Authors: Don DeLillo
We were all laughing, not knowing exactly why. Maybe we thought Bloomberg was crazy. Or maybe we laughed because it was the only reaction we could trust, the only one that could keep us at a safe distance. Anatole, replying to the laughter, tapped his spoon against the plastic tray to his right. I finished my corn flakes and proceeded, as arranged, to the library.
Myna was sitting alone in one of the rooms downstairs. Her table was covered with books, all abandoned there, many left open (a breach in their solemnity), massive volumes in tiny lines of print. Beyond the table were long high stacks, reeking a bit of perspiration (presumably human), the 900 series, history in its smelliest caparisons, each dark aisle booby-trapped with a metal stool or two. It was fairly pleasant to be there, the library as womb, fluorescent refuge from chaos or rain. Myna was reading Zap Comix. I sat next to her, then reached across the table and pulled a book toward me. It was a dictionary, opened to facing pages that began with
Kaaba
and ended with
kef.
Myna looked different somehow. I hadn’t seen her in about a week and it took me a couple of seconds to realize that her face was much more clear, almost completely blotchless. She leaned toward the dictionary. We read the definitions to each other for a while. Some of them were extremely funny. Then we selected certain words to read aloud. We read them slowly, syllable by syllable, taking turns, using at times foreign or regional accents, then replaying the sounds, perhaps backward, perhaps starting with a middle syllable, and finally reading the word as word, overpronouncing slightly, noses to the page as if in search of protomorphic
spoor. Some of the words put Myna into a state of mild delirium; she thought their beauty almost excessive. We kept reading for half an hour. The words were ways of touching and made us want to speak with hands. We went into a far corner of the high stacks. There I started taking off her dress. The great cumulus breasts came rolling out of hand-beaded blue Victorian velvet. We laughed loudly, then tried to quiet each other with soft punches to the arm. A button fell to the floor, rolling unsteadily into a distant corner. I made bubbling noises, rubbing my face in her breasts, scratching an itch just under my eye with her left nipple. Together we got the dress down over her hips, hitting each other lightly to warn the laughter off, and in time it was at her feet. I made strange noises of anticipation (
gwa, gwa
) and this made her hit me with both hands, but weakly because of the laughter rocking inside her. We heard something at the doorway and made faces at each other, exaggerated fright-masks, and I looked past her and through the slightly tilted rows of books, tilts and counter-tilts, angles commenting on other angles, centuries misplaced by slumbering hands, the entire self-contradictory mass looming humorously over my darling’s epic breasts. There was no one in the doorway. I plucked a chord or two on the tense elastic of her iridescent panties. Sign of tiny pink ridges, wave-shaped, about her buoyant waist. We kissed and bit. She tickled certain vulnerable areas below my ribs. We touched, patted and licked. It may be impossible to explain why it seemed so very important to get her completely naked. Our hands rolled the pants past her hips and thighs. To mark the event I brought new noises to the room, vowel sounds predominating. Myna stepped away from the clothes, aware of the moment’s
dynamics, positing herself as the knowable word, the fleshmade sigh and syllable. She was beautiful, broad as a many-sectioned cubistic bather, conceptually new, cloud-bosomed, ultimate. To be forever loved in ways unworthy. In seconds we would be ingathered, amassment of hair and limbs, unbrokenly focused, hunting each other in the melting cave. Some one or thing at the doorway’s edge. No: closer. A woman lurking in the stacks. I could see her, four rows away, shoulder to nose between the shelves. I gestured to Myna of the danger nearby. Then I tried to help her get into her clothes, accidentally bumping her once with my knee so that she fell forward over a stool. We looked at each other, not knowing whether to be alarmed by the approaching footsteps, or amused, or merely indifferent. I directed her toward a small alcove in which was placed a bust of some unnamed immortal. Then I opened a book and began to read in a soft voice a number of reflections on an ancient war I had never even heard of until that moment. The woman was Mrs. Berry Trout, an administrator of some kind. She gave me an unloving look.
“What’s your name, young man?”
“Robert Reynolds,” I said, slipping into my southern accent.
