by Don DeLillo
* * *
“She was a different breed of cat,” my father said. “She knew things nobody else knew. There was something magic about that woman. I don’t believe in devils or saints or evil spirits. If you can’t see it, is my theory, then it isn’t there. But when your mother talked about these things it wasn’t so easy to be a skeptic. Her mother drowned when she was a little girl. Maybe it did something to her. She remembered things that happened to her when she was only two years old. Maybe she just dreamed them but if they were just dreams she could make them sound deadly real. When she was carrying Mary, the minute she knew she was carrying Mary, she said it was a girl. She said it was the kite-soul of her mother. The kite-soul. It sounds Oriental, doesn’t it? Something Buddhists or Hindus might believe in. Something to do with reincarnation. I’ve never come across that phrase before or since. But to get back to Mary. Mary when she was born resembled me more than anyone. And when Jane was born it seemed a sure bet that the blond side of the family had been lost somewhere, your mother’s side, and her mother’s side. Ann felt desolate. I think she felt a whole race had faded away in some genetic catastrophe. Then you were born. She looked at you and said there he is, up out of the Irish seas like Lycidas. I loved her like I’ll never love anything in this world again. When you were born she was happy and I didn’t care what she said or how little I understood. She was happy and that was all that mattered. I have that much to thank you for anyway.”
As she edged closer to death, he said, he began drinking heavily. Then one day he stopped drinking. He cut it out completely. He stopped drinking and got into his Maserati and took the first of a series of strange drives over the dark narrow roads around town. He would go out shortly after midnight and begin driving. He would take it up to 110, corner at 75, slam it way out to the fringe, the delicate pressure of his foot on the accelerator becoming part of a game of tender balances, and his hands on the wheel daring him closer to the bright splashing eyes in the adjacent lane. In the rain one night he went into a spin and ended up in a ditch. He got out of the car, bleeding around the head, and walked back to town. He went about a mile out of his way to pass through the Negro section of Old Holly, past the bars and old frame houses. He was waiting for a man with a knife to come out of a doorway at him. All this time, he told me, he had been trying to steal death from her body. By confronting it himself, he would keep it away from her. And on that last night a man leaned out of a bar and began following him. My father turned a corner, clenched his fists and waited. It was still raining and he could taste the rain mixed with blood running into his mouth. The man came around the corner and walked up to him and began to tapdance. My father stood there and the man danced around him, shuffling slowly and mumbling some old scat lyric. When he started to walk away, the man followed at a distance of several yards, gliding and tapping with the loose elegance of the indomitably drunk. My father walked backwards for almost half a block, watching the man come closer. Then he turned quickly and began to run, and he could hear the feet still tapping behind him, diminishing now, and the voice growing dimmer, a weary moan from swamps or cotton, words of an unknown language.
For several years I had thought of my father as the witness. Now, at her death, he became more than that. Our bond tightened and he closed in on me. We stood on the grass with scores of people. The splendor of her coffin was a comfort to everyone. I watched them and knew they were proud of her. To be buried in such luxury. Surely her life must have been something of a grand episode. For a moment I thought of those fabled khans and their nymphomaniacs who are always crashing into trees somewhere between Paris and Nice. There is substance to most clichés and we admire these men and women for having the wit to die as they have lived. The thought passed quickly and then down went mother in her silver Ferrari, a single rose clinging to the lid.
“She’s watching us,” my father said. “You think she’s down there but she’s not. Not her. She’s watching us. She’s watching to see what we’re going to do to each other.”
* * *
When Meredith returned from England she got a secretarial job in Manhattan. I went into the city one day to buy some shoes and we met later for lunch.
“How’s the job coming along?”
“I love it,” she said.
“Back in the swing of things yet? I guess it takes a while. That was quite a vacation.”
“New York is the most exciting place in the world to work. London is fun to walk around in and New York is fun to work in.”
“I missed you,” I said. “I guess you could tell that from my letters.”
“They were nice letters. They were very creative. I can’t tell you how sorry I was to hear about your mother.”
“I’m asking you to marry me.”
“I’m not the one you need,” she said.
“Two daiquiris on the rocks.”
