The Body Artist

by Don DeLillo

  She thought maybe he lived in a kind of time that had no narrative quality. What else did she think? She sat in the nearly bare office on the second floor and didn't know what else she thought.

  They spoke every morning at the glass-top table on the sunporch and she recorded what they said. The room was unheated but they sat comfortably in the current run of sunny days over mugs of mint tea.

  He sat hunched, speaking toward the device, sometimes into it, seemingly to it, with it, just he and it, and when he stopped cold, between constructions, his mouth continued to vibrate slightly, a shadow movement that resembled an old person's tremor of reflex or agitation.

  "Did you know Rey? Do you know who I mean when I say Rey?"

  "It is not able."

  "Try to answer. Please. You see how important it is to me. Talk like him. Say some words."

  There's a code in the simplest conversation that tells the speakers what's going on outside the bare acoustics. This was missing when they talked. There was a missing beat. It was hard for her to find the tempo. All they had were unadjusted words. She lost touch with him, lost interest sometimes, couldn't locate rhythmic intervals or time cues or even the mutters and hums, the audible pauses that pace a remark. He didn't register facial responses to things she said and this threw her off. There were no grades of emphasis here and flatness there. She began to understand that their talks had no time sense and that all the references at the unspoken level, the things a man speaking Dutch might share with a man speaking Chinese – all this was missing here.

  "Push the thing."

  "Push the button. No, do not push the button. That's the stop button. Did you hear us in the room? He and I. Talking."

  She wanted to touch him. She'd never touched him, she didn't think, or did passingly, maybe, once, strapping him into his seat in the car, when he was wearing a sweater or jacket.

  "You know him where he was. You know him from before. You heard him speak to me. Did we see you? Were you hidden somewhere so we could not see you? Understand hidden? You know his voice. Make me hear it."

  She knew, she told herself she was not an unstrung woman who encounters a person responsive to psychic forces, able to put her in touch with her late husband.

  This was something else.

  She watched him. His hair looked chalky today. He seemed barely here, four feet away from her. He didn't know how to measure himself to what we call the Now. What is that anyway? It's possible there's no such thing for those who do not take it as a matter of faith. Maybe it was a physicist she needed to talk to, someone, she wasn't sure, who might tell her what the parameters were. She hated that word. She used it but didn't know what it meant and used it anyway. The birds were going crazy on the feeder.

  She called Mariella and got the machine. A synthesized voice said, Please / leave / a message / after / the / tone. The words were not spoken but generated and they were separated by brief but deep dimensions. She hung up and called back, just to hear the voice again. How strange the discontinuity. It seemed a quantum hop, one word to the next. She hung up and called back. One voice for each word. Seven different voices. Not seven different voices but one male voice in seven time cycles. But not male exactly either. And not words so much as syllables but not that either. She hung up and called back.

  She walked down the long hall and up the stairs to the third floor and past the empty rooms to the bathroom near the far end. He was sitting in the tub when she opened the door. He did not move his head or in any way acknowledge. She stood there looking. He had soap in one hand and a washcloth in the other. He remained in this position, hands poised, and she watched him. He did not move. He did not look at her or acknowledge by other means. His hands were barely out of the water, the sliver of soap, the washcloth bunched. Soap is called a sliver in this figuration.

  She whispered, "Look at me."

  When he did this, unbashfully, she got on her knees at the side of the tub and took the washcloth out of his hand. She moved it side to side over his shoulders and down his back. She washed in the hollow under the arm. This is the armpit, one and two. She took the soap out of his other hand and rubbed it on the cloth and washed his chest and arms, wordlessly naming his parts for him. She set the cloth down gently on the water, where it plumed inward and sank, and she swabbed his belly under the water with the soap, a drone of motion, her hand slowly circling his navel. Then she leaned across him to place the soap in the soap dish, the sliver of soap, watching him all the time, and she put her hand in the water and eased along the penis, here it is, and cupped and rubbed the testicles, naming and numbering his parts, one and two, and a small moist glow showed above his lips.

  His hand came out of the water holding the cloth. She took it from him and held it spread across her face and pressed into the pores and she rubbed it over her mouth and gave it back to him. She touched his face, which was lightly fuzzed, and does he shave and who taught him, and ran her finger softly across his mouth, tracing the shape of his lips. She traced his nose and brows and the rim of his ear and the swirled inner surface. This followed by that. This leading to that. He was not skittish under her touch, or only routinely so, and she thought that nothing could seem unusual to him, or startling, or stirring, measured against the fact, the blur, whatever it was – the breathless shock of his being here.

  She felt something wispy at the edge of her mouth, half in half out, that could only be a hair. She plucked at it and brushed with her thumb, a strand of hair from the washcloth, and she couldn't feel it on her face anymore and she looked at him and looked at her hand and maybe it was just an itch.

  Then she went back down the hall and of course it did not feel to her that she'd been washing a child but then it wasn't quite a man either but then, again, this was who he was, outside the easy sway of either/or, and she was still finding things to examine, and wondering aloud about his use of a washcloth, which seemed a high refinement, and defending herself for her actions, and analyzing her own response to the motion of her hand over his body as she walked for miles through the blueberry barrens, in blowing mist, jacket fastened and tape reels turning.

