Libra

by Don DeLillo

  “Someday I want to travel the length and breadth of it by train. Talk to everybody I meet. It’s the idea of Russia that impresses me more than the physical size.”

  “What idea?” Reitmeyer said.

  “Read a book.”

  “You always say read a book, like that’s the answer to everything.”

  “Maybe it is.”

  “Maybe it isn’t.”

  “Then how come I’m smarter than you are. ”

  “You’re also dumber,” Reitmeyer said.

  “He’s not as dumb as an officer,” Heindel said.

  “Nobody’s that dumb,” Oswald said.

  They called him Ozzie the Rabbit for his pursed lips and dimples and for his swiftness afoot, as they saw it, when there was a scuffle in the barracks or one of the bars off-base. He was five feet nine, blue-eyed, weighed a hundred and thirty-five, would soon be eighteen years old, had conduct and proficiency ratings that climbed for a while, then fell, then climbed and fell again, and his scores on the rifle range were inconsistent.

  Heindel was known as Hidell, for no special reason.

  He went to the movies and the library. Nobody knew the tough time he had reading simple English sentences. He could not always get a fixed picture of the word in front of him. Writing was even tougher. When he was tired it was all he could do to spell five straight words right, to spell a single small word without mixing up the letters.

  It was a secret he’d never tell.

  He had a liberty card, a gaudy Hawaiian shirt that made him feel like an intruder in his own skin, and a window seat on the train to Tokyo.

  It was Reitmeyer who’d arranged the date, explaining to Lee that all he had to do was show up at the right time and place and flash his heartwarming American smile. A thousand forbidden pleasures would be his.

  Welcome to JP—land of sliding doors and slant-eyed whores.

  He walked invisibly through layers of chaos, twilight Tokyo. He walked for an hour, watching neon lights pinch through the traffic haze, with English words jumping out at him, TERRIFIC TERRIFIC, under the streetcar cables, past the noodle shops and bars. He saw Japanese girls walking hand in hand with U.S. servicemen, six doggie bakers and cooks by the look of them, all wearing jackets embroidered with dragons. It was 1957 but to Lee these men had the style of swaggering warriors, combat vets taking whatever drifted into meathook reach.

  He walked through mazes of narrow streets mobbed with shoppers. He was remarkably calm. There was something about being off-base, away from his countrymen, out of America, that took the edge off his wariness, eased his rankled skin.

  He checked the piece of paper with her name on it.

  Lamps were lit along the alleyways. He saw a legless man with an accordion, his torso set on weird metal supports, like a Singer sewing machine—an ideogram sign flapping on his chest.

  He found Mitsuko all right, a baby-face girl, sort of formless, wearing a skirt and white blouse and a handkerchief on her head, waiting by a sign that read SOLDIERS ACCESS, the rendezvous point as devised by Reitmeyer, on a street of cheap arcades.

  She took him to a pachinko parlor, a long narrow room full of people pressed against upright machines. They were trying to maneuver a steel ball into a little hole. The machines made a factory din, like a stamping plant maybe. When she found a free machine, she pressed a lever that released the ball. This was the signal for nirvana or whatever they call the absolute state. She stared into the gray circle, watching the ball go round and round. People pushed through the room, students, old women in kimonos, men who looked educated, with high-paying jobs, all waiting for machines. They were three-deep in some places, patient in the noise and hanging smoke as if nothing hit upon the skin but the racing gray ball.

  He checked the paper with her name.

  Two hours later they were in a room with sliding panels and straw mats. Something told him the place wasn’t hers. It looked imitation Japanese. A silk roll hung from the wall, except it probably wasn’t silk. He caught a glimpse of a pinup calendar above a dressing table, some bars of Lifebuoy soap. She took off her open-toed shoes. It was a little hard to believe he was on the legendary verge of getting laid. The subject of a million words, noises, laughs and shouts in the sandlots and barracks of his experience. He felt a stillness, looking at his first naked girl, grown-up, outside a magazine. There was something serious about a woman nude. He felt different, serious, still. He was part of something streaming through the world. Then her hand was in his pants, matter-of-fact, like she was turning on a tap. He took off his clothes, folded the shirt with the windswept palms. The moment had been waiting to happen. The room had been here since the day he was born, waiting for him, just like this, to walk in the door. It was just a question of walking in the door, entering the stream of things.

