by Don DeLillo
Shut up, he told himself.
Jack Laws nurtured an element of hysteria in his laugh. His head went tilt, his hands came up to his chest in paw form and he shook out some cries of phobic joy. It was an up-to-date cultural mannerism, an index of the suspicion that nothing we say or do can be properly gauged without reference to the fear that pervades every situation and specific thing. Jack was broad-shouldered and short. He had a snub nose, small mouth and well-cleft chin. His face, over all, possessed a sly innocence that quickly shaded off into grades of uncertainty or combativeness, depending on the situation. His presence in a room was an asset at most gatherings. The area he occupied seemed a pocket of sociability and cheer. In some rooms, however, people’s reactions to Jack, whether friendly or indifferent, were based on their feelings for Ethan. Pammy was aware of these angles of reflection. She tried to divert Jack at such times, subtly.
Ethan was back in the armchair, smiling cryptically again. He was onto vodka, neat. Jack finished off Pammy’s steak, talking at the same time about a friend of his who was in training to swim some strait in Europe, the first ever to attempt it north to south, or something. There was a comedy record on the stereo. It was Lyle’s latest. He played such records often, getting the routines down pat, the phrasing, the dialects, then repeating the whole thing for people on the floor in slack times. This one he played for Ethan’s benefit. He watched Ethan, studying his reaction, as the record played, as Jack ate and talked, as Pammy wandered around the room. After a while he followed her over to the bookshelves.
“Did you pay the Saks thing?”
“No, what thing?”
“They’re panting,” he said. “They’re enclosing slips with the bill. Little reminders. They’re calling you Ms.”
“Next week.”
“You said that.”
“They’ll wait.”
“Where did I tell you the battery was for the Italian clock when the one in there now runs out?”
“I don’t know.”
“You forgot already.”
“What battery?” she said.
“I went to nine places, looking. It’s one point four volts. You can’t go around the corner. It’s a certain size. Least you could do is remember where it is when I tell you.”
“There’s a battery in there.”
“For when it runs out,” he said. “It’s a ten-month-some-odd life expectancy and we’ve had the clock nearly that long already.”
“Okay, where’s the battery?”
“In the kitchen drawer with the corkscrews and ribbons.”
Lyle went into the bedroom and turned on the TV set. That was the only light. He watched for a few minutes, then began coasting along the dial. Jack came in and he had to stop. It made Lyle nervous to watch television with someone in the room, even Pammy, even when he wasn’t changing channels every twenty seconds. There was something private about television. It was intimate, able to cause embarrassment.
“What’s on?”
“Not much.”
“You watch a lot?” Jack said. “I do.”
“Sometimes.”
“It keeps the mind off things. You don’t have to involve yourself too much. Listen, talk, anything.”
“I talk all day,” Lyle said.
“Exactly, I know.”
Jack hadn’t moved from the doorway. He was eating a peach, standing in light from the hall. When he turned and laughed, reacting to something Ethan or Pam had said, Lyle saw the patch of white hair above his neck. He thought of saying something about it but by the time Jack turned his head again, he’d lost interest.
“Bed’s a mess but come on in, find a chair, cetra cetra.”
“That’s okay, I’m just snooping around.”
“Nothing’s on, looks like.”
“But can you believe what they show sometimes? I think it’s disgusting, Lyle. I can’t believe. It’s so sleazy. Who are those people? I refuse to watch. I totally do not watch. Ethan watches.”
“Sometimes you see something, you know, interesting in another sense. I don’t know.”
“What other sense?”
“I don’t know.”
“I totally cannot believe. What goes on. Right there on TV.”
“What are you doing these days, Jack?”
“I’m thinking of getting a scheme together.”
“What kind?”
“I know where I can get microfilmed mailing lists of two hundred thousand subscribers to these eight or nine health publications. I think it’s A to M.”
“You’ll, what, sell them?”
“Sell them.”
“What else, of course.”
“Sell them, what else?”
They watched and listened for ten minutes as two announcers tried to fill time during a rain delay at a ball game.
“We have two sets,” Jack said.
“I’m thinking of that.”
“I made him get an extra.”
He laughed lightly, ending on a note of apprehension, and went back inside. Pammy was sitting on the floor. With her index finger she kept tapping an ice cube in her glass, watching it plunge briefly, then surge.
“You know what I don’t think?” she said. “I don’t think I can stand the idea of tomorrow.”
She looked at Ethan, who stared into the carpet.
“I really, it seems, I don’t think.”
“It’s that time of night,” Jack said.
“It’s just that I can’t accommodate any more time than what’s right here. It’s, where we go, your friend here, together with me. Choose precisely the word, for this is important. Not place, which is the elevator’s word. Not office or building, which are too common and apply anywhere.”
“Environment.”
“Thank you, Jack.”
“Should I make coffee?”
