Don DeLillo - The Body Artist

Repeat.

The wind started blowing at noon and was still shaking the windows when she walked along the halls five hours later.

The phone was ringing.

In the kitchen he dropped a glass of water and she extended an arm, seeing the speckled wet begin to spread on the plank floor.

The shrill wind made her uneasy, turning her inward, worse in a way than obliterating snow or deposits of ice that bring down power lines.

She built a fire and then walked out of the room and up the stairs, listening to the walls take the wheezy strain.

In the kitchen she said, "Don't touch it."

The best things in this house were the plank floor in the kitchen and the oak balustrade on the staircase. Just saying the words. Thinking the words.

She said, "Don't touch it," and extended an arm, held out a hand to forestall any effort he might make to pick up the pieces. "I'll clean it up later."

There's something about the wind. It strips you of assurances, working into you, continuous, making you feel the hidden thinness of everything around you, all the solid stuff of a hundred undertakings – the barest makeshift flimsy.

She cleaned it up now. She didn't wait for later. There was something in the moment that she needed to keep.

She picked up the ringing phone and it was Rey's lawyer at the other end. Something about debts. He was in heavy debt. There were obligations and liabilities. He had debts cascading on other debts. This made her feel good. It was Rey all right. She felt a rush of affection even as the news made her think of her own dimming finances. It was the Rey she knew and not some other. She was sure he hadn't been aware of the situation or had considered it so integral to the condition of his life that knowing about it was just another form of not knowing about it. It occupied no more consciousness than a soft cough on a summer's day. There were loans outstanding, accounts in arrears and taxes long overdue. The man recited numbers in a voice that had a government patent. He pointed out the implications, the sinister transits of spousal responsibility. She laughed gaily and wished him luck.

Then he stopped eating. She sat him down at the table and fed him by hand. She urged and teased. He took some food, then less. She tried force-feeding him but he rejected most of it passively, head averted, or took it in and let it dribble out, let it dangle or spew.

She began to eat less herself. She looked at him and didn't want to eat. He ate next to nothing for three days running and she ate little more. It was suitable in a way. It was what she hadn't thought of on her own.

She looked at him. Poor bastard. She watched him with all the intensity of the first moments and hours but there was something in her look that felt different now, a deathly devotion almost.

Sometimes she followed him through the house. She watched him sleep. Mornings on tape, the questions and answers, little lessons and memorizations, all this faded into a daze of stray talk and then more or less agreed-upon silence. She fed him soup while he sat on the toilet once. The days were toneless and droning.

Finally she got in the car and began to drive the back roads, the fire roads, all the places no one goes, and she left the car and walked through fields to the highest point, the knoll or slope, and scanned the area with her hands cupping her face, looking for Mr. Tuttle.

From a long way off what would he look like, walking the way he walked, narrowly, in curved space?

Like someone you could easily miss. Like someone you technically see but don't quite register in the usual interpretive way.

Like a man anonymous to himself.

Like someone you see and then forget you see. Like that, instantly.

She hadn't been able to find binoculars in the house and what was the point anyway. He wasn't anywhere out here. But she scanned for hours from different sites, hands at her temples to block the glare.

How could such a surplus of vulnerability find itself alone in the world?

Because it is made that way. Because it is vulnerable. Because it is alone.

Or you see him upside down, the way the eye sees before the mind intervenes.

She drove back to the house and walked all through it, room to room, one more time. She thought she'd climb the stairs and walk along the hall and go up to the third floor and find him in the small bedroom off the large empty room at the far end of the hall, as she had the first time, sitting on the edge of the bed in his underwear.

But when he wasn't there she knew he wouldn't be, if that makes sense. A few strides before she reached the doorway she knew he wouldn't be and then he wasn't. She'd known it all along.

She was left to wander the halls, missing him. He was gone so completely there was nothing left, not a single clinging breath of presence, but even as the rooms went empty around her, she felt something in her body try to hold him here.

She began to call the institutions, mindful of the irony, and she listened to recorded voices and poked option buttons and sometimes spoke to someone in a made-up voice of middling concern.

She gave herself two days to do this. On the afternoon of the second day she spoke to a director of psychiatric services at a small hospital about an hour south and he told her that a man who roughly matched the general description she'd provided had been admitted, pending tests, the day before.

She did not press for details. She wanted to believe this was him, being cared for and fed, clean and safe and medicated – free, finally, not to suffer.

But why should it be him? He wasn't mental. Why did she think of calling mental hospitals in the first place, just after she'd discovered him? He didn't act crazy, only impaired in matters of articulation and comprehension. Why did she ever think there was something psychotic about him except in the sense that people who threaten our assumptions are always believed to be mad?

But then it could be him.

She had a thing she stuck in her mouth, an edged implement, smallish, plastic, and she pressed it to the back of her tongue and scraped whatever debris might be massed there, a slurry of food, mucus and bacteria.

This was not a defense against the natural works of the body. This was what she did.

She calculated all the plausible requirements. Then she exceeded them. She shattered their practicality. This is what had to be done. It was necessary to alter the visible form, all the way down to the tongue. She was suppressing something, closing off outlets to the self, all the way down to the scourings at the deep end of the tongue, concealed from human view. The mind willed it on the body.

It was necessary because she needed to do it. This is what made it necessary.

His future is not under construction. It is already there, susceptible to entry.

She had it on tape.

She did not want to believe this was the case. It was her future too. It is her future too.

She played the tape a dozen times.

It means your life and death are set in place, just waiting for you to keep the appointments.

She listened to him say, Don't touch it. I'll clean it up later.

It is the thing you know nothing about.

Then she said it herself, some days later. He'd been in there with her. It was her future, not his.

How much myth do we build into our experience of time?

Don't touch it, she said.

He'd known this was going to happen. These were the words she would say. He'd been in there with her.

I'll clean it up later.

She wanted to create her future, not enter a state already shaped to her outline.

Something is happening. It has happened. It will

happen. This is what she believed. There is a story, a flow of consciousness and possibility. The future comes into being.