by Don DeLillo
“Bill Lawton.”
“The man. The name I mentioned.”
“I don’t think so,” Lianne said.
“This is their secret. I know the name but that’s all. And I thought maybe Justin. Because my kids totally blank out when I bring up the subject.”
She didn’t know that Justin was taking the binoculars on his visits to the Siblings. They weren’t his binoculars exactly, although she guessed it was all right for him to use them without permission. But maybe not, she thought, waiting for the man to call her number.
“Aren’t they doing birds in school?”
“Last time it was clouds.”
“Turns out I was wrong about the clouds. But they’re definitely studying birds and birdcalls and habitats,” she told the woman. “They go trekking through Central Park.”
She realized how much she hated to stand in line with a number in her fist. She hated this regimen of assigned numbers, strictly enforced, in a confined space, with nothing at the end of the process but a small white bow-tied box of pastry.
He wasn’t sure what it was that woke him up. He lay there, eyes open, thinking into the dark. Then he began to hear it, out on the stairs and along the hall, coming from a lower floor somewhere, music, and he listened carefully now, hand drums and stringed instruments and massed voices in the walls, but soft, but seemingly far off, on the other side of a valley, it seemed, men in chanted prayer, voices in chorus in praise of God.
Allah-uu Allah-uu Allah-uu
There was an old-fashioned pencil sharpener clamped to the end of the table in Justin’s room. She stood at the door and watched him insert each pencil in the slot and then crank the handle. He had red-and-blue combination pencils, Cedar Pointe pencils, Dixon Trimlines, vintage Eberhard Fabers. He had pencils from hotels in Zurich and Hong Kong. There were pencils fashioned from tree bark, rough and knotted. There were pencils from the design store of the Museum of Modern Art. He had Mirado Black Warriors. He had pencils from a SoHo shop that were inscribed along the shaft with cryptic sayings from Tibet.
It was awful in a way, all these fragments of status washing up in some little kid’s room.
But what she loved to watch was the way he blew the microscopic shavings off the pencil point after he finished sharpening. If he were to do it all day, she’d watch all day, pencil after pencil. He’d crank and blow, crank and blow, a ritual more thorough and righteous than the formal signing of some document of state by eleven men with medals.
When he saw her watching he said, “What?”
“I talked to Katie’s mother today. Katie and what’s-his-name. She told me about the binoculars.”
He stood and watched her, pencil in hand.
“Katie and what’s-his-name.”
“Robert,” he said.
“Her little brother Robert. And his older sister Katie. And this man the three of you keep talking about. Is this something I should know about?”
“What man?” he said.
“What man. And what binoculars,” she said. “Are you supposed to take the binoculars out of the house without permission?”
He stood and watched. He had pale hair, his father’s, and a certain somberness of body, a restraint, his own, that gave him an uncanny discipline in games, in physical play.
“Did your father give you permission?”
He stood and watched.
“What’s so interesting about the view from that room? You can tell me that, can’t you?”
She leaned against the door, prepared to remain for three, four, five days, in the context of parental body language, or until he answered.
He moved one hand away from his body, slightly, the hand without the pencil, palm up, and executed the faintest change in facial expression, causing an arched indentation between the chin and lower lip, like an old man’s mute version of the young boy’s opening remark, which was “What?”
He sat alongside the table, left forearm placed along the near edge, hand dangling from the adjoining edge, curled into a gentle fist. He raised the hand without lifting his forearm and kept it in the air for five seconds. He did this ten times.
It was their term, gentle fist, the rehab center’s term, used in the instruction sheet.
He found these sessions restorative, four times a day, the wrist extensions, the ulnar deviations. These were the true countermeasures to the damage he’d suffered in the tower, in the descending chaos. It was not the MRI and not the surgery that brought him closer to well-being. It was this modest home program, the counting of seconds, the counting of repetitions, the times of day he reserved for the exercises, the ice he applied following each set of exercises.
There were the dead and maimed. His injury was slight but it wasn’t the torn cartilage that was the subject of this effort. It was the chaos, the levitation of ceilings and floors, the voices choking in smoke. He sat in deep concentration, working on the hand shapes, the bend of the wrist toward the floor, the bend of the wrist toward the ceiling, the forearm flat on the table, the thumb-up configuration in certain setups, the use of the uninvolved hand to apply pressure to the involved hand. He washed his splint in warm soapy water. He did not adjust his splint without consulting the therapist. He read the instruction sheet. He curled the hand into a gentle fist.
Jack Glenn, her father, did not want to submit to the long course of senile dementia. He made a couple of phone calls from his cabin in northern New Hampshire and then used an old sporting rifle to kill himself. She did not know the details. She was twenty-two when this happened and did not ask the local police for details. What detail might there be that was not unbearable? But she had to wonder if it was the rifle she knew, the one he’d let her grip and aim, but not fire, the time she’d joined him in the woods, as a fourteen-year-old, in a halfhearted hunt for varmints. She was a city girl and not completely sure what a varmint was but clearly recalled something he’d said to her that day. He liked to talk about the anatomy of racecars, motorcycles, hunting rifles, how things work, and she liked to listen. It was a mark of the distance between them that she listened so eagerly, the perennial miles, the weeks and months.
