by Don DeLillo
She smiled a bit at that. Progress, he thought. It wasn’t macabre, perhaps, but it had a little something all its own.
6
Pammy was writing a direct-mail piece on the subjects of sorrow and death. The point was to get people to send for a Grief Management brochure entitled “It Ends For Him On The Day He Dies—But You Have To Face Tomorrow.” The brochure elaborated on death, defined the study known as grief management and offered a detailed summary of the company’s programs (“Let Professionals Help You Cope”) and a listing of regional offices. It cost a dollar.
Pammy had written the brochure months earlier. Ethan, in one of his moments of feigned grandeur, had called it “a classic of dispassion and tact.” There were others in the office who considered it too “nuts-and-boltsy,” like a four-page insert for radio condensers in some dealer publication.
“Death is a religious experience,” Ethan had said. “It is also nuts-and-boltsy. Something fails to work, you die. A demonstrable consequence.”
In a context in which every phrase can take on horribly comic significance, she thought she’d done well. Her job, in the main, was a joke, as was the environment in which she carried it out. But she was proud of that brochure. She’d maintained a sensible tone. There was a fact in nearly every sentence. She hadn’t let them print on tint. If people wanted to merchandise anguish and death, and if others wished to have their suffering managed for them, everybody could at least go about it with a measure of discretion and taste.
“Say it, say it.”
“Maine.”
“Again,” he said. “Please, now, hurry, God, mercy.”
“Maine,” she said. “Maine.”
There was activity on the floor. Lyle left post 5 and stopped at the Bell teleprinter. A young male carrier went by, blond shoulder-length hair. Lyle pressed the E key, then GM. Feed him to Ethan. Paper slid along the floor before settling. There was a second level of noise, very brief, a clubhouse cheer. He stepped back to get a look at the visitors’ gallery. Attractive woman standing behind the bulletproof glass. He looked at the print-out as he walked back to his booth. Range for the day. Numbers clicked onto the enunciator board. Eat, eat. Shit, eat, shit. Feed her to us in decimals. Aggress, enfoul, decrete. Eat, eat, eat.
V.R. GM—12.33 2524
106.400
10.10 69
12.30 70
10.12 68 ½
12.33 +70 + 1 ½
He went to the smoking area, where he saw Frank McKechnie standing at the edge of a noisy group, biting skin from his thumb. Lyle isolated two members of the group and began doing a routine from a comedy record he’d recently bought. It was something he felt he did particularly well. It suited his careful stance, the neutral way his eyes recorded an audience. He could read their delight at his self-containment, the incongruity of enclosed humor. They began to lean. They actually watched his lips. When a third member of the group edged in, drawn by the laughter, Lyle ended prematurely and went over to McKechnie, who looked off into the smoke that rose above the gathering.
“So where are we?”
“Who knows?”
“We’re inside,” Lyle said.
“That’s for sure.”
“It’s obvious.”
“It’s obvious because if we were outside the cars would be climbing up my back.”
“The outside world.”
“That’s it,” McKechnie said. “Things that happen and you’re helpless. All you can do is wait for how bad.”
Lyle didn’t know exactly what they were talking about. He exchanged this kind of dialogue with McKechnie often. He’d watch his friend carefully throughout. McKechnie seemed to take it seriously. He gave the impression he knew what they were talking about.
“I want to ask you about this man who shot Sedbauer.”
“Huge page in today’s paper.”
“Sedbauer’s guest.”
McKechnie made a motion with his thumb and index finger, indicating a headline.
“Mystery of Stock Exchange Murder Unraveling Slowly.”
“So far I like it.”
“Gunman, obscure background, dum dum dum, carrying, get this, a bomb on his person, dum dum. Suspected terrorist network. Confusion over identity. Links being sought, dumdy dum. The guy refuses to talk, see a lawyer or leave his cell.”
“He had a bomb when on his person?”
“When he was caught. After he shot George. He was standing right over there. A miniature explosive package. I quote.”
“Nice.”
“Where are we, Lyle, as you put it so beautifully yourself?”
“We’re inside.”
