Americana

by Don DeLillo

  Boy. One doesn’t keep books.

  Girl. That’s very British and amusing.

  Boy. Experience is important.

  Girl. Experience is something I’d like to have without going through all the trouble of getting it.

  Boy. As I see it, there’s no reason why we shouldn’t get married. We like each other a lot. We have mutual respect for each other’s taste in clothes. We like to do a lot of the same things. And everybody says we’re an attractive couple.

  Girl. Aren’t there other things to consider?

  Boy. One doesn’t keep books.

  Girl. That really is an amusing remark.

  Boy. I promise you one thing. If we get married I’ll definitely put you in my film. We’re supposed to use students as actors but I’m sure they’ll make an exception in this case. It’ll even have a soundtrack.

  Girl. Can I wear what I’m wearing?

  Boy. You can wear whatever you want. And you can say whatever you want.

  Girl. It’ll be wild. It’ll be super. It’ll be too much.

  When Austin was dressed I asked him to leave and he said he’d wait outside in his car. Carol put on one of my shirts and read quietly through the next scene. I tried not to sneak looks at her as I played with the tape recorder. I felt it was important to keep things on a strictly professional level and I wanted to make a casual remark, something technical about sound or lighting, but nothing very scientific arrived at the tip of my tongue. Then Brand showed up, surprisingly, on time. Carol went into the bathroom and Brand stripped down to his shorts, long white things with green alarm clocks on them. She came out wearing a thigh-length nightgown and walked toward the bed without looking at either of us. Glances carefully prepared to indicate nothing more than mild interest were exchanged between Brand and me as we noted the soft commanding bounce of her breasts. Carol stood on the bed, hands on hips, looking about her as if to make sure the set had been cleared of all but essential personnel, and then lowered herself to a pillow, where she sat wrapped in her own limbs, an entrance and a place-taking of totally serious humor, one level of personality already in role and trying to demand obedience of the other, which perhaps was beginning to hate the camera. Brand sat on the other pillow. I told him to take off his glasses. Then we discussed what was to follow. Although Brand assured me that he had memorized his lines, I insisted on an improvised scene, first because I didn’t trust him, second because I didn’t like what I had written. I told them to retain the spirit of the thing and forget the details. Carol stared at the inkblue dogs on Brand’s arm, the fornicating dogs. He blinked several times and reached for his glasses but I moved them out of reach. I set up camera and tripod at the foot of the bed.

  Man. There was a red moon.

  Woman. Schenectady is famous for its moons.

  Man. Right away you start in. It’s better you don’t know anyway. I’m not supposed to tell you anything but you always get me to tell you.

  Woman. You tell me where but that’s all.

  Man. That’s enough. That’s too much. Sometimes I wonder about you. Always asking. Isn’t it better you don’t know? You’re too interested. You shouldn’t be that interested.

  Woman. You’re my sweetheart. I want to know what you do on your business trips.

  Man. It’s not right that you should want to know. There’s something wrong with it. Sometimes I wonder about you.

  Woman. What’s fascinating about people like you is your blazing sense of morality. Your devotion to the concept of a place for everything and everything in its place. When you get right down to it, that’s what morality means to a moralist. It means shoot to kill but not in a hospital zone. You might wake the patients.

  Man. What are you talking about? What’s she talking about?

  Woman. I’m talking about your underwear. Did you buy those shorts in Schenectady? Was it before or after you fulfilled the contract? I’ve never seen them before. They’re marvelous. They go beyond the outlandish into some private area of metaphysics. All the clocks say nine forty-five. Do you suppose that’s morning or evening? Somehow it seems terribly important. You must give me the name of the store so I can call them and ask. In the meantime I want you to tell me very specifically whether you were wearing those shorts when you fulfilled the contract.

  Man. Let’s get back to what we were saying.

  Woman. You don’t even remember what we were saying. Now answer my question. Were you wearing those shorts when you carried out the terms set down in the small print?

  Man. Okay, I was wearing these shorts.

  Woman. Now tell me exactly what time it was when you killed him.

