Mao II

by Don DeLillo

  He opened the drawer to his right and found some more foreign coins, some binder clips and lapsed driver’s licenses. He knew where Karen was, blank-faced in Manhattan, all receptors working. The next major item was reader mail, how to take it out of chronological order and structure it geographically, country by country, state by state.

  He put his face to the keys and blew.

  He raised the front end of the typewriter and rubbed the damp cloth over the pad, lifting dust and hair.

  Mao used photographs to announce his return and demonstrate his vitality, to reinspire the revolution. Bill’s picture was a death notice. His image hadn’t become public yet and he was already gone. This was the crucial turn he needed in order to disappear completely, even from those he’d loved and trusted all these years. He would return in his own way, living somewhere else, more remotely, in one or another kind of disguise. Scott thought the photograph might make him look older. Not older in the picture but older as himself, after the fact of the picture. The picture would be a means of transformation. It would show him how he looked to the world and give him a fixed point from which to depart. Pictures with our likeness make us choose. We travel into or away from our photographs.

  He opened the middle drawer and found a narrow black brush, some stamps, some rubber bands and old lead pennies and a bottle of typewriter correction fluid.

  Bill would make a return to the book. This was the essence of Bill’s return. He would work on the novel with fresh energy, cut it back, gut it, strip it six ways to Sunday. He’s a new man now. He has the power of a reconstructed secret. Scott imagined him hunched over a desk, working the old spare territories of the word.

  He lifted the typewriter cover and cleaned the hammers with the black brush.

  He put his face to the keys and blew.

  Karen’s life had no center with Bill on the lam. She was all drift and spin. Scott missed her in more ways than he could name. He was left with the memorized body, the ageless shape and cadence and the way she arched and twisted, dull-eyed in the near terror of this approaching thing, then all the noise descending on their last held stroke. It was broken down to match-light in his brain. He half hated her and badly wanted her back. She was the one love, the routine astonishment, someone you could dream of as your sister and then wake to find next to you in bed, without shame or contradiction. Every time she heard a creak in the floor she thought it was an armed attack. Always on nameless alert. She used to say to him, If people knew what I was thinking they would put me away forever. But they would put us all away, he said. They have put us away. We are put away for our thoughts, one way or another. We have put ourselves away, he said. Pleasure in lists. The old black keys were smudged by years of anxious pawing. He used the damp cloth, rubbing one key at a time. There was happiness in these little fixit missions, the dignity of keeping on.

  Everson was tight-lipped in his tower redoubt. Mao aswim in his river. The night before on TV Scott had seen some footage shot by a tourist in rural China and it showed strange things, it showed a Chinese Christian cult in a meeting by a river and they were in the midst of a collective ascension with young men and women walking into the river arms aloft, faltering, swirling, many swept downstream. The footage was shaky and had a quality of delirium, an abnormal subjectivity, the kind of offhand amateur fleetness that was hard to trust, but they used slow motion and stop-action and they circled floating heads and then they ran it all from the start, people dressed mainly in white marching into the river in sets of two and three, arms still flying as the heads disappeared. And Karen not here to see it. A bonanza for our gal Karen. And Karen drifting and spinning. He looked at the wall charts. He could arrange the reader mail geographically or maybe book by book, although there was a great deal of mail that referred to both books or neither book, the philosophical mail, the stories of writerly desire, the verities and nullities. Bill was hiding from his photograph. He’d engineered the whole damn thing the same damn way he developed impressionistic ailments that he could then control with medication.

  He put his face to the keys and blew.

  He opened the lower righthand drawer, the deep compartment designed for files, and he saw some old passports, old bank books, he saw some postcards from daughter Liz.

  Bill’s return would not be complete without Scott, of course. When the time was right Bill would contact him. A phone call, a few terse instructions. Scott would deal with the house and furnishings, all the legalities of selling and closing, and he would spend many days packing manuscripts and books and shipping them to Bill and would then work out the final quiet arrangements and do the last little things and drive off in the long night to join Bill and make their new beginning.

  There was a packet of letters from Bill’s sister. He knew Bill had grown up with an older sister in various places in the Midwest and the Great Plains but the most recent of the letters was eleven years old, so maybe she was dead. He found Bill’s army discharge papers and some insurance policies and a document labeled Notification of Birth Registration. This piece of paper advised that there was a record of birth preserved in the state office for the registration of vital statistics, Des Moines, Iowa. Near the bottom of the page was a seal marked Department of Commerce. The date on the document corresponded to Bill’s date of birth, which Scott had seen many times on records and forms, and the name of the child was Willard Skansey Jr.

  He put his face to the keys and blew.

  He moved the typewriter and other objects to the radiator cover and ran the damp cloth over the desktop.

  He took a closer look at the army discharge and saw the same name that appeared on the birth registration.

  Bill was not an autobiographical novelist. You could not glean the makings of a life-shape by searching his work for clues. His sap and marrow, his soul’s sharp argument might be slapped across a random page, sentence by sentence, but nowhere a word of his beginnings or places he has lived or what kind of man his father might have been.

