Americana

by Don DeLillo

  “You know, they have things called diffusion filters that you can use to soften the actor’s face in tight shots.”

  “Austin, let’s dispense with terminology and see if we can weave a spell over this April evening. There won’t be any tight shots. I want you standing against that bare stretch of wall. Is Carol married, by the way?”

  “News to me if she is.”

  “Interesting girl,” I said.

  “Drotty thinks she’s too intense. He wants her to exteriorize.”

  “Okay, we’re ready. Try to avoid theatrical pauses. And keep inflection to a minimum.”

  I sighted on Austin against the wall and then started shooting, my voice a cheerful machine designed for the interrogation of the confused and the dislocated.

  “Marital status.”

  “Divorced.”

  “Children.”

  “None.”

  “Appendix.”

  “Excised.”

  “What do you think of the war?” I said.

  “I’ve seen it on television. It’s sponsored by instant coffee among other things. The commercials are very tasteful in keeping with the serious theme of the program’s content. Some of the commercials are racially integrated. Since I worked for seven years as an employee of the network responsible for the warcasts, I am in a position to point out that the network and the agency joined forces in order to convince the sponsor that integrated commercials were desirable. Their argument was that the war itself is integrated. Balanced programming has always been one of the network’s chief aims.”

  “Draft status.”

  “I took my physical right after college. Trick knee. Terminal dandruff. They were more discriminating in those days.”

  “How long were you married?”

  “About three years.”

  “Can you tell the camera why you didn’t have children?”

  “We wanted to have fun first. We decided that children could wait until after the fun was over, after Europe, after we became established.”

  “Did you go to Europe?”

  “Not until we were divorced. We met in Florence and drank orangeade. I was staying in a fourteenth-century palazzo. In the dining room one evening I began a conversation with a very unattractive girl who turned out to be both German and lame. We spent part of the night in her—not my—room and in the morning I met my ex-wife on the Ponte Vecchio and we walked through the city for hours. By early evening she had developed a slight limp and I discovered I did not want to be with her anymore.”

  “What caused the divorce?”

  “My image began to blur. This became a problem for both of us. However, we have continued to be very fond of each other. Divorce is a wonderful invention, much better than protracted separation or murder. It destroys tension. It liberates many wholesome emotions which had been tyrannized by the various mental cruelties. Divorce is the most educating route to a deep understanding between two people. It’s the second and most important step in arriving at a truly radiant form of self-donative love. Marriage, of course, is the first step.”

  “Parents.”

  “Mother deceased.”

  “Father.”

  “He’s buried alive but still breathing. I don’t really look forward to his death. But I admit it would bring relief.”

  “Why?” I said.

  “I remember the sound of his bare feet on the stairs. He never wore slippers, my father. People were always giving him slippers for Christmas. But there is a certain kind of American masculinity which precludes the wearing of articles of clothing which might possibly dull the effect of the brutal truth of one’s immediate environment.”

  “The camera dislikes evasiveness. As Mr. Hitchcock says, one must not use flashback to deceive. What are you proud of, if anything?”

  “I’ve made many short movies of one kind or another. Weekend films. Orgy-porgies. Nonplot things with friends. More than a hobby but not much more. Until this point, of course. And I used to be proud of one of the things I did. It was done in Central Park during a ceremony following one of the assassinations. There was an old Negro couple standing at the back of the crowd. The man was tall and lean with a face like a rock pointing out to sea. He wore a black suit and a white shirt with a high starched collar, rounded at the edges, and a black tie knotted about an inch below the top button of his shirt. He held a black hat in his hand. The woman was almost as tall as he was and her face in its own way was just as strong, but softer somehow, not rock but earth. The word dignity is unavoidable. And I felt for some reason that they were not husband and wife but brother and sister. Whatever they were, they looked like pillars of the black Baptist Church. They stood listening to the speeches and music, standing absolutely straight, absolutely motionless, and I raised my camera and began to shoot. From time to time I’d go into the crowd or train the camera on one of the platform speakers. But I’d always come back to the old Negro couple. I must have looked at that scrap of film fifty times. It meant a lot to me. I was proud of it. It wasn’t just a day in the park or something you see on the seven o’clock news. Those two faces seemed more enduring than the republic itself. The film began with them and ended with them. They framed a sense of confusion. At least that’s what I thought. It took me a long time to see how wrong I was. The camera implies meaning where no meaning exists. I had not celebrated that brother and sister. I had mocked them. I had exploited their sorrow. I had tried to make them part of a hopeful message on the state of the Union. To be black is to be the actor. To be white is to be the critic.”

