never seen, brilliances, worlds, until finally it was time to go.

  I came away from the old city feeling I’d been engaged in a contest of some singular and gratifying kind. Whatever he’d lost in life-strength, this is what I’d won.

  13

  Shutters down, laundry hanging in a dead calm on the terraces and rooftops. There’s an aura of formal accord in the stillness that falls over certain cities at fixed times of the day and week. Everyone has agreed to disappear. The city is reduced to surfaces, planes of light and shade. To the lone figure, walking these streets, the silence has the well-plotted force of something commonly willed. It is a strict observance, the wishing of a spell upon things.

  This is more or less what I was thinking when the argument started. A man and woman in a basement room, shouting at each other. I crossed the street and walked through a fence-gap into the pine woods, where I sat on a bench like an old man musing. The shouting grew intense, voices overlapping. It was the only sound on this weekend afternoon except for taxis down by the Hilton, cornering in early summer pain. Now the balcony doors along the street slowly opened. The woman’s voice reached a bitter shriek. The neighbors began to appear on their balconies, looking down toward the sunken windows. The man was in a raucous fury, the woman spoke at runaway speed. Several people were out there, then several more, people in pajamas, in night dresses, in robes and shorts, children grimacing in the light. All listened to the voices below, listened carefully at first, trying to catch the drift. In their dishevelment they were oddly meticulous figures, attentive, bodies held in equilibrium as they tried to comprehend, to be reasonable and fair. Then a man in striped shorts cried out a command for quiet. A bald old man in blue pajamas cried out the same plaintive word. From all the occupied balconies, voices cried out for quiet, quiet, a brief and powerful surge. In a short time the argument subsided, dropped off to a muttered exchange, and people withdrew to their rooms, fastening the louvered doors behind them.

  I was happy to be back. There was dinner with Ann, there were five new pages from Tap’s nonfiction novel to read. The desk in my office was full of neat stacks of paper that I looked forward to marking up and restacking, and pink and coral roses climbed the full height of a six-story building a few blocks away. But later in the day, when I thought about the walk I’d taken, it wasn’t the abandoned streets I recalled, the centuries-old slumber, or the antic look of the undergarments those roused people wore. It was the two voices, that man and woman in plain rage, battling.

  British Columbia. I knew two things about Victoria. It was “English” and it was “rainy.” I had no idea what kind of house they lived in, what the street looked like, how they went about their daily routine. Did he walk to school or ride a bus? Was it a school bus or a city bus? What color was the bus? These things carried a haunting importance. These were the things my own father used to ask me all the time about my own small crossings of the world. His
catechism of minims and incidentals. Now I saw what he was getting at. He wanted a detailed picture in which to place the small figure, the lone figure. The only safety is in details. Here we have a certainty or two, the petty facts of time and weather that connect people across a distance. He used to ask me about the lighting in the classroom, the amount of time we took for recess, which children were assigned to close the cloakroom doors, gripping the indentations to slide the panels shut. These were formal questions, addressed to me in clusters. I had to give him names, numbers, colors, whatever I could collect of particular things. These helped him see me as real.

  I had no usable details of my son’s comings and goings, nothing clear, nothing intact. I had trouble seeing them, seeing Kathryn taking walks across the city. In the single year we’d spent on South Hero, in the Champlain Islands, we’d walked through a deep and empty winter, walked through blowing drifts and across the lake’s stunned surface (men in fishing shanties after perch and smelt). How she’d loved it, nature at the cutting edge, alert and pure. I could not have known how pure that winter would one day seem to me, bright with detail, as though set aside for future use. We had our landscape of meditation and rough love, working it out, good days and bad. I could see the place clearly, see them in it, down to the weave of their Shetland sweaters. What I needed was a sense of the present, their living days, the things around them. They’d removed themselves from my experience of real places.

  Who were they when I wasn’t there? What were the secrets they were keeping? I knew them in the simplest way, the accumulation, the natural gathering of hours. Is it a personal limitation or a theory of the universe that makes me want to say this is everything? This is what love comes down to, things that happen and what we say about them. Certainly this is what I wanted from Kathryn and Tap, the seeping love of small talk and family chat. I wanted them to tell me how they’d spent their day.

  Ann, that evening, leaned against the balustrade on her terrace, facing in toward the door, where I stood with a drink. It was still light, too early to go to dinner, and she was telling me that Charles had just become involved in a major project in the Gulf. He would be part of a team responsible for the safety system in a gas liquefaction plant on Das Island, due to be operational by the end of the year. He had recited a stream of data over the phone. Hundreds of millions of cubic feet of gas per day, yearly tonnage of butane, propane, sulphur. He was excited, the Arabs were excited. The Japanese, who had already contracted for most of the processed gas, were also excited. The safety apparatus was an engineering marvel and Charles could hardly wait to get started.

  “When does it happen?”

  “He’s back here day after tomorrow. A week later he flies to Abu Dhabi and pitches up on his island.”

  “Summer in the Gulf.”

  “It’s a wonderful piece of luck. We’re both a little stunned by it. He needs to get immersed in something like this, something brand new.”

  “Complex systems, endless connections.”

  “These bring him peace, I think. Peace and rest. He wants to talk to you incidentally. Instructed me to make sure James didn’t leave town. Bind and gag him if necessary, he said.”

  “I look forward to seeing the old bastard. It’s been a while.”

