by Don DeLillo
He didn’t believe this but he believed her. She felt it and meant it.
“You ask yourself what the story is that goes with the briefcase. I’m the story,” she said.
7
The two dark objects, the white bottle, the huddled boxes. Lianne turned away from the painting and saw the room itself as a still life, briefly. Then the human figures appear, Mother and Lover, with Nina still in the armchair, thinking remotely of something, and Martin hunched on the sofa now, facing her.
Finally her mother said, “Architecture, yes, maybe, but coming out of another time entirely, another century. Office towers, no. These shapes are not translatable to modern towers, twin towers. It’s work that rejects that kind of extension or projection. It takes you inward, down and in. That’s what I see there, half buried, something deeper than things or shapes of things.”
Lianne knew, in a pinprick of light, what her mother was going to say.
She said, “It’s all about mortality, isn’t it?”
“Being human,” Lianne said.
“Being human, being mortal. I think these pictures are what I’ll look at when I’ve stopped looking at everything else. I’ll look at bottles and jars. I’ll sit here looking.”
“You’ll need to move the chair a little closer.”
“I’ll push the chair up to the wall. I’ll call the maintenance man and have him push the chair for me. I’ll be too frail to do it myself. I’ll look and I’ll muse. Or I’ll just look. After a while I won’t need the paintings to look at. The paintings will be excess. I’ll look at the wall.”
Lianne crossed to the sofa, where she gave Martin a light poke in the arm.
“What about your walls? What’s on your walls?”
“My walls are bare. Home and office. I keep bare walls,” he said.
“Not completely,” Nina said.
“All right, not completely.”
She was looking at him.
“You tell us to forget God.”
The argument had been here all this time, in the air and on the skin, but the shift in tone was abrupt.
“You tell us this is history.”
Nina looked at him, she stared hard at Martin, her voice marked by accusation.
“But we can’t forget God. They invoke God constantly. This is their oldest source, their oldest word. Yes, there’s something else but it’s not history or economics. It’s what men feel. It’s the thing that happens among men, the blood that happens when an idea begins to travel, whatever’s behind it, whatever blind force or blunt force or violent need. How convenient it is to find a system of belief that justifies these feelings and these killings.”
“But the system doesn’t justify this. Islam renounces this,” he said.
“If you call it God, then it’s God. God is whatever God allows.”
“Don’t you realize how bizarre that is? Don’t you see what you’re denying? You’re denying all human grievance against others, every force of history that places people in conflict.”
“We’re talking about these people, here and now. It’s a misplaced grievance. It’s a viral infection. A virus reproduces itself outside history.”
He sat hunched and peering, leaning toward her now.
“First they kill you, then you try to understand them. Maybe, eventually, you’ll learn their names. But they have to kill you first.”
It went on for a time and Lianne listened, disturbed by the fervor in their voices. Martin sat wrapped in argument, one hand gripping the other, and he spoke about lost lands, failed states, foreign intervention, money, empire, oil, the narcissistic heart of the West, and she wondered how he did the work he did, made the living he made, moving art, taking profit. Then there were the bare walls. She wondered about that.
Nina said, “I’m going to smoke a cigarette now.”
This eased the tension in the room, the way she said it, gravely, an announcement and an event suitably consequential, measured to the level of discussion. Martin laughed, coming out of his tight crouch and heading to the kitchen for another beer.
“Where’s my grandson? He’s doing my portrait in crayon.”
“You had a cigarette twenty minutes ago.”
“I’m sitting for my portrait. I need to unwind.”
“He gets out of school in two hours. Keith is going to pick him up.”
“Justin and I. We need to talk about skin color, flesh tones.”
“He likes white.”
“He’s thinking very white. Like paper.”
“He uses bright colors for the eyes, the hair, maybe the mouth. Where we see flesh, he sees white.”
“He’s thinking paper, not flesh. The work is a fact in itself. The subject of the portrait is the paper.”
Martin walked in licking foam from the rim of the glass.
“Does he have a white crayon?”
“He doesn’t need a white crayon. He has white paper,” she said.
He stopped to look at the vintage passport photos on the south wall, stained with age, and Nina watched him.
“So beautiful and so dignified,” she said, “those people and those photographs. I’ve just renewed my passport. Ten years come and gone, like a sip of tea. I’ve never cared much about how I look in photographs. Not the way some people do. But this photograph scares me.”
“Where are you going?” Lianne said.
“I don’t have to go anywhere to own a passport.”
Martin came around to her chair and stood behind it, leaning over to speak softly.
“You should go somewhere. An extended trip, when we get back from Connecticut. No one is traveling now. You should think about this.”
“Not a good idea.”
“Far away,” he said.
“Far away.”
“Cambodia. Before the jungle overtakes what remains. I’ll go with you if you like.”
Her mother smoked a cigarette like a woman in the 1940s, in a gangster film, all nervous urgency, in black and white.
“I look at the face in the passport photo. Who is that woman?”
“I lift my head from the washbasin,” Martin said.
“Who is that man? You think you see yourself in the mirror. But that’s not you. That’s not what you look like. That’s not the literal face, if there is such a thing, ever. That’s the composite face. That’s the face in transition.”
“Don’t tell me this.”
“What you see is not what we see. What you see is distracted by memory, by being who you are, all this time, for all these years.”
“I don’t want to hear this,” he said.
“What we see is the living truth. The mirror softens the effect by submerging the actual face. Your face is your life. But your face is also submerged in your life. That’s why you don’t see it. Only other people see it. And the camera of course.”
He smiled into his glass. Nina put out her cigarette, barely smoked, waving away a trail of smeary mist.
“Then there’s the beard,” Lianne said.
“The beard helps bury the face.”
“It’s not much of a beard.”
“But that’s the art of it,” Nina said.
“The art of looking unkempt.”
“Unkempt but deeply sensitive.”
“This is American kidding. Am I right?” he said.
“The beard’s a nice device.”
“He speaks to it,” Nina said. “Every morning, in the mirror.”
“What does he say?”
“He speaks in German. The beard is German.”
“I am flattered, right?” he said. “To be the subject of such kidding.”
“The nose is Austro-Hungarian.”
He leaned toward Nina, still standing behind her, touching the back of his hand to her face. Then he took the empty glass to the kitchen and the two women sat quietly for a moment. Lianne wanted to go home and sleep. Her mother wanted to sleep, she wanted to sleep. She wanted to go home and talk to Keith for a while a
nd then fall into bed, fall asleep. Talk to Keith or not talk at all. But she wanted him to be there when she got home.
Martin spoke from the far end of the room, surprising them.
“They want their place in the world, their own global union, not ours. It’s an old dead war, you say. But it’s everywhere and it’s rational.”
“Fooled me.”
“Don’t be fooled. Don’t think people will die only for God,” he said.
His cell phone buzzed and he altered his stance, turning toward the wall and seeming to speak into his chest. These fragments of conversation, which Lianne had heard before, from a distance, included English, French and German phrases, depending on the caller, and sometimes a small jeweled syllable such as Braque or Johns.
He finished quickly and put the phone away.
“Travel, yes, it’s a thing you ought to consider,” he said. “Get your knee back to normal and we’ll go, quite seriously.”
“Far away.”
“Far away.”
“Ruins,” she said.
“Ruins.”
“We have our own ruins. But I don’t think I want to see them.”
He moved along the wall toward the door.
“But that’s why you built the towers, isn’t it? Weren’t the towers built as fantasies of wealth and power that would one day become fantasies of destruction? You build a thing like that so you can see it come down. The provocation is obvious. What other reason would there be to go so high and then to double it, do it twice? It’s a fantasy, so why not do it twice? You are saying, Here it is, bring it down.”
Then he opened the door and was gone.
He watched poker on television, pained faces in a casino complex in the desert. He watched without interest. It wasn’t poker, it was television. Justin came in and watched with him and he outlined the game to the kid, in snatches, as the players paused and raised and the strategies unfolded. Then Lianne came in and sat on the floor, watching her son. He was seated at a radical slant, barely in contact with the chair and staring helplessly into the glow, a victim of alien abduction.
She looked at the screen, faces in close-up. The game itself faded into anesthesia, the tedium of a hundred thousand dollars won or lost on the flip of a card. It meant nothing. It was outside her interest or sympathy. But the players were interesting. She watched the players, they drew her in, deadpan, drowsy, slouched, men in misfortune, she thought, making a leap to Kierkegaard, somehow, and recalling the long nights she’d spent with her head in a text. She watched the screen and imagined a northern bleakness, faces misplaced in the desert. Wasn’t there a soul struggle, a sense of continuing dilemma, even in the winner’s little blink of winning?
She said nothing about this to Keith, who would have turned half toward her, gazing into space in mock contemplation, mouth open, eyelids slowly closing and head sinking finally to his chest.
He was thinking of being here, Keith was, and not thinking of it but only feeling it, alive to it. He saw her face reflected in a corner of the screen. He was watching the cardplayers and noting the details of move and countermove but also watching her and feeling this, the sense of being here with them. He had a single-malt scotch in his fist. He heard a car alarm sounding down the street. He reached over and knocked on Justin’s head, knock knock, to alert him to a revelation in the making as the camera located the hole cards of a player who didn’t know he was dead.
“He’s dead,” he told his son, and the kid sat without comment in his makeshift diagonal, half in the chair, half on the floor, semi-mesmerized.
She loved Kierkegaard in his antiqueness, in the glaring drama of the translation she owned, an old anthology of brittle pages with ruled underlinings in red ink, passed down by someone in her mother’s family. This is what she read and re-read into deep night in her dorm room, a drifting mass of papers, clothing, books and tennis gear that she liked to think of as the objective correlative of an overflowing mind. What is an objective correlative? What is cognitive dissonance? She used to know the answers to everything then, it seemed to her now, and she used to love Kierkegaard right down to the spelling of his name. The hard Scandian k’s and lovely doubled a. Her mother sent books all the time, great dense demanding fiction, airtight and relentless, but it defeated her eager need for self-recognition, something closer to mind and heart. She read her Kierkegaard with a feverish expectancy, straight into the Protestant badlands of sickness unto death. Her roommate wrote punk lyrics for an imaginary band called Piss in My Mouth and Lianne envied her creative desperation. Kierkegaard gave her a danger, a sense of spiritual brink. The whole of existence frightens me, he wrote. She saw herself in this sentence. He made her feel that her thrust into the world was not the slender melodrama she sometimes thought it was.
She watched the faces of the cardplayers, then caught her husband’s eye, onscreen, in reflection, watching her, and she smiled. There was the amber drink in his hand. There was the car alarm sounding somewhere along the street, a reassuring feature of familiar things, safe night settling in. She reached over and snatched the kid from his roost. Before he went off to bed, Keith asked him if he wanted a set of poker chips and a deck of cards.
The answer was maybe, which meant yes.
Finally she had to do it and then she did, knocking on the door, hard, and waiting for Elena to open even as voices trembled within, women in soft chorus, singing in Arabic.
Elena had a dog named Marko. Lianne remembered this the instant she hit the door. Marko, she thought, with a k, whatever that might signify.
She hit the door again, this time with the flat of her hand, and then the woman stood there, in tailored jeans and a sequined T-shirt.
“The music. All the time, day and night. And loud.”
Elena stared into her, radiating a lifetime of alertness to insult.
“Don’t you know this? We hear it on the stairs, we hear it in our apartments. All the time, day and fucking night.”
“What is it? Music, that’s all. I like it. It’s beautiful. It gives me peace. I like it, I play it.”
“Why now? This particular time?”
“Now, later, what’s the difference? It’s music.”
“But why now and why so loud?”
“Nobody ever complained. This is the first time I’m hearing loud. It’s not so loud.”
“It’s loud.”
“It’s music. You want to take it personally, what can I tell you?”
Marko came to the door, a hundred and thirty pounds, black, with deep fur and webbed feet.
“Of course it’s personal. Anybody would take it personally. Under these circumstances. There are circumstances. You acknowledge this, don’t you?”
“There are no circumstances. It’s music,” she said. “It gives me peace.”
“But why now?”
“The music has nothing to do with now or then or any other time. And nobody ever said loud.”
“It’s fucking loud.”
“You must be ultrasensitive, which I would never think from hearing the language you use.”
“The whole city is ultrasensitive right now. Where have you been hiding?”
Every time she saw the dog out in the street, half a block away, with Elena carrying a plastic baggie to harvest his shit, she thought Marko with a k.
“It’s music. I like it, I play it. You think it’s so loud, walk faster on your way out the door.”
Lianne put her hand in the woman’s face.
“It gives you peace,” she said.
She twisted her open hand in Elena’s face, under the left eye, and pushed her back into the entranceway.
“It gives you peace,” she said.
Marko backed into the apartment, barking. Lianne mashed the hand into the eye and the woman took a swing at her, a blind right that caught the edge of the door. Lianne knew she was going crazy even as she turned and walked out, slamming the door behind her and hearing the dog bark over the sound of a solo lute from Turkey o
r Egypt or Kurdistan.
Rumsey sat in a cubicle not far from the north facade, a hockey stick propped in a corner. He and Keith played in pickup games at Chelsea Piers at two in the morning. In warmer months they wandered the streets and plazas at lunchtime, in the rippling shadows of the towers, looking at women, talking about women, telling stories, taking comfort.
Keith separated, living nearby for convenience, eating for convenience, checking the running time of rented movies before he took them out of the store. Rumsey single, in an affair with a married woman, recently arrived from Malaysia, who sold T-shirts and postcards on Canal Street.
Rumsey had compulsions. He admitted this to his friend. He admitted everything, concealed nothing. He counted parked cars in the street, windows in a building a block away. He counted the steps he took, here to there. He memorized things that crossed his consciousness, streams of information, more or less unwillingly. He could recite the personal data of a couple of dozen friends and acquaintances, addresses, phone numbers, birthdays. Months after the file of a random client crossed his desk, he could tell you the man’s mother’s maiden name.
This was not cute stuff. There was an open pathos in the man. At the hockey rink, in poker games, they shared a recognition, he and Keith, an intuitive sense of the other’s methodology as teammate or opponent. He was ordinary in many ways, Rumsey, a broad and squarish body, an even temperament, but he took his ordinariness to the deep end at times. He was forty-one, in a suit and tie, walking through promenades, in waves of beating heat, looking for women in open-toed sandals.
All right. He was compelled to count things including the digits that constitute the foreparts of a woman’s foot. He admitted this. Keith did not laugh. He tried to see it as routine human business, unfathomable, something people do, all of us, in one form or another, in the off moments of living the lives others think we are living. He did not laugh, then he did. But he understood that the fixation was not directed toward sexual ends. It was the counting that mattered, even if the outcome was established in advance. Toes on one foot, toes on the other. Always totaling ten.