Don DeLillo (3 page)

AGAIN
I had a visitor, four days into unbroken solitude, a reporter this time, flamboyantly bald and somewhat dwarfish, dressed in sagging khaki, drifts of hair from outlying parts of his head adorning the frames of his silver-tinted glasses, an emblem on the sleeve of his battle jacket —
RUNNING DOG NEWS SERVICE.

“Where do you want to sit?”

“Your manager told us you were approachable,” he said. “We’ve known for seventy-two hours where you were located but we didn’t want to make a move until we got ahold of Globke. We don’t operate mass-media-crash-style. We wanted Globke’s version of your frame of mind in terms of were you or were you not approachable. Ill take this chair and we can put the tape recorder right here.”

“No tape,” I said.

“That’s what we anticipated.”

“No notes either.”

“No notes?”

“Note-taking’s out.”

“You want some kind of accuracy, don’t you?”

“No,” I said.

“Then what do you want?”

“Make it all up.
Go
home and write whatever you want and then send it out on the wires. Make it up. Whatever you write will be true.”

“We know it’s asking a lot to expect an interview, even a brief one, which is what we assure you is what we want, but maybe a statement will have to do. Will you give us a statement?”

“A statement about what?”

“Anything at all,” he said. “Just absolutely anything. For instance the rumors. What about the rumors?”

“They’re all true.”

“Okay, but what about authorities in Belgium?”

“Does Globke have Belgium under contract? If Globke doesn’t have it under contract, whatever it is, I’d be guilty of malfeasance in discussing it publicly.”

“Authorities in Belgium want to question you about your alleged financial involvement in a planeload of arms confiscated in Brussels that was supposedly on its way to either this or that trouble-spot, depending on which rumor you believe.”

“Do you know what the word malfeasance means? This is a word that carries tremendous weight in a court of law. Much more weight than misfeasance or non-feasance.”

“Okay, but what about the damage to your vocal chords from the continuous strain and the story that you’ll never perform in public again?”

“You decide, “I said. “Whatever you write will be true. I’ll confirm every word.”

“Okay, but what about Azarian? Azarian says he’s reorganizing the group along less radical musical lines. Will you make a statement about that?”

“Yes,” I said.

“What’s your statement?”

“Azarian has been horribly disfigured in a gruesome accident. His face is being reconstructed with skin and bone taken from the faces of volunteers. His voice is not his voice. It belongs to a donor. What Azarian seems to be saying is really being said by another person’s vocal chords.”

“That’s the other thing. An accident. You were in an accident and you’re hidden away in some rich private clinic in south central Maryland. The accident thing was interesting to us, ideologically. An accident for somebody like you is the equivalent of prison for a revolutionary. We were kind of rooting for an accident. Which is, wow, really weird. But that’s what happens. You get into guerrilla ideology, you find yourself trying to handle some pretty unwholesome thoughts.”

“There’s no such region as south central Maryland.”

“Okay, but listen to this on the subject of accidents. We got a tip from I won’t say what source that your manager was about to leak word of an accident. We figure he wanted to co-opt all the other accidents. He wanted exclusive rights to your accident. Anyway his story had you half-dead when a schooner piled into some rocks during a storm off the coast of Peru. First you’re missing and presumed drowned. Then you’re half-dead aboard a rescue vessel. And Peru does have a coast because I was there two years ago Christmas. But he dropped the idea for whatever reason. This is pretty sophisticated stuff, Bucky. I mean there’s rumor, there’s counter-rumor, there’s manipulation, and there’s, you know, this ultra-morbid promotional activity. What’s it all mean?”

“The plain man of business is gone from the earth.”

“Before I forget,” he said, “we’d like to add your name to a list of sponsors that we use on all correspondence pertaining to the black captive insurrection fund. The other names are on this sheet. Should I leave it and you can get back to us or do you want to look at it now? It’s up to you .whatever you want me to do with it.”

“Tear it in four equal pieces,” I said.

“Okay, can we get on to some more statements now?”

“I don’t think so, no.”

“We’d like a short statement about your present whereabouts.”

I’m wherever you want me to be.”

