Great Jones Street (Contemporary American Fiction)

by Don DeLillo

  “I’m not up on things,” I said.

  “You’re missing a lot. There’s a lot going on. It’s all under the surface, of course. Surface events are practically nil. But that doesn’t mean nothing’s going on. Incidentally you were seen in three different cities in England day before yesterday. And you’re buried in an unmarked grave in rural Montana. As opposed to urban Montana, I guess.”

  “The rumors are getting a little sloppy.”

  “Poetic is the word according to Globke. But things keep going. Things haven’t let up at all. The press is still having the dry heaves over your disappearance. The underground press. The radical press. The trade press. The straight press. The revolutionary press.”

  “It can’t be much of a disappearance. ABC was here this morning. Do you want the package or not?”

  “Do I want the package or not? Well now that’s not the easiest question to answer. I do want the package, yes. But what do I want to do with it? Now that’s something else. I’ve been given a plane ticket and certain instructions. But there are other courses I might pursue. These people known as Happy Valley aren’t necessarily prepared to understand every little nuance of the situation. I mean presumably the thing is up for bidding. It’s a free market, isn’t it? There are subtleties. Maybe somebody is prepared to bid on this product. There are nuances. There are ambiguities. Life itself is sheer ambiguity. If a person doesn’t see that, he’s either an asshole or a fascist.”

  “But you’ll take the package with you.”

  “Absolutely,” he said. “I’ll do that absolutely. In fact I leave on vacation in a matter of hours. Point or points unknown. Globke will have to get along without me for the next few weeks. Actually I haven’t made my big decision yet. I want to wait till the last minute. This flight or that. I may choose to take my seat at the negotiating table with Dr. Pepper. Or I may decide to deal on my own. Straight salary gets to be boring, tax structures being what they are. So who knows? I may risk all.”

  “Florence Nightingale and a whole lot of bandages.”

  He raised the shopping bag.

  “Here, take this,” he said.

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the product.”

  The package he took from the shopping bag looked the same as the one in the trunk. Brown wrapping paper. Brown gummed tape. Same size. Roughly the same weight. Hanes displayed his amusement by putting his hand to his face and gazing into the middle distance.

  “Opel,” I said.

  “Very good. Excellent. I didn’t think you’d know. She gave it to me when I was last here. You were sleeping the sleep of the innocent. She told me to call it the product. I don’t normally approve of private jokes. But in this case, two people I’ve admired—why not? Apparently she was going to leave it here for you to find once we were on our way to Pepperland. She had no intention of coming back here, as you may or may not know. When we finished with Dr. Pepper she planned to head directly for Spain. Eventually you’d find the package and that would be the end of the little joke. But when the courier turned out to be an old acquaintance, namely myself, she thought it would be a nice idea to embellish the joke by having me deliver the goods. I have no idea what’s in there and don’t intend to ask. To be opened when the Glob begins to menace. Her words. When the Glob begins to menace.”

  “Whatever it is, it’s my birthday present.”

  “Happy birthday,” he said. “But I want you to know I’m disappointed you don’t have any advice for me on what kind of cartridge recorder to get. I love to get advice from people at the top of a particular professional heap. Any kind of advice from such people I find is worth listening to.”

  “Any kind at all?”

  “Absolutely,” he said.

  “Be willing to die for your beliefs, or computer printouts of your beliefs.”

  “That’s nearly a very interesting remark,” Hanes said.

  I opened the trunk, gave him the original package and replaced it with Opel’s gift. That night there was a woman in the hall when I went down the stairs. She was in the process of opening the door to the first floor apartment. Her galoshes, with shoes inside them, were set against the wall, dripping snow, and she stood in bare feet and sorted through the keys in her handbag. She was a short compact woman whose ankles seemed to have a special density. I nodded to her—the kind of greeting exchanged by men confined in submarines for long periods.

  “I’m the woman downstairs,” she said. “Up-on-three told me there was a new person. You’re not noisy, that’s for sure. If it’s too cold, hit the pipes. Micklewhite. Downstairs from you.”

