by Don DeLillo
“I was preparing for the desert.”
“You were oiling your goddamn .38.”
“That was my desert period.”
“You were leaping through burning hoops for a better America.”
She watched him close his eyes and go to sleep. It took only seconds. Pure of heart, she thought. She found some brandy in the cabinet and sat a while drinking, watching him sleep. The digital clock in the wall unit had stopped days earlier at 4:01. 4:01 sounded about right. She finished the brandy and got up off the floor, creaking a bit. Selvy’s head was tilted left. She put her hand to his face: sleep and warmth. Then the other hand, framing him. He opened his eyes finally. She waited for him to adjust to his surroundings.
“What would you do differently, knowing what you know now?”
“What do I know now?” he said.
There was an interval of dusky sex. Both half asleep, alternately active and listless, they lay diagonally across the bed, breathing deeply and evenly, muttering at times. It must have been a dream, she thought later, seeing him naked in the dawn, a dream in first light, crouched rigidly by the window, body leaning slightly forward, arms enfolding his knees, head lowered, a dream in gray space, motionless, absolutely still, she thought later, as though he’d learned from some master of the wilderness how to suspend even the rhythms of his breathing.
4
The maroon and gold pimpmobile, double-parked outside a nude-encounter studio, drew a crowd of admirers, largely because its rear window was custom-fashioned to resemble a lightning bolt.
It’s Times Square Saturday night. Everybody’s in costume. Cowboys, bikers, drag queens, punk rockers, decoy cops, Moonies, gypsies, Salvation Army regulars, Process evangelists in dark capes, skinhead Krishna chanters in saffron robes and tennis sneakers. Glitter and trash everywhere. Hot pants, blond wigs, slouch hats, silver boots. Late-season heat blasts. Waves of humid air pour over the crowds. Horns blowing, engines revving, music wailing from loudspeakers in record stores. There is swamp fever in the air. Everybody’s soaked through with sweat, eyes glassy and distant. Priests, doormen, movie ushers, French sailors, West Point cadets, waitresses in dirndls, Shriners wearing fezzes.
The two men seemed composed, totally untroubled by the heat. Selvy had first noticed them an hour ago and about a mile away, near the Coliseum. Now they were standing on a corner watching the quasi-Hindus dance and chant. They were both small, both in western boots; one wore dark glasses. They thought the chanters were funny. They stood laughing at them, pointing occasionally.
Selvy crossed the street. A kid with a walkie-talkie moved with him nearly stride for stride as he headed north on Broadway. Magic massage. Topless pinball. Scandinavian skin games. The kid was gangly, maybe sixteen, with the supercharged look of a once bright child who’d failed to develop. The walkie-talkie had an antenna that measured roughly ten feet, tall enough to scrape the bottom of theater marquees, and so the boy kept toward the edge of the sidewalk, often balancing on the curbstone itself. At Forty-fifth Street, he put the set to his mouth.
“Code blue,” he said. “Prepare to activate all units. People in the street, take your positions. Camera one, code blue. This is a take. Give me a reflector over here. This set is closed. Camera’s rolling, you people. Everybody’s live. We are shooting live. This is a live action scene. Prepare sound stage to record. All right, you cab drivers, let’s hear it. Watch those cables, everybody. Closing the set to all but essential personnel. Nude scene, nude scene. Get it moving, everybody, please. Am leaving the district. Repeat. Am leaving the district.”
Overloaded with static, random brain noise, he stepped off the curbstone and went striding diagonally across the street, trailed now by four smaller kids. Selvy found an Irish bar on Eighth Avenue. He knocked back a couple of Jim Beams and waited for something to happen.
The blank of tool steel was cherry-red. Earl Mudger held it to the anvil with a pair of tongs, rough-forging the shape he wanted with a double-faced hammer.
He took off his gloves and put on a pair of goggles. He held the steel blank to a grinder belt, further shaping and sizing, removing excess metal.
Leaving the goggles hanging from a hook, he went into the next room, where there was a band saw, a drill press, a lathe, a grindstone and a small heat-treated furnace. He heated the steel blank for twenty minutes, then immersed it in quenching oil.