“You need someone who’s much more mature than I am.”
“Will you marry me?”
“No.”
“Will you at least think about it? I’d feel much better if you’d at least think about it. You can promise me that much. That you’ll think about it for a week or so. Then we can discuss it again. I can drive over to your house and we’ll go somewhere, some quiet place, and have a quiet dinner and talk about it. I know just the place. It’s just outside Westport. It’s a nice ride over there at this time of year. You’ll like this place. The top of the bar is plated with ha’pennies. Real English ha’pennies. We’ll have a quiet dinner and talk about it and then I’ll take you right back home.”
* * *
Mary was delighted by the fact that Arondella wore taps on his shoes.
* * *
The study of dead Englishmen flourished in the afternoon. We looked forward to them, sons of Bread Street and Aid-winkle Rectory. It was May of my senior year at Leighton Gage and on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons we sat in an air-conditioned hourglass and savored our own total incomprehension as an assistant professor charted the poems of Dryden, Lovelace, Fanshawe and Suckling. They were all so incomparably dead, the Penguin poets, and we loved them because their lines meant less to us than the dark side of the moon. It was the best kind of class to have in the afternoon, an exercise in almost pure language, demanding nothing more than fractional consciousness since there wasn’t the slightest hope of understanding what those poems were all about, and we drowsed and smiled, happy in our own little angel-infancy, snug in our Thamesian punt, and when the sonic belch of experimental jets went ripping across the desert we came close to applauding the symbolism; but a trembling applause it would have been, for we knew that it signaled the death of our drowsy England and the beginning of a new mortality, just months away now, the start of job, mate, child, desk, drink, sit, squat, quiver, die. Afternoon was for political science or dead Englishmen. That’s why Monday afternoons were so terrible. Monday meant Zen.
Hiroshi Oh was an alarmingly fragile man. In the lecture hall he would ease into his chair in careful stages, always on the verge of blowing away, and then he’d smile desolately at his children. Tall blond milwaukees—prepare for Zen! I always enjoyed that opening smile. It was the smile of the bored Orient, tired of truth, bound in inland stillness, indifferent to westernization. The lecturer’s chair and desk were on a platform in front of the huge sanitized hall, which resembled a cafeteria in the second-best pavilion at some international exposition. There were enough seats for two hundred students but only thirty of us were enrolled with Dr. Oh. We were well spread out, a half dozen or so at the very back of the room, the rest scattered here and there, presenting a difficult target, some of us seeking camouflage in the depth of our suntans, which matched the burnt sienna of the desks. The walls were glass, as was the low ceiling; the floor was something that made me think of crushed beetles, a whole civilization of black beetles smashed, baked and tiled in the Kitchens of Sara Lee. It was a perfect place for Zen.
Sunlight and viscid insect juice were the colors of those Monday
afternoons. Zen had little in common with dead Englishmen and no one dared to drowse. It was total sleep or total awareness. All chose sleep, yet it seemed to elude us; it seemed always seconds away, a magical sleep filled with the soft tempera of spring, with new green trees standing alert to the wind, with the odors of earth pulsing and the riddle of a petaled woman crossing a footbridge. It was the perfect sleep but it never quite descended. It filled the hall above us and waited at the frontier of every mind. We desired this sleep because we were twenty years old and already beginning to learn there was no such thing as invincibility. We wished to take what was left of our courage and hope, and retire it to a dream. Beauty was too difficult and truth in the West had died with Chief Crazy Horse; a lifetime of small defeats was waiting. We knew this, and we knew that sleep was the only industry in life that did not diminish one’s possibilities. But the perfect sleep never came. The sun held at the window and we listened, on those long afternoons, to Hiroshi Oh speaking of the need to cleanse our mouths of the word Buddha; speaking of drawing water and gathering fuel, how marvelous, how miraculous; speaking of the stillness in movement, the need for becoming a bamboo; humming tirelessly of these delicate things, his voice a tiny motor propelling a butterfly, while we all turned toward the sun at the window and dreamed of the sleep that would shine like awakening. Oh sieged us with tons of sparrow feathers; it was indeed marvelous and miraculous, smelling so of the unattainable and the old that in some dark part of our souls we instinctively revolted. It was in Oh’s class that a student named Humbro ate his copy of D. T. Suzuki’s introduction to Zen. Humbro sat three seats away from me but there was nobody between us. One day I saw him tear a page out of the book and eat it. He seemed to enjoy it. At every class he’d eat a few more pages. By the beginning of May he had eaten the whole book. Humbro was revered as an existential hero. In the course of eating the book he made no attempt to conceal his actions from Dr. Oh but the professor didn’t seem to mind; at least he never mentioned it and we all thought he secretly approved. One must become a book before one can know what is inside it.