  “Is there anything else you’d like to tell the camera?”

  “Simply hello. Hello to myself in the remote future, watching this in fear and darkness. Hello to that America, whatever it may be doing or undoing. I hope you’ve finally become part of your time, David. You were always a bit behind, held back by obsolete sensibilities.”

  “Do you have any particular ambition in life?”

  “To get out of it alive.”

  “Thank you,” I said.

  I shut down all systems, tape and film, and we talked for a while on subjects of no interest to either of us. Then Austin left and I took a blank piece of paper, crumpled it into a tight sphere and began tossing jump shots at the wastebasket. I pretended to be Oscar Robertson against Jerry West. An hour later I banked in a long left-hand hook and went to bed. It was the eighth anniversary of my mother’s death.

  I bought a hat, the first I had owned since childhood, a gray plaid bop cap which I wore with a magical child’s belief in the infinities of common things. During the drive from New York to Maine I had worn at times a khaki fatigue cap, borrowed from Pike, but he had taken it back and buried it in his sea bag; no war games allowed with his private battle gear. On the hotel bed I rested, cap over my eyes. A full morning brushed through the shuddering blinds. Fellini, master of hats and noses, understands the philosophical nature of costume. My twenty-eight years in the movies. Making of a life so easily made that a hat on the head could become the man. The hat wore me. Arrivato Zampanó: the trailer and the road, her flawed boy’s body announcing the strongman, and he in chains, bellowing. My teeth clicking in the dark at the Bleecker Street Cinema as they dance across the sky, a necklace of chessmen, hands locked in the northern dawn. Eyes closed, I inhaled some industrial gloom from the hat’s soft lining, L. S. Stratford Ltd., bit of Finney falling down the stairs. I looked between the cracks inside the dark. Burt Lancaster toweling his chest: (and we live there, grubbing, in the pores). Bell looking at the poster of Belmondo looking at the poster of purposeful Bogart. Old man on the swing, Watanabe, singing to his unseen infancy. I took a walk around the bed, missing those stale chambers on the West Side, nicely epicene in their way, a touch of seedy glamour drifting in off Needle Park, pale tapering men who live for the films of the thirties. Shane rides toward the immaculate mountains.

  * * *

  I walked out to Howley Road, a cool night frozen over with stars. The light was on inside
the camper and as I approached there worked up through my stomach the boy’s delightful feeling of being a scout moving into enemy territory, moving through the darkness toward an outpost where the unsuspecting enemy sits smoking, just seconds from silent expert death.

  “Today’s my birthday,” Brand said. “We’re trying to think of ways to celebrate.”

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty.”

  “You’re two years older than I am. What’s it like to be thirty? A friend of mine told me three things happened when he reached thirty. He gained weight around the middle. He stopped reading novels. And he had a recurring year-long dream about a tapeworm in his stomach that gets so big it begins literally to outgrow him. It feeds on his vital organs, getting bigger as he gets smaller and weaker, until finally when it works its way out of his mouth, eating his gums and teeth in the process, it weighs about one hundred and eighty pounds, most of it him, and he’s down to thirty pounds of bone and translucent skin and he falls on the floor and sees the huge slimy jaws of the tapeworm fitting themselves around his head as he wakes up. Warren Beasley told me that story, the radio personality.”

  “What do you mean he stopped reading novels?” Brand said.

