Americana

by Don DeLillo

  Mr. Hutchins described himself, in no particular context, as a stickler for accuracy. He and the ladies said goodnight then, time to catch Bob Hope on TV, and we watched them walk past a huge skeletal flywheel and out into the street. Bud and I tried to top each other and intimidate the two older men with all sorts of insane technical data. Owney Pine finally put one of his fat white arms around the boy’s head, muffling him in jest and holding him that way for a minute or so, a quality of mutual affection informing the little scene as the man quietly jostled and bumped, barely aware of the struggling boy, who, at an overgrown fifteen or sixteen, could not have been easy to hold.

  “Plan to be here awhile?” Glenn said.

  “A few days maybe. My camera seems interested in this place.”

  “Are you one of those people from the mass media?” Owney said, still keeping Bud from wriggling out.

  “I’m an independent filmmaker. I’m scouting locales at the moment. How’d you like to be in the movies?”

  “Sheee.”

  “You think about it,” I said.

  Bud cut in then with another question and Owney released him. We talked a bit longer. The young man eased down off the bandstand and headed toward us. He carried the guitar over his shoulder and dragged a knapsack along the ground behind him. He seemed a skinny broken kid in decomposing clothes, enormously happy about something. The others backed off slightly at his approach—an ethnologic retreat really, one that I sensed rather than actually witnessed.

  “Hey, what’s that? That an 8 or 16?”

  “It’s a Scoopic 16. It’s basically a news camera.”

  “I’m walking to California,” he said.

  He stood there, smiling, in ankle-high basketball sneakers. Glenn Yost said he and Bud had better be getting on home to have a look at the bloodworms. He said the boy dug up worms and sold them for bait. They were kept in large jars in the basement. He and Bud liked to look in on the worms every evening about sundown because that was the time the worms did most of their writhing and both father and son got a special kick out of seeing worms writhe, especially in masses. Glenn’s left eye stuttered again. I couldn’t be sure whether or not this was some local brand of double-reverse sophisticated humor. The boy’s face was noncommittal and I thought they might be playing games with me, satirizing the outsider’s conviction that smalltown life is a surrender to just such tiny deaths, worm-watching and Masonic handshakes. (Or were they trying to negate the serpent power of the longhair, distract him with worms while the townspeople put their torches to his guitar?) Owney Pine said he would tag along with them. The park lights came on.

  “I started walking about three months ago,” the young man said. “I started out from Washington, D.C., so it’ll be almost a coast-to-coast walk. I’ve been trying to do it in a straight line, D.C. to Frisco, but I’ve strayed a little south. There’s plenty of time to adjust, I guess.”

  “About two thousand miles. I’m Dave Bell. What’s your name?”

  “Richard Spector. Sometimes I have trouble remembering it. It seems so long ago that it meant anything.”

  He sat next to me, feet up on the bench and knees high as he huddled against his own legs. He was very frail and his hair covered much of his face. He looked directly at me when he spoke but with no implication of challenge in his eyes, no sense of ideologies about to clash, and I felt he had whittled these things out of his way, settling down to a position defined only by the length of each footsore day.

  “People have been taking good care of me,” he said. “They feed me and sometimes give me places to sleep. At first I get a lot of strange what-is-it looks. But when I tell them I’m walking to California, they get all caught up in the craziness of the thing. People are real great if you can get them off details and onto something crazy. They’ve really been taking tremendous care of me. I brought along all the savings I had, about seven hundred dollars in cash and traveler’s checks, and in three months I’ve had to spend only about a hundred and fifty dollars for food and for sleeping in hotels whenever it was too cold at night for outdoor-type sleeping and I couldn’t find anywhere else to stay.”

  “I don’t want to sound discouraging, Richard, but you look awfully tired and run-down.”

  “You should have seen me before I left.”

