Don DeLillo - The Body Artist

She wasn't trying to be funny. It was true, a paradox of the spectral sort. Then she tried to be funny, using sweet talk and pet names, but soon felt foolish and stopped.

He ate breakfast, or didn't, leaving most of it. Then he stood in the doorway between the kitchen and the long hall that led to the foyer. She sat at the table, waiting. He looked past her or through her and she almost knew what was coming.

He said, "But where are you going?"

He said, "Just a little while into town."

He said, "But there's nothing we need. And I'll get it if we need it. I know what to get. We need some what's-it-called. Scouring powder."

He said, "What?"

She knew almost at once, even before he spoke. She didn't know specifically but sensed and felt the change in him. The tea was smoking in her mug. She sat at the table and watched him and then she knew completely in the first electric exchange because the voice, the voices were not his.

"But we don't need it now this minute. I'll get it when I go. Ajax. That's the stuff. There's nothing to scour right now."

She listened and it was her. Who the hell else. These things she'd said.

"Ajax, son of Telamon, I think, if my Trojan War is still intact, and maybe we need a newspaper because the old one's pretty stale, and great brave warrior, and spear-thrower of mighty distances, and toilet cleanser too."

Do you recognize what you said weeks earlier, and yes, if it is recited back to you, and yes, if it is the last thing you said, among the last things, to someone you loved and would never see again. This is what she'd said to him before he got in the car and drove, if only she d known, all the way to New York.

"Just for a drive. This is all. I'll take the Toyota," he said, he said, "if I ever find my keys."

This is what the man was saying in the doorway; looking small and weak, beat down by something. It did not seem an act of memory. It was Rey's voice all right, it was her husband's tonal soul, but she didn't think the man was remembering. It is happening now. This is what she thought. She watched him struggle in his utterance and thought it was happening, somehow, now, in his frame, in his fracted time, and he is only reporting, helplessly, what they say.

He said, "Take a walk why don't you. Great day. Leave the car, leave the keys."

He said, "They're in the car. Of course. The keys. Where else? This is it. How can I tell you? This is always it."

He stood in the doorway, blinking. Rey is alive now in this man's mind, in his mouth and body and cock. Her skin was electric. She saw herself, she sees herself crawling toward him. The image is there in front of her. She is crawling across the floor and it is nearly real to her. She feels something has separated, softly come unfixed, and she tries to pull him down to the floor with her, stop him, keep him here, or crawls up onto him or into him, dissolving, or only lies prone and sobs unstoppably, being watched by herself from above.

She could smell his liniment on her body, his muscle rub, and then he was all through talking.

You stand at the table shuffling papers and you drop something. Only you don't know it. It takes a second or two before you know it and even then you know it only as a formless distortion of the teeming space around your body. But once you know you've dropped something, you hear it hit the floor, belatedly. The sound makes its way through an immense web of distances. You hear the thing fall and know what it is at the same time, more or less, and it's a paperclip. You know this from the sound it makes when it hits the floor and from the retrieved memory of the drop itself, the thing falling from your hand or slipping off the edge of the page to which it was clipped. It slipped off the edge of the page. Now that you know you dropped it, you remember how it happened, or half remember, or sort of see it maybe, or something else. The paperclip hits the floor with an end-to-end bounce, faint and weightless, a sound for which there is no imitative word, the sound of a paperclip falling, but when you bend to pick it up, it isn't there.

That night she stood outside his room and listened to him whimper. The sound was a series of weak cries, half cries, dull and uniform, and it had a faint echo, a feedback, and carried a desolation that swept aside words, hers or anyone's.

She didn't know what it meant. Of course she knew. He had no protective surface. He was alone and unable to improvise, make himself up. She went to the bed and sat there, offering touches and calming sounds, softenings of the night.

He was scared. How simple and true. She tried to tend him, numb him to his fear. He was here in the howl of the world. This was the howling face, the stark, the not-as-if of things.

But how could she know this? She could not.

Maybe he was just deranged, unroutinely nuts. Not that it's ever routine. A nutcase who tries to live in other voices.

He lay curled in a thin blanket. She uncovered him and lay on top. You are supposed to offer solace. She kissed his face and neck and rubbed him warm. She put her hand in his shorts and began to breathe with him, to lead him in little breathy moans. This is what you do when they are scared.

She thought she saw a bird. Out of the corner of her eye she saw something rise past the window, eerie and bird-like but maybe not a bird. She looked and it was a bird, its flight line perfectly vertical, its streaked brown body horizontal, wings calmly stroking, a sparrow, not wind-hovering but generating lift and then instantly gone.

She saw it mostly in retrospect because she didn't know what she was seeing at first and had to re-create the ghostly moment, write it like a line in a piece of fiction, and maybe it wasn't a sparrow at all but a smaller bird, gray and not brown and spotted and not streaked but not as small as a hummingbird, and how would she ever know for sure unless it happened again, and even then, she thought, and even then again.

It isn't true because it can't be true. Rey is not alive in this man's consciousness or in his palpable verb tense, his walking talking continuum.

Nice word. What does it mean?

She thought it meant a continuous thing, a continuous whole, and the only way to distinguish one part from another, this from that, now from then, is by making arbitrary divisions.

This is exactly what he doesn't know how to do.

She was working her body, crouched on the cold floor, smelling herself.

But it can't be true that he drifts from one reality to another, independent of the logic of time. This is not possible. You are made out of time. This is the force that tells you who you are. Close your eyes and feel it. It is time that defines your existence.

But this is the point, that he laps and seeps, somehow, into other reaches of being, other time-lives, and this is an aspect of his bewilderment and pain.

Somehow. The weakest word in the language. And more or less. And maybe. Always maybe. She was always maybeing.

She knelt, body upright and rigid, legs at hip-distance, head back, arms back, pelvis pushed forward.

Let arms drop down.

Dangle right hand over right foot and then left over left.

Everything flows backward from the pelvis.

Place palms on soles, matching hands to feet.

Time is the only narrative that matters. It stretches events and makes it possible for us to suffer and come out of it and see death happen and come out of it. But not for him. He is in another structure, another culture, where time is something like itself, sheer and bare, empty of shelter.

Hold position.

Everything flows from the pelvis backward to the chest and shoulders and arms, to the furious flung-back head.

Hold position, breathing normally, then abnormally.