by Don DeLillo
I had to keep watching. Others glanced, two kids took pictures, a man wearing an apron hurried past, street pace quickened by the threat of weather.
I approached, careful not to get too close.
I said, “I wonder if I might ask a question.”
No response, face the same, arms stiff, regimental.
I said, “Up to now, I haven’t tried to guess what your purpose is, your cause. And if there was a poster, I can’t help thinking it might convey a message of protest.”
I took a step back, for effect, although she could not see me. I don’t think I expected a response. The idea that she might open her eyes and look at me. The possibility of a few words. Then I realized that I’d started by saying I would ask a question and I hadn’t done this.
I said, “And the boy in the white shirt and blue tie. Last time, downtown somewhere, there was a boy with you. Where is the boy?”
We remained in place. People maneuvering for position, traditional taxi panic, and it wasn’t even raining yet. A sign in Mandarin, Cantonese, a few words in Hindi. I needed a specific challenge to help me counteract the random nature of the encounter. A woman. Did it have to be a woman? Would anyone pause to look if a man stood here in an identical posture? I tried to imagine a man with a sign in Phoenician, circa one thousand B.C. Why was I doing this to myself? Because the mind keeps working, uncontrollably. I moved closer again and faced her directly, mainly to discourage those who wanted to take her picture. The man wearing an apron came back this way, pushing a series of interlocked shopping carts, four carts, empty. The woman with eyes ever closed, she fixed things in place, stopped traffic for me, allowed me to see clearly what was here.
Had I made a mistake, talking to her? It was intrusive and stupid. I’d betrayed something in my register of cautious behavior and I’d violated the woman’s will toward a decisive silence.
I stood there for twenty minutes, waiting to see how she would react to the rain. I wanted to stay longer, would have stayed longer, felt guilty about leaving, but the rain did not come and I had to set out for my next appointment.
Didn’t Artis tell me once that she spoke Mandarin?
• • •
We found a nearly empty restaurant not far from the gallery. Stak ordered broccoli, nothing with it. Good for the bones, he said. He had a long face and stand-up hair and wore a jogging suit that zippered up the back.
Emma told him to finish the story he’d started telling us in the taxi.
“Okay so I began to wonder where Oaxaca is. I guessed it’s in Uruguay or Paraguay, mainly Paraguay, even though I was ninety percent sure it’s in Mexico because of the Toltecs and the Aztecs.”
“What’s the point?”
“I used to need to know things at once. Now I think about them. Oaxaca. What do you have? You have o a and then x a and then c a. Wa há ca. I denied myself knowledge about the population of Oaxaca or the ethnic breakdown or even for sure what language they speak, which could be Spanish or some Indian language mixed with Spanish. And I situated the place somewhere where it doesn’t belong.”
I’d told Emma about the art gallery and the lone object on display and she told Stak and he agreed to take a look. An accomplishment in itself.
It was clear that I was the go-between, recruited to ease the tension between them, and I found myself headed directly into the sensitive subject itself.
“You’re done with school.”
“We’re done with each other. We don’t need each other. Day to day is one more wasted day.”
“Maybe I know the feeling, or remember it. Teachers, subjects, fellow students.”
“Meaningless.”
“Meaningless,” I said. “But other kinds of school, less formal, with independent research, time to explore a subject thoroughly. I know you’ve been through all this.”
“I’ve been through all this. It’s all a bunch of faces. I ignore faces.”
“How do you do that?”
“We learn to see the differences among the ten million faces that pass through our visual field every year. Right? I unlearned this a long time ago, in childhood, in my orphanage, in self-defense. Let the faces pass through the vision box and out the back of your head. See them all like one big blurry thing.”
“With a few exceptions.”
“Very few,” he said.
There was nothing he cared to add.
I looked at him intently and said in the most deliberate voice I could manage, “ ‘Rocks are, but they do not exist.’ ”
After a pause I said, “I came across this statement when I was in college and forgot it until very recently. ‘Man alone exists. Rocks are, but they do not exist. Trees are, but they do not exist. Horses are, but they do not exist.’ ”
He was listening, head bent, eyes narrowed. His shoulders squirmed a little, fitting themselves to the idea. Rocks are. We were here to see a rock. The object on exhibit was officially designated an interior rock sculpture. It was a large rock, one rock. I told Stak that this is what raised the statement from the far corners of my undergraduate mind.
“ ‘God is, but he does not exist.’ ”
What I did not tell him was that these ideas belong to Martin Heidegger. I hadn’t known until fairly recently that this was a philosopher who’d maintained a firm fellowship with Nazi principles and ideologies. History everywhere, in black notebooks, and even the most innocent words, tree, horse, rock, gone dark in the process. Stak had his own twisted history to think about, mass starvation of his forebears. Let him imagine an uncorrupted rock.
The show had been installed a couple of decades earlier, still running, ever running, same rock, and I’d visited three times in recent years, always the lone witness except for the attendant, the guardian, a late-middle-aged woman seated at the far end of the gallery wearing a black Navajo hat with a feather in the band.
