by Don DeLillo
“Twenty years later.”
“He sees form, color, depth, beauty.”
“Is this an advance in aesthetics?”
“He sees the light.”
“Or a sellout, a self-deception. Remarks of a property owner.”
“He sees the light,” Nina said.
“He also sees the money. These are very pricey objects.”
“Yes, they are. And at first, quite seriously, I wondered how he’d acquired them. I suspect in those early years he sometimes dealt in stolen art.”
“Interesting fellow.”
“He said to me once, I’ve done some things. He said, This doesn’t make my life more interesting than yours. It can be made to sound more interesting. But in memory, in those depths, he said, there is not much vivid color or wild excitement. It is all gray and waiting. Sitting, waiting. He said, It is all sort of neutral, you know.”
She did the accent with a deft edge, maybe a little nasty.
“What was he waiting for?”
“History, I think. The call to action. The visit from the police.”
“Which branch of the police?”
“Not the art-theft squad. I know one thing. He was a member of a collective in the late nineteen sixties. Kommune One. Demonstrating against the German state, the fascist state. That’s how they saw it. First they threw eggs. Then they set off bombs. After that I’m not sure what he did. I think he was in Italy for a while, in the turmoil, when the Red Brigades were active. But I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“No.”
“Twenty years. Eating and sleeping together. You don’t know. Did you ask him? Did you press him?”
“He showed me a poster once, a few years ago, when I saw him in Berlin. He keeps an apartment there. A wanted poster. German terrorists of the early seventies. Nineteen names and faces.”
“Nineteen.”
“Wanted for murder, bombings, bank robberies. He keeps it—I don’t know why he keeps it. But I know why he showed it to me. He’s not one of the faces on the poster.”
“Nineteen.”
“Men and women. I counted. He may have been part of a support group or a sleeper cell. I don’t know.”
“You don’t know.”
“He thinks these people, these jihadists, he thinks they have something in common with the radicals of the sixties and seventies. He thinks they’re all part of the same classical pattern. They have their theorists. They have their visions of world brotherhood.”
“Do they make him nostalgic?”
“Don’t think I won’t bring this up.”
“Bare walls. Nearly bare, you said. Is this part of the old longing? Days and nights in seclusion, hiding out somewhere, renouncing every trace of material comfort. Maybe he killed someone. Did you ask him? Did you press him on this?”
“Look, if he’d done something serious, causing death or injury, do you think he’d be walking around today? He’s not in hiding anymore, if he ever was. He’s here, there and everywhere.”
“Operating under a false name,” Lianne said.
She was on the sofa, facing her mother, watching her. She’d never detected a weakness in Nina, none that she could recall, some frailty of character or compromise of hard clear judgment. She found herself prepared to take advantage and this surprised her. She was ready to bleed the moment, bearing in, ripping in.
“All these years. Never forcing the issue. Look at the man he’s become, the man we know. Isn’t this the kind of man they would have seen as the enemy? Those men and women on the wanted poster. Kidnap the bastard. Burn his paintings.”
“Oh I think he knows this. Don’t you think he knows this?”
“But what do you know? Don’t you pay a price for not knowing?”
“It’s my price. Shut up,” her mother said.
She drew a cigarette from the pack and held it. She seemed to be thinking into some distant matter, not remembering so much as measuring, marking the reach or degree of something, the meaning of something.
“The one wall that holds an object is in Berlin.”
“The wanted poster.”
“The poster does not hang. He keeps the poster in a closet, in a mailing tube. No, it’s a small photograph in a plain frame, hanging over his bed. He and I, a snapshot. We’re standing before a church in one of the hill towns in Umbria. We’d met only a day earlier. He asked a woman walking by to take our picture.”
“Why do I hate this story?”
“His name is Ernst Hechinger. You hate this story because you think it shames me. Makes me complicit in a maudlin gesture, a pathetic gesture. Foolish little snapshot. The one object he displays.”
“Have you tried to determine whether this man Ernst Hechinger is wanted by the police somewhere in Europe? Just to know. To stop saying I don’t know.”
She wanted to punish her mother but not for Martin or not just for that. It was nearer and deeper and finally about one thing only. This is what everything was about, who they were, the fierce clasp, like hands bound in prayer, now and evermore.
Nina lit the cigarette and exhaled. She made it seem an effort to do this, breathe out smoke. She was drowsy again. One of her medications contained codeine phosphate and she was careful when taking it until recently. It was only days in fact, a week or so, since she’d stopped following the exercise regimen without altering her intake of painkillers. Lianne believed that this slackness of will was a defeat that had Martin in the middle of it. These were his nineteen, these hijackers, these jihadists, even if only in her mother’s mind.
“What are you working on?”
“Book on ancient alphabets. All the forms writing took, all the materials they used.”
“Sounds interesting.”
“You ought to read this book.”
“Sounds interesting.”
“Interesting, demanding, deeply enjoyable at times. Drawing as well. Pictorial writing. I’ll get you a copy when it’s published.”
“Pictograms, hieroglyphics, cuneiform,” her mother said.
She appeared to be dreaming aloud.
