Don DeLillo - The Angel Esmeralda

I was the only one watching the show. The other inmates sat half dazed, heads down. It was a matter of time of day, time of year, dusk nearly upon us, the depressive specter of last light stirring at the oblong windows high on one wall. The men sat distanced from each other, here to be alone. This was the call to self-examination, the second-guessing of a lost life, no less compelling than the believer’s call to prayer.

I watched and listened. The girls were my daughters, Laurie and Kate, ten and twelve. Their mother had told me, curtly, over the phone, that the kids had been selected to appear on such a program. No details available, she said, at the present time, as if she were reporting, herself, from a desk in a studio humming with off-camera tensions.

I sat in the second row, alone, and there they were, sharing a table, speaking about fourth-quarter estimates, first one girl, then the other, a couple of sentences at a time, credit quality, credit demand, the tech sector, the budget deficit. The picture had the quality of online video, user-generated. I tried to detach myself, to see the girls as distant references to my daughters, in jittery black and white. I studied them. I observed. They read their lines from pages held in their hands, each looking up from the page as she yielded to the other reader.

Did it seem crazy, a market report for kids? There was nothing sweet or charming about the commentary. The girls were not playing at being adult. They were dutiful, blending occasional definitions and explanations into the news, and then Laurie’s eyes showed fleeting panic in her remarks about the Nasdaq Composite — a mangled word, a missing sentence. I took the report to be a tentative segment of a barely noticed show on an obscure cable channel. It wasn’t any crazier, probably, than most TV, and anyway who was watching?

My bunkmate wore socks to bed. He tucked his pajama legs into the socks and lay on his bunk, knees up and hands folded behind his head.

“I miss my walls,” he said.

He had the lower bunk. This was a matter of some significance in the camp, top or bottom, who gets what, like every prison movie we’d ever seen. Norman was senior to me in age, experience, ego and time served and I had no reason to complain.

I thought of telling him that we all miss our walls, we miss our floors and ceilings. But I sat and waited for him to continue.

“I used to sit and look. One wall, then another. After a while I’d get up and walk around the apartment, slowly, looking, wall to wall. Sit and look, stand and look.”

He seemed to be under a spell, reciting a bedtime story he’d heard as a child.

“You collected art, is that it?”

“That’s it, past tense, collected. Major museum quality.”

“You’ve never mentioned this,” I said.

“I’ve been here how long? They’re somebody else’s walls now. The art is scattered.”

“You had advisers, experts on the art market.”

“People used to come and look at my walls. Europe, Los Angeles, a Japanese man from some foundation in Japan.”

He sat quietly for a time, remembering. I found myself remembering with him. The Japanese man took on facial features, a certain size and shape, portly, it seemed, pale suit, dark tie.

“Collectors, curators, students. They came and looked,” he said.

“Who advised you?”

“I had a woman on Fifty-seventh Street. There was a guy in London, Colin, knew everything about the Postimpressionists. A dear sweet man.”

“You don’t really mean that.”

“It’s something people say. One of those expressions that sound like someone else is talking. A dear sweet man.”

“A loving wife and mother.”

“I was happy to have them look. All of them,” he said. “I used to look with them. We’d go picture to picture, room to room. I had a house in the Hudson Valley, more paintings, some sculpture. I went there in the autumn for the fall colors. But I barely looked out the windows.”

“You had the walls.”

“I couldn’t take my eyes off the walls.”

“And then you had to sell.”

“All of it, every last piece. Pay fines, pay debts, pay legal fees, provide for family. Gave an etching to my daughter. A snowy night in Norway.”

Norman missed his walls but he was not unhappy here. He was content, he said, unstuck, unbound, remote. He was free of the swollen needs and demands of others but mostly disentangled from his personal drives, his grabbiness, the lifelong mandate to accrue, expand, construct himself, to buy a hotel chain, make a name. He was at peace here, he said.

I lay on the top bunk, eyes closed, listening. Throughout the building men in their cubicles, one talking, one listening, both silent, one sleeping, tax delinquents, alimony delinquents, insider traders, perjurers, hedge-fund felons, mail fraud, mortgage fraud, securities fraud, accounting fraud, obstruction of justice.

Word began to spread. By the third day most of the chairs in the common room were occupied and I had to settle for a place near the end of the fifth row. On screen the girls were reporting on a situation rapidly developing in the Arab Emirates.

“The word is Dubai.”

“This is the word crossing continents and oceans at the shocking speed of light.”

“Markets are sinking quickly.”

“Paris, Frankfurt, London.”

“Dubai has the worst debt per capita in the world,” Kate said. “And now its building boom has crumbled and it can’t pay the banks what it owes them.”

“It owes them fifty-eight billion dollars,” Laurie said.

“Give or take a few billion.”

“The DAX index in Germany.”

“Down more than three percent.”

“The Royal Bank of Scotland.”

“Down more than four percent.”

“The word is Dubai.”

“This debt-ridden city-state is asking banks to grant six months’ freedom from debt repayments.”

“Dubai,” Laurie said.

“The cost of insuring Dubai’s debt against default has increased one, two, three, four times.”

“Do we know what that means?”

“It means the Dow Jones Industrial Average is down, down, down.”

“Deutsche Bank.”

“Down.”

“London — the FTSE One Hundred Index.”

“Down.”

“Amsterdam — ING Group.”

“Down.”

“The Hang Seng in Hong Kong.”

“Crude oil. Islamic bonds.”

“Down, down, down.”

“The word is Dubai.”

“Say it.”

“Dubai,” Kate said.

The old life rewrites itself every minute. In four years I’ll still be here, puddling horribly in this dim waste. The free future is hard to imagine. I have trouble enough tracing the shape of the knowable past. This is no steadfast element, no faith or truth except for the girls, being born, getting bigger, living.

Where was I when this was happening? I was acquiring meaningless degrees, teaching a freshman course in the dynamics of reality TV. I changed the spelling of my first name to Jerold. I used my index and middle fingers to place quote marks around certain ironic comments I made and sometimes used index fingers only, setting off a quotation within another quotation. It was that kind of life, self-mocking, and neither the marriage nor the business I briefly ran seems to have happened in any fixed consideration. I’m thirty-nine years old, a generation removed from some of the inmates here, and I don’t remember knowing why I did what I did to put myself in this place. There was a time in early English law when a felony was punishable by removal of one of the felon’s body parts. Would this be an incentive to modern memory?

I imagine myself being here forever, it’s already forever, eating another meal with the political consultant who licks his thumb to pick bread crumbs off the plate and stare at them, or standing in line behind the investment banker who talks to himself aloud in beginner’s Mandarin. I think about money. What did I know about it, how much did I need it, what would I do when I got it? Then I think about Sylvan Telfair, aloof in his craving, the billion-euro profit being separable from the things it bought, money the coded impulse, ideational, a kind of discreet erection known only to the man whose pants are on fire.