by Don DeLillo
The second encounter was longer and stranger. Museum of Modern Art. No matter how many times I go to the museum, walking east to west, it's always farther down the street than it was last time. I was wandering through an exhibition on Dada and there was Elster, alone, stooped over a display case. I knew he'd written about the meanings of baby talk and so he'd clearly be interested in a major show of objects created in the name of demolished logic. I followed him for half an hour. I looked at the things he looked at. At times he leaned on his cane, other times simply carried it, haphazardly, horizontally, through tides of people. I told myself be calm, be civilized, speak slowly. When he moved toward the exit I approached him, reminded him of the earlier meeting, talked some baby talk and then urged him gently across the sixth floor to the gallery where the slow-winged Psycho was installed. We stood in the dark and watched. I sensed nearly at once that Elster was resisting. Something was being subverted here, his traditional language of response. Stillborn images, collapsing time, an idea so open to theory and argument that it left him no clear context to dominate, just crisp rejection. Out on the street he spoke at last, mostly about his aching knee. No film, no chance, not ever.
A week later he telephoned and said he was in a place called Anza-Borrego, in California. I'd never heard of it. Then a hand-drawn map arrived in the mail, roads and jeep trails, and I caught a bargain flight the next afternoon. Two days, I thought. Three at most.
3
Every lost moment is the life. It's unknowable except to us, each of us inexpressibly, this man, that woman. Childhood is lost life reclaimed every second, he said. Two infants alone in a room, in dimmest light, twins, laughing. Thirty years later, one in Chicago, one in Hong Kong, they are the issue of that moment.
A moment, a thought, here and gone, each of us, on a street somewhere, and this is everything. I wondered what he meant by everything. It's what we call self, the true life, he said, the essential being. It's self in the soft wallow of what it knows, and what it knows is that it will not live forever.
I used to sit through the credits, all of them, when I went to the movies. It was a practice that worked against intuition and common sense. I was in my early twenties, unaffiliated in every respect, and I never left my seat until the full run of names and titles was completed. The titles were a language out of some ancient war. Clapper, armorer, boom operator, crowd costumes. I felt compelled to sit and read. There was a sense that I was capitulating to some moral failing. The starkest case of this occurred after the final shot of a major Hollywood production when the credits began to roll, a process that lasted five, ten, fifteen minutes and included hundreds of names, a thousand names. It was the decline and fall, a spectacle of excess nearly equal to the movie itself, but I didn't want it to end.
It was part of the experience, everything mattered, absorb it, endure it, stunt driving, set dressing, payroll accounting. I read the names, all of them, most of them, real people, who were they, why so many, names that haunted me in the dark. By the time the credits ended I was alone in the theater, maybe an old woman sitting somewhere, widowed, children never call. I stopped doing this when I began to work in the business, although I didn't think of it as a business. It was film, only that, and I was determined to do one, make one. Un film. Ein film.
Here, with them, I didn't miss movies. The landscape began to seem normal, distance was normal, heat was weather and weather was heat. I began to understand what Elster meant when he said that time is blind here. Beyond the local shrubs and cactus, only waves of space, occasional far thunder, the wait for rain, the gaze across the hills to a mountain range that was there yesterday, lost today in lifeless skies.
"Heat."
"That's right," Jessie said.
"Say the word."
"Heat."
"Feel it beating in."
"Heat," she said.
She was sitting in the sun, first time I'd seen her do this, wearing what she always wore, jeans rolled to the calves now, shirtsleeves to the elbows, and I stood in the shade watching.
"You'll die doing that."
"What?"
"Sitting in the sun."
"What else is there to do?"
"Stay inside and plan your day."
"Where are we anyway?" she said. "Do I even know?"