Back in the smaller of the two basement rooms he set the blank on the metal base of the testing machine he’d designed himself. It was fitted with wheels, gauges, handles, weights, a fulcrum arm and a precisely sized diamond tip, and it measured the hardness of steel. First time the blank tested out high, as he’d anticipated. Too brittle at that level. He reheated it for an hour. After it cooled he tested again. About right this time. It wouldn’t break or chip easily. It would hold its cutting edge.
He took off his apron and lit up a cigarette. Then he lay supine on a long workbench, watching the smoke drift toward the ceiling. Upstairs the baby was crying.
The man next to Selvy drank beer. He wore a touring cap well down on his forehead, almost touching his nose. His bills and change were set before him in a small puddle of beer.
“You a TV type?”
“No,” Selvy said.
“The old Madison Square Garden used to be right across the street there. We used to get TV types coming in here all the time. Knick fans, Rangers. I mention it because I’m promoting something sensational. Madison Avenue should give it a look.”
He waited for Selvy to ask what he was promoting. Selvy kept an eye on the mirror. They were in the bar. He saw them take a booth near the men’s room. One of them had a mustache, very sparse. The other, with sunglasses, had a tapering face. Both wore light windbreakers.
“What I’m doing is a contest to the death. Man versus polar bear. Combat supreme. Polar bear is vicious. Polar bear can decimate a herd of reindeer in like a matter of minutes. I’m lining up this guy Shunko Hakoda. A sumo wrestler. He goes three-fifty, easy. His agent’s hedging right now but I think we got the numbers. Meanwhile I’m negotiating with the president of Malawi to hold the fight there. I’m envisioning a large cage in the middle of a soccer stadium. You’re asking yourself where we’ll find a polar bear in Malawi.”
Selvy eased off the bar stool and walked out. He headed back toward Times Square, taking the same route. Naked karate. Pagan baths. A battle-scarred Cadillac moved slowly down Broadway, a man’s foot hanging out one window. It weaved on past, bumpers caked with mud, streaks of dirt across all four doors. Selvy watched it plow into the back of the maroon and gold pimpmobile. Tinkling glass. Little puffs of dust. The onlookers were overjoyed. They glanced at each other wide-eyed as if to confirm the dimensions of the event.
In seconds the owner-pimp emerged, wispy beard, a trifle hassidic in his mink hat and understated black velvet suit. He moved in little scat steps, half a dancer, aggrieved and restive in this sidewalk crush, already eyeing the Cad, which sat throbbing in a patch of broken glass and chunks of rusty dirt dislodged from the fenders.
Selvy was pinned by a dozen spectators. He reached out for an awning support in order to avoid being swept in a given direction against his will. Over the heads of some teenage girls he saw the two men at the edge of the crowd, earnestly discussing something. He couldn’t tell whether they’d spotted him. Also hard to tell what they might be carrying under those loose-fitting windbreakers.
The doors of the Cadillac slowly opened and bodies of various sizes and types became visible. The car was full of Hispanics (official police designation), maybe ten or eleven, at least three of them children. The crowd turned its attention back to the pimp.
Selvy used the awning support to stand fast while most of those around him took about four involuntary steps into the street. Traffic was halted at the scene of the accident. Whole masses of onlookers were rocked one way or another by sudden imbalances elsewhere in the crowd. A police siren sounded at a steady volume with the car unable
to make progress in the stalled traffic.
Selvy forced people aside and made it to the nearest open doorway. He climbed a long flight of stairs. The walls on both sides were full of graffiti. At the top he turned and looked back. Then he walked down the corridor. He passed several rooms with small curtained booths, a few people milling about. He passed another room with a man standing in the doorway.
“Photograph live nudes,” the man said sleepily.
Selvy turned right into another corridor. He stopped by a window. Down on the street a mounted policeman was moving through the crowd. He passed another open door. Gadgets, novelties, devices, creams, ointments, marital aids. Wholesale only. At the end of the corridor was a black metal door with two words painted on it in vivid red: NUDE STORYTELLING.