He’d hefted the weapon and said to her, “The shorter the barrel, the stronger the muzzle blast.”
The force of that term, muzzle blast, carried through the years. The news of his death seemed to ride on the arc of those two words. They were awful words but she tried to tell herself he’d done a brave thing. It was way too soon. There was time before the disease took solid hold but Jack was always respectful of nature’s little fuckups and figured the deal was sealed. She wanted to believe that the rifle that killed him was the one he’d braced against her shoulder among the stands of tamarack and spruce in the plunging light of that northern day.
Martin embraced her in the doorway, gravely. He’d been somewhere in Europe when the attacks occurred and was on one of the first transatlantic flights as schedules resumed, erratically.
“Nothing seems exaggerated anymore. Nothing amazes me,” he said.
Her mother was in the bedroom dressing for the day, finally, at noon, and Martin walked around the room looking at things, stepping among Justin’s toys, noting changes in the placement of objects.
“Somewhere in Europe. This is how I think of you.”
“Except when I’m here,” he said.
The standing hand, a small bronze normally on the bamboo end table, was now on the wrought-iron table, laden with books, near the window, and the Nevelson wall piece had been replaced by the photograph of Rimbaud.
“But even when you’re here, I think of you coming from a distant city on your way to another distant city and neither place has shape or form.”
“This is me, I am shapeless,” he said.
They talked about events. They talked about the things everyone was talking about. He followed her to the kitchen, where she poured him a beer. She poured and talked.
“People read poems. People I know, they read poetry to ease the shock an
d pain, give them a kind of space, something beautiful in language,” she said, “to bring comfort or composure. I don’t read poems. I read newspapers. I put my head in the pages and get angry and crazy.”
“There’s another approach, which is to study the matter. Stand apart and think about the elements,” he said. “Coldly, clearly if you’re able to. Do not let it tear you down. See it, measure it.”
“Measure it,” she said.
“There’s the event, there’s the individual. Measure it. Let it teach you something. See it. Make yourself equal to it.”
Martin Ridnour was an art dealer, a collector, an investor perhaps. She wasn’t sure what he did exactly or how he did it but suspected that he bought art and then flipped it, quickly, for large profit. She liked him. He spoke with an accent and had an apartment here and an office in Basel. He spent time in Berlin. He did or did not have a wife in Paris.
They were back in the living room, he with the glass in one hand, bottle in the other.
“Probably I don’t know what I’m talking about,” he said. “You talk, I will drink.”
Martin was overweight but did not appear ripe with good living. He was usually jet-lagged, more or less unwashed, in a well-worn suit, trying to resemble an old poet in exile, her mother said. He was not quite bald, with a shadow of gray bristle on his head and a beard that looked about two weeks old, mostly gray and never groomed.
“I called Nina when I got in this morning. We’re going away for a week or two.”
“Good idea.”
“Handsome old house in Connecticut, by the shore.”
“You arrange things.”
“This is something I do, yes.”
“I have a question, unrelated. You can ignore it,” she said. “A question from nowhere.”
She looked at him, standing behind the armchair across the room, draining his glass.
“Do the two of you have sex? It’s none of my business. But can you have sex? I mean considering the knee replacement. She’s not doing the exercises.”
He took the bottle and glass toward the kitchen, responding over his shoulder with some amusement.
“She doesn’t have sex with her knee. We bypass the knee. The knee is damn tender. But we work around it.”
She waited for him to return.
“None of my business. But she seems to be entering a kind of withdrawal. And I just wondered.”
“And you,” he said. “And Keith. He’s back with you now. This is true?”
“Could leave tomorrow. Nobody knows.”
“But he’s staying in your flat.”
“It’s early. I don’t know what will happen. We sleep together, yes, if that’s what you’re asking. But only technically.”
He showed quizzical interest.
“Share a bed. Innocently,” he said.
“Yes.”
“I like this. How many nights?”
“He spent the first night in the hospital for observation. Since then, whatever it is. This is Monday. Six days, five nights.”
“I will be asking for progress reports,” he said.
He’d talked to Keith a couple of times only. This was an American, not a New Yorker, not one of the Manhattan elect, a group maintained by controlled propagation. He tried to gain a sense of the younger man’s feelings about politics and religion, the voice and manner of the heartland. All he learned was that Keith had once owned a pit bull. This, at least, seemed to mean something, a dog that was all skull and jaws, an American breed, developed originally to fight and kill.
“One of these days maybe you and Keith will have a chance to talk again.”
“About women, I think.”
“Mother and daughter. All the sordid details,” she said.
“I like Keith. I told him a story once that he enjoyed. About cardplayers. He’s a cardplayer of course. About cardplayers I used to know and about the seating arrangement they maintained at their weekly game, for nearly half a century. Longer actually. He enjoyed this story.”
