by Don DeLillo
Telling it made him breathe harder. He kept licking his lips and then took sweat from the back of his hand, putting the hand to his mouth. Blood dripped on the shiny red trunks.
“How bad is it?”
“Stiff, stiff. Hurts like hell. Is someone coming?”
I saw several men standing against the wall of the building across the street, looking up at us. Above them, all up and down the street, there were people on the balconies, in robes and pajamas, watching quietly.
“I’ve been expecting this,” he said. “The only question was which country, how they’d go about it. It could have been worse, boy. Better believe it.”
Lindsay stood in the hospital corridor, watching me approach. She was bright with fear, shining. I was afraid to touch her.
A man came from the Ministry of Public Order. We sat in the kitchen drinking Nescafé. He was a middle-aged man, a chain smoker whose brisk and commanding manner grew almost entirely out of the management of his cigarettes and lighter. I asked him if anyone had claimed responsibility for the action. This is how we referred to it. It was the action.
Yes, phone calls had been made to several newspapers. A group that called itself the Autonomous People’s Initiative had claimed responsibility. No one knew who they were. Considering how they’d handled the action, he said, it was yet to be decided whether or not they were to be taken seriously. The weapon found at the scene was a 9mm pistol called a CZ-75, made in Czechoslovakia.
He asked me what I’d seen and heard. The next day there was another visitor, a man from the political section of the U.S. embassy. He showed me credentials and asked if I had any scotch. He’d just had a nice visit, he said, with David Keller in the hospital. We went into the living room, where I waited for him to ask about my job, my contacts with local people. Instead he asked about the Mainland Bank. I told him what little I knew. They lent money to Turkey, impressive sums. They had only a representative office in Turkey—no foreign bank had a full-fledged branch—so they approved these loans out of the Athens office. He knew all this, although he didn’t say so. He had the look of a once fat child, milk-white, smooth-surfaced, wheezing. He was incomplete without the much-loved bulk, alluding to it every time he moved, a soft-footed man, lowering himself carefully into the chair, carefully crossing his legs.
He asked a few questions about my trips to countries in the region. He approached the subject of the Northeast Group several times but never mentioned the name itself, never asked a direct question. I let the vague references go by, volunteered nothing, paused often. He sat with the drink in his hand, having wrapped the bottom of the glass in a paper napkin he’d found in the kitchen. It was a strange conversation, full of hedged remarks and obscure undercurrents, perfect in its way.
But who were they really after?
This is it, this is the thing I can’t resolve. I’d gone running at the same hour for six straight days. No sign of David at that hour except on the last of these days. Were they waiting for me? Did David precipitate the action by rushing the gunmen before they had a chance to realize this was not the man they wanted? Or did they simply mistake him for me? There would be a curious symmetry to such an error, a symmetry of misidentification, especially if we believe that Andreas Eliades was behind the action or somehow involved in it. It was Andreas who mistook me for David Keller the night we first met. He thought I was the banker. Did his companions think David was the risk analyst? The possibility is haunting, that there is an exact correspondence at the center of all this confusion, this formlessness of motive and plan and execution. A harmony.
What is the counter-argument?
There was no mix-up. David and I don’t look alike, we weren’t wearing similar clothes, we hadn’t been following similar routines. They wanted the banker. They waited outside his building, saw him come out in running clothes, drove up to the woods and placed themselves at the end of the likeliest path.
Which do you believe?
I want to believe they plotted well. I don’t like thinking I was the intended victim. It puts all of us at the mercy of events. It’s one more thing to vex me with its elusiveness, its drift—a fading into distances of human figures and whatever is real and absolute about the light that falls around them. When the gunman turned my way, I was at that instant not only the intended victim but had clearly done something (I tried to remember what) to merit his special attention. But he didn’t aim and fire. This is the point. It turned out that he didn’t know who I was, what I was supposed to have done. I want to interpret this as a sign in my favor.
Did you think you were going to die?
A pause filled my chest, a blank fear. We stood looking at each other. I waited for the second self to emerge, the cunning unlearned self, the animal we keep in reserve for such occasions. It would impel me to move in this or that direction, strategically, flooding my body with adrenalin. But there was only this heavy pause. I was fixed to the spot. Helpless, deprived of will. Why was I standing rigid on a wooded hill, fists clenched, facing a man with a gun? The situation pressed me to recall. This was the only thing to penetrate that blank moment—an awareness I could not connect to things. The words would come later. The single word, the final item on the list.