  He put the typewriter back on the desk.

  A bank robber’s name. Or a tough welterweight of the 1930s with his hair parted in the middle. A bank robber lying low between jobs.

  He read some of the letters. He read the postcards from Liz, he looked at the photographs in the canceled passports and read the place names stamped on the old pages, thick and web-engraved. He read the rest of the letters from sister Clair, moving the chair nearer the window as dusk fell, ordinary news of weather and children and croup, pale-blue ink on lined paper.

  There’s so much paper in this house.

  Then he turned on the lamp and went to work on his lists until it was time for dinner.

  She talked to the woman who lived in a plastic bag half a block from Brita’s building. This person knew some things about bundling and tying. Survival means you learn how to narrow the space you take up for fear of arousing antagonistic interest and it also means you hide what you own inside something else so that you may seem to possess one chief thing when it is really many things bundled and tied and placed inside each other, a secret universe of things, unwhisperable, plastic bags inside plastic bags, and the woman is somewhere in there too, bagged with her possessions. Karen talked to her about what she ate, did she have a hot meal ever, was there something she needed that I can get for you. Practical talk. The woman looked out at her, dark-eyed and sooty, barely ever responding, showing the soot that deepens into the face and becomes the texture of the person.

  It is hard to find a language for unfortunates. One word out of place and their eyes call up a void.

  She saw a man weaving through the subway saying, “I have holes in my sides.” Not even asking for money or shaking a plastic cup. Just going car to car in that firm-footed pace you learn to adopt in the subway even if you are broken-bodied. She tried to read the Spanish directions about what to do in an emergency. “I have holes in my sides.” There must be something about the tunnels and crypts of the city that makes people think they are Jesus
.

  Uptown there were schoolboys wearing ties as headbands. They widened the neck part to fit around the forehead with the knot near the right ear and the main part drooping over the shoulder. Shooting with their schoolbags. In other words lifting the school-bag to the hip Uzi-style and spraying imaginary fire with their lips pushed out. Only Catholic boys wore uniforms back home. She remembered nuns in station wagons and how she walked among them at a football game. They were in black and white, she was in color.

  There were water-main breaks and steam-pipe explosions, asbestos flying everywhere, mud propelled from caved-in pavement, and people stood around saying, “It’s just like Beirut, it looks like Beirut.”

  On the bus you have to push a narrow tape to signal for a stop. English on the buses, Spanish on the subways. Bring hurry-up time to all man.

  The saxophonist in white sneakers played in a deep crouch, leaning forward on his toes, knees bent high, the low-slung metal nearly scraping the pavement, buses, cars, trucks, there are magazines for sale on the sidewalk, totally old copies of Life and Look, the generosity of those old covers, the way they seem a pity and a consolation, forgiving us the years between, and the saxman shuts his eyes, nodding to the sounds.

  In the loft she looked at a photograph of refugees in a camp, the whole picture out to the edges nothing but boys crowded together, most of them waving urgently, pale palms showing, all looking in the same direction, bareheaded boys, black faces, palms that catch the glare, and you know there are thousands more outside the edges of the picture but in the midst of the visible hundreds who are jammed and pushed together waving, this suffocating picture of massed boys, she noticed a single worried adult, one man’s head showing at upper right, and he is wearing a knit cap and has his hand near his forehead possibly shielding his eyes from the glare and all the boys are looking in the general direction of the camera and he is standing diagonally and peering over the heads and across the frame and out of the picture. He does not look like an official or a leader. He is part of the mass but lost there, stuck there on the page that is filled with waving boys, and nowhere in the picture is there a glimpse of ground or sky or horizon, it is only heads and hands, and she wondered if the waving was for food, throw the food, all those grimacing boys looking at the camera. Are there truckloads of food on the other side of the camera or is it just the camera they’re waving at, the camera that shows them an opening to the food? A person comes with a camera and they think it means food. And the lost-looking man whose mind is not on the food or the camera but on the crowd, how he might escape before they trample him.

  Brita said, “And I don’t mind your staying for a while. But we both know I have to kick you out one of these days and it’s going to be sooner rather than later. And I’m telling you there is no Bill to be found around here.”

  “I’m not looking for him face by face in the street. I just need this time away from Scott. I’m looking for Bill kind of in my mind, to think where he might be.”

  “And you and Scott.”

  “I really love Scott in most of the ways that count. God that sounds awful. Forget I said that. We just stopped talking the way we used to. We actually lacked the strength to talk to each other. We silently agreed we are going to let this get as bad as it can get and then see what happens. It was a question of willfully let it fester. All alone in Bill’s house. And these are two people who had a constant daily plan for getting things done. Who used to totally talk.”

  Brita went away to take pictures of writers and left the keys and some money. She gave Karen oral and written instructions for feeding the cat and working the locks and the alarm system and she left phone numbers and dates—San Francisco, Tokyo and Seoul.