“No, no, this isn’t a coffee conversation. This is a gut topic. Wait a minute now, I’ll get to it. Don’t think I don’t know that your friend here has not in the longest time made the slightest remark to his job. Why? Because you know as well as I do, Jack, what happens to people. Your friend here used to joke. You recall it, Jack, as well as I do. We both heard this man. He’d be so funny about his job and those people in the field. The stories. Do you believe? Per diem rates for terminal-illness counseling? So if it drags on, forget it, we got you by the balls? And the woman in Syracuse? With the grief-stricken pet, what was it, canary, in Syracuse, that the other one died—not canary, what, shit, I’m screwing this up. But that’s okay. You’re dear friends. We’re dear friends here. But he no longer does it. That’s the point and he thinks I don’t notice. Because it’s so stupid. It’s so modern-stupid. It’s this thing that people are robots that scares me. And the environment, Jack, thank you.”
“I never heard about the grief-stricken canary.”
“Jack, you heard. We all did.” She pointed toward the bedroom. “He still talks about it. Just say Syracuse to Lyle, blink-blink-blink, the way he laughs, right, with the eyelids.”
Ethan made a sweeping movement with his arm, a gesture of cancellation. His cravat, an ironic adornment to begin with, had slipped over the front of his shirt so that he appeared to be wearing a child’s scarf.
“The thing is,” he said.
They waited.
“To forge a change that you may be reluctant to forge, that may be problematical for this or that reason, you have to tell people. You have to talk and tell people. Jack sees what I’m getting at. You have to bring it out. Even if you have no intention at the time of doing it out of whatever fear or trembling, you still must make it begin to come true by articulating it. This changes the path of your life. Just telling people makes the change begin to happen. If, in the end, you choose to keep going with whatever you’ve been doing that’s been this problematical thing in your life, well and good, it’s up to you. But if you need to feel you’re on the verge of a wonderful change, whether you are or not, the thing to do is tell people. ‘I am on
the verge of a wonderful change. I am about to do something electrifying. The very fibers of your being will be electrified, sir, when I tell you what it is I propose to do.’ To speak it in words is to see the possibility emerge. Doesn’t matter what. Don’t bother your head over what. For the purposes of this discussion it could be mountain-climbing we’re talking about or this friend of Jack, the oft-mentioned scaly chap who plans to swim the North Sea left-handed. Our lives are enriched by these little blurbs we send each other. These things are necessary to do. ‘I am going back to school to learn Arabic, whatever.’ Say it to people for six months. ‘I am going to live in Maine or else.’ Jack sees my point. Tell people, tell them. Make something up. The important thing is to seem to be on the verge. Then it begins to come true, a little bit. I don’t know, maybe talking is enough. Maybe you don’t want to forge the change. Maybe telling people is the change. How should I know? Why ask me? Lyle, where is Lyle? Say good night to Lyle.”
“I think I know what you mean,” Pammy said.
“Do you see a glimmer?”
“I think I see a glimmer.”
“We’ll hail a cab, Jack. Our bottle of wine will be in the back seat. It will complete the circle. I believe in circles.”
“Jack, really, happy birthday, I mean it.”
“I tried to get drunk.”
“Needn’t apologize,” she said. “Tell your friend here I think I see what he means.”
“Well I don’t,” Jack said.
In the bedroom Lyle watched television. Pammy came in, sat at the end of the bed, where earlier she’d dressed, and undressed. It made little or no sense, all this undressing, dressing. If you calculated the time. Hours spent. After a while she stood up, nude, and walked to Lyle, who sat in a director’s chair, his back to her. She put her hands on his shoulders. The volume on the TV set was turned way down. She heard cars outside, the sound of tires on a wet street, whispered s’s. Her face had Nordic contours and looked flawless in this light. He extended one arm across his chest and gripped her hand in his.
4
After the close Lyle walked north on Pearl. Currents of humid air swept through the streets. As he waited for a light to change he became aware of a figure nearby, a furtive woman, literally inching toward him. He turned slightly, nearly facing her. She stopped then and spoke, although not directly to Lyle, her head averted somewhat.
“She’s a man’s toilet, a whore. He’s legally disabled meanwhile. He sits with his clocks and watches, knowing she’s out of his sight, being a toilet for men. Three in the morning. Four in the morning. Please, who needs it? For him, special, she’ll drop dead. I’m expecting it shortly.”
Lyle noted that she was in her fifties, stunted somewhat, normally dressed, probably not Jewish despite the faint lilt to her voice. He went east on John Street, enumerating these facts as though he were conversing with someone who sought a description of the woman. This was something he did only on buses as a rule. His attention would wander to someone across the aisle and he’d find himself putting together a physical description of the man or woman—almost always a man. The notion of police interrogation was part of the mental concept. He was a witness identifying a suspect. These interludes developed without planning; he simply found himself relating (to someone) the color of a particular man’s shoes, trousers and jacket, his estimated height and weight, black man, white man, so forth. When he realized he was doing it, he stopped, telling himself to shut up. Sometimes, walking, he memorized the numbers on license plates of certain cars. Hours later he’d repeat the number to make sure he still knew it. The testing of a perennial witness.
