Libra

by Don DeLillo

  He read the sign across the street. Discount on Lab Coats. There were voices around the corner, the particular ragged laughter of people leaving a bar. At daybreak the rooster would crow, the dogs would bark, like some tin-shack village in the Caribbean.

  The memory was a series of still images, a film broken down to components. He couldn’t quite make it continuous. He saw Raymo heaving open the car door, a stutter motion, each segment leaving a blur behind. The bursts from the surplus Thompson were the first shots fired at the Bay of Pigs. This made Raymo a figure of respect among his fellow prisoners during the twenty months they would spend in the fortress of La Cabana listening to rifle reports from the moat, where the executions took place, each crisp volley followed by a precise echo, an afterclap, as the prisoners thought about the dog that lived in the moat, lapping up blood.

  Finally the taxi stopped outside.

  He went into the bathroom and ran cold water over his hands, trying to ease the sting where the lotion had failed. He’d contracted malaria during his Indonesian stint and felt the effects now and then, a sense that his body was a swamp. He went to the door and waited.

  His wife cut him once, swinging a knife across the kitchen table and catching the left side of his jaw, after a night of who knows what. He never thought of her by name. He thought of her being somewhere very vague, in a room with curtains, never moving from the chair. This is what happens to loved ones who go away. We make them sit in a room forever.

  The woman came in, wearing a hard tan, her skin smoked and cracked. She said she was Rhonda. She had heavy dark makeup that made him think of nights at the shore and gonorrhea.

  “Casal said be nice to you.”

  “What do you think he meant by that?”

  She smiled and unzipped her skirt. Casal was the bartender at the Habana, a waterfront dive that catered to merchant seamen, Cubans with a grudge and other floating bodies on the tide.

  All night it sounded across the water. “Listen, my brothers, to the roar of the white typhoon.” It was the grimmest, most godawfu! thing, to be ashamed of your country.

  Win Everett was in pajamas looking at a two-day-old copy of the Daily Lass-O, the student newspaper at TWU. There were contests for yell leaders and twirlers. A nationwide search was under way for a typical coed. He sat in an armchair in a comer of the bedroom. He learned from the paper that the school’s original name was the Texas Industrial Institute and College for the Education of White Girls of the State of Texas in the Arts and Sciences. He skipped the piece on JFK.

  The phone rang downstairs. He heard Mary Frances walk into the kitchen and pick up the receiver. She came to the foot of the stairs and he dropped the newspaper, waiting to hear her call his name.

  She watched him come down the stairs, looking nearly weightless in his pajamas, that softness of step he’d developed only lately, as if to show someone watching that he’d taken the path of self-effacement. They touched lightly as he moved past and she knew it meant they would make love on the fresh sheets with the window open and the smell of rain and dripping leaves still in the air.

  Parmenter calling from a public booth. Win could hear traffic noises, excited air. He watched Mary Frances start upstairs, her hand leaving the carved newel and slipping along the handrail, barely touching.

  “How do we proceed?”

  “The phone is, secure. They’re not interested in me anymore. Besides, I’ve cleaned it.”

  A brief laugh. “You know how to do that?”

  “I tinker in the basement,” Win said.

  “Do you know a man named George de Mohrenschildt?”

  “No.”

  “Does odd jobs for Domestic Contacts. I find out he’s also hooked to Army Intelligence. Cuba via Haiti. He’s on the way to Haiti. It probably involves an arms deal. George comes across pro-Castro. I believe this is a genuine attachment. He thinks we’ve behaved rather badly. But the fact is, if my information is correct, he’s working against Castro interests, or will be as soon as he gets to Haiti. In any case George doesn’t concern us directly. He has a young friend, a kid he debriefed on behalf of the Agency. A defector who repented, more or less, after two years plus in the USSR. I got George to tell me his name and I’ve done some checking. There’s a 201 file on the kid dating to December 1960.”

  “Did SR Division insert him?”

