by Don DeLillo
“I think about him. But I think about Kim too. He was husband-for-eternity. He wore a dark blue suit and maroon tie. They all did. And all the brides wore Simplicity Pattern number eight three nine two with the neckline two inches higher.”
“Go back to Scott and stay with him. You people belong together, all three of you. I think it’s a strange and sad way to live in many respects but who am I to say that something is strange and anyway you desperately need each other. I don’t like thinking of Bill being off alone somewhere.”
“How do you know he’s alone?”
“Of course he’s alone. He wants to be so alone that he can forget how to live. He doesn’t want it anymore. He wants to give it all back. I’m completely certain he’s alone. I know that man for a hundred years.”
“I’ll run your bath now,” Karen said.
Scott was doing reader mail. It was all over the attic, mail arrayed in slanted ranks on the desk and table, on the tops of file cabinets and bookshelves. He was structuring the mail by country. Once that was done he would put each country in chronological order so he might easily locate a letter sent from Belgium, say, in 1972. There was no practical reason why he’d ever want to find such a letter or any other piece of reader mail in particular. The point is that he would have it all in place. The house would make more sense in this alignment. And once he had all the other countries in place, he would do the United States. He would do it state by state, masses of letters through the decades. Most mail made Bill uneasy. It cut into his isolation and made him feel he was responsible for the soul of the sender. Scott laughed at this of course. About the only letters Bill looked at came from jerk-water towns and junctions, wide places in the road. He lingered over postmarks and return addresses. He liked to recite place names that carried the ghost music of remote terrain, hamlets that sat in a summer buzz under the Indian sky. He wanted to believe that only a few shy high-school kids or army recruits or piano teachers in small lost towns might truly see what was important in his work.
That evening Scott reread the letters from Bill’s sister. Then he went through the bedroom looking for anything that might tell him where Bill was or when he would call or if he would call. The medications were spread through two upper drawers in the bureau. There were many more than he’d known about and he examined the brand names. They were like science-fiction gods. And he glanced at the manuals and reference works and little paperback pill books. He looked for personal letters and documents. There was a single empty suitcase at the top of the closet and a small old electric fan set on a folded paper bag down among the shoes. He looked for sealed instructions, mocking himself for the thought and the phrase, but still thinking there might be something he was supposed to find eventually.
Willard Skansey. A welterweight fighting outdoors in steaming holiday weather before a crowd of straw hats.
Scott would never reveal the name change to anyone. He would keep absolutely silent. He was happy to keep silent, even now, beginning to feel abandoned. For many years Bill had been able to trust people to keep silent on his behalf. It would sustain and expand Scott, it would bring him closer than ever to Bill, keeping the secret of his name.
He went into the workroom and studied the wall charts again. He read the postcards from Liz. Then he made a list of things to do when he was finished with the mail.
Karen rode in a taxi, she loved these jouncing yellow cabs with their slender Ethiopians at the wheel. They had padded wheels, they had furry covers for their wheels and religious pictures pasted to the dash. She was looking at a wedge-shaped building in Times Square and it had a band of glowing letters running all around it. In other words the news of the day flashing across a moving-message unit. There was something about the funeral of someone famous but she couldn’t get a clear look from out the taxi window and the words went fleeting off the edge and continued around the corner and she had this stopped feeling you get when there’s something awesome in the news, this stoppage in the body, the cold stilled excitement that prepares you for something vast. She waited for the main news to return but the taxi started up again. She formed a picture of people massing in a square.
A crazy storm broke over the city. Box huts struck and pummeled by slashing hail. She thought, Hailstones the size of hailstones. It was only the lucky construction sheeting that saved the boxes from melting on people’s heads.
They used big canvas carts from the postal service for garbage or belongings.
They talked and mumbled to themselves, they nodded and talked, lone figures deep in monologue, they gesture to themselves and nod convincingly.
The messiah is here on earth and he is a chunky man in a business suit from the Republic of Korea.
She stood just looking at the spoon sometimes. She told Brita she didn’t want to take it with her when she left. It had a new setting now, detached from the burlap, and she was afraid that moving the spoon again might damage it in some mysterious inner way.
She asked everywhere for Omar but he wasn’t to be seen except for one time he was sitting on a fire escape with a Spanish woman and it took Karen a while to get him to come down and talk to her. All he said was he was off the corner now. He would have other things to do that he was setting up. He got somebody pregnant in Coney Island that he would have to deal with and Karen felt a deep pause, something in her chest opening to jealousy and loss. Plus there was a man coming around who lyingly claimed Omar had stolen his handgun. A piece of bent metal with a taped handle. She listened to him and felt the weight of those tiled hallways and punctured doors, the crack alleys where women left their babies wrapped in headlines. He told her he didn’t miss the corner. He was full of major plans. There were schemes that he could turn to cash. She listened to him and missed him. His gaze tended to drift and she knew he didn’t really see her. It made her feel strange, knowing she was about to disappear forever from sight and mind and memory, and there was someone she would think of often and he’d forget who she was, he was forgetting even as she stood there. But that was the weight of his life, those were the turns of phrase she could never understand.