  We both laughed and then he asked if he could handle the camera. I removed the lens hood for him and he took the camera and stood up, putting his eye to the rubber eyecup and then slowly covering the park in a virtuoso 360-degree pan. I heard a car come to an abrupt stop and I turned and saw first a young woman’s face at the window on the passenger side, and then the head and shoulders of a man about my age rising over the car’s roof from the other side as he looked in our direction. Apparently satisfied that he had been right in stopping, he returned to the driver’s seat, threw the car into reverse and quickly parked, tires marking the pavement. He got out, again looking our way, closing the door with a certain disdainful élan, and then came through the park entrance, looking now, it was clear, not at Richard or at me—a considerable relief—but at the camera in Richard’s hands. The girl followed, quite slowly, a lissome blonde of twenty-five or so, in her quiet prime, pretty and tarrying and yet to be hurt, not at all in love. Richard extended the camera to me. The man’s eyes followed it right into my hands.

  “Does that thing put out a sync pulse?”

  “That’s right,” I said.

  “Sound,” he said.

  “That’s right.”

  “I’m Austin Wakely. The lady is Carol Deming. I saw that thing from the car and I said let me get a closer look. What kind of action are you into?”

  “Under the underground,” I said.

  “But with sound.”

  “Some sound. Here and there.”

  “I’m an actor,” he said.

  “He’s studying to be an actor,” Carol said.

  I introduced myself, told them where I was from and asked them to join me on the bench. I realized Richard Spector was gone. Then I saw him sitting once more on the edge of the bandstand.

  “I’m studying with Drotty,” Austin said.

  “Who’s he?”

  “He’s originally from Minneapolis. He worked with Guthrie there. But he’s a very freeform individual and it became more and more untenable for him to try and function in a structured environment. That’s why he came over to McCompex. That’s the new institute five miles east of here. You haven’t heard of it back East yet but you will. The full name is the McDowd Communication Arts Complex. The regular session ends next month. I’m staying on for the summer session. Before I came out to McCompex I worked at a variety of odd jobs around the country. I’m originally from Washington, state of.”

  Carol was sitting between us.

  “It’s a question of who I am and what I want to be,” Austin said. “I have to relate to something. Drotty is nonsocietal. I’ve learned a lot from him. He’s a homosexual of course. They all are. He has his tensions and anxieties and he smokes a great deal. They all do. But Drotty has taught me something and it’s this. Societal pressure is fierce but you’ve always got the option to repattern. Acting is love. What was it Nazimova said?”

  I moved my leg slightly, the slimmest fraction of an inch, and Carol and I were touching. She sat absolutely still as Austin continued to speak. I moved again and we were touching now thigh to knee. The occasion was one of infinite subtlety. She may not have noticed the scant pressure of my leg; she may have noticed but thought nothing of it; or she may have known all along what I was doing. I edged my arm toward hers. Austin kept talking. Now our forearms were touching, the faintest inshore breeze of our bare flesh barely in contact, flesh resting on points of almost invisible silver hair. Still she was motionless, no sign either way. I waited several minutes. Then I moved my right hand across my lap and let it rest above my right knee. Carol was looking straight ahead. I was extremely nervous. The next few seconds would tell whether or not she knew and how she saw fit to respon
d to the knowledge. I did not want to be disappointed. It was important that she give me the right sign. I let my hand slide very slowly into the crease formed by our two legs. I let it rest there. We were both looking straight ahead. Then I felt a slight pressure from her thigh, a slight and pleasant heat on the tips of my fingers, the slightest suggestion of shifting weight, a muscle tensing, her body not moving and yet expressing movement, finding a new balance, shifting inside itself, shifting toward me. I returned the pressure and then moved several inches away. Austin kept talking and I began to relax. Carol and I looked straight ahead. It was my first ego-moment since New York.

  Austin told me how to get in touch with him and said he would like to hear more about my plans. I realized for the first time how handsome he was. He had dark hair and eyes. His shoulders were broad. There was a splendid intensity about him. We all got up and Austin and I shook hands. Carol stood off to the side, her arms folded under her breasts, normally a housewife’s backyard stance, trading gossip and detergent advice, but her hips were thrust forward somewhat, eyes interested and musing, and this more than redeemed the moment. I told Austin I liked his car, a green Barracuda, and in the course of the next few sentences I managed to point out that my red Mustang, now in Maine, had the same kind of high-back buckets, plus dual racing mirrors.

