Don DeLillo - Point Omega

Soon we were headed west, cars and trucks in clusters, rattling traffic, four lanes, and my cell phone rang. I paused a moment, then snatched it off my hip and said yes. No response. I said yes, glancing at the screen. BLOCKED CALLER. I said yes, hello, speaking louder. No response. I looked at Elster. His eyes were open now, head turned my way, more alert than I'd seen him in a week. I said yes and glanced at the screen. BLOCKED CALLER. I hit the off switch and slid the phone into the case clipped to my belt.

I hated freeway driving, traffic heavier now, cars shooting across lanes. I kept my eyes on the road. I didn't want to look at him, didn't want to hear any questions or speculations. I was thinking six things at once. The mother. She remembered his name in her sleep. I was thinking someone's returning my call. That's all it was, all it could be, someone I knew returning my call of last evening or earlier this morning, friend, colleague, landlord, weak signal, failed transmission. What did it mean? It meant that soon the city would be happening, nonstop New York, faces, languages, construction scaffolds everywhere, the stream of taxis at four in the afternoon, off-duty signs lighted.

I thought of my apartment, how distant it would seem even when I walked in the door. My life at a glance, everything there, music, movies, books, the bed and desk, the seared enamel around the burners on the stove. I thought of the telephone ringing as I entered.

September 4

Norman Bates, scary bland, is putting down the phone.

The man stood at the wall thinking ahead. He'd started doing this, jumping scenes, speeding through scenes mentally, visually, with closing time not too far off. He didn't want to check his watch. He tried to contain his impatience, to direct every energy toward the screen, see what is happening now.

The door easing everlastingly open.

The strip of interior light spreading across the floor as the door continues to move.

The shadow of the door vanishing under the door.

These abstract moments, all form and scale, the carpet pattern, the grain of the floorboards, binding him to total alertness, eye and mind, and then the overhead shot of the landing and the attack on Arbogast.

His visits to the gallery mingled seamlessly in memory. He could not recall on which day he'd watched a particular scene or how many times he'd watched certain scenes. Could they be called scenes, becalmed as they were, the raw makings of a gesture, the long arc of hand to face?

He was in place, as always, his place, in body contact with the north wall. People in uneasy passage, in and out. They would stay longer, he thought, if there were chairs or benches here. But any kind of seating arrangement would sabotage the concept. The bare setting, and the darkness, and the chill air, and the guard motionless at the door. The guard purified the occasion, made it finer and rarer. But what was he guarding? The silence maybe. Or the screen itself. They might climb the screen and claw it, tourists from the movie malls.

Standing was part of the art, the standing man participates. That was him, sixth straight day he'd been here, last day of the installation. He would miss being in this room, free at times to walk around the screen and to observe from the reverse side, to note the left-handedness of people and objects. But always back to the wall, in physical touch, or he might find himself doing what, he wasn't sure, transmigrating, passing from this body into a quivering image on the screen.

The dull parts of the original movie were not dull anymore. They were like everything else, outside all categories, open to entry. This is what he wanted to believe. But he yielded to the screen more readily at certain times. He conceded this, the screen empty of characters, the screen that reveals a stuffed bird or a single human eye.

Three children entered, two boys and a girl, interchangeably blond, with a woman behind them.

He could not understand why the detective, Arbogast, clearly stabbed once below the heart, goes hurtling down the stairs with stab wounds on his face. Maybe the viewer is expected to imagine a second and third and fourth knife slash but he wasn't willing to do this. There was a clear discrepancy between the action and the visible effect.

He tried to consider the complexities of editing. He tried to think in terms of the conventional projection. He couldn't recall spotting the problem when he'd last seen the movie, on TV. Maybe the error is not detectable at twenty-four frames per second. He'd read somewhere that this is the speed at which we perceive reality, at which the brain processes images. Alter the format and expose the flaws. This was a flaw that a person might tend to excuse unless he was a man of attenuated viewpoint. If that was him, then that was him.

The children lingered just inside the door, not sure whether they wanted to investigate whatever it was they'd walked into, and the woman slipped along the side wall and paused and looked at the screen and then moved to the juncture of the two walls. He watched the kids gradually withdraw their attention from the film and glance around them. Where are they, what is this? One of them looked toward the door, where the guard stood, staring into the daylong narrows of his detachment.

Arbogast is still falling down the stairs.

He thought again of a situation. The children made him think of this, a situation in which the film is shown beginning to end over twenty-four consecutive hours. Hadn't this happened somewhere, once, different museum, different city? He considered how he might set the terms of such a showing. Select audience. No children, no casual viewers. Entry forbidden once the screening begins. What if someone wants to leave, has to leave? All right you can leave. Leave if you absolutely have to. But once out, you do not re-enter. Make it a personal test of endurance and forbearance, a kind of punishment.

But punishment for what? Punishment for watching? Punishment for standing here day after day, hour after hour, in hapless anonymity? He thought of others. That's what others might say. But who were these others?

The woman seemed to slide along the wall invisibly, in little fixed increments. He could barely see her and was certain she could not see him. Was she with the children or not? The children were three bright objects, ages maybe eight to ten, gathering light from the screen, where lurid death was being scratched out in microseconds.

Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates. Norman Bates as Mother, crouched at the foot of the stairs now, in a widow's wig and floor-length dress. He gathers himself spiderlike over the detective, who is supine on the hall carpet, and resumes the business of stabbing.

Anonymous, he and the museum guard. Was the guard who was here today the same guard of the previous five days? Was the guard of the previous five days the same guard all day long? They must switch guards at some point during the day but he had failed to notice or had forgotten. A man and woman entered, parents of the kids, genetic code crackling in the air. They were large people in khaki shorts, tremendously three-dimensional, with tote bags and knapsacks. He watched the film, looked at others, watched the film. Through it all, the mind working, the brain processing. He didn't want this day to end.

Then somebody said something.

Somebody said, "What am I looking at?"

It was the woman to his left, standing closer now, and she was speaking to him. He was confused by this. The question made him stare harder at the screen. He tried to absorb what she'd said. He tried to deal with the fact that someone was standing next to him. This hadn't happened before, not here. And he tried to adjust to the other thing that hadn't happened, that was sort of never supposed to happen. Being spoken to. This woman standing somehow next to him was changing every rule of separation.