by Don DeLillo
There were gas-main ruptures and fireballs outside famous restaurants and people kept saying, “Beirut, Beirut, it’s just like Beirut.”
Near the park she went past the beggar who says, “Spare a little change, still love you.” Every time she passed he was doing his daylong refrain. People went by. Still love you. They went by. Still love you. Spare a little change. They went by. Still love you. She left empty bottles and soda cans at the openings of lean-tos and took other bottles to be redeemed, buying food for the squatters in the park and telling them there was a man from far away. Omar took her into tenements where he did his swift business in figures of speech she never quite caught on to. There were tile floors in the hallway and they had these punctures in the door where they put in locks and took out locks. It was a civilization of locks. A pointing hand painted on an alley wall seemed to lead nowhere.
In the loft she went through many books of photographs, amazed at the suffering she found. Famine, fire, riot, war. These were the never-ceasing subjects, the pictures she couldn’t stop looking at. She looked at the pictures, read the captions, looked at the pictures again, rebels with hoods, executed men, prisoners with potato sacks on their heads. She looked at the limbs of Africans starving. The hungry were everywhere, women leading naked children in a dust storm, the way their long robes billowed. She read the caption and then looked at the picture again. The picture was bare without the words, alone in open space. Some nights she came into the loft and went straight to the pictures. Delirious crowds swirling beneath enormous photographs of holy men. She might study the same picture seven times in seven nights, children falling from a burning tenement, and read the caption every time. It was suffering through and through. It was who is dying in the jungle rot. The words helped her locate the pictures. She needed the captions to fill the space. The pictures could overwhelm her without the little lines of type.
She talked to Israelis and Bangladeshis. A man with sparkly eyes turned halfway in his seat, driving breakneck downtown, and she formed a picture of the taxi in a steep careen, shooting still-life flames. She talked to all the drivers, asking questions in the cash slot.
They went by. Still love you. Went by. Still love you.
There was a dialect of the eye. She read the signs and sayings near the park. The Polish bars, the Turkish baths, Hebrew on the windows, Russian in the headlines, there were painted names and skulls. Everything she saw was some kind of vernacular, bathtubs in kitchens and old Waterman stoves, the liquor-store shelves enclosed in bulletproof plastic like some see-through museum of bottles. She kept seeing the words Sendero Luminoso on half-demolished walls and boarded storefronts. Sendero Luminoso on the cinder-block windows of abandoned tenements. Beautiful-looking words. They were painted over theater posters and broadsheets on all the peeling brick walls in the area.
“I’m not in too good of a mood,” Omar said.
“I’m only asking.”
“Don’t slime up to me. All I’m saying, okay.”
“I’m asking a simple question. Either you know or you don’t.”
“No time for sex, okay, then you come around, which I don’t even know your name.”
“I found out how old you are. They told me in the park.”
“Hey I make my living. I protect my corner regardless. Know what I’m saying. Be it I’m six or sixty.”
“So all right, you’re mature and experienced to the sky. But that’s the way I feel about it.”
“The Shining Path. Sendero Luminoso. Spanish for Shining Path.”
“Is it religious?”
“It’s guerrillas and whatnot. Making their presence felt.”
“Where?”
“Wherever,” Omar said.
Bodies stirring in the bandshell, lost children on the milk cartons. She recalled the sign for DEAF CHILD and formed a picture of a Sunday hush on a country road. It’s just like Beirut. She talked to certain familiars in the park, telling them how to totalize their lives according to the sayings of a man with the power. In the subways she read the Spanish emergency even if the English was right next to it. She reasoned that in an actual emergency she could switch to the English if needs be and in the meantime she was trying out voices in her head.
In the subways, in many of the streets, in corners of the park at night, contact could be dangerous. Contact was not a word or touch but the air that flashed between strangers. She was learning how to alter the way she walked and sat, how to hide her glances or sort of root them out. She remained in the deep core. She walked within herself, did not cross the boundary into the no-man’s -land of a glance, a fleeting ray of recognition. Like I’m a person and you’re a person, which gives you the right to kill me. She formed a picture of people running in the streets.
She liked climbing the ladder to Brita’s bed with the little TV in hand and the loft all dark and sitting near the ceiling in the glow, watching without sound.
A daylit scene comes on of a million people in a great square and many banners swung aloft with Chinese writing. She sees people sitting with hands calmly folded over knees. She sees in the deep distance a portrait of Mao Zedong.
Then rain comes on. They’re marching in the rain, a million Chinese.
Then people riding bicycles past burnt-out vehicles. Bicyclists wearing rain shrouds and holding umbrellas. She sees scorched military trucks with people inspecting closely, awed to be so near, and lampposts in the distance arching over trees.
