Players

by Don DeLillo

  From that point, in sparse light, he seemed to be inviting a question or two, his head cocked and an element of serious expectation in his stance, generally—a fixing of distances. His hands were jammed into slash pockets, thumbs showing.

  “Shouldn’t this stuff be concealed better?”

  “There’s no reason for anyone to suspect this house of being anything out of the ordinary.”

  “Somebody comes down to fix the furnace.”

  “I come with him.”

  “And you’re showing this stuff very freely, aren’t you? What do you know about me, J.?”

  “That’s what she would say. Or her brother. But I operate on basic, really visceral levels. Terror is purification. When you set out to rid a society of repressive elements, you immediately become a target yourself, for all sorts of people. There’s nobody who mightn’t conceivably stick it to you. Being killed, or betrayed, sometimes seems the point of it all. As for what I know about you, Lyle, I would say you’re George Sedbauer’s successor. That’s clear to me. This difference: George didn’t know who he was working for. George thought we were involved in high-level—quote—industrial espionage—close quote. We led him to believe we represented international banking and shipping interests. He copied all sorts of arcane documents from his company’s safes and files and told us whatever he knew about the Exchange itself. He thought Vilar was liaison man for some secret banking cartel. It never occurred to him until the end, literally the last minute, I would think, that Vilar wanted to blow up the Exchange.”

  “Boom.”

  “Vilar was a little bomb-happy for my taste. But there it is. And George in the meantime was wearing out the Xerox.”

  “Not knowing.”

  “I liked George. We got along. George was an interesting man. We spent time together.”

  “What did you do with the material he copied?”

  “It was worthless.”

  “A lot of waxy paper.”

  “Look at this stuff,” Kinnear said. “Riot shields, tear gas, all that anti-crowd business in the sixties. These are artifacts. This stuff is memorabilia. Aside from the explosives, I don’t think any of this stuff even works anymore. And I can’t really vouch for the explosives. Maybe these chemicals have an effective half life that expired ten minutes ago. But look at it all. Obviously hauled out of some National Guard armory in the middle of a night in spring. Pure nostalgia, Lyle. But I wanted you to see it. I would imagine a collection of weapons might have complex emotional content for someone in your position. It’s an arsenal, after all. Only fair you know the nature of the game.”

  He propped one of the silhouette targets against the wall. He took out his handkerchief and cleaned off the top of an upended milk crate, then sat facing the target. He touched a finger several times to the dust on the face of the target. Entertainment, Lyle thought. A little show biz.

  “It’s this uncertainty over sources and ultimate goals,” Kinnear said. “It’s everywhere, isn’t it? Mazes, you’re correct. Intricate techniques. Our big problem in the past, as a nation, was that we didn’t give our government credit for being the totally entangling force that it was. They were even more evil than we’d imagined. More evil and much more interesting. Assassination, blackmail, torture, enormous improbable intrigues. All these convolutions and relationships. Assorted sexual episodes. Terribly, terribly interesting, all of it. Cameras, microphones, so forth. We thought they bombed villages, killed children, for the sake of technology, so it could shake itself out, and for certain abstractions. We didn’t give them credit for the rest of it. Behind every stark fact we encounter layers of ambiguity. This is all so alien to the liberal spirit. It’s a wonder they’re bearing up at all. This haze of conspiracies and multiple interpretations. So much for the great instructing vision of the federal government.”

  He turned from the target to face Lyle, who stood on the other side of the table.

  “What really happened?” Kinnear said. “Who ordered the wiretaps? Why were the papers shredded and what did they say? Why does this autopsy report differ from that one? Was it one bullet or more? Who erased the tapes? Was so-and-so’s death an accident or murder? How did organized crime get involved—who let them in? How deeply are the corporations involved in this or that mystery, this or that crime, these murders, these programs of systematic torture? Who ordered these massive surveillance programs? Who wrote the anonymous letters? Why did these witnesses drop out of sight? Where are the files? Where are the missing bullet fragments? Did this suspect work for the intelligence service or didn’t he? Why do these four eyewitness accounts clash so totally? What happened, Lyle, on the floor that day?”

