Don Delillo - The Names

We told each other where you had to sign a legal document to get a drink, where you couldn't eat meat on Wednesdays and Thursdays, where you had to sidestep a man with a cobra when you left your hotel. We knew where martial law was in force, where body searches were made, where they engaged in systematic torture, or fired assault rifles into the air at weddings, or abducted and ransomed executives. This was the humor of personal humiliation."It is like the Empire," said Charles Maitland more than once. "Opportunity, adventure, sunsets, dusty death.”Along some northern coast at sundown a beaten gold light is waterborne, sweeping across lakes and tracing zigzag rivers to the sea, and we know we're in transit again, half numb to the secluded beauty down there, the slate land we're leaving behind, the peneplain, to cross these rainbands in deep night. This is time totally lost to us. We don't remember it. We take no sense impressions with us, no voices, none of the windy blast of aircraft on the tarmac, or the white noise of flight, or the hours waiting. Nothing sticks to us but smoke in our hair and clothes. It is dead time. It never happened until it happens again. Then it never happened.

I took a boat in two stages to Kouros, an obscure island in the Cycladic group. My wife and son lived there in a small white house with geraniums in olive oil cans on the roof edge and no hot water. It was perfect. Kathryn was writing reports on the excavation at the south end of the island. Our boy, who was nine, was working on a novel. Everyone is writing away. Everyone is scribbling.When I got there the house was empty. Nothing moved in the streets. It was a hundred degrees, four o'clock, relentless light. I crouched on the roof, hands clasped above my eyes. The village was a model of irregular geometry, the huddled uphill arrangement of whitelime boxes, the street mazes and archways, small churches with blue talc domes. Laundry hung in the walled gardens, always this sense of realized space, common objects, domestic life going on in that sculpted hush. Stairways bent around houses, disappearing.It was a sea chamber raised to the day, to the detailing light, a textured pigment on the hills. There was something artless and trusting in the place despite the street meanders, the narrow turns and ravels. Striped flagpoles and aired-out rugs, houses joined by closed wooden balconies, plants in battered cans, a willingness to share the oddments of some gathering-up. Passageways captured the eye with one touch, a sea green door, a handrail varnished to a nautical gloss. A heart barely beating in the summer heat, and always the climb, the small birds in cages, the framed approaches to nowhere. Doorways were paved with pebble mosaics, the terrace stones were outlined in white.The door was open. I went inside to wait. She'd added a rush mat. Tap's writing table was covered with lined sheets. It was my second visit to the house and I realized I was scrutinizing the place, something I'd done the first time as well. Was it possible to find in the simple furniture, in the spaces between the faded walls, something about my wife and son that had been hidden from me during our life together in California, Vermont and Ontario? We make you wonder if you are the outsider in this group. The meltemi started blowing, the nagging summer wind. I stood by the window, waiting for them to appear. White water flashed outside the bay. Cats slipped out of hidden places in the rough walls and moved stretching into alleyways. The first of the air booms came rolling across the afternoon, waves from some distant violence, making the floor tremble slightly, window frames creak, causing plaster dust to trickle between abutting walls with an anxious whispering sound. Men were using dynamite to fish.Shadows of empty chairs in the main square. A motorcycle droning in the hills. The light was surgical, it was binding. It fixed the scene before me as a moment in a dream. All is foreground, wordless and bright.They arrived from the site on a motor scooter. Kathryn had a bandanna around her head and wore a tank top over baggy fatigue pants. It was in its way a kind of gritty high fashion. Tap saw me at the window and ran back to tell his mother, who didn't quite catch herself from looking up. She left the scooter at the edge of a stepped street and they came up toward the house single file."I stole some yogurt," I said."So. Look who's here.”"I'll pay you back a little at a time. What are you up to, Tap? Helping your mom revise the entire history of the ancient world?”I grabbed him under the arms and lifted him to eye level, making a noise that exaggerated the strain involved. I was always making lionlike noises, rough-housing with my kid. He gave me one of his tