Don DeLillo (25 page)

I picked up the plant he’d indicated and threw it against the wall, using a windmill motion. Chess looked briefly at the cracked clay, leaves still embedded in lumps of earth. Then he leaned over in his chair and spread the newspaper clippings on the floor between his feet.

“Everybody’s searching, you know. Everybody’s trying to make the journey. But they’re going about it wrong. They’re seeking the wrong kind of privacy, the old privacy, never again to be found. Now here’s an item about a seventy-year-old man who’s sailing from Cape Hatteras to England in a skiff that’s only nine feet long. It says he plans to practice yoga at sea. This one is about a Bloom-ington housewife who’s flying from Minnesota to Australia in a balloon. Evidently she has relatives in Australia. That’s the ostensible reason for the journey. We both know the real reason. A group of Methodists from Pittsburgh are setting out next month for the Sinai Desert where they intend to pray and fast for forty days and nights. It says they’re being urged by their bishop to take along some kind of rations besides water but it says the group thus far has resisted the idea. Woman, sixty-two, circles world in single-engine plane. Now here’s a Norwegian man who sat for two hundred and two hours in a window box on his terrace, breaking the world record by thirty-some-odd hours. We both know he wasn’t interested in records. A man in Missouri spent a hundred and sixty-one days in a deep cavern. Missouri abounds in caverns. He ate canned food, he drank water, he burned over nine hundred candles. He said it’s the first time in his life he wasn’t bored. Sensory overload. People are withdrawing from sensory overload. Technology. Whenever there’s too much technology, people return to primitive feats. But we both know that true privacy is an inner state. A limited environment is important. Yes, yes. But you can’t fly off in a balloon and expect to find the answer.

The will has to urge itself to this task. The mind has to level itself across a plane of solitude. We’re painting this whole floor of the building a dark gray. Not the plant room. No, no. The plant room stays white. Everything else gets painted gray.”

“I just had a thought.”

“The concept of a captive lunatic fringe within an organization is mine alone, my concept alone, despite what you may have heard to the contrary. Irrationality can be managed to great effect. There’s power and intimidation behind every event the dog-boys are made to stage.”

“Are you Dr. Pepper?” I said. “You’re not, are you?”

“I’m Chess and these are my plants. Pepper is at least four inches taller than I am. You know that. Voice aside. Color of eyes aside. The man is four inches taller than I am. Pepper’s feats in the realm of disguise are well known and well documented but the man can’t hide four inches of muscle, bone and tissue. I’m Fred Chess, ordinary American. I used to be a theatrical producer. I went into photo offset work after that Nothing seemed to be panning out. Look, if I were Pepper, it would mean I knew all along what kind of drug was in the package. Any long-standing intimate connection between Pepper and Happy Valley would mean that I, as Pepper, had knowledge of the drug from the very beginning. You’d have to revise everything that’s happened. It would mean that I managed not only Bohack but also Hanes and Watney. If I’m Pepper, it means everything’s been a lie up to now. I managed the whole thing, it means. I guided the product from hand to hand. It was my circle, point by point, the product originating at Happy Valley and ending there. It would mean that you’ve been the victim of the paranoid man’s ultimate fear. Everything that takes place is taking place solely to mislead you. Your reality is managed by others. Logic is inside out. Events are delusions. If I were Pepper, it would mean I knew the nature of the product, I had it delivered to you, I planned and followed its course, I fabricated a Toronto meeting between Hanes and Watney, I assigned the informer to Azarian, I planted Hanes in the subway, I had Watney leave the bubble gum cards, I had Bohack bring you over here — the straight line intersecting the circle. It would mean I managed Opel.”

“But there’s the difference in height,” I said.

“Of course there is,” he said. “There’s no feasible way a man can subtract four inches, is there? Not to mention eye color, voice, skin pigmentation, size of genitals and so forth. I’m Fred Chess is who I am. Fact is I have no particular respect for Dr. Pepper. The man’s always been a cunt-hair away from outright quackery.”

He went into the bathroom and turned off the shower, saying
ow
twice, apparently because the tap was hot. Then he opened the door and stepped into the hall. Soon the pounding stopped. Chess came back inside, followed by Bohack, Longboy and three others, men at the beck of the strongest hand, two wearing lumber jackets like mine. Beyond these six, others were gathering in the hall, male and female, standing at rest, pardonably devoid of any sign of gloom. At the edge of every disaster, people collect in affable groups to whisper away the newsless moments and wait for a messenger from the front. A small wet belch, like a child’s, rippled from my lips. The window began to clear, gradually, in long vertical patches.