  As they drove away, I nodded to Richard and he slipped off the bandstand and walked back to the camper with me. We talked with the others for a while. Later, over a dinner of corned beef and sangria, Sullivan announced that Richard Spector would henceforth be known as Kyrie Eleison. I reached for the tape recorder.

  “I used to be a mailboy in the Justice Department in Washington,” he said. “I felt I was becoming transparent. I had the feeling that after I ate dinner, people could see the food in my stomach. That’s just one of the things that was happening to me. I began to fear that chunks of government buildings would dislodge and fall on top of me. But I think the worst thing of all was when I was walking on a crowded street. You know how people jockey back and forth, the fast walkers trying to overtake the slow walkers. There’s always a lot of shoving and the fast walkers are always stepping on the slow ones and knocking their shoes off. I was a fast walker. I was always hurrying even when I was just going for an aimless stroll, and I used to get annoyed when slow walkers got in my way. One day I was trying to get around an old man who kept drifting toward the curb and blocking my path and suddenly I found myself shouting at him in my own head, shouting inwardly and silently: LOOK OUT! LOOK OUT! I never actually spoke the words. I just shouted them mentally. I began to do that all the time. LOOK OUT, I would say to people. MOVE! MOVE! And I could see the words in my head in big block letters like in a cartoon. Then one day a woman slowed down suddenly and I almost crashed into her. I found myself shouting a new word in my head: DIE! If I had said it aloud she probably would have died. It was really a hideous inner scream and I could see the word in my head in red letters with a big exclamation point. I began to realize I was abnormal. I was a person who walked along the street mentally shouting DIE at innocent people. After several months of this I tried to make a conscious effort to stop shouting the word. But it was too late. It just popped into my head automatically. DIE! DIE! I’ll tell you the kind of person I was. I was the kind of person who’s always falling in love with the wives of his best friends.”

  “Have you stopped shouting DIE?” Sullivan said.

  “I stopped shouting it the day I quit my job and I haven’t shouted it since. I haven’t shouted anything since. I’ll tell you what else I was. I was the kind of person who always reads those lists of the dead and missing that newspapers print after plane crashes. I read the lists compulsively. I don’t know what I expected to find. The name of a friend? My own name? A long list of dead people’s names is the most depressing thing you can read. Some of the names are incomplete and some have no hometowns next to them. Then they list the missing. How could anybody be missing from a plane crash? Where could they go? I’ll tell you what else I used to do. I had a strange kind of embarrassment about saying people’s names, especially the names of good friends and relatives. For some reason I could never address them by their right names. It was some goofy form of embarrassment. I used to call people Max, Charlie, Guido or Steve. Those were the four names I used most often. I didn’t use one particular name for one particular person. The names and people were interchangeable. I might address somebody as Max one day and as Guido the next. It could even change from sentence to sentence. Nobody seemed to mind. I guess it’s like being referred to as buddy or pal or friend. I don’t know why I picked Max, Charlie, Guido and Steve. I had no trouble with women. I always called women by their right names. Why couldn’t I call men by their right names?”

  “Has that changed too?” I said.

  “Everything’s changed,” he said. “I no longer have any anxiety about not being able to speak French. It used to worry me. My father speaks French very well. He was always inviting people to dinner and speaking French with them. It was his way of maintaining power over me. But now I don’t care about that stuff anymore. I’m no longer frightened. There’s a whole bunch of people like me who have broken out. We’re not interested in the power that older people grasp for. They try to keep us down by speaking French and knowing how to mix whisky sours and wearing suits where the buttons on the coatsleeves really unbutton. But a lot of us have broken out. We don’t care if we don’t know how to pronounce the names of French wines. What’s wrong with California wine anyway? What the heck, this is America. Bad as it is, we have to learn to live with it.”

