by Don DeLillo
Keith tall, five or six inches taller than his friend. He saw male pattern baldness develop in Rumsey, seemingly week by week, on their noontime walks, or Rumsey slumped in his cubicle, or holding a sandwich with both hands, head lowered to eat. He carried bottled water everywhere. He memorized the numbers on license plates even as he drove.
Keith seeing a woman with two kids, goddamn. She lived in Far fucking Rockaway.
Women on benches or steps, reading or doing crosswords, sunning themselves, heads thrown back, or scooping yogurt with blue spoons, sandaled women, some of them, toes exposed.
Rumsey eyes down, following the puck across the ice, body crashing the boards, free of aberrant need for a couple of happy shattering hours.
Keith running in place, on a treadmill at the gym, voices in his head, mostly his own, even when he wore a headset, listening to books on tape, science or history.
The counting always led to ten. This was not a discouragement or impediment. Ten is the beauty of it. Ten is probably why I do it. To get that sameness, Rumsey said. Something holds, something stays in place.
Rumsey’s girlfriend wanted him to invest in the business she ran with three relatives including her husband. They wanted to add stock, add running shoes and personal electronics.
The toes meant nothing if they were not defined by sandals. Barefoot women on the beach were not about their feet.
He compiled bonus miles on his credit cards and flew to cities chosen strictly for their distance from New York, just to use the miles. It satisfied some principle of emotional credit.
There were men in open-toed sandals, here and there, in the streets and parks, but Rumsey did not count their toes. So maybe it wasn’t just the counting that mattered. One had to factor in the women. He admitted this. He admitted everything.
The persistence of the man’s needs had a kind of crippled appeal. It opened Keith to dimmer things, at odder angles, to something crouched and uncorrectable in people but also capable of stirring a warm feeling in him, a rare tinge of affinity.
Baldness in Rumsey, as it progressed, was a gentle melancholy, the pensive regret of a failed boy.
They fought once, briefly, on the ice, teammates, by mistake, in a mass brawl, and Keith thought it was funny but Rumsey was angry, a little shrill with accusation, claiming that Keith threw a few additional punches after he realized who it was he was hitting, which wasn’t true, Keith said, but thought it might be, because once the thing starts, what recourse is there?
They walked toward the towers now, amid the sweep and crisscross of masses of people.
All right. But what if the digits don’t always total ten? You’re riding the subway, say, and you’re sitting eyes down, Keith said, and you’re absentmindedly scanning the aisle, and you see a pair of sandals, and you count and count again, and there are nine digits, or eleven.
Rumsey took this question with him up to his cubicle in the sky, where he went back to work on less arresting matters, on money and property, contracts and titles.
One day later he said, I would ask her to marry me.
And later still, Because I would understand that I was cured, like Lourdes, and could stop counting now.
Keith watched her across the table.
“When did it happen?”
“About an hour ago.”
“That dog,” he said.
“I know. It was a crazy thing to do.”
“What happens now? You’ll see her in the hall.”
“I don’t apologize. That’s what happens.”
He sat and nodded, watching her.
“Hate to say it but when I came up the stairs just now.”
“You don’t have to say it.”
“The music was playing,” he said.
“I guess that means she wins.”
“No louder, no softer.”
“She wins.”
He said, “Maybe she’s dead. Lying there.”
“Dead or alive, she wins.”
“That dog.”
“I know. It was totally crazy. I could hear myself speaking. My voice was like it was coming from somebody else.”
“I’ve seen that animal. The kid fears that animal. Won’t say it but does.”
“What is it?”
“A Newfoundland.”
“The whole province,” she said.
“You’re lucky.”
“Lucky and crazy. Marko.”
He said, “Forget the music.”
“He spells his name with a k.”
“So do I. Forget the music,” he said. “It’s not a message or a lesson.”
“But it’s still playing.”
“It’s still playing because she’s dead. Lying there. Being sniffed by big dog.”
“I need to get more sleep. That’s what I need,” she said.
“Big dog sniffing dead woman’s crotch.”
“I wake up at some point every night. Mind running nonstop. Can’t stop it.”
“Forget the music.”
“Thoughts I can’t identify, thoughts I can’t claim as mine.”
He kept watching her.
“Take something. Your mother knows about this. This is how people sleep.”
“I have a history with the things people take. They make me crazier. They make me stupid, make me forget.”
“Talk to your mother. She knows about this.”
“Can’t stop it, can’t go back to sleep. Takes forever. Then it’s morning,” she said.
The truth was mapped in slow and certain decline. Each member of the group lived in this knowledge. Lianne found it hardest to accept in the case of Carmen G. She appeared to be two women simultaneously, the one sitting here, less combative over time, less clearly defined, speech beginning to drag, and the younger and slimmer and wildly attractive one, as Lianne imagines her, a spirited woman in her reckless prime, funny and blunt, spinning on a dance floor.
