Don DeLillo (18 page)

His hands were set flat on the table. All through the narrative there was no change in his expression. I knew those people were out there. The pure so-called products. Found dead near railroad tracks or shipped in bulk to the warehouses of the certifiably insane. Pepper nevertheless seemed to be reciting for mere exercise. Maybe he was giving this particular identity a workout, stretching its muscles, adding a furlong to its distance. To my ear there were no defects in the unstressed delivery of his voice.

“What happens now?” I said.

“Eventually I want to package the stuff in twenty-five-milligram green capsules. Mean green beans. Too early to work out pricing.”

“But you don’t have the sample. Hanes has it.”

“That’s why I’m here, Buck. Hanes won’t be able to unload the product easy as all that. Hanes doesn’t know about balance and edge. The kid’s untried and untested, a pissy little babe among the timber wolves. He doesn’t have any up-top connections and he doesn’t know what it’s like out there, although by this time he’s maybe finding out. He’ll be back is my guess. He can’t stay out there indefinitely without putting himself in grave danger. This whole business qualifies as high risk. If he survives at all, back here is the first place he’ll come. I’m all but convinced of that. Hell put the thing back where he got it from. That’s the first instinct of the trapped man. Meanwhile I’ll be close by. Ill be keeping an eye on things. I’ll be in touch.”

“I may not be here,” I said.

“Buck, I want this product badly. This may be my last venture in the field of drugs and drug abuse. I crave new frontiers. There’s a craving in my breast for the uncharted spaces and territories of the human mind. Energy. I want to tap untapped fields of energy. Dope is okay. Dope is the power of the earth, the use of earth products to dig deeper into the earthen parts of the mind. But energy is the power of the universe. I want to tap that power. I see masses of people changing their energy patterns by controlling bio-rhythms from the basic frequencies of the universe. Stereo electrodes. Control of internal changes. I envision abuses, of course. I envision mail-order ads in the rear extremities of men’s magazines. Cures cancer in seconds I Adds inches to your cock! But that kind of booshit’s inevitable and I can’t take time to worry about it, much as it grieves me in the professional sense. I’m already semi-involved in a process I call the process of centrifugalism. Stereo electrodes. Blood-pressure impactors. What I call the auto-domination of the inner mind.”

“I’ve got problems right now that don’t have anything to do with you or Hanes or the universe.”

“I want to end this phase of my career with a technical and merchandising feat that goes beyond the legendary. You and I, friend, are the only two people in positions of trust. Once the product is returned, we’ll go into deep consultation. Where there’s money to be made and legends to be created, I don’t leave anything to chance and it strikes me as boding well for the future of our partnership that you’ve been wooed by other agencies of the underground without releasing the product. But accept a word of caution. This operation is fraught with danger. Bohack is not a man to be trifled with. He’s an edgy gent with all kinds of deliveries. Some reasonable. Some not so.”

“Who the hell is Bohack?”

“Pffff.”

“What?” I said.

“He laughed,” Menefee said. “That’s the way he laughs. Pffff. Pffff-pffff. It took me months before I caught on. For months I thought he was blowing loose threads off my shirt.”

In his toxic glee Menefee repeatedly bumped his chin on the edge of the table. Finally he told me that Bohack was the name of the man who commanded one of Happy Valley’s two camps. As both men rose I heard the pneumatic drill jabbing into stone. Then Dr. Pepper took a pair of glasses from the inside pocket of his suit coat. With a disposable tissue he rubbed the lenses, held them to the light and then carefully fitted the glasses over his ears and nose. They were dark glasses with heavy black frames. A touch of comic paranoia, I thought. One disguise covering another. The touring clown doubly self-effaced.

OPEL AND
I made love once in the anechoic chamber in the mountains. I thought of this as I lay in bed, unable to sleep. What were we like then, in that time and space, unburdened of the weight of outer sound? We were like angels harboring each other in the notion of desireless-ness, dazed in our acquiescence to this drift through subatomic matter. The love of minds should last beyond lives. Maybe it does, each mind a dice-toss of neutron stars, invisible except to theory, pulling at cold space to find its lover. Opel never returned to the chamber because the wedge-shaped baffles made her think of bats hanging in a cave.

I took the number of steps necessary to get from the bed to the door. No one was there. I picked up a magazine and tried to read a column of print, getting to the second line before I had to stop because of the pressure behind my eyes. Molten water dripped from the pipe connected to the radiator, bleaching the wood floor. It was almost daylight, snow on the way, the phone squatting on the stacked phone books, the firemen breathing in the firehouse. I went to the door again. A young black woman stood in the hall, legs well apart, hands on hips. She was arrayed in burnishings and pleated streaks, and there was a trim glitter about her, a commercial grace, evident in the seamless way she shifted weight to orchestrate a sort of stylish body violence. I stood there in old shorts and dirty toenails. Azarian came up the stairs then. We went inside, where he took a chair and I got into bed. The woman remained in the open doorway. For the first time in three days I felt it was possible to sleep.

