Americana

by Don DeLillo

  I played with the soft flesh and spinning hair. I kissed her fingers, index and middle now bent around the tall hole, and then her middle finger was in my mouth and I sucked at the knuckle and swung my left arm near to her face and found her lips with my index finger and she sucked and licked at it. With my head, my ears, I forced her thighs apart and they gave slowly, grudgingly, with great art and lewdness, and then tongue to root I swam in my being toward defeat so satisying that no pleasure of mere sense could be noted or filed. I was on my knees again, high above her, and I dipped to her breasts and licked and smelled, playing with them, batting the nipples lightly with my finger. I asked her to stand against the wall facing the foot of the bed. She did this. I lay in the middle of the bed, my arms and legs spread wide. She looked at me. All I had to do was raise my head slightly and glance toward my middle. She advanced slowly, as all lewd advances must be made, and kneeled at the end of the bed and took my ankles in her hands and as her hands moved up my legs began to descend, with manifest deliberation, a mime of some creature that has been burrowing for centuries. Her hands were there now and they assembled a brief little pageant of phallus worship and then it was in her mouth and I began to twist and arch. Before very long I made myself ask her to stop and then I was on my knees again and she was on her back and looking up at me. Her head this time was at the foot of the bed and the simple fact of this opposition, this turning on an axis, seemed enormously lewd. I played some more with her breasts. I kissed her on the lips. Abomination. I curled my tongue between her legs again and kissed her once more on the lips in a dream of wheels in white rooms and into her then I went, evolving the basic topography, and entering her I was occupied by her, another turning on an axis, wrong way on the bed, the army occupied by the city. Abomination. I began to think her thoughts or what I imagined to be her thoughts. I became third person in my own mind. (Or her mind.) And in her as deep as I could go, hard and wild as I could strive, I listened to what she was thinking. Little mothers’ sons. He wants to wake up alone. Michelangelo’s David. Wasp of the Wild West. He is home at last.

  I smelled the cookies baking. It lasted only seconds. Then I sank into the bed again and it was like a field on which a certain number of troops have pretended to be dead, trading their odors with the smell of the earth and feeling a deliciousness not known since the games of childhood. I went back to sleep then. When I came out of it, I was not even amazed at the ease with which I could put aside the previous night. It is so much simpler to bury reality than it is to dispose of dreams. I showered and shaved. With my curved scissor I clipped some hair from my nostrils. I looked not bad, things considered, the film-segment done and torn out of me (all blood and eyes), the black wish fulfilled (with all the accompanying panics of such a moment), very little money in my pocket and nowhere in particular to go.

  1) New York was not waiting for me with microphones and fleets of ribboned limousines, sweet old Babylonian movie-whore of a city yawning like Mae West.

  2) The network had by this time disposed of my corporate remains in some file cabinet marked pending return of soul from limbo.

  3) To stay in Fort Curtis was out of the question; the town was now simply the sum of its unfilmed monotonies.

  4) The camper itself seemed off-limits. What could Sullivan and I say to each other? (What had we ever said?)

  But in the mirror, these things considered, I looked not bad. Indeed I remained David Bell. I brushed my teeth, dressed, and went to the armchair to pare my fingernails. Perhaps I could go to Montana and fall in love with a waitress in a white diner. Canada might be nice, the western part, for it was one of the very last of the non-guilty regions in the world. I could smoke hashish for a year squatting outside the Blue Mosque in Istanbul. A woman came in then, wearing an open robe over a pair of dungarees and a sweater. I had never seen her before. She changed the sheets, punching the bed repeatedly and then striking the pillow with the edge of her hand in karate fashion. She looked at me briefly in that analytical manner by which all hotel employees compute the biographies of lodgers. I continued to clip my nails, watching silver divots jump through the air. She finished with the bed and threw the used sheets into the hall. Then she reached past the door frame and dragged in a vacuum cleaner. Immediately I pulled in my legs. She activated the machine and began to vacuum, guiding it with one hand while with the other she tried to brush her hair out of her eyes. On her feet she wore heavy white socks and loafers. The robe was beltless and huge, possibly her husband’s. The machine crawled past me, eating my fingernails, and I lifted my feet up onto the chair. She got on her knees and was about to clean under the bed when she turned and looked at me. I could go to Texas.