  “I thought I’d get around to asking you.”

  “I wasn’t there,” J. said. “You were there. I didn’t even know it was supposed to happen. They did it on their own. A brother-sister act.”

  “You want to know what happened.”

  “What happened, Lyle? How many shots were fired? Who did the shooting? Was it one person or more? Did you see a gun? What did the suspect or suspects look like?”

  Kinnear paused here, summoning forensic energy for the windup.

  “When governments become too interesting, the end is in sight. Their fall is contained not in their transgressions, obviously, but in the material that flows from these breaches, one minute sinister and vicious, the next nearly laughable. Governments mustn’t be that interesting. It unsettles the body politic. I almost want to say they had too much imagination. That’s not quite it, though, is it?”

  “Fantasies.”

  “They had too many fantasies. Right. But they were our fantasies, weren’t they, ultimately? The whole assortment. Our leaders simply lived them out. Our elected representatives. It’s fitting, then, no more than fitting, and we were stone blind not to guess at it. All we had to do was know our own dreams.”

  “You ought to take this lecture on tour,” Lyle said. “They pay well.”

  “I sense you’re enjoying this. You need this, don’t you? A sense of structure. A logical basis for further exposition.”

  Lyle heard footsteps right over him. A door closed, causing slight vibrations. He picked up what he thought might be an M-16. It was heavier than he’d expected. He held it at belly level, bouncing it lightly in his hands. Through a small window high on the wall he could see beyond the latticework that skirted the back porch. Marina was unfolding a beach chair in half shade. The weapon made him uneasy. The simple feel of it contained the severity of its ends. G-g-g-gun, he thought. No doubting its authority. Down to the smallest spiral groove it was clearly a device cut and shaped to function with chill precision. Memory of a toy’s coppery taste on his tongue. The thing was near perfect. It could kill a man before the color of its stock registered in his mind. He put it down, deciding Kinnear was homosexual.

  Later he sat out back with Marina. He didn’t know who anyone was, really, but it didn’t seem odd that he was here. He could have napped in his chair, easily, one hand cupped above the grass. Marina was reading a newspaper. She kept chopping at it to keep it compact in the wind.

  “I’d like to ask if I can.”

  “What?”

  “Why, exactly, you chose the Exchange to hit? Or is that too obvious?”

  “The fact of George.”

  “He gave you access.”

  “They get threats. They’re aware. Guards every few feet. But having someone on the floor. It was handed to us. We knew we would do something. Rafael wanted to disrupt their system, the idea of worldwide money. It’s this system that we believe is their secret power. It all goes floating across that floor. Currents of invisible life. This is the center of their existence. The electronic system. The waves and charges. The green numbers on the board. This is what my brother calls their way of continuing on through rotting flesh, their closest taste of immortality. Not the bulk of all that money. The system itself, the current. That’s Rafael. The doctor of philosophy approach to bombing. ‘Financier
s are more spiritually advanced than monks on an island.’ Rafael. It was this secret of theirs that we wanted to destroy, this invisible power. It’s all in that system, bip-bip-bip-bip, the flow of electric current that unites moneys, plural, from all over the world. Their greatest strength, no doubt of that.”

  “What did Kinnear think of this?”

  “They have money. We have destruction. What?”

  “J.—what did he think?”

  She looked back at the newspaper. Lyle felt it was important to ask questions that would not disappoint her. He may have missed right there. Kinnear was standing in the window above them, a telephone in his hand.

  “It would have appealed to him if he had known. Not the bombing of itself. The thinking behind it. He would have discussed, discussed, discussed. J. is all theory. He’s waiting for the instruments of world repression to fall apart on their own. It will happen mystically in a pink light. The people will step in and that will be that. One way of betraying the revolution is to advance theories about it. We don’t only make doctrines, my brother and I. We’re here to destroy. When we did the dynamite in Brussels, the embassy, it was beautiful because we were technicians completing an operation. In and out. The cleanest piece of work imaginable. Theory is an effete diversion. Its purpose is to increase the self-esteem of the theorists. The only worthwhile doctrine is calculated madness.”