She said, “Sumerians, Assyrians, so on.”
“I’ll get you a copy, definitely.”
“Thank you.”
“You’re welcome,” Lianne said.
The cheese and fruit were on a platter in the kitchen. She sat with her mother a moment longer and then went in to get the food.
Three of the cardplayers were called by last name only, Dockery, Rumsey, Hovanis, and two by first name, Demetrius and Keith. Terry Cheng was Terry Cheng.
Someone told Rumsey one night, it was Dockery the waggish adman, that everything in his life would be different, Rumsey’s, if one letter in his name was different. An a for the u. Making him, effectively, Ramsey. It was the u, the rum, that had shaped his life and mind. The way he walks and talks, his slouchings, his very size and shape, the slowness and thickness that pour off him, the way he puts his hand down his shirt to scratch an itch. This would all be different if he’d been born a Ramsey.
They sat waiting for R’s reply, watching him linger in the aura of his defined state.
She went down to the basement with a basket full of laundry. There was a small gray room, damp and stale, with a washer and dryer and a metallic chill that she felt in her teeth.
She heard the dryer in operation and walked in to see Elena leaning on the wall with her arms folded and a cigarette in her hand. Elena did not look up.
For a moment they listened to the load bounce around the drum. Then Lianne put her basket down and raised the lid of the washer. The filter pan held the lint rubble of the other woman’s wash.
She looked at it briefly, then took the pan out of the washer and extended it to Elena. The woman paused, then took it and looked. Without changing position she used a backhand motion to bang the pan twice against the lower part of the wall she was leaning on. She looked at it again, took a drag on her cigarette and handed the pan across to Lia
nne, who took it and looked and then placed it on top of the dryer. She threw her things in the washer, fistfuls of darks, and put the filter pan back on the agitator or activator or whatever it was called. She poured in detergent, made selections on the control panel, set the dial on the other side of the panel and closed the lid. Then she pulled the control knob to start the wash.
But she didn’t leave the room. She assumed the load in the dryer was nearly done or why would the woman be standing here waiting. She assumed the woman had come down only minutes ago, saw the load was not yet done and decided to wait rather than go up and down and up again. She couldn’t see the time dial clearly from this position and preferred not to make a show of looking. But she had no intention of leaving the room. She stood against the wall adjacent to the wall the woman was leaning on, half slouched. Their straitened lanes of vision possibly crossed somewhere near the middle of the room. She kept her back erect, feeling the impress of the old pocked wall against her shoulder blades.
The washer began to rumble, the dryer tossed and clicked, shirt buttons hitting the drum. There was no question that she would outwait the other woman. The question was what the woman would do with the cigarette if she finished smoking it before the load was done. The question was whether they’d look at each other before the woman left the room. The room was like a monk’s cell with a pair of giant prayer wheels beating out a litany. The question was whether a look would lead to words and then what.
It was a rainy Monday in the world and she walked over to Godzilla Apartments, where the kid was spending an after-school hour with the Siblings, playing video games.
She used to write poetry on days like this when she was in school. There was something about rain and poetry. Later there would be something about rain and sex. The poems were usually about the rain, how it felt to be indoors watching the lonely drops slide down the windowpane.
Her umbrella was useless in the wind. It was the kind of wind-whipped rain that empties the streets of people and makes day and place feel anonymous. This was the weather everywhere, the state of mind, generic Monday, and she walked very close to buildings and ran across streets and felt the wind hit straight down when she reached the redbrick heights of Godzilla.
She had a quick cup of coffee with the mother, Isabel, and then peeled her son off the computer screen and muscled him into his jacket. He wanted to stay, they wanted him to stay. She told them she was a villain too real for video games.
Katie followed them to the door. She wore red jeans rolled up and a pair of suede ankle boots that glowed neon along the welt when she walked. Her brother Robert hung back, a dark-eyed boy who looked too shy to speak, eat, walk a dog.
The telephone rang.
Lianne said to the girl, “You’re not still sky-watching, are you? Searching the skies day and night? No. Or are you?”
The girl looked at Justin and smiled in sly connivance, saying nothing.
“He won’t tell me,” Lianne said. “I ask and ask.”
He said, “No, you don’t.”
“But if I did, you wouldn’t tell me.”
Katie’s eyes went brighter. She was enjoying this, alert to the prospect of a crafty reply. Her mother was talking on the wall-mounted phone in the kitchen.
Lianne said to the girl, “Still waiting for word? Still watching for planes? Day and night at the window? No. I don’t believe it.”
She leaned toward the girl, speaking in a stage whisper.
“Still talking to that person? The man whose name some of us are not supposed to know.”
The brother looked stricken. He stood fifteen feet behind Katie, dead still, looking at the parquet floor between his sister’s boots.
“Is he still out there, somewhere, making you search the skies? The man whose name maybe we all know even if some of us are not supposed to know.”
Justin plucked her jacket away from her elbow, which meant let’s go home now.
“Maybe just maybe. This is what I think. Maybe it’s time for him to disappear. The man whose name we all know.”
She had her hands on Katie’s face, cradling it, caging it, ear to ear. In the kitchen the mother was raising her voice, talking about a credit-card problem.
