Don DeLillo - Libra

"They watch us all the time. It's like Big Brother in Nineteen Eighty-four. This isn't a book about the future. This is us, here and now."

"I used to read the Bible," Bobby said.

"I used to read the manual. I never looked at my schoolbooks but I read the Marine Corps manual."

"Make you a man."

"Then I found out what it's really all about. How to be a tool of the system. A workable part. It's the perfect capitalist handbook."

"Be a Marine."

"Orwell means the military mind. The police state is not Russia. It's wherever we have the mind that can think up manuals full of rules for killing."

"Where's this Stalin, dead?"

"Dead."

"I thought I heard that."

"But Eisenhower's not. Ike is our own Big Brother. Our commander in chief."

They lay in the dark, thinking.

Because of what they did to us. The way she had to work and quit and take care of me and get fired and work and quit and pick up and leave. Let's pick up and leave. Scraping up pennies for the next move somewhere. Daily humiliations all her life. This is known as ground down by the system. Except she never questions that. It is only the local conditions. It is Mr. Ekdahl and his puny divorce settlement. It is the whispering behind her back. It is the neighbors with their Hotpoint washers and Ford Fairlane cars, which she competes against the only way she can.

"My boy Lee loves to read."

His mother never-ending.

Three days running, for no special reason, every meal was rabbit chow-lettuce, carrots, water.

Oswald ran past the chicken wire, turned into the cell block, stopped at the white line. Dupard was in the cell wearing skivvies and sitting on Oswald's rack. Dupard's mattress was smoldering. Oswald watched the pale smoke collect in the air. His cellmate just sat there, hangdog, thoughtful, picking at his feet.

"Bobby, how come?"

"You want your rack?"

"Stay there."

"We're not supposed to talk."

"You're only making things worse."

"I'm evicting lice, that's all. They're boring into my skin. Time to rid the premise, man."

"Did you ask for a new mattress?"

"I axed. They punch my face."

He was calm, a little sullen, mainly thoughtful and resigned.

"They'll only extend your time."

"In my own mind this is nothing to excite themselves. I don't feel like there's any guilt to be handed out whereby I'm punished. I'm fumigating these lice on out of here. In other way of saying it, it's like I'm doing their job for them."

"This is your second fire."

"Regulate the voice."

"Well I don't see the point of mattress fires, frankly."

"Stop talking, Ozzie. They kill your ass."

Two guards came down the passageway, brushed past Oswald and entered the cell. The fire was so insignificant they were able to delay getting water until after they'd spent five grim minutes pounding Dupard.

Oswald stood at the white line, looking away.

They moved him out to the chicken wire. Not only guards but fellow inmates, all those bodies to avoid, those eyes and inner melodies-terror, gloom, psycho violence. The trick inside the wire was to stay within your own zone, avoid eye contact, accidental touch, gestures of certain types, anything that might hint at a personality behind the drone unit. The only safety was in facelessness.

He developed a voice that guided him through the days. Forever, endless, identical. The brig was so unthinking it eventually drove out fear. He ran in the passageways, he ran in place. He scrubbed the brightwork in the head, squared away his area, made up his rack. The point of the brig was to clean the brig. He drew his bucket from the storeroom, stood at the white line. They'd built the brig just to keep it clean. It was where they put their white lines. Everything depended on the lines. The brig was the place where all the lines that were painted in the military mind were made bright and clean forever. Once he understood that, he knew he had their number.

He sat in the TV room watching reruns of Dick Clark's American Bandstand. Reitmeyer came in to shake his hand. Haifa dozen other guys dropped by to ask about the brig. He wore his Hawaiian shirt, smirking a little, telling them he'd breezed right through. Great training for life in the U.S. Gives you that competitive edge. That's Ozzie for you, said his barracks-mates. That's the Rabbit, that's Bugs, and they drifted out one by one, leaving him to stare at the high-school boys and girls shuffling drowsily on a dance floor in Philadelphia.

Two weeks later he followed directions to a house in the Sanya district of Tokyo. He made his way through a ragpickers' village built with material scavenged from other parts of the city. Old women jogged through the alleys carrying empty bottles, broken chair legs, pieces of indefinable junk. Houses were shoulder-high, made of old packing crates and strips of sheet metal, the walls stuffed with cardboard and rags. There were lines of people selling blood at mobile units, people who seemed hollow-bodied, so small, in such collapse. It would never bottom out. No matter how far down you went into the world, there were distances still to go, worse things to see and experience. He made it a point not to hurry through the area. He wanted to see what was here.

He entered a tenement and looked in an open door to a flat where a young man was trying to fix a mimeograph machine. Konno had told him to go to the fourth floor but hadn't supplied an apartment number. The hallway was dark and rank. A child was wailing on one of the upper stories.

Hidell climbs the ancient creaking stairs.

On four, two more doors were open. Students milled inside the apartments, moved from one to the other. A young man looked at Ozzie, who was standing in the hallway, smiling, in his T-shirt and dusty jeans. The man smiled back and pointed to a door at the end of the hall. Oswald knocked and was told to enter. He saw a tatami mat and low table. A woman moved across the room. She was about fifty years old, with a moon face and pixie hairdo, wearing a light cotton kimono. She said her name was Dr. Braunfels. She taught German and Russian on a private basis to students at Tokyo University. She understood he was interested in learning Russian. He said he was, and waited. She sat cross-legged on the mat at the far side of the table. She asked him to take off his shoes. These were the nice little gestures that went with the setting.

She wore eye makeup that matched the pale-blue shade of the kimono. He hadn't expected a European. It was encouraging, it was all to the good, it made his decision seem timely, fixed to favorable circumstances. She was probably important, an adviser to radical students and a recruiting officer or handler of agents. She gestured for him to sit facing her on the mat. She watched him assume the awkward position. They ate rice cakes wrapped in seaweed.

"And you are Oswald, Lee," she said finally, as if correcting an imbalance, adding the last stately note to some diplomatic exchange.

There were bamboo shades behind her, a screen to one side. The ceiling was low, a dark-toned wood. Small polished objects here and there. You were supposed to appreciate the near-bareness, the placement of things. Twigs in a vase on the lacquer table.

He told her he wanted to defect.

"I've been thinking this is the step to take, that I'll never be able to live in the U.S. I want a life like these students, political, working in the struggle. I'm not an innocent youth who thinks Russia is the land of his dreams. I look at this coldly in the light of right and wrong. I do think there is something unique about the Soviet Union that I wish to find out for myself. It's the great theory come to life. Before I was fifteen I began indoctrinating myself in the New Orleans library. I studied Marxist ideology. I could lift my head from a book and see the impoverishment of the masses right there in front of me, including my own mother in her struggle to raise three children against the odds. These socialist writings showed me the key to my environment. The material was correct in its thesis. Capitalism is beginning to die. It is taking desperate measures. There is hysteria in the air, like hating Negroes and communists. In the military I'm learning the full force of the system. There is something in the system that builds up hate. How would I live in America? I would have a choice of being a worker in a system I despise or going unemployed. Nobody knows how I feel about this.