by Don DeLillo
“It’s Pam, isn’t it?”
“I don’t, what.”
“Jeanette.”
“Actually no.”
“High school.”
“Jeanette.”
“How many years was that ago?”
“High school, Jeanette.”
“I don’t blame you not remembering. Boy, the time.”
“I think I may remember now.”
“You work here, right? Everybody works here.”
“I’m supposed to be on the down.”
“You’re still remembering? Jeanette, who hung around with Theresa and Geri.”
“I remembered just then.”
“That was how many years, right?”
“They won’t let me on.”
“But don’t you love this place? You should see how I have to get to the cafeteria. A local and an express down. Then an express up. Then the escalator if you can get there without them ripping your flesh to pieces.”
“Torn asunder, I know.”
“You work for the state, being here?”
“I’m in the wrong tower.”
Pammy and Lyle didn’t go out much anymore. They used to spend a lot of time discovering restaurants. They traveled to the palest limits of the city, eating in little river warrens near the open approaches to bridges or in family restaurants out in the boroughs, the neutral décor of such places and their remoteness serving as tokens of authenticity. They went to clubs where new talent auditioned and comic troupes improvised. On spring weekends they bought plants at greenhouses in the suburbs and went to boatyards on City Island or the North Shore to help friends get their modest yachts seaworthy. Gradually their range diminished. Even movies, double features in the chandeliered urinals of upper Broadway, no longer tempted them. What seemed missing was the desire to compile.
They had sandwiches for dinner, envelopes of soup, or went around the corner to a coffee shop, eating quickly while a man mopped the floor near their table, growling like a jazz bassist. There was a Chinese place three blocks away. This was as far as they traveled, most evenings and weekends, for nonutilitarian purposes. Pammy was skilled at distinguishing among the waiters here. A source of quiet pride.
Lyle passed time watching television. Sitting in near darkness about eighteen inches from the screen, he turned the channel selector every half minute or so, sometimes much more frequently. He wasn’t looking for something that might sustain his interest. Hardly that. He simply enjoyed jerking the dial into fresh image-burns. He explored content to a point. The tactile-visual delight of switching channels took precedence, however, transforming even random moments of content into pleasing territorial abstractions. Watching television was for Lyle a discipline like mathematics or Zen. Commercials, station breaks, Spanish-language dramas had more to offer as a rule than standard programming. The repetitive aspect of commercials interested him. Seeing identical footage many times was a test for the resourcefulness of the eye, its ability to re-select, to subdivide an instant of time. He rarely used sound. Sound was best served by those UHF stations using faulty equipment or languages other than English.
Occasionally he watched one of the public-access channels. There was an hour or so set aside every week for locally crafted pornography, the work of native artisans. He found on the screen a blunter truth certainly than in all that twinkling flesh in the slick magazines. He sat in his bowl of curved space, his dusty light. There was a child’s conspicuous immodesty in all this genital aggression. People off the streets looking for something to suck. Hand-held cameras searching out the odd crotch. Lyle was immobile through this sequence of small gray bodies. What he saw retained his attention completely even as it continued to dull his senses. The hour seemed like four. Weary as he was, blanked out, bored by all these posturing desperadoes, he could easily have watched through the night, held by the mesh effect of television, the electrostatic glow that seemed a privileged state between wave and visual image, a secret of celestial energy. He wondered if he’d become too complex to look at naked bodies, as such, and be stirred.
“Here, look. We’re here, folks. The future has collapsed right in on us. And what does it look like?”
“You made me almost jump.”
“It looks like this. It looks like waves and waves of static. It’s being beamed in ahead of schedule, which accounts for the buzzing effect. It looks like seedy people from Mercer Street.”
“Let me sleep, hey.”
“See, look, I’m saying. Just as I speak. I mean it’s this. We’re sitting watching in the intimacy and comfort of our bedroom and they’ve got their loft and their camera and it gets shown because that’s the law. As soon as they see a camera they take off their clothes. It used to be people waved.”
“Good.”
“Right here. Ri’chere, ladies and gennemen. See the pandas play with their shit. Triffic, triffic.”
Pammy had the kind of smile that revealed a trace of upper gum. She’d been told that was touching. In her more complicated movements, in package-carrying or the skirting of derelicts, she showed a gawkiness that was like a clap of hands bringing back her youth. She had a narrow face, hair lank and moderately blond. People liked her eyes. Some presence in them seemed at times to jump out in greeting. She was animated in conversation, a waver of hands, an interrupter, head going, eyes intent on the speaker’s mouth, her own lips sometimes repeating the beat. Her body was firm and straight and could have been that of a swimmer. Sometimes she didn’t associate herself with it.