  Man. You know I don’t talk about that. It’s bad enough I tell you where. Details cause trouble. You learn that in this business. Details cause trouble.

  Woman. Tell me what time it was. What harm could that possibly do?

  Man. It was ten after one.

  Woman. Repeat that.

  Man. It was about ten after one in the morning.

  Woman. I thought so. I knew it.

  Man. How did you know?

  Woman. It’s written all over you. It’s literally written all over you. Those clocks on your shorts are a dead giveaway.

  Man. The clocks say nine forty-five.

  Woman. Exactly. That’s exactly the point. You’ve got to burn them as soon as possible. We can drive down to Nell’s place and burn them there.

  Man. Look, if you have to know exactly how I did it, I’ll tell you.

  Woman. I’m not interested.

  Man. The last show was coming out. The ticket window was closed. The marquee was dark. Only about ten people came out. I got out of the car and walked up to him; I put out my hand as if I wanted to shake hands with him. It’s your natural reaction when a guy puts out his hand like I did that you take it. I knew who he was but he didn’t know me like from Adam. He never saw me before. But he put out his hand anyway. That’s the natural reaction. Anyone would have done the same thing. We stood there shaking hands and I had a big smile on my face and I called him by his name. He wanted to let go but I kept a tight grip on his hand. Then I put my left hand in my jacket, still holding him with the other hand, and I took out the .38 and fired three times right into the breast pocket of his shirt. There was a war movie playing.

  Woman. What did it sound like?

  Man. What’s the difference what it sounded like?

  Woman. Did it make a bang? Did it make a whimper? Did it crack, resound, boom, ping?

  Man. It was like 20mm cannon fire. It was like hosing down an LZ with your 20 mike-mike. There’s the slang again. There it is.

  Woman. How did you feel later?

  Man. How would you feel? It was a hospital zone.

  Woman. You broke the cardinal rule.

  Man. I broke the cardinal’s back. He was riding his bike, this Buddhist cardinal, when I double-indemnitized him.

  Woman. What were his politics, sweetheart?

  Man. Slightly to the left of God.

  Woman. That would make him a Taft Republican.

  Man. Which Taft?

  Woman. Which God?

  Man. The one that made little green clocks.

  Woman. And little white boys to wear them.

  Man. Respect for your husband.

  Woman. You’re not my husband. My husband is black. Blacker. Blackest black.

  * * *

  Austin’s car left the curb in a burst of hysterical rubber. I knew I wouldn’t be able to sleep for a while so I walked out to Howley Road with Brand. We moved along, jogging part of the way, fighters doing roadwork, snapping out short lefts and rights as we dance-jogged, doing 360-degree turns without breaking stride, hog-grunting on the dark road. We slowed to a walk.

  “I’m surprised you people have decided to stay on,” I said. “I thought you’d get tired of this place. I didn’t think this thing I’m doing would take this long.”

  “Nobody decided to stay on,” he said. “We never discussed it. We’
ve never discussed anything and nobody’s made any decisions that I know of. We just stayed on.”

  “But aren’t you tired of this place?”

  “I never thought about it. Anyway where would we go without you? You’re leading this expedition.”

  “I don’t think that’s in effect anymore. It’s just that I didn’t think it would take this long to do this thing I’m doing.”

  “Nobody’s talked about moving on,” he said.

  “What about your book?”

  “There is no book, Davy. There’s eleven pages and seven of them don’t have any words on them. And I’m not making any great claims for the other four.”

  “I thought you were writing all the time you were up in Maine. How long were you up there?”

  “Almost a year,” he said.

  “What did you do all that time?”

  “I don’t know. I really don’t remember much of it. I guess I was stoned most of the time. I think I blew a fuse or something. My head went dead. That’s the only way to put it. Something in there burned out and blew away. Went dead.”

  “And you were in that garage for a whole year. And you weren’t doing anything.”

  “I was doing something. I was killing my head.”

