by Don DeLillo
“Was his shack located on a windy mountaintop? And had you gone there to find out the true meaning of life?”
“San Francisco would be completely leveled,” Sullivan said. “Georgetown would be razed. In their place we would construct motels and houses that were identical in every detail. The new San Francisco would have no hills. The coast of Maine would be indistinguishable from Des Moines, Iowa. In the new gray Washington all the senators would spend eight hours a day in their identical offices, chained to radiators, being flogged by French tarts. This is known as the philosophy lesson, wisdom of the old world, the culture we so badly lack. Nobody would ever sweat. Sweating is wastefulness. If you were caught sweating you would be shot on sight. The air conditioners in every room in the country would be permanently set at fifty degrees fahrenheit. There would be no way to turn them off.”
“What else did he say?”
“He said that all the new universities would consist of only one small room. It would work this way. At the beginning of each semester the entire student body—which would have to number at least five hundred thousand in order to give the computers enough to do—would assemble in a large open space in front of a TV camera. They would be televised and put on videotape. In a separate operation the instructors would also be videotaped, individually. Then two TV sets would be placed in the single room which represented the university. The room would be in a small blockhouse at the edge of a thirty-six-lane freeway; this proximity would help facilitate transmission of electronic equipment. Oh, there might be some banners on the wall and maybe a plaque or two, but aside from these the only things in the room would be the TV sets. At nine o’clock in the morning of the first day of classes, a computer would turn on the two television sets, which would be facing each other. The videotape of the students would then watch the videotape of the instructors. Eventually the system could be refined so that there would be only one university in the whole country.”
“Frankly I think Black Knife is a little bit out of date.”
“The biggest surprise was yet to come. Black Knife went on to say, with a full moon above us, that this massive surrender to our deepest dreams and impulses would be the best thing that could happen. After all, it was the true expression of ourselves in the most profound darkness of our beings. We would attain complete self-realization. We would set forth on the world’s longest march of vulgarity, evil and decadence. We would establish the greatest superstate of them all. The world would be on its knees before our crazed power—if it isn’t already. And then, having set one foot into the mud, one foot and three toes, we would stop for a moment, take a look around, and decide whether to sink further and eventually die or whether to return to firm land and begin again, living off roots and berries but no symbols, shedding the ascetic curse, letting the buffalo run free, knowing everything a nation can know about itself and proceeding with the benefit of this knowledge and the awareness that we have chosen not to die. It’s worth the risk, he said, for if we took the latter course we would become, finally, the America that fulfills all of its possibilities. The America that belongs to the world. The America we thought we lived in when we were children. Small children. Very small children indeed.”
“And he told you all this. This broken-down swatch of buffalo hide.”
“It was a cold night,” she said. “And the moon was full.”
In the morning it rained. I was the last one down. It felt good to sit in the kitchen, yawning, and smell coffee and bacon and hear rain slanting through the trees. I watched the others move from stove to refrigerator and back, bumping into each other, barely awake and walking through webs.
“What do you do for a living?” Brand said.
“That’s a mute point,” Pike said.
“Why don’t you tell him?” I said.
“I’m a humanist of animals.”
“Tell him,” Sullivan said.
“I’m the proprietor of an electrical appliance repair shop on Fourteenth Street.”
“Tell him what you specialize in.”
“Toasters with doors and prewar radios. I have problems with pop-up things and things that are combinations of things like clock-radios or radio-phonographs. You have to read to keep up-to-date. I haven’t read a book in twenty years. I don’t have a head for numbers. I don’t like voltage. My shop is small and I do what I can to encourage people to keep out.”
“I have a head for numbers,” I said. “Numbers fascinate me. Numbers have power. The whole country runs on numbers. I love to count things. I love to add and subtract. Everybody has numbers. Everybody is a number. Is that so terrible? Maybe it is. I frankly don’t know.”
“Listen up now,” Pike said.
“Everybody start eating,” Sullivan said. “I plan to fry myself an absolutely perfect egg. An astonishing egg. Perfect whites and yellows. Tone, texture, integrity.”
“I want everybody to listen up now because this is important. In a fair fight who would emerge victorious, a tiger or a polar bear? Now the tiger is a fast powerful sinewy animal that has everything it takes to make a good hunter and killer. The tiger is classic. But you’ll be making a big mistake if you underrate the polar bear. Polar bear can take off your arm with one lazy swipe of the paw. Polar bear has amazing speed for his size and he can camouflage himself in the snow. Natural selection is the name we give to this phenomenon. Tiger or polar bear.”
“Where are they fighting?” Brand said.
“What do you mean?”
“If they’re fighting in the arctic circle you have to favor the polar bear. In the jungle the tiger is the big stud. Nobody messes with the tiger on his own turf. He’s the main man, the big bopper.”
“Look, Jack, they’re just fighting. It could be anywhere. Who can beat who is the thing we’re concerned with.”
