Don DeLillo: Point Omega

Copyright © 2010 by Don DeLillo

September 3

There was a man standing against the north wall, barely visible. People entered in twos and threes and they stood in the dark and looked at the screen and then they left. Sometimes they hardly moved past the doorway, larger groups wandering in, tourists in a daze, and they looked and shifted their weight and then they left.

There were no seats in the gallery. The screen was freestanding, about ten by fourteen feet, not elevated, placed in the middle of the room. it was a translucent screen and some people, a few, remained long enough to drift to the other side. They stayed a moment longer and then they left.

The gallery was cold and lighted only by the faint gray shimmer on the screen. back by the north wall the darkness was nearly complete and the man standing alone moved a hand toward his face, repeating, ever so slowly, the action of a figure on the screen. When the gallery door slid open and people entered, there was a glancing light from the area beyond, where others were gathered, at some distance, browsing the art books and postcards.

The film ran without dialogue or music, no soundtrack at all. The museum guard stood just inside the door and people leaving sometimes looked at him, seeking eye contact, some kind of understanding that might pass between them and make their bafflement valid. There were other galleries, entire floors, no point lingering in a secluded room in which whatever was happening took forever to happen.

The man at the wall watched the screen and then began to move along the adjacent wall to the other side of the screen so he could watch the same action in a flipped image. He watched Anthony Perkins reaching for a car door, using the right hand. He knew that Anthony Perkins would use the right hand on this side of the screen and the left hand on the other side. He knew it but needed to see it and he moved through the darkness along the side wall and then edged away a few feet to watch Anthony Perkins on this side of the screen, the reverse side, Anthony Perkins using the left hand, the wrong hand, to reach for a car door and then open it.

But could he call the left hand the wrong hand? because what made this side of the screen any less truthful than the other side?

The guard was joined by another guard and they spoke awhile quietly as the automatic door slid open and people came in, with kids, without, and the man went back to his place at the wall, where he stood motionless now, watching Anthony Perkins turn his head.

The slightest camera movement was a profound shift in space and time but the camera was not moving now. Anthony Perkins is turning his head. it was like whole numbers. The man could count the gradations in the movement of Anthony Perkins’ head. Anthony Perkins turns his head in five incremental movements rather than one continuous motion. it was like bricks in a wall, clearly countable, not like the flight of an arrow or a bird. Then again it was not like or unlike anything. Anthony Perkins’ head swiveling over time on his long thin neck.

It was only the closest watching that yielded this perception. He found himself undistracted for some minutes by the coming and going of others and he was able to look at the film with the degree of intensity that was required. The nature of the film permitted total concentration and also depended on it. The film’s merciless pacing had no meaning without a corresponding watchfulness, the individual whose absolute alertness did not betray what was demanded. He stood and looked. in the time it took for Anthony Perkins to turn his head, there seemed to flow an array of ideas involving science and philosophy and nameless other things, or maybe he was seeing too much. but it was impossible to see too much. The less there was to see, the harder he looked, the more he saw. This was the point. To see what’s here, finally to look and to know you’re looking, to feel time passing, to be alive to what is happening in the smallest registers of motion.

Everybody remembers the killer’s name, Norman Bates, but nobody remembers the victim’s name. Anthony Perkins is Norman Bates, Janet Leigh is Janet Leigh. The victim is required to share the name of the actress who plays her. it is Janet Leigh who enters the remote motel owned by Norman Bates.

He’d been standing for more than three hours, looking. This was the fifth straight day he’d come here and it was the next-to-last day before the installation shut down and went to another city or was placed in obscure storage somewhere.

No one entering seemed to know what to expect and surely no one expected this.

The original movie had been slowed to a running time of twenty-four hours. What he was watching seemed pure film, pure time. The broad horror of the old gothic movie was subsumed in time. How long would he have to stand here, how many weeks or months, before the film’s time scheme absorbed his own, or had this already begun to happen? He approached the screen and stood about a foot away, seeing snatches and staticky fragments, flurries of trembling light. He walked around the screen several times. The gallery was empty now and he was able to stand at various angles and points of separation. He walked backwards looking, always, at the screen. He understood completely why the film was projected without sound. It had to be silent. It had to engage the individual at a depth beyond the usual assumptions, the things he supposes and presumes and takes for granted.

He went back to the wall at the north end, passing the guard at the door. The guard was here but did not count as a presence in the room. The guard was here to be unseen. This was his job. The guard faced the edge of the screen but was looking nowhere, looking at whatever museum guards look at when a room stands empty. The man at the wall was here but maybe the guard did not count him as a presence any more than the man counted the guard. The man had been here for days on end and for extended periods every day and anyway he was back at the wall, in the dark, motionless.

He watched the actor’s eyes in slow transit across his bony sockets. Did he imagine himself seeing with the actor’s eyes? or did the actor’s eyes seem to be searching him out?

He knew he would stay until the museum closed, two and a half hours from now, then come back in the morning. He watched two men enter, the older man using a cane and wearing a suit that looked traveled in, his long white hair braided at the nape, professor emeritus perhaps, film scholar perhaps, and the younger man in a casual shirt, jeans and running shoes, the assistant professor, lean, a little nervous. They moved away from the door now into partial darkness along the adjacent wall. He watched them a moment longer, the academics, adepts of film, of film theory, film syntax, film and myth, the dialectics of film, the metaphysics of film, as Janet Leigh began to undress for the blood-soaked shower to come.

When an actor moved a muscle, when eyes blinked, it was a revelation. every action was broken into components so distinct from the entity that the watcher found himself isolated from every expectation.

Everybody was watching something. He was watching the two men, they were watching the screen, Anthony Perkins at his peephole was watching Janet Leigh undress.

Nobody was watching him. This was the ideal world as he might have drawn it in his mind. He had no idea what he looked like to others. He wasn’t sure what he looked like to himself. He looked like what his mother saw when she looked at him. but his mother had passed on. This raised a question for advanced students. What was left of him for others to see?