A group of old men come on stiffly posed in Mao suits.
She sees soldiers in the darkness who come jogging through the streets. She is mesmerized by rows and rows of jogging troops and those riot guns they carry.
Then people being routed in the dark, great crowds rent and split, the way a crowd folds away, leaving a space that looks confused.
They show high officials in Mao suits.
The soldiers jogging in the streets, entering the vast area of the daylit square although it is night now. There is something about troops jogging out of streets and avenues into a great open space. They are jogging in total drag step almost lazily with those little guns at port arms and the crowd breaking apart.
Then the portrait of Mao in the daylit square with paint spattered on his head.
The troops come jogging in total cadence in that lazy drag step, row after row, and she wants it to keep on going, keep showing the rows of jogging troops with their old-fashioned helmets and toylike guns.
They show a smoldering corpse in the street.
There are dead bodies attached to fallen bicycles, flames shooting in the dark. The bodies are still on the bikes and there are other bicyclists looking on, some wearing sanitary masks. You could actually say a pile of bodies and many of the dead still seated on their bikes.
What is the word, dispersed? The crowd dispersed by jogging troops who move into the great space.
One crowd replaced by another.
It is the preachment of history, whoever takes the great space and can hold it longest. The motley crowd against the crowd where everyone dresses alike.
They show the portrait of Mao up close, a clean new picture, and he has those little mounds of hair that bulge out his head and the great wart below his mouth that she tries to recall if the wart appears on the version Andy drew with a pencil that she has on the wall in the bedroom at home. Mao Zedong. She likes that name all right. But it is funny how a picture. It is funny how a picture what?
She hears a car alarm go off in the street.
She changes channels and a million Chinese come on in the daylit square. She is hoping to catch more shots of jogging troops. They show the bicycle dead, a soldier’s body hanging from a girder, the row of old officials in Mao suits.
What does it mean that all these old men are dressed in Mao suits and the people in the square are all in shirtsleeves?
The motley crowd dispersed.
They show the great state portrait in the deep distance and she is pretty certain there is no wart in Andy
’s drawing.
There is something about troops entering a square, jogging row after row in lazy cadence. She keeps changing channels to see the troops.
They show the bicycle dead.
The daylit square comes on again. It is funny how a picture shows the true person even when it is incomplete.
And in the street when she goes out later there is a taxi that has skidded into a parked car and a third car’s alarm is sounding. People stand around eating and watching. The sodium-vapor lamps bend over the incandescent scene and in the vertigo of intermingled places, the great square in Beijing and the wind-smoked downtown street and the space in the squat building where the TV sits, she stands peering at the crushed car, looking for upside-down bodies and blood dashed everywhere.
They went by. Spare a little change. Went by. Still love you. Spare a little change. Went by. Still love you.
She followed a man who looked like Bill but he turned out on further inspection to be not a writer type at all.
She took the gentlest possible care of the food-encrusted spoon from the art gallery. She kept it on a shelf, clearing some of the books so it could sit undisturbed and in open sight but also out of the sun. She was worried about the food. If the food was somehow touched or rubbed by another object or if it was softened by warm air, it might crumble off the spoon and this would be a defacement she didn’t think she could bear. The spoon and food were one.
She spoke sincerely to a couple in the park, a man and woman textured in soot. They sat on a mattress inside their box hut. Karen squatted at the opening, her fingertips touching the ground, and there was a plastic bag that was the entrance curtain sort of draped over her shoulder.
Our task is to prepare for the second coming.
The world will be a universal family.
We are the spiritual children of the man I talked about from far away.
We are protected by the total power of our true father.
We are the total children.
All doubt will vanish in the arms of total control.
Omar Neeley was fourteen. She walked with him past the Ukrainian Jesus on the church façade. They walked past the AIDS hotel. She realized she didn’t know where he lived or if he had parents or siblings. She used to think siblings were strictly white and middle-class due to something in the nature of the word. They walked past the black cube sculpture that was balanced on a point. It had ten men sleeping beneath it with their shopping bags and shopping carts alongside, with crutches lying beside some of them, some arms and legs in casts. Omar was supposed to help her carry plasterboard left at a demolition site. Take it to the park. But down one of the factory streets two men in undersized hats came up, those little fedora hats and muscle T-shirts. She felt the contact in the air, the streak of meaning that takes the blood out of your face. But all they did was talk. They talked to Omar in figures of speech she couldn’t make out. Then they walked along with him and he never looked back, and they walked and he went with them. What about my plasterboard. One of them talked to him with a hand on his arm and he walked along with that jangling gait, big for his age.
