Americana

by Don DeLillo

  The membrane had microscopic pores which enabled air to enter. Natural light could barely penetrate but the spotlights were an adequate substitute. Sullivan preferred them actually, claiming that sunlight was overrated. I put my fingers to one of the pieces of sculpture; the paint was dry, a deep gray; the others were browns of varying flat tones, a black and bone-white, a glacial silver. The three windows in the loft, pale and wavering behind the skin of the sandwich wrap, were shut tight, and yet the wrapping undulated as if grazed by a sea breeze. Some of the smaller power tools lay on a workbench. I went from figure to figure, thumbing each one, running the back of my hand over the bending surfaces. The building was quiet. I wondered why this one door had not been marked; to give a door the name River was an act of odd joy, or poetry, or childhood. I thought of the river in Old Holly then, and then of leaves, palms up, turning in a gentle current above the long, still, suspended fish with silver-dollar eyes, and then the woman ironing clothes in the shingled house, standing in her slip, the blinds not quite shut, and the September music of that warm night, elms and leisures of a dark street when the lawns smell of sweet wet grass and you are a boy, the hopelessness of lust, her bare arms and the shine of silk moving as her slow body moved, twice my age at least, ironing with the smooth movements of a lioness caressing her cubs, and I held to a tree and watched for an hour or more, twice my age, her light brown hair, lazy eyes, the softness of her face, never seen before and never since. All I wanted now was sleep.

  A stained chunk of foam rubber, the remains of a mattress, lay under the workbench. I dragged it out and rolled my body into a ball and went immediately to sleep inside the plastic envelope of that room. Sins and rivers passed through my dreams, underwater faces fish-staring in my mind. I woke up to silence and chill, the accusations of the klieg lights. The city was full of people searching for the man or woman who might save them. My body stank of cold sweat, liquor and fear. The loft seemed endless, a scene lifted from the sandy bottom of a dream. A shape in the shape of my mother was forming in the doorway.

  5

  I was wearing green military-advisor sunglasses, a pair of wolf-hide moccasins, black chinos, a tight T-shirt and a khaki fatigue cap cocked low over my eyes. Pike was sprawled in the back seat and Sullivan was at my side watching New England unbury itself from the last snow of winter bleeding now into the earth. The radio was announcing a sale on ground round steak and then some old-time rock came on, lush and mystical, cockney voices wailing through a prayer wheel of electric sitars, and we roared past Boston in a low cloud of crematory smoke. The windows were closed and the heater on and I moaned and chanted in the wrap-around fallopian coziness of my red Mustang, an infinitely more religious vehicle than the T-Bird I had owned in college. All America was on the verge of spring and the countryside was coming to glory, what we could see of the countryside through the smoke and billboards. There is nothing more thrilling than the first days of a long journey on wheels into the slavering mouth of an incredible and restless country. I shouted as I drove, exceeded speed limits, quoted poetry and folksong. Proper old Boston was behind us, its churches and gang killings, and ahead was Maine where surf blew over the rocks, where ruddy lobstermen in yellow hats and hip boots crackled with tales of the deep. We stopped in Salem for lunch and then visited the House of the Seven Gables, where the pretty little guide would not accompany us up the secret staircase, fearing quick cougar paws in the dark, and in late afternoon we reached the coast of Maine and saw a black apocalyptic storm clenched over the ocean, the air cool and tense, about to break, and when it came I thought the car might bust wide open and Pike woke up thinking we were all about to die and then told us about the great elliptical migrations of the cranes of Europe. I spurred the frisky Mustang past hundreds of bungalows, guest cottages and motels, twenty-five hundred miles from Marlboro country, and neon lobster phantasms swam across the wet road. It was evening when we got to Millsgate, a small white town on Penobscot Bay. The rain had stopped and we had dinner in a fishnet restaurant and then set out on foot to search for Bobby Brand’s ascetic garage, Brand in exile, Brand junkless, Brand writing the novel that would detonate in the gut of America like a fiery bacterial bombshell. We went up a small hill, walking in the middle of the street. There were no cars, no sounds at all, and the air was so sharp it seemed to scratch the lungs. Four dogs came toward us and Pike barked at them but they just trotted by. The moon was full, obscured every few seconds by long swift clouds, and the whole sky seemed to be breathing. At the top of the hill I found the street we were looking for and we turned left and walked past the village green. A row of white houses flanked one side of the green; opposite the houses was a white clapboard church with a steeple. The high school was set back at the far end of the lawn, facing the street. Several porchlights were on and we could see the cannon and the black pocked balls stacked on the grass beside it. Up ahead there was a gap in the trees and I looked down to the water which was streaked silver from the moon and from the white lights of the houses set in the woods above the small coves on either side of the bay.

  “New England is the most sexless place in the hemisphere,” Sullivan said. “It has the sex appeal of Hyde Park in London on a warm afternoon when they all take off their shirts and collapse on the grass and then you understand why they had to go to Africa to get their kicks.”

  We reached the garage.

