Players

by Don DeLillo

  She saw Ethan disengage himself from three policemen and a civilian, this last apparently being the man who operated the bulldozer. Pammy assumed he’d found the body and called the police. Ethan walked over to her. He was chewing gum. There was a strange menace about him, the slackness of his body. He seemed to be walking right into the ground, getting smaller as he approached, more dangerous somehow, as though he no longer possessed the binding force, the degree of concentration, that keeps people from splintering.

  “Yeah, it was gasoline,” he said. “There’s a large tin over on its side right nearby.”

  “Burned.”

  “He set himself on fire.”

  “He poured it over him.”

  “Yeah, and lit it.”

  She held Ethan by the shirt, twisting the fabric in her fists. An ambulance arrived and the gulls scattered again. Ethan looked off into the trees, thinking of something. Not intently, however. He might have been trying to recall the sequence of events in an anecdote. Or something he was supposed to do, perhaps. Some errand or small task. The men were out of the ambulance. Pammy didn’t want to think about the mechanics of what happened next or even hear voices in the distance, or sounds, whatever sounds would have to be made. Several gulls started to leave the ground, rising on their scraggy feet, wings rippling, stirring up air. She let go of Ethan’s shirt and turned toward the woods, her hands over her ears.

  For a while she held her breath. During this period she could hear, or feel, right under each hand, where it covered her ear, a steady pressuring subroar, oceanic space, brain-deadened, her own coiled shell, her chalky encasement for the world of children, all soft things, the indulgent purr of animals sunning. When she let out her breath, the roar was still there. She’d thought the two were related.

  She concentrated on objects. Her hands were clasped behind her neck. There was a reason for this but she didn’t want to know what it was. She studied the mossy rocks.

  It was driving in on her. It was massing. She felt if she untensed her body something irrevocable, something irrevocable and lunatic, something irrevocable, totally mad, would happen. Nothing had a name. She’d declared everything nameless. Everything was compressed into a block. She fought the tendency to supply properties to this block. That would lead to names.

  Ethan came back after a while. They walked toward the car. The ambulance and one of the police cars were gone. He asked her to take his car back to the house. He would go with the policeman. The other man had climbed into the bulldozer and was sitting there, smoking.

  “They’re very nice. They couldn’t have been nicer.”

  “You’ll be gone how long?”

  “They’ll take me back as soon as we’re finished up. Unless you don’t want to go there. You can come with us.”

  “Ethan, what did Jack do?”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I mean what did he do?”

  At the house she cleaned up. She put things in their original places. She wanted everything to be the way it was when she arrived. The phone rang. It was Lyle. She told him about Jack, beginning a long and at times nearly delirious monologue. She lapsed into accounts of recent dreams. She tried to speak through periods of yawning that were like seizures, some autonomic flux of the nerve apparatus. Lyle calmed her down eventually. He summarized what had happened in short declarative sentences. This seemed to help, breaking the story into coherent segments. It eased the surreal torment, the sense of aberration. To hear the sequence restated intelligibly was at that moment more than a small comfort to her. It supplied a focus, a distinct point into which things might conceivably vanish after a while, chaos and divergences, foes of God.

  “Will you be all right?”

  “Yes.”

  “Will Ethan be back soon?”

  “I think so.”

  “It won’t be so bad when you’re not alone. He’ll be there in a little while. And I’ll be seeing you very soon. It’ll be a little easier when you’re back in the city. There’ll be people.”

  “I know.”

  “Tell Ethan we’ll have lunch when he gets back. Call me, tell him. We’ll make a lunch date.”

  “All right.”

  “Actually I’m not in New York right now. I’m in a motel in a foreign country, believe it or not. Canada anyway. Just a business thing. Nothing special. But I’m leaving right after I hang up. I’ll be home in a matter of hours.”

  “I guess I’ll leave tomorrow, depending.”

  “Don’t call the apartment,” he said. “I’m not answering the phone for a while.”