Lianne herself, bearing her father’s mark, the potential toll of plaque and twisted filaments, had to look at this woman and see the crime of it, the loss of memory, personality and identity, the lapse into eventual protein stupor. There was the page she wrote and then read aloud, meant to be an account of her day, yesterday. This was not the piece they’d all agreed to write. This was Carmen’s piece.
I wake up thinking where’s everybody. I’m alone because that’s who I am. I’m thinking where’s the rest of them, wide awake, don’t want to get up. It’s like I need my documents to get out of bed. Prueba de ingreso. Prueba de dirección. Tarjeta de seguro social. Picture ID. My father who told jokes he didn’t care clean or dirty the kids have to learn these things. I had two husbands they were different except for their hands. I still look at a man’s hands. Because somebody said it’s a question of which brain is working today because everybody has two brains. Why is it the hardest thing in the world, get out of bed. I have a plant that needs water all the time. I never thought a plant could be work.
Benny said, “But where’s your day? You said this is your day.”
“This is the first like ten seconds. This is still in bed. Next time we’re here maybe I finish getting out of bed. Next time after that I wash my hands. That’s day three. Day four, my face.”
Benny said, “We live that long? By the time you take a pee we all be fatal.”
Then it was her turn. They’d been asking and then urging. They’d all written something, said something about the planes. It was Omar H. who brought it up again, in his earnest way, right arm raised.
“Where were you when it happened?”
For nearly two years now, ever since the storyline sessions began, with her marriage receding into the night sky, she’d listened to these men and women speak about their lives in funny, stinging, straightforward and moving ways, binding the trust among them.
She owed them a story, didn’t she?
There was Keith in the doorway. Always that, had to be that, the desperate sight of him, alive, her husband. She tried to follow t
he sequence of events, seeing him as she spoke, a figure floating in reflected light, Keith in pieces, in small strokes. The words came fast. She recalled things she didn’t know she’d absorbed, the fragment of spangled glass on the lid of his eye, as if sewn there, and how they’d walked to the hospital, nine or ten blocks, in near deserted streets, in halting steps and deepest silence, and the young man who assisted, a deliveryman, a kid, helping support Keith with one hand and holding a pizza carton with the other, and she nearly asked him how someone could phone in an order for takeout if the phones were not working, a tall Latino kid but maybe not, holding the carton by the bottom, balanced on the palm of his hand and out away from his body.
She wanted to stay focused, one thing following sensibly upon another. There were moments when she wasn’t talking so much as fading into time, dropping back into some funneled stretch of recent past. They sat dead still, watching her. People, lately, watched her. She seemingly needed watching. They were depending on her to make sense. They were waiting for words from her side of the line, where what is solid does not melt.
She told them about her son. When he was nearby, within sight or touch, in himself, in motion, the fear eased off. Other times she could not think of him without being afraid. This was Justin disembodied, the child of her devising.
Unattended packages, she said, or the menace of lunch in a paper bag, or the subway at rush hour, down there, in sealed boxes.
She could not look at him sleep. He became a child in some jutting future. What do children know? They know who they are, she said, in ways we can’t know and they can’t tell us. There are moments frozen in the run of routine hours. She could not look at him sleep without thinking of what was yet to come. It was part of his stillness, figures in a silent distance, fixed in windows.
Please report any suspicious behavior or unattended packages. That was the wording, wasn’t it?
She almost told them about the briefcase, the fact of its appearance and disappearance and what it meant if anything. Wanted to tell them but did not. Tell them everything, say everything. She needed them to listen.
Keith used to want more of the world than there was time and means to acquire. He didn’t want this anymore, whatever it was he’d wanted, in real terms, real things, because he’d never truly known.
Now he wondered whether he was born to be old, meant to be old and alone, content in lonely old age, and whether all the rest of it, all the glares and rants he had bounced off these walls, were simply meant to get him to that point.
This was his father seeping through, sitting home in western Pennsylvania, reading the morning paper, taking the walk in the afternoon, a man braided into sweet routine, a widower, eating the evening meal, unconfused, alive in his true skin.
There was a second level to the high-low games. Terry Cheng was the player who divided the chips, half to each winner, high and low. He’d do it in seconds, stacking chips of different colors and varying denominations in two columns or two sets of columns, depending on the size of the pot. He did not want columns so high they might topple. He did not want columns that looked alike. The idea was to arrive at two allotments of equal monetary value but never of evenly distributed colors, or anything close to that. He’d stack six blue chips, four gold, three red and five white and then match this, with steel-trap speed, fingers flying, hands sometimes crossing, with sixteen white, four blue, two gold and thirteen red, building his columns and then folding his arms and looking into secret space, leaving each winner to rake in his chips, in unspoken respect and semi-awe.
No one doubted his skills of hand-eye-mind. No one tried to count along with Terry Cheng and no one ever harbored the thought, even in the brooding depths of the night, that Terry Cheng might be wrong in his high-low determinations, just this once.