In the worst noise of the subway there was music playing. Saw musicians under stairways and scattered along passages and they had keyboards and amps and violins, they had hi-hat cymbals and wagging saxophones. Gospel preachers worked the turnstiles, testifying strongly. Men sat in the grime with sand pails at their side waiting for a coin to drop. The musicians kept their odds and ends in shopping carts and played with the trains screaming in and announcements coming in gauzy bursts.
The warning aura came when she was alone in the loft. A mercury glow moved up the shanks of the towers out there. She came away from the window with a feeling in her arm that was like running current. She saw zigzags of silvery light and thought at once of the fleeting text that ran around the building in Times Square. Suddenly she knew who had been buried in the news of the day. She saw the lightning-lit word streams and the name she’d missed when she sat in the taxi and the line about weeping chanting mourners in the millions. She groped to the sofa and sat motionless for fifteen minutes, seeing the words streak across the building and go over the edge and continue on the other side. She was able to see the other side. Then the pain and nausea rolled in. She had no sense of time. The light was metallic and intense. Sendero Luminoso. It was right inside her, gleaming out of the pain mass. The beautiful-sounding Shining Path.
She realized Brita was in the room with her now. It was okay now. She kept saying okay. This is a word they know in numerous countries.
That night they sat together on the sofa with the TV juxtaposed against the conversation. They talked and watched. Then they saw what was on and listened to the voice that spoke behind the images.
It was the death of Khomeini.
It was the body of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini lying in a glass case set on a high platform above crowds that stretched for miles. The camera could not absorb the full breadth of the crowd. The camera kept panning but coul
d not inch all the way out to the edge of the anguished mass. On the screen the crowd had no edge or limit and kept on spreading.
The voice said, Crowds estimated, and the picture showed the crowds of mourners and Karen could go backwards into their lives, see them coming out of their houses and shanties, streams of people, then backwards even further, sleeping in their beds, hearing the morning call to prayer, coming out of their houses and meeting in some dusty square to march out of the slums together.
The voice said, Weeping chanting mourners.
There were mourning banners in the streets. Great photographs of Khomeini hung from building walls and many people in the crowd beat themselves on the head and chest.
The voice said, Rivers of humanity, and Karen realized this was the next day now, the funeral, with crowds estimated at three million and everybody dressed in black, all the streets and highways packed with black-clad mourners, and there were people who ran twenty-five miles to the cemetery, ran in grief and mourning, collapsed, carried, pulled along by others, and the roof of a bus fell in under the weight of people trying to see the body.
The voice said, Frenzied mourning. Beating their hands against their heads in grief.
The body was wrapped in a white burial shroud in a refrigerated van that could not get through the streets. Police fired shots in the air to disperse the crowd and make way for the body and there were pictures of fire hoses spraying tight arcs.
The crowd grew and clamored and the van turned back and the body had to be transported to the cemetery by helicopter.
There were aerial shots of the burial site surrounded by crowds. Karen thought they were like pictures of a thousand years ago, some great city falling clamorously to siege.
Then the helicopter landed and the crowds broke through the barriers. The living were trying to bring the dead man back among them.
Karen’s hands were over her mouth.
The living forced their way into the burial site, bloodying their heads and tearing at their hair, choking in the thick dust, and the body of Khomeini rested in a flimsy box, a kind of litter with low sides, and Karen found she could go into the slums of south Teheran, backwards into people’s lives, and hear them saying, We have lost our father. All the dispossessed waking to the morning call. Sorrow, sorrow is this day.
The living fell upon the body and knocked it to the ground.
The living do not accept the fact that their father is dead. They want him back among them. He should be the last among them to die. They should be dead, not him.
The voice said, Distraught and chanting mourners.
The living beat themselves and bled. They ripped the funeral shroud and tried to take the dead man into their tide, their living wave, and reverse the course of time so that he lives.
Karen’s hands were pressed to her face.
The living touched the body, they pressed the imam’s flesh to keep him warm. They had bloody shirts and there were towels around the heads of many men, soaked with blood.
Karen felt she was among them. She saw the shrouded body on the litter surrounded by bearded men, black-clad mourners and revolutionary guards, and they were fighting to touch the imam and take pieces of his shroud.
She could see his thin white legs exposed to the light. They were fighting over the body and beating their own faces.
She thought of the delicate tending of the dead and watched the frenzy of this scene and believed she might pass out. It was an injury to the idea that the dead are protected. His delicate hands and legs were so unfairly exposed. The living paraded the body around the compound and there were soldiers firing shots and men with bloodied heads.
But they were only trying to bring him back among them. The voice said, Eight people trampled to death and many thousands injured.
But it was the tale of a body now. It was beginning to be the story of a body that the living will not yield to the earth. They were passing out from heat and grief. There were people diving into the grave. She saw them throw themselves rag-bodied into the opening. Their bodies did not matter anymore and were limp and bent with grief. They wanted to occupy the grave to keep the imam out.
