Americana

by Don DeLillo

  “I hope you got what you want,” he said.

  “It should be okay. This camera was designed for sports, nature, news, that kind of thing. I may need you one more time.”

  “Can I ask a question?”

  “That’s all for today, gentlemen.”

  He laughed at that and then reached out a hand to help me to my feet.

  * * *

  Pike slept in the back of the camper. Brand and I were up front, waiting for Sullivan in the parking lot of a supermarket. I saw a group of women standing by a station wagon. There were seven of them, pushing cartons and shopping bags over the open tailgate into the rear of the car. Celery stalks and boxes of Gleem stuck out of the bags. I took the camera from my lap, raised it to my eye, leaned out the window a bit, and trained it on the ladies as if I were shooting. One of them saw me and immediately nudged her companion but without taking her eyes off the camera. They waved. One by one the others reacted. They all smiled and waved. They seemed supremely happy. Maybe they sensed that they were waving at themselves, waving in the hope that someday if evidence is demanded of their passage through time, demanded by their own doubts, a moment might be recalled when they stood in a dazzling plaza in the sun and were registered on the transparent plastic ribbon; and thirty years away, on that day when proof is needed, it could be hoped that their film is being projected on a screen somewhere, and there they stand, verified, in chemical reincarnation, waving at their own old age, smiling their reassurance to the decades, a race of eternal pilgrims in a marketplace in the dusty sunlight, seven arms extended in a fabulous salute to the forgetfulness of being. What better proof (if proof is ever needed) that they have truly been alive? Their happiness, I think, was made of this, the anticipation of incontestable evidence, and had nothing to do with the present moment, which would pass with all the others into whatever is the opposite of eternity. I pretended to keep shooting, gathering their wasted light, letting their smiles enter the lens and wander the camera-body seeking the magic spool, the gelatin which captures the image, the film which threads through the waiting gate. Sullivan came out of the supermarket and I lowered the camera. I could not help feeling that what I was discovering here was power of a sort.

  * * *

  In the evening we sat in the camper on Howley Road and listened to the radio. A war summary came on. I did not listen to the news, merely to the words themselves, the familiar oppressive phrases. It was like the gray talk of the network—not what something meant and often not its opposite.

  “Who wants to be in my novel?” Brand said. “It’ll cost you fifty dollars and I’m in a position to guarantee immortality.”

  “I want to be made a brain surgeon,” Pike said.

  “Eighty dollars even.”

  “A lover,” I said. “Make me a great lover.”

  “A hundred and fifty dollars gets you into bed with the female character of your choice.”

  “Are you in the book?” I said to Sullivan.

  “You’re all in it,” Brand said. “Everybody’s in it.”

  “Put me down for the one-fifty then.”

  “You’ll be wanting change,” Sullivan said.

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Because I had an affair in someone else’s novel many years ago. My partner found it less than satisfactory. He was a naval officer with heaps of experience. Of course I was just a girl then.”

  “Make me a brain surgeon with unsteady hands,” Pike said. “You can build suspense around a theme like that.”

  “Suspense is no longer relevant,” I said.

  “Bullthrow,” Pike shouted. “That’s bullthrow.”

  “Easy,” Sullivan said.

  “Pike’s pique reaches mountainous proportions,” I said, very pleased with myself.

  “Bullthrow.”

  The words issued smoothly from an intelligent face (no doubt), running on past some reverse point of tolerance, and soon they seemed to generate an existence of their own, to demand an independence, to live in a silhouette of meaning more subtle, more cunning than the intelligence which bred them might ever know. We listened quietly for a while. The announcer said he had accidentally read the previous day’s dispatch.

  “I have fantasies about falling in love with a Vietnamese girl,” Brand said. “But then she dies of a funny disease and I spend the rest of my life in pain.”

  The northern monsoon clouds were lifting. The killer teams were sweeping the villages. At night you could see the tracers streaking across the free-fire zones. There are twenty rounds to a magazine.

  “America can be saved only by what it’s trying to destroy,” Sullivan said.

  * * *

  I spent much of the next two days in the library, doing research, thinking, worrying, writing monologues and dialogues. I walked over to the camper late in the afternoon of the second day and found Pike alone. I reported my plans to visit Chicago. Then I talked him into driving me up and down one of the quiet old streets in town while I shot some footage out the front window. I instructed him to drive at a walking speed or even less. I didn’t have clamps with which to fasten the camera to the door frame and I wanted as little movement as possible. Also I liked the idea of drawing out the rows of houses, extending them in time, understanding them as more important in their appearances than in the voices and sorrows they contained. It was an interview in the new language. And with no people in sight I was able to shoot at higher than normal speeds, reducing vibration and prolonging the scene even more. By inches we moved along the street, each silent and lovely home a slow memorial to some shrill inner moment unquieted by time.