  “The way we fake our own files, who knows for sure? There’s no clear sign we put him into Russia. That’s all I can tell you except for this. He spent some of his service time at a closed base in Japan. Atsugi. He was a radarman. Had access to data concerning U-2 flights. A nice house-present to give the Soviets when he went over. He married a Russian girl. Decided he wanted to come home. The young marrieds settled in Dallas, met George, spent evenings with the local émigrés, reminiscing. One night about two and a half weeks ago, according to George, our young man fired a shot into the night, aimed at the infamous head of Major General Edwin A. Walker, U.S. Army, resigned.”

  A silence. Win listened to the dense rush of air in the earpiece, a city alive, horns blowing, cars streaming across the Potomac bridges.

  “Could be a nice find, Larry.”

  “Don’t make it sound like a three-room apartment. We could put him together. A far-left type. Work him in. Tie him to Cuban intelligence. Possibly even place him at the scene. If he thinks he’s operating on the left, pro-Castro, pro-Soviet, whatever his special interest, we’ll help him select a fantasy. There’s never a dearth of reasons to shoot at the President.”

  “Tell Mackey. Give T-Jay the details. T-Jay will bring him in,”

  He always seemed to be going to bed. It was always bedtime. The day came and went and it was time to go to bed again.

  He went around turning off lights, checking the front and back doors. He’d seen a U-2 once on a salt flat in Nevada. It looked like a child’s idea of advanced reconnaissance. Freakish wingspan, basic body that looked unfinished, wingtips that folded over. But it had a jet engine under a glider frame and could climb at an angle steeper than forty-five degrees, soar to eighty-five thousand feet, its camera sweeping a path over a hundred miles wide. Dark lady of espionage, the Soviets called it. He checked to see that the oven was off. The last thing downstairs was the oven.

  Mary Frances was in bed, waiting. A soft light glowed by the armchair. He felt the air on his body as he undressed. The night was full of new things, earth musk and wet bark and night jasmine, a scented freshness, a turning of the earth after rain. He pressed down slowly. The wind-burnt face and whitish brows. The perfumed tincture of her breasts. He would love her into death, into the secret sleep. Her head rolled on the pillow, eyes shut tight. He hid his face in the curve of her neck. The night was full of water moving, faint wet sounds, rainwater dripping through trees, water falling from eaves, running in downspouts, wet sounds of tires on asphalt, tires on a wet street. He raised up slightly, locked his hands in hers, fingers extended. Each pushed hard against the other. A charged fragrance. Hollow thunder in the distance. Water silent in grassy pools, running down leaf stems, collecting in the webbed centers of leaves, droplets, trembling drams, water on the leaves of the blackjack oak set near the house, a light spatter on the screen when the wind shifts. She was blond and white and pink, rough-textured, broader than he was and stronger-minded now, the stronger by far, and all she wanted for him was something safe and plain. He smelled light sweat, felt spittle reaching to his chin. Their hands pushed against each other, fingers tensed and shaking. He felt a rustling response in the sheets, her ass wagging, moisture in the white down at the sides of her mouth. He said her name and watched her eyes come open to that deep wondering of hers, that trust she placed in the ordinary mysteries. She was in the world as he could never be. She meant the world. He freed a hand and wiped away the spit. She said his name quickly, many times, like some cheerleader’s sideline riff, and that was that was that.

  Side by side, listening to the radio.

  “I wonder,” she said. “W
hat do other people say to each other?”

  “When?”

  “Now. I want to know what people say. Maybe there are things we haven’t thought of.” Laughing at herself. “Things we ought to be saying.”

  “While having sex or afterward?”

  “While having sex is not interesting. Moany-groany love talk. No, afterward, now.”

  “Do you think we’ve been saying the wrong things all these years?”

  “Wouldn’t you like to overhear? I don’t want to watch other people. I want to listen.”

  “They talk about wanting a cigarette.”

  “Who was that on the phone?”

  “ ‘Where are my cigarettes?’ That’s what they say.”

  “He wouldn’t tell me his name.”