She worked for a firm called the Grief Management Council. Grief was not the founder’s name; it referred to intense mental suffering, deep remorse, extreme anguish, acute sorrow and the like. The number of employees varied, sometimes radically, from month to month. In its brochures, which Pammy wrote, Grief Management was described as a large and growing personal-services organization whose clinics, printed material and trained counselors served the community in its efforts to understand and assimilate grief. There were fees for individuals, group fees, special consultation terms, charges for booklets and teaching aids, payments for family sessions and marital grief seminars. Most regional offices were small and located in squat buildings that also housed surgical-supply firms and radiology labs. These buildings were usually the first of a planned complex that never materialized. Pammy had visited several, for background, and the photos she took for her brochures had to be severely cropped to eliminate the fields of weeds and bulldozed earth. It was her original view that the World Trade Center was an unlikely headquarters for an outfit such as this. But she changed her mind as time passed. Where else would you stack all this grief? Somebody anticipated that people would one day crave the means to codify their emotions. A clerical structure would be needed. Teams of behaviorists assembled in the sewers and conceived a brand of futurism based on filing procedures. To Pammy the towers didn’t seem permanent. They remained concepts, no less transient for all their bulk than some routine distortion of light. Making things seem even more fleeting was the fact that office space at Grief Management was constantly being reapportioned. Workmen sealed off some areas with partitions, opened up others, moved out file cabinets, wheeled in chairs and desks. It was as though they’d been directed to adjust the amount of furniture to levels of national grief.
Pammy shared a partitioned area with Ethan Segal, who was responsible for coordinating the activities of the regional offices. Because of his longish hair, his repertoire of ruined flourishes, his extravagantly shabby clothing, a somewhat ironic overrefinement of style, Pammy thought of him as semi-Edwardian. Even the signs he showed of middle age were tinged with a kind of blithe ornamentation. Extra weight gave him an airiness, as it does some people, and Ethan used this illusion of buoyancy to appear nonchalant while walking, lofty in conversation, a coward at games. And those sweeping motions of his arms, the ruined flourishes, became more dramatic, emptier (by intention), as various irregularities crept into his posture. With him lived Jack Laws, a wou
ld-be drifter. Jack had a patch of pure white at the back of an otherwise dark head of hair. His success with certain people was based largely on this genetic misconjecture. It was the mark, the label, the stamp, the sign, the emblem of something mysterious.
“Adorable useless Jack.”
“What, I’m working.”
“It’s amazing, it’s almost supernatural, really, the way people get an idea, a tiny human hankering for something, and it becomes a way of life, the obsession of the ages. To me this is amazing. A person like me. Nurtured on realities, the limitations of things.”
“I walked in the wrong tower.”
“Jack wants to live in Maine.”
“I find that, you know, why not?”
“It’s the driving force of his life, suddenly, out of nowhere, this thing, Maine, this word, which is all it is, since he’s never been there.”
“But it’s a good word,” she said.
“Maine.”
“Maine,” she said. “It’s simple maybe, Ethan, but it has a strength to it. You feel it’s the sort of core, the moral core.”
“This from a person who uses words, so it must mean something.”
“I use words, absolutely.”
“So maybe Jack has something.”
“Ethan, Jack always has something. Whatever it is, Jack has the inner meanings of it, the pure parts. We both know this about Jack.”
“What do I do, commute?”
“I’d like to be there now,” she said. “This city. Time of year.”
“July, August.”
“Scream city.”
“You think he’s got something then.”
“I use words.”
“You think he’s picked a good one.”
“Jack has. Jack always has.”
In the same way that she thought of Ethan as semi-Edwardian, she considered his mouth, apart from the rest of him, as German. He had assertive lips, something of a natural sneer, and there were times when he nearly drooled while laughing, bits of fizz appearing at the corners of his mouth. These were things Pammy associated with scenes of the German high command in World War II movies.
“Maybe we’ll go up and look.”
“Look at what?” she said.
“The terrain. Get the feel of it. Just to see. He’s telling everyone. Maine or else. Not that I’d commute, obviously. But just to see. Three or four weeks. He’ll get it out of his system and we’ll come back. Life as before, the same old grind.”
“Maine.”
“You’re right, you know, Pammy old kid. It does have a kind of hewn strength. Sort of unbreakable, unlike Connecticut. I like hearing it.”
“Maine.”
“Say it, say it.”
“Maine,” she said. “Maine.”
Lyle saw his number on the enunciator board. He went to one of the booths along the south wall, reaching for the phone extended by a clerk.
“Buy five thousand Motors at sixty-five.”
“GM.”
“There’s more behind it.”
He put down the phone and walked over to post 3. An old friend, McKechnie, crossed toward him at an angle. They passed without sign of recognition. Sporadically over the next several hours, as Lyle moved to different parts of the floor, traded in the garage annex, conversed with people at his booth, he thought of something that hadn’t entered his mind in a great many years. It was the feeling that everyone knew his thoughts. He couldn’t recall when this suspicion had first occurred to him. Very early on, obviously. Everyone knew his thoughts but he didn’t know any of theirs. People on the floor were moving more quickly now. An electric cross-potential was in the air, a nearly headlong sense of revel and woe. On the board an occasional price brought noise from the floor brokers, the specialists, the clerks. Lyle watched the stock codes and the stilted figures below them, the computer spew. Inner sex crimes. A fancywork of violence and spite. Those were the shames of his adolescence. If everyone here knew his present thoughts, if that message in greenish cipher that moved across the board represented the read-outs of Lyle Wynant, it would be mental debris alone that caused him humiliation, all the unwordable rubble, the glass, rags and paper of his tiny indefinable manias. The conversations he had with himself, straphanging in a tunnel. All the ceremonial patterns, the soul’s household chores. These were far more revealing, he believed, than some routine incest variation. There was more noise from the floor as Xerox appeared on the board. Male and female messengers flirted in transit. The paper waste accumulated. It was probably not an uncommon feeling among older children and adolescents that everyone knows your thoughts. It put you at the center of things, although in a passive and frightening way. They know but do not show it. When things slowed down he went to the smoking area just beyond post I. Frank McKechnie was in there, field-stripping a cigarette.