  “All right,” I said. “Pike’s barking in his sleep. He doesn’t care where he is as long as he’s got a bottle at his elbow. You don’t have any novel in the works and you’re in no hurry to get back to Maine or anywhere else. But what about Sully?”

  “You’ll have to ask her. I told you, nobody discusses anything in our family. We’re a very tightlipped bunch.”

  “How long’s your money going to hold out?”

  “The lady’s been picking up tabs the last ten days or so.”

  “I didn’t know that,” I said. “I wish I could lend you some money but I’m not fixed too well myself. I guess I’m out of a job by this time.”

  “I was wondering about that. I’d talk to the lady if I were you.”

  We jogged some more, drinking in the cool air, drinking it and snorting it out again, throwing punches at the wind. Then the four of us sat around the table in the camper making small sounds with our feet and elbows.

  “I was wondering a bout that,” Sullivan said. “I seemed to remember that you were due in the Southwest sometime last week but I wasn’t sure. You didn’t say anything.”

  “I’ve been busy.”

  “That was a good job, David.”

  “I was making twenty-four five. Look, I need you one more time for the thing.”

  “I’ll be here,” she said.

  “He took my glasses away and tucked me in bed,” Brand said. “It wasn’t as much fun as I thought it might be. That Carol what’s-her-name Deming. She got a little bit weird at the end. What’s the point of the whole thing anyway?”

  “Go play with your doll,” I said.

  * * *

  Austin dressed as he had for the first sequence. I was wearing a lime nylon turtleneck and a pair of chinos with stovepipe stripes.

  “Then the lame girl in Florence was real,” he said.

  “That’s right. It took the edge off meeting my ex-wife. We’d been hinting to each other about a possible reconciliation. But the lame girl caused a strange kind of shift in my thinking. Hard to explain. My ex-wife’s parents were in Germany at the time. The lame girl was German. Then late in the day my ex-wife started limping. None of it meant anything. But it confused me somewhat. I tried to tie it all together. But it wouldn’t quite tie. It was just enough to throw things off. The lame girl was homely and that didn’t help matters.”

  “You tell me some things but not others. Why I’m in this uniform again for instance.”

  “Did Fred Zinnemann tell Burt Lancaster?”

  “I’m used to doing what I’m told at McCompex,” he said. “But there’s no reason why you can’t be a little less grudging.”

  “Up against the wall, motherfucker.”

  It was his final scene. I sighted on him standing against the printed black words. Then I narrated, making it up as I went along.

  “The year is 1999. You are looking at a newsreel of an earlier time. A man is standing in a room in America. It is you, David, more or less. What can the two of you say to each other? How can you empty out the intervening decades? It’s possible to put your hand to a movie screen and come away with a split second of light, say a taxicab turning a corner, and it’s right there on your thumb, Forty-ninth Street and Madison Avenue. You can talk to the screen and it may answer. You barely remember the man you’re looking at. Ask him anything. He knows all the answers. That’s why he’s silent. He has come through time to answer your questions. He is standing still but moving. He is silent with answers. You have twenty seconds to ask the questions.” (I held on Austin Wakely, motionless against the wall, expressionless, and quietly I counted off the seconds—one through twenty.) “We come now to the end of the recorded silence.”

  Austin and I shared a bottle of warm Coke.

  “Listen,” I said. “Can you do something for me?”

  “What’s that?”

  “Get me Drotty. I want Drotty for one hour.”

  * * *

  “Why was he killed?”

  “He made a clerical error. He messed up some sort of minor detail. Details cause trouble. He used to say that.”

  “How was he killed?”

  “How are most businessmen killed? Their hearts fail and they fall down on the rug. He had heart failure with minor variations. No one can say his death was meaningless.”

  “What will you do now?”

  “I’ll go to Topeka, Kansas.”

  “Why there?”

  “I’ve always wanted to sit in a laundromat in Topeka, Kansas. I think it has something to do with prenatal memories.”

  “Do you plan to get in touch with your family?”

  “I prefer to let the bitterness linger. Any kind of contact at this point would only be confusing all around.”

