Authors: Don DeLillo
“I’ve just realized what’s really curious about you,” I said. “Somehow you don’t transmit any sense of a personal future.”
“I’m a now person, Gary.”
“That’s good because I’m a then person.”
“I know,” she said. “That’s why I like you. I need some perspective in my life.”
“You’ll hate me for saying this, Myna, but I think you’re one of the prettiest girls I’ve ever known. Man or boy. Pound for pound.”
“People are always telling me that. What a pretty face I have. It’s just a thing you say to fat girls. It’s supposed to make us guilty so we’ll lose weight.”
“But it’s true,” I said.
“I know it’s true. All I have to do is lose fifty pounds and go to a skin doctor. But I like myself the way I am. I don’t want to be beautiful or desirable. I don’t have the strength for that. There are too many responsibilities. Things to live up to. I feel like I’m consistently myself. So many people have someone else stuck inside them. Like inside that big large body of yours there’s a scrawny kid with thick glasses. Inside my father there’s a vicious police dog, a fascist killer animal. Almost everybody has something stuck inside them. Inside me there’s a sloppy emotional overweight girl. I’m the same, Gary, inside and out. It’s hard to be beautiful. You have an obligation to people. You almost become public property. You can lose yourself and get almost mentally disturbed on just the public nature of being beautiful. Don’t think I haven’t thought about it. You can get completely lost in that whole dumb mess. And anyway who’s to say what’s beautiful and what’s ugly?”
“There are standards.”
“Whose?”
“I don’t know. The Greeks. The Etruscans. You can’t escape some things. History forces you to listen and to see.”
“You have to balance history with science fiction,” she said. “It’s the only way to keep sane.”
“We’ll have another picnic tomorrow.”
“Jesus, can we?”
“We can do anything we want, Myna.”
“Can we bring something besides chopped almonds? Can we bring vegetable pancakes and maybe brownies?”
“We can bring anything we want as long as it’s humble and meatless.”
“Can we not bring this blanket? Can we bring a different blanket? I don’t like this one. It makes me think of dead baby rabbits.”
“It’s been in my family for generations.”
“The way you say some things. I actually believe you. I think you’re serious. Then it hits me that something’s not right. Can I bring my book again?”
“Of course.”
“Can I wear my orange dress that you like so much?”
“You look like an explosion over the desert. Yes, you can wear it.”
“Can I bring my tarot cards with me?”
“Of course you can. Absolutely. It’s a picnic.”
“Thank you, Gary.”
M
OST LIVES ARE GUIDED
by clichés. They have a soothing effect on the mind and they express the kind of widely accepted sentiment that, when peeled back, is seen to be a denial of silence. Their menace is hidden with the darker crimes of thought and language. In the face of death, this menace vanishes altogether. Death is the best soil for cliché. The trite saying is never more comforting, more restful, as in times of mourning. Flowers are set about the room; we stand very close to walls, uttering the lush banalities.
Norgene Azamanian’s name did not seem ridiculous for long. We knew that nothing is too absurd to happen in America. Norgene, the man and the name, soon became ordinary, no less plausible than refrigerators or bibles or the names for these objects. When he died, of injuries sustained in an automobile accident, we repeated certain phrases to each other and dedicated our next game to his memory. A local minister called him a fallen warrior.
An article in the school paper quoted the president, Mrs. Tom Wade, as saying that his untimely death at the age of twenty-one would serve as a tragic reminder that our destiny is in the hands of a Being or Force dwelling beyond the scope of man’s reason. Norgene wasn’t a very good football player. But death had overwhelmed even his mediocrity and we conspired with his passing to make him gigantic. For many of us it was a first experience with death. We believed the phrases. He was indeed a fallen warrior; we were unquestionably reminded of our destinies. We took the field on the night of Norgene’s memorial game and played like magnificent young gods, not out to avenge death but only to honor the dead, to remake memory as a work of art. That was the first half. In the second half the whole game fell apart. There were fights, broken plays, every kind of penalty. We still won easily. But the last hour left a bad taste (as the saying goes) in everyone’s mouth.