“We know where you are at this point. We want to know what you’re doing here.”

“Nothing.”

“But why here?” he said. “Will you make a statement about that?”

“You know where you are in New York. You’re in New York. It’s New York. This fact is inescapable. In other places I didn’t always know where I was. What is this, Ohio or Japan? I wanted to be in one place. An identifiable place.”

“Okay, but you’ve got a studio-equipped house in the mountains and it’s almost inaccessible to anybody who doesn’t have a detailed map. We still don’t see why you’re here rather than there. You’ve lived there. It must be identifiable.”

“How tall are you?” I said.

“Six feet even.”

“Incredible.”

“It’s the way I hunch.”

“You’re a six-foot dwarf.”

“I hunch. I can’t help it. I’ve always hunched.”

“It’s really a studio-equipped mountain,” I said. “There is no house as such. There’s the facsimile of a house. There’s the pictorial mode of a house. Exactly what my house in the mountains would look like if I had a house and there were mountains. My present state of mind doesn’t accommodate the existence of mountains. I am in a plains mood.”

“Can we discuss your personal life?” he said.

“Sure we can. I won’t be here while we’re discussing it because I’m going out now. But you go right ahead. Everything you report will be true. I’ll personally vouch for every syllable.”

“Your manager told us you were approachable.”

“That wasn’t Globke you talked to. That was the facsimile of Globke. Transparanoia markets facsimiles. Everybody under contract has his or her facsimile. It’s one of the terms in the standard contract. Once you sign the contract, you’re obliged to live up to the terms. This is basic to a sound contractual relationship. At this precise moment in duplicate time, Bucky Wunderlick is having his toenails clipped in the Waldorf Towers. You’ve been conducting an interview with his facsimile.”

I could see myself reflected in his glasses as I rose from my bowl-shaped chair and moved slowly backward toward the door. He raised an arm in shaggy homage.

“Peace.”

“War.”

THE ROOM’S TENSIONS
were suitable to few enterprises besides my own, that of testing the depths of silence. Or one’s willingness to be silent. Or one’s fear of this willingness.

The snow turned brown on the window ledge. There was soup to eat when the old stove worked. Things functioned sporadically; other things functioned all the time but never to full effect. Through large parts of many nights I sat with Opel’s coat around my shoulders. The little radio made its noises, fierce as a baby, never listening to itself. This was America’s mechanical voice, its doll voice, coughing out slogans into the dawn, testing itself in the event of emergency, station after station fading away in the suffering breath of the national anthem. The firemen stayed in the firehouse.

I heard a noise in the hall and put my head out the door. He was there, sitting on the top step, Fenig again, peering down at me through the dimness.

“I couldn’t write,” he said. “I got started on a science-fiction thing but it bogged down in the early stages. I tried to walk it out. You know, pace it out. Sometimes it helps, a simple thing like walking up and down a room. When the inspiration peters out, I get off my duff and start pacing. I pace certain ways, depending on the situation. This time I was pacing five steps north, around, eight steps southeast, over to starting point, five steps north again. It sounds stupid but it works. Do something over and over and soon little irregularities show up in the routine. Unconscious, unbidden. This is when you know you’re back in business. Come on up. I’ll show you my place.”

His room was sparsely furnished. It was dominated by an enormous trunk, balding with age, fitted out with huge rusty buckles and other types of metalwork. A rolled-up carpet lay against a wall. Fenig’s typewriter was set on a small metal table with wheels. The shade on a nearby lamp had a cup-and-saucer motif.

“This is where I live and work,” he said.

This was my first good look at Fenig. Because of the hood, his nose seemed larger perhaps than it really was, and since there is a sense of tragic destiny associated with people who have large noses, Fenig in his sweat shirt made me think of a gym teacher standing in a rainy playground while kids slash laughingly at his arms with improvised knives. We sat in old wooden chairs; on each one, several layers of paint were easily distinguishable in the manner of geological strata. Fenig himself appeared well kept, his clothes neat and recently laundered.