  “There’s some cigarettes under here and a book of matches. You want them or not?”

  “No,” I said.

  She sucked them in. I had no idea what time it was. My fingernails in the machine. The hair of my belly and balls curled in the sheets in the hallway. She attached a small brush to the pipe and cleaned the blinds.

  “That’s a Vaculux, isn’t it? My father used to handle that account. That was years ago. He’s growing a beard now. Just the thought of it makes me uncomfortable.”

  “I just do my job,” she said.

  She left quietly then, one more irrelevant thing that would not go unremembered. My feet were still up on the chair. Inaction is the beginning of that kind of knowledge which has as its final end the realization that no action is necessary. It works forward to itself and then back again and there is nothing more relaxing and sweet. The chambermaid had left the door open and Sullivan was standing there in her gypsy trenchcoat. We smiled at each other. If I stayed in that chair long enough they would all come to me, chancellors, prefects, commissioners, dignitaries, wanting to know what I knew that could be of use.

  “Come to view the body?” I said.

  “May I sit down?”

  “Please.”

  She sat at the head of the bed, on the pillow, imitating the characteristics of my own posture, knees high and tight, hands folded over them. Above her on the wall—a gap between the printed words—was a lithograph of an Indian paddling a canoe on a mountain lake. I have said much earlier that in describing Sullivan I would try to avoid analogy but at that moment she seemed herself an Indian, an avenging squaw who would descend the hill after battle to tear out the tongues of dead troopers so they would not be able to enjoy the buffalo meat of the spirit world. Daughter of Black Knife she seemed, a workmanlike piece of murder.

  “I hope you didn’t miss me this morning, David. I couldn’t sleep so I walked back out to the camper. I didn’t think you’d mind.”

  “What took place? What occurred or happened? It seems to have slipped my mind.”

  “It stopped raining and the fantasies came out to play. Your home movie had put you in a state of anguish. I tried to console you. You wanted to be drenched in sin and so I made it my business to help you along. Old friends have obligations to each other. David, I truly love you and hate you. I love you because you’re a beautiful thing and a good boy. You’re more innocent than a field mouse and I don’t believe you have any evil in you, if that’s possible. And I hate you because you’re sick. Illness to a certain point inspires pity. Beyond that point it becomes hateful. It becomes very much like a personal insult. One wishes to destroy the sickness by destroying the patient. You’re such a lovable cliché, my love, and I do hope you’ve found the center of your sin, although I must say that nothing we did last night struck me as being so terribly odd.”

  “Kiss my ass,” I said.

  “Do you need any money?”

  “Brand tell you to ask me that?”

  “He said you were running low. I have some. We’re bound to bump into each other again. You can pay me back then.”

  “I can manage, Sully.”

  “Where are you going?”

  “West, I guess.”

  “I hate to think of you all alone out there, David. Honest, I really do lov
e you in my own spidery way. You’ll have no one to talk to. And no one to play games with. And the distances are vast. We’re parked right across the street. Come with us.”

  “Where?”

  “Back to Maine. Then home.”

  “What about Brand? Will he stay in Maine?”

  “He hasn’t decided,” she said. “It all depends on his auntie Mildred. If she comes across with some money he may try Mexico. Otherwise he goes back to the garage. His only real hope is to return to combat. I’ve suggested he re-enlist. I’m convinced it’s the only way he’ll survive. You’ve got to confront the demons here and now. Right, leftenant?”

  “There aren’t any demons bothering me,” I said. “My problem is immense, as we both know, but it’s strictly an ethnic one. I don’t have any Jewish friends. How do you know so much about Brand?”

  “He tells me things.”

  “Has he told you about his novel? The Great American Sheaf of Blank Paper.”

  “He whispered the sad details.”

  “When was this?” I said.

  “That very first night in Maine.”

  “I don’t seem to remember you two being alone at any point in the evening.”

  “He came into the room.”

  “The one you and I were sleeping in?”

  “Yes.”

  “I see.”

  “And he knelt by my bed and whispered things to me. Sad little things. He wanted me to know the truth. I guess he thought it would make for a happier trip. I gave him absolution of course.”

