Don DeLillo: Point Omega

Elster in pajamas came dragging out of his bedroom to join us on the deck, barefoot, coffee mug in hand. He looked at Jessie and then smiled, seeming to remember in his grogginess that there was something he wanted to do. He wanted to smile.

He settled into a chair, speaking slowly, voice faint and scorched, bad night, early morning.

"Before I fell asleep, eventually, was thinking when I was a small kid how I'd try to imagine the end of the century and what a far-off wonder that was and I'd figure out how old I'd be when the century ended, years, months, days, and now look, incredible, we're here-we're six years in and I realize I'm the same skinny kid, my life shadowed by his presence, won't step on cracks on the sidewalk, not as a superstition but as a test, a discipline, still do it. What else? Bites the skin off the edge of his thumbnail, always the right thumb, still do it, loose piece of dead skin, that's how I know who I am."

I'd looked once in the medicine cabinet in his bathroom. Didn't have to open the cabinet door, there was no door. Ranks of bottles, tubes, pillboxes, nearly three shelves' worth, and a few other bottles, one uncapped, on the lid of the toilet tank, and several printed inserts scattered on a bench, unfolded, showing small bold cautionary typeface.

"Not my books, lectures, conversations, none of that. It's the goddamn hangnail, it's the dead skin, that's where I am, my life, there to here. I talk in my sleep, always did, my mother told me back then and I don't need anyone to tell me now, I know it, hear it, and this is more significant, somebody should make a study of what people say in their sleep and somebody probably has, some paralinguist, because it means more than a thousand personal letters a man writes in his lifetime and it's literature as well."

They weren't all prescription drugs but most were and all of it was Elster. The lotions, tablets, capsules, suppositories, the pastes and gels and the bottles and tubes they came in and the labels, inserts and price stickers-all this was Elster, vulnerable, and maybe there's supposed to be something morally degraded about my presence in the room but I didn't feel guilty, only intent on knowing the man and all those accessories of being, the mood-shifting agents, the habit-forming agents that no one sees or tries to imagine. Not that these things were serious aspects of the true life he liked to refer to, the lost thoughts, the memories that range through decades, the dead skin on the thumb. Still, in a way, here he was in his medicine cabinet, the man himself, marked out clearly in drops, tablespoons and milligrams.

"Look at all this," he said, not looking at it, the landscape and sky, which he'd indicated with a backwards sweep of the arm.

We didn't look at it either.

"Day turns to night eventually but it's a matter of light and darkness, it's not time passing, mortal time. There's none of the usual terror. It's different here, time is enormous, that's what I feel here, palpably. Time that precedes us and survives us."

I was becoming accustomed to this, his scale of address, long decades of thinking and speaking about transcendent matters. In this case he was speaking to Jessie, he'd been speaking to her all along, leaning forward in his chair.

She said, "The usual terror. What's the usual terror?"

"Doesn't happen here, the minute-to-minute reckoning, the thing I feel in cities."

It's all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers everywhere, he said, train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras. It's all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There's an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what's left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

"The film," I said.

He looked at me.

"Man at the wall."

"Yes," I said.

"Up against the wall."

"No, not as an enemy but a kind of vision, a ghost from the war councils, someone free to say whatever he wants, unsaid things, confidential things, appraise, condemn, ramble. Whatever you say, that's the film, you're the film, you talk, I shoot. No charts, maps, background information. Face and eyes, black-and-white, that's the film."

He said, "Up against the wall, motherfucker," and gave me a hard look. "Except the sixties are long gone and there are no more barricades."

"Film is the barricade," I told him. "The one we erect, you and I. The one where somebody stands and tells the truth."

"I never know what to say when he talks like that."

"He's been talking to students all his life," I said. "He doesn't expect anybody to say anything."

"Every second's the last breath he takes."

"Sits and thinks, that's what he's here for."

"And this movie you want to make."

"Can't do it alone."

"But isn't there a real movie you'd rather do? Because how many people will want to spend all that time looking at something so zombielike?"

"Right."

"Even if he ends up saying interesting things, it's something they could read in a magazine." "Right," I said.

"Not that I go much to movies. I like old movies on television where a man lights a woman's cigarette. That's all they seemed to do in those old movies, the men and women. I'm normally so totally disregardless. But every time I see an old movie on television, I keep a sharp eye out for a man lighting a woman's cigarette."

I said, "Footsteps in movies."

"Footsteps."

"Footsteps in movies never sound real."

"They're footsteps in movies."

"You're saying why should they sound real."

"They're footsteps in movies," she said.

"I took your father to a movie once. Called 24 HourPsycho. Not a movie but a conceptual art piece. The old Hitchcock film projected so slowly it takes twenty-four hours to screen the whole thing."

"He told me."

"What did he tell you?"

"He told me it was like watching the universe die over a period of about seven billion years."

"We were there ten minutes."

"He said it was like the contraction of the universe."

"The man thinks on a cosmic scale. We know this."

"The heat death of the universe," she said.

"I thought he'd be interested. We were there and gone, ten minutes, he fled and I followed. Didn't talk to me all the way down six flights. He was using a cane then. Slow journey down, escalators, crowds, corridors, finally stairs. Not one word."

"I saw him that night and he told me. I thought I might want to see it. The whole point of nothing happening," she said. "The point of waiting just to be waiting. Next day I went."

"You stayed awhile?"

"I stayed awhile. Because even when something happens, you're waiting for it to happen."

"How long did you stay?"

"I don't know. Half an hour."

"That's good. Half an hour's good."

"Good, bad, whatever," she said.

Elster said, "When she was a child, she used to move her lips slightly, repeating inwardly what I was saying or what her mother was saying. She'd look very closely. I'd speak, she'd look, trying to anticipate my remarks word for word, nearly syllable for syllable. Her lips would move in nearest synchronization with mine."

Jessie was sitting across the table as he was speaking. We were eating omelettes, we ate omelettes nearly every night now. He was proud of his omelettes and tried to get her to watch as he broke the eggs, beat them with a fork and so on, talking all the way through the seasoning and olive oil and vegetables, enunciating the word frittata, but she wasn't interested.

"It was as though she was a foreigner learning English," he said. "She was right in my face, trying to define the words I was uttering, to absorb them and process them. She was looking, thinking, repeating, interpreting. Looking at my mouth, studying my lips, moving her lips. I have to tell you I was disappointed when she stopped doing this. Someone who truly listens."