  She felt the warning aura in the street, the sense that she was glowing, cars and people glowing, the electric shiver down her arm and then the full truth of the pain, the pain in full surround, streaming from the neurons, a brain trail so deep it might crack the skin. She could not see for a number of seconds, maybe half a minute, or could see only glow, intense white shadow, and she stood dizzily where she was and waited for the street to reappear so she might walk out of the glow and come into objects and surfaces and the words that we attach to them.

  She took a taxi back to the building. She began taking taxis here and there, yellow cabs driven by fantastically named men from Haiti, Iran, Sri Lanka, the Yemen—names so wondrous she couldn’t always tell whether they were printed last name first or in the normal sequence. Karen talked to them. She was loose in the city of overflowing faces and needed to find ways to tell them apart. One man said he was from the Yemen and she tried to imagine where that might be. She talked to Sikhs and Egyptians, calling through the partition or putting her mouth to the cash slot, asking family questions or what about religious practices, did they pray facing east.

  She saw pictures of missing children on shopping bags and milk cartons, on posters stuck to building walls, and then you hear about women who give away babies, leave babies in the trash. She came upon this park, saw it from a cab. She saw the normative life of the planet, businesspeople crossing streets beneath the glass towers, the life of sitting on buses that take you logically to destinations, the unnerved surface of rolling plausibly along. Saw sleeping bodies in the tunnels and ramps, heads hidden, sooty feet, tightly bundled objects clutched to the knees.

  Sony, Mita, Kirin, Magno, Midori.

  She saw these soot-faced people pushing shopping carts filled with bundled things and she thought they were like holy pilgrims marching on endlessly but possibly thinking more and more about how to get through the next ten minutes, their priorities now revealed to them, and never mind Jerusalem.

  She began to form pictures of people falling in the street. She’d see a man just walking and then he had a cut head or whatnot, getting up dazed. Or see a man stepping off the curb and form a picture of a car that’s bearing down and then he’s in the street all bloodied up.

  She came upon this park. It was something you come upon and then stop in your tracks. A tent city. Huts and shacks, she was thinking of the word; lean-tos; blue plastic sheeting covering the lean-tos and the networks of boxes and shipping containers that people lived in. A refugee camp or the rattiest edge of some dusty township. There was a bandshell with bedding on the stage, a few bodies stirring, a lump of inert bedding suddenly wriggling upward and there’s a man on his knees coughing up blood. She walked in a kind of straight-legged bobbing way as if to mock her own shy curiosity or conceal her awe. Stringy blood looping from his mouth. There were bodies shrouded on benches, bedding set out to dry on the fence of the children’s pool. And the makeshift shelters draped in blue, the box huts, the charcoal stoves and shaving mirrors, smoke rising from fires set in oil drums. It was a world apart but powerfully here, a set of milling images with breath and flesh and a language everywhere that sounded like multilingual English, like English in grabs and swoops, broken up and cooked. People in stages of rag-wearing, some less badly equipped, belongings bundled in milk crates and shopping carts. She saw a man sitting in a collapsed armchair outside his shipping box and he resembled a sketch of an ordinary homeowner on a shady street before the picture is fully drawn. He talked to himself in an everyday voice, a man with some education, with a history of possessions and relations, this was clear to her. Talking intelligently to himself, making sense, and when he saw Karen standing there he shifted his remarks directly to her as if they’d been having this conversation all along. And from the spot where she stood now, a distance from the bandshell, she could see more bodies stirring, hear the coughing, and she realized the whole deep stage was spread with bedding and there were people moving everywhere, a slowly spreading ripple and moan, or not moving, or lying completely still, half forms, beating hearts, faces and names.

  She had to walk slowly to accommodate her awe. She went home to feed the cat but returned right away, taking a Jamaican taxi and saying Tompkins Square. It might be ten-plus acres with pigeons walking everywhere
but not a single one aloft and even when she tried to kick-scatter several birds they only scurried away at best, not so much as flapping a fitful wing. People in clusters and larger groups, tending toward evening. Somebody cooked meat on a skewer and there was a fight not far away, a man and woman pushing an older man, backing him up, and he slapped at their hands and did a scat step, turning, and fell down hard. The whole thing absorbed into the background. Things fading all the time, hard to retain. A police minicab came by like some Bombay cartoon.

  When night came down she was talking to a tall kid wearing a sweatshirt with Coke bottles pictured across the front, row after row. He was selling marijuana at the edge of the park, going, Grass grass grass grass. His voice got lower as he went through the chant, ending in a kitty-cat hiss. People walking by said Omar. He had a long face, sloped forehead and shallow chin and his tightly webbed hair was so close to the scalp and so clearly defined and widely parted it had a maplike contrast and precision.

  The fallen man was still down, trying to get something out of his back pocket. An old white came by wearing a rag coat and baseball cap and high sneakers and the two men fell into conversation.

  Omar said, “But sometimes you get an EDP and the police come with stun guns and blinding lights.”

  “All the paraphernalia.”

  “They have a gun that shoots fifty thousand volts. Be surprised how sometimes it only slows the guy down. Shoot him again, gets up again. It’s your adrenaline.”