American.
How do you connect things?
Learn their names. After I told the man from the Ministry what I’d seen in the pine woods, I told him everything else I knew, gave him all the names. Eliades, Rowser, Hardeman, all the tenuous connections. I gave him business cards, supplied approximate dates of conversations, names of restaurants, cities, airlines. Let the investigators work up chronologies, trace routes, check the passenger manifests. Their job was public order. Let them muse on the plausibilities.
What else?
Nothing. I reconstructed events in such a way that I was able to omit a certain name without causing the sequence to appear incomplete. It was Ann Maitland I didn’t want them to know about. She was not of a type or mind to disavow this kind of protection, it seemed to me.
She and I said nothing directly to each other about the shooting. It was coded matter. It was matter we could refer to only within the limits of a practiced look. Even this became too much. We began to look past each other, as if at meadows in the distance. Was Andreas the figure we saw? Our talks became ironic pastorales, slowly paced, with repeated attempts at tenderness.
Lindsay spoke only of my coming to David’s aid, which put a fine sheen on her tendency to reassure us all.
The city went white with sun and dust. Charles would labor in the Gulf, installing radio links, infrared sensors. David would recover without complications, cracking jokes in the mandatory American manner, the cherished manner of people self-conscious about death. This is the humor of violent surprise.
I see them in the primitive silkscreen the brain is able to produce, maybe eight inches in front of my closed eyes, miniaturized by time and distance, riddled by visual static, each figure a dancing red ribbon. These are among the people I’ve tried to know twice, the second time in memory and language. Through them, myself. They are what I’ve become, in ways I don’t understand but which I believe will accrue to a rounded truth, a second life for me as well as for them.
People sit on the steps of the Propylaea as if in a classroom, fifty of them, listening to their guide. The faces are intent, arranged in rows on the marble heights among the common encumbrances and gear, the handbags, cameras, sun hats.
Amid the scaffolding above them a workman slips the bit of a power drill into a block of dressed stone. The shank of the drill is a full meter long and produces a noise of rotating abrasions that sings among the columns and walls.
The native stone is worn smooth, worn down by treading feet, lustrous and slick. An old box camera stands on a tripod with a black cloth hanging down. It is aimed at the Parthenon.
We approach hypnotically, walking on the smooth stones, not watching where we step. The west facade rears before us. It would take a wrenching effort to
avert our eyes from it. I’d seen the temple a hundred times from the street, never suspecting it was this big, this scarred, broken, rough. How different from the spotlighted bijou I’d seen from the car that night, coming back from Piraeus, a year ago.
The marble seems to drip with honey, the pale autumnal hue produced by iron oxide in the stone. And there are stones lying about, stones everywhere as I cross around to the south colonnade—blocks, slabs, capitals, column drums. The temple is cordoned by ropes but this mingled debris is all over the ground, specked surfaces, rough to the touch, wasting in acid rain.
I stop often, listening to people read to each other, listening to the guides speak German, French, Japanese, accented English. This is the peristyle, that is the architrave, those are the triglyphs.
A woman pauses to fix her sandal.
Beyond the retaining wall the great city spreads, ringed by mountains, heat struck, steeped in calamity. The smoke of small fires hangs on the hills, motionless, fixed there. The breathless rim, cinders falling from the sky. Paralysis. Nothing will disperse but powers of sound, rising from the traffic arcs, the jittery cars locked in concrete. Bombings will become commonplace, car bombings, firebombings of offices and department stores. A blind might will seem to shake things, to course headlong through that entire year. No one claims credit for the worst of the terror.
I walk to the east face of the temple, so much space and open ness, lost walls, pediments, roof, a grief for what has escaped containment. And this is what I mainly learned up there, that the Parthenon was not a thing to study but to feel. It wasn’t aloof, rational, timeless, pure. I couldn’t locate the serenity of the place, the logic and steady sense. It wasn’t a relic species of dead Greece but part of the living city below it. This was a surprise. I’d thought it was a separate thing, the sacred height, intact in its Doric order. I hadn’t expected a human feeling to emerge from the stones but this is what I found, deeper than the aft and mathematics embodied in the structure, the optical exactitudes. I found a cry for pity. This is what remains to the mauled stones in their blue surround, this open cry, this voice we know as our own.
