by
Don DeLillo
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America, then as later, was a sanitarium for every kind of statistic. We took care of them. We tried to understand them. We did what we could to make them well. Numbers were important because whatever fears we might have had concerning the shattering of our minds were largely dispelled by the satisfaction of knowing precisely how we were being driven mad, at what decibel rating, what mach-ratio, what force of aerodynamic drag. So there was a transferred madness, a doubling, between the numbers themselves and those who made them and cared for them. We needed them badly; there is no arguing that point. With numbers we were able to conceal doubt. Numbers rendered the present day endurable, heralded the impressive excesses of the future and stocked with a fine deceptive configuration our memories, such as they were, of the past. We were all natural scientists. War or peace, we thrived on the body-count.
Mary was not a pretty girl. But there was an animation to her face, an intelligence, which nullified her plainness. She read her favorite authors in curiously appropriate ways—Proust supinely, Faulkner with bourbon, O’Casey wearing my father’s turtleneck. She was a fine swimmer and tennis player, although at times there seemed a touch of condescension in her attitude toward sport; it was all so easy, so predictable in outcome. She treated the family almost the same way she might treat her tennis racket, with rough affection and a charming lighthearted contempt. The latter did not extend to me, however. Her kid brother. I think she loved me very much. Almost everything my father said was received by Mary in a spirit of high delight. “Daddy,” she used to say, “you’re almost as funny as Eisenhower.” But he was not delighted by her as much as bewildered. I think she made my father question the structure of his own nature, for to him it was surely apparent that only the rebel mischief of his seed could have produced this stray comedienne.
lmao
Wild, of course, had yet to meet Meredith. Miss Dairy Products USA was a name of my own making and Wild was merely repeating my own bad joke. I had known, as junior year drew to a close, that I would ask her to marry me. I also knew, pending her acceptance, that we would return together to Leighton Gage for my final year. My classmates in their evolving worldliness would consider Merry too pure, too naive, too inexperienced to be let loose outside of Disneyland. So I tried to prepare them—a joke here, an anecdote there, an occasional nervous quip. And as I said these things I would often think of her, in a London park or square, on a bench beneath some granite admiral, and she’d be so pretty, nodding as the pigeons nodded, pouting at the pouting children in their prams, so pretty and white, those thrifty breasts, salvation of Western man, furling a yellow umbrella. Some good-bad nights I spent, loving my self-hatred. I was trying to prepare them, that’s all; take the glint off their eager scalpels. I punished myself by going for long underwater swims in the artificial lake, coming up gasping, the sky regarding me through misty spectacles, quite curiously. And still I tried to prepare them. These are the things men do when they have orchestrated their lives to the rumble of public opinion. Merry arrived with me on campus the following autumn. They all said she was a nice girl and seven of us took a mass touchless shower.
The study of dead Englishmen flourished in the afternoon. We looked forward to them, sons of Bread Street and Aid-winkle Rectory. It was May of my senior year at Leighton Gage and on Tuesday and Thursday afternoons we sat in an air-conditioned hourglass and savored our own total incomprehension as an assistant professor charted the poems of Dryden, Lovelace, Fanshawe and Suckling. They were all so incomparably dead, the Penguin poets, and we loved them because their lines meant less to us than the dark side of the moon. It was the best kind of class to have in the afternoon, an exercise in almost pure language, demanding nothing more than fractional consciousness since there wasn’t the slightest hope of understanding what those poems were all about, and we drowsed and smiled, happy in our own little angel-infancy, snug in our Thamesian punt, and when the sonic belch of experimental jets went ripping across the desert we came close to applauding the symbolism; but a trembling applause it would have been, for we knew that it signaled the death of our drowsy England and the beginning of a new mortality, just months away now, the start of job, mate, child, desk, drink, sit, squat, quiver, die. Afternoon was for political science or dead Englishmen. That’s why Monday afternoons were so terrible. Monday meant Zen.