“The group broke up,” Azarian said. “As a group we no longer exist. We officially broke up.”

“Who’s the nice lady?”

“Security,” he said. “Her name’s Epiphany Powell. Maybe you’ve heard of her. She used to sing, she used to model, she used to act. Now she’s doing security. The group broke up. We no longer exist as a group. Of course there wasn’t any real hope once you left. Still and all it’s frightening. Nobody was really prepared for it. But it happened. We no longer exist in the old sense.”

“As of when?”

“I heard it on the radio coming in from the airport. When I left L.A., things were still in flux. Nothing was decided to the point where we could come out and say we’ve reached a decision. But I guess we broke up because I heard it on the radio. It sounded pretty official. Who has final word in these matters?”

“The radio,” I said.

“A lot of it was my doing,” he said. “I got heavily involved in black music. Not performing or producing. Just listening. That old showcase stuff with everybody in shiny clothes and pomaded hair. Brushed drums, piano, sax breaks. ‘Baby don’t you know that I love you so.’ I’m into that sound, Bucky, and I can’t get out. After all these years I realize that’s the only sound I really love. So I neglected the band and now we no longer exist as a group. The little dance routines they do. Hands flashing out, feet gliding, bodies whirling so smoothly. Romantic soul music done by immortal groups. The Infatuations. The Tailfins. The Splendifics. ‘It’s a hurtin’ pain you give me, babe, but I’m fightin’ for my love.’ It’s all love and sorrow, Bucky, and it just about destroys me emotionally. The crude dumb emotion, it’s so incredibly beautiful. Sorrowful ballads with occasional falsetto passages. And even when I’m just listening to records I can see them moving on stage, doing the little whirls and gliding steps, flashing out their hands. Shiny bright hair. Custom tuxedos. Fantastic teeth and fingernails. And the cheap emotion behind the lyrics just wrecks me. The Motelles. The Vanities. The Willows. The Renditions. The Flairs. Nate Pearce and the Hydromatics. ‘Baby can’t you see how you’re upsettin’ me, shoo-eee, shoo-eee.’ Everything is there, Bucky. There’s nothing else I want or need.”

“Where’s Globke? Have any idea?”

“We haven’t been in touch at all. Globke? Not at all.”

“Where’s Hanes?” I said.

“I never talk to Hanes. Globke’s office boy? I never talk to him.”

“I’m almost ready to make a move. But I need a certain item.”

“Bucky, the people I front for are a business-oriented group. They know how to handle the item in question. They’re not a bunch of knife-wielding dope fiends. They don’t stockpile explosives. They’re a force in the community. They’re known on the street and they’re known in the smoke-filled rooms and the corner offices.”

“But are they known in the ladies’ lounge? Are they known in the organ lofts and the prehistoric caves?”

“You said you’re ready to make a move. Move into what?”

“The claustrophobia of vast spaces. Noise, echoes, noise. Not knowing which is which. People flaming out in the four-dollar seats.”

“Are you afraid?”

“It’s the only thing to do,” I said. “Absolutely necessary to make the move. I’m betraying an idea I only half understand. But it’s necessary. I’m betraying this room and these objects. But it has to be done. In that sense I’m afraid. I feel immense and heavy. I feel as though I’m being towed out of a hangar.”

“There’s nothing more frightening than the immensity and weight of blackness,” Azarian said. “It’s just so incredibly heavy. Getting into it is like sinking into tons of funky cement in order to arrive at some historical point where you can see who you are and who they are and how you’ve been historicized by the journey. Blackness has a hard firm smell all its own. It’s like walking into a room in one of the Arab nations and all these guys in burnooses and sandals are standing around in the dimness and they’re all smoking hashish and saying things you don’t understand and everything smells of hash and unfamiliar feet and the tremendous intense weight of strange centuries. Centuries we never experienced. I don’t know how I can make you feel the weight and heaviness. The smell that’s both metallic and organic. The slowness of everything. The indifference of the black experience to the person who’s trying to seek it out. It’s the weightiest of all trips. I guarantee you. It’s intense beyond belief. It’s harder than the hardest drugs.”

“The product isn’t here. I don’t know where it is. Happy Valley doesn’t know where it is either. There’s no business to be done.”

“They’ll give you first of all a bonus. Second a percentage. Third the option to invest You get the bonus no matter how marketable the product turns out to be. They’re putting pressure on me, Bucky. I’d like to resolve this thing.”

When I woke up, Azarian was at the window looking out at the snow. I had no idea how long I’d slept. There were noises on the street, men unloading a truck. The woman leaned against the door frame, coat opened. I sat up in bed and stared at her, knowing it wasn’t Azarian’s security she was responsible for, nor mine. It seemed she was part of the pressure they were putting on him. Hair worn short. Caved face. Slender imperial neck. Hurdler’s fused body. All in all a well-crafted piece of smoked glass and chrome. Azarian opened the window, scooped some snow off the ledge and tasted it.