  "How could you be living here without my knowing?"

  "But you know. I am living."

  He half hit himself on the cheek, a little joke perhaps.

  "But before. I hear a noise and you are in a room upstairs. For how long were you here? Talk into the thing."

  "Talk into the thing." he said in a voice that may have been an unintended imitation of hers.

  She was in town, driving down a hilly street of frame houses, and saw a man sitting on his porch, ahead of her, through trees and shrubs, arms spread, a broad-faced blondish man, lounging. She felt in that small point in time, a flyspeck quarter second or so, that she saw him complete. His life flew open to her passing glance. A lazy and manipulative man, in real estate, in fairview condos by a mosquito lake. She knew him. She saw into him. He was there, divorced and drink-haunted, emotionally distant from his kids, his sons, two sons, in school blazers, in the barest blink.

  A voice recited the news on the radio.

  When the car moved past the house, in the pull of the full second, she understood that she was not looking at a seated man but at a paint can placed on a board that was balanced between two chairs. The white and yellow can was his face, the board was his arms and the mind and heart of the man were in the air somewhere, already lost in the voice of the news reader on the radio.

  She called Mariella's number and got the machine. She listened to the recording and hung up and then called again and hung up. She called several times over the next day and a half and listened to the recorded voice and did not leave a message. When she called again and Mariella answered, she put down the phone, softly, and stood completely still.

  She said, "Talk like him. I want you to do this for me. I know you are able to do it. Do it for me. Talk like him. Say something he said that you remember. Or say whatever comes into your head. That is better. Say whatever
comes into your head, just so it is him. I will not ask you how you are able to do it. I only want to listen. Talk like him. Do like him. Speak in his voice. Do Rey. Make me hear him. I am asking you nice. Be my friend. A trusted person, this is a friend. Do this for me."

  They came flying in straight-up to the rungs, fighting for space at the feeding ports, pecking at others, wings humming and breasts burnt white in the sun. feed spilling from their beaks. They flew off and came back, semi-hovering, nine, ten, eleven birds, others fixed to the window screen, some in trees nearby, not singing exactly but what's the word, twitter or peep or squeak, and they attacked each other on the rungs or scrambling in midair, the color-changing birds, the name-saying birds, the birds that feed upside down.

  At night she stood outside his room and watched him sleep. She stayed for an hour and then went on-line to look at the cars start to appear on the two-lane highway that entered and left Kotka, in Finland, watching until she was able to sleep herself, finally, with the arrival of nordic light.

  CHAPTER 5

  It was another slow morning, foggy and still, and the phone was ringing. She stood nude in the workout room, bent left, eyes shut, checking the time on her wrist.

  Or sat cross-legged, back straight, breathing dementedly. She blew through her nostrils and made echoey sounds in her throat, visualizing her body lifting and spinning, a rotation with every breath.

  Or went about on all fours, knees hip-distance apart, rump up, feeling the cat-length in her pose, doing the shoulder roll.

  She stood and swung slowly about, eternally checking the time, half her body wheeling with the arc of the left arm, the watch arm, or the body levered by the arm and the head cranking incrementally like the second hand on the missing watch, mouth open and eyes ever tight.

  She heard a plane cross the sky and then the light blinked off and on, the sunlight, the sunray, an event she assembled through closed lids, and she knew the fog had finally lifted.

  When it was too damp and cold on the sunporch, they talked in the panelled room and she took notes and recorded. He barely spoke some mornings but was willing on others and they sat near the fire she'd built and the house was dead around them.

  "Being here has come to me. I am with the moment, I will leave the moment. Chair, table, wall, hall, all for the moment, in the moment. It has come to me. Here and near. From the moment I am gone, am left, am leaving. I will leave the moment from the moment."

  She didn't know what to call this. She called it singing. He kept it going a while, ongoing, oncoming, and it was song, it was chant. She leaned into him. This was a level that demonstrated he was not closed to inspiration. She felt an easing in her body that drew her down out of laborious thought and into something nearly uncontrollable. She leaned into his voice, laughing. She wanted to chant with him, to fall in and out of time, or words, or things, whatever he was doing, but she only laughed instead.

  "Coming and going I am leaving. 1 will go and come. Leaving has come to me. We all, shall all, will all be left. Because I am here and where. And I will go or not or never. And I have seen what I will see. If I am where I will be. Because nothing comes between me."

  She was laughing but he was not. It came out of him nonstop and it wasn't schizophrenic speech or the whoop of rippling bodies shocked by God. He sat pale and still. She watched him. It was pure chant, transparent, or was he saying something to her? She felt an elation that made it hard for her to listen carefully. Was he telling her what it is like to be him, to live in his body and mind? She tried to hear this but could not. The words ran on, sensuous and empty, and she wanted him to laugh with her, to follow her out of herself. This is the point, yes, this is the stir of true amazement. And some terror at the edge, or fear of believing, some displacement of self, but this is the point, this is the wedge into ecstasy, the old deep meaning of the word, your eyes rolling upward in your skull.