  “To be human is to go through stages,” Brand said. “I’ve been through them all. But that’s over now. I eat, sleep and write. I’m all through shooting smack. I’m all through dropping acid. I’m working all that New York insanity and violence out of my system. I go over to the high school and play basketball with the kids. It’s beautiful here and this is where I am. I’m purifying myself. You can help me, Davy. My brain needs cleaning out. I think the way I talk. The way I’m trying not to talk anymore. You can help me get rid of the slang. You have my permission to correct me whenever I fall back into the old drug argot or military talk. One of the things I’ve figured out for myself up here in exile is that there’s too much slang in my head. It’s insidious. It leads to violence. You can help, Davy. I want to be colorless.”

  We were sitting around a small table in his camper, inside the garage, drinking instant Maxwell House. The main part of the camper was plastic, designed to fit over the cab and back of a Ford F-250 pickup truck. The truck itself was black, the rest of the unit a dark gray with black trim around the windows and door. Inside were three bunks, a table, a hotplate and a typewriter; this was where Brand lived. I had met him years before when Merry and I went out to East Hampton one weekend. He seemed to be a one-man dispensary of meth, acid, hashish and various amphetamines. I was drawn to Brand. He represented the danger that was lacking in my life, real danger, not the plastic stuff available in great quantities at the network or the celluloid peril of those movie roles with which I challenged the premise of my marriage. All the bright young men of Madison Avenue searched for some facsimile of danger, some black root which might crack the foundation of their basic Episcopalianism, and we looked to the milder psychedelics, the study of karate, the weekend skydiving club, the sports-car rally. That weekend Brand gave me a tab to slip under my tongue, a ticket to unapproachable regions, and what I remember is the sight of myself at the age of sixty, mangled larvae clinging to the bleak flesh, the pit, the hellish comedy of my face; and that was the last occasion, save one, on which I tried to cross the swamp all alone. Brand had gone from Yale straight into the Air Force, where he flew an F-4 fighter-bomber over the elephant grass of a disappearing province. After his discharge (which may have been medical) he lived in a rooming house in the West Nineties shooting heroin and cocaine, then drifted into peace movements of the sing-along type and finally discovered acid, political activism and writing. Brand was roughly my age. He was tall, had sandy hair, wore glasses, was likable and frightening, lived off his family most of the time, seemed to change his personality every few weeks and sometimes minutes, could easi
ly be visualized lying on a bed in a college dorm wearing a sweatshirt, denims, loafers and white socks, reading an economics textbook, dreaming of spoons and blue flame. He had a pair of copulating dogs tattooed on his right forearm.

  “My aunt Mildred owns this garage. She lives right down the street but she’s in Bangor now finishing up some legal business. Too bad you can’t meet her. She plays the clarinet.”

  “When do we leave?” I said.

  “Tomorrow’s fine with me. I’ve leaving my manuscript behind. It needs a rest. Did you bring your camera?”

  “It’s in the car. I’ve also got a battery-operated tape recorder. And Sullivan brought along her fantastic NordMende fifteen-band portable radio. It gets the whole world.”

  “That’s great.”

  “Do we sleep here tonight?” Sullivan said.

  “We may as well get used to it,” I said.

  “We don’t have to. Mildred left me the keys to her house. We’ll be less crowded there. She’s always asking me to move in with her but I tell her the garage is magical. It’s full of emanations. I can’t write anywhere but here. When do you have to be in Arizona?”

  “Three weeks from yesterday. If all goes well, the crew will have everything set up by the time I get there. I hope you’ll all decide to hang around while we’re shooting. I don’t know whether I’ll be able to drive back with you. Most likely I’ll have to fly. Pike, you and Sully can pick up my car here and take it back for me.”

  “My license expired eighteen years ago,” Pike said.

  We got our bags from the car and walked over to Brand’s aunt’s house. It was a fine old house, the place where everyone’s grandmother lives in television commercials, full of other people’s memories and yet warmed by a mood of love and simplicity that was universal. Starched lean men and little girls with straight blond hair looked darkly from photographs hung in the hallway. The living room was all chintz and needlepoint and bible kindness, wallpapered with faded yellow roses and soaked in an odor of old bodies rocking toward sleep. Brand took Sullivan and Pike upstairs and I wandered through the kitchen and pantry, feeling I had come to the heart of something, to the secret of the terror of small towns on Sunday, the eucharistic silence of coffee and buns after the long walk back from church. How long had it been since I had stood in a pantry at midnight, the dark shelves lined with cookie jars, jam and spices? Taste and smell can safecrack memory in the shadow of an instant, and in that pantry, nibbling dry cookies with the compulsive fervor of a penitent seeking the message of his past, I returned to a tight hot room in another town, the idle perfume of a summer.