Several weeks later, sometime between three and six in the morning, Tom Cook Clark shot himself in the head with an ivory-handled Colt .45. Emmett Creed referred to him in a eulogy as one of the best football minds in the country. He was also a molder of young men and a fine interdenominational example to all those fortunate enough to have been associated with him. Creed himself assumed the deceased man’s responsibilities with the quarterbacks. The wake was held at the funeral home in town because there was nowhere in particular to send the body and no family to send it to. Everyone commented on how good the embalmed corpse looked. This became the theme of the wake. We assembled in the anteroom, clinging to walls, avoiding the center of the room for some reason, and we told each other how good the dead
man looked, as if he were not dead at all but only waxed and well-dressed as part of some process of rejuvenation and would soon be buzzed awake, thinner than ever and quite refreshed. We reacted to the impact of death in this way, exchanging comical remarks in all seriousness, consoling each other with handshakes and slogans. Major Staley came to pay his respects. The major commanded the Air Force ROTC unit at the school. He saw me and came over. We shook hands, slowly and delicately, foregoing on this special occasion all intimations of virility.
“I understand he was despondent because of ill health,” the major said.
We heard about the collision right away. It happened only about a quarter of a mile from campus. It was about ten at night. State troopers stood on the road, writing in their little books, copying from each other. They identified Norgene from the contents of his wallet. There were three others dead, one a girl (passenger, female, white). Her legs stuck out of the wreck, terribly white, the only white things in all that blood and swirling red light, the only things quiet in the voices and noise. I wondered who she was. I also wondered why her death seemed more wasteful than the others. I kept looking at her legs. Then I went back to my room, thinking about the extra syllable in the fallen warrior’s Christian name, how it had shamed tradition and brought bad luck.
This was Major Staley’s first year here. His father was the school’s most famous alumnus, a three-letter man and a war hero, one of the crew on the Nagasaki mission. The major was about thirty-eight years old. He taught just one course, Aspects of Modern War. Since I wasn’t part of the cadet wing I had taken to seating myself in the last row, a bit of civilian humility. One day I asked
the major how many megatons would have to be contained in the warhead of an antimissile missile in order to guarantee interception of an SS-9 missile with multiple warheads.
“You’d probably need in excess of a two-meg warhead to get the kind of x-ray pulse-intensity you’re talking about.”
I was fascinated by the way the state troopers copied from each other’s little books. One trooper stood writing, another at his shoulder writing what the first one wrote. They checked each other out until it was apparent that they had reached an accord. It was a safeguard against errors and stray facts. There couldn’t possibly be a mistake if they all had the same information.
In my room that night, before falling asleep, I tried to imagine where Tom Cook Clark came from, what he thought, what kind of life he led. I don’t know what made me think of him that particular night. (At that point, of course, he was still alive.) I tried to understand who he was and what made him whoever he Was when he seemed no more than a face, a hat, a certain way of talking. He existed (then). I lay in bed thinking of him as I had thought of only several others in my entire life, all casual acquaintances, blanks more or less. I could guess nothing about him. I could imagine nothing. I could invent nothing. Why did he remain so blank? It made me feel stupid and weak. Perhaps the man had a need to live in another man’s mind. His existence might be threatened if he could not be brought to life in perhaps the only mind that had ever tried to reconstruct him. It was strange that he would kill himself in a matter of weeks. Maybe the failure was mine, the ill health mine, that blank life a kind of notebook in need of somebody else’s facts, those facts a
mass of jargon for the military mind, this jargon resembling clichés passed from mourner to mourner in the form of copied notes. But it was just another of my philosophic speculations, to think his life depended on what my mind could make of him, existence turning on a wheel, numerical, nonbuddhist, the notes comforting the notebook, numbers covering the words used to cover silence. He was a scholarly man, I thought (in the anteroom of the funeral home), remembering that he smoked a pipe and did not use profanity.
“Given three warheads per missile and an accuracy factor of a quarter mile, they’d need four to five hundred of the SS-nine classification to achieve first-strike destruction capability of ninety-five percent relative to what we could hit back with in terms of Minuteman counter capacity,” the major added.