O
NE NIGHT THE MAJOR
and I played a crude form of war game in his motel room. He sat facing me, about four feet away, a small table between us. On the table were pencils, pads, maps, and a chart that I was having a great deal of trouble trying to read upside down. The major said that one of the big problems with war games, whether they were being played at the Pentagon, at NORAD or Fort Belvoir, at a university or think tank, was the obvious awareness on the part of all participants that this wasn’t the real thing. (What we were playing, he added, was barely the simulated thing; we had no computer, intelligence reports, projection screens, and only a few numerical estimates of troop units, missile inventories, production capacities.) The gaming environment, as he called it, could never elicit the kind of emotions generated in times of actual stress; therefore gaming was probably just a second-rate guide (hopefully not too misleading) to what might be expected from governments
when the armies were poised and lithe missiles were rising from their silos. As I sat there, listening, I wondered why we were meeting in a motel. It seemed to me that the major’s house should have been ready for occupancy by this time and that his family should have joined him. However it did not seem appropriate to comment.
He looked through the material in front of him, then glanced around the room before spotting what he wanted, a world atlas. It was on the bed, about eight feet away. He asked me to get it for him.
“Now this scenario is premised on futuribles,” he said. “The basic situation as I’ve set it up for us is definitely in the area of what we know to be projected crisis situations. It could happen. Tensions. Possible accidents. Unrelated hostilities. Or maybe not so unrelated. Precedents: one act of aggression tending to legalize another. Then finally a showdown between two major powers. That’s the basic situation, the starting point or premise as I’ll conceptualize it for you in a minute. What happens after that is up to us. Now, before I forget, the two major powers are just who you might expect them to be except I’ve changed their names slightly, just to make them a little less appealing or distasteful to our emotions, as the case may be. COMRUS is one and AMAC is the other. It’s not supposed to fool anybody and it just gives you a glimpse of what we might be able to do in the future in terms of totally our own situations, not depending on existing bodies or preconceptions. So it’s just to neutralize our emotions a little bit. In fact I haven’t bothered to change much else, just a designation here and there since I’m just beginning to get into this. So we’re a little bit disorganized and inconsistent this first time and we’ll
probably have to improvise as we go along. But to get back, what happens after I introduce this thing is up to us. We might become wildly implausible or we might run right through the crisis game from escalation to escalation with absolutely traditional military logic — if there is such a thing and I’m not sure there is. We might not even get to the point of using nuclear weapons. Or we might start pitching right off.”
The major outlined the crisis.
It begins in the Sea of Japan. An AMAC destroyer of the Seventh Fleet, on maneuvers, is strafed by two NORKOR MIGs. Damage is light; there are no casualties. Two days later a Polaris submarine in the East Siberian Sea is reported missing. In Germany three high-ranking agents defect to the West; unmarked planes drop leaflets over East Berlin, over Prague, over Budapest. There are a dozen explosions of suspicious origin at military bases throughout Spain and Turkey. An unmanned AMAC intelligence plane is downed by COMCHIN missiles in the Formosa Strait. Fires break out on successive days at the atomic power laboratory in Los Alamos and in the civil defense command center at Cheyenne Mountain. The commander of an AMAC truck convoy, following orders, fails to stop at an East German roadblock along the Autobahn; shots are exchanged and the convoy breaks through. A Dutch-built factory ship, being delivered to NORKOR, is struck by torpedoes and sunk outside Chongjin. COMRUS objects strongly. Several explosions damage Nike-Hercules installations on Okinawa. COMCHIN negotiators suspend talks with the Japanese over ownership of the Senkaku Islands in the East China Sea. Within a time-frame of ten hours there are over a dozen small clashes, involving demonstrators and troops, on both sides
of the Berlin wall. Messages are exchanged. There are reports that Egyptian troops have retaken El Arish. COMRUS demands gradual allied withdrawal from West Berlin. COMRUS demands withdrawal of all AMAC auditors in Indochina. NATO reports large-scale troop movements west of Leipzig, east of Lübeck, near Klatovy. COMRUS claims an overkill factor of three in relation to Western Europe. A dozen light bombers of the Warsaw Pact air forces are spotted over Bonn. An RAF reconnaissance plane is shot down by MIG-23S after violating East German airspace. More ultimatums. Troops of the Warsaw Pact nations, using conventional weapons, clash with NATO forces at three different locales along the West German frontier. SAC is put on alert. Twelve COMRUS infantry divisions — about a hundred twenty thousand men — are moved to Western Europe from Lake Baikal north of Mongolia. AMAC navy jets from the carrier
Kitty Hawk
engage COMRUS aircraft two hundred miles south of Vladivostok. COMCHIN explodes a thirty-megaton device at its test site in northern Tibet. The use of tactical nuclear weapons by an AMAC ground unit in West Germany is at first denied and then claimed to be accidental. A brief cessation of hostilities. Charges and countercharges. COMRUS (Staley) and AMAC (Harkness) are approaching a state of war.
