by Don DeLillo
Karen came down from the stage and looked for someone who might listen. She had Master’s total voice ready in her head.
13
There were two stories about the ferry. It was hit by shell-fire from gunboats about thirty miles from the Lebanese coast and it turned around and came back to Larnaca. Two dead, one missing, fifteen wounded. Or the ferry was very near the Lebanese port of Junieh when it was struck by land-based artillery batteries or rocket launchers and it turned around and came back to Larnaca. One dead, one missing, nine wounded.
Bill was down at the harbor watching the ferry put in. He counted eighteen holes in the white hull. The ferry was called Zeno the Stoic and held one thousand passengers but the story was that only fifty-five had made the voyage.
Another story concerned the gunboats operating in Lebanese waters. They might have been Syrian, Israeli or Lebanese, and if they were Lebanese the story had it that they might have been operating from a makeshift base controlled by a Christian general who thought the ferry was an Iraqi freighter carrying arms to a rival faction.
But if the ferry was hit by land-based batteries, the story was that Shiites loyal to Syria did the shelling, or Shiites loyal to Iran, or possibly Christians loyal to Israel. The other story said the Syrians themselves were responsible.
Bill watched passengers come out of the opening in the bow and walk slowly along the pier toward a group of waiting people. It was midday and hot and he thought if he’d arrived a day or two sooner he would now be among them, slumped and trudging or dead somewhere or said to be missing. The story was that the casualties had been picked up at sea by Royal Air Force helicopters and taken to one of the British bases on the island. There were many thousands of Lebanese on Cyprus these days and now fifty-five who thought they were going home were unexpectedly back, if the number was accurate, minus the dead and missing.
He walked along the palm-lined seafront past cafés and shops. The pang in his side was deeper and steadier now, right front upper abdomen. He was getting to know it well. Sometimes a pain feels familiar even as it hits you for the first time. Certain conditions seem to speak out of some collective history of pain. You know the experience from others who have had it. Bill felt joined to the past, to some bloodline of intimate and renewable pain.
He took a table and ordered a brandy. There were lights strung across the promenade and he thought he might sit here all day waiting for dusk, for the sea breeze to freshen and the lights to come on, colored bulbs attached to wires that trailed and looped among the palms. And then sit here some more, sit into early morning with his Metaxa, a medicine dating nobly to the nineteenth century, and come back at noon or so and sit a while longer, waiting for a story to circulate that the ferry was running again.
He didn’t really think he would have ended among the dead, injured or missing. He was already injured and missing. As for death, he no longer thought he would see it come from the muzzle of a gun or any other instrument designed to be lethal. This was a thing he used to brood about. Shot by someone. Not a thief or deer hunter or highway sniper but some dedicated reader. He felt a touch of anticipation at times, seeing the bleak thing happen. He had put himself in deep seclusion and a certain forceful logic made it possible that some lonely young man might see a mission here. There were the camera-toters and the gun-wavers and Bill saw barely a glimmer of difference. An undersized kid with pinkish eyes, self-creating, an only child (as Bill began to see him) who lives in full-length mirrors and comes upon a novel that speaks to him in dangerous and radiant ways. Scott was not one of these. He had an enterprise and wit that scattered the darker spirits but it was also true that he’d popped out of a package, gasping for air, showing a need to consume whatever is left after he has read the books and collected the rumors. Then there was the finger Bill had received in the mail. He kept it around a while, a ring finger he guessed, gone mummy-brown, and he used to look at it and wonder what it meant. But that was long ago and he’d lost the feeling he might walk out of the post office and see a slight lad come diagonally toward him, showing the roguish smile he’s been preparing for weeks.
He felt like calling up what’s-her-face, the photographer, and talking to her machine.
He started back to his hotel. His leg didn’t hurt much and his left shoulder, where he’d struck the pavement when the car hit him, felt altogether fine. But there was pain in the other shoulder now. He stopped in the lobby of one of the larger hotels to pick up a Paris Herald and saw a sign welcoming a group of veterinarians from Britain. Among the doctors again. The newspaper said thousands were leaving Beirut to escape the fighting. Coffins were stacked at cemetery entrances because there was no more room for the dead. Outside the city they were burying people in clusters, two or three bodies to a grave. Skulls were spray-painted on the walls of ruined buildings and there wasn’t any water and the rats were getting bigger and the power grid was down.
Bill believed he faced no danger there. Isolation only, unsparing, stony, true, the root thing he’d been rehearsing all these years. And if the ferry didn’t run, maybe the hydrofoil would, lifting above the sea chop and maneuvering through the fire of massed batteries. And maybe it wouldn’t. But there was a chance the airport would reopen. He’d sit aboard a ghostly flight with six or seven tense Beirutis, refugees in reverse, going home to terror on every level.
On the street he tried to recall the name of his hotel so he could ask someone where the hell it was. The place was small and cheap, a fair distance from the swaying masts in the marina. That’s the life he might have had, an answering machine and designer sheets and a racing sloop and a woman he could love and a mess of red mullet grilling in a pit. He realized he was feeling pain every time he took a deep breath.
