Don DeLillo: The Body Artist

"Tell me what you're doing."

"Feeding my face. Looking out the window," Mariella said. "Talking to you."

"What are you eating?"

"Carrot sticks."

"This is not feeding your face."

"This is starving my body. I know. They're showing some of his early work at the Film Forum. You didn't know him that long. This could be a plus."

In the morning she heard the noise. It had the same sort of distinctness she'd noted the first time, about three months ago, when she and Rey had gone upstairs to investigate. He said it was a squirrel or raccoon trapped somewhere. She thought it was a calculated stealth. It had a certain measured quality. She didn't think it was an animal noise. It carried an effect that was nearly intimate, like something's here and breathing the same air we breathe and it moves the way we move. The noise had this quality, of a body shedding space, but there was no one there when they looked.

She was in the kitchen when she heard it this time. She carried her tea upstairs. The rooms at the end of the second-story hall. The dim third story, bulbs blown and most of the furniture removed. The short stairway to the cupola. She looked into the stillness, head swiveling, her upper body projected into the structure, which was fairly broad and used as storage space. Her tea was cold by the time she stood on the floor of the cupola. She poked into old clothing layered in cardboard boxes and looked at documents gone brittle in leather folders. There was a stuffed owl and a stack of unframed watercolors, badly warped. She saw a twirling leaf just outside the window. It was a small amber leaf twirling in the air beneath a tree branch that extended over the roof. There was no sign of a larva web from which the leaf might be suspended, or a strand of some bird's nest-building material. Just the leaf in midair, turning.

She found him the next day in a small bedroom off the large empty room at the far end of the hall on the third floor. He was smallish and fine-bodied and at first she thought he was a kid, sandy-haired and roused from deep sleep, or medicated maybe.

He sat on the edge of the bed in his underwear. In the first seconds she thought he was inevitable. She felt her way back in time to the earlier indications that there was someone in the house and she arrived at this instant, unerringly, with her perceptions all sorted and endorsed.

She looked at him.

"Tell me. You've been here how long?"

He didn't raise his head. There was something so strange about him that she heard her words hang in the room, predictable and trite. She felt no fear. He had a foundling quality – lost and found – and she was, she guessed, the finder.

"You have been here," she said, speaking clearly, pausing between words.

He looked at her and seemed older now, the scant act of head-raising, a simple tilt of chin and eyes that was minutely crucial to his transformation – older and faintly moist, a sheen across his forehead and cheeks.

He said something.

She said, "What?"

His underwear consisted of white trunks and a T-shirt that was too big and she studied him up and down, openly, everywhere.

"It is not able," he said.

"But why are you here? And have you been here for long?"

He dropped his head and appeared to think about these matters as if working out the details of a complicated problem.

They stood outside the house near the top of the sloped field and watched a lobsterboat pumping through the whitecaps. She'd fed him leftover soup and some bread, some toast. You had to flip the thing twice to get the bread to toast properly.

"What do you see?" she said, gesturing toward the boat and the advancing cloudline.

"The trees are some of them," he said. "Bending. Swaying in the wind. Those are birches. The white ones. Those are called paper birches." "The white ones."

"The white ones. But beyond the trees." "Beyond the trees." "Out there," she said. He looked a while. "It rained very much." "It will rain. It is going to rain," she said. He wore a windbreaker and a pair of workpants and seemed unhappy out here. She tried not to press him for information. She found the distance interesting, the halting quality of his speech and actions, the self-taught quality, his seeming unconcern about what would happen to him now. Not apathy or indifference, she thought, but his limited ability to consider the implications. She wasn't sure what it meant to him, being found in someone else's house.

The wind came harder now and they turned away from it. She amused herself by thinking he'd come from cyberspace, a man who'd emerged from her computer screen in the dead of night. He was from Kotka, in Finland.

She said, "It did not rain. It will rain."

He moved uneasily in space, indoors or out, as if the air had bends and warps. She watched him sidle into the house, walking with a slight shuffle. He feared levitation maybe. She could not stop watching him.

It was always as if. He did this or that as if. She needed a reference elsewhere to get him placed.

They sat in the grim panelled room under prints of sailing ships. The phone was ringing. He looked at the charred logs collapsed in the fireplace, last night's fire, and she watched him. The books on the low shelves were mostly summer reading you find in rented houses, books suited to the role, with faded jacket illustrations of other houses in other summers, or almanacs, or atlases, a sun stripe edging the tops of the taller books.

His chin was sunken back, severely receded, giving his face an unfinished look, and his hair was wiry and snagged, with jutting clumps.

She had to concentrate to note these features. She looked at him and had to look again. There was something elusive in his aspect, moment to moment, a thinness of physical address.

She whispered, "Talk to me."

He sat with his legs awkwardly crossed, one trouser leg riding up his calf, and she could see that he'd knotted a length of string around the top of his sock to keep it from sagging. It made her think of someone.

"Talk to me. I am talking," he said.

She thought she understood what he meant by this. There was a certain futility in his tone, an endlessness of effort, suggesting things he could not easily make clear to her no matter how much he said. Even his gestures seemed marked by struggle. She knew she would have to call hospitals and clinics, psychiatric facilities, to ask about a missing patient.

The rain hit the windows in taps and spatters, small and countable, and then it was everywhere, banging the roof of the sunporch and filling the downspouts, and they sat and listened to it.

She said, "What's your name?"

He looked at her.

She said, "I came here to be by myself. This is important to me. I am willing to wait. I will give you a chance to tell me who you are. But I don't want someone in my house. I will give you a chance," she said. "But 1 will not wait indefinitely."

She didn't want it to sound like a formal warning but it probably did. She would have to call the nearest mission for the homeless, which wouldn't be near at all, and maybe the church in town or the church with the missing steeple on Little Moon and she would have to call the police, finally, if nothing else worked.

"I am here because of Rey, who was my husband, who is dead. 1 don't know why I'm telling you this because it is surely unnecessary. But I need to live here alone for a time. Just tell me if you understand."

He moved his hand in a manner that seemed to mean she didn't have to say anything further. Of course he understood. But maybe not.

The storm rolled in and they sat and listened. The rain was so total they had to listen to it. She could call the real estate agent and make a complaint about a person on the premises. That was another thing she could do.