“Nobody knows me from shit,” he said. “But I’m a two-time Laszlo Piatakoff Murder Mystery Award nominee. My one-acters get produced without exception at a very hip agricultural college in Arkansas. I’m in my middle years but I’m going stronger than ever. I’ve been anthologized in hard cover, paperback and goddamn vellum. I know the writer’s market like few people know it. The market is a strange thing, almost a living organism. It changes, it palpitates, it grows, it excretes. It sucks things in and then spews them up. It’s a living wheel that turns and crackles. The market accepts and rejects. It loves and kills.”

Light entered mildly, the only wage a northern winter pays to moderation. A corner of the room began to shimmer, the sun raising dust in uncertain columns, and I realized I was still wearing Opel’s coat. Fenig in his cotton-acrylic hood. Wunderlick tucked in at the waist, baring his bony wrists.

“There’s a woman lives downstairs,” he said. “First floor. Micklewhite. She’s got a kid about twenty, deformed and retarded. He was born with something wrong with his skull. It’s soft for some reason. His head is full of dents and funny little configurations. His family was ashamed and they never did anything. They just kept him in the room. Now the father’s dead and the mother’s nutty and the kid is still in the room with his pliable head. He can’t talk or dress himself or anything. I don’t know if he can even crawl. I’ve never seen him myself. She doesn’t exhibit him around. But she told me everything. Micklewhite and her all-American boy. I’ve put him in four stories, sight unseen.”

The radiator was similar to the one in the room below, a tall stooped object standing in a corner, wholly reconcilable with its surroundings or lack of them, nice to look at and even listen to, the kind of radiator that has a metal receptacle hooked to its back for the purpose of holding water and moistening the air. Our matching radiators. Something to water once in a while.

“Fame,” he said. “It won’t happen. But if it does happen. But it won’t happen. But if it does. But it won’t.”

The building was pounded by shock waves from an explosion at a construction site nearby. I watched Fenig’s jowls quiver a bit, all the loose skin on his face agitated by the tremor, a disquiet at the center of his neatness and calm. There was no sign of a radio, telephone or television set.

“I met Laszlo Piatakoff at a Baskerville Society dinner thing at the Hilton.”

“Who is he?” I said.

“Laszlo Piatakoff is the Marjorie Pace Kimball of murder mystery. That’s no exaggeration.”

Down on the street someone was using a hammer. The sound was vibrant, accompanied by liquid echoes, and soon it was joined by the sound of another hammer, maybe a block away, a thick ripple to each granulating blow, probably Bond Street. The heavier of the two sounds was the more distant, and together they formed a slowly spreading wake, one of time, silence and reverberation, each of these flowing through the others, softening the petrified air, until finally one hammer was rested, and the other grew brutal.

“Everybody knows the thing about an infinite number of monkeys,” Fenig said. “An infinite number of monkeys is put to work at an infinite number of typewriters and eventually one of them reproduces a great work of literature. In what language I don’t know. But what about an infinite number of writers in an infinite number of cages? Would they make one monkey sound? One genuine chimp noise? Would they eventually swing by their toes from an infinite number of monkey bars? Would they shit monkey shit? It’s academic, you say. You may be right. I don’t know. One thing I do know. It’s all a question of being in the right place at the right time. Knowing the market. Spotting its fluctuations. Measuring its temperament. I’ve written millions of words. Every one of them is in that trunk.”

When I went downstairs I had to content myself with fashioning an impersonation of sleep, eyes closed, body lax, a studied evenness to my breathing. This, in the end, became tiring, and I ate some food and then sat by the window. The air carried a dismal stench, some kind of earth gas released by the detonations. I closed my eyes again. When I opened them it was well into evening. The room behind me was dark. I thought of opening the window and shouting:

“Fire! Hey, fire!”

The great doors of the firehouse would slowly come open. I’d get a glimpse of the big machine, fire-engine red, rigged with shiny appliances. Then tiny men in black booties would appear, edging out onto the sidewalk, lifting their beady eyes to my window.

“Fire!” I’d shout. “Hey, fire, fire!”

One small man would take several steps forward, moving into the light shed by a streetlamp. He’d tug at his booties for a second. Then he’d look back up at my window.

“Water,” he would say, barely above a whisper.