Don DeLillo - Point Omega

She was watching the tall spooky house looming over the low motel, the turreted house where Mother sometimes sits by the bedroom window and where Norman Bates assumes the vesture of cross-dressing hell.

He thought about this, about Norman Bates and Mother.

He said, "Can you imagine yourself living another life?"

"That's too easy. Ask me something else."

But he couldn't think of something else to ask. He wanted to dismiss the idea that the film might be a comedy. Was she seeing something he had missed? Did the slow pulse of projection reveal something to one person and conceal it from another? They watched the sister and the lover talk to the sheriff and the wife. He wondered if he could work the conversation around to dinner, although there was no conversation right now.

Maybe we could get a bite nearby, he would say.

I don't know, she'd say. I might have to be somewhere in half an hour.

He imagined turning and pinning her to the wall with the room emptied out except for the guard who is looking straight ahead, nowhere, motionless, the film still running, the woman pinned, also motionless, watching the film over his shoulder. Museum guards should wear sidearms, he thought. There is priceless art to protect and a man with a gun would clarify the act of seeing for the benefit of everyone in the room.

"Okay," she said, "gotta go now." He said, "You're leaving."

It was a flat statement, you're leaving, spoken reflexively, stripped of disappointment. He hadn't had time to feel disappointed. He checked his watch for no reason. It was something to do rather than stand there dumbly. In theory it gave him time to think. She was already moving toward the door and he hurried after her, but quietly, eyes averted from anyone who might be watching. The door slid open and he was behind her, out into the light and onto the escalator, floor to floor, and then across the lobby and through the revolving door to the street.

He caught up to her, careful not to smile or touch, and said, "What about doing this sometime at a real movie with seats to sit on and people on the screen who laugh and cry and shout?"

She paused to listen, half turning toward him, middle of the sidewalk, bodies pushing past.

She said, "Would that be an improvement?"

"Probably not," he said, and this time he smiled. Then he said, "Do you want to know something about me?"

She shrugged.

"I used to multiply numbers in my head when I was a kid. A six-digit number times a five-digit number. Eight digits times seven digits, day and night. I was a pseudo genius."

She said, "I used to read what people were saying on their lips. I watched their lips and knew what they were saying before they said it. I didn't listen, I just looked. That was the thing. I could block out the sound of their voices as they said what they were saying."

"As a kid."

"As a kid," she said.

He looked directly at her.

"If you'll give me your phone number, I could call you sometime."

She shrugged okay. That was the meaning of the shrug, okay, sure, maybe. Although if she saw him on the street an hour from now, she probably wouldn't know who he was or where she'd met him. She recited the number quickly and then turned and walked east into the midtown glut.

He went into the crowded lobby and found a cramped space on one of the benches. He put his head down to think, to duck away from it all, the sustained pitch of voices, languages, accents, people in motion carrying noise with them, lifetimes of noise, a clamor bouncing off the walls and ceiling and it was loud and surrounding, making him cower down. But he had her phone number, this is what mattered, the number was securely in mind. Call her when, two days, three days. In the meantime sit and think about what they'd said, what she looked like, where she might live, how she might spend her time.

That's when the question came to mind. Did he ask her name? He didn't ask her name. He made the inner gesture of reproving himself, a finger-wagging cartoon of teacher and child. Okay, this is another matter he would be able to think about. Think about names. Write down names. See if you can guess the name from the face. The face had brightened slightly when he talked about the numbers he did in his head as a kid. Not brightened but sort of loosened, her eyes showing interest. But the story wasn't true. He did not multiply large numbers in his head, ever. This was something he said sometimes because he thought it would help explain him to others.

He sneaked a look at his watch and did not hesitate, crossing to the ticket area and paying full price. Should be half adult, considering the hour, or free, should be free. He blinked at the ticket in his hand and hurried to the sixth floor, two steps at a time on the escalator, everybody going the other way. He entered the dark gallery. He wanted to bathe in the tempo, in the near static rhythm of the image. The French couple was gone. There was one person and the guard and then him, here for the last less-than-an-hour. He found his place at the wall. He wanted complete immersion, whatever that means. Then he realized what it means. He wanted the film to move even more slowly, requiring deeper involvement of eye and mind, always that, the thing he sees tunneling into the blood, into dense sensation, sharing consciousness with him.

Norman Bates, scary bland, is putting down the phone. He will turn off the light in the motel office. He will move along the stepped path to the old house, several rooms lighted, dark sky beyond. Then a series of camera shots, varying angles, he remembers the sequence, he stands at the wall and anticipates. Real time is meaningless. The phrase is meaningless. There's no such thing. On the screen Norman Bates is putting down the phone. The rest has not happened yet. He sees in advance, afraid that the museum will close before the scene ends. The announcement will sound throughout the museum in all the languages of the major museum nations and Anthony Perkins as Norman Bates will still be going up the stairs to the bedroom, where Mother is lying long dead.

The other person walks out the tall door. There is only him and the guard now. He imagines all motion stopping on the screen, the image beginning to shudder and fade. He imagines the guard removing the sidearm from his holster and shooting himself in the head. Then the screening ends, the museum closes down, he is alone in the dark room with the body of the guard.

He is not responsible for these thoughts. But they're his thoughts, aren't they? He returns his attention to the screen, where everything is so intensely what it is. He watches what is happening and wants it to happen more slowly, yes, but he is also mind-racing ahead to the moment when Norman Bates will carry Mother down the stairs in her white bedgown.

It makes him think of his own mother, how could it not, before she passed on, two of them contained in a small flat being consumed by rising towers, and here is the shadow of Norman Bates as he stands outside the door of the old house, the shadow seen from inside, and then the door begins to open.

The man separates himself from the wall and waits to be assimilated, pore by pore, to dissolve into the figure of Norman Bates, who will come into the house and walk up the stairs in subliminal time, two frames per second, and then turn toward the door of Mother's room.

Sometimes he sits by her bed and says something and then looks at her and waits for an answer.

Sometimes he just looks at her.

Sometimes a wind comes before the rain and sends birds sailing past the window, spirit birds that ride the night, stranger than dreams.

24 Hour Psycho, a videowork by Douglas Gordon, was first screened in 1993 in Glasgow and Berlin. It was installed at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in the summer of 2006.