Near the foot of John Street was the toy skyscraper where his firm had offices. The benches outside were painted in primary colors, as were various decorations on the lower façade. He thought of building blocks and games with flashing lights. There were whimsical phone booths and a superdigital clock. To get to the elevator bank he went through a blue neon tunnel. He got off the elevator and was stopped by Teddy Mackel, a middle-aged man in charge of the mail room.
“I think you ought to walk by Zeltner’s room, Lyle.”
“I heard.”
“Makes me want to take back my chastity vow that I took when I was with the Marist Brothers earlier in this century, Lyle, Jesus.”
“We need it around here, something, for morale”
“Tall, I like that about a woman. Tall, nice.”
“More there.”
“Never end a sentence with a preposition,” Mackel said. “That’s the other thing I learned when I was with the Marists. They’re a teaching order. Those were the two things they taught us. Chastity and how to end sentences. Which one did me less good I bet you can guess.”
“Neck to neck, I judge it.”
“Tell me confidentially, will we survive, Lyle? My kids are worried. They want to finish college. You’re down there in the dust of battle. Say some words to our viewing audience.”
There was an alcove outside Zeltner’s office. She was at the desk there, reading a paperback book, her shoulders hunched in a way that indicated a special depth of solitude, he thought, like a figure in a Hopper painting. He came back the other way now, having stopped at the water cooler. Fairly long blond hair. That was about all that registered. He stopped at the end of the hall, wondering what to do next. There were two or three people he could visit, more or less plausibly, in their offices. He didn’t feel like doing that but didn’t want to leave either. Leaving presented a void. He heard the elevator door open and decided he couldn’t stand around any longer. He went back to the alcove. He leaned over, tapping his index finger on the surface of the desk.
“Where is he? Is he around somewhere?”
“He didn’t say.”
“Nothing’s moving in there.”
“I don’t know where he is.”
“The elusive Zeltner.”
“He forgets to tell me.”
“That’s right, I forgot that about him.”
“Who should I say was asking?”
“Not important, really, I’ll come back.”
Blond hair, little or no makeup, blank sort of face with nice enough features. Teeth and nails on the drab side. Blondness and probably great figure would account for local acclaim. Must be seen in motion no doubt.
Pammy on the eighty-third floor of the north tower contrived to pass the time by devising a question for Ethan Segal. If the elevators in the World Trade Center were places, as she believed them to be, and if the lobbies were spaces, as she further believed, what then was the World Trade Center itself? Was it a condition, an occurrence, a physical event, an existing circumstance, a presence, a state, a set of invariables? Ethan didn’t respond and she changed the subject, watching him type figures into little boxes on a long form, folded over his machine, crowding down on it, only his fingers moving.
“We have nothing planned,” she said. “Lyle doesn’t think he’ll be able to get away. It’s very hair-raising right now, I gather. He’s talking about not before October.”
“That’s a nice time, really.”
“I think it would be specially nice if we did something together.”
“Where?”
“Wherever.”
“Vales of time and space.”
“I think it would work very well, Ethan. It can be wearing, just two. We all get along.”
“Lyle’s not available, so.”
“You wouldn’t consider October as soon enough, I don’t imagine.”
“I’d never last it out, Pam.”
“This city.”
“July, August.”
“I’m thinking about tap-dancing lessons,” she said.
“Let me type.”
“No comment?”
“Let me type awhile,” he said. “I like filling these little boxes with numbers. Numbers are indispensable to my world view at present. I don’t believe I’m doing this. This is some toad’s chore. But I genuinely enjoy it. It’s so anally satisfyin
g. Contentment at last.”
Late one afternoon Lyle waited outside the building on John Street. When she came out, in a crowd, he realized it would be awkward, physically and otherwise, to try to isolate her from the others. She might not recognize him. Someone from the office might see them and come over to join the conversation. He followed her half a block, not yet trying to catch up. At the corner she got into a waiting car, which moved off quickly. He felt resentful, as if he’d been supplanted by another man. It was a green VW, California plates 180 BOA.
He sat on a bench in a plaza overlooking the river. He felt lessened somehow. Freighter cranes slanted across the tops of sheds in the Brooklyn dock area. It was the city, the heat, an endless sense of repetition. The district repeated itself in blocks of monochromatic stone. He was present in things. There was more of him here through the idle nights than he took home with him to vent and liberate. He thought about the nights. He imagined the district never visited, empty of human transaction, and how buildings such as these would seem to hold untouchable matter, enormous codifications of organic decay. He tried to examine the immense complexity of going home.
The next afternoon he managed to reach her before she joined the flow into the streets. He spoke through a reassuring smile. He concentrated on this expression to the degree that he could visualize his own lips moving. It was a moment of utter disengagement. He didn’t know what he was saying and with people swarming around them and traffic building nearby he could barely hear her voice when she replied, as she did once or twice, briefly, in phrases as translucent as his own. He guided her unobtrusively toward a quieter part of the arcade, trying to reconstruct the first stages of their conversation even as he continued to babble and gleam. He wasn’t yet certain she recognized him.