Stak said, “I used to throw rocks at fences. There was nowhere else to throw a rock except at people and I had to stop doing people or they’d put me in detention and feed me fertilizer twice a day.”
A buoyancy in his voice, the self-approbation of a fourteen-year-old, and who could blame him. We were getting along pretty well, he and I. Maybe it was the broccoli. His mother sat next to him, saying nothing, looking at nothing, listening to us, yes, warily, not knowing what it was that the boy might say next.
I insisted on paying for lunch and Emma yielded, accepting my role as troop leader. The gallery occupied the entire third floor of an old loft building. We trekked up the stairs single-file and there was something about the cramped passage, the weak lighting, the stairs themselves and the walls themselves that made me think we’d been transformed into black-and-white, drained of skin pigment and the color values of our clothing.
The room was long and wide with plank floorboards and chipped and dented walls. The old bicycle belonging to the attendant was propped against the far wall next to her folding chair, no sign of the woman herself. But here was the rock itself, braced on a solid metal slab about three inches high. There were strips of white tape on the floor that marked visitor limits. Get close but don’t touch. Emma and I paused, half a room away, setting the rock in noble perspective. Stak wasted no time, striding directly to the object, which was taller than he was, and finding everything he needed to look at, all the irregularities of surface, the projections and indentations that belong to a rock, a boulder in this case, general shape somewhat rounded, maybe six feet across at its broadest point.
We approached slowly, she and I, quietly, but was it out of churchlike respect for the rock sculpture, the natural artwork, or were we simply observing the joined form of object and observer—the elusive boy who rarely attaches himself to something solid. Of course he reached across the taped border and managed to touch the rock, barely, and I felt his mother heed an inner pause, a caution, waiting for an alarm to start wailing. But the rock simply sat there.
We stood to either side of him and I allowed myself a mi
nute or two with the rock.
Then I said, “Okay, go ahead.”
“What?”
“Define rock.”
I was thinking of myself at his age, determined to find the more or less precise meaning of a word, to draw other words out of the designated word in order to locate the core. This was always a struggle and the current instance was no different, a chunk of material that belongs to nature, shaped by forces such as erosion, flowing water, blowing sand, falling rain.
The definition needed to be concise, authoritative.
Stak yawned outstandingly, then leaned away from the rock, appraising it, measuring the thing from a certain distance, its physical parameters, solid surface, its crags, snags, spurs and pits, and he walked around it, noting the whole unhoned expanse.
“It’s hard, it’s rock hard, it’s petrified, it has major mineral content or it’s all mineral with the long-dead remains of plants and animals fossilized inside it.”
He spoke some more, arms drawn to his chest, hands mixing the fragments of his remarks, phrase by phrase. He was alone with the rock, a thing requiring a single syllable to give it outline and form.
“Officially let’s say a rock is a large hard mass of mineral substance lying on the ground or embedded in the soil.”
I was impressed. We kept looking at it, three of us, with traffic blasting by outside.
Stak talked to the rock. He told it that we were looking at it. He referred to us as three members of the species H. sapiens. He said that the rock would outlive us all, probably outlive the species itself. He went on for a while and then addressed no one in particular, saying there are three kinds of rock. He named them before I could attempt to recall the names and he spoke about petrology and geology and marble and calcite, and his mother and I listened while the boy grew taller. The attendant walked in then. I preferred to think of her as the curator, same woman, same feathered hat, a T-shirt and sandals, baggy denims fitted with bicycle clips. She carried a small paper bag, said nothing, went to her chair and took a sandwich out of the bag.
We watched her openly, in silence. The huge gallery area, nearly bare, and the one prominent object on display lent a significance to the simplest movement, man or woman, dog or cat. After a pause I asked Stak about another kind of nature, the weather, and he said he was no longer involved with the weather. He said the weather was long gone. He said that some things become de-necessitated.
His mother spoke then, at last, in a tense whisper.
“Of course you’re involved. The temperature, celsius and fahrenheit, and the cities, one hundred and four degrees, one hundred and eight degrees. India, China, Saudi Arabia. What happened to make you say you’re not involved? Of course you’re involved. Where did it all go?”
Her voice sounded lost and on this day everything about her suggested a lost time. Her son about to return to his father and then what happens, where’s the future if he doesn’t go back to school, what lies waiting? A son or daughter who travels at a wayward angle must seem a penalty the parent must bear—but for what crime?
I reminded myself that I needed a name for Stak’s father.
Before we left, the boy called across the room to the curator, asking her how they got the rock into the building. She was in the process of lifting the curved end of one slice of her bread in order to inspect the interior of the sandwich. She said they made a hole in the wall and hoisted the thing from a flatbed truck equipped with a crane. I’d thought of asking the same question the first time I was here but decided it was interesting to imagine the thing always here, undocumented.
Rocks are, but they do not exist.
On our way down the dim stairway I quoted the remark again and Stak and I tried to figure out what it means. It was a subject that blended well with our black-and-white descent.