  “Impossible to anticipate.”

  “Is one permitted to say ‘moneys’—the plural?”

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  In the early evening she drove him to a subway station. He had a long conversation with himself, internal. One voice was Lyle as a former astronaut who’d walked on the surface of the moon. The other voice was Lyle as a woman, interviewing the astronaut in a TV studio. The astronaut persona spoke movingly of weightlessness as a poetic form of anxiety and isolation. Somewhere at the top of the original Lyle’s head, the interviewer smiled and cleared her throat. They drove past houses, more houses. Then they were on Main Street, Flushing.

  “Rosemary doesn’t know me as Vilar. She knows me as Marina Ramirez.”

  “Okay, good.”

  “But you know me as Vilar.”

  “Correct.”

  The woman persona asked questions about colors and shapes, loneliness among the stars. Will we ever walk on Mars, she said. There were waits for lights to change. The conversation trailed off. He felt stupid, having had it. Marina was watching him as she glided to a stop behind a line of other cars.

  “We still have the intent to hit Eleven Wall.”

  He didn’t react.

  “It has to be shattered to whatever extent we can manage before they decide to close it down for their own purposes. All this decentralization we see. It is a reaction to terror? I amuse myself by thinking they have a master plan to eliminate prominent targets. To go underground. Or totally electric. Nothing but waves and currents talking to each other. Spirits. So, the thing should be hit to whatever extent, now.”

  “Thus your interest in a second George.”

  “It’s easier with a George.”

  “I would think so.”

  “Don’t you think?”

  “I would certainly think so.”

  “Of course a George isn’t everything,” she said. “We need a Vilar as well. Someone who does explosives in his sleep.”

  Lyle got out of the car, automatically checking his pockets for keys, change, wallet, cigarettes. He watched her edge away into light traffic. They’d changed to Ohio plates.

  He spent the evening in the district. It was hazy and dense, even by the river. Two men ignored a third, their buddy, urinating, as they wrestled in slow motion near the tennis dome at the foot of Wall, one of them trying to reach a bottle the other had in his back pocket. Lyle turned a corner and walked slowly west. He knew the lack of activity was deceptive, time of day, day of week, an illusion of relief from the bash of predatory engineering. Inside some of the granite cubes, or a chromium tower here and there, people sorted money of various types, dizzying billions being propelled through machines, computer-scanned and coded, filed, cleared, wrapped and trucked, all in a high-speed din, that rip of sound intrinsic to deadline activities. He’d seen the encoding rooms, the micro-filming of checks, money moving, shrinking as it moved, beginning to elude visualization, to pass from a paper existence to electronic sequences, its meaning increasingly complex, harder to name. It was condensation, the whole process, a paring away of money’s accidental properties, of money’s touch. Somehow he’d come back to South Street. All three men wrestled now, back-pedaling in a roistering circle that seemingly had the bottle at its center. Their grappling took place in even slower motion than it had before, a film of reaching and mistimed grips, and they murmured and cursed, hanging on. What remained, he thought, could hardly be identified as money (itself, in normal forms, a compression of one’s worth). The process remained, Marina’s waves and charges, a deathless presence. Lyle thought of his own money not as a medium of exchange but as something to be consigned to data storage, traceable only through magnetic flashes. Money was spiritual indemnity against some unspecifiable future loss. It existed in purest form in his mind, my money, a reinforcing source of meditation. He watched a woman move from phone to phone in a series of open booths outside an office building near the Cotton Exchange. This view of money, he felt, was not the healthiest. Secrecy, possessiveness, cancer-bearing rationality. The woman, depositing no coins, lifted the phone off the hook, screamed something into it, then threw it back into the booth. After she’d done this to the sixth and last phone, hurling it fiercely, she saw Lyle approach and smiled at him, her raw skin cracking. When he smiled back, blinking a bit, she said: “Suck out my asshole, mister.” He stopped, watching her hobble down the street. Then he picked up one of the dangling phones and called Rosemary Moore, letting it ring and ring.