Keith talked to him on the telephone, twice, briefly, after the planes. Then they stopped calling each other. There was nothing left, it seemed, to say about the others in the game, lost and injured, and there was no general subject they might comfortably summon. Poker was the one code they shared and that was over now.
Her schoolmates called her Gawk for a time. Then it was Scrawn. This was not necessarily a case of hateful naming, coming mostly from friends and often with her connivance. She liked to pose in parody of a model on a runway, only all elbows, knees and wired teeth. When she began to grow out of her angularity, there were the times her father rolled into town, sunburnt Jack, shooting out his arms when he saw her, a beautifully burgeoning creature he loved in muscle and blood, until he went away again. But she remembered these times, his stance and smile, the half crouch, the set of his jaw. He’d shoot out his arms and she’d fall shyly into the enclosing fold. This was ever Jack, hugging and shaking her, looking so deeply into her eyes it seemed at times he was trying to place her in proper context.
She was darkish, unlike him, with large eyes and wide mouth and with an eagerness that could be startling to others, a readiness to encounter an occasion or idea. Her mother was the template for this.
Her father used to say of her mother, “She’s a sexy woman except for her skinny ass.”
Lianne was thrilled by the chummy vulgarity, the invitation to share the man’s special perspective, his openness of reference and slant rhyme.
It was Jack’s perspective on architecture that had drawn Nina. They met on a small island in the northeast Aegean where Jack had designed a cluster of white stucco dwellings for an artists’ retreat. Set above a cove, the grouping, from offshore, was a piece of pure geometry gone slightly askew—Euclidean rigor in quantum space, Nina would write.
Here on a hard cot, on a second visit, was where Lianne was conceived. Jack told her this when she was twelve years old and would not refer to it again until he called from New Hampshire, ten years later, saying the same things in the same words, the sea breeze, the hard cot, the music floating up from the waterfront, sort of Greek-Oriental. This was some minutes or hours, this phone call, before he gazed into the muzzle blast.
They were watching TV without the sound.
“My father shot himself so I would never have to face the day when he failed to know who I was.”
“You believe this.”
“Yes.”
“Then I believe it too,” he said.
“The fact that he would one day fail to recognize me.”
“I believe it,” he said.
“That’s absolutely why he did it.”
She was slightly drunk after an extra glass of wine. They were watching a late-night newscast and he thought of hitting the sound button when the commercials ended but then did not and they watched in silence as a correspondent in a desolate landscape, Afghanistan or Pakistan, pointed over his shoulder to mountains in the distance.
“We need to get him a book on birds.”
“Justin,” he said.
“They’re studying birds. Each kid gets to choose a bird and that’s the bird he or she studies. That’s his or her feathered vertebrate. His for boys. Hers for girls.”
There was stock footage on the screen of fighter planes lifting off the deck of a carrier. He waited for her to ask him to hit the sound button.
“He’s talking about a kestrel. What the hell’s a kestrel?” she said.
“It’s a small falcon. We saw them perched on power lines, mile after mile, when we were somewhere out west, back in the other life.”
“The other life,” she said, and laughed, and pushed up off the chair, headed for the bathroom.
“Come out wearing something,” he said, “so I can watch you take it off.”
Florence Givens stood looking at the mattresses, forty or fifty of them, arranged in rows at one end of the ninth floor. People tested the bedding, women mostly, bouncing lightly in seated positions or lying supine, checking for firmness or plushness. It took her a moment to realize that Keith was standing at her side, watching with her.
“Right on time,” she said.
“You’re the one who’s on
time. I’ve been here for hours,” he said, “riding the escalators.”
They walked along the aisle and she stopped several times to check labels and prices and to press into the bedding with the heel of her hand.
He said, “Go on, lie down.”
“I don’t think I want to do that.”
“How else will you know if this is the mattress you want? Look around. They’re all doing it.”
“I’ll lie down if you’ll lie down.”
“I don’t need a mattress,” he said. “You need a mattress.”
She wandered along the aisle. He stood and watched and there were ten or eleven women lying on beds, bouncing on beds, and a man and a woman bouncing and rolling, middle-aged and purposeful, trying to determine if one person’s tossing would disturb the other’s sleep.
There were tentative women, bouncing once or twice, feet protruding from the end of the bed, and there were the others, women who’d shed their coats and shoes, falling backwards to the mattress, the Posturepedic or the Beautyrest, and bouncing with abandon, first one side of the bed, then the other, and he thought this was a remarkable thing to come upon, the mattress department at Macy’s, and he looked across the aisle and they were bouncing there as well, another eight or nine women, one man, one child, testing for comfort and sculptural soundness, for back support and foam sensation.
Florence was over there now, seated at the end of a bed, and she smiled at him and fell back. She bounced up, fell back, making a little game of her shyness in the midst of public intimacy. Two men stood not far from Keith and one of them said something to the other. It was a remark about Florence. He didn’t know what the man had said but it didn’t matter. It was clear from their stance and their vantage that Florence was the subject.