Don DeLillo - The Angel Esmeralda

“There was a big foldout menu that I hid behind while I kept sneaking looks. He was eating a full meal, something slopped in brown gravy from the center of the earth. And he had a Coke with a straw bending out of the can.”

“You talked to him.”

“I said something not too original and we talked off and on. He had his coat thrown onto the seat opposite him and I was eating a salad and there was a book lying on top of his coat and I asked him what he was reading.”

“You talked to him. The man who makes you lower your eyes in primitive fear and dread.”

“It was a diner. He was drinking Coke through a straw,” she said.

“Fantastic. What was he reading?”

“He said he was reading Dostoevsky. I’ll tell you exactly what he said. He said, ‘Dostoevsky day and night.’”

“Fantastic.”

“And I told him my coincidence, that I’d been reading a lot of poetry and I’d read a poem just a couple of days earlier with a phrase I recalled. ‘Like midnight in Dostoevsky.’”

“What did he say?”

“Nothing.”

“Does he read Dostoevsky in the original?”

“I didn’t ask.”

“I wonder if he does. I have a feeling he does.”

There was a pause and then she said that she was leaving school. I was thinking about Ilgauskas in the diner. She told me that she wasn’t happy here, that her mother always said how accomplished she was at being unhappy. She was heading west, she said, to Idaho. I didn’t say anything. I sat there with my hands folded at my belt line. She left without a coat. Her coat was probably in the coatrack on the first floor.

At the winter break I stayed on campus, one of the few. We called ourselves The Left Behind and spoke in broken English. The routine included zombie body posture and blurred vision, lasting half a day before we’d all had enough.

At the gym I did my dumb struts on the elliptical and lapsed into spells of lost thought. Idaho, I thought. Idaho, the word, so voweled and obscure. Wasn’t where we were, right here, obscure enough for her?

The library was deserted during the break. I entered with a keycard and took a novel by Dostoevsky down from the shelves. I placed the book on a table and opened it and then leaned down into the splayed pages, reading and breathing. We seemed to assimilate each other, the characters and I, and when I raised my head I had to tell myself where I was.

I knew where my father was — in Beijing, trying to wedge his securities firm into the Chinese century. My mother was adrift, possibly in the Florida Keys with a former boyfriend named Raúl. My father pronounced it raw-eel, like a thing you eat with your eyes closed.

In snowfall, the town looked ghosted over, dead still at times. I took walks nearly every afternoon and the man in the hooded coat was never far from my mind. I walked up and down the street where he lived and it seemed only fitting that he was not to be seen. This was an essential quality of the place. I began to feel intimate with these streets. I was myself here, able to see things singly and plainly, away from the only life I’d known, the city, stacked and layered, a thousand meanings a minute.

On the stunted commercial street in town there were three places still open for business, one of them the diner, and I ate there once and stuck my head in the door two or three times, scanning the booths. The sidewalk was old pocked bluestone. In the convenience store I bought a fudge bar and talked to the woman behind the counter about her son’s wife’s kidney infection.

At the library I devoured about a hundred pages a sitting, small cramped type. When I left the building the book remained on the table, open to the page where I’d stopped reading. I returned the next day and the book was still there, open to the same page.

Why did this seem magical? Why did I sometimes lie in bed, moments from sleep, and think of the book in the empty room, open to the page where I’d stopped reading?

On one of those midnights, just before classes resumed, I got out of bed and went down the hall to the sun parlor. The area was enclosed by a slanted canopy of partitioned glass and I unlatched a panel and swung it open. My pajamas seemed to evaporate. I felt the cold in my pores, my teeth. I thought my teeth were ringing. I stood and looked, I was always looking. I felt childlike now, responding to a dare. How long could I take it? I peered into the northern sky, the living sky, my breath turning to little bursts of smoke as if I were separating from my body. I’d come to love the cold but this was idiotic and I closed the panel and went back to my room. I paced awhile, swinging my arms across my chest, trying to roil the blood, warm the body, and twenty minutes after I was back in bed, wide awake, the idea came to mind. It came from nowhere, from the night, fully formed, extending in several directions, and when I opened my eyes in the morning it was all around me, filling the room.

Those afternoons the light died quickly and we talked nearly nonstop, race-walking into the wind. Every topic had spectral connections, Todd’s congenital liver condition shading into my ambition to run a marathon, this leading to that, the theory of prime numbers to the living sight of rural mailboxes set along a lost road, eleven standing units, rusted over and near collapse, a prime number, Todd announced, using his cell phone to take a picture.

One day we approached the street where the hooded man lived. This was when I told Todd about the idea I’d had, the revelation in the icy night. I knew who the man was, I said. Everything fit, every element, the man’s origins, his family ties, his presence in this town.

He said, “Okay.”

“First, he’s a Russian.”

“A Russian.”

“He’s here because his son is here.”

“He doesn’t have the bearing of a Russian.”

“The bearing? What’s the bearing? His name could easily be Pavel.”

“No, it couldn’t.”

“Great name possibilities. Pavel, Mikhail, Aleksei. Viktor with a k . His late wife was Tatiana.”

We stopped and looked down the street toward the gray frame house designated as the place where the man lived.

“Listen to me,” I said. “His son lives in this town because he teaches at the college. His name is Ilgauskas.”

I waited for him to be stunned.

“Ilgauskas is the son of the man in the hooded coat,” I said. “Our Ilgauskas. They’re Russian, father and son.”

I pointed at him and waited for him to point back.

He said, “Ilgauskas is too old to be the man’s son.”

“He’s not even fifty. The man is in his seventies, easy. Mid-seventies, most likely. It fits, it works.”

“Is Ilgauskas a Russian name?”

“Why wouldn’t it be?”

“Somewhere else, somewhere nearby, but not necessarily Russian,” he said.

We stood there looking toward the house. I should have anticipated this kind of resistance but the idea had been so striking that it overwhelmed my cautious instincts.

“There’s something you don’t know about Ilgauskas.”

He said, “Okay.”

“He reads Dostoevsky day and night.”

I knew that he would not ask how I’d come upon this detail. It was a fascinating detail and it was mine, not his, which meant that he would let it pass without comment. But the silence was a brief one.

“Does he have to be Russian to read Dostoevsky?”

“That’s not the point. The point is that it all fits together. It’s a formulation, it’s artful, it’s structured.”

“He’s American, Ilgauskas, same as we are.”

“A Russian is always Russian. He even speaks with a slight accent.”

“I don’t hear an accent.”

“You have to listen. It’s there,” I said.