“Maybe it’s time. Do you think that’s possible? Maybe you’re just not interested anymore. Yes or no? Maybe just maybe it’s time to stop searching the skies, time to stop talking about the man I’m talking about. What do you think? Yes or no?”
The girl looked less happy now. She tried to dart a look left to Justin, like what’s going on here, but Lianne pressed a little tighter and used her right hand to block the view, smiling at the girl mock-playfully.
The brother was trying to will his invisibility. They were confused and a little scared but that’s not why she took her hands from Katie’s face. She was ready to leave, that’s why, and all the way down on the elevator, twenty-seventh floor to lobby, she thought of the mythical figure who’d said the planes were coming back, the man whose name they all knew. But she’d forgotten it.
Rain was lighter now, wind diminished. They walked without a word. She tried to remember the name but could not do it. The kid would not walk beneath the spread umbrella, staying four paces back. It was an easy name, this much she knew, but the easy names were the ones that killed her.
9
This day, beyond others, she found it hard to leave. She came out of the community center and walked west, thinking about another day, not long in coming, when the storyline sessions would have to end. The group was reaching that time and she didn’t think she could do it again, start over, six or seven people, the ballpoint pens and writing pads, the beauty of it, yes, the way they sing their lives, but also the unwariness they bring to what they know, the strange brave innocence of it, and her own grasping after her father.
She wanted to walk home and when she got there she wanted to find a phone message from Carol Shoup. Call me soonest please. It was only a feeling but she trusted it and knew what the message would mean, that the editor had quit the assignment. She would walk in the door, listen to the four-word message and know that the editor could not handle the book, a text so webbed in obsessive detail that it was impossible to proceed further. She wanted to walk in the door and see the lighted number on the telephone. This is Carol, call me soonest. A six-word message that implied a great deal more. This is what Carol liked to say in her phone messages. Call me soonest. It was something promised, that last urgent word, an indication of auspicious circumstance.
She walked without plan, west on 116th Street past the barbershop and record shop, the fruit markets and bakery. She turned south for five blocks and then glanced to her right and saw the high wall of weathered granite that supported the elevated tracks, where trains carry commuters to and from the city. She thought at once of Rosellen S. but didn’t know why. She walked in that direction and came to a building marked Greater Highway Deliverance Temple. She paused a moment, absorbing the name and noticing the ornate pilasters above the entrance and the stone cross at roof’s edge. There was a sign out front listing the temple’s activities. Sunday school, Sunday morning glory, Friday deliverance service and Bible study. She stood and thought. She thought of the conversation with Dr. Apter concerning the day when Rosellen could not remember where she lived. This was an occasion that haunted Lianne, the breathless moment when things fall away, streets, names, all sense of direction and location, every fixed grid of memory. Now she understood why Rosellen seemed to be a presence in this street. Here was the place, this temple whose name was a hallelujah shout, where she’d found refuge and assistance.
Again she stood and thought. She thought of the language that Rosellen had been using at the last sessions she’d been able to attend, how she developed extended versions of a single word, all the inflections and connectives, a kind of protection perhaps, a gathering against the last bare state, where even the deepest moan may not be grief but only moan.
Do we say goodbye, yes, going, am going,
will be going, the last time go, will go.
This is what she was able to recall from the limp script of Rosellen’s last pages.
He walked back through the park. The runners seemed eternal, circling the reservoir, and he tried not to think of the last half hour, with Florence, talking into her silence. This was another kind of eternity, the stillness in her face and body, outside time.
He picked up the kid at school and then walked north into a breeze that carried a faint stir of rain. He was relieved to have something to talk about, Justin’s schoolwork, his friends and teachers.
“Where do we go?”
“Your mother said she’d be walking home from the meeting uptown. We want to intercept her.”
“Why?”
“To surprise her. Sneak up on her. Lift her spirits.”
“How do we know which way she will come?”
“That’s the challenge. A direct route, an indirect route, she’s walking fast, she’s walking slow.”
He was speaking into the breeze, not quite to Justin. He was still back there, with Florence, double in himself, coming and going, the walks across the park and back, the deep shared self, down through the smoke, and then here again to safety and family, to the implications of one’s conduct.
In one hundred days or so, he would be forty years old. This was his father’s age. His father was forty, his uncles. They would always be forty, looking aslant at him. How is it possible that he was about to become someone of clear and distinct definition, husband and father, finally, occupying a room in three dimensions in the manner of his parents?
He’d stood by the window in those last minutes looking at the opposite wall, where a photograph hung, Florence as a girl, in a white dress, with her mother and father.
The kid said, “We go which way? This street or that street?”
It was a picture he’d barely noticed before and the sight of her in that setting, untouched by the consequences of what he’d come to say, caused a tightness in his chest. What she needed in him was his seeming calm, even if she didn’t understand it. He knew she was grateful for this, the fact that he was able to read the levels of her distress. He was the still figure, watching, ever attentive, saying little. This is what she wanted to cling to. But now she was the one who would not speak, watching him by the window, hearing the soft voice that tells her it is ended now.