by
Don DeLillo
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Jane sat on a folding chair eating an apple. My father stood by the projector. He nodded to me and I switched off the light and then sat next to Jane. The first commercial lasted twenty seconds. A house stood on a quiet suburban street at night. Inside, a man and a woman were having an argument. A teen-age girl leaned against the TV set listening to them. She was very homely. Then she disappeared, returning seconds later with a small bottle of something. The man and woman looked at the bottle, embraced and began to sing. The next commercial was one minute long. A boy wearing thick glasses was practicing the piano. A hockey stick was propped against the wall behind him. In the distance could be heard the shouts and laughter of children his own age. The boy got to his feet, picked up the hockey stick and raced toward the door. A woman emerged from the next room. She was holding a toothbrush. She ran after the boy, waving the toothbrush and screaming. The boy opened the door and tripped. He fell down the steps and lay on the stone path, motionless. His glasses had been broken. Blood was flowing from a severe gash at a point directly above the bridge of his nose. He appeared to be unconscious. It was a beautiful night, a cool and clear and almost autumn night. The wind rushed across the grass outside the high basement window. The sky was howling with stars. I thought of old men playing violins and of women in white convertibles driving me to Mexico.
i love the flatness of this
When it rained Sullivan put on her old buttonless trench-coat even though we were inside the camper. What a mysterious and sacramental journey, I thought, not knowing most of the time where we were, depending on Pike to get us from place to place. Every time I saw a river I thought it was the Mississippi. Every gas station attendant we talked to was named Earl.
lol
I moved my leg slightly, the slimmest fraction of an inch, and Carol and I were touching. She sat absolutely still as Austin continued to speak. I moved again and we were touching now thigh to knee. The occasion was one of infinite subtlety. She may not have noticed the scant pressure of my leg; she may have noticed but thought nothing of it; or she may have known all along what I was doing. I edged my arm toward hers. Austin kept talking. Now our forearms were touching, the faintest inshore breeze of our bare flesh barely in contact, flesh resting on points of almost invisible silver hair. Still she was motionless, no sign either way. I waited several minutes. Then I moved my right hand across my lap and let it rest above my right knee. Carol was looking straight ahead. I was extremely nervous. The next few seconds would tell whether or not she knew and how she saw fit to respond to the knowledge. I did not want to be disappointed. It was important that she give me the right sign. I let my hand slide very slowly into the crease formed by our two legs. I let it rest there. We were both looking straight ahead. Then I felt a slight pressure from her thigh, a slight and pleasant heat on the tips of my fingers, the slightest suggestion of shifting weight, a muscle tensing, her body not moving and yet expressing movement, finding a new balance, shifting inside itself, shifting toward me. I returned the pressure and then moved several inches away. Austin kept talking and I began to relax. Carol and I looked straight ahead. It was my first ego-moment since New York.
I sat at the bar and had a scotch. The ashtray in front of me was full of pared fingernails. I was on the third drink when she arrived. The way she walked made her skirt sway lightly across her legs and I felt lucky and full of improvisation, a nice loose music in my head, and I knew the auto mechanics were watching her but not with sludge and crankcase lust; rather with a small joy, I thought, a tiny leap of flesh, the light lucky feeling of seeing a pretty girl with bare legs walking across a room behind a smile that says she likes being a woman being watched. I tried not to look so pleased. She glanced at my drink and asked for the same.
Pike slept in the back of the camper. Brand and I were up front, waiting for Sullivan in the parking lot of a supermarket. I saw a group of women standing by a station wagon. There were seven of them, pushing cartons and shopping bags over the open tailgate into the rear of the car. Celery stalks and boxes of Gleem stuck out of the bags. I took the camera from my lap, raised it to my eye, leaned out the window a bit, and trained it on the ladies as if I were shooting. One of them saw me and immediately nudged her companion but without taking her eyes off the camera. They waved. One by one the others reacted. They all smiled and waved. They seemed supremely happy. Maybe they sensed that they were waving at themselves, waving in the hope that someday if evidence is demanded of their passage through time, demanded by their own doubts, a moment might be recalled when they stood in a dazzling plaza in the sun and were registered on the transparent plastic ribbon; and thirty years away, on that day when proof is needed, it could be hoped that their film is being projected on a screen somewhere, and there they stand, verified, in chemical reincarnation, waving at their own old age, smiling their reassurance to the decades, a race of eternal pilgrims in a marketplace in the dusty sunlight, seven arms extended in a fabulous salute to the forgetfulness of being. What better proof (if proof is ever needed) that they have truly been alive? Their happiness, I think, was made of this, the anticipation of incontestable evidence, and had nothing to do with the present moment, which would pass with all the others into whatever is the opposite of eternity. I pretended to keep shooting, gathering their wasted light, letting their smiles enter the lens and wander the camera-body seeking the magic spool, the gelatin which captures the image, the film which threads through the waiting gate. Sullivan came out of the supermarket and I lowered the camera. I could not help feeling that what I was discovering here was power of a sort.
“I have fantasies about falling in love with a Vietnamese girl,” Brand said. “But then she dies of a funny disease and I spend the rest of my life in pain.”