  * * *

  There is a motel in the heart of every man. Where the highway begins to dominate the landscape, beyond the limits of a large and reduplicating city, near a major point of arrival and departure: this is most likely where it stands. Postcards of itself at the desk. One hundred hermetic rooms. The four seasons of the year in aerosol cans inside the medicine chest. Repeated endlessly on the way to your room, you can easily forget who you are here; you can sit on your bed and become man sitting on bed, an abstraction to compete with infinity itself; out of such places and moments does modern chaos raise itself to the level of pure mathematics. Despite its great size, the motel seems temporary. This feeling may rise simply from the knowledge that no one lives here for more than one or two days at a time. Then, too, it may be explained by the motel’s location, that windy hint of mystery encircling a lone building fixed in what was once a swamp; a cold gale blows from the lake or bay, sunlight cracks on the wingtips of distant planes, ducks tack upwind, and nowhere is there a sign of a human on foot. The motel seems to have been built solely of bathroom tile. The bedsheets are chilly and faintly damp. There are too many hangers in the closet, as if management were trying to compensate for a secret insufficiency too grievous to be imagined. From small gratings in the wall comes a steady and almost unendurable whisper of ventilation. But for all its spiritual impoverishments, this isn’t the worst of places. It embodies a repetition so insistent and irresistible that, if not freedom, then liberation is possible, deliverance; possessed by chaos, you move into thinner realms, achieve refinements, mathematical integrity, and become, if you choose, the man on the bed in the next room. The forest lodge, the suite of mauve rooms, the fleabag above the hockshop, the borrowed apartment—all too personal, the unrecurring moment. Men hold this motel firmly in their hearts; here flows the dream of the confluence of travel and sex.

  Edwina Meers was staying at such a motel near O’Hare Airport, roughly seventeen miles from the center of Chicago. Meredith had given me the name of the place and I had called Edwina and Charles and told them to expect me. Then I had borrowed Glenn Yost’s car, a gray spastic Pontiac, and headed north in the night. It was good to be on the road again, daring the logic of the white line. Many trailer trucks went by, bearing the license plates of a dozen states, and the car rocked in their wind. I was part of the commerce, the romance of long-haul freight,
the epic striding song of the Triple A travel guides.

  It was nine in the morning and Edwina came to the door in a flowered zip-front skirt and tight undershirt top.

  “You lucky man, I’m all alone. Do come in. Charles has already dashed off to a meeting. Our luggage is strewn about everywhere so you’ll just have to sit on the bed. Do you mind if I leave the telly on? The broadcasts in this country are not to be believed.”

  “Why aren’t you staying in town?”

  “Charles balked at the notion. The dear man has an absolute obsession for punctuality and so he decided we had best park our hot little bodies as close to the airport as possible, since our shed-ule seems to be predicated on a split-second readiness that might do justice to a miss-isle system. Positively dreads being late for takeoffs. It’s all very sexual, I suppose.”

  “We can drive in for lunch if you like. I’ve been to Chicago on business trips and I think I can find my way around fairly well.”

  “That’s awfully nice of you, David. Really I’m so glad you could come. Meredith has told me so much about you. She’s such a super girl, don’t you think? So sort of fresh and homogenized.”

  Edwina had a round plain face, freckled slightly, like a pancake. She was probably in her mid-thirties and seemed delighted about the whole thing; the tensions of an unpretty youth now safely behind her, perhaps she was finding over-thirty to be her personal prime, the golden age of her passion and wit. There was a commercial on the television set. A woman in a bathtub was washing her legs with a bar of beauty soap. One knee out of the water, she slowly guided the soap along her calf, then up over her knee and down her thigh as the picture drifted into a slow dissolve. Now she was standing on the tile floor, a long soft-focus shot, head back, hands moving slowly over the towel across her belly and thighs. Edwina leaned against a chest of drawers.

  “I’m confused,” I said. “Somehow or other I had the impression you were American.”

  “I am, David.”

  “How long have you been living in England?”

  “Funnily enough it’s almost ten years to the day. Charles and I were married in Philadelphia and then off we went. I had a South American lover before I married Charles and all he wanted to do was produce babies. He was so sort of primitive and awful. Charles had a homosexual affair before he met me. His lover was best man at our wedding.”

  “Have you been to Chicago before?”