I wasn't using my cell phone and almost never touched my laptop. They began to seem feeble, whatever their speed and reach, devices overwhelmed by landscape. Jessie was trying to read science fiction but nothing she'd read so far could begin to match ordinary life on this planet, she said, for sheer unimaginableness. Her father found two handweights in a closet, seven or eight pounds each, made in Austria. How long have they been here? How did they get here? Who used them? He started using them now, lifting and breathing, lifting and gasping, one arm, then the other, up and down, sounding like a man in the midst of controlled strangulation, autoerotically asphyxiating.
What did I do? I filled the styrofoam cooler with bags of ice and bottles of water and took aimless drives, listening to tapes of blues singers. I wrote a letter to my wife and then tried to decide whether to send it or tear it up or wait a couple of days and then rewrite it and send it or tear it up. I tossed banana peels off the deck for animals to eat and I stopped counting the days since I'd arrived, somewhere around twenty-two.
In the kitchen he said, "I know about your marriage. You had the kind of marriage where you tell each other everything. You told her everything. I look at you and see this in your face. It's the worst thing you can do in a marriage. Tell her everything you feel, tell her everything you do. That's why she thinks you're crazy."
At dinner, over another omelette, he waved his fork and said, "You understand it's not a matter of strategy. I'm not talking about secrets or deceptions. I'm talking about being yourself. If you reveal everything, bare every feeling, ask for understanding, you lose something crucial to your sense of yourself. You need to know things the others don't know. It's what no one knows about you that allows you to know yourself."
Jessie rotated the glasses and dishes in the cabinet so we wouldn't use the same ones all the time and neglect the others. She did this in periodic spells of energy, a person possessed, working out a systematic arrangement in the sink, in the drain basket and on the shelves. Her father encouraged this. He dried the plates and then watched her shelve them, each in its determined slot. She was functioning, she was helping out around the house and she was doing it to an extreme degree, which was good, which was great, he said, because what's the meaning of doing dishes if you're not driven by something beyond sheer necessity.
He said to her, "Before you leave, I want you to see a bighorn sheep."
She went slack-jawed and held her hands out, palms up, like where did this come from, like what did I do to deserve this, eyes wide, a dumbfounded cartoon child.
The night she talked about art galleries in Chelsea.
She used to visit the galleries with a friend named Alicia. She said Alicia was deep as a dime. She said they'd walk down the long street choosing galleries at random and looking at the art and then walking down the street again and around the corner and up the next street, walking and looking, and one day she thought of something inexplicable. Let's do the same thing, up and down the same streets, but without going in the galleries. Alicia said yes, like instantly. They did this and it was quietly exciting, she said, it was like the idea of both their lifetimes. Walking down those long and mostly empty streets on weekday afternoons and unspokenly bypassing the art and then crossing the street and walking up the other side of the same street and turning the corner and going to the next street and walking down the next street and crossing to the other side and walking up the same street. Down and then up and then over to the next street, again and again, just walking and talking. It honestly deepened the experience, she said, made it better and more appreciative, street after street.
The night she stood on the edge of the deck, facing out into the dark, hands on the rail.
It was a nearly studied pose, unlike her, and I stood up, I wasn't sure why, just stood up, watching her. The light in Elster's bedroom was still on. I think I wanted her to turn and see me standing there. If I said something, she would know I was standing. The source of the voice would indicate I was standing and she would wonder why and then turn and look at me. This would tell me what she wanted, the way she turned, the look on her face, or what I wanted. Because I had to be smart, be careful. We were three of us alone here and I was the one in the middle, potential disrupter, the family fuckup.
When the light in Elster's bedroom went out I realized what an innocent reversion the moment was, teenage boy and girl from another era waiting for her parents to go to bed, except that her parents were divorced and bitter and her mother had gone to bed three hours ago, eastern standard time, and possibly not alone.