  “That’s what he told me. I don’t know what he meant by it.”

  “I’m taking all the slang out of my book. I’m inventing new slang.”

  “Sully, have you seen Ikiru by any chance?”

  “Wait a minute, Davy, we’re talking about novels. I plan to take out the slang and replace it with new forms, new modes. Maybe I’ll eliminate language itself. It may be possible to find a completely new mode. I’ve been thinking about this lately. I’d like your opinion.”

  “In my little home movie, the thing I’m doing, I haven’t reduced the value of language at all. I’ve reinforced it, in fact. What I’ve reduced is movement, the kind of movement that tells a story or creates a harmony. I want language to evolve from static forms. The film is a sort of sub-species of the underground. What I’m shooting now is just a small segment of what will eventually include more general matter—funerals, traffic jams, furniture, real events, women, doors, windows. Auto-fiction. Actors, people playing themselves, lines of poetry. When I’m done I’d like to put the whole thing in a freezer and then run it uncut thirty years from now.”

  “I’ll be sixty then,” Brand said.

  “I’ll be dirt,” Pike said.

  “Sully, I wonder if you’d be willing to appear in the movie. It won’t take long. We can do it tomorrow. A brief scene. I know I haven’t been spending much time around here lately but it’s only because I’ve been so busy. I’m very grateful that nobody’s complained about the number of days we’ve been spending here. So will you do it? A brief scene. Speak to me, sad-eyed lady of the lowlands.”

  “Of course, David. Anything for you.”

  Brand wanted to arm-wrestle. We locked hands and exchanged iron glares. I didn’t know whether or not he was serious. He began to exert pressure and I put my head down and concentrated, trying to keep my elbows square on the table. For several minutes we strained, giving and taking little. My forearm was tense, muscles humming, and I put everything I had into one pivotal offensive, all my strength, a vein leaping in my wrist, his arm starting to give, elbow losing traction; then he stiffened suddenly and we were stalemated again and Sullivan was standing over us holding a strange painted wood-and-wire doll.

  “It’s your birthday present,” she said. “I made it for you this afternoon. It’s a doll-god of India. A menacing bitchy hermaphroditic divinity.”

  “I think I’m afraid of it,” Brand said.

  * * *

  The grass was wet and the steel supports of the swings behind the bandstand in the park were dull silver in the clear morning. This from the twelfth year, boys on sleds seen through gauze in slow motion, their round steaming faces fading in the snow, the great love I had for my heavy boots and their rusty interlocking buckles; entering winter, pure and empty, sea-creature (brain) pulsing in the cookie jar, art and science of the shovelers of snow, the rocking chair’s steady knocks thundering through the house, her hands clenching the edges of the armrests, knuckles white, and I wondered how that worked, whether blood stayed dammed in the veins of the hand or moved up the arm waiting for the hand to go soft, rocking in her darkness, snow softly dropping. But there was no snow now and I would have to shoot by daylight. Sullivan stood behind one of the swings, no questions asked or explanations offered, a woman, a figure in a landscape although snow was impossible and disease did not blast her cells, an actor, a woman nonetheless whose generating force took from the camera some of its power, weakening thankfully what was for me an all too overarching moment. Birds rested on the chimneys of several homes, starlings or wrens, neo-pterodactyls for all I knew, Iowa for all I knew, Alexandria, Kamakura, and through the eyepiece I saw pass behind her a blue panel truck with the single word Smith in white across the side. Nearer Iowa then and more than small comfort. Eight o’clock in the morning. Turned-up bowl of the bandstand. Trees and wet grass. Sand impacted in the sandbox by last night’s late rain. Gulley of an outflung leg. Four-finger handprint. Pail’s perfect circle. I adjusted the wind filter and she sat on the swing now, a nautical creak working down the links of the chains, tips of her fingers lightly touching them. She began to rise toward me, nothing in her eyes.