  Kyrie slept in the hotel room that night. The rest of us settled down on our cots inside the camper. Just before I went to sleep, I imagined myself fighting with Brand. We hit each other dozens of times. Then something else moved across my mind, possessions, things in my home, shapes of objects un-fondled of late, the Olivetti Lettera 32, the Nikon F, and then girls in purple stockings rolling across a paper plain, and James Joyce and Antonioni and Samuel Beckett sitting in my living room, six legs crossed at the ankles, Tana Elkbridge naked on Riverside Drive while her husband read Business Week at thirty thousand feet, and Jennifer naked in the West Eighties, something touching about her hipbones, and Meredith naked in Gramercy Park, and Sullivan naked in the bath. Then we were fighting again. I backed away from a long right and came back with a left to the cheekbone and a short straight right square on the point of the chin. Brand went to his knees and hung there, breathing blood. I kicked him in the stomach and went to sleep.

  We had breakfast in a diner the next morning. Men in short-sleeve shirts came and went. I formed my hand into a claw. Brand sat at the table laughing. Then Sullivan began to laugh. People at the counter turned to look at them. Brand was slumped over the table, arms folded, and his head rocked as he laughed. Sullivan sat rigidly, facing Brand, laughing out over his head. I formed both hands into claws and bobbed up and down in the chair. Lips parted slightly, curling down at the corners, I bared my lower set of teeth and dug them into my upper lip. I knew they were not laughing at me and yet I continued to make ghoulish faces and claw at the air. I did not like to be left out. I did not know why they were laughing and so I pretended they were laughing at me. Pike began to laugh. I turned toward the people at the counter and clawed at their backs. Kyrie was laughing now. The waitress came with our food and Brand looked up at her and nearly fell off the chair howling. My claws became hands again. Kyrie pointed at his scrambled eggs and this set them off on a fresh wave of laughter. The waitress smiled as she stood by the table writing out the check. Brand pointed at her pencil. She looked at it and began to laugh. Everything was funny. It was a clear day in spring and suddenly everything was funny. I went to the bathroom and looked at myself in the mirror.

  They laughed all through breakfast. Somebody would point to something and they’d all laugh. The ketchup bottle was hilarious. Brand continually took off his glasses and wiped them with a napkin. His was the universal face o
f alumni bulletins. Assistant plant manager of the general foam division, Tenneco Chemicals, East Rutherford, N.J. Training and education officer, Air University’s Warfare Systems School, Maxwell AFB, Ala. Brand the junior partner. The young Republican. He was about an inch taller than I was. He weighed 210 or so. His eyes were panes of muddy glass, gray and very distant. Now he stood and blessed the restaurant, his face deadpan again, his right hand making crosses over the heads of the assembled men and women. I finished breakfast and left a twenty-dollar bill on the table. Pike followed me out. We stood on the sidewalk in front of the hotel. It was called Ames House, I noticed.

  “See if you can answer this,” Pike said. “Think about it as long as you want before answering. Here it is. Open up the stomach of a killer whale and roughly how many seals and porpoises are you likely to find?”

  “You’d better let me think about it.”

  “Two dozen,” he said.

  Checkout time was noon. I went up to the room, called downstairs and asked the voice to get the office in New York. When the switchboard girl at the network came on, I asked to speak with David Bell. It was an odd feeling. Binky answered.

  “Miss me?” I said.

  “Who’s this?”

  “The person you admire most in the whole world.”

  “Stop fooling around.”

  “Dave Bell’s my name; cinematography’s my game.”

  “David, how are you?”

  “Miss me?”

  “Yes, it’s so boring around here.”

  “It’s boring out here too.”

  “Where are you?” she said.

  “Fifty-third and Lex.”

  “Guess what? There’s a rumor going around that Grove Palmer is a fag. Jody told me Sid Slote ran into him accidentally in Bermuda and he was hanging around with some very swishy types.”

  “It figures. I always wondered about that guy.”

  “Guess what else?”