I asked her to come over and sit with me. I used that phrase, sit with me. She crossed the deck and we sat for a time. She said she'd been thinking about an elderly couple she took to doctors and helped at home sometimes. They all watched daytime TV and the woman kept looking at her husband to check his reaction to whatever the people on the screen were saying or doing. But he didn't have a reaction, he never had a reaction, he never even noticed that she was looking, and Jessie thought this was the whole long spectacle of a marriage sort of drop by drop, one head turning, the other head oblivious. They lost things all the time and spent hours and then days trying to find them, the mystery of disappearing objects, eyeglasses, fountain pens, tax documents, keys of course, shoes, one shoe, both shoes, and Jessie liked looking, she was good at it, all three of them moving through the apartment talking, looking, trying to reconstruct. The couple used old-fashioned fountain pens fed by actual ink. They were nice people, unfilthily rich, losing, misplacing, dropping all the time. They dropped spoons, dropped books, lost toothbrushes. They lost a painting, by a famous living American, that Jessie found at the back of a closet. Then she watched the wife look at the husband to note his response and she realized that she'd become part of the ritual, one watching the other watch the other.
They were as normal as people could be and still be normal, she said. A little more normal, they might be dangerous.
I reached over and took her hand, not sure why. I liked thinking of her with those old people, three innocents searching rooms for hours. She let me do it, giving no sign that she'd noticed. It was part of her asymmetry, the limp hand, blank face, and it did not necessarily make me think the moment might be extended to include other gestures, more intimate. She was sitting next to anyone, talking through me to the woman in a sari on the crosstown bus, to the receptionist in the doctor's office.
None of this mattered when her father's light went on. I didn't know how to disengage my hand without feeling ridiculous. The move had to be strategic, not tactical, had to be full-bodied, and I got up and walked over to the rail, the hand an incidental detail. He came out shuffling and moved past me, pajamas smelling old, body old, the bedroom, the bedsheets, his dependable stink trailing the man to his chair.
"Want a drink?"
"Scotch, neat," he said.
Inside I heard the screen door open and shut and watched her cross the living room and head down the hall, night over, one of a hundred times I'd caught a glimpse of her or moved past her or walked in the door as she was walking out, a small lifetime of nonencounters, like with your sister growing up, only carrying static now, a random agitation in the air.
I took his scotch out to the deck, vodka for me, one cube, vast night, moon in transit. When she was a child, he said, and I waited while he sipped his drink. She had to touch her arm or face to know who she was. Happened rarely but happened, he said. She'd put her hand to her face. This is Jessica. Her body was not there until she touched it. She doesn't remember this now, she was small, doctors, tests, her mother would pinch her, barest response. She wasn't a child who needed imaginary friends. She was imaginary to herself.
We talked about nothing special then, household matters, a trip to town, but certain themes whispered at the margins. The father's love, that was one, and the other man's stalled life, and the young woman who didn't want to be here, and other questions as well, implicit, the war, his role, my film.
I said, "The camera's on a tripod. I sit alongside. You look at me, not at the camera. I use available light. Is there noise from the street? We don't care. This is primate filmmaking. The dawn of man."
A faint smile. He knew I was only talking. The reason for being here had begun to fade. I was simply here, only talking. I wanted to lose the notion of going back there, to responsibility, old woes, to the burn of beginning something that would lead nowhere. How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement? One day soon all our talk, his and mine, will be like hers, just talk, self-contained, unreferring. We'll be here the way flies and mice are here, localized, seeing and knowing nothing but whatever our scanted nature allows. A dim idyll in the summer flatlands.
"Time falling away. That's what I feel here," he said. "Time becoming slowly older. Enormously old. Not day by day. This is deep time, epochal time. Our lives receding into the long past. That's what's out there. The Pleistocene desert, the rule of extinction."
I thought of Jessie sleeping. She would close her eyes and disappear, this was one of her gifts, I thought, she drops into immediate sleep. Every night the same. She sleeps on her side, curled up, embryonic, barely breathing.
"Consciousness accumulates. It begins to reflect upon itself. Something about this feels almost mathematical to me. There's almost some law of mathematics or physics that we haven't quite hit upon, where the mind transcends all direction inward. The omega point," he said. "Whatever the intended meaning of this term, if it has a meaning, if it's not a case of language that's struggling toward some idea outside our experience."