Selvy looked behind him. Then he opened the door and stepped inside. The outer office consisted of a desk, a telephone and a couple of chairs. A chubby black man in a porkpie hat sat at the desk, smoking a cigar. He had a racing form spread in front of him.
“Be a short wait,” he said.
“Who’s doing the storytelling?”
“Not me, guarantee.”
“How much per story?”
“Cost you upwards of thirty-fi’ dollars for a half-hour story, depending.”
“How much minimum?”
“I let you get away with fifteen down. What I’m saying, the basic story is fifteen. Activities can run you a little more.”
“All right,” Selvy said.
“You a cop, Jim?”
“Just want to hear a nude story.”
“Because if this is a sweep of the area, you ought to be sweeping anywheres but here. What I’m saying, it’s all seen to.”
“How long do I wait?”
“Pick out a chair, Jim. There’s a story in progress.”
Mudger trued up the cutting edge with a coarse hone. He found this mysteriously pleasing. There was a lightbulb directly overhead so that he could determine the best sharpening angle by noting the shadow cast by the blade on the stone, and its gradual disappearance. Sight, sound, touch. He maintained a steady pressure as he moved the blade-edge into the stone.
The shape of tools. Proportions and heft. The satisfactions of cutting along pencil lines, of measuring to the sheer edge of something and coming out right, of allowing for slight variations and coming out right, of mixing fluids and seeing the colors blend, a surface texture materializing out of brush striations.
Cleaning up grit wheels. This made him happy. He liked the touch of rough surfaces. He liked the sounds things made when excess finish was removed. Sandpapering, grinding, buffing. He liked the names of things.
It was midnight. He went into the washroom. Standing over the commode he tried to spit into the stream of urine as it emerged. On the third try he connected, watching the blob of spit go skipping into the bowl.
He set to work on the handle. It would be burl maple. The names of things. Subtly gripping odors. Glues and resins. The names. Honing oil. Template. Brazing rod. The names of things in these two rooms constituted a near-secret knowledge. He felt obscure satisfaction, something akin to a freemason’s pride, merely saying these names aloud for Tran Le or her grandmother or the two men, Van and Cao. Carborundum. Emery wheel. Tenon and drawbore. You couldn’t use tools and materials well, he believed, unless you knew their proper names.
Cleaning up grit wheels. Hand-stitching a leather sheath. Doing your own heat-treating.
Sharpness: dry-shaving a square inch of your forearm with a freshly honed blade.
By heat-treating the steel blank himself, he knew he was sacrificing some of the exactness a commercial firm would provide. But he preferred it this way. His instrument start to finish.
He fitted a brass guard to the steel. Then he took two slabs of burl maple and roughed out a fit. He sanded, applied epoxy and set rivets. Ought to hold forever.
When the unit was dry he leveled out the finger grooves and used the belts and sanders to get the handle down to a tighter, firmer fit.
He buffed the wood and brass to a fine sheen. Then he alternately polished and sharpened the blade, finally using various buffing wheels to get the edge and finish he wanted.
Sharpness: the sight of blood edging out of a cut in your thumb.
He climbed the back stairs to the kitchen and opened a can of beer, taking it with him up one more flight to the bedroom. He moved quietly past the cradle and looked at Tran Le curled in bed. Her face was touched pearl gray by a night light nearby. She was the most beautiful woman he’d ever seen, a Saigon bar girl at fourteen, leaning against a parked jeep eating an Almond Joy when he first set eyes on her eight years ago. He took off his shirt. When he sat on the edge of the bed, she turned toward him.
“Sleep,” he said.
“Where Van is, Earl?”
“Out of town. With Cao.”
“Business.”
“They be back maybe tomorrow, next day. You sleep.”
“Sleep,” she said.
“Maybe Van come back with gift for his sister. This because Van know she such a good little wife. Earl tell Van. She is de sweetest little wife in de whole wide world.”
