Players

by Don DeLillo

  After a while he takes off his pants. Careful not to disturb the woman, with whom he is not ready to exchange words or looks, he eases onto the bed. Upper body propped by an elbow, he reclines on his side, facing the telephone. Instinct tells him it will shortly ring. He decides to organize his waiting. This will help pull things into a systematic pattern or the illusion of a systematic pattern. Numbers are best for this. He decides to count to one hundred. If the phone doesn’t ring at one hundred, his instinct has deceived him, the pattern has cracked, his waiting has opened out to magnitudes of gray space. He will pack and leave. One hundred is the outer margin of his passive assent.

  When nothing happens, he lowers the count to fifty. At fifty he will get up, get dressed, put his things together and leave. He counts to fifty. When nothing happens, he lowers the count to twenty-five.

  There’s a splatter of brightness at one edge of the window. Minutes and inches later, sunlight fills the room. The air is dense with particles. Specks blaze up, a series of energy storms. The angle of light is direct and severe, making the people on the bed appear to us in a special framework, their intrinsic form perceivable apart from the animal glue of physical properties and functions. This is welcome, absolving us of our secret knowledge. The whole room, the motel, is surrendered to this moment of luminous cleansing. Spaces and what they contain no longer account for, mean, serve as examples of, or represent.

  The propped figure, for instance, is barely recognizable as male. Shedding capabilities and traits by the second, he can still be described (but quickly) as well-formed, sentient and fair. We know nothing else about him.

  About the Author

  Don DeLillo, the author of more than ten novels, including White Noise and Libra, has won many honors in this country and abroad, including the National Book Award, the Irish Times International Fiction Prize, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work and the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for his novel Underworld. His last novel was The Body Artist.