by Don DeLillo
Hidell means don’t tell.
The id is hell.
Jerkle and Hide in their little cell.
Oswald stood at the white line in front of the urinal. A guard moved alongside, peering in that inquisitive way, like what do we have here to pass the time.
Oswald requested permission to cross the line.
“I’m looking at your hairline, shitbird. What is supposed to be the length of the hair in the area of the nape of the neck?”
“Zero length.”
“What do I see?”
“I don’t know.”
The guard pushed him stumbling across the line. When he turned to recross he looked directly in the man’s face. A long-headed type, half intelligent, small bright eyes.
Oswald turned to face the urinal, requested permission to cross.
“I’m looking at your sideburns. What am I looking at?”
“My sideburns.”
“The hair on your sideburns will not exceed what length when fully extended.”
“One-eighth inch.”
The guard extended the hair between his thumb and index finger, twisting for effect. Oswald let his head lean that way, not so much to ease the pain, which was mild, as to show he would not accept pain stoically in these circumstances. The guard released and then popped him in the head with the heel of his hand.
Oswald requested permission to cross the line.
“The length of the hair at the top of the head will not exceed how many inches maximum.”
“Maximum three inches.”
He waited for the guard to grab a handful.
“The fly of the trousers shall hang in what kind of line and shall not do what when they are what.”
“The fly of the trousers shall hang in a vertical line and shall not gap when they are unzipped.”
The guard reached around and grabbed him by the nuts.
“I know the type.”
“Aye aye sir.”
“I spot the type a mile away.”
“Aye aye sir.”
“The type that can’t stand pain.”
“Aye aye sir.”
“The sniveling phony Marine.”
A prisoner approached the second white line, requested permission to cross. The guard looked over, slowly. He let go of Oswald’s crotch. It was raining again. He detached the billy club from his belt and approached the second prisoner.
“What’s your name?”
“Nineteen. ”
“Don’t you know the code, Nineteen?”
“I requested permission to cross the line.”
“You didn’t request permission to talk.” The guard jabbed him lightly in the ribs. “Prisoners are silent. We observe the international rules of warfare in this head. This is my head. Nobody talks without my say-so.”
He jabbed the prisoner with the billy club.
“Prisoners run silent. They fall to the deck silent when struck. Do you know how to fall, Nineteen?”
The guard jabbed twice, then three more times, harder, before Nineteen realized he was supposed to fall down, which he did, crumpling slowly, in careful stages. His right shoulder touched the white line. The guard kicked him back over.
“We observe the principles of night movement in this head. What is the first principle of night movement, Nineteen?”
“Run at night only in an emergency.”
The guard swung the club without bothering to lean toward the prisoner, using a casual backhand stroke, grazing the man’s elbow. The guard did not look at the man as he swung. This was one of the features of the local style.
The guard looked at Oswald.
“Why did I hit him?”
“He recited principle number two.”
The guard swung the club, hitting the man in the shoulder.
“In this head we know our manual word for word,” the guard told the crumpled man, standing with his back to him. “We say nothing in this head that does not come from the manual. We kill silent and with surprise.”
Oswald needed desperately to piss.
“In the final assualt,” said the guard, “it is the individual Marine, with his rifle and his what, who closes with the enemy and destroys him.”
“Bayonet,” the prisoner said.
“A vigorous bayonet assault, executed by Marines eager to drive home cold steel, can do what, what, what.”
Silence from the man on the deck. He tightened his fetal knot a second before the guard stepped back half a stride and swung the club in a wide arc, striking the knee this time. Oswald was eager to be called.
The guard looked at Oswald, who said at once, “A vigorous bayonet assault, executed by Marines eager to drive home cold steel, can strike terror in the ranks of the enemy.”
The guard swung the club backwards once more, striking Nineteen on the arm. Oswald felt a slight satisfaction. The guard made a point of gazing into the distance as he struck his blows.
Oswald sensed the guard’s interest shift his way. He was ready for the question.
“Principle number one.”
“Get the blade into the enemy.”
“Principle number two.”
“Be ruthless, vicious and fast in your attack.”
The guard took half a step, switched the billy to his left hand and swung it hard, striking Oswald’s collarbone. He was genuinely surprised. He thought they’d reached an understanding. The blow knocked him back three steps and forced him to one knee. He’d thought he was through getting hit for the day.
“There are no right answers,” the guard advised, looking into the distance.
Oswald got to his feet, approached the white line, stood staring at the urinal. He requested permission to cross.
“To execute the slash, do what.”
“One, assume the guard position.”
“Then what.”
“Two, step forward fifteen inches with the left foot, keeping the right foot in place.”
The guard swung the club, hitting him in the arm. He was sweaty with the need to piss, his upper body moist and chill.
“There are no right answers in this head. It is the stupidest arrogance to give an answer that you think is right.”
The guard jabbed him in the ribs with the butt end of the stick. The other man, Nineteen, was still crumpled on the deck.
