E. Doctorow - The Book of Daniel

“Oh shit,” Daniel said. He scratched his beard.

“That’s right. I mean I’ll drive you down there, it’s all the same to me, but I’m just saying what’s true.”

“OK, I appreciate that.”

“They’ll just hassle you, you know. Till you get the idea.”

“Right. Well, can you give me a lift someplace where I can thumb a ride?”

“Sure, which way you going?”

Daniel stood at Century Boulevard just before the turn to the San Diego Freeway. He stood with his bag between his feet and his thumb out. His chest hurt. Finally a VW camper pulled up. The driver was a blond kid with long mustaches and no shirt. The kid had a bed in the camper, a mattress with a sleeping bag on top of it, curtains on the windows, books in a bookshelf.

“Where you goin’?”

Daniel looked at his map. The wagon sped down the Freeway whining its way in the grey sun past oil refineries, billboards, power plants, industrial parks, furnaces, trailer parks, junkyards, storage tanks, ramps, cloverleafs, shopping centers, tract housing pennants flying, and on south into the country.

I don’t know what to write to convey the temperature change of the book. Take your coat off, it’s warm here. A headache passes through the eyes. It has to do with the atmosphere, the light. The light burns you. The sun warms you tans you but doesn’t burn you. The light burns you, chars the back edges of the vision. The sun has to be out in this part of the book. It is a chemical sun. It shines through a grey haze. It shines through a balmy stillness of air which lacks all natural smells. And to think all this was once only orange groves.

It was all together so much of itself, so completely what it was I reveled in it. I was exhilarated, I took deep breaths of the balmy air. Power lines were strung through the sky. Sulfurous smoke rose over the flatland. Steel cities vibrated the earth. It was the country of strontium children.

LOVE IT OR LEAVE IT

Daniel realized that though he’d come three thousand miles to a place he’d never seen before he felt right at home. That is the way it is. Everyone who lives there has just arrived. It’s a place you recognize immediately. On the Freeway we pass a convoy of army trucks. Helicopters cross the highway overhead. Gnatty jets loop in the sun high over the ocean. Electronic plants nestle in their landscaping. A highly visible military-industrial complex. Everything in the open in the wide spaces and bright light of California.

I sit in a trailer in a great plain surrounded by hills. In the great plain below the hills of the south a dark green helicopter rises and beats across the sky. It passes over the trailer, its compressions beating the white air till it’s thick. The helicopter flies down the sky toward the hills to the north. There, in the great plain, it sinks to a landing. It is a marine helicopter. I’m told all day and all night it rises and flies and sets in the great plain. Nobody knows why. All the students here look ragged and wizened. They wear shredded pants held up with rope and no shoes, and torn shirts and coolie caps of tented straw, tied with a string under the chin. Water is beginning to fill the plains. We are abandoning cars for bicycles.

The trailer belongs to the kid who gave me the lift. He’s a teaching assistant, a TA, and he shares this stationary trailer with three other TA’s. He has western ways of quiet self-attention. In the new life-style you value yourself and your feelings. You don’t ask questions. You don’t even ask a dude’s name if he doesn’t tell you. It doesn’t matter. There is a counter-world for us all to deal with. Let him use your office. This is the new University of California at Irvine, in Orange County. It is a ring of great concrete egg boxes with roofs of orange tile, recalling Spain. It is still under construction. Lesser faculty have offices in trailers.

“Hello?” A feminine voice.

“Phyl?”

“Are you there?”

“Yes, I got a lift from the airport.”

“Are you all right?”

“Yes. It’s hot as hell out here.”

“How weird. It just started to snow.”

“What’s the story?”

“She’s holding her own.”

“Come on, no bullshit.”

“It’s not bullshit. I saw her myself. She looks the same.”

“Are the Lewins still there?”

“Just your father. We came home to fix dinner. Then your mother’s going back to the hospital to pick him up.”

“Is the baby all right?”

“Yes. We’re all fine.”

“But?”

“What?”

“You said we’re all fine as if something’s the matter.”

“Well, your mother keeps asking me what you’re doing. She wants to know why you aren’t here.”

“Did you tell her?”

“It’s not easy.”

“You think it’s weird, don’t you?”

“No — you know I don’t.”

“Well it is. The whole trip is insane. I don’t know if it can do any good even if I get what I’m after. But what else can I do? Can you tell me what else there is to do?”

“I’m not criticizing, Daniel.”

“What did she say?”

“She said: ‘Is the truth something you can give someone for pneumonia.’”

“Oh shit. No. The answer is no. But what the fuck does she expect me to do — sit the deathwatch with her?”

“You want to talk to her? She’s in the kitchen.”

“No. Tell her I called and that I’ll be back as soon as I can. It’s very rough for them. Do what you can.”

“I am.”

“Don’t let them wait on you.”

“I’m trying not to. But I think she wants to keep busy. She doesn’t confide in me, Daniel. Your father barely talks to me. He barely pays attention to the baby.”

“Well, their own baby may be dying, Phyl.”

“You don’t have to tell me that.”

“All right — I’m sorry. Don’t you lose your cool. Do I hear crying?”

“No. But I’m doing the best I can.”

“I know you are. I hope to be back late tomorrow. I’ll call you. OK? Phyllis, OK?”

“OK.”

2ND PHONE CALL — NOT COLLECT

“Hello?” A feminine voice.

“Is this the Mindish residence?” A silence. “Hello?” “What?”

“Is that you, Linda?”

Another silence.

“I’m afraid you have the wrong number.”

“No come on, listen, this is Danny Isaacson. This is Linda, isn’t it, Linda Mindish from Weeks Avenue?”

A hand covering the phone. A silence. A sense of someone listening with her hand over the mouth of the phone. Here is this sudden connection, this sound-hole. She’s falling.

“Hello? Hey, are you there? Isn’t this you?”

“This is not the Mindish residence. You have the wrong people.”

Daniel smiled. “Well, what residence is this?”

“I’m afraid I can’t tell you.” She is hanging up.

“Wait! I’ve got your address, 1099 Poinsettia, right? See? I’ve got your phone. You might as well talk to me.”

“It’s nothing,” I hear her answering someone, hand muffling the phone.

“Linda?”

“Who are you? What do you want?”

“Hey, Linda, you remember the way you used to poke me in the ribs? You remember how we used to bend each other’s fingers? Only you usually won because you were older. You were a strong girl, you had strong hands for a girl.”

“Goodbye.”

“Hey — if you hang up I’ll dial again. Or I can bang on your door. So what’s the point?”

“You better learn there’s a law against bothering people.”

“But we know each other. Can’t you talk for a second, is it going to hurt you to talk?”

“I have nothing to say to you. Just stay away. Leave us alone.”

“I happened to be in the neighborhood.”

The soft cup over the phone. “It’s nothing, a friend,” he hears her muffled voice.