“Where do we want to be?”
“Inside.”
“Those both are right answers.”
“I prepared.”
“Wait and see how bad,” McKechnie said. “That’s all you can do. I’m getting ready to raise the barricades. There’s a serious health problem in the family. There’s my brother piling up gambling debts and making midnight phone calls complete with whispering and little sobs. Bookies, loan sharks, threats. Very educational. Interest compounded hourly. Then there’s my oldest, who has a hearing problem to begin with and now out of nowhere who’s found sitting on the floor in his room just staring at the wall. Twice last week. Has trouble moving his arms. Doesn’t want to talk. He’s too young to take drugs. It’s not drugs. We had him to the doctor. They did these scans they do. Nothing definite. So now we’re thinking of a shrink for kids. Did you ever feel you were in a vise? I walk around thinking what happened.”
“Let’s try to have lunch next week.”
McKechnie reduced his cigarette butt to a speck of tobacco and a speck of paper. He dropped these on the floor. Then he jumped about a foot in the air, landing on the specks.
“Enjoy that?”
“Very advanced,” Lyle said.
“I used to be better. You should have seen me.”
“It’s something you couldn’t do in the outside world. They’d point and say ya ya.”
“Why don’t we have lunch right now as a matter of fact? We’ll go upstairs.”
“I don’t eat up there anymore.”
“Why not?”
“I don’t know, Frank.”
“There has to be a reason.”
“I suppose.”
“You don’t know what it is.”
“I just haven’t been up there in a while.”
“Lyle, I’m not exactly a promoter of tight-ass social customs. I don’t have decanters full of sherry that I wheel out for my guests with their Bentleys parked outside. But there’s nothing wrong with eating at the Exchange. It’s halfway civilized and that’s something.”
“It’s inside.”
“It’s inside, right. It’s convenient, it’s quick, it’s good, it’s nice and it’s halfway fucking gracious, which is no small feat these days. So stop being stupid. You’re talking like a jerk.”
“No pissa me off, Frank.”
Pammy had dinner with Ethan and Jack. They went to a place in SoHo. She was excited. Dinner out. Somewhere in her waking awareness there were glints of anticipation whenever Ethan and Jack walked into a room or when she picked up the ringing phone and it was one of them on the other end. Most people in her life were dispiriting presences. She looked forward to being with these two. If Ethan ever left his job, she’d sink into stupor and mutism.
The restaurant was full of hanging plants. A young woman arrived with the wine, telling them their food order would be delayed.
“There’s a smoky fire in the basement right now. The kitchen staff is down there arguing over whether or not they want to pee on it. I opted out, unless they rig a swing, I told them. Distance is not my thing. There’s Peter Hearn the conceptualist and his dog Alfalfa. I can never uncork without rupturing myself in the worst places, unless you don’t consider sex important. Do you ever see how they uncork, with the knees? I’m sorry but I refuse to do that. It’s degrading. I give a litt
le bend, which is gruesome enough. More than that, forget about, you’ll have to go somewhere else.”
They started on the wine. Smoke seeped into the main room but nobody left. There was no food being served. Everybody felt obliged to crack jokes and to drink a little faster than usual. A situation such as this could not be allowed to evolve without comic remarks and a trace of sophisticated hysteria, Ethan’s mouth slid gradually into a secret grin. A woman at the other end of the room coughed and waved a handkerchief. Jack took the empty wine bottle to the waitress, who returned eventually with another, which Jack opened. Pammy wondered if her face was blotched. Wine did that. The man with the coughing woman ordered another round. Another man came out of the basement and began carrying plants out the front door. A two-inch needle, a sect ornament of some kind, was embedded in the flesh beneath his lower lip, pointing downward, its angle of entry about forty-five degrees. Jack hit the table and looked away, trying to suppress his laughter. The man left plants on the sidewalk and came back in for more. Wine squirted out of Jack’s mouth. The room was filling with smoke. There was noise in the street, then wide beams of interweaving light. About ten firemen walked in. Pammy started to laugh, chewing at the air, her face blazing and clear, transcendently sane in this rose-stone glow. The firemen waddled around, bumping into each other. Ethan finished off another glass. The room seemed physically diminished by their entrance. They were outsized in helmets and boots, stepping heavily, lifting themselves like men on skis. Pammy couldn’t stop laughing. The firemen cleared the place, slowly. Everybody was coughing, bottles and glasses in their hands. They trooped out, disappointed at the lack of applause.