  Was he supposed to give her money? Reitmeyer hadn’t said. He saw himself having sex with her. He was partly outside the scene. He had sex with her and monitored the scene, waiting for the pleasure to grip him, blow over him like surf, bend the trees. He thought about what was happening rather than saw it, although he saw it too.

  He had a duty weekend coming up but was back in Tokyo the first possible chance. It turned out she took his money only to play pachinko. She was a pachinko fool, a total addict of the form, standing for hours in a raincoat that wasn’t hers. He’d go out, come back, go out again, checking the strip joints and cowboy bars. He’d stand near the entrance and watch her play. People pressed into the room. Now and then somebody won a prize, a packet of leaf-shaped sweets. He watched her raise her right foot behind her, absently scratch the other ankle.

  Strange days in the fabulous East.

  This time she took him to a room in a large apartment block set near factories and oil-storage tanks. The air smelled of sulfur and tidal scum. He could see a river from the window but didn’t know what it was called. She told him she was thirty-four years old. Strange days and nights. Some time after they were dressed again, a man came in, moving through the shadows, young, lean, familiar with the room, seeming to take Lee for granted, acting as if he knew everything Lee had ever said and done. He was looking for his raincoat.

  Lee never understood the man’s connection to Mitsuko. A brother, cousin, lover, a handler or protector of some kind, although not a pimp (if she didn’t take money). Lee saw him several times over the next couple of weeks. He was an interesting guy, last name Konno, with wavy hair and dark glasses. He chain-smoked Lucky Strikes, knew American jazz, names that Lee was at a loss to identify. They talked politics. They drank beer and gin, which Lee brought to the room but only sipped to be polite. Konno’s English was okay, better than rudimentary. He wore shabby clothes and shoes and a black silk scarf, always, outdoors and in.

  The autumn damp took hold. Lamplight shimmered in networks of alleys crowded with wooden houses and shops. They’d taken away his American space. Not that it mattered. His space had been nothing but wandering, a lie that concealed small rooms, TV, his mother’s voice never-ending. Louisiana, Texas were lies. They were aimless places that swirled around the cramped rooms where he always ended up. Here the smallness had meaning. The paper windows and box rooms, these were clear-minded states, forms of well-being.

  Mitsuko took him into the land of nūdo. Billboards, photographs, leaflets, lamppost signs, nudes in booths and theaters, neon and paper nudes, models to be photographed, nudes arrayed in colored lights, strangely pale beneath the fake rose glow. Rain-slick streets like the streets in his reveries, movie shadows and dark-coated men, Mitsuko’s little pouting mouth, her language of sighs and hints, reverie of stillness, perfection of desire, her legs slightly parted, arms at her sides.

  She did none of the things Reitmeyer had said she’d do, and Ozzie didn’t ask.

  In the bubble he worked in a hot glow, marking intercept paths, checking the oscilloscope for traces of electron motion that represented air traffic within a given sector.

  Through the all-night watches he engaged
officers in conversation, asked them questions about world affairs. It turned out he knew more than they did. They didn’t know the-basic things. Names of leaders, types of political systems. The younger officers were the worst informed, Joe College types, which served to justify some old suspicion of his about the way things work.

  A crackling voice requesting winds aloft at eighty thousand feet, a voice outside the dome of night, beyond the known limits.

  There were bars and bar girls near the base but he preferred going to Tokyo, alone, where he visited Konno in the huge development near the factories. The coppery smog was so thick it obscured the setting sun. Konno smoked Luckies and talked about the struggle to exist. He worked only part-time, an elevator operator, because the country was awash in college graduates. Sometimes Mitsuko showed up and she and Ozzie made love to Thelonious Monk records, weird plinking and bonging blues, sort of Japanese come to think of it. Other times Konno took him to the Queen Bee, a nightclub with elaborate floor shows and gorgeous women drifting through the smoke like one hundred slit-skirt versions of a Howard Johnson’s hostess. It occurred to Lee that he ought to wonder what an elevator man and a pfc. were doing in a place like this.