  “Larry Parmenter. You remember him. Somebody’s house in Miami.”

  “Kind of just barely.”

  “Maybe three years ago.”

  “What did he want to talk about?”

  “Curious lady.”

  “Some nights I need to be held. Tonight I’m a listener. So nice to lie in rumpled sheets and listen. Cover me with words. We’re two gossipy bodies alone in the night. Tell me what you talked about.”

  “Very sexy stuff.”

  “Oh sure really.”

  “U-2 planes. The planes that spotted the missiles the Soviets were putting into Cuba. We used to call the photos pornography. The photo interpreters would gather to interpret. ‘Let’s see what kind of pornography we pulled in today.’ Kennedy looked at the pictures in his bedroom as a matter of fact.”

  “Talk,” she said.

  “Spy planes, drone aircraft, satellites with cameras that can see from three hundred miles what you can see from a hundred feet. They see and they hear. Like ancient monks, you know, who recorded knowledge, wrote it painstakingly down. These systems collect and process. All the secret knowledge of the world.”

  “Isn’t it one of the best things there is, feeling the air on your body on a night like this?”

  “I’ll tell you what it means, these orbiting sensors that can hear us in our beds. It means the end of loyalty. The more complex the systems, the less conviction in people. Conviction will be drained out of us. Devices will drain us, make us vague and pliant.”

  Years together, years of transience, cover operations, plausible denials, dead silences had given Mary Frances no reason to believe she would ever know exactly what kind of secrets Win was keeping at a given time, which meant there was something welcome in these moments of wordiness, in the shape and range of his meanders. She encouraged him to tell her whatever he could about subjects and developments close to his work, or simply things on his mind—encouraged him tacitly, creating receptive fields around him, stillnesses. A wifely labor as natural to her as choosing curtains. By now she was adept at discharging an air of shy curiosity and although there was no longer any real work for him to do, she still wanted to know, wanted badly to hear. But tonight it happened that she fell asleep, drifting lightly off, twisted in a bedsheet, one arm swept across his chest. He listened to the radio, a man preaching the gospel in a bright clear voice, a thrilling voice, youthful, assured. Yes yes yes yes. God is alive and well in Texas.

  He would put someone together, build an identity, a skein of persuasion and habit, ever so subtle. He wanted a man with believable quirks. He would create a shadowed room, the gunman’s room, which investigators would eventually find, exposing each fact to relentless scrutiny, following each friend, relative, casual acquaintance into his own roomful of shadows. We lead more interesting lives than we think. We are characters in plots, without the compression and numinous sheen. Our lives, examined carefully in all their affinities and links, abound with suggestive meaning, with themes and involute turnings we have not allowed ourselves to see completely. He would show the secret symmetries in a nondescript life.

  An address book with ambiguous leads. Photographs expertly altered (or crudely altered). Letters, travel documents, counterfeit signatures, a history of false names. It would all require a massive decipherment, a conversion to plain text. He envisioned teams of linguists, photo analysts, fingerprint experts, handwriting experts, experts in hairs and fibers, smudges and blurs. Investigators building up chronologies. He would give them the makings of deep chronos, lead them to basement rooms in windy industrial slums, to lost towns in the Tropics.

  He turned off the radio and slipped out from under her arm. He wanted a cigarette. He put on his pajamas and found two bent Winstons in his shirt pocket, on the armchair. He sat smoking, trying to read. The storm moved west in blue-white rattling streaks. T-Jay will bring him in. Win knew that the name Mackey was a pseudonym assigned by the Records Branch. Theodore J. MACKEY. Win had also used a false name through the years, standard practice for officers engaged in covert work. Mackey’s name became enveloped in a certain favorable light, a legendary light, when exile leaders found out he had gone ashore with the scouts at Blue Beach. Once it was clear the invasion would fail, Mackey returned in a whaleboat and cruised the inlets with a megaphone, calling for and finding survivors. Win didn’t know his real name.

