Don DeLillo - Point Omega

I mentioned the caretaker. He said he'd known the man for thirty years. The man was a volunteer naturalist, an expert on local plants and fossils. They were neighbors, he said, and then looked at me and listed a few categories of people in distress, ending with those who come to the desert to commit suicide.

Elster agreed to make the call, finally, the one to Jessie's mother. I tested locations for him and the clearest signal was outside, late afternoon, the man facing away from the house. He spoke Russian, his body sagged, it was hard for him to lift his voice above a whisper. There were long pauses. He listened, then spoke again, every word a plea, the response of an accused man, negligent, stupid, guilty. I stood nearby, understanding that his one lapse into awkward English was a helpless mimicry of hers, an expression of shared pain and parental identity. A helicopter appeared in the pale sky to the east and I watched him straighten his back, slowly, head raised, free hand blocking the sun.

Later I asked if he'd done what I'd told him to do. He looked away and walked toward his bedroom. I'd told him to raise the subject of Jessie's friend, the man she'd been seeing. Isn't this why her mother had sent her here? I stood at the door to his room. He sat on the bed, one hand raised in a gesture I could not interpret. What's the use or what's the connection or leave me alone.

He wanted pure mystery. Maybe it was easier for him, something beyond the damp reach of human motive. I was trying to think his thoughts. Mystery had its truth, all the deeper for being shapeless, an elusive meaning that might spare him whatever explicit details would otherwise come to mind.

But these weren't his thoughts. I didn't know what his thoughts were. I barely knew my own. I could think around the fact of her disappearance. But at the heart, in the moment itself, the physical crux of it, only a hole in the air.

I said, "Do you want me to call?"

"Doesn't make sense. Someone in New York."

"It's not supposed to make sense. What makes sense? Missing people never make sense," I said. "What's her name, Jessie's mother? I'll talk to her."

It wasn't until the following morning that he agreed to give me her phone number. Busy signal for half an hour, then an angry woman who resisted answering questions from someone she didn't know. The conversation went nowhere for a while. She'd met the man once, didn't know where he lived, how old he was exactly, what he did for a living.

"Just tell me his name. Can you do that?"

"She has three friends, girls, these names I know. Otherwise who she sees, where she goes, she doesn't listen to names, she doesn't tell me names."

"But this man. They went out together, yes. You met him, you said."

"Because I insisted. Two minutes he stands here. Then they leave."

"But he told you his name, or Jessie did."

"Maybe she told me, first name only."

She could not recall the name and this made her angrier. I put Elster on the phone and he said something to calm her. It didn't work but I wasn't giving up. I reminded her there was something about this man that she didn't like. Tell me, I said, and she responded ungrudgingly for a change.

For a week or longer there were phone calls. When she picked up, the caller put down the phone. She knew it was him, trying to reach Jessie. The ID screen displayed Blocked Caller. It was him every time, putting down the phone softly, and she could remember him standing in her doorway like someone you see three times a week, a delivery man with groceries, and you still don't know what he looks like.

"Last time I see Blocked Caller I pick up the phone and say nothing. Nobody is speaking. We are playing like it's a stupid game. I wait, he says nothing. He waits, I say nothing. Full minute. Then I say I know who you are. Man puts down the phone."

"You feel sure it was him."

"This is when I tell her she is going away."

"And once she went away."

"No more phone calls," the mother said.

He stopped shaving, I made it a point to shave every day, do nothing different. We waited for news. I wanted to get out, get in the car and join the searchers. But I imagined Elster with a mouthful of sleeping pills, the contents of a bottle. I imagined a soggy lump, a glob, thirty or forty pills compacted and dripping spit. I sat and talked to him about the medications in his cabinet. Only the usual dose, I said. Double-check the directions, heed the warnings. I actually said this, heed the warnings, and the phrase did not seem stilted. I imagined him standing in the doorway of his bathroom, mouth forced partly open by the dense mass, a tentative attempt, a literal taste, one hand on each doorpost, bracing him.

Jessie had no cell phone but the police were checking records to see if she'd made or received calls on our phones. They were checking motel registers, reports of crimes in nearby counties and states.

"We can't leave."

"No, we can't."

"What if she comes back?"

"One of us has to be here," I said.

I was cooking the omelettes now. He seemed to wonder what he was supposed to do with the fork in his hand. I made coffee in the morning, set out bread, cereal, milk, butter and jam. Then I went to his bedroom and talked him out of bed. Nothing happened that was not marked by her absence. He ate sparingly. He moved through the house like someone mopping the floor, taking steps determined by laborious circumstance.

He was supposed to be in Berlin in a week, a lecture, a conference, he wasn't clear on the details.

He began to see things out of the corner of his eye, the right eye. He'd walk into a room and catch a glimpse of something, a color, a movement. When he turned his head, nothing. It happened once or twice a day. I told him it was physiological, same eye every time, routine sort of dysfunction, minor, happens to people of a certain age. He turned and looked. Someone there but then she wasn't.

I was counting the days again as I'd done in the beginning. Days missing. One of us was almost always on the deck, keeping watch. We did this well into the night. It became a ritual, a religious observance, and often, when both of us were out there, completely wordless.

We kept the door to her bedroom closed.

He began to resemble a recluse who might live in a shack on an abandoned mining site, unwashed old man, shaky, stubbled, caution in his eyes, a fear from one step to the next that someone or something is waiting.

He referred to her now as Jessica, the real name, the birth name. He spoke in fragments, opening and closing his hand. I could watch him being driven insistently inward. The desert was clairvoyant, this is what he'd always believed, that the landscape unravels and reveals, it knows future as well as past. But now it made him feel enclosed and I understood this, hemmed in, pressed tight. We stood outside and felt the desert bearing in. Sterile thunder seemed to hang over the hills, stormlight washing toward us. A hundred childhoods, he said obscurely. Meaning what, the thunder maybe, a soft evocative rumble sounding down the years.

He asked me for the first time what had happened. Not what I thought or guessed or envisioned. What happened, Jimmy? I didn't know what to tell him. Nothing I might say to him was more or less likely than something else. It had happened, whatever it was, and there was no point thinking back into it, although we would of course, or I would. He had the intimate past to think back to, his and hers and her mother's. This is what he was left with, lost times and places, the true life, over and over.

A call late one night, the mother.

"I think I know his name."

"You think you know."

"I was sleeping. Then I wake up with his name. It is Dennis."

"You think it is Dennis."

"It is Dennis, for sure."