We came into the last Monday of May, the last week of that last year, with cries of career opportunity sounding through campus, flutter and caw of mortality, General Dynamics and IBM, rumors loose in the land, huge shingled wings beating above the dorms, true love and baseball, vernal equinox, the moon and the scoop of tides, a horn-rimmed diplomat from Boeing pointing to the sky. Only four of us showed up for Zen, four out of thirty. Dr. Oh treated us to a smile even more desolate than usual and led us outside to a remote grove where he would conduct class, medieval fashion, in the dubious shade of a palm tree. He sat at the base of the tree and we drew around him, sitting cross-legged in a final bid for his approval. Oh spoke of Emptiness. The mind is an empty box within an empty box. With his index finger he made a sign in the air, one motion, name-shape, the circle’s single fulfilling line. I lay flat on my back and watched the sky move through the blue openings of the tree. Then I closed my eyes and thought of sleep. Emptiness is Fullness. Become the book. Become the bamboo. The darkness ran shallow green. Then it was black, welcoming as deep space, and I sighed audibly and advanced into a fresh galaxy. What did I understand of all this? Episcopalian with chapped lips. Oh hummed and chanted. Note the paradox. Empty box within empty box. He went into more paradox, more gentle conflict, more questions of interpretation in which ancient masters nodded their disagreement. It was Oh’s practice to reveal some deep Zen principle, carefully planting evidence of its undeniable truth, and then to confront us with a totally different theory of equally undeniable truth. He seemed to enjoy trying to break our minds, crush us with centuries of confusion, as if to say: If the great teachers and enlightened ones of history cannot find a common interpretation, how will you ever know what to believe, you poor white gullible bastards? In the speckled dark, flat on my back, I listened to the water of his voice and tried to hear the silences he so expertly inserted between words. Remove your eyelids. Empty your minds. See the stone as other stones see it. Here, outside, on the warm female grass, the promise of an immortal sleep was never more strong. I felt myself leaving the universe. But the doctor’s words, sounding centuries away, brought me back every time. I tried again and again and each time returned. Then I opened my eyes and sat up and they were all on their backs, my fellow students, eyes closed and bellies softly throbbing, trying to leave this plane of existence. Oh looked at me and motioned me down again, a whisper of his eyes, down, my child, this is your last chance, tomorrow the corporations come calling, never again will you come close to this moment, the chance to capture the sleep of awakening. I lay back and closed my eyes again. I wondered if any of the others had found it. Humbro was here, the eater of Zen, five feet away. Wild was not here. Wild was in the sun lounge, grinning, no doubt, tracing the history of third stream jazz for some little girl from a cold climate. The darkness spread wide open and I knew there was room for me way inside but I could not escape. Remember the Arizona. I opened my eyes and saw Dr. Oh get to his feet and then I heard him say: “Rise, little children.”
And we rose. We gathered in the sun lounge and took a poll. No one had slept, not one of us. Wild told us to get ready. The corporations were indeed coming, with charts and natural shoulders. He stood and gave us a simple nondenominational blessing, not knowing the formal procedure for last rites.
* * *
“We spring from a humane tradition,” my mother said. “One of my forebears interceded with President Lincoln himself on behalf of the poor misguided Indians of Minnesota.”
“Ann, what’s that got to do with the college we send him to?”
“The University of Virginia was good enough for my forebears.”
“He wants to go to this place out West. Let him go where he wants.”
“I’ve made up my mind,” I said. “That’s definitely where I want to go.”