The guard swung the club, smashing Oswald on the upper back. The idea seemed to be why bother with questions. Oswald made a decision to let the piss come flowing out. It was an anger and a compensation. He felt it flow down his leg, knowing deep relief, deliverance, good health everywhere, long life to all.
The guard swung the club, hitting the side of Oswald’s neck.
He put his hands over the back of his head, covering up. The last blow put the guard strangely on edge. He stood looking into the distance but was different from before, mouth hanging open, a dead spot in his eye, and Oswald knew they were all one word away from a private carnage of the type you hear about from time to time, nameless and undetailed.
He watched the puddle take shape on the floor, his arms crossed at the back of his head. He needed a moment to think.
He sighed deeply, stepping up to the white line. He looked straight ahead and lowered his hands slowly to his sides. It was his sense of things that if he moved slowly and openly and did not show terror, the guard would stand off. The guard’s mental condition had to be taken into account. They were all here to see to it that the guard came through. Oswald believed that the man crumpled on the deck knew this as well as he did. He sensed the man’s awareness of the moment. They had to let the moment cohere, build itself back to something they all recognized as a rainy Wednesday in Japan.
He stood at the white line and waited.
Dupard whispered in the dark.
“I definitely get the idea they want to send me home in a box. The first minute I put on the green service coat, I look like I’m dead. It’s a coffin suit for a fool. I seen it on the spot.”
“I liked the
uniform,” Ozzie told him. “It was great how it looked. I was surprised how great I felt. I kept it cleaned and moth-proofed. I kept heavy objects out of the pockets. I looked in the mirror and said it’s me.”
“Nice joke. They told my mother. Get him in the service, Mrs. Dupard. The streets of America getting crazy by the day. Your boy is safe with us.”
“That’s what they told my mother.”
“They sent me to JP to save me from West Dallas niggers. Believe this booshit? They put me behind bars so nobody slips off with my wallet and shoes.”
“It’s the whole huge system. We’re a zero in the system.”
“They give me their special attention. Better believe.”
“They watch us all the time. It’s like Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-four. This isn’t a book about the future. This is us, here and now.”
“I used to read the Bible,” Bobby said.
“I used to read the manual. I never looked at my schoolbooks but I read the Marine Corps manual.”
“Make you a man.”
“Then I found out what it’s really all about. How to be a tool of the system. A workable part. It’s the perfect capitalist handbook.”
“Be a Marine.”
“Orwell means the military mind. The police state is not Russia. It’s wherever we have the mind that can think up manuals full of rules for killing.”
“Where’s this Stalin, dead?”
“Dead.”
“I thought I heard that.”
“But Eisenhower’s not. Ike is our own Big Brother. Our commander in chief.”
They lay in the dark, thinking.
Because of what they did to us. The way she had to work and quit and take care of me and get fired and work and quit and pick up and leave. Let’s pick up and leave. Scraping up pennies for the next move somewhere. Daily humiliations all her life. This is known as ground down by the system. Except she never questions that. It is only the local conditions. It is Mr. Ekdahl and his puny divorce settlement. It is the whispering behind her back. It is the neighbors with their Hotpoint washers and Ford Fairlane cars, which she competes against the only way she can.
“My boy Lee loves to read.”
His mother never-ending.
Three days running, for no special reason, every meal was rabbit chow—lettuce, carrots, water.
Oswald ran past the chicken wire, turned into the cell block, stopped at the white line. Dupard was in the cell wearing skivvies and sitting on Oswald’s rack. Dupard’s mattress was smoldering. Oswald watched the pale smoke collect in the air. His cellmate just sat there, hangdog, thoughtful, picking at his feet.
“Bobby, how come?”
“You want your rack?”
“Stay there.”
“We’re not supposed to talk.”
“You’re only making things worse.”
“I’m evicting lice, that’s all. They’re boring into my skin. Time to rid the premise, man.”
“Did you ask for a new mattress?”
“I axed. They punch my face.”
He was calm, a little sullen, mainly thoughtful and resigned.
“They’ll only extend your time.”
“In my own mind this is nothing to excite themselves. I don’t feel like there’s any guilt to be handed out whereby I’m punished. I’m fumigating these lice on out of here. In other way of saying it, it’s like I’m doing their job for them.”
“This is your second fire.”
“Regulate the voice.”
“Well I don’t see the point of mattress fires, frankly.”
“Stop talking, Ozzie. They kill your ass.”
Two guards came down the passageway, brushed past Oswald and entered the cell. The fire was so insignificant they were able to delay getting water until after they’d spent five grim minutes pounding Dupard.
Oswald stood at the white line, looking away.
They moved him out to the chicken wire. Not only guards but fellow inmates, all those bodies to avoid, those eyes and inner melodies—terror, gloom, psycho violence. The trick inside the wire was to stay within your own zone, avoid eye contact, accidental touch, gestures of certain types, anything that might hint at a personality behind the drone unit. The only safety was in facelessness.