  “And then you moved over and let him get into bed with you.”

  “That’s correct,” she said.

  “And I was right across the room. A deep sleep it was indeed. And you two have been swinging ever since?”

  “Here and there.”

  “I see.”

  “Yes,” she said.

  “What I don’t understand are the logistics of the thing. How did you manage it?”

  “We grasped at every fleeting opportunity. It was like the springtime of urgent love. While we were on the road it wasn’t at all easy. Things picked up when we got here.”

  “What about Pike?”

  “Guard duty,” she said.

  “And the first time was that night in Maine and I was right across the room.”

  “It was really quite funny, David. You were snoring like Lyndon Baines Johnson.”

  “I don’t snore. I do not fucking snore.”

  What followed had its aspects of burlesque humor, a touch of stylized sadism, bits of old tent shows and the pie in the face. I swung my legs over the arm of the chair and pushed myself up over it and onto the floor. Sullivan got off the bed and we were both standing now. In her soiled torn trenchcoat she seemed to belong in a demonstration thirty years overdue.

  “Wait here,” I said. “I want to take leave of the others. Handclasp of manly comrades. We’ll drink to destiny.”

  “And what will you and I drink to, David?”

  “My health, of course.”

  I climbed into the back of the camper. Pike and Brand were playing gin rummy. Pike was talking about the dingo dogs of Australia and he did not look up when I came in. I stood behind him, put my hands on his shoulders and squeezed very hard. Finally he had to stop talking.

  “The lady wants you.”

  “What for?” he said.

  “Room 211. You’d better haul ass, colonel.”

  He got up slowly and left and I took his folding chair, turning it around first so that my crossed arms rested on its back as I faced Brand across the small table. He was wearing a khaki fatigue jacket. I was wearing rugged corduroy trousers and a blue workshirt.

  “She told me,” I said.

  “Who told you what?”

  “Sully told me that you two have been playing doctor and nursey.”

  “So what.”

  “That took balls when you consider that we’re old friends, you and I, and she was with me if not in name then certainly by implication.”

  “Balls help,” he said.

  “I’ve known her for years. You can’t just move in like that.”

  “You knew her for years and I knew her for minutes. It comes to the same thing. These matters have to be assessed in the light of eternity.”

  “Let me tell you something. Latch on to this. Are you listening? She let you into her pants only because you’re afraid to be a writer. Did you get that? My advice to you is re-up in the goddamn Air Force. Our weapons system isn’t complete without you.”

  “At least I flew, buddy. You were some kind of grunt or file clerk.”

  “I wasn’t even in.”

  “That figures.”

  “That figures, does it?”

  “Damn straight,” he said.

  “Let’s get out to where we’ll have some room to move around in.”

  “Talk is cheap.”

  “That’s a very original comment,” I said.

  We walked through a narrow driveway into the parking lot behind the hotel. Three cars were back there, front bumpers nudging a long squared-off log. Brand took off his jacket and threw it to the ground. I reached for the tattooed dogs on his forearm and began to pinch. He looked surprised and then yelled. Then he pinched the side of my neck. We held on to each other that way, pinching and trying not to grimace or yell. I was in great pain. I knew I could not take it for very long and I let go of him and kicked him in the shins. He pulled my hair. Then we stood facing each other.

  “Why are we fighting over that ugly bitch?” I said.

  “She’s not ugly.”

  “Homely then.”

  “She’s not even homely and you know it.”

  “She’s homely.”

  “She is not,” he said.

  “Aren’t you going to take off your glasses?”

  We started to wrestle and he bit me on the shoulder. I got him in a headlock and then spun him to the ground over my hip. I didn’t kick him in the ribs although it would have been the easiest thing in the world. Then, on the ground, he looked up at me fiercely and clutched his groin. It was a strange thing to do and I didn’t know what it was supposed to mean.