Billy Mast, who roomed two doors away from me, worked every night at memorizing a long poem in a language he’d never read before, never spoken, never even heard except in one or two movies. Billy got extremely high marks in everything. Scholastically he ranked in the ninety-ninth percentile. In several of his classes, prorated scoring systems were devised according to the standards he set. Every night he did more work on the elegy. I’d visit him sometimes just to hear the sounds he made, his guttural struggle against those grudging consonants. He liked to hit his desk with both hands as he recited. Billy’s course in the untellable was restricted to ten students. Knowledge of German was a prerequisite for being refused admission.
Closing my eyes, finally, on the night of the accident, I wanted to dream that I put my hand between the dead girl’s legs. Arousals of guilt had considerable appeal to
me, particularly on waking. I liked to lie in bed, viewing after-images of morbid sex and trying to apportion guilt between the conscious mind and the unconscious. But that night’s sleep turned out to be a restless one, empty of remembered dreams.
“W
HO WAS THE GREATER MAN
?” Bloomberg said. “You get just one try. Sir Francis Drake or the prophet Isaiah? Take your time answering. It’s not as obvious as it seems.”
“How can you compare them?” Andy Chudko said. “They were in two different fields.”
“The answer seems obvious only at first. Be very careful.”
“I don’t think it seems obvious at all,” Chudko said.
I stood in the doorway. Bloomberg and Andy Chudko occupied the beds. Anatole was supine, two pillows beneath his head, hands folded on his chest. Chudko sat on my bed, facing the doorway, his right foot (extended to infinity) at a 45-degree angle to the door (when closed). I noted other angles, elevations, intervals, and then situated myself carefully on the chair by the window, between the beds, facing past both men toward the open doorway, toward the corridor or trade route. Chudko’s head and torso met without benefit of a neck. His whole
body in fact seemed welded, part joined to part in bursts of heat and pressure. His silver guitar was on the other chair, the chair by the door.
“I don’t understand you, Bloomers. Gary, you room with this guy. What do you make of him?”
“Our next secretary of defense.”
“My roommate will be glad to hear that I’m off my diet as of an hour ago. I think he’ll rejoice in that.”
“I do. I definitely approve.”
“I’ve seen my mistake,” Bloomberg said. “I thought I would become more efficient if I ate less. I thought the discipline of dieting would be good for me, It would make me quicker in body and therefore quicker in mind. It would give me a sense of physical definition and therefore of spiritual awareness. This was all wrong. I thought I would feel better if I weighed less. I thought I would have more respect for myself. I thought I’d gain in self-assurance and in the general loftiness of my ideals. None of this happened. It was all part of the Jewish thing, you see. I thought the self-control of dieting would lead to the self-control needed to unjew myself. But it didn’t work out that way. As I lost weight, as I continued to struggle against food and its temptations, I began to lose the idea of myself. I was losing the idea of my body, who it belonged to, what exactly it was, where all the different parts of it were located, what it looked like from different angles and during the various times of the day and evening. I was losing the most important part of my being. Obesity. What I had considered self-control was really self-indulgence. To make me pretty. To give me quick feet. I realize now that these things aren’t important, that they’re nothing compared with my individual reality. I dropped to two-ninety, then to two eighty-two. My self-awareness
started to fade. It was a terrible shedding of the skin. I was losing more and more of myself. I was losing more of the old body and more of the newly acquired mind. If this disappearance were to continue, I would soon be left with only one thing. Gentlemen, I allude to my Jewishness. This is the subsoil, as it were, of my being. It would be the only thing left and I would be, in effect, a fourteen-year-old Jewish boy once more. Would I start telling silly jokes about my mother? Would I put some of that old ghetto rhythm in my voice — jazz it up a little? Would the great smelly guilt descend on me? I don’t want to hear a word about the value of one’s heritage. I am a twentieth-century individual. I am working myself up to a point where I can exist beyond guilt, beyond blood, beyond the ridiculous past. Thank goodness for America. In this country there’s a chance to accomplish such a thing. I want to look straight ahead. I want to see things clearly. I’d like to become single-minded and straightforward in the most literal sense of those words. History is no more accurate than prophecy. I reject the wrathful God of the Hebrews. I reject the Christian God of love and money, although I don’t reject love itself or money itself. I reject heritage, background, tradition and birthright. These things merely slow the progress of the human race. They result in war and insanity, war and insanity, war and insanity.”