In his room he noted down expenses on a pad. Then he looked at the pages he’d written and didn’t think he could do any more. It was too hard. It was harder than major surgery and it didn’t even keep you alive. He looked at a picture on the wall and saw everything that existed outside the room he was sitting in and the one he was trying to write about. It was a picture of fishing nets stowed in canvas baskets and it had sex, memories, cravings, names of old friends, principal rivers of the world. Writing was bad for the soul when you got right down to it. It protected your worst tendencies. Narrowed everything to failure and its devastations. Gave your cunning an edge of treachery and your jellyfish heart a reason to fall deeper into silence. He couldn’t remember why he wanted to write about the hostage. He’d done some pages he halfway liked but what was the actual point?
He looked up and said aloud, “Keltner takes his time, tipping a glance at the baseball. Hey what a toss. Like a trolley wire, folks.”
He took off his shoes and socks. He slouched in the chair, his feet on the bed, the writing pad flat in his lap. He needed to talk to a doctor and have a drink. First the drink. But it would hurt to get up, it would hurt to walk to a café and sit down and breathe, it might even hurt to swallow, so we have the classic dilemma here. He should have asked Charlie how he’d stopped drinking. He loved his old friend, he felt an unremitting love all those recent hours they’d spent together in New York and London, felt an unremitting need to leave, get going, shake hands goodbye. Charlie used to talk about growing old on Park Avenue, he saw himself a frail old man in a wheelchair tended by some wordless black nurse in subaudible sneakers. She pushed him ever steadily into the sun. He was so old and brittle he could barely issue a breath but they dressed him up like a small child at a party, they made him look helplessly resplendent in an oversized jacket and a shirt collar that hung off the neck. He saw himself bundled in a blanket in the warmest time of day and the sunniest part of the street. Because when the shadows fell across the sidewalk, the nurse pushed him toward the sun, they went ever sunward, slowly, until he was posed totally still at the corner of a prewar building, taking the sun, this was the sun spot for the next quarter hour, and Charlie used to go pink with shame and delight, conjuring his senile end.
Firecrackers were called salutes.
It was a life consisting chiefly of hair—hair that drifts into the typewriter, each strand collecting dust along its length and fuzzing up among the hammers and interacting parts, hair that sticks to the felt mat the way a winding fiber leeches on to soap so he has to gouge it out with a thumbnail, all his cells, scales and granules, all his faded pigment, the endless must of all this balling hair that’s batched and wadded in the works.
Ought to do some sightseeing while I’m waiting for the ferry. Did he say this aloud? The Turkish Fort, the English Cemetery. He changed position slowly, testing movement and weight shifts in several directions, his face showing strain until he realized he could get up easily. He went to the bathroom and urinated and there was no sign of blood. He lifted his shirt and looked at the original bruise on his abdomen and it hadn’t expanded or changed color. The middle-period pottery, the lace-making village. He looked in the mirror and saw he hadn’t shaved in some days. The scrape on his face was no better and no worse. Better if anything and certainly not worse. He thought he would put on his shoes and socks and have a little lookaround if only to hide from the gaping page.
His right shoulder throbbed heavily.
He could have told George he was writing about the hostage to bring him back, to return a meaning that had been lost to the world when they locked him in that room. Maybe that was it. When you inflict punishment on someone who is not guilty, when you fill rooms with innocent victims, you begin to empty the world of meaning and erect a separate mental state, the mind consuming what’s outside itself, replacing real things with plots and fictions. One fiction taking the world narrowly into itself, the other fiction pushing out toward the social order, trying to unfold into it. He could have told George a writer creates a character as a way to reveal consciousness, increase the flow of meaning. This is how we reply to power and beat back our fear. By extending the pitch of consciousness and human possibility. This poet you’ve snatched. His detention drains the world of one more thimble of meaning. He should have said these things to that son of a bitch, although actually he liked George, but he’d never considered the matter in quite this way before and George would have said that terrorists do not have power and anyway Bill knew he’d forget the whole thing before much time went by.
He remembered the important things, how his father wore a hat called the Ritz, gray with a black band, a raw edge and a snap brim, and someone was always saying, “Measure your head before ordering,” which was a line in the Sears Roebuck Catalog, and how firecrackers were called salutes.
He thought he’d like to sit in the sun, get away from the gaping page and hail a cab and go down to the seafront and find a bench near a cluster of canvas baskets piled with fishing nets. He finished lacing his shoes but then pulled down the bedcover and eased onto the sheets, just for a moment, to stop the dizziness, the helpless sense that he was fading into thinness and distance.
Hair nuzzled to the edges of the hooked rug, hair that’s twirled around the spokes of the tub strainer and snarled in the drain trap and grimed around the base of the sink, pubic hair curlicued on the rim of the toilet bowl, nape hair kinked fast to the inside of his collar, hair on his pillow and in his mouth and on his dinner plate, but it’s the typewriter where he notices mostly, accumulating hair, all his lost strands settled in the mechanism, the grayness and tumble, the soft disorder, everything that is not clear and sharp and bright.