Her mother came in, Nina, in a dark skirt and white blouse, leaning on her cane. Martin held her briefly and then watched her settle into the chair, slowly, in segmental movements.
“What old dead wars we fight. I think in these past days we’ve lost a thousand years,” she said.
Martin had been away for a month. He was seeing the last stage of the transformation, her embrace of age, the studied attitude that weaves easily through the fact itself. Lianne felt a sadness on his behalf. Has her mother’s hair gone whiter? Is she taking too much pain medication? Did she have a minor stroke at that conference in Chicago? And, finally, was he lying about their sexual activity? Her mind is fine. She is not so forgiving of the normal erosions, the names she now and then forgets, the location of an object she has just, seconds ago, put somewhere. But she is alert to what is important, the broad surround, to other states of being.
“Tell us what they’re doing in Europe.”
“They’re being kind to Americans,” he said.
“Tell us what you’ve bought and sold.”
“What I can tell you is that the art market will stagnate. Activity here and there in modern masters. Otherwise dismal prospects.”
“Modern masters. I’m relieved,” Nina said.
“Trophy art.”
“People need their trophies.”
He seemed heartened by her sarcasm.
“I’ve just barely set foot in the door. In the country in fact. What does she do? She gives me grief.”
“This is her job,” Lianne said.
They’d known each other for twenty years, Martin and Nina, lovers for much of that time, New York, Berkeley, somewhere in Europe. Lianne knew that the defensive stance he took at times was an aspect of their private manner of address, not the stain of something deeper. He was not the shapeless man he claimed to be or physically mimicked. He was unflinching in fact, and smart in his work, and gracious to her, and generous to her mother. The two beautiful Morandi still lifes were gifts from Martin. The passport photos on the opposite wall, Martin also, from his collection, aged documents, stamped and faded, history measured in inches, and also beautiful.
Lianne said, “Who wants to eat?”
Nina wanted to smoke. The bamboo end table stood next to the armchair now and held an ashtray, a lighter and a pack of cigarettes.
Her mother lit up. She watched, Lianne did, feeling something familiar and a little painful, how Nina at a certain point began to consider her invisible. The memory was located there, in the way she snapped shut the lighter and put it down, in the hand gesture and the drifting smoke.
“Dead wars, holy wars. God could appear in the sky tomorrow.”
“Whose God would it be?” Martin said.
“God used to be an urban Jew. He’s back in the desert now.”
Lianne’s studies were meant to take her into deeper scholarship, into serious work in languages or art history. She’d traveled through Europe and much of the Middle East but it was tourism in the end, with shallow friends, not determined inquiry into beliefs, institutions, languages, art, or so said Nina Bartos.
“It’s sheer panic. They attack out of panic.”
“This much, yes, it may be true. Because they think the world is a disease. This world, this society, ours. A disease that’s spreading,” he said.
“There are no goals they can hope to achieve. They’re not liberating a people or casting out a dictator. Kill the innocent, only that.”
“They strike a blow to this country’s dominance. They achieve this, to show how a great power can be vulnerable. A power that interferes, that occupies.”
He spoke softly, looking into the carpet.
“One side has the capital, the labor, the technology, the armies, the agencies, the cities, the laws, the police and the prisons. The other side has a few men willing to die.”
“God is great,” she said.
“Forget God. These are matters of history. This is politics an
d economics. All the things that shape lives, millions of people, dispossessed, their lives, their consciousness.”
“It’s not the history of Western interference that pulls down these societies. It’s their own history, their mentality. They live in a closed world, of choice, of necessity. They haven’t advanced because they haven’t wanted to or tried to.”
“They use the language of religion, okay, but this is not what drives them.”
“Panic, this is what drives them.”
Her mother’s anger submerged her own. She deferred to it. She saw the hard tight fury in Nina’s face and felt, herself, only a sadness, hearing these two people, joined in spirit, take strongly opposing positions.
Then Martin eased off, voice going soft again.
“All right, yes, it may be true.”
“Blame us. Blame us for their failures.”
“All right, yes. But this is not an attack on one country, one or two cities. All of us, we are targets now.”
They were still talking ten minutes later when Lianne left the room. She stood in the bathroom looking in the mirror. The moment seemed false to her, a scene in a movie when a character tries to understand what is going on in her life by looking in the mirror.
She was thinking, Keith is alive.
Keith had been alive for six days now, ever since he appeared at the door, and what would this mean to her, what would this do to her and to her son?
She washed her hands and face. Then she went to the cabinet and got a fresh towel and dried herself. After she tossed the towel in the hamper she flushed the toilet. She didn’t flush the toilet to make the others think she’d left the living room for a compelling reason. The flushing toilet wasn’t audible in the living room. This was for her own pointless benefit, flushing. Maybe it was meant to mark the end of the interval, to get her out of here.
What was she doing here? She was being a child, she thought.
The talk had begun to fade by the time she returned. He had more to say, Martin, but possibly thought this was not the moment, not now, too soon, and he wandered over to the Morandi paintings on the wall.