  She had tea waiting when Ethan came back. They sat outside. He wore nothing over his short-sleeved shirt despite the chill. Pammy wondered whether it would be all right to get him a sweater. She decided finally it might be taken as an imposition of sorts, a subtle belittling of his distress. What comfort, really, would warm clothing give him now? It occurred to her that people unconsciously honored the processes of the physical world, danced fatalistically with nature whenever death took someone close to them. She believed Ethan wanted to feel what was here. If it rained, he wouldn’t move. If she draped a sweater over his shoulders, he might well shrug it off. We are down to eating and sleeping, if that. Rudiments, she thought. Whatever the minimum. That’s what we’re down to. She watched color spread across the sky beyond the Camden Hills. A sunset is the story of the world’s day. They spun back away from it, upended like astronauts, but snug in their seats, night-riding, as the first stars pinched into view.

  “They don’t have a good burn center here if Jack had lived,” he said. “They would have had to rush him to Baltimore, which is ridiculous, considering how remote we are.”

  “Don’t you mean Boston?”

  “There’s nothing in Boston that’s comparable to what’s available in Baltimore. They would have had to get him to Bangor first, either there or Bar Harbor. Then on a plane either to Boston or New York, I would imagine. Then from there to Baltimore. So even if he’d lived.”

  “Ethan, the only thing is time. That’s the only thing that can alleviate. Time is change. After a period of time it won’t be so bad. That’s the only thing you can believe right now. That’s what you have to concentrate on. Time will make it easier to bear.”

  “The consolations of time.”

  “That’s right. That’s it. The only thing.”

  “The healing hand of time.”

  “Are you making fun?”

  “My time is your time.”

  “Because I don’t think this is funny.”

  “I see myself as an old man,” he said. “I hobble to the store for cream cheese and a peach. I buy single items only. One sweet roll, one peach, one bottle of celery tonic. ‘How much is that cucumber, young fella? No, the other one.’ I stand in a corner of the store and take out my little change purse, seeing if I have enough.”

  “Stop, really.”

  “I’m all alone. There’s no one to help me shop. I buy stale bread to save money. Kids race between the shopping carts, knocking me off-balance. They barely notice. Their mothers say nothing. I’m practically invisible. I go to a corner of the store and count my change, my few bills, repeatedly folded, folded repeatedly. I buy one onion, a single stick of margarine.”

  “This could be my father,” she said, “which isn’t in the least amusing to me.”

  “Six eggs minimum.”

  “People live like that.”

  “I hobble down the wide aisles. My body is too ancient to be offensive. All the odors have gone bland on me. I don’t even have the pleasure of smelling myself in bed. They tell me six eggs minimum. I say I’m too weak to break the carton. All I can do is lift one out. Six minimum. That’s the rule. I live alone. All my friends are dead, Jack in particular, adorable useless Jack. I stand in a corner of the store and bring up phlegm. I’m very secretive and clever about this. I hawk, secretively. I’ve learned how to do it so it’s not too loud. I feel the phlegm hobbling around at the back of my mouth
. I hawk some more. A phlegmy old man. This isn’t funny,” he said. “I wouldn’t laugh if I were you.”

  She decided not to fly back. It was an eleven-hour bus ride. Watching a small boy come up the aisle to use the toilet, Pammy smiled, close to tears, her face developing cracks around the eyes and becoming lustrous, showing complex regret. The dead elms along the road brought a graver response. She’d never seen them in such numbers, silenced by blight, dark rangy things, their branches arched. It was startling, all this bareness, and the white frame houses, sometimes turreted or capped by a widow’s walk, and the people who lived there, how different the dead elms made them seem, more resonant, deepened by experience, a sense about them of having lived through something, although she knew she was projecting this, seeing them only in glimpses, piano teachers (a sign in the window), dealers in pewter and marine antiques. She was eager to be back in the apartment, closed away again, spared the need to react tenderly to things. These were commonplace moments, no more, simple enough to have gone unnoticed at other times. Sloping lawns, A drowsy fern in a bay window. She wanted to be spared these fragments of coastal noon, garbled eyeblinks, so perishable and affecting. And Ethan’s strange delineation of the evening before, his deadpan novella. Spared that, too.