It was dark. There were two hundred people in the streeet. Jack stepped onto the narrow platform at the back of one of the fire engines. He swung out from the vertical bar. The gaiety they’d brought into the street dissolved in minutes. Ethan and Pam started off down the block but Jack didn’t want to get off the fire truck. He shouted commands and made wailing noises. Nobody paid much attention. The man with the needle beneath his lip came out with the last of the plants. Firemen dragged a hose around the corner. Ethan stood looking at Jack, a steadying distance in his gaze.
“I wonder what happened to the rain they predicted,” Pammy said.
Jack came along finally. They turned a corner and headed south, moving toward Canal Street and the possibility of a taxi. Standing outside the cast-iron buildings were large cardboard cylinders that contained industrial sweepings from the factory lofts. Jack charged one of them, shoulder-first, knocking it down. They followed along quietly as he ranged both sides of the street, crashing into containers. Just past Grand he hurdled an overturned container and veered neatly, forearm out front, body set low, to run into a metal garbage can. Pammy, eventually, noted that Ethan hadn’t altered stride and she had to hurry to catch up with him. Jack was sitting in the gutter, holding his knee. The can was on its side, rolling only slightly back and forth, much of its contents still within, an indication of weight. To Pammy it made sense in a way. He’d always appeared to have reserves of uncommitted energy. A hitter of garbage cans. She watched him get to his feet, raggedly. Although there was no sign of an empty cab, Ethan leaned into the sparse traffic, arm high in the air.
“Does he do this often?”
“Tuesdays and Thursdays,” Ethan said. “The rest of the week he speaks in tongues.”
Lyle sometimes carried yellow teleprinter slips with him for days. He saw in the numbers and stock symbols an artful reduction of the external world to printed output, the machine’s coded model of exactitude. One second of study, a glance was all it took to return to him an impression of reality disconnected from the resonance of its own senses. Aggression was refined away, the instinct to possess. He saw fractions, decimal points, plus and minus signs. A picture of the competitive mechanism of the world, of greasy teeth engaging on the rim of a wheel, was nowhere in evidence. The paper contained nerve impulses: a synaptic digit, a phoneme, a dimensionless point. He knew that people want to see their own spittle dripping from the lacy openwork of art. On the slip of paper in his hand there was no intimation of lives defined by the objects around them, morbid tiers of immortality. Inked figures were all he saw. This was property in its own right, tucked away, his particular share (once removed) of the animal body breathing in the night.
When Pammy got home, he wasn’t there. This was disappointing. Lately she’d found that the nutritive material for their sex life was often provided by others, whoever happened to be present at a party or other gathering. She wondered whether she’d become too complex to care whether the others were gay or straight. It would be nice, so nice if he walked in right now. When she realized how late it was, she grew angry. Soon she was doing what she always did when she was mad at Lyle. She began to clean the apartment. First she mopped the kitchen, then the bathroom. She swept up in the living room and, once the kitchen floor was dry, quickly did the dishes. It was an intricate cycle of expiation and virtue, a return to self-discipline. Whenever things went badly between them, she took it as a preview, seeing herself alone in a brilliantly well-kept apartment, everything in place, everything white somehow, a sense of iron-fisted independence clearly apparent in all this organization. In the middle of the night, obviously too late to vacuum, she took a shower, put on her pajamas and sat reading in bed, feeling good about herself.
Lyle came home.
“Your face is splotched,” he said.
“You’ll get hit.”
“What are you doing up? You’re still up. It’s unbelievably late. I’ve never seen it so late. It’s really late out there. You should see. Go to the window and look. No, don’t. You won’t learn a thing that way. Stay where you are.”