  He read the Daily Lass-O. He read that the school chucked its original name in 1905 to call itself the College of Industrial Arts, or CIA. He was too tired to appreciate the irony, or coincidence, or whatever it was. There were too many ironies and coincidences. A shrewd person would one day start a religion based on coincidence, if he hasn’t already, and make a million. Yes yes yes yes. He looked around for an ashtray. He hadn’t felt well for a long time now. Ever since whenever it was. He felt tired and forgetful. He had to talk to himself, inwardly, when he was driving the car, give simple commands, scold, to keep his concentration. He fumbled change at drug counters, buying kiddie soap in an aerosol can for his little girl. There were times when he could not bear to be alone in the house. The house was a terrible place when his wife and child were not there, when they were late coming home in the car. He imagined accidents all the time. A stunned wreck at the side of the road. The house grew dark around him.

  It was all part of the long fall, the general sense that he was dying.

  In Atsugi

  The dark plane drifted down, sweeping out an arc of hazy sky to the east of the runway. It had a balsa-wood lightness, a wobbliness, uncommonly long-winged, and it came in over the power pylons that stretched through the rice fields and up into the hills and out of sight. A strange high sound whistled through the air, bringing people out of houses outside the base, men taking bowlegged stances to follow the line of descent—a sound like a gull-shriek endlessly prolonged, caroming through the deep caves set around the base, the kamikaze nests of the second war. Men appeared in barracks windows to catch a glimpse of the landing. A man stood outside the radar bubble watching with folded arms. Two men in utility caps paused outside the mess as the plane glided finally in over the fields and the barbed-wire fences, touching down lightly, its lop-eared wingtips sparking when they scraped the runway, cartoonishly, in the chalk blaze of noon.

  “The son of a bitch climbs unbelievable.”

  “I know. I heard,” Heindel said.

  “But fast. It’s gone before you know it. Never mind how high.”

  “I know how high.”

  “I was in the bubble,” Reitmeyer said.

  “Eighty thousand feet.”

  “The son of a bitch requests winds at eighty thousand feet.”

  “Which isn’t supposed to be possible,” Heindel said.

  “I was plotting intercepts. I heard. The mystery man speaks.”

  The first marine, Donald Reitmeyer, had a large squared-off frame and a lazy amble that made him seem to be sinking into the ground. He watched the tractor approach to tow the plane to its remote hangar. The plane would be escorted, the hangar surrounded, by men with automatic weapons. Reitmeyer took off his cap and waved it at someone heading toward them across the fuming tarmac, a slightish man who walked with his head tilted and one shoulder droop
ing, the Marine who’d been watching from the radar hut when the plane came in.

  “It’s Ozzie. Looking like his usual self.”

  Heindel shouted, “Oswald, move it.”

  “More skosh,” Reitmeyer called, using a familiar pidgin phrase.

  “Show some life.”

  “Show some interest.”

  The three men walked toward the barracks. “We know how high it goes, so the next question,” Reitmeyer said, “is how far it goes and what does it do when it gets there.”

  “Deep into China,” Oswald said.

  “How do you know?”

  “It’s logic and common sense. Plus the Soviet Union.”

  “It’s called a utility plane,” Heindel said.

  “It’s a spy plane. It’s called a U-2.”

  “How do you know?”

  “Common knowledge, pretty much,” Oswald said. “You hear things, and the things you don’t hear you can find out easy enough. You know those buildings way past the hangars at the east end. That’s called the Joint Technical Advisory Group. Which is a phony name where the spies hide out.”

  “You’re so fucking sure,” Reitmeyer said.

  “What do you think’s there, dormitories for the wrestling team?”

  “Well just shut up about it.”

  “I go to the briefings. I know what to shut up about.”

  “You see the armed guards, don’t you?”

  “That’s my point, Reitmeyer. Nobody gets near this base without clearance.”

  “Well just try shutting up.”

  “Imagine flying over China,” Heindel said. “The vastness of China.”

  “China’s not so vast,” Oswald said. “What about the Soviet Union, for vast?”

  “How vast is it?”