People with supermarket carts. When did these things come out of the stores and into the streets? She saw these things everywhere, pushed, dragged, lived in, fought over, unwheeled, bent, rolling haywire, filled with living trivia, the holistic dregs of everything if that is correctly put. She talked to the woman in the plastic bag, offering to get a shopping cart for her, which is something I might be able to do. The woman spoke out at her from inside the bag, spoke in raven song, a throttled squawk that Karen tried to understand. She realized she understood almost no one here, no one spoke in ways she’d ever heard before. The whole rest of her life had been one way of hearing and now she needed to learn another. It was a different language completely, unwritable and interior, the rag-speak of shopping carts and plastic bags, the language of soot, and Karen had to listen carefully to the way the woman dragged a line of words out of her throat like hankies tied together and then she tried to go back and reconstruct.
The woman seemed to be saying, “They have buses in this city that they crouch for wheelchairs. Give us ramps for people living in the street. I want buses that they crouch for us.”
She seemed to say, “I want my own blind dog that it’s allowed in the movies.”
But maybe it was something else completely.
There are people gathering in clusters everywhere, coming out of mud houses and tin-roof shanties and sprawling camps and meeting in some dusty square to march together to a central point, calling out a name, collecting many others on the way, some are running, some in bloodstained shirts, and they reach a vast open space that they fill with their pressed bodies, a word or name, calling out a name under the chalk sky, millions, chanting.
She said, “Let me into vibration” or “Get me annihilation,” and when Karen brought her hot food on a pie plate she took it into her bag and disappeared.
Brita came home and they sat eating a meal that Karen carefully prepared. She had cleaned the place and packed her own small belongings in a tote bag she set by the door, to show she was ready to leave anytime the word was given.
Brita was impressive, she was frantically lagged and talkative, charged with a stark energy that had the center drained out and was all restless edges. She looked hollow-boned and beautiful like someone back from glaring tropic solitude.
“Do you like baths or showers?” Karen said.
“I take baths when there’s time. I give myself up to my bath. It’s the only place where I’m happy in the present moment.”
“I’ll run you a bath.”
“Usually I’m happy only thinking about it later. About five years later. Except for my bath and except for my writers. I’m happy doing writers.”
“I don’t think I’ve ever said that before. ‘I’ll run a bath for you.’ It sounds strange coming out.”
“And what about Bill, so where is he, does anyone know, that foolish man?”
“There’s no news or Scott would have called me.”
“There is a tendency of men to disappear. What do you think? Although I guess you’ve done some disappearing yourself. I could never just disappear into the blue. I would have to make certain announcements. Let the bastards know why I’m leaving and let them know where to find me so they can tell me how sorry they are that I’m gone.”
“Did your husband disappear?”
“He went on a business trip.”
“When was this?”
“Eighteen years ago.”
“It’s like what’s the name of that myth?”
“Exactly. And he has a series of adventures and performs legendary feats and comes back with a contract for a million spare parts. ”
“Tell me when you want me to run a bath.”
“Did your husband disappear?” Brita said.
“They sent him to England to be a missionary. I don’t know where he is now.”
“And you were married in this church.”
“There is a thing called a matching ceremony. This is before the wedding. They have mate selection.”
“Do I really want to hear this?”
“Some members wear actual labels saying Infertile, like, or May Be Gay. Just so the surprises are kept in check.”
“Listen, there are going to be surprises. I would be the tattooed lady if I had to list the full particulars.”
“Taking Powerful Tranquilizers.”
“And who selected your mate?”
“Reverend Moon.”
“And how did you feel about this?”
“I thought it was perfectly lovely. I stood up when my name was called. I went to the front of this ballroom-type place. Master was way over at the other end of the stage with many people standing between us, officials and members of the blessing committee and so forth. So then he just pointed to a man in the audience.”
“And you looked at him and knew he was the right one.”
“I tho
ught I honestly loved him even before he finished rising to his full height. I thought how great he’s Korean because many Koreans have been church members for a long time and this would give us a deeper foundation to build on. And I liked the darkness and sleekness of his hair.”
“My husband was largely bald.”
“But guess what I found out later. The day before the ceremony Master had looked at photographs of members and he actually matched us by photograph. So I thought how great, I have an Instamatic husband.”
“Do you know how lucky you are to be out of there?”
“I don’t like hearing that expressed, necessarily.”
“You are extremely lucky.”
“There are more potatoes,” Karen said.
“There are always more potatoes. I’m talky by nature. Okay? I make a lot of noise, I see people, I see men, I like to talk to men, I have affairs but I never know I’m happy for five years minimum. Think about Scott.”