Find someone to push him ever sunward.
There’s always something you’re not supposed to see but it is a condition of growing up that you will see it.
When the boy pulled the hood away the prisoner looked for lizards fixed to the wall. They were small and pale, milky green, so pale and still he had to concentrate to find them.
The room drained the longings out of him. He was left with images.
Time moved tormentingly, carried by insects, all-knowing, if we can say it moves, if we can call it time. It all but talked to him. It had its own despair, it was present in the food and the effects of food, it seeped through his body in the form of fevers and infections, endless watery waste.
But the images were small and closed, time-dimmed. He wanted to think of the city burning, rockets streaking off the launchers. But the only images he could shape were compact and private, small closed moments in a house where things half happened, dimly, somewhere at the end of the hall.
It made the prisoner anxious, not having a pencil stub or scrap of paper. His thoughts fell out of his head and died. He had to see his thoughts to keep them coming.
He thought of the lizards as shards of light, sunlight in the shape of tapered jade. He memorized their positions on the wall and tried to bring them back into the world of the hood.
The boy wore a dark T-shirt under the top part of someone’s jogging suit and almost always had fatigue pants and ratty striped sneakers.
There was no more schedule for the war. It took place anytime or all the time and Israeli jets pounded over the city, creating the ancient spacious booms of a detonating sky.
The prisoner thought of himself as the boy’s own thing. He was the handy object the boy might tip and shape to his own wandering designs. He was the boy’s childhood, the idea of boyhood shining bright. A young male finds a thing and takes it directly to the center of his being. It contains the secret of who he is. The prisoner thought about this. He was the lucky find that enabled the boy to see himself clearly.
But then he stopped memorizing the lizards. It violated some resentful rule he couldn’t quite identify.
His body began to swell up. He watched his legs become airy white floats and did not accept them as his own. His body was fleeing with his voices.
No one came to interrogate him.
It was hard to stand normally or even shift positions on the mattress and he knew the time was near when he would become the collector of permanent conditions. They would find him and move in. Serous fluid in the tissues, spasms in the chest, all the chronics and abidings.
He wanted a notebook and pencil. There were thoughts he could not formulate without writing them down.
He thought of the no-shirt man alive on the wire.
It was hard to adapt to the absence of sense-making things. He couldn’t know for certain whether the rules had changed or been slightly refined or completely and eternally abandoned or whether they had ever existed in the first place, if we can call them rules or even trust the runted memory of a thing called a rule.
He identified with the boy. He saw himself as someone who might become the boy through the effortless measure of the mind thinking back. He thought at times he remembered the boy. There was a moment in some dim summer day when the boy stood by the door in the casual contraction of time.
The prisoner sensed a second darkness under the hood and knew the power was off again. He was just another Beiruti, no power, no water, listen to whistling shells, happens all the time.
There were strip fragments of concrete still attached to the bent steel rod the boy used to beat the bottoms of the prisoner’s feet when he remembered.
The war was audible but without the traffic sounds now, the routine honking that rode above the machine guns and mortars. City emptying out. He tried to shape an image of stark vistas down the long ruined avenues, a last sad pleasure, but it didn’t work anymore.
Nothing lay behind him but compact snatches. All energy, matter and gravity were ahead, the future was everywhere, all the things people say, stretching unbearably.
The hoods made no sense. Why were both of them wearing hoods? The boy needed only his own hood to protect himself from being identified at some unlikely future time. And if the boy wanted the prisoner to wear a hood, a hood without
eyeslits, a punishment, a midair hole, then he didn’t need a hood of his own. He could have fed the prisoner through a mouth slot in the man’s rag hood.
Two images in the dimness. The grandmother that had to be tied to a chair. The father seated drunk on the toilet, vomit sloshed in his dropped pants.
Only writing could soak up his loneliness and pain. Written words could tell him who he was.
He knew there were times when the boy pretended to leave the room but remained to watch him. He was the boy’s discovery, the glow he’d scraped from the earth. He felt the concentrated presence and knew exactly where the boy stood and he remained motionless on the mat and studied a dead stillness all the while the boy stood watching.
Small closed images under the hood.
The only way to be in the world was to write himself there. His thoughts and words were dying. Let him write ten words and he would come into being once again.
They brought him here in a car with a missing door.
A wet scrap of paper and a pencil that a dog has chewed. He could write his terror out, get it on the page and out of his body and mind.
Is there time for a final thought?
He knew the boy was standing by the door and he tried to see his face in words, imagine what he looked like, skin and eyes and features, every aspect of that surface called a face, if we can say he has a face, if we believe there is actually something under the hood.
Bill listened to the voices at the next table and knew he was in the presence of the British vets. Two men and a woman. He looked at the food in front of the woman and pointed. The waiter made a scrawl on his pad and went away. Bill downed his brandy.
He got up, taking the empty glass with him, and leaned toward the veterinarians.