“Your father and I have been arguing over Princeton and Virginia for three years now. Suddenly you come waltzing into the house and announce that you plan to attend some unheard-of school in California. Mary is behind this, isn’t she? She’s told you to make tracks away from this house. Well, goddamn it, I won’t allow you to be running loose three thousand miles from home.”
“Ann, relax. We’ll talk about it tomorrow.”
“Shut up. All of you shut up. That little slut is behind this. That ugly little bitch. Whose is she? She’s not mine. She doesn’t resemble me. She doesn’t think like me. He’s mine. That boy. He is mine. To whom does Mary belong, Clinton? If not to me, then to whom? By simple process of elimination, we arrive at you, do we not? I was a brilliant little grammarian as a girl. I can tell you that. God. Dear God. Do whatever you like, David. In the end, who cares? Who cares what happens to anyone?”
* * *
Summer in a small town can be deadly, even worse in a way than slum summers or the deep wet summers of gulf ports. It isn’t the deadliness of filth or despair and it doesn’t afflict everyone. But there are days when a terrible message seems to be passing from sunlight to shadow at the edge of a striped afternoon in the returning fathoms of time. Summer unfolds slowly, a carpeted silence rolling out across expanding steel, and the days begin to rhyme, distance swelling with the bridges, heat bending the air, small breaks in the pavement, those days when nothing seems to live on the earth but butterflies, the tranquilized mantis, the spider scaling the length of the mudcaked broken rake inside the dark garage. A scream seems imminent at every window. The menace of the history of quiet lives is that when the moment comes, the slow opened motion of the mouth, the sound which erupts will shatter everything that moves for miles around. The threat is at its worst in summer, in the wide rows of sunlight, as old people cross the lawns, humming like insects, as they sit in the painted gray stillness of spare rooms, breezing themselves with magazines about Siam and bare-breasted Zanzibar, as they stand on porches trying to gather in the shade, as they eat ice cream in the drugstore, two spinsters revolving on t
heir stools beneath the halted fans, and all will come apart when the moment arrives. It is not felt every day and only some people can feel it. It may not be as violent as slums, tar melting on rooftops and boys wailing their hate at white helmets, but in the very silence and craft of its rhyming days summer in a small town can invert one’s emotions with the speed of insanity.
One feels it most of all on Sundays. The neat white churches stand in groves of sunlight. Grandfather cops, absurd gunbelts over their paunches, direct whatever traffic is coming out of the church parking lots after services. The worshippers come down the steps blinking and damp, moving slowly and with the extreme caution which a new and vaster environment always exacts, heading across lawns or toward the parking lots where their cars seem to be swimming in the bluesteel incandescence of the gravel. Metal hot to the touch and hell-stench inside. On Sundays, in the wide rows of light, it’s as though all the torpor of Christianity itself is spread over the land. In the blaze of those moments, men in tight collars and the neat white shoes of little girls on the steps of churches, one feels all the silence of Luther, of Baptist picnics, divinity students playing softball, popes on their chamber pots, scary Methodists driving jalopies over cliffs; of teen-age Jehovah girls handing out leaflets, of Greek archbishops, revivalists fondling snakes in the Great Smokies, Calvinists blowing bagpipes, Gideon bibles turning yellow all over Missouri. All these, in a river of silence, remember to rest on the seventh day.
My mother, Jane and I walked home from church. People nodded to each other, faces tight in the glare, and went toward their separate streets. A few cars moved past, lakebound, filled with rubber floats and children in swimsuits. We turned into our street and I began to run. I ran upstairs and changed into old clothes. Then my father came in with a white bag full of buns. This happened every Sunday. I opened the bag and took out the buns and small bits of sugar frosting stuck to my fingers. Soon coffee was ready. Jane didn’t want bacon and eggs because it was already too hot to eat a real breakfast. My mother would not have air conditioning in the house. We all sat down and ate the buns. We ate in silence. Then my mother said something about breakfast being the most important meal of the day. In Virginia they used to have hot cereal, strawberries, eggs, ham, and real farm bread. They used to put butter and marmalade on the bread. Everyone drank fresh milk instead of coffee. After this we were all silent again. It was ten o’clock in the morning.