“Let me posit something here,” Brand said. “If a middle-weight from Akron goes to defend his title in Panama City against a local boy, the bookmakers take cognizance of that fact. Odds are laid accordingly. Now perhaps my analogy limps. Perhaps it limps. Nevertheless you station a tiger on an ice floe against some big white mother and he’ll keep slipping around on his hindquarters while the polar bear tears him apart. Vice versa in the jungle. Bear would collapse from heat prostration. You can’t have them fighting in a vacuum. And you can’t pick a neutral site either, like the desert or the mountains, because then both of them will be out of their natural elements and the fight won’t be a true test of their abilities. The contest is much too hypothetical to be given serious consideration.”
Pike ate his breakfast in silence. His eyes schemed like dice. An entire philosophy had been questioned, its precepts put in grave doubt, and some serious thinking had to be done, some material reassembled, before he could meet his antagonist in open debate. Sullivan filled the moody silence by announcing that my digression on numbers was somewhat less than Euclidean in its sweep and purity; that one of my main faults was a tendency to get blinded by the neon of an idea, never reaching truly inside it; that to follow a number to infinity was not necessarily to arrive at God. With her fork she bisected a crisp slice of bacon, a piece so brittle the fork barely had to touch it; she then halved the two fragments, then the smaller four, then the resulting eight, and so on, working with the quietly fanatical precision of all those people whose job it is to divide small things into smaller things, who live on the rim of insanity; finally there was nothing left of the slice but a hundred decimal points. Did the bacon represent the insignificance of numbers; the futile quest for infinity; the indivisible nature of God as opposed to the fractional promiscuity of numbers? Was it all a lesson in prime matter and substantial form: Were the bits of bacon supposed to be numbers and the fried egg God? Brand looked on in fascination. I finished eating and went upstairs. I found a telephone and called Binky, collect, at the office.
“What’s new?”
“Too much,” she said.
“What?”
“Reeves Chubb, Carter Hemm
ings, Mars Tyler, Quincy Willet, Paul Joyner, Chandler Bates and Walter Faye.”
“Axed?” I said.
“Sandbagged, throttled and axed. Drawn and quartered. It’s official.”
“Jumping mother balls. A mass execution. The magnificent seven gunned down at the OK Corral. Some sweaty little infighting among the survivors, what?”
“I think you’re getting promoted,” Binky said. “It’s just a rumor at this point but Jody thinks it’s on the level.”
“Protect my interests, Bink, and I’ll take you to the top with me. We’ll be like Cary Grant and Roz Russell. Sipping martinis in my penthouse office. Has Weede begun hiring new people yet?”
“Just one so far.”
“What’s his name?”
“Harris Hodge.”
“How old is he?” I said.
“I don’t know, David. He won’t be starting until next week. I haven’t even seen him yet.”
“Find out how old he is. I’ll call you in a few days. Do you miss me?”
“I have to hang up now,” she said.
I went into the bathroom, took off my shirt and began shaving my chest with an electric razor. It was a ritual cleansing of the body, a prelude to the sacred journey. The rain had stopped. I was happy. Through the bathroom window, as I shaved, I could see most of the town of Millsgate, white houses massed in a jest of innocence, fresh sunlight on the steeple. A girl went along the street skipping rope, head back, eyes seeking the break in the clouds; two white sloops, heeling severely, played at the mouth of the bay. I tried to imagine, to remember really, what it was like to live without the terminal fears of the city, for I had loved a town once without knowing it, and the love would not release me. There was a vein of murder snaking across the continent beneath highways, smokestacks, oilrigs and gasworks, a casual savagery fed by the mute cities, and I wondered what impossible distance must be traveled to get from there to here, what language crossed, how many levels of being. My hair went willingly into the fish-mouth of the razor.
A woman came down the steps of an old house. She wore a blue dress and carried pruning shears. I stopped shaving to watch her. She was close to forty, I guessed, fair-skinned, wearing flat heels, appealing in the almost abstract way a waitress is appealing in her plain white dress and the easy cadence of her body as she walks away from your table. The woman began to trim the hedge, handling the large shears with uncommon ease, and then, perhaps feeling the intensity of my stare, she looked up and saw me. I did not move and soon she went back to work, humming softly, proceeding along the hedge, her arms beating, somewhat like a bird discovering flight. I watched her for a least half an hour. She would never know it, of course, but she had given me the strangest, darkest, most horrifying idea of my life. It was an idea for a film I might make somewhere out there among the lost towns of America.
They were waiting for me. Brand locked the house and we carried our suitcases to the garage and put them in the camper. Then I trotted down to my car and drove it to the garage. I transferred my movie camera and tape recorder to the camper. Brand backed the F-250 out as we stood on the sidewalk counting the dents and bruises. Then he came out to give it one final look, circling slowly with a thoughtful expression on his face. He adjusted his glasses, blinking rapidly into the sun.