Mudger’s rudimentary speech often degenerated into stock Negro dialect, catching him unaware. All those recruits he’d trained and pained. The less power you have, the more dominance you maintain in secondary areas. Speech rhythms, foot speed, hair texture. He finished his beer sitting on the edge of the bed. He needed only a couple of hours sleep. Then he’d watch the sun come up.
The woman was young with a healthy reddish face, oval in shape, and large brown eyes. Her hair, center-parted, billowed evenly to either side. She wore an ordinary shift and sandals.
Selvy watched her walk to the outer office. The room was medium sized with a few vinyl chairs, a coffee table and a lamp constructed out of a football helmet. In a corner was a folding bed, doubled up, on casters.
“Stony, is this all?”
“What you see.”
“They said two minimum.”
“Man’s been waiting.”
“I’m kind of beat, frankly.”
“Tell him a story, Nadine. Man’s entitled.”
“Being I’m new, I won’t make waves. But ordinarily there’d be a tussle over this. Two’s the minimum, Stony, and you know it.”
“Do him a quickie, hon, and we’ll all go home.”
She sat across from Selvy. Her knees had a tender sheen. He liked shiny knees. He also liked her voice, a modified drawl. It took her a second or two to gear up to the introductory routine.
“Goes like this: you’re allowed to pick one story out of the following three. More, you pay extra. Each story runs ten minutes, depending. Longer of course for activities. Okay. ‘Flaming Panties.’ The Valley of the Jolly Green Giant, Ho Ho Ho.’ And the ‘Story of Naomi and Lateef.’ The second one’s mostly gay, just so we get our preferences right.”
“Wouldn’t I want a man to tell it?”
“Look, who knows?”
“You’re new here.”
“My second full week and I’m ready to bow out. Quit while they still love you. How much did you give Stony?”
“Fifteen down.”
“Just checking,” she said. “You have to do that with horseplayers. Okay, pick one.”
“I’ll try ‘Naomi and Lateef.’ ”
“You’re only the second person to pick that. Most everybody picks ‘Flaming Panties.’ It’s really sick, too. The mind that comes up with stuff like that.”
“They’re not your stories.”
“I don’t make them up. I just recite them.”
“I thought they were your stories.”
“If I made up ‘Flaming Panties,’ I don’t know, I think I’d run a sword through my body. It is the sickest.”
Selvy heard the man in the outer office talking to someone. He seemed agitated, although the words weren’t clearly audible through the closed door.
“If you get stimulate
d by the story, pay attention, you can give me an extra ten if you want, or an extra twenty, depending. We leave it up to customer preference. What’s wrong?”
“Nothing,” he said.
“That’s just Stony making life hard for the kid who brings his sandwich.”
Selvy nodded.
“The ‘Story of Naomi and Lateef,’ ” she said, standing momentarily to unzip the shift down the back, then stepping out of it and sitting down again. She looked at him impatiently.
“What?” he said.
“If you keep your clothes on, it means you’re a cop.”
“I see. I didn’t realize.”
“Nude storytelling, it says on the door.”
“Everybody, that means.”
“You’re catching on,” she said.
“There are some people I’m trying to avoid, more or less.”
“We all get naked. If you don’t, you’re a cop. That’s what they told me. I’m also supposed to say we recommend the twenty-dollar activity, which is the one we need the bed for. That goes in at the part we came to before.”
“I’ve got a better idea.”
“Of course if you’re ashamed. We get all sorts. Maybe we can work out a compromise. I don’t think a person ought to be forced to get undressed in front of a stranger. It’s just everybody’s so casual about their bodies.”
“There are some people I’m trying to avoid. What say you and I go out and get something to eat. Come on, put on your dress, we’ll go. Is there a back way?”
“Whoa, big fella.”
“I’ll take the twenty-dollar activity. Just not here, okay? We’ll grab a bite, come on.”
“Come, go; eat, sleep; dress, undress.”
“Nadine. Is that your name?”
“Yes.”
“How old are you?”
“Never mind.”
“You’ll never reach twenty if you hang around here much longer. I’m your last chance.”
“At least you’re smiling. You’d better be smiling.”
“Come on, we’ll go to Little Rock.”