Old people sit among upright fragments along the north facade, old women in white socks and heavy shoes, men with lapel badges, a guard in his gray cap, smoking, carrying with him the official aura, the glaze of vacant hours. The old box camera remains untended on its tripod, the black hood lifted in a breeze. Where is the photographer, the old man in the battered gray jacket with sagging pockets, the man with the sunken face, dirt in his fingernails? I feel I know him or can invent him. It isn’t necessary for him to appear, eating pistachio nuts out of a white bag. The camera is enough.
People come through the gateway, people in streams and clusters, in mass assemblies. No one seems to be alone. This is a place to enter in crowds, seek company and talk. Everyone is talking. I move past the scaffolding and walk down the steps, hearing one language after another, rich, harsh, mysterious, strong. This is what we bring to the temple, not prayer or chant or slaughtered rams. Our offering is language.
THE PRAIRIE
14
He was in the middle of a crowd, tongue tied! There was a man in a daise like a drunkerds skuffling lurch, realing in a corner. One window had glass, three others were boarded up when the glass was broken, and it wasn’t conveeniently well lighted in there, like an Indian’s hut of adoby and straw. “Childs play” came a voice through the gloom. It was the widow Larsen his mother’s friend that smelt of spoilt milk. Or someone said “Come across, get right” and it was directed right to him. It was like one of his teeth chattering dreams when he was in the middle of the mirky depths and they called to him from all around. He felt retched, he mumbled in his mind. “Yeeld” came another voice and it was none but the old cantankerus man with the crooked face and laim leg, known as a nefariot skeemer and rummy, natural born for bone picking. “Yeeld” he followed up. Everywhere the others were speaking, but he didn’t know what they were saying. The strange language burst out of them, like people out of breath and breathing words instead of air. But what words, what were they saying? Right next to him was his father bursting forth in secret language which the boy could not decifer in the least. It sounded like a man who talks to owls. The circuit rider watched him. He smiled at the boy and nodded apealingly but his face was like a patch of midnight that has never been cleared away. A secret mockery was wrapped in his friendlyness. What was this strange tongue they spoke? Was it the language of the plains Indians? No, because we know it from the gospels and the acts. This strange and age old practise was glossylalya, to speak with tongues. To some a gift but to Orville Benton a curse and calamitty! The words echoed in his head. People burst out in sudden streams. They were like long dolerus tales being dold out one by one. Who’s words were they? What did they mean? There was none to tell him in that gloomy place. Something he did not like troubled him. The same haunting feeling that he felt in the darkest nights crept over him like gang green. He felt droplets of clammy sweat form on his for head. The circuit rider’s firm hand was on his shoulder and then on his youthful head. “White words” his nodding face remarked. “Pure as the drivelin snow.” His eyes bored through the middle of Orville’s forhead. He stiffend visibly. The rain was like horses hooves on the roof, leaking through the patches. He took his hand off the boy’s head to stretch his fingers and make the bones crack. “Yeeld” his mother said to him with a wiry look that was like a rathful warning to mind his manners, there was company coming. He wanted to yeeld. This is the point! There was nothing in the world he wanted than to yeeld totaly, to go across to them, to speak as they were speaking.
“Do whatever your tongue finds to do! Seal the old language and loose the new!”