“She’s ready, Davy,” he said. “The old plastic bitch is ready to roll. You’re the captain. Which way are we going?”
“West,” I said. “Aim her more or less to the west.”
I put my car in the garage and Brand locked up. We flipped coins and it was determined that I would ride up front with him for the first fifty miles. We assumed our respective posts. The school bell began to ring. Brand put the camper into gear.
PART TWO
6
Men on small islands would do well to avoid the pursuit of philosophy. The island illusion, that solitude and wisdom invented each other, is a very convincing one. Day by day I seem to grow more profound. Often I feel I am on the verge of some great philosophical discovery. Man. War. Truth. Time. Fortunately I always return to myself. I look beyond the white lace of the surf to my own unassembled past and I decide to let others stitch together the systems. I enjoy the triteness of the situation, man and island, exile in the ultimate suburb. The surf is massing and rolling, uneven now, page after page of terrible wild words. All the colors borrow, sea from beach from sky, and after a while I follow my own footprints back to the house.
(The film is projected.)
There were many visions in the land, all fragments of the exploded dream, and some of the darkest of these visions were those processed in triplicate by our generals and industrialists—the manganese empires, the super-sophisticated gunnery, the consortiums and privileges. Something else was left over for the rest of us, or some of the rest of us, and it was the dream of the good life, innocent enough, simple enough on the surface, beginning for me as soon as I could read and continuing through the era of the early astronauts, the red carpet welcome on the aircraft carrier as the band played on. It encompassed all those things which all people are said to want, materials and objects and the shadows they cast, and yet the dream had its complexities, its edges of illusion and self-deception, an implication of serio-comic death. To achieve an existence almost totally symbolic is less simple than mining the buried metals of other countries or sending the pilots of your squadron to hang their bombs over some illiterate village. And so purity of intention, simplicity and all its harvests, these were with the mightiest of the visionaries, those strong enough to confront the larger madness. For the rest of us, the true sons of the dream, there was only complexity. The dream made no allowance for the truth beneath the symbols, for the interlinear notes, the presence of something black (and somehow very funny) at the mirror rim of one’s awareness. This was difficult at times. But as a boy, and even later, quite a bit later, I believed all of it, the institutional messages, the psalms and placards, the pictures, the words. Better living through chemistry. The Sears, Roebuck catalog. Aunt Jemima. All the impulses of all the media were fed into the circuitry of my dreams. One thinks of echoes. One thinks of an image made in the image and likeness of images. It was that complex.
* * *
Old Holly was a suburb of New York only in the strict geographical sense; unlike the surrounding communities it was not an extension of the city’s monoxide spirit, a point of mere arrival and departure. The town did not have the sheen of a manicurist’s artistry about it. The houses were very old, most of them, and agreeably shabby, two or three stories with small shuttered windows, high ceilings, gabled roofs, porches which in some cases went entirely around the houses, repeating the eccentric angles sketched by the roof-edges. Through all the houses drifted some thin plasm of identity, stirring the senses of the casual visitor. One enters here and tastes clove or mellow tobacco in the air; the next house smells faintly of mint, varnish somewhere, the soft thick snuff of an old rug; one hears music elsewhere, no more than intimations from the keys of a lidded piano, no more than cutlery and voices, the indolent sermon of a saw on wood, no more than silence or the stagnant inner sound which silence contains in all old rooms deep in sunlight. In certain rooms in some of the houses, the floors were slightly tilted, moldings loose, ceiling beams off-center, and when you got out of bed at night for a glass of water and there was wind and rain the sensation was not unlike that of being at sea in a storm. If you were a boy it was a simple matter to pretend your house was a ship, for the stairs creaked and there were small dark corners where you could put your hand to the wall and feel the house sigh in the wild currents of the wind. The dim persuasions of sameness, the low clean lines which imply neither victory nor defeat but only stalemate, equation, the century’s dry science, were nowhere present among these houses. Only two pieces of property included swimming pools. The country club was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Physically, then, Old Holly might have been set in the middle of Connecticut or in some Pennsylvania valley which owed
the fact of its livelihood to no large city. In spirit, the town was even less suburban. It had not been built with the automobile in mind; the streets were somewhat less than broad and people could be seen walking at all hours of the day and evening to the stores on Ridge Street. There were no parking lots in the middle of town, no need for them, and no shopping center or aluminum custard stand flanked by a miniature golf course and a driving range. There were many small hills, nagging little curves instead of neat intersections, and the sight of headlights picking out trees through low fog was, to a boy, something beautiful and rare, for the car was alien to this environment, its passage difficult and bizarre. Most of the people who lived in Old Holly worked there as well, tradesmen, factory hands, professional men, and the train depot was never crowded at the regular commuter hours. We were a town then, American in our outlook, plain and meat-eating, relatively unhurried, willing to die for our country, or for photographs of our country.