Karen went backwards into their lives, into the hovels and unpaved streets, and she watched the pictures on the screen.
Water cannons were turned on and the soldiers fired shots and took back the body at last. They pushed it aboard the helicopter and she could see the litter hanging out of the open door and the body exposed on the litter as the rotors turned and the craft began to lift.
But the living swarmed over the helicopter and dragged it back down.
It was possible to believe that she was the only one seeing this and everyone else tuned to this channel was watching sober-sided news analysis delivered by three men in a studio with makeup and hidden mikes. Her hands were pressed against her temples. She watched the body sticking out of the door and dust kicking up and that mass of black-clad mourners hanging off the skids and dragging the craft down to the ground.
It was the delicate tending of the dead that was forgotten here.
The troops drove the crowd back and the helicopter climbed once more. This time it swept the living away. They fell back from the wind-blast of the rotors and beat their heads and chests.
The voice said, Six hours later, and Karen saw a whole new barrier set up around the site. Cargo containers and double-decker buses. There was a sound track with amplified warnings carrying over the plain that stretched beyond the burial site and there were crowds to the horizon, crowds out to the edge of the long-distance lens.
The helicopter landed with the body in a metal casket, which revolutionary guards carried on their shoulders a short distance to the grave. But then the crowd surged again, weeping men in bloody headbands, and they scaled the barriers and overran the gravesite.
The voice said, Wailing chanting mourners. It said, Throwing themselves into the hole.
Karen could not imagine who else was watching this. It could not be real if others watched. If other people watched, if millions watched, if these millions matched the number on the Iranian plain, doesn’t it mean we share something with the mourners, know an anguish, feel something pass between us, hear the sigh of some historic grief? She turned and saw Brita leaning back on the far arm of the sofa, calmly smoking. This is the woman who talked about needing people to believe for her, seeing people bleed for their faith, and she is calmly sitting in this frenzy of a nation and a race. If others saw these pictures, why is nothing changed, where are the local crowds, why do we still have names and addresses and car keys?
Here they come, black-clad, pushing toward the grave. Helicopters flew in low over the plain. They dipped at perilous angles over the heads of the living and enveloped them in dust and noise. People beat themselves unconscious and were passed limply hand to hand over the heads of the crowd to recovery areas nearby.
Sorrow, sorrow is this day.
It was ten meters to the grave but it took the guards at least ten frenzied minutes to reach the spot and put the casket in the earth. It was the story of a body that the living did not want to yield.
Once the body was buried they put concrete blocks on top of it. The helicopters kicked up dust and many mourners wept and fell. When evening came the guards moved a black cargo container on a flatbed truck and placed it over the gravesite. The living climbed the sides of the container and spread flowers across the top and there were photographs of Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini fixed to the metal surface.
The voice said, The black turban, the white beard, the familiar deep-set eyes.
Black-veiled women, the women in full-length veils, Karen tried to think of the word, chadors, women wrapped in chadors came forth and moved in close and there were many hands pressed to the container, there were hands touching the photographs and pressed to the metal.
Karen went backwards into the lives of the women, she saw them coming toward the camera in the narrow streets, then back even further to when they were growin
g up, to when they put on the veil and looked out at the world from the black wrapping, backwards to what it felt like dressed head to foot in black the first time, calling out a name under the burning sky.
The living carried signs and chanted. Khomeini the idol-smasher is with God today. Hours into night, under floodlights, the living beat their hands against their chests in grief.
Early in the park, first thing, she talked to those who were awake. A few people sat huddled on benches with coffee in paper cups and a woman spread a blanket over the pool fence.
Karen said, “We will all be a single family soon. Because the day is coming. Because the total vision is being seen.”
Then she climbed onto the bandshell stage and went among the bodies in sleeping bags and burlap and plastic. She talked to people one by one, squatting down flatfooted, her fingers linked an inch above the floor.
She said, “Prepare the day. Be ready in your mind and heart. There is plan for all mankind.”
She made her way across the stage, searching for bodies with open eyes.
She said, “Heart of God is only homeland. Pali-pali. Total children of the world.”
The sounds of bitter sleep, the moans that rose from untellable dreams. And she talked to those who lay awake. Totally talked. Rough coughing all around her, the nasal scrape, the measure of those bodies breathing, it sounded very much like work. Stale air holding close, the old dead smell of bedding and sweat and pee and slept-in clothes. She talked in the intimacy of first light with sleeping people all around.
She said, “For there is single vision now. Man come to us from far away. God all minute every day. Hurry-up time come soon. ”
The police minicab scooted past the box huts webbed in blue sheeting, past two men in hooded jerseys sharing a smoke. Past the woman in the broken folding chair sitting lopsidedly asleep. Past the man on the ground with pigeons moving near his head, poking for food in his hair and clothes. Past the whole population that knows the laws of the nomad encampment, all their bundles tight, bags containing bags, people edged down, reading the space their lives are assigned.