"What idea?"
"What idea. Paroxysm. Either a sublime transformation of mind and soul or some worldly convulsion. We want it to happen."
"You think we want it to happen."
"We want it to happen. Some paroxysm."
He liked this word. We let it hang there.
"Think of it. We pass completely out of being. Stones. Unless stones have being. Unless there's some profoundly mystical shift that places being in a stone."
Our rooms had a common wall, hers and mine, and I imagined myself lying in bed, in shallow awareness, half hallucinatory, there's a word for this, and I tried to think of the word on two levels, seated on the deck and sprawled in bed, hypnagogic, that was it, and there is Jessie only a meter away, serenely dreaming.
"Enough for one night," he said. "Enough and enough."
He seemed to be looking for a place to put his glass. I took it from him and watched him go inside and soon his bedroom light went out.
Or wide awake, can't sleep, both of us, and she is lying on her back, legs apart, and I am sitting up and smoking although I haven't had a cigarette in five years, and she is wearing whatever she wears when she goes to bed, T-shirt to the thighs.
I was still holding Elster's glass. I put it on the deck and finished my drink, slowly, and set the glass down next to his. I went inside and turned off a couple of lights and then stood outside her room. There was space between door and jamb and I eased the door open and stood there, waiting for the dark to soften to the point where I could make out shapes. Then there she was, in bed, but it took some time before I realized she was looking at me. She was under the bedsheet looking straight at me and then she turned on her side and faced the far wall, pulling the sheet up to her neck.
Another moment passed before I drew the door quietly back to its original position. I went outside again and stood at the rail awhile. Then I adjusted the reclining chair to full length and lay flat on my back, eyes shut, hands on chest, and tried to feel like nobody nowhere, a shadow that's part of the night.
Elster drove in grim silence. This was routine. Even with no traffic, there were forces ma
ssed in opposition, depending on day and time-road conditions, threat of rain, impending nightfall, people in the car, the car itself. The GPS unit was okay, alerting him to turns, confirming the details of past experience. When Jessie was along, stretched across the rear seat, he'd try to listen to whatever she might be saying and the effort made him hunch toward the steering wheel in tense concentration. She liked to read road signs aloud, Restricted Area, Flash Flood Area, Call Box, Rock Slide Next 6 Miles. We were alone this time, he and I, going to town to stock up on groceries. He didn't want me to drive, he didn't trust other drivers, other drivers were not him.
In the market he moved along the shelves choosing items, tossing them in a basket. I did the same, we divided the store, moving quickly and capably and passing each other now and then in one of the aisles, avoiding eye contact.
On the way back I found myself engaged by the scribbled tar of repair work on the paved road. I was drowsy, staring straight ahead, and soon the spatter on the windshield seemed even more interesting than the tar. When we were off-road, on rubble, he reduced speed drastically and the easy bouncing nearly put me to sleep. My seat belt wasn't fastened. He usually said "Seat belts" when he started the car. I sat up straight and rolled my shoulders. I looked at the grit under my fingernails. The rule of seat belts was meant for Jessie but she didn't always comply. We went past a spindly creek bed and I wanted to pound the dashboard a few times, tom-tom-like, to get the blood pumping. But I just closed my eyes and sat there, nowhere, listening.
When we got back to the house she was gone.
From the kitchen he called her name. Then he went through the house looking. I wanted to tell him that she'd gone for a walk. But it would have sounded false. She didn't do that here. She hadn't done that since she'd arrived. I left the groceries on the kitchen counter and went outside to scan the immediate area, kicking through thorny bushes and ducking under mesquite snags. I wasn't sure what I was looking for. My rented car was where I'd left it. I checked the car's interior and then tried to detect fresh tire marks on the sandy approach to the house and later we both stood on the deck looking intently into the stillness.