  * * *

  “I see myself in a big stone house on the Oregon coast,” Brand said. “I’m exactly sixty years old. I built the house myself, rock by rock. I see myself as one of those unique old writers who’s still respected for his daring ideas and style. Young disciples make pilgrimages to visit me. They come hiking up to my house carrying knapsacks and copies of my books. There are no roads in the area. It’s like Big Sur, only more lonely and remote. The house is right above the ocean and I can see seals basking on the rocks and big lean seabirds skimming over the waves and even an occasional shark, the fin of a big beautiful shark bright in the sunlight. The shark is my personal symbol. At the back of all my books there’s an imprint of a shark just like the wolfhound on Alfred A. Knopf books. The surf thunders on the rocky beach. The wind comes off the water and blows past the house and goes whistling through the woods out back. I see myself as lean and craggy. The young disciples come from every corner of the world. Sometimes they come in groups, a bunch of young Frenchmen and their girlfriends bringing greetings from famous old French philosophers and writers, guys I shared symposiums with and signed petitions with, famous old French intellectuals who haven’t given up their revolutionary ideas and who still exert a profound influence on French foreign policy. The young disciples usually stay a week or so. We have quiet talks and go walking on the beach. They ask me about my life and thought. Sometimes I get a stray, a young female disciple who comes all alone from Sweden at great personal expense and hardship. She is young and blond and lovely. The Swedish experiment has not worked, she says. We go to bed together. We can hear the wind and the gulls. There’s nothing in the room except the four stone walls and the bed. Afterward she tells me I am like a man half my age. We speak only rarely. She cooks simple Swedish meals for me. We walk on the beach. I read her the first chapter of my work in progress and she tells me it is the best and truest I have done. She asks me about my wife. I had been married years before to a beautiful Vietnamese girl who died of a rare lung disease. I say nothing to the Swede. I merely take her hand and lead her to the bed. Two weeks later I tell her that she must go. My work demands the tension of loneliness. She understands. I go back to work. It is all hard and clean. The surf crashes on the rocks. A month later a tall lovely Australian girl with titian hair comes walking up the steep rocky path. She is carrying a knapsack and my lone book of verse.”

  * * *

  In the afternoon I went to the library. Then I walked back out to Howley Road, almost not noticing the brightness and calm of the day, the trees in their easy bending eagerness smelling of higher terrain. Suddenly I regretted the
calmness of lowlands, of sea level, and thought if this were mountain country all my earnest plans might be shoveled easily into the wind. In the pitiless insanity of nature above the timber-line no other resolution is needed than that of a river changing color as it flows down the continent toward its own promise and past. Pike was alone in the camper, barking softly in his sleep, and there was nobody in the bar across the road.

  * * *

  I spent sixteen straight hours slopping white paint on the dull green walls of my hotel room and then, using a much smaller brush, printing the two thousand words of the next part of the script in black paint over the white.

  I finished early in the morning. I went out to the camper, where I spent most of the day either sleeping or watching Sullivan and Brand play chess. In the evening I went back to the hotel. Glenn Yost came up to the room and looked at the walls. I told him it had cost me two sizable bribes and a promise to pay for the repainting when I checked out. His crazed eye was very active. I told him that during filming he would stand by the armchair and read the words and sentences as they progressed around the room. He’d be on camera intermittently; from time to time I’d pan one of the walls, perhaps in accord with the line he was reading, perhaps against the line, camera and man reading in opposite directions. I’d anticipate the script at times. I’d also shoot passages he had already recited. Somewhere along the way we’d cut, reload, re-position, and proceed again. I gave him time to read through the whole thing, showing him exactly where certain passages picked up after being interrupted by windows or door frames. The left eye jumped. I told him to be cool, that none of this mattered in the least.

  “I stand here frankly amazed.”

  “The eye’s really hopping,” I said.

  “I don’t know but what I’d rather be at home fixing the screen door.”

  “Fellini says the right eye is for reality and the left eye is the fantasy eye. Whenever you’re ready, Glenn.”

  “What the hell, let’s go.”

  I stood over the tripod and gave him a hand-sign.