by
Don DeLillo
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In his room he noted down expenses on a pad. Then he looked at the pages he’d written and didn’t think he could do any more. It was too hard. It was harder than major surgery and it didn’t even keep you alive. He looked at a picture on the wall and saw everything that existed outside the room he was sitting in and the one he was trying to write about. It was a picture of fishing nets stowed in canvas baskets and it had sex, memories, cravings, names of old friends, principal rivers of the world. Writing was bad for the soul when you got right down to it. It protected your worst tendencies. Narrowed everything to failure and its devastations. Gave your cunning an edge of treachery and your jellyfish heart a reason to fall deeper into silence. He couldn’t remember why he wanted to write about the hostage. He’d done some pages he halfway liked but what was the actual point?
He could have told George he was writing about the hostage to bring him back, to return a meaning that had been lost to the world when they locked him in that room. Maybe that was it. When you inflict punishment on someone who is not guilty, when you fill rooms with innocent victims, you begin to empty the world of meaning and erect a separate mental state, the mind consuming what’s outside itself, replacing real things with plots and fictions. One fiction taking the world narrowly into itself, the other fiction pushing out toward the social order, trying to unfold into it. He could have told George a writer creates a character as a way to reveal consciousness, increase the flow of meaning. This is how we reply to power and beat back our fear. By extending the pitch of consciousness and human possibility. This poet you’ve snatched. His detention drains the world of one more thimble of meaning. He should have said these things to that son of a bitch, although actually he liked George, but he’d never considered the matter in quite this way before and George would have said that terrorists do not have power and anyway Bill knew he’d forget the whole thing before much time went by.
“What about the holes in the boat? All repaired?”
A round of amusement here, the others sharing some joke without a word or glance.
“Don’t worry about the holes.”
“All repaired?” Bill said.
“The holes are well above the waterline.”
“We don’t speak about the holes,” another customer said.
“The holes are but details,” the clerk said.
[...] He had eyes you noticed. They were bright blue, and when he smiled, they were alive, and his broken nose gave him a humorous look. But only his voice gave a hint of his reputation. It was a voice which had a hundred things in it, and a girl told me once she thought it was “seductive.” He had a way of offering something and pulling it back; just when you thought he was laughing at you, he seemed to like you—about the time you decided things were going well, his voice would turn you away. [...]
I understood Eitel even less when he told me these stories. I had always thought that to know oneself was all that was necessary, probably because I didn’t know myself at all. I did not see how Eitel could talk about himself so clearly, and be able to do nothing with it. I even wondered why he didn’t mind that I told him nothing further about me, and I had the feeling that our friendship was of very small size. Often, after I left him and went back to the house I rented on the edge of the desert, I would leave off thinking about Eitel, and I would be stuck in my own past. I wanted to talk to him, to try to explain things I could not explain to myself, but I couldn’t do it. I can’t remember ever talking about the orphanage, at least not since I went into the Air Force. I had such a desire to be like everybody else, at least everybody who had made it, and to make it, I boxed my way into the middleweight semi-finals of an Air Force enlisted man’s tournament, and when that gave me the chance to go to flying school, I studied hours at night to pass the pre-flight examinations. Until I graduated, nothing seemed so important as to get my wings.
A waiter brought ice cream. It was melted on the plates, and only Elena took a dish. “This is soft ice cream, isn’t it?” she said. “That’s the expensive kind, I’ve heard.” When everybody looked puzzled by the remark, Elena became a little desperate in the attempt to prove it. “I don’t remember where I heard, but I did see it advertised, soft ice cream, I mean, or maybe I was eating it, I don’t know.”
oh dear
[...] He found himself thinking of those years when he had been in college at an Eastern university which had put the crown to his parents’ ambition; and with a shock—it was truly so long ago—he remembered how clumsy he had been in his late adolescence. With what hunger he had watched, and with what hatred, while wealthy students paraded their dates through the doors of all those fraternity houses to which he had never been invited; what contempt he had felt for his own dates in college—town girls, working girls, an occasional night with some unattractive student from the neighboring college for women. He had left school with the fire of knowing that the world saw him as homely and insignificant, and maybe that had been the spur to make those early movies. If it was true, then his success had come from hunger and from anger, and in those years at the capital, while his hunger had been fed and his anger mellowed into wit, he had spent his urge and been admired and lost the energy of his talent. [...]
It was not for this alone he loved the situation. He saw it now that he had one true love—those films which had flowered in his mind and never been made. In betraying that love, he had betrayed himself. Which led into another theory. The artist was always divided between his desire for power in the world and his desire for power over his work. With this girl it was impossible to thrive in the world except by his art, and for these weeks, these domestic weeks when all went well and the act of sitting beside her in the sun could give him a sense of strength and the confidence of liking himself, he would feel indifference to that world he had found so hard to leave. To quit it by the bottom—that was nice, it gave a feeling there was fruit to life. And he was warmed by the knowledge that he was good for Elena, that for the first time in was-it-forever? somebody improved by knowing him, someone grew, he did not spoil all he touched. So, he could see their affair hopefully. He would teach her all the small things, that was nothing. What was more important, she understood the rest. Eitel could see her becoming one day the wise mistress of his home, confident in herself and what she could give to him. So, at the end of fantasy, was his return to the world after all.
One night in his house with the accordion washing through the desert air, he showed for Elena and himself, on his own projector, a print in sixteen millimeter of one of his early films. It was very powerful, he felt; a picture about jobless people with the ideas of a young man and the enthusiasm of twenty years ago, but still it was so good that he knew why he had not looked at it in a long time, and while the camera and the actors went their short course, he watched with an aching heart, excited with the artist’s self-love for what he had done, suffering from the dull fear that he could never do it again, and yet caught by the sudden enthusiasm that he could do more, that he could do everything. And all the while he wondered at the young man who had made such a film. “I didn’t know a thing when I made those pictures,” he said to Elena, “and yet somehow I knew more. I wonder where it’s hiding in me.” Elena kissed him when the movie was done. “I love you,” she said. “You’ll do a wonderful strong movie like this again.” And Eitel, frightened beyond fright, knew his vacation was over, and he must begin again that script, that skeleton of an art work he had until now been unable to create.
Such talk left Lulu more tense than ever. She was beginning to suggest these days that we ought to get married, and I think she never found me so attractive as when I would turn her down. The thought of marriage left me badly depressed. I could see myself as Mr. Meyers, a sort of fancy longshoreman scared of his wife, always busy mixing drinks for Lulu and the guests. I suppose what depressed me most was that I was forced to think about myself and what I wanted, and I was not ready for that, not by far. Once in a while, depending on my mood and my general estimate of my assets, I would think of becoming everything from a high school coach to a psychoanalyst, and several times I found myself thinking vaguely of a career in the FBI or more easily being a disc jockey with one of those sinuous lines of patter which mean so many things to so many people who stay up late at night. Once in a very great while, with a lack of ambition as cheerful as a liver complaint, I would remember that I wanted to be a writer, but like all my other inspirations, the central urge was not there—the only hint could be that I wanted to find some work I liked.