  "What is the moment? You said the moment. Tell me what this means to you. Show me the moment."

  He said, "Talk into the thing."

  "What do you know? Who is Rey? Do you talk to him? Did you ever talk to him? Do you know who I am talking about when I say Rey? I am Lauren. Who is Rey? A man. So tall. Look. So tall. This tall. And a mustache. A man with hair on his upper lip. Look at me, geek. How tall? This tall. A man with brushy hair on his upper lip. But then he shaved his mustache."

  He shaved his mustache. She'd forgotten this until now.

  She saw something out of the corner of her eye. She turned her head and nothing was there. The phone was ringing. She decided to find an optometrist because she thought she d seen something a number of times, or once or twice, out of the corner of her right eye, or an ophthalmologist, but knew she wouldn't bother. The phone was ringing. She picked it up and waited for someone to speak.

  It was time to sand her body. She used a pumice stone on the bottoms of her feet, working circular swipes, balls, heels, and then resoaped the foot and twisted it up into her hand again. She liked to hold a foot in a hand. She patiently razed the lone callus, stretching the task over days, lost in it, her body coiled in a wholeness of intent, the kind of solemn self-absorption that marks a line from childhood.

  She had emery boards and files, many kinds of scissors, clippers and creams that activated the verbs of abridgment and excision. She studied her fingers and toes. There was a way in which she isolated a digit for sharp regard, using a magnifier and a square of dark cardboard, and there were hangnails flying and shreds and grains of dead skin and fragments of nail, scintillas, springing in the air.

  It was good to be doing this again.

  Maybe this man is defenseless against the truth of the world.

  What truth? She thought, What truth?

  Time is supposed to pass, she thought. But maybe he is living in another state. It is a kind of time that is simply and overwhelmingly there, laid out, unoccurring, and he lacks the inborn ability to reconceive this condition.

  What ability?

  There is nothing he can do to imagine time existing in reassuring sequence, passing, flowing, happening – the world happens, it has to, we feel it – with names and dates and distinctions.

  His future is unnamed. It is simultaneous, somehow, with the present. Neither happens before or after the other and they are equally accessible, perhaps, if only in his mind.

  The laws of nature permit things that in fact, in practice, she thought, never happen.

  But could.

  But could not.

  But could. If only in his mind, she thought.

  She ate dull light dinners, quickly, getting it over with. Sometimes he didn't appear and sometimes he appeared but didn't eat and once he was missing for six or seven hours and she went through the house and then down the driveway in the dark, shining a flashlight in the trees and calmly saying, "Where are you?"

  She waited inside with a book in her hands, a prop, sitting and thinking, not thinking, any woman who knows the worst.

  He came into the room then, edgingly, in his selfwinding way, as if, as if. She watched him try to adapt his frame to a wing chair and allowed herself a certain measure of relief, a kind of body lightness that disengaged her dreamily from the stolid woman with the book.

  She thought of a man showing up unexpectedly. Not the man who was here now. Another man. It was nothing, it was something that came into her mind while she ate her breakfast, a man appearing suddenly, as in a movie, and he is shot from below. Not shot but photographed. Not shot-shot but captured on motion-picture film, from below, so that he looms. It comes as a shock, the way it's done, a man at the door, lighted in such and such a way, menacingly, for effect, or encountered in the driveway when she gets out of her car, a large man, looming suddenly above her. It is the shock of the outside world, the blow, the stun of intrusion, and the moment is rendered in a way that's deeply threatening to two people who have been living reclusively, in self-involved circumstances. It turns out that he is the owner of the house, a large man, yes, fo
r effect, old but fit, or not so old, and it turns out further that he is here to talk about Mr. Tuttle.

  She saw herself in the scene, in the driveway, listening to the man. It was just a passing thing, a story she told herself, or screened, forgettably. The man explains to her that Mr. Tuttle, by whatever name, is a family member of the second cousin type, or he is the son, this is better, of a beloved sister, and he has spent much of his life in this house, with an undiagnosed condition, or braindamaged, better, and being cared for part-time by a nurse hired by the man, the owner, who is a little tweedy, a little shabby but mostly sad, sort of family sad, and when the owner and his wife Alma resolved to live elsewhere, with the children grown and starting families of their own, they decided to rent this old lopsided pile, their memoried hearth and home, and eventually probably sell, and they put Mr. Tuttle, whose real name does not get used, into a facility for people suffering from one sort of condition or another, a hundred miles from here, states of being that are beyond the most reckless surmise, and it never occurred to the family, when they heard he was missing from the facility, that he might be capable of finding his way back to the house, until now. It has occurred to them now, and so here he is, the owner, inquiring.

  She refrains, in her imagining, as does the owner, from using the lost dog analogy as it pertains to Mr. Tuttle, out of whatever scruple and so on, and that was how the thing ended, more or less, over breakfast, with the owner and the tenant in the driveway, looking vaguely at the house.

  The name Alma came out of nowhere. It seemed completely believable. Everything seemed believable, even the lost dog return, and the thing about the scene is that it never reached the point of does she turn him in, does she give him up, but just ended, abruptly, like this.