“It’s a mind drug,” Chess said. “Mind drugs affect different people different ways. They’re notorious for that. Highly unpredictable. Dr. Pepper thought this stuff was atropine at first. Atropine diminishes the killer impulse. No market for that. No street market anyway. But by the time he was finished he knew it was something else. It’s a drug that affects one or more areas of the left sector of the brain. Language sector. Still no market for this product. Street or otherwise. It damages the cells in one or more areas of the left sector of the human brain. Loss of speech in other words.”

“I know all this. This is boring.”

“Pepper was nice enough to dissolve the chemical powder with a sterile something-or-other and prepare an ampule for us. But you know what’s hard to figure? Why U.S. Guv was fooling around with this stuff in the first place. Maybe they have a language warfare department. Maybe they think the best way to silence troublemakers is literally. That would be funny as hell if that were true. Glub, glub, glub. Or maybe Pepper was right the first time. Atropine. A tranquilizer for the killing site. But I doubt it. The man knows his dope. I give him that. Dope’s his home away from home. I’m sure he was right with his second analysis.”

“He’d fucking well better be right.”

“Note this,” Chess said. “You’ll be perfectly healthy. You won’t be able to make words, that’s all. They just won’t come into your mind the way they normally do and the way we all take for granted they will. Sounds yes. Sounds galore. But no words. No songs. You watch, I said to myself. We’ll get him here and then hell refuse to cooperate. But so far you’ve cooperated beautifully. It took us a great deal of time and trouble to get the drug back into our possession. Therefore we’re compelled to use it. We have the drug so we’re forced to administer it. Anything to say? Last words? Oh yes, we hope you’ll continue to stay on Great Jones Street. We like having you nearby, yes, absolutely. Any last words?”

“Pee-pee-maw-maw,” I said.

Chess eked out laughter — a petty tremble of his lips that slowly grew into a radical whining body-sound, all parts surrendering themselves to glee. Soon we were all laughing, every one of us, those in the plant room and those in the hallway, all but Bohack who stood quietly amid the vegetation, one plant touching his shoulder at the crest of its ascent. His eyes were focused and perfectly clear but it was hard to tell what he was looking at. His presence was such that only stillness could fully accommodate the cavernous power his body engendered. The room seemed to contract about him, our laughter soaking dolefully into his skin, all becoming quiet now. A phone rang in one of the other rooms. Cincinnati, I thought. All gone my mountain songs. Something in Bohack shivered invisibly at the sound of the phone and I began to realize his captivity was stricter even than mine. The news of tapes in flames brought him no joy. As the phone was answered he chose in fact not even to remain for the final stifling, in motion suddenly toward the door, crashing past two men, the lumber jacket wearers, one of them doing a little roundelay at the end of Bohack’s lunge. All watched in unconnected manner this destruction of the placid air around us. He began wading through people in the hallway and soon was gone, metal door closing hard behind him as (in my mind) he stepped daintily over the vomit stain in the outer hall. Quiet returned then, a hurried calm accumulating in a kind of regional pattern, far hallway first, moving inward toward the center of the plant room. They were young, all those people gathered beyond the doorway, but haggard and slow to move, handymen, woodworkers, seamstresses, possessed of a rueful nostalgia, perhaps for the prairie womb common to them all, that land too bleak for song to live. Chess examined Longboy’s fingernails for dirt and then counseled him on the proper angle of insertion, according to Dr. Pepper, forty-five to sixty degrees. Manhattan, soberest of bridges, was restored to the window in dwindling mist, never less plain, arm and broadsword of the sky. Longboy opened his medic’s kit and lifted a hypodermic syringe to the pale light.

POLICE DOGS
roamed the U-Haul trailer lots. In dock areas I found the packing houses, seeking to investigate perspectives pure as theorems, the self-mastery of these concrete structures, invulnerable to melancholy. The weather turned again, spring backing off for glassy distances of sleet, a cancellation of the body’s feast of seasons, hard to wake to darkness. I dressed in old sweaters, three or four, each sufficiently torn to offer views of the one beneath but not so torn that all were visible in one wearing. I took great care to vary the layers day to day. One sweater was Opel’s, a ski extravaganza, desperately out of place among the rock ‘n’ roll caftans at the back of the closet. I never ventured north of Cooper Square. Two deaf men had an argument near a construction shack, using their hands to curse each other, finally picking up boards and taking turns attacking. Never ventured north of Cooper Square but stood above the rivers east and west,
wod-or,
this double sound all I could fashion from the sight of sluggish currents in transit to the sea.