  “We’re going to Mycenae while he’s here. It’s that time again. The goat-bells and wild poppies. He loves to sit on top of the palace ruins after everyone has left. The wind makes a ghostly sound, sweeping between those hills. Mycenae is his place, as Delphi is mine. Blood and steel. This is what he says about it. Massive rocks, blood cries, something old that he claims to recognize but can’t seem to define for me.”

  I reread Tap’s pages that night. They were full of small indents, moments of discovery, things the young hero sees and wonders about. But nothing mattered so much on this second reading as a number of spirited misspellings. l found these mangled words exhilarating. He’d made them new again, made me see how they worked, what they really were. They were ancient things, secret, reshapable.

  There’s a grizzled old man, a sodbuster he is called in the text, who injures his leg in a drunken fall. The support he uses to get around with is one we’ve all seen. It includes a crosspiece to fit under the armpit and it is usually made of wood—the wood of a white-barked tree in this case. It is called a burch cruch.

  This term had a superseding rightness as it appeared on the page. It found the spoken poetry in those words, the rough form lost through usage. His other misrenderings were wilder, freedom-seeking, and seemed to contain curious perceptions about the words themselves, second and deeper meanings, original meanings. It pleased me to believe he was not wholly innocent of these mistakes. I thought he sensed the errors but let them stand, out of exuberance and sly wonder and the inarticulate wish to delight me.

  Charles Maitland sat alone in the dark hush of the bar at the Grande Bretagne, a midafternoon lull. He looked up when he saw me enter. A smile broke across his face, some kind of tigerish gleam in his eye.

  “You wily bastard, James. Sit, sit.”

  “What are you drinking? I want something long and cool.”

  “Long and cool, is it? What a crafty piece of work.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  The bartender wasn’t at the bar. I heard him talking to a waiter in a back room somewhere.

  “I always thought George Rowser was a fool. I’m the bloody fool, aren’t I?”

  “Why are you a fool, Charlie?”

  “Come on, come on.”

  “I don’t know what you’re getting at.”

  “You don’t know, you don’t know. In a pig’s eye, Axton. You bastard, I never even suspected. I never imagined. You were damned good. I don’t mind telling you I’m impressed, even a bit envious, you know. It’s been a year, has it, since we’ve been making the rounds together? And you never slipped. You never gave me reason to wonder.”

  The waiter came out. Charles ordered me a drink and then simply looked at me, examining as if in retrospect, wondering what he might have missed that could have given him a clue. A clue to what? I pressed him to explain.

  “I appreciate your stance,” he said. “It’s the only professional stance. But the channel’s no longer current, is it? You’re relaxing with a friend.”

  “What channel?”

  “Come on, come on.”

  He was glowing with admiration and delight, pink with it, shaking a match at the end of his cigarette. I decided to wait him out. I talked about his job in the Gulf, congratulated him, asked for details. When I was halfway through my drink, he approached the subject again, fearful of being deprived of it.

  “Funny how I happened to see the report. I don’t keep up the way I used to. I used to read every bloody word in those digests and surveys.”

  “What did it say exactly?”

  He smiled. “Only that the Northeast Group, an American firm selling political risk insurance, has maintained a connection with the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency since its inception. Diplomatic sources et cetera.”

  I found it necessary to gaze across the room, to do some retrospective thinking of my own. I was aware that I’d narrowed my eyes, looking into the half light, like an illustration of someone studying an object or development. Two men entered speaking French.

  “Of course you were aware in advance of this unraveling. You knew it was blown.”

  “Rowser knew.”

  “You learned it from him, did you?”

  “He’s very deft for someone who sweats and twitches,” I said.

  “Where exactly did you see the report?”

  Smiling, playing the game. “Has it appeared in more than one place? I doubt it. Too soon for that. The Middle East Security Survey. I used to read it all the time. Fallen off in recent years. But I still subscribe. Saw the current issue, as it happens, while I was in the Gulf. Just out. The minister of petroleum’s personal copy.”

  “Is that what he’s called—the minister of petroleu
m?”

  “The minister of petroleum and mineral resources.”

  “Nice.”

  “You were damned good, James. All this time engaged in a back-channel dialogue with CIA. I never thought George Rowser was capable of this. I must tell him someday I misjudged him.”

  “How was it put?”

  “The way they usually put things. You know as well as I. Better no doubt. ‘Diplomatic sources arriving in London from Baghdad and Amman report that security officials in the Middle East have discovered a link et cetera, et cetera.’ What I’m curious to know is whether your firm is a full-fledged proprietary or simply a convenient source of information. Not that I’m asking, you understand. They’ve exposed only the bare outline. I know there must be much more and it must be absolutely riveting and one day I hope to hear you tell it, James.”

  “Drink up. We’ll have another.”

  “I haven’t told Ann. It isn’t likely this kind of special information in a confidential newsletter will filter through to the public at large. Those whose business it is to know will surely know. The rest will go on as they always have. If your past is no longer a total secret, there is still your future to consider. I thought it best to tell no one, not even Ann. No doubt your plans are well advanced by now. You’ll need all possible room to maneuver.”

  What a joke—and no one to share it with. Rowser had taken me to that Moghul tomb to tell me in a roundabout way the same thing I’d just heard from Charles. I’d failed to listen, to understand. In his own way Rowser was intent on doing me a favor. He was resigning because the news was soon to appear and he wanted me to do the same. This is the trouble with dupes. You have to save their skin in the end. Assuming they know there’s something they need to be saved from.

  I refrained from getting drunk. Charles gave me another of his newly respectful looks as we said goodbye outside the hotel. I went back to the office and telexed my resignation. It was not easy to feel righteous about this.