“He feels like talking.”
“I was downtown. I walked around down there till now. What was it like, she asked. Well, to begin with, it was cool finally, a rivery breeze, and no one around, nothing, a drunk or two early on but later nothing, a car, another car, another car, looking for the tunnel. The district, outwardly, is like the end of organized time—outwardly, mind you. At night I mean it’s like somebody forgot something. They went away. The mystery, right, of why everybody left these gorgeous pueblos.”
“Inwardly?”
“Things happening. Little men in eyeshades.”
“Fascinating, these insights of his.”
“What is it, Splotch? Annoyed at my lack of consideration? I called. You weren’t here.”
“We ought to go out more.”
“There’s nothing out there. That’s my point. Everybody went away. You can hear doors blowing shut in the wind. The scientists are mystified.”
7
Lyle cultivated a quality of self-command. As a corollary to this extreme presence of mind, he built a space between himself and most of the people he was likely to deal with in the course of daily events. He was aware of his studied passage down the corridors of his firm’s offices. Happily he parodied his own manner, swiveling toward a face and beaming an anemic look right past it. It was satisfying to stand on the floor, say, during a lull in trading, or after hours in a bar in the district, and note how some people subtly exhibited their relative closeness to him while others, sensing his apartness or knowing it for fact, were diligent in keeping ritual distances.
The waiter, at six feet four, let his head slip down a notch as he took their orders.
“I want something outer spacelike,” Lyle said. “What’s a zombie? Bring me one of those.”
Rosemary Moore had a Scotch and water. Her boss, Larry Zeltner, ordered gin and tonic for himself and also for the two young women, known to Lyle only as Jackie and Gail. He’d come upon them in the elevator as he and Rosemary were leaving the office. Zeltner suggested they all go for a drink. Lyle quickly agreed, trying to indicate that he and Rosemary had entered the elevator together by chance, just as the others had.
“It’s what I said this morning,” Zeltner said. “It’s what I always say: who�
�ll do it? Get somebody to do it and I’m with you. Otherwise goodbye. Then there’s the situation, how do we total, who’s reconciling, where do you tighten up the indicators?”
Lyle made a point of conversing with Jackie, who was unattractive. He didn’t know why he took this precaution or what, exactly, it meant. Somehow it seemed a safe course. He finished his drink before the others were halfway through with theirs. Jackie appeared to be studying him as she spoke, measuring his attentiveness or wondering why his replies had dwindled to simple nods of the head, three every ten seconds. Rosemary said she had to leave. He emptied his face of indications. Zeltner told her not to bother with money; it was his treat, et cetera. Lyle watched her walk out the door. She hadn’t implied to the others, in any manner at all, that she’d ever spoken a word to him before this evening. He wasn’t sure whether this was by specific design or part of a social code that prevailed in all her relations with others.
“Yumpin’ yimminy,” he said. “My train to catch. Have to go out to the boonies to see this friend of mine’s wife with all kinds of problems. Jesus, hospitals, I hate them. Kid is all screwed up. Wife may be serious. I told him I’d be out tonight. Larry, lunch, without fail, the soonest.”
He smiled at the women, left money and hurried out, trying to detach himself from the tiny disaster of that speech. It was rush hour in the streets. He half ran toward the corner where the Volkswagen usually arrived to get her. His body was filled with chemical activity, streams of desperate elation. She was still there, waiting. Again he could see his lips moving as he spoke through a hole in the air. Rosemary put her sunglasses on.
They were in a taxi heading uptown. Strategically he’d chosen a bar near the approach to the Queensboro Bridge. It seemed the way to deal with her. She was the kind of woman whose very lack of reaction summoned in him a need to resort to discredited tactics. The driver’s name was Wolodymyr Koltowski. Lyle tried to ignore the hack number. He was sweating extensively. Traffic on the East River Drive was unusually manic-depressive, a careening streak of excitation and suicidal gloom. Lyle felt at fault, as he always did in a cab, with a woman, when traffic moved too slowly or at this raging pace. He realized he’d forgotten to put stamps on some envelopes the night before.