  I helped him up and we went out front. We shook hands and I told him he could have my car or sell it and keep the money; either way it was his. Then I went to the back of the camper and stole Sullivan’s radio. I left it with the desk clerk and went upstairs. I told them Brand was waiting and we wished each other luck. Pike and I shook hands. Sullivan kissed me on the chin. When they were gone I packed my things in two suitcases, including the camera, which weighed only about seven-and-a-half pounds, and all the reels of tape and film. I decided to leave behind the tripod and tape recorder as well as a suit, a sportcoat and two pairs of shoes. I called the desk clerk upstairs and told him that everything was his and that it was more than enough to pay for repainting the room. He went away confused. Then I masturbated into the clean sheets, feeling an odd and emptying joy, the cool uncaring pleasure of those times when nothing is foreseen and all that is left behind seems so much dead weight for the ministrations of the minor clergy. I went downstairs and stuffed the radio into one of the suitcases. Then I took off on the first stage of the second journey, the great seeking leap into the depths of America, wilderness dream of all poets and scoutmasters, westward to our manifest destiny, to sovereign red timber and painted sands, to the gold-transfigured hills, westward to match the shadows of my image and my self.

  PART FOUR

  12

  I am falling silently through myself. The spirit contracts at the termination of every passion, whether the season belongs to pain or love, and as I prepare the final pages I feel I am drifting downward into coma, a sleep of no special terror and yet quite narrow and bottomless. Little of myself seems to be left.

  1) Intense solitude becomes unbearable only when there’s nothing one wishes to say to another.

  2) Saints talk to birds but only lunatics get an answer.

  I have re
ached the point where the coining of aphorisms seems a very worthy substitute for good company or madness. Surely this account falls short of either. Too much has been disfigured in the name of symmetry. Our lives were the shortest distance between two points, birth and chaos, but what appears on these pages represents, in its orderly proportions, almost a delivery from chaos. Too much has been forgotten in the name of memory. There is no mention of the scar on my right index finger, the white medicine I took as a child, the ether visions of my tonsillectomy. In my mind the resonance of these distant things is sheer thunder, outlasting immortal books, long and short wars, journeys to other planets. In short I have not been cunning enough. I have taken the middle path, neither heaven nor hell, and no amount of self-serving research can persuade me that cunning does not grow its sharpest claws at the very extremes of consciousness. Not that this work has been engineered to no purpose. It is a fond object. I like to look at it, pages neatly stacked, hundreds of them, their differences hidden from the eye. Every so often I move the manuscript to another room in order to be surprised by it as I enter that room. It never fails to be a touching thing, my book on a pinewood table, poetic in its loneliness, totally still, Cézannesque in the timeless light it emits, a simple object, the box-shaped equivalent of the reels which sit in my small air-conditioned storage vault.

  I’ve been studying the footage of late, hour after hour. There is a crippled beauty in some of it—Sullivan on the swing, all shadow and menace, a long dark heron wading through one’s empty sleep. The Fort Curtis episodes are only a small part of what eventually became a film in silence and darkness. The whole thing runs nearly a week, the uncut work of several years. Viewed in the sequence in which it was filmed, the movie becomes darker and more silent as it progresses. There are the Fort Curtis segments. There are demonstrations, speeches, parades, riots. There is a vacation I took in Vermont, and people entering my apartment, and selected parts of a love affair. Then there are long unedited scenes in which friends and strangers declaim their madness to the camera. At this point I dispensed with sound. There are houses, all kinds of houses, everywhere I went. There are newspaper stands, store windows, bus terminals and waiting rooms. There are nuns, hundreds of them, so very black and white, perfect subjects in their long procession, soundless as beads passing through a hand. I returned to individuals briefly—women and boys in hospital corridors, deaf-mutes playing chess, people in tunnels. The true play could not be found in theaters. The true play was ourselves and we needed shadows on which to chalk our light, speed to conquer sequence, infinitesimal holes in which to plant our consciousness. I began to underexpose then, to become ever more crude, destroying shape and light, attempting to solve the darkness by entering it fully. There are museums toward the end of the movie, overcast scenes shot in marble halls, all empty, submarine in appearance, being crushed by darkness spreading from the edges of the screen, limestone kings barely visible, pleasant Flemish ladies in square frames, and then, finally, for a long time, there is nothing. I myself appear briefly at the very end, reflected in a mirror as I hold the camera during the first of the Fort Curtis scenes. These twenty seconds of film also serve as a beginning.