Don DeLillo - Point Omega

I asked her to come over and sit with me. I used that phrase, sit with me. She crossed the deck and we sat for a time. She said she'd been thinking about an elderly couple she took to doctors and helped at home sometimes. They all watched daytime TV and the woman kept looking at her husband to check his reaction to whatever the people on the screen were saying or doing. But he didn't have a reaction, he never had a reaction, he never even noticed that she was looking, and Jessie thought this was the whole long spectacle of a marriage sort of drop by drop, one head turning, the other head oblivious. They lost things all the time and spent hours and then days trying to find them, the mystery of disappearing objects, eyeglasses, fountain pens, tax documents, keys of course, shoes, one shoe, both shoes, and Jessie liked looking, she was good at it, all three of them moving through the apartment talking, looking, trying to reconstruct. The couple used old-fashioned fountain pens fed by actual ink. They were nice people, unfilthily rich, losing, misplacing, dropping all the time. They dropped spoons, dropped books, lost toothbrushes. They lost a painting, by a famous living American, that Jessie found at the back of a closet. Then she watched the wife look at the husband to note his response and she realized that she'd become part of the ritual, one watching the other watch the other.

They were as normal as people could be and still be normal, she said. A little more normal, they might be dangerous.

I reached over and took her hand, not sure why. I liked thinking of her with those old people, three innocents searching rooms for hours. She let me do it, giving no sign that she'd noticed. It was part of her asymmetry, the limp hand, blank face, and it did not necessarily make me think the moment might be extended to include other gestures, more intimate. She was sitting next to anyone, talking through me to the woman in a sari on the crosstown bus, to the receptionist in the doctor's office.

None of this mattered when her father's light went on. I didn't know how to disengage my hand without feeling ridiculous. The move had to be strategic, not tactical, had to be full-bodied, and I got up and walked over to the rail, the hand an incidental detail. He came out shuffling and moved past me, pajamas smelling old, body old, the bedroom, the bedsheets, his dependable stink trailing the man to his chair.

"Want a drink?"

"Scotch, neat," he said.

Inside I heard the screen door open and shut and watched her cross the living room and head down the hall, night over, one of a hundred times I'd caught a glimpse of her or moved past her or walked in the door as she was walking out, a small lifetime of nonencounters, like with your sister growing up, only carrying static now, a random agitation in the air.

I took his scotch out to the deck, vodka for me, one cube, vast night, moon in transit. When she was a child, he said, and I waited while he sipped his drink. She had to touch her arm or face to know who she was. Happened rarely but happened, he said. She'd put her hand to her face. This is Jessica. Her body was not there until she touched it. She doesn't remember this now, she was small, doctors, tests, her mother would pinch her, barest response. She wasn't a child who needed imaginary friends. She was imaginary to herself.

We talked about nothing special then, household matters, a trip to town, but certain themes whispered at the margins. The father's love, that was one, and the other man's stalled life, and the young woman who didn't want to be here, and other questions as well, implicit, the war, his role, my film.

I said, "The camera's on a tripod. I sit alongside. You look at me, not at the camera. I use available light. Is there noise from the street? We don't care. This is primate filmmaking. The dawn of man."

A faint smile. He knew I was only talking. The reason for being here had begun to fade. I was simply here, only talking. I wanted to lose the notion of going back there, to responsibility, old woes, to the burn of beginning something that would lead nowhere. How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement? One day soon all our talk, his and mine, will be like hers, just talk, self-contained, unreferring. We'll be here the way flies and mice are here, localized, seeing and knowing nothing but whatever our scanted nature allows. A dim idyll in the summer flatlands.

"Time falling away. That's what I feel here," he said. "Time becoming slowly older. Enormously old. Not day by day. This is deep time, epochal time. Our lives receding into the long past. That's what's out there. The Pleistocene desert, the rule of extinction."

I thought of Jessie sleeping. She would close her eyes and disappear, this was one of her gifts, I thought, she drops into immediate sleep. Every night the same. She sleeps on her side, curled up, embryonic, barely breathing.

"Consciousness accumulates. It begins to reflect upon itself. Something about this feels almost mathematical to me. There's almost some law of mathematics or physics that we haven't quite hit upon, where the mind transcends all direction inward. The omega point," he said. "Whatever the intended meaning of this term, if it has a meaning, if it's not a case of language that's struggling toward some idea outside our experience."

"What idea?"

"What idea. Paroxysm. Either a sublime transformation of mind and soul or some worldly convulsion. We want it to happen."

"You think we want it to happen."

"We want it to happen. Some paroxysm."

He liked this word. We let it hang there.

"Think of it. We pass completely out of being. Stones. Unless stones have being. Unless there's some profoundly mystical shift that places being in a stone."

Our rooms had a common wall, hers and mine, and I imagined myself lying in bed, in shallow awareness, half hallucinatory, there's a word for this, and I tried to think of the word on two levels, seated on the deck and sprawled in bed, hypnagogic, that was it, and there is Jessie only a meter away, serenely dreaming.

"Enough for one night," he said. "Enough and enough."

He seemed to be looking for a place to put his glass. I took it from him and watched him go inside and soon his bedroom light went out.

Or wide awake, can't sleep, both of us, and she is lying on her back, legs apart, and I am sitting up and smoking although I haven't had a cigarette in five years, and she is wearing whatever she wears when she goes to bed, T-shirt to the thighs.

I was still holding Elster's glass. I put it on the deck and finished my drink, slowly, and set the glass down next to his. I went inside and turned off a couple of lights and then stood outside her room. There was space between door and jamb and I eased the door open and stood there, waiting for the dark to soften to the point where I could make out shapes. Then there she was, in bed, but it took some time before I realized she was looking at me. She was under the bedsheet looking straight at me and then she turned on her side and faced the far wall, pulling the sheet up to her neck.

Another moment passed before I drew the door quietly back to its original position. I went outside again and stood at the rail awhile. Then I adjusted the reclining chair to full length and lay flat on my back, eyes shut, hands on chest, and tried to feel like nobody nowhere, a shadow that's part of the night.

Elster drove in grim silence. This was routine. Even with no traffic, there were forces massed in opposition, depending on day and time-road conditions, threat of rain, impending nightfall, people in the car, the car itself. The GPS unit was okay, alerting him to turns, confirming the details of past experience. When Jessie was along, stretched across the rear seat, he'd try to listen to whatever she might be saying and the effort made him hunch toward the steering wheel in tense concentration. She liked to read road signs aloud, Restricted Area, Flash Flood Area, Call Box, Rock Slide Next 6 Miles. We were alone this time, he and I, going to town to stock up on groceries. He didn't want me to drive, he didn't trust other drivers, other drivers were not him.