“Needs seasoning,” he said. “Want a bite?”

“Close the window.”

“Epiphany used to sing in supper clubs, according to the data on her. Did I tell you that? Supper clubs. I didn’t know places like that existed anymore. Must have been a weird scene. She acted in exploitation movies for six or seven months. A real professional. She did some modeling here and there. It’s been a hard road. All that professionalism. It does things to people. Makes them hard.”

“It don’t faze Piffany,” she said. “Nothing faze Tiffany.”

Azarian looked at her a while longer, then turned to me.

“So nobody knows where the product is.”

“True.”

“Including the people who were holding it.”

“True again.”

“I believe you, Bucky. You wouldn’t mislead me in a situation like this. At least I can report back with a definite answer. No more skip-this and wait-on-that. I was tired of the whole thing. No more now.”

“Are you afraid?” I said.

“Of everything. More than ever. Constantly.”

Into boiling water I dropped the plastic pouch lumpy with beef chunks and frozen noodles. I watched it slide down the side of the pot as the water stilled for a moment before resuming its furor. There was no clock that worked, no way to measure the fourteen minutes deemed necessary for thawing and the regeneration of flavor. I counted to sixty a total of seven times, then multiplied by two and removed the pouch, cutting it open with a pair of rusty blunt grooming scissors found protruding from a beer can, one blade in each triangular incision. I waited for the long-dormant odor of goulash to be broadcast to my nose, smoke of herdsman’s meat, but the air held little more than a limp whiff of carrots. I plopped contents into cornflake bowl and set to eating, eyes off the food, teeth working mechanically. I tried in fact to close off all my senses to this dim experience. Abused longhorns stuffed in pouches. Ceremonial flesh injected with cursed preservatives. Eating myself: lessons in the effects of auto-cannibalism. I tried to erase taste-memory from my lips with a two-ply paper towel, floral bordered. Then I got up and answered the telephone, chilled by the feel of the earpiece.

“It’s your manager, who loves you. Don’t ask where I am. They tell me you’ve been on my trail, telephonically speaking. What I would call a sudden turn of events. You looking for me.”

“Where are the tapes?”

“What tapes?”

“You had somebody go through this apartment. Transparanoia owns a key. I remember that. And I know you’ve got the tapes.”

“What tapes?” he said. “I want to hear you say the whole thing. What tapes? Tell me in my ear.”

“Mountain tapes.”

“So those tapes. So those are the tapes you’re referring to when you say I have the tapes.”

“Where are they, Glob?”

“I don’t have them.”

“Of course you have them.”

“Of course I have them. I’ve been thinking about those things every day for over a year now. Once you walked off the tour, I stopped thinking and started lusting. I got itchy fingered. I got wild. You walked off the goddamn tour, Bucky. You took away my action. We needed product, see. You were failing to deliver product. Product is something that matters deeply. You owed us product. Contracts in our files specified what product you owed, when it was due, how it was to be presented. This was not a question of a few thousand dollars gurgling down the drain. We’re a parent corporation. We’ve got subsidiaries and affiliates all over the place. Do you know what they’re constantly doing? They’re yowling for their food. Feed me, feed me. Enormous sums of money were involved in your disappearing act. All these companies with their mouths opened wide for the worm breakfast, the worm lunch, the worm dinner. I needed the tapes to keep some kind of action going. Create demand for exotic product. Keep the public salivating. So I had a man hang around from time to time. Whenever you left the building he called me and I got down there quick-quick and snooped around hoping against hope to find the famous tapes. We also spent two days covering every inch of your mountain place. But I figured you were sitting on them. I figured they were right there in Opel’s apartment. Trouble was you never left for very long. I couldn’t give the place a professional Bogart-movie kind of going over. I entered on tiptoes and lifted up here and looked in there, dainty as a parakeet, covering my tracks before I even made any tracks. The night I finally got to the package was some terrific night because I don’t know how many guys go charging up and down the stairs making animal sounds and stomping with their feet. Doors being smashed open and all kinds of commotion below me and then above me and there I am on tippytoes in the middle of the room with this package in my arms which I know contains the mountain tapes and this Mongol horde is racing up and down the stairs making sounds of conquest. I thought sure they’d break in on me and confiscate the object. When they left I heaved three long sighs and blessed myself in the Russian manner, right shoulder first, which my original wife used to do almost constantly before she got pissed off at God and started drinking vodka gimlets. Three sighs of relief. Thank you, Jesus, for letting me find the mountain tapes and for not letting those cuckoos come in here and butcher me, a poor senior executive performing his humble task.” “That’s what amazes me,” I said. “The fact that you’d go to all that trouble. Your money, your position, your reputation. You more or less own this building, Globke.”