“I’m in no mood.”
“Neither am I.”
“It’s total decay.”
“What are we talking about?” Lyle said.
“The outside world.”
“Is it still there? I thought we’d effectively negated it. I thought that was the upshot.”
“I’m walking around seeing death masks. This, that, the other. My wife is having tests. They take tissue from underneath the arm. My brother is also out there with his phone calls. I’m seeing visions, Lyle.”
“Don’t go home.”
“I understand you people have something to look at these days.”
“What’s that?”
“Zeltner’s new sec’y. I understand it walks and talks.”
“I haven’t been over yet this week.”
“Living quiff, I hear. I wish you’d check that out and tell me about it. I have to live somehow. I’m in no mood for what’s out there. She goes for more tests tomorrow. Fucking doctor says it could be cancer.”
“Let’s have lunch sometime.”
Pammy thought of the elevators in the World Trade Center as “places.” She asked herself, not without morbid scorn: “When does this place get to the forty-fourth floor?” Or: “Isn’t it just a matter of time before this place gets stuck with me inside it?” Elevators were supposed to be enclosures. These were too big, really, to fit that description. These also had different doors for entering and leaving, certainly a distinguishing feature of places more than of elevators.
If the elevators were places, the lobbies were “spaces.” She felt abstract terms were called for in the face of such tyrannic grandeur. Four times a day she was dwarfed, progressively midgeted, walking across that purplish-blue rug. Spaces. Indefinite locations. Positions regarded as occupied by something.
From Grief’s offices she looked across the landfill, the piers, the western extremities of anonymous streets. Even at this height she could detect the sweltering intensity, a slow roiling force. It moved up into the air, souls of the living.
2
Lyle shaved symmetrically, doing one segment on the left side of his face, then the corresponding segment on the right. After each left-right series, the lather that remained was evenly distributed.
Crossing streets in the morning, Pammy was wary of cars slipping out from behind her and suddenly bulking into view, forcing her to stop as they made their turns. The city functioned on principles of intimidation. She knew this and tried to be ready, unafraid to stride across the angling path of a fender that probed through heavy pedestrian traffic.
The car turning into Liberty Street didn’t crowd her at all. But unexpectedly it slowed as she began to cross. The driver had one hand on the wheel, his left, and sat with much of his back resting against the door. He was virtually facing her and she was moving directly toward him. She saw through the window that his legs were well apart, left foot apparently on the brake. His right hand was at his crotch, rubbing. She was vaguely aware of two or three other people crossing the street. The driver looked directly at her, then glanced at his hand. His look was businesslike, a trifle hurried. She turned away and walked down the middl
e of the street, intending to cross well beyond the rear of the car. The man accelerated, heading east toward Broadway.
They roamed in cars now. This was new to her. She felt acute humiliation, a sure knowledge of having been reduced in worth. She walked a direct line toward the north tower but had no real sense of destination. Her anger was imparted to everything around her. She moved through enormous smudges, fields of indistinct things. In a sense there was no way to turn down that kind of offer. To see the offer made was to accept, automatically. He’d taken her into his car and driven to some freight terminal across the river, where he’d parked near an outbuilding with broken windows. There he’d taught her his way of speaking, his beliefs and customs, the names of his mother and father. Having done this, he no longer needed to put hands upon her. They were part of each other now. She carried him around like a dead beetle in her purse.
In college the girls in her dormitory wing had referred to perverts as “verts.” They reacted to noises in the woods beyond their rooms by calling along the hall: “Vert alert, vert alert.” Pammy turned into the entrance and walked across the huge lobby now, the north space, joined suddenly by thousands coming from other openings, mainly from the subway concourses where gypsy vendors sold umbrellas from nooks in the unfinished construction. They’d been stupid to make a rhyme of it.
Lyle checked his pockets for change, keys, wallet, cigarettes, pen and memo pad. He did this six or seven times a day, absently, his hand merely skimming over trousers and jacket, while he was walking, after lunch, leaving cabs. It was a routine that required no conscious planning yet reassured him, and this was supremely important, of the presence of his objects and their locations. He stacked coins on the dresser at home. Sometimes he tried to see how long he could use a face towel before its condition forced him to put it in the hamper. Often he wore one of the three or four neckties whose design and color he didn’t really like. Other ties he used sparingly, the good ones, preferring to see them hanging in the closet. He drew pleasure from the knowledge that they’d outlast the inferior ties.