• • •
I listen to classical music on the radio. I read the kind of challenging novel, often European, sometimes with a nameless narrator, always in translation, that I tried to read when I was an adolescent. Music and books, simply there, the walls, the floor, the furniture, the slight misalignment of two pictures that hang on the living room wall. I leave objects as they are. I look and let them be. I study every physical minute.
• • •
Two days later she showed up unannounced, never happened before, and she’d never been so clumsy and rushed, not slipping out of her jeans but fighting her way out, needing to rid herself of the seething sort of tensions that accompany any matter involving her son.
“He embraced me and left. I don’t know what scared me more, the leave-taking or the embrace. This is the first time totally that he volunteered an embrace.”
It appeared that she was undressing just to undress. I stood at the foot of the bed, shirt on, pants on, shoes and socks, and she kept undressing and kept talking.
“Who is this kid? Did I ever see him before? Here he is, there he goes. Embraced me and left. Goes where? He’s not my son, never was.”
“He was, he is. Every inch the boy you took out of the orphanage. Those missing years. His years,” I said. “You knew the moment you first saw him that he carried something you could never claim as your rightful due, except legally.”
“Orphanage. Sounds like a word out of the sixteenth century. The orphan boy becomes a prince.”
“A prince regent.”
“A princeling,” she said.
I laughed, she did not. All the command she’d demonstrated with the children in the schoolroom, there and elsewhere, the woman in the mirror knowing who she is and what she wants, all undermined by the boy’s brief visit, and here was the urgency of her need to break free, a flail of limbs on my messy bed.
I would see her less often after this, call and wait for a return call, longer hours at her job, and she was quieter now, early dinner and then home, alone, rarely a word about her son except to say that he had given up his Pashto, stopped learning, stopped speaking except when there was a practical matter that needed to be addressed. Her remarks were delivered in an evenness of tone, from a sheltered distance.
I decided to go running. I wore a sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers and went running in the park, around the reservoir, rain or shine. There is a smartphone that has an app that counts the steps a person takes. I did my own count, day by day, stride for stride, into the tens of thousands.
- 6 -
The woman swiveled away from her desktop screen and looked at me for the first time. She was a recruiter and the job in question was listed as compliance and ethics officer for a college in western Connecticut. I repeated the term to myself periodically as we spoke, omitting western Connecticut, which was a three-dimensional entity. Hills, trees, lakes, people.
She said I’d be responsible for interpreting the school charter to determine regulatory requirements in the context of state and federal laws. I said fine. She said something about supervision, coordination and oversight. I said okay. She waited for questions but I didn’t have a question. She threw in the term bilateral mandate and I told her that she resembled an actress whose name I didn’t know, someone appearing in a recent revival of a play I hadn’t seen. But I’d read about it, I said, and I’d looked at the photographs. The recruiter smiled faintly, her face becoming real in the amplified company of the actress. She understood that my remark was not an attempt to ingratiate myself. I was simply being self-distracted.
We spoke in a friendly way about theater and it was clear from this point on that she wanted to dissuade me from considering the position, not because I was underqualified or overeager but because I didn’t belong there, in that environment. Compliance and ethics officer. She didn’t realize that everything she’d reported about the position, in the authorized terminology of job listings, was suited to my preferences and central to my past experience.
• • •
People here and there, hands out, standing man with paper cup, woman crouched above her vomit in seasick colors, woman seated on blanket, body rocking,
voice chanting, and I see this all the time and always pause to give them something and what I feel is that I don’t know how to imagine the lives behind the momentary contact, the dollar contact, and what I tell myself is that I am obliged to look at them.
Taxis, trucks and buses. The noise persists even when traffic is stopped. I hear this from my rooftop, heat beating into my head. This is the noise that hangs in the air, nonstop, whatever time of day or night, if you know how to listen.
I didn’t use my credit card for eight straight days. What’s the point, what’s the message. Cash leaves no trace, whatever that means.
The phone rings, recorded message from a state agency concerning massive disruptions of service. The voice does not say massive but this is how I interpret the message.
I check the stove after turning off the burners and then make sure the door is locked by unlocking it and then relocking it.
I look out the window at the streetlights and wait for someone to walk by, casting a long shadow in an old movie.
I feel a challenge to be equal to whatever is forthcoming. There is Ross and his need to confront the future. There is Emma and the tender revisions of our love.
The phone rings again, the same recorded message. I spend about two seconds wondering what kind of services will be disrupted. Then I try to think about all the phones of every type bearing this message, people in the millions, but no one will remember to mention it to anyone else because what we all know is not worth sharing.
• • •
Breslow was Emma’s surname, not her husband’s. I knew this much and I’d more or less settled on a first name for the man. Volodymyr. He was born in this country but I decided what’s the point of giving him a name if it’s not Ukrainian. Then I realized how wasteful this was, thinking this way, at this time, wasteful, shallow, callous, inappropriate.
Invented names belong to the strafed landscape of the desert, except for my father’s and mine.
I wandered through the townhouse until I found him, at the kitchen table, eating a grilled cheese sandwich. Someone nearby was running a vacuum cleaner. He raised a hand in greeting and I asked how he was doing.