  2

  Pammy bare-breasted on the redwood deck watched Ethan row toward shore, varying light between them, fire opal and conifer bronze, a checkered shade from house to water’s edge, curt blue noon beyond. She sat on a bench while Jack Laws cut her hair. The house was all glass and cedar shingles, built vertically, its reflecting surfaces dense with trees. Jack muttered instructions to himself, thinning out an area behind her left ear. She looked west toward silhouetted hills, the mainland.

  “What are you up to back there?”

  “You wanted drama, right? A change. Don’t interrupt.”

  “What’ll we do for lunch?”

  “That’s all we do here. We plan meals at great length with all this business about fresh vegetables, fresh lobster, country-fresh eggs, this bullshit routine. We talk about it, right? Then we actually plan it, the specifics. Then we do it, we make it. Then we sit down and eat it, talking about it all the while.”

  “I don’t want you doing things to my hair in this mood.”

  “Then we, what, clean up, throw away, wash and dry. And then it’s time to discuss mealtime, foodtime, the next meal. Quick, drive out to roadside stands. Blueberries, squash, corn, hurry.”

  “It’s not a life-enhancing mood you’re in. I sense little warmth there, Jack.”

  “After dark,” he said. “The quiet.”

  “I don’t like scissors in your hand.”

  “Do you believe how dark?”

  “It’s called night, Jack. We call that night.”

  “I didn’t know it would be like this. I thought swimming at least. Do you believe this water?”

  “Cold, I know.”

  “I thought morning swims. I thought at last, freedom from crowded beaches. But this water. Who knew?”

  “It’s not totally out of the question.”

  “It’s the pits.”

  “Try again,” she said. “Maybe it was just that day.”

  “You have nice breasts.”

  “A bit hairy right now.”

  “Nice breasts for a girl.”

  “I still want to know what we’ll do fo
r lunch.”

  “If he ever gets here to supervise.”

  “He rows well, I think.”

  “The supervisor,” Jack said. “If the supervisor ever gets here.”

  “Anytime Ethan wants to rent a house this nice in a setting this lovely, cetra cetra, I’m perfectly happy to have him supervise.”

  “What’s he got in that boat, four tons of pig iron, the way he’s rowing?”

  “I like watching him. People rowing. People rowing and people bicycling. They’re nice to watch. Once we were in England and somewhere near Windsor Castle we saw these boys rowing, prep school, in racing boats, rowing as teams in these sculls, and along the shore there’s the instructor going along on this little path right along the shore on his bicycle, this towpath, calling out instructions.”

  “I’m doing this par excellence.”

  “So rowing and bicycling together,” she said. “Boy, what a treat for my jaded cranium.”

  “This is drama extraordinaire.”

  “All I want’s a new head.”

  “You got it, charley.”

  She’d always lived in apartments. This was a house in the woods at the edge of a bay, a house that inhaled the weather, frequent changes in temperature. She heard noises all night long. Animals lived in the roof and cellar. There were bats in the unused chimney. In bed, curled under blankets and quilts, she couldn’t tell the difference between the sounds of wind and rain, or bats and squirrels, or rain and bats. There were ship-creakings everywhere and charred wood hissing in the fireplace, sputtering up at times, never quite still. When fog worked in from the bay it seemed to suggest some basic change in the state of information. The dampness in foul weather was penetrating. Birds flew into the huge glass windows, seeing forest within, and were stunned or killed.

  They watched Ethan step out of the dinghy and pull it onto the stony beach, up over the tide line. He came up the make-shift steps and along a bending path, disappearing in the trees once or twice, head down when he emerged, trudging. Pammy went inside to find a shirt.