  “Are you certain they’re still bitter?”

  “All but my brother. He never felt that way toward me.”

  “Will you get in touch with him, then?”

  “No.”

  “Why not?”

  “I’m afraid to see what has happened to him by this time.”

  “The camera appreciates your willingness to appear before it under such difficult circumstances.”

  * * *

  I have tried up to now to avoid any grand revelations concerning the professionals in the cast. Carol and Austin were mixed things to me. I’m not sure exactly when I realized they could be valuable but I do know that the idea grew, in one form or another, out of first impressions. In Austin’s case, appearance and age were vital; the fact that he was an actor meant nothing. Carol, both overflowing and annoyingly recessive, seemed, actress or not, to possess a talent for shading every moment, for moving across one’s mental landscape like a teasing pattern of sunshine and cloud; it was a difficult talent, defying analysis and frustrating to witness until it displayed itself before the camera, a petty and even neurotic talent for concealing things not worth concealing, or for pretending to conceal, or pretending to disclose, or for dropping hints or sly eyelashes, a pain in the neck in other words, and perfect.

  If these two people have seemed remote up to now, even indecipherable, mainly the girl, it should be understood that I did not want to understand them too well. They were mixed things to me, living people qualified (perhaps enlarged) by my own past, by my fantasies, mirror-seeking, honors, shames, and by those I loved or failed to love. Knowing them too well would have confused the issue, and the alter-issue, and the issue’s bride, and the sister of the issue. And so I’ve tried to set them down as I knew them then, or failed to know them.

  Now, in retrospect, and briefly, I think I can say that Carol was simply a lost girl trying to make the best of invisibility. Even her hair seemed questionably blond. It is worth pointing out that the moment she first appeared
before my camera I ceased to care about her other roles, all those fluent ambiguities which at first had seemed so appealing and then so disturbing the night she talked me under the table at Buster’s Bar & Grill. The camera chewed up these parts and spat them out. Carol was the best performer in the cast because she was the most consistently invisible.

  With Austin Wakely it was easy for me to keep my interest to a minimum. I had no curiosity at all about Austin, either before or after he became one of my players. He had a good strong chin and gleaming teeth. If he had been born with a red, white and blue mole on his back, a mole in the shape of a flag, it still would have been his face that I put before the camera.

  * * *

  Carol sat in the armchair, eyes closed, working her way out of one thin atmosphere into another. The scene had been by far her easiest and yet she seemed exhausted. I went over to the window. A man put a coin in a parking meter and walked around the corner. It was just turning noon and the street was fairly crowded. The shoestore was having a sale. A car stalled at the light.

  “I’ve just realized how few black faces I’ve seen since I got here.”

  “Even the bibles in this town are white,” she said.

  “The kind of town this is I’ll bet they don’t even know what’s going on all over the goddamn country.”

  “They see it on the box. It’s like watching the moon through a telescope.”

  “Everything’s going on but it’s still boring,” I said.

  Her eyes remained closed. I almost moved toward her. I remembered the bench in the park in town, the ego-moment of our bodies barely in contact. We sat that way, chair and windowsill, for a long time. Nothing that was good, even temporarily good, even for a slow second, could happen between us. I didn’t know why I was so sure of that. Maybe she was just too far inside. It was at times the way I liked to think of myself and maybe I felt nothing could be stolen from her in return for what would have to be surrendered to get at that private awareness. Besides I didn’t know what she thought of me. Not knowing that, I couldn’t know what form we’d take together. Then there was the fact that her eyes were closed.

  “You seem tired,” I said.

  “It’s this weather, so full of life and sweet smells. It’s a struggle to get through weather like this. I like to plot my existence on a fever chart in my head. In New York in the humid weather it used to rise and once in Montana at twenty below it nearly jumped off the chart and I thought I would die of too much life. I guess that sort of thing is mostly autosuggestion though. I can talk myself into almost anything. When I die I’ll talk myself into another womb and start all over. That’s what they do in Tibet—people who couldn’t even get into Princeton entering fresh wombs like crazy.”