This one day of late rain I saw a toothless man circle a cart banked with glowing produce. He bellowed into the wind, one of nature’s raw warriors, flapping around in unbuckled galoshes. A few people huddled nearby. One would now and then extend a hand toward the cart, finger-pricing, as the man wailed to the blank windows above him. It was a religious cry he produced, evocative of mosques and quaking sunsets.

RED YAPPLES GREEN YAPPLES GOLDEN YAPPLES MAKE A YAPPLE PIE MAKE ALSO A YAPPLE STRUDEL YAPPLES YAPPLES YAPPLES BIG JUICY YAPPLES FROM THE HEART OF THE YAPPLE COUNTRY

I turned a corner and someone came out of an old hotel and ran in sputtering little steps to my side. It was the girl Skippy, Happy Valley’s emissary, original bearer of the plain brown package. I kept walking and she remained alongside. We headed south and east into narrower streets, the city’s older precincts, less here of surfaces, of broad lines, the women pinned in little windows, forty years flowing through an isolated second, their true lives taking place in a European pastureland. A neon digit, sizzling a bit, hung lopsided from the front of a luncheonette. It grew colder as the wind gripped in and the island tapered toward the bay. Secure I felt beneath my sweaters. Skippy coughing.

The oldest immigrants lived in tower blocks, a long way from fertile pavement, these streets now ruled by darker races of the plains. It was early afternoon and soon to rain, nondeliverance in the air, a chemical smell from the river. The bridges were cruelly beautiful in this weather, gray ladies nearly dead to all the poetry written in their names. Tall black kids in sneakers charged up out of the subway, cutting left and right across a street, fast-breaking, three on two, one of them turning now in the air, ancient stick-fingers tapping a parking sign. A man demanded money, sitting on the arm of an abandoned chair, its springs exposed. I kept forgetting Skippy was with me, then would turn to see her, body bent forward in a coughing spasm, head pointed, moving like a dog in water. We walked behind two resplendent little women wearing plastic liners over their hats, coats and shoes, one of them loudly cataloguing various items along the sidewalk.

NEWSPAPER VOMIT SHIT GLASS CARDBOARD BOTTLE SHIT SPIT NEWSPAPER GLASS SHIT GARBAGE BOTTLE CARTON BOTTLE PAPER STOCKING SHIT GARBAGE SHIT GARBAGE GARBAGE SHIT

In barbershops Latin men stood talking in button-down shirts with collars open and sleeves folded two cuff-lengths to the lower forearm, apparel of an earlier Madison Avenue, that somber street now freshly regimented, paunchy and gay in Kool-Aid fiesta colors and Spanish sideburns. We headed west from the bridge districts and reached Chinatown, where Skippy seemed confused, apparently thinking this was San Francisco, and had to calm herself by standing for a while before the window of a fish market, watching a man guide a jagged blade up the belly of a trout as bits of fishy insides dripped onto the flaked ice. We hurried into the Criminal Court Building for warmth and sweets. The lobby was crowded and noisy, a chorus of the accused, the counter-accused, the victimized, and the lawyers, families and friends of all of these. With it all, more irate than the rest, came that special whine of minor violators. Everybody was smoking, shouting, biting down on stony Chiclets, sucking cough drops, everybody but the pimps, regal and absolute, who merely scanned the landscape, property-hunting. Behind his counter the blind newsdealer loomed as justice does, something of a self-parody, appearing to sense every nuance in the hall. He lived through his fingers, working their heat into every coin, tapping out change for the doomed and for the brothers-in-law of the doomed. We bought some candy and stood in a corner. Short purposeful men crossed the lobby on their way to and from duty, each slightly overweight and carrying the
Daily News
folded under one arm, civil servants, custodians of some kind, herders of jury members from room to room. I licked chocolate from the heel of my hand. A family of blacks surrounded a pustular lawyer, crowding his panicked grin. Outside we saw a man with hands to eyes in the shape of binoculars and he was slowly turning on a street corner, clouds, taxis, birds, detectives, all nautically viewed by this revolving man, once drunk perhaps but well beyond that now, persevering, in full command, sensing he had found a way of dealing with the world. We walked down to the Battery, past all the forty-story objects. Wind seemed to drop directly down the flanks of buildings before ripping along the narrow streets and we passed men clutching their black hats and moving shoulder first in quick bursts of locomotion and sometimes even backward, ten or twelve men at a time, their briefcases filled with mergers, all walking backward into the wind. A rag man at the edge of the park retched into his scarf, working himself up to a moment of vast rhetoric. His seemed the type of accusation aimed at those too constricted in spirit to see the earth as a place for gods to grow, a theater of furious encounters between prophets of calamity and simple pedestrians trying to make the light.