  I turned off the lights and went upstairs. Brand and Pike were sharing one of the bedrooms. They sat on their beds, the career soldier and the recruit, untying shoelaces, yawning, yanking T-shirts over their heads. Brand told me the other bedroom was at the far end of the hall and as I left them I heard Pike begin his account of the wanton slaughter of the buffalo in the eighteen sixties and seventies, herds three miles long and two miles wide decimated by Sunday huntsmen firing from trains. Sullivan was already in bed, reading her Yeats. The room obviously had not been used for a while and it was bare except for the lamp, the small table on which it stood, one chair, Sullivan’s bed, and the cot where I would be sleeping. The roof sloped down over this part of the house and my cot was at the shallow end of the room. Sullivan turned off the light and I undressed, standing naked for a few seconds next to the cot, wondering whether she could see me. It felt wonderful to be sleeping in the same room as Sullivan. I slipped between the cold sheets. The ceiling angled down right over me and I raised my arm and touched it with my fingertips. All children, I thought, should be permitted to sleep in such a room; the child loves nooks and odd angles and is frightened into nightmare by equidistance, by parallel planes which conceal nothing.

  “Pike is telling about the bison.”

  “His saddest tale,” she said.

  “We’ll be out there soon.”

  “David on the way to Oz.”

  “I wonder if there are any Arapahoes still left. Or Chiricahuas. My favorite tribe. The Chiricahua Apaches. Burt Lancaster with that paisley headband.”

  “Will you get your blizzard?”

  “I guess not. It’ll be April soon.”

  “Desert flowers will be blooming.”

  “Did you ever notice? Darkness seems to make people speak in short sentences.”

  “Yes,” she said. “And when the lights come on, we open up and ramble and say absolutely nothing. But in bed in the dark we’re urged on by the monkey waiting in our sleep.”

  “What monkey?”

  “We become documentary. We become newsreels telling what we think is the truth. Our listener is really no more than a fragment of the dark. The true audience is darkness itself. We unwrap our lives to it, trying to appease the monkey.”

  “What monkey?” I said.

  “The Viennese monkey. But what we say really adds up to little more than empty daytime chatter. It’s nothing compared to the revelation yet to come.”

  “Which is?”

  “The single unending sentence.”

  “Sleep and dream.”

  “Yes.”

  “Tell me a story,” I said.

  “What kind?”

  “About the great golden West and the Indians and the big outdoor soul of America.”

  “Do I have to speak in short sentences?”

  “No.”

  “I have just the thing,” she said. “It’s about a wise old holy man of the Oglala Sioux and what he said to me once on a moonlit night.”

  “Is this for real or are you going to make it up as you go along?”

  “This is for real,” Sullivan said.

  “Tell me then.”

  “He was a hundred years old and he looked like the stump of an oak tree. As a boy he had fought at the Little Bighorn with Crazy Horse. Even then he had disliked bloodshed and he spent most of the years of his adulthood fasting and praying. Some time ago, through the good offices of an anthropologist who had once been a friend of my father, I was permitted to visit Black Knife in his shack in the hills of South Dakota. I asked him a few polite questions which he chose to ignore, displaying at the very outset a splendid contempt for the amenities. He puffed on an ugly old corncob pipe. I think it must have been filled with mud and wet leaves. Then I asked him if things had changed much since he was a boy. He said that was the most intelligent question anyone had ever asked him. Things had changed hardly at all. Only materials had changed, technologies; we were still the same nation of ascetics, efficiency experts, haters of waste. We have been redesigning our landscape all these years to cut out unneeded objects such as trees, mountains and all those buildings which do not make practical use of every inch of space. The ascetic hates waste. We plan the destruction of everything which does not serve the cause of efficiency. Hard to believe, he said, that we are ascetics. But we are, more than all the fake saints across the sea.”

  “He said this to you, this old Sioux mystic?”

  “He kept well abreast of things with newspapers and periodicals.”

  “Go on.”

  “What we really want to do, he said, deep in the secret recesses of our heart, all of us, is to destroy the forests, white saltbox houses, covered bridges, brownstones, azalea gardens, big red barns, colonial inns, riverboats, whaling villages, cider mills, waterwheels, antebellum mansions, log cabins, lovely old churches and snug little railroad depots. All of us secretly favor this destruction, even conservationists, even those embattled individuals who make a career out of picketing graceful and historic old buildings to protest their demolition. It’s what we are. Straight lines and right angles. We feel a private thrill, admit it, at the sight of beauty in flames. We wish to blast all the fine old things to oblivion and replace them with tasteless identical structures. Boxes of cancer cells. Neat gray chambers for meditation and the reading of advertisements. Imagine the fantastic prairie motels we could buil
d if only we would give in completely to the demons of our true nature; imagine the automobiles that might take us from motel to motel; imagine the monolithic fifty-story machines for disposing of the victims of automobile accidents without the bother of funerals and the waste of tombstones or sepulchres. Let the police run wild. Let the mad leaders of our nation destroy whomever they choose. That’s what we really want, Black Knife told me. We want to be totally engulfed by all the so-called worst elements of our national life and character. We want to wallow in the terrible gleaming mudcunt of Mother America. (That’s what he said.) We want to come to terms with the false anger we so often display at the increasing signs of sterility and violence in our culture. Kill the old brownstones and ornate railroad terminals. Kill the rotten stinking smalltown courthouses. Blow up the Brooklyn Bridge. Blow up Nantucket. Blow up the Blue Ridge Parkway. We must realize we are living in Megamerica. Neon, fiber glass, Plexiglass, polyurethane, Mylar, Acrylite.”