The preacherman was gripping him with hot terrible hands. He shrank back in perfect terrour. This is the same young boy who daintilly walked through the intrales and vains of rotting cattle, dead in the pastures of fatal bacillis. He tried to speak in tongues. Orville tried! But his voice had a bedragled sound to it which he did not like. It sounded dreery with weakness. “Get wet, son” the looming face remarked. “Childs play is what we’re doing.” This preacherman wore regular clothes with rolled up sleeves unlike the figures of the past with long clokes and little white collars. They were safer men by the look of them! His father kept nodding his head in a way that bewilderd him. People threw an arm up with figitty fingers to shake around. He scand the church such as it was. Many were speaking now, some in a quiet manner and some raising a fuss and hubub. The circuit riding man eyed the boy. He hummed a little, cracking his bones. This was not a boy who prayed much but now he shut his eyes and prayed that he would understand and speak. His mother was speaking. His mother was on her knees on the cold floor crying out and mumbling. Many a poor soul would have envyed her if he could not hear in himself the same voice of the so called spirit. These are the words of the circuit riding man. “The worldwind is here. The invisible spirit’s voice. Hear it in yourself and yeeld.” He trusted the voices around him. He wanted to speak in the spirit’s voice. He felt an enormas wish to do so. It was sheer desire. He must do it, he wished to do it. But how could he speak if he could not understand? These words were upside down and inside out! What did they mean? The preacherman knew. He listened and said. He could interprit tongues. “The spirit is the river and the wind.” Even in his creeping despair, the boy marveled a little at how these people spoke. When he tried, it was poor at best. All his words were poor clattery English like a stutterrer at the front of the class. He didn’t even know how to begin, where was the whurl of his ignorant tongue. A spidery despair loomed over him. It seemed as if all the worlds ills and evils had come screaming into his head. Forboding seaped from all the gouls and hags and multy eyed creatures of his dark dreams. His dreams were heavy things. He imagined another world, peaceful and trankwel. The prairie was all around him. True there is always a creature out there that will be happy to lick and saver the curious wandrer. Bull elk roamed the
plains and there were coogar to be seen in the hilly places if the roomers were correct. However this story captured a lot of disbelief in some places to be sure. “Not a coogar been seen here abouts in fifty year” remarked the old timers. But the boy did not fear any animal. This was the country of his heart. He had a personal treasure he loved, which were black leather boots with canvis lining, a gift from the big hearted Lonnie Wright, who’s strange fait we have seen earlier. “A smigen a’ bad news, lad” grinning sheepily. And in his boots he was a little of the full man he was yet to become, roaming the prairie and learning its ways, which were the ways of the horned lark and the rodent hunting hawk, the wild flowers and the sun hovering heavenly on the wheat. He had seen the small horned lark in its nest in the grass and weeds when it was just hatched even before it had its flight feathers when it was in danger from the natural hunger of others. But these thoughts of pity toward things that are less powerful than our selvs would not over power the shadowy rememberance of terrour. Through field and forest, dale and mountain, always on the move, like an Indian, like a short legged dwarf hidden in the tall grass, he wanted to feel the morning dew on his face and neck, he wanted to see the smokey stones of camp fires in the dawn.
“A still pool” they said to him. Were they being kindly or mean? The terrible truth is that it didn’t matter. A still pool was a still pool. He dumb foundedly tried to speak. He listened, he heard, and he tried again. A strange laps of ability kept ocurring. It was like the depths of a failed skeem. “Another hair brained skeem of yours, Orville!” This was his mother’s voice echoing in his head. A good woman for all of that! It was the father eating a naw a’ cheese he did not understand. It was the rath of a father for his only son, who’s only crime was being there, doing his chors around the house and in the fields, the same ruteen day in and out. These were the careless wants of his boyhood. What things awaited? He neither knew nor cared to wonder. He only wished to free himself from this dredful woe of incomprehenshun. They spoke all around him and he couldn’t make real sense of it. He wanted freely to yeeld but he couldn’t get there or go across to them. The preacherman’s anger was stamped in his eyes. He could read it like a book. It was the ominus stamp of doom. Not fury or natural pain did this straw haired boy fear but the doom of the night and the specters. Psyhcology! “When you die you go away” his mother told him, but his father had a rigamaroll of dying, with specters and surprising visits. He tried to stiful his sobbs. He felt done in and then some. It was a dream but not a dream. The gift was not his, the whole language of the spirit which was greater than Latin or French was not to be seized in his pityfull mouth. His tongue was a rock, his ears were rocks. This was his queer discription of the situation, mumbled in his mind. He wanted to strike himself silly, but his hand was stade by the rathful look of the preacher. His arms and legs had gone to the wind, he was deaf and dumb. A jolting urge said “Run!” His legs suddenly stirred up into speed not consulting his brain in the matter of where he should go. He sped out the creakey door and into the pouring rain. Streaks of lightning leaped across the sky. A terrible energy burst through him, the energy of panick and fear. He was a strong enough boy for his age and his legs took him capably over the sogging turf. All the land was gray. The sky was black. No where did he see the gentle prairie of his careless days. Lonnie Wright was long gone. He would have opened his door to any young wafe, even a bad one. There was no where to run but he ran. The farm to market road was mud itself. His shoes squished and the lumpy mud flew onto his clothes and hands. He looked in vane for familiar signs and safe places. No where did he see what he expected. Why couldn’t he understand and speak? There was no answer that the living could give. Tongue tied! His fait was signed. He ran into the rainy distance, smaller and smaller. This was worse than a retched nightmare. It was the nightmare of real things, the fallen wonder of the world.