Summer in a small town can be deadly, even worse in a way than slum summers or the deep wet summers of gulf ports. It isn’t the deadliness of filth or despair and it doesn’t afflict everyone. But there are days when a terrible message seems to be passing from sunlight to shadow at the edge of a striped afternoon in the returning fathoms of time. Summer unfolds slowly, a carpeted silence rolling out across expanding steel, and the days begin to rhyme, distance swelling with the bridges, heat bending the air, small breaks in the pavement, those days when nothing seems to live on the earth but butterflies, the tranquilized mantis, the spider scaling the length of the mudcaked broken rake inside the dark garage. A scream seems imminent at every window. The menace of the history of quiet lives is that when the moment comes, the slow opened motion of the mouth, the sound which erupts will shatter everything that moves for miles around. The threat is at its worst in summer, in the wide rows of sunlight, as old people cross the lawns, humming like insects, as they sit in the painted gray stillness of spare rooms, breezing themselves with magazines about Siam and bare-breasted Zanzibar, as they stand on porches trying to gather in the shade, as they eat ice cream in the drugstore, two spinsters revolving on their stools beneath the halted fans, and all will come apart when the moment arrives. It is not felt every day and only some people can feel it. It may not be as violent as slums, tar melting on rooftops and boys wailing their hate at white helmets, but in the very silence and craft of its rhyming days summer in a small town can invert one’s emotions with the speed of insanity.
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[...] I was in one of those lonely moods which come over sixteen-year-olds when it occurs to them that in other parts of the world young men are hunting condors on high white crags and making love to whispering women who were born in Singapore. In its lonely way this is the most romantic of moods. You go for long walks that are like episodes in French novels. You feel that some great encounter is about to take place, something that will change the course of your life. Some old gardener will take you into an attic room, play the violin as it has never been played before and tell you the secret of existence. A dark woman will draw alongside in a new convertible and then lean over, without a word, and open the door for you; she will drive you to Mexico and undress you very slowly. [...]
There was nothing to do. All afternoon I sat on the porch, motionless, thinking of the wet bodies of women. It was getting hotter. The stillness was almost absolute. There was a taste of water in the air, warm salt biting the lips. I felt heavy. I wished it would rain. Is this how people die, watching along the street for some sign that will tell them the moment is here, at last, rise up and act, the time is upon us, quickly, into the streets, now, grenades and motorcycles, a warning word, salt on the wet bodies of women. Dr. Weber walked down the street. He was a short man with a mustache. The machete is a most effective weapon, doctor. You are surprised that I speak your language? Harvard. Class of ‘34. He was carrying his bag. He wore a dark suit. There was a gravy stain on his shirtfront. I waited for him to look toward the porch and give me that yellow smile which doctors and dentists employ so often, a clenched wry smile as the money changes hands, and when he did I turned away and yawned. Practitioner. Oath-taker. I rode out the afternoon on that yawn.
[...] Buford Long, who would be serving as bartender. I watched Buford set things up and I decided that tending bar might be a pretty good way to spend one’s life. Spanking down big foaming steins of beer to be encircled by the huge skeet-shooting hands of virile novelists. Rattling the cocktail shaker and doing a little samba step for the amusement of the ladies. To be an expert at something. I asked Buford how he liked tending bar and he said the ice made his knuckles cold and sent weird shooting pains up to his head. [...]
love this [the gap between his imagination & reality]
“I’ve always wanted to be a writer,” he said. “Right out there in that room tonight there were forty or fifty good stories. I tried to write when I was a young man but I had no staying power. I’d get started in a burst of energy and goodwill and then I’d just fade out and die. Let’s face it, I was born to be an insurance agent. But the thing gnaws at me even now, lad. Sometimes I have trouble sleeping and I get out of bed and light a cigarette and sit by the open window. And I get this bittersweet feeling about my life and what I’ve done and what I haven’t done. You’re too young to understand that. But there’s something poetic about sitting by an open window at midnight smoking a cigarette. The cigarette is part of it. There are memories in the smoking of a cigarette. I just sit there thinking about my life. I killed three Japanese in the war that I know of. I’m telling you these things because they’ll be useful to you someday.”
I did not move. I felt close to some overwhelming moment. In the dim light her shadow behind her consumed my own. I knew what was happening and I did not care to argue with the doctors of that knowledge. Let it be. Inside her was something splintered and bright, something that might have been left by the spiral passage of my own body. She was before me now, looking up, her hands on my shoulders. The sense of tightness I had felt in my room was beginning to yield to a promise of fantastic release. It was going to happen. Whatever would happen. The cage would open, the mad bird soar, and I would cry in epic joy and pain at the freeing of a single moment, the beginning of time. Then I heard my father’s bare feet on the stairs. That was all.
god this writing