  “Right.”

  “I been here it seems like a hundred years. My husband used to be the super. But he died of complications. I take care of sending up the heat. If you get cold, hit twice on the pipes. My kid inside isn’t normal. Don’t worry if you hear noises.”

  “It doesn’t get very loud.”

  “My husband had all kinds of cockamamie ideas. First off he wanted to sell the kid to a carnival. But who’d buy him? They wouldn’t be able to sell enough tickets for all the trouble it takes to take care of him. Then he wanted to rent him out to colleges where they have doctors and nurses studying in there. I put the kibosh on that. I said you’re dreaming. I said nobody wants to look at this kid. I said the only thing to do is leave him here and keep the door closed.”

  “What’s his name?” I said.

  “His name? He don’t have a name. We never figured he’d live past four months with a head like his head. But did we get fooled. Did we get stuck with a lemon. My husband, he figured make the best of it. Find an interested party and either sell the kid outright or lease him by the month. Carnivals, they have seasons. Take him, bring him back, take him, bring him back. You should have seen that s.o.b. He used to work out schemes and plans and arrangements, left and right. I said hooey. I said you’re dreaming. I said you’ll have to go to the booby hatch to find an interested party. He wanted to take out ads, my husband. Carnivals, they have special newspapers. He kept working out plans and more plans and more plans until the day he keeled over. You should have seen him keel over. It was just after the second operation. Tessie was here, the candy store’s daughter. We watched him keel right over. I told Tessie I said I bet it’s complications. But he had big plans. You should have seen him talk. He was only this big but he had a mouth on him like a power saw. I’ll tell you what he was because you wouldn’t guess it if you saw him. He was a horse pervert. He went to the track rain or shine. Him and the chink from the Bronx, they went to the track in blizzards with their hats down over their ears. He lost thirty, forty simoleons on the average every time they went. The chink had winners left and right. The chink knew the scratch sheet, he knew the smart money, he knew the track, he knew the weather, he knew the animals. My husband, he didn’t know shit from Shinola. He’d starve himself half to death to save enough money to give it to a horse. But don’t mind my mouth. I talk and talk and never know what’s coming out. It’s loneliness, that’s all it is. It’s living with someone that can’t form a word.”

  I tried to remember what I was doing on the stairs. I had my lumber jacket on but I didn’t know where I was headed. I stayed outside the building for a while. A man in a long coat stood in the alley between Lafayette and Broadway. When I went back upstairs it was quiet everywhere. No bowel sounds in the plumbing and little of Fenig tracing his way to productivity. The man from ABC had left his card on the table. Although I’d never seen him on television I was able to recall almost every detail of his appearance. He possessed that high gloss common to interchangeable celebrities, to the male secretaries of important female executives, to lawyers with connections in show business. His clothes had seemed extremely tight, equipped with hidden straps, and he hadn’t changed expression for the course of his visit. Television. Maybe it was all a study in the art of mummification. The effect of the medium is so evanescent that those who work in its time apparatus feel the need to preserve thems
elves, delivering their bodies to be lacquered and trussed, sprayed with the rarest of pressurized jellies, all to one end, a release from the perilous context of time. This is their only vanity, to expect to dwell forever in hermetic sub-corridors, free of every ravage, secure as old kings asleep in sodium.

  I undressed for the first time in two days, getting into bed naked and weak, unfamiliar with my own body. Fenig began then, taking long and desperate strides, and the soft boy below, Micklewhite’s carnival meat, cried four times in the making of a dream.