  So she wasn’t unhappy about stepping out onto Eighth Avenue at ten or so in the evening, part of the morbid bazaar that springs up outside the bus terminal every summer night, spreading through the wetness and stench. Restless men sorted among the miscellany. Pigments, styles, dialects, persuasions. Sets of eyes followed her to the corner. Immediately east, west and south were commercial streets, empty and dark now, a ray system of desolation, perhaps a truer necropolis, the outlying zone to which all bleak neon aspires.

  Her taxi rocketed east, the back half about to be jettisoned, it seemed. The apartment was serene. Objects sat in pale light, reborn. A wicker basket she’d forgotten they had. A cane chair they’d bought just before she left. Her memory in things.

  She couldn’t fall asleep. The long ride was still unraveling in her body, tremors and streaks. She turned on the black-and-white TV, the one in the bedroom. An old movie was on, inept and boring, fifties vintage. There was a man, the hero, whose middle-class life was quietly coming apart. First there was his brother, the black sheep, seriously in debt, pursued by grade-B racketeers. Phone calls, meetings, stilted dialogue. Then there was his wife, hospitalized, apparently dying of some disease nobody wanted to talk about. In a series of tediously detailed scenes, she was variously brave, angry, thoughtful and shrill. Pammy couldn’t stop watching. The cheapness was magnetic. She experienced a near obliteration of self-awareness. Through blaring commercials for swimming pool manufacturers and computer trainee institutes, she remained in the chair alongside the bed. As the movie grew increasingly maudlin, she became more upset. The bus window had become a TV screen filled with serial grief. The hero’s oldest boy began to pass through states of what the doctor called reduced sensibility. He would sit on the floor in a stupor, either unable to speak or refusing to, his limbs immobile. Phone calls from the hero’s brother increased. He needed money fast, or else. Another hospital scene. The wife recited from a love letter the hero had written her when they were young.

  Pammy was awash with emotion. She tried to fight it off, knowing it was tainted by the artificiality of the movie, its plain awfulness. She felt it surge through her, this billowing woe. Her face acquired a sheen. She ran her right hand over the side of her head, fingers spread wide. Then it came, on-rushing, a choppy sobbing release. She sat there, hands curled at her temples, for fifteen minutes, crying, as the wife died, the boy recovered, the brother vowed to regain his self-respect, the hero in his pleated trousers watched his youngest child ride a pony.

  Movies did that to people, awful or not. She got up finally and went into the kitchen. Her face looked recently finished, an outer surface of raw tissue. She supposed she’d been building up to this. There were baffled pleasures everywhere, whole topographies rearranged to make people react to a mass-market stimulus. No harm done succumbing to a few bogus sentiments. She craved a roast beef sandwich, a cold beer. Nothing here but envelopes of soup.

  It was after midnight but there was an all-night delicatessen around the corner. She got dressed and went downstairs, surprised to find the streets anything but empty. The newsstand was still doing business, the deli, the bagel noshery, the pizza-souvlaki joint, the bars, the ice cream store, the hamburger place. It was still warm and people were in shirtsleeves and shorts and denims and tank tops and sandals and house slippers. Some elderly men and women sat outside their apartment building in beach chairs, gesturing, munching olives and nuts. Everyone was eating. Wherever she looked there were mouths moving, people handling food, passing it around, cartons of French fries, sugar cones with double scoops, and talking, hollering, tissue paper drifting in the light air. An average street. Nowhere special. Not a theater in sight to account for all these people. All eating. Oral New York. Declaiming through the slush of mouthfuls of food. Lapping and crunching. Perennial ranter. The babble king of cities. Pammy had to stand in line. The counterman licked his mustache and rolled his eyes.

  She emerged with a small bag of groceries. The ghost engines droned everywhere—down sewers, under basement stairways, in air conditioners and cracks in the pavement. All these complicated textures. Clownish taxis bearing down. Sodium-vapor lamps. The city was unreasonably insistent on its own fibrous beauty, the woven arrangements of decay and genius that raised to one’s sensibility a challenge to extend itself. Silhouettes of trees on rooftops. Garbagemen at midnight rimming metal cans along the pavement. And always this brassy demanding, a soul that imposes and burdens and defrauds, half mad, but free with its tribal bounty, sized to immense design.