  Konno would slouch in, taking off his raincoat and dragging it along the floor as they were led to a table in a platformed area above the tourists, the Japanese businessmen, American officers, contract pilots (recognizable by their drab short-sleeve shirts and fancy sunglasses, whatever the weather). Konno pocketed checks without seeming to pay and one night introduced Lee to a hostess named Tammy, a woman in a silver dress and shiny face paint.

  Konno believed in riots.

  Konno believed the U.S. had used germ warfare in Korea and was experimenting with a substance called lysergic acid here in Japan.

  Life is hostile, he believed. The struggle is to merge your life with the greater tide of history.

  To have true socialism, he said, we first establish capitalism, totally and heartlessly, and then destroy it by degrees, bury it in the sea.

  He was a member of the Japanese-Soviet Friendship Society, the Japanese Peace Council, the Japan-China Cultural Exchange Association.

  Foreign capital, foreign troops dominate modem Japan, he said.

  All foreign troops are U.S. troops. Every Westerner is an American. Every American serves the cause of monopolistic capital.

  Tammy took Lee to a Buddhist shrine.

  One night at the Queen Bee, Konno announced that MACS-1, Lee’s unit, would soon leave for the Philippines. This was news to the young Marine. He was beginning to like Japan. He liked coming to Tokyo. He counted on these discussions with Konno, who was able to argue Lee’s own positions from a historic rather than a purely personal viewpoint, from the ashes, the rebuilt waste of a blasted landscape and economy.

  Why were they shipping him out, now, of all times, when things were going well for a change, when he had things to look forward to, a woman, now and then, to crawl into bed with, people to talk to who did not see him as a figure in the shadows?

  They went to the flat near the river. Konno paced the room, tugging at the ends of his silk scarf. He hinted there were others who knew about Pfc. Oswald and admired his political maturity. He said there were things that could be accomplished by people with similar ideas on world affairs, people situated in certain places, within easy reach of each other. He gave Lee a pistol, small and silver-plated, a derringer, a gift, modest, two-shot, and asked him to pick up some Luckies back at the base.

  Reitmeyer tried to pick him up and turn him upside down, grabbing from behind, at the crotch and the shirt collar, basic aimless ballbreaking fun, but he messed it all up, ending with one hand gripping Ozzie’s side pocket and the other in an armpit, with the victim more or less parallel to the ground, flailing for a door jamb. At first Ozzie reacted with good-natured yelping surprise, out for a midair swim; then, as Reitmeyer manhandled and yanked, refusing to see it wouldn’t work, trying to cartwheel him halfway around, he complained in fierce whispers, with ultimatums and unfinished threats; then struggled hard to free himself, close to bursting into frustrated tears, a snared and wriggling kid, pink with rage; then, finally, and this brought forth a certain lurking satisfaction, familiar, falsehearted, awful, he went completely limp.

  One night he wandered into a Tokyo bar that was either a queer hangout or some kind of kabuki show or maybe a little of both. The customers were all male and the hosts or hostesses—they looked increasingly like men as his eyes grew accustomed to the dark—wore bright kimonos and high swirling wigs, their mouths precisely painted, faces layered in chalk. Educational. Someone rustled nearby, a costumed man waiting to lead him to a table, but Ozzie walked quietly to the door, feeling watched, odd, peculiar, quaint. When he opened the door he saw a familiar figure in the street. It was a Marine from his unit, Heindel, just walking on by. Ozzie had a moment of small panic. He didn’t want to be seen coming out of a place like this. They’d mop the barracks with him if word got out. They’d have a hog-wallow of gruesome fun. The oddball loner caught sneaking out of a swishy bar. He moved back into the dimness and ordered a beer, keeping an eye to the street. Hidell in a dark jacket with a pouncing tiger on the back. Ozzie drank his beer and got his bearings. The darkness was creepy. Whining music came from the walls.