The major went through this scenario very slowly. He referred to his maps at least ten times, showing me the precise locations of certain countries, cities, military bases. Often he paused during these map readings as if waiting for me to comment, perhaps on the subtle geographic patterns he had devised for the various conflicts. I had trouble finding any particular pattern but I could tell quite easily how much time and work he had put into the
project. It seemed almost sad. I was hardly a competent enemy. I had no experience in this sort of thing. I had been plagued by joyous visions of apocalypse but I was not at all familiar with the professional manipulations, both diplomatic and military, which might normally precede any kind of large-scale destruction. All I could do was try to react intelligently, if that word can be used, to whatever the major did with his divisions, his air force, his warships, his missiles. I wasn’t feeling very involved. In fact I considered the scenario somewhat boring despite all the frenzy and tension. At this point the major set down the rules for the second and final part of the game, the part in which I would participate, and he also invited me to share an elaborate chart he had prepared, using information taken from a study by some military research institute. Before we started, he said he was working on a totally simulated world situation — seven major nations of his own making, seventeen major cities, an unspecified (secret) number of military installations, fairly complete demographic, economic, social, religious, racial and meteorological characteristics for each nation. He would have it ready for us in two or three weeks; it would be a much more pure form of gaming than the one we were using now.
At length we began. It took only twelve major steps or moves to complete the game and yet we were at it for more than three hours. It was the strangest thing I had ever taken part in. There were insights, moves, minor revelations that we savored together. Silences between moves were extremely grave. Talk was brief and pointed. Small personal victories (of tactics, of imagination) were genuinely satisfying. Mythic images raged in my mind.
(1) Nuclear-powered COMRUS submarines enter the
Gulf of Mexico. An AMAC carrier of the Sixth Fleet is badly damaged by enemy aircraft in the Mediterranean.
(2) Seven COMRUS trawlers are sunk off the coast of Oregon. Missiles fired by Vulcan surface-to-air batteries destroy two MIG-21 fighter planes near Mannheim.
(3) COMRUS troops invade Western Europe. The atomic test site at Amchitka in the Aleutians is believed wiped out.
(4) SAC bombers assume maximum attack posture. The President leaves the White House situation room and boards Air Force One.
(5) COMRUS explodes a one-megaton nuclear device high in the air over territory west of Brussels, causing virtually no damage to property.
(6) SAC bombers attack a limited number of COMRUS military targets, using low-yield kiloton bombs to reduce collateral damage.
(7) Partial evacuation of major COMRUS cities. ICBMs hit strategic targets throughout Europe. COMRUS medium-range bombers attack AMAC air bases in England. Long-range missiles hit Grand Forks AFB in North Dakota.
(8) AMAC ICBMs, B–52S and B–58S strike at air bases, dams, bridges, railroads and missile sites deep inside COMRUS territory. The Tallinn missile defense system is hit and partially destroyed. The antimissile complexes on the western outskirts of Moscow are badly damaged. AMAC orders almost total evacuation of major cities.
(9) COMRUS orders almost total evacuation of major cities. Three Polaris submarines in the North Atlantic are destroyed. Radar installations in Alaska and Greenland are wiped out. Titan installations surrounding Tucson in Arizona are hit by COMRUS SS—9 missiles with
warheads totaling nearly 100 megatons. Tucson is rendered uninhabitable by fallout.
(10) The city-busting begins. Selected population centers within COMRUS borders are hit by Minuteman 3 ICBMs carrying MIRV warheads. Polaris submarines in the North Sea and the Baltic fire missiles at selected sites. SAC bombers raid selected cities from Murmansk to Vladivostok.