  14

  HASHISH smoked in motels always seemed mean. I remember the feeling of something in the middle of my head trying to expand, to work itself outward, causing fearsome pressure. We were in motels between flights or performances, or between a flight and a performance, or the other way around. The motel was never quite the same but motel time was identical everywhere we stayed. There were no edges to the tensions of our waiting; it was one blank plane of unsegmented time. We were usually located somewhere on the outskirts of a vast population center (not necessarily a city) and we sat on the bed or floor, never in chairs, sucking up bad hash, waiting for the ever-rumored limousine to come slipping in out of the plastic glades, a comically elegant hearse into which seven or eight bodies might eventually drop, musicians, road managers, long blond girls with perfect legs, most of us in soiled old clothes, mendicant’s denim and mauled boots, all rank with weed, trying to encompass the range of inconsistencies and finding this an unworthwhile endeavor. But it’s the rooms we waited in that I recall. Their plainness had a center to it, a remote secret, something one might seek to reach only through the unbent energies of certain drugs. It was a strange thing about hashish used in this environment; it seemed a puppet drug of technology, made and marketed under government supervision, a contingency weapon devised by some hobbyist of the nastier industrial echelons. Nothing was safe and there was no sure way to the center. I became both frightened and totally immobile, distrustful of everyone in the room, growing heavier by the second. A grim organic motor pulsed against the walls of my head. Often I tried to reason my way out of this conjuncture of fear and stone-weight. But there were too many areas of concentrated pressure, there was too much gravity in the universe, and although I never reconciled myself to whatever horror was ultimate I could not resist the systematic truth that I was being subsumed into an even more immobile category, that of chair, bed, room or motel itself. (It was after one of these half-hours of pensive insanity that I came up with the name Transparanoia for our spreading inkblot of holding companies, trusts, acquisitions and cabals.) In the plainest of rooms nothing was comprehensible. We waited to be taken to a sports arena, convention center, theater or stadium, there to plug ourselves in, to run the lucky hum through our blood, to give them evil meat to eat, the blind maidens naked on Styrofoam pedestals, the sellers of ancient medicines, the masters of trance, the black stoics exhibiting their puncture marks, the knifemen and poisoners, every head melting in the warp of our sound, its deflected electric howl, ladies screaming from wheelchairs, children in drag, feeble-minded bankers, wine merchants and baby rapers, mystics in heat, translucent boys fondling the tits of missionaries’ wives. They pressed against each other, chained to their invisible history, the youngest among them knowing of all needs that one is uppermost, the need to be illiterate in the land of the self-erasing word.

  For the first time in weeks Fenig was sitting at the top of the landing. I paused at my door, feeling certain there was something he wanted to say.

  “Every pornographic work brings us closer to fascism.”

  I went inside, not bothering to lock the door. In a little while he came in. It was a dark afternoon and I lit a candle. Fenig sat at the edge of a straight-backed chair, leaning well forward, easily able to put his fingers to the tips of his tennis sneakers.

  “Many thanks,” he said.

  “What for?”

  “For listening.”

  “I had to stop anyway to get the door opened. So it wasn’t that much of an ordeal. Haven’t seen you, Eddie. Pounding away at the old machine. Is that what you’ve been doing?”

  “You called me Eddie. That’s a gracious gesture and I appreciate it. Coming from you, Bucky, tops in your trade, it’s not the kind of thing I’m ever likely to forget. Is there some coffee you can give me?”

  “I haven’t been able to find the coffee.”

  “I’d be happy to consume the dregs from an old cup that’s just lying around unwashed.”

  “Sorry.”

  “I’m in the middle of a dark period, practically black. It’s one of those times in a writer’s life when he or she just wants to fall into bed and pull the covers over his or her head. I’m dropping all my genres and going into a new one completely. The kiddie filth didn’t pan out. I can’t sell a thing. I can’t make anything happen. It’s all going sour and I’m just beginning to suspect the reason. Maybe I’ll have more on that next time we get together. But for now suffice it to say I’m in deep trouble.”

  “How deep?”

  “How deep is deep, Bucky? The very depths. The place where no sunlight reaches. The pressure hole of the great ocean trench. I’m surrounded by blind fish swimming all around me. It’s colder than mountains.”

  “The pacing hasn’t helped. Is that right?”