He developed a voice that guided him through the days. Forever, endless, identical. The brig was so unthinking it eventually drove out fear. He ran in the passageways, he ran in place. He scrubbed the brightwork in the head, squared away his area, made up his rack. The point of the brig was to clean the brig. He drew his bucket from the storeroom, stood at the white line. They’d built the brig just to keep it clean. It was where they put their white lines. Everything depended on the lines. The brig was the place where all the lines that were painted in the military mind were made bright and clean forever. Once he understood that, he knew he had their number.
He sat in the TV room watching reruns of Dick Clark’s American Bandstand. Reitmeyer came in to shake his hand. Half a dozen other guys dropped by to ask about the brig. He wore his Hawaiian shirt, smirking a little, telling them he’d breezed right through. Great training for life in the U.S. Gives you that competitive edge. That’s Ozzie for you, said his barracks-mates. That’s the Rabbit, that’s Bugs, and they drifted out one by one, leaving him to stare at the high-school boys and girls shuffling drowsily on a dance floor in Philadelphia.
Two weeks later he followed directions to a house in the Sanya district of Tokyo. He made his way through a ragpickers’ village built with material scavenged from other parts of the city. Old women jogged through the alleys carrying empty bottles, broken chair legs, pieces of indefinable junk. Houses were shoulder-high, made of old packing crates and strips of sheet metal, the walls stuffed with cardboard and rags. There were lines of people selling blood at mobile units, people who seemed hollow-bodied, so small, in such collapse. It would never bottom out. No matter how far down you went into the world, there were distances still to go, worse things to see and experience. He made it a point not to hurry through the area. He wanted to see what was here.
He entered a tenement and looked in an open door to a flat where a young man was trying to fix a mimeograph machine. Konno had told him to go to the fourth floor but hadn’t supplied an apartment number. The hallway was dark and rank. A child was wailing on one of the upper stories.
Hidell climbs the ancient creaking stairs.
On four, two more doors were open. Students milled inside the apartments, moved from one to the other. A young man looked at Ozzie, who was standing in the hallway, smiling, in his T-shirt and dusty jeans. The man smiled back and pointed to a door at the end of the hall. Oswald knocked and was told to enter. He saw a tatami mat and low table. A woman moved across the room. She was about fifty years old, with a moon face and pixie hairdo, wearing a light cotton kimono. She said her name was Dr. Braunfels. She taught German and Russian on a private basis to students at Tokyo University. She understood he was interested in learning Russian. He said he was, and waited. She sat cross-legged on the mat at the far side of the table. She asked him to take off his shoes. These were the nice little gestures that went with the setting.
She wore eye makeup that matched the pale-blue shade of the kimono. He hadn’t expected a European. It was encouraging, it was all to the good, it made his decision seem timely, fixed to favorable circumstances. She was probably important, an adviser to radical students and a recruiting officer or handler of agents. She gestured for him to sit facing her on the mat. She watched him assume the awkward position. They ate rice cakes wrapped in seaweed.
“And you are Oswald, Lee,” she said finally, as if correcting an imbalance, adding the last stately note to some diplomatic exchange.
There were bamboo shades behind her, a screen to one side. The ceiling was low, a dark-toned wood. Small polished objects here and there. You were supposed to appreciate the near-bareness, the placement of things. Twigs in a vase on the lacquer table.
He told
her he wanted to defect.
“I’ve been thinking this is the step to take, that I’ll never be able to live in the U. S. I want a life like these students, political, working in the struggle. I’m not an innocent youth who thinks Russia is the land of his dreams. I look at this coldly in the light of right and wrong. I do think there is something unique about the Soviet Union that I wish to find out for myself. It’s the great theory come to life. Before I was fifteen I began indoctrinating myself in the New Orleans library. I studied Marxist ideology. I could lift my head from a book and see the impoverishment of the masses right there in front of me, including my own mother in her struggle to raise three children against the odds. These socialist writings showed me the key to my environment. The material was correct in its thesis. Capitalism is beginning to die. It is taking desperate measures. There is hysteria in the air, like hating Negroes and communists. In the military I’m learning the full force of the system. There is something in the system that builds up hate. How would I live in America? I would have a choice of being a worker in a system I despise or going unemployed. Nobody knows how I feel about this. I’m sincere in my ideal that this is what I want to do. This is not something intangible. I’m ready to go through pain and hardship to leave my country forever.”
That evening he sat alone at the Queen Bee, thinking he’d approached the main business too quickly. She did not seem happy to hear the news and she countered it with news of her own. His unit was shipping out for the latest hot spot, Formosa, in a couple of weeks. What she wanted him to do, for now, was put aside any thought of defecting and concentrate on getting access to classified documents and photographs. She spent some time discussing this. She talked about his job, not his life. She wanted tactical call signs, authentication codes, radio frequencies. She wanted spotter photos of U-2s.
There would be money for this, although she realized money was not his motive. She talked about a second meeting in Yamato, near the base, and gave him detailed directions. She spoke in a practiced way about procedures and craft, about the need for discipline, possibly referring to his rumpled street clothes and day-old stubble. She said she admired the Japanese because a man might spend a lifetime getting one thing right.