The northern monsoon clouds were lifting. The killer teams were sweeping the villages. At night you could see the tracers streaking across the free-fire zones. There are twenty rounds to a magazine.
“America can be saved only by what it’s trying to destroy,” Sullivan said.
There is a motel in the heart of every man. Where the highway begins to dominate the landscape, beyond the limits of a large and reduplicating city, near a major point of arrival and departure: this is most likely where it stands. Postcards of itself at the desk. One hundred hermetic rooms. The four seasons of the year in aerosol cans inside the medicine chest. Repeated endlessly on the way to your room, you can easily forget who you are here; you can sit on your bed and become man sitting on bed, an abstraction to compete with infinity itself; out of such places and moments does modern chaos raise itself to the level of pure mathematics. Despite its great size, the motel seems temporary. This feeling may rise simply from the knowledge that no one lives here for more than one or two days at a time. Then, too, it may be explained by the motel’s location, that windy hint of mystery encircling a lone building fixed in what was once a swamp; a cold gale blows from the lake or bay, sunlight cracks on the wingtips of distant planes, ducks tack upwind, and nowhere is there a sign of a human on foot. The motel seems to have been built solely of bathroom tile. The bedsheets are chilly and faintly damp. There are too many hangers in the closet, as if management were trying to compensate for a secret insufficiency too grievous to be imagined. From small gratings in the wall comes a steady and almost unendurable whisper of ventilation. But for all its spiritual impoverishments, this isn’t the worst of places. It embodies a repetition so insistent and irresistible that, if not freedom, then liberation is possible, deliverance; possessed by chaos, you move into thinner realms, achieve refinements, mathematical integrity, and become, if you choose, the man on the bed in the next room. The forest lodge, the suite of mauve rooms, the fleabag above the hockshop, the borrowed apartment—all too personal, the unrecurring moment. Men hold this motel firmly in their hearts; here flows the dream of the confluence of travel and sex.
Several minutes later we were in bed. An open suitcase slid to the floor. She kept talking about her husband. I hit her and she was quiet. Naked she was even more plain, and the hunger I had expected from her did not show itself. Into her neutrality and silence I directed something like desperation. It was the old fascism. War, sadism, self-abasement, it was all that. She took it—but not to keep and not for herself. I thought she would want to feast on my body. I had been inserted into the televised dream of motel, the pleasure of being other and none. I had been hung in that dream, a thing out of modern fiction, beautiful boy plundered by the crumbling duchess. I had expected to enjoy it greatly, her greed and tongue and the dredgings of her fantasy. But she had climbed into bed like an old shoemaker and I found myself overburdened with parts—hers, mine, the dream’s—and she did not seem to distinguish between what was authentic and what was ugly and brutal. It may have been that the final partition had fallen.
damn
“We’re consultants to government and industry,” Wild said finally. “Want to know about production flow systems? Materials handling? Centralized processing and distribution? Automation you know isn’t necessarily the answer. First you study the operation. Then you analyze the system in terms of costs and functional elements. Maybe automation isn’t the answer at all. Maybe it’s selective automation you want. One or two small changes can turn the trick. Relocate a conveyor line. Design a special component. Too many people think automation is the answer to everything. This is a fallacy. I work with good men. They do their job and they like what they’re doing and they don’t ever squawk. Once I dated one of their daughters for a period of several some odd months. She was all jugs. I liked her. But she kept using a word I couldn’t stand. She was always using it. I tromped over to the museum. I went tromping through the park. I tromped down Rush Street. Automation is no panacea. We understand that in my father’s outfit. Systems planning is the true American artform. More than jazz for godsake. We excel at maintenance. We understand interrelationships. We make it all work, from parcel entry to in-plant distribution to truck routing and scheduling. We know exactly where to put the nail that holds the broom. A lot of countries can’t do that. They don’t know how. Practically nobody in Europe knows where to put the nail. You know that Frenchman who wrote that book, what he said? There are three great economic powers in the world. America. Russia. And America in Europe. We have to show them where to put the nail. But the Russians still lag. They lag in industrial research, in computerization, in automated systems. They lag. We know how to plan things, like overall corporate policy, like inventory management, like distribution, like site suitability. We’re experts in containerization, unit loads, electronic data processing, feasibility studies. We know how to zero in. What’s so terrible about that?”
“And I have the questions,” I said. “We begin, simply enough, with a man watching television. Quite possibly he is being driven mad, slowly, in stages, program by program, interruption by interruption. Still, he watches. What is there in that box? Why is he watching?”
“The TV set is a package and it’s full of products. Inside are detergents, automobiles, cameras, breakfast cereal, other television sets. Programs are not interrupted by commercials; exactly the reverse is true. A television set is an electronic form of packaging. It’s as simple as that. Without the products there’s nothing. Educational television’s a joke. Who in America would want to watch TV without commercials?”
“How does a successful television commercial affect the viewer?”
“It makes him want to change the way he lives.”
“In what way?” I said.
“It moves him from first person consciousness to third person. In this country there is a universal third person, the man we all want to be. Advertising has discovered this man. It uses him to express the possibilities open to the consumer. To consume in America is not to buy; it is to dream. Advertising is the suggestion that the dream of entering the third person singular might possibly be fulfilled.”