  “No, and neither has Charles. We landed yesterday afternoon and rented a car. Then we settled in here and drove into town. We had been invited to a sort of fat businessmen’s party given by a chap called either Lawrence Thomas or Thomas Lawrence. He’s the man Charles is seeing on business. It was awfully sweet of him actually, going to all that trouble for the sole purpose of getting Charles acquainted with some of the local moneybags. But I must say it was far from being the most witty dinner party I’ve ever attended. The men talked about steel alloys and dyestuffs and the wives were even more boring if that’s possible. Do you know there’s a company called American Metal Climax Inc.? God, the man who thought that one up. Anyway, David, they served coq au vin for dinner and it was ten parts vin to one part coq. Then they kept handing me tall fruity rum drinks called Dormant Volcanoes. Needless to say, I soon got pissed as a newt. Then this Thomas or Lawrence chap took our pale little bodies to another party in a smashing eleven-room flat belonging to a man who apparently owns Venezuela. You wouldn’t believe what was hanging on the walls. Braque, Chagall, Mondrian, Renoir—I can’t begin to list them. I’ve no doubt the poor man was duped into buying absolute fakes but I must confess it was a gorgeous sight, all those walls reeking of money. This man, who’s apparently called Arno Tumbler, was off on his private island in the Caribbean where he’s learning to be a French impressionist. The party itself was vile. First this Lawrence Thomas man practically raped me while we were dancing. Then a whole bunch of sort of speckled mad people arrived, all with painted faces and wearing the most bloody awful things really. A bunch of palsied twits if you ask me. One of them exposed his privates to me. All I did was remark to Charles that I didn’t think a team of the Queen’s own surgeons would be able to determine the sex of some of these creatures and the next thing I saw was this horrible little man looking me straight in the eye and smiling, with his george dangling amidships. Really, David, am I expected to find this sort of thing amusing? There were masses of these people jumping about in their robes and feathers. One felt oneself to be the center of attraction by mere dint of one’s being so extraordinarily commonplace.”

  I had to keep reminding myself that she was American. Like a convert to a new religion, she was more dedicated than those who have been singing the psalms for two thousand years. I wondered what her English husband thought of this rainy patter.

  “You’re leaving when?”

  “Tomorrow afternoon,” she said. “We fly to Omaha, Denver, Little Rock and Atlanta. God, how dreary. Just before we left London, masses of postcards began arriving from virtually everyone we know, all on their hols in the most super places. Gwyllam is in Sardinia photographing bandits and smugglers. Dilys is apparently on the verge of being forcibly ejected from Portugal for sheer blatant hedonism. And dear old Harry and Nigel are in Madagascar again, writing their joint memoirs and buggering each other to death. Not that I’m complaining about the likes of Little Rock, mind you. It’s great fun to be back in one’s native land. But, really, David, the spectacular filth. I mean one reads about the Middle West and one expects to see all sorts of Shakers and Mennonites dashing about the countryside with brooms and paintbrushes. The weather is killing though, don’t you think? I should like it to be like this in London. And I understand the steaks out here are absolutely top hole.”

  Several minutes later we were in bed. An open suitcase slid to the floor. She kept talking about her husband. I hit her and she was quiet. Naked she was even more plain, and the hunger I had expected from her did not show itself. Into her neutrality and silence I directed something like desperation. It was the old fascism. War, sadism, self-abasement, it was all that. She took it—but not to keep and not for herself. I thought she would want to feast on my body. I had been inserted into the televised dream of motel, the pleasure of being other and none. I had been hung in that dream, a thing out of modern fiction, beautiful boy plundered by the crumbling duchess. I had expected to enjoy it greatly, her greed and tongue and the dredgings of her fantasy. But she had climbed into bed like an old shoemaker and I found myself overburdened with parts—hers, mine, the dream’s—and she did not seem to distinguish between what was authentic and what was ugly and brutal. It may have been that the final partition had fallen.

  “Goodness, I wonder what Meredith would think of us. Do you suppose we’ve committed some medieval form of incest? Three times removed or something? It’s all so wonderfully sordid, don’t you think? But you must think I’m easy meat, darling. And you detest the way I speak. That’s all right, David, you’re not the first. I’ve had a long series of lovers, all of whom despised the earth I walk on and all of whom begged me to take them back when inevitably I sent them away out of sheer boredom. You see, my men think I bore them when in point of fact just the reverse is true. It never dawns on them, poor lambs, until their banishment is a fait accompli. They need me, you see. They need an empty room in which to unwrap their secret goodies. Do you believe in an afterlife?”

  “For whom?” I said.

  “For whom indeed. Quite a good answer. Perhaps the saintly people and the tedious people are all sort of jumbled up and sent indiscriminately to heaven or hell while the rest of us go absolutely nowhere. I shouldn’t mind that actually. Sublime nothingness. I’m studying the Hindus. Cycles and cycles of existence. Vicky Glinn and I are taking lessons from a swami who lives in abject poverty in a tiny flat in Battersea. This man is very impressive, the genuine article I should think, but he communicates the most awful smell. Right now I think I’d like nothing better than two hours of precious sleep. I su
ggest you leave, David. This way I’ll get my rest and you’ll be free to analyze the entire episode. You’re the type, aren’t you? You see, I’m not a totally stupid woman. I have my moments of insight. Pick up that suitcase, will you please? And, David, when you get around to your session of deep analysis, do try to be kind to both of us.”

  In the car I could taste her on the back of my hand. I stopped for gas and called Ken Wild at his office. Then I drove into town and found a camera supply store. I bought some Kodak Tri-X reversal film, a wind filter and a light metal tripod with a pan-and-tilt head. An hour later Wild walked into a restaurant about three blocks from the Drake Hotel. He had gained some weight and his forehead had risen about half an inch. We stood at the bar and ordered drinks.