  She walked beneath a flophouse marquee. It read: TRANSIENTS. Something about that word confused her. It took on an abstract tone, as words had done before in her experience (although rarely), subsisting in her mind as language units that had mysteriously evaded the responsibilities of content. Tran-zhents. What it conveyed could not itself be put into words. The functional value had slipped out of its bark somehow and vanished. Pammy stopped walking, turned her body completely and looked once more at the sign. Seconds passed before she grasped its meaning.

  THE MOTEL

  It’s never quite still, is it? Room static. Inherent nuance and hum. And the woman in the bed. Her even breathing. He doesn’t know for a fact that she’s asleep. He’s never seen her sleeping really. He suspects she does it fitfully. Something about her, an aspect of her willingness to carry out designs, to be utilized, suggests a resistance to the implicating riches of deep sleep. He finds it hard to imagine her reaching a final depth, that warm-blooded slumbrous culmination, the point where sleep becomes the tidal life of the unconscious, a state beyond dreaming. To watch a woman at this stage of sleep, throbbing, obviously in touch with mysteries, never fails to worry him a little. They seem at such times to embody a mode of wholeness, an immanence and unit truth, that his feelings aren’t equal to.

  He’s barefoot and shirtless, stretched in a chair. He wears pants with the belt unfastened. The room is dark. He wonders about the tendency of motels to turn things inward. They’re a peculiar invention, powerfully abstract. They seem the idea of something, still waiting to be expressed fully in concrete form. Isn’t there more, he wants to ask. What’s behind it all? It must be the traveler, the motorist, the sojourner himself who provides the edible flesh of this concept. Inwardness spiraling ever deeper. Rationality, analysis, self-realization. He spends a moment imagining that this vast system of nearly identical rooms, worldwide, has been established so that people will have somewhere to be afraid on a regular basis. The parings of our various searches. Somewhere to take our fear. He laughs briefly, a nasal burst.

  The phone will ring and he will be told to go somewhere. He will be given detailed instructions. The number is known. It has been communicated. Certain assurances have been
given. It’s just a matter of time. He’ll get impatient again, no doubt. He’ll resolve to leave. But this time the phone will ring and the voice will give instructions of a detailed nature.

  He makes the speech sound m, prolonging it, adding a hint of vibrato after a while. Then he laughs again. First light appears, a sense of it, wholly mental perhaps. He doesn’t want day to come, particularly. He makes the sound, not moving his lips, expressionless.

  We watch him stand by the bed. The woman has made three visits in the two days he’s had the room. She’s on her stomach now, one arm up on the pillow, the other by her side. Although he’s always known her limits, the unvarying sands of her being, he questions whether his own existence is any more entire. Maybe this amounts to an appreciation of sorts. That the lock of bodies should yield a measure of esteem strikes him as incongruous in this case. He notes her paleness. Downy gloss along her lower spine. She knows things. She isn’t deadened to the core. She knows his soul, for instance.

  (In that moment, wearing her white plastic toy, that odd sardonic moment, so closely bordering on cruelty, a playlet of brute revelation, she let him know it was as an instrument, a toy herself, that she appeared. Dil-do. A child’s sleepy murmur. It was as collaborators that they touched, as dreamers in a sea of pallid satisfaction.)

  Her complicity makes it possible for him to remain. He stares at the hollows in her buttocks. Dark divide. The ring of flesh that’s buried there. We see him walk to the desk, where he gets the map with the street index attached. He takes it to the chair, stretching his frame.

  The idea is to organize this emptiness. In the index he sees Briarfield, Hillsview, Woodhaven, Old Mill, Riverhead, Manor Road, Shady Oaks, Lakeside, Highbrook, Sunnydale, Grove Park, Knollwood, Glencrest, Seacliff and Greenvale. He finds these names wonderfully restful. They’re a liturgical prayer, a set of moral consolations. A universe structured on such coordinates would have the merits of substance and familiarity. He becomes a little giddy, blinking rapidly, and lets the map slip to the floor.