  He found a taxi and headed out to Konno’s district. Chemical smoke pouring off the shipyards and factories. Skinhead kids on bikes shooting out of alleys, coming at a racing slant over the pot-holed streets.

  Hidell means don’t tell.

  No one was home. He walked for miles, lost, before he found another cab. He went to the Queen Bee, greeted by a hostess whose sole duty was to bow to entering guests. Konno was alone at a table near the rear. They talked a long time. Girls in swimsuits passed across the stage, each throwing a hip toward the audience of businessmen and U.S. brass. It was a vast place, a noisy crowd. Konno was tired and hoarse, coming down with something. A silence at the table. Then Lee let it be known that he’d seen something interesting in Atsugi one day, a plane called a U-2.

  He paused, measuring how he felt. Inside the bouncy music and applause, he occupied a pocket of calm. He was not connected to anything here and not quite connected to himself and he spoke less to Konno than to the person Konno would report to, someone out there, in the floating world, a collector of loose talk, a specialist who lived in the dark like the men with bright lips and spun-silk wigs.

  He pointed out that the plane climbed right off the radarscopes. He said it reached an altitude almost five miles above the known record. He suggested it was armed with amazing cameras and headed for hostile soil.

  He barely noticed himself talking. That was the interesting part. The more he spoke, the more he felt he was softly split in two. It was all so remote he didn’t think it mattered what he said. He never even looked at his companion. He sat in a white calm and let the sentences float. Konno studied him, listened, jittery, needing a shave, sniffing the nicotine on his fingers, a habit of his that seemed to imply there was never enough—enough of what you craved. Lee talked softly on. Ten thousand years of happiness, or whatever it means when they say banzai.

  He let it be known that he’d figured out the U-2’s rate of climb. He didn’t say what it was but went into detail on other, minor matters, testing Konno’s knowledge of technical things, lecturing a little, pointing out flaws in the base’s security.

  A man in a white tuxedo introduced the bathing beauties by name. Sincere applause. The two men went into the chill night. It was late and quiet and Lee pulled his windbreaker tight around him. Konno stood smoking, hunched away from the wind, knees bent, looking down an empty neon street.

  Take the double-e from Lee.

  Hide the double-l in Hidell.

  Hidell means hide the L.

  Don’t tell.

  White ideograms. Roman letters ticking in the dark. Konno said they were waiting for one of the hostesses, Tammy, and he looked a little dejected about it, maybe because h
e needed sleep. She came out a side exit wrapped in plastic rainwear including a hat and floppy booties, and seemed ready for some hard-earned relaxation. She thought she knew a pachinko parlor that might still be open. She wanted to play pachinko.

  A radarman named Bushnell was climbing the exterior stairs of his barracks when he heard a sharp noise, a single hard rap, like a ruler striking a desk. On second thought, no, that wasn’t it. More like a little popping sound, a two-inch firecracker maybe. Except that wasn’t it either. That wasn’t even close. Maybe just a slamming door actually.

  He went inside and saw Ozzie sitting on a footlocker, alone in the squadbay, showing his funny smile. He had a little bitty pistol in his hand and there was a streak of blood across his left arm, above the elbow.

  “I believe I shot myself,” he said.

  Bushnell studied the perfect little scene. He thought Ozzie’s remark sounded historical and charming, right out of a movie or TV play.

  “Where did you get the gun is what I’m thinking if I’m the duty officer and just happen to come around.”

  “Meanwhile would you do something?”

  “What do you want me to do?”

  “Get a corpsman would be fine with me.”

  “What’s it doing? Is it bleeding? Looks like a shaving cut to me.”

  “There’s a hole in my arm.”

  “You shave yet, Ozzie? I hear your mother shaves but you don’t. What happens when they see the gun?”

  “It was an accident.”

  “Bullshit. You should have used your .45.”

  “And blow my arm off.”

  “It’s government issue, shitbird. What are you supposed to tell them, I found the gun on a sidewalk at high noon?”

  “I did find it.”

  “Christ, Ozzie, you make me sick. You’re sitting here all alone. What if I don’t come in? You just sit and wait? If there’s anything I don’t respect, it’s bad planning.”