  “There was a point there and I shouldn’t admit this even to you, Bucky, but there was a point there when I actually did some running and jumping. I told myself it was exercise, exercise. But I knew deep down it was an extreme form of pacing, an attempt to reinvigorate the format. Now I’m back to conventional pacing again so maybe all is not total blackness just yet. I’ve written in many styles and in great quantity. I used to turn out material by the yard and they used to pay me by the yard. I don’t know what’s happened. I know I haven’t priced myself out of the market. I know I haven’t lost my willingness to work. But the fact remains I can’t sell a thing lately. Rejections every which way. It must be an inner failing. Pornography caused the original trouble. That much I know. I got lost in P-ville and I couldn’t get out with my professionalism intact. I’m just now beginning to understand the factors and motivations behind my lack of inspiration, for lack of a better word, but that’s another story for another season. If there’s anything I am, it’s professional. Take that away and I turn into an amorphous mass of undifferentiated matter. There’s a cruel kind of poetry to the market. The big wheel spins and gyrates and makes firecracker noises, going faster and faster and throwing off anybody who can’t hold on. The market is rejecting me but I’m not blind to the cruel poetry in it. The market is phenomenal, bright as a hundred cities, turning and turning and there are little figures everywhere trying to hold on with one hand but they’re getting thrown off into the surrounding night, the silence, the emptiness, the darkness, the basin, the crater, the pit. But the son of a bitch won’t get rid of me that easy. I’m a tenacious brute for my size. I’m an in-fighter who can hold his own, pound for pound. I know the ups and downs of this business like few men in my time. But I appreciate your calling me Eddie. This is a big thing to an emotional person like me, which is basically what I am, and I want you to know I’ll remember. Everybody else forgets but I remember.”

  “I can’t offer advice for your comeback.”

  “I’ll tell you what you can do,” he said. “You can find the coffee pot you used last time you made coffee and maybe there’s some grounds left over in the ground holder and you can give me a paper napkin and I can saturate the napkin with soggy coffee grounds and just hold it under my nose and sniff it for a little while.”

  “Aside from everything else I don’t think I have any napkins.”

  “The paper kind is what I need.”

  “Even if there are some, I haven’t seen any coffee grounds lately.”

  “Fame, riches, greatness, immortality.”

  We sat through a long period of silence. Fenig tugged on the laces used to tighten the hood of his sweatshirt. He too
k his own pulse, right thumb on left wrist. He ran his tongue over the hair on the back of his hand. Then he made an odd sound. Warp. I leaned toward him.

  “What’s wrong?”

  “Sick to my stomach,” he said. “It’s a characteristic of every dark period I go through. This is the absolute middle of it. The cold ocean trench. Not being able to start something new. Warp. It’s happened before but never this bad. Genetically blind fish.”

  “Some water maybe.”

  “I’ll be all right in a minute.”

  “You don’t look good.”

  “Warp.”

  “Something to drink, Eddie.”

  “I’d better get upstairs. I thought it was sinking back into my stomach but maybe it’s not. Upstairs would be best. Warp. I don’t like to inflict my creative tensions on other people. Best if I went upstairs.”

  “Yes,” I said.

  The bed was a vast welcoming organism, a sea culture or synthetic plant, enraptured by the object it absorbed. As I headed deeper into mists and old stories, into windy images poised on the rim of sleep, I began to feel that the bed was having a dream and that the dream was me. One candle burned, this light not quite eluding my awareness. I was barely conscious, being dreamed by a preternatural entity, taken for a mind’s ride into the mystery of things. It was all a question of control. I was being dreamed-smoked-created. The dream took form as a man asleep in a bed situated in the middle of a room in which a lone candle burned. This was not real but a dream and I was no more than the stale chemical breath of the dreamer. The essential question was one of control. I went deeper now, struggling to produce a dream of my own, to return from those dim midlands with the fire of legend and sex contained in a thimble, safe for men to use. I was suspended in a double moment, trying to free myself, when suddenly a fierce noise broke over the bed, a wild ringing that lifted me through levels of consciousness out into the cold open room. Telephone. It seemed incredible and I merely stared at the sucking black shape. Each note seemed louder and more shrill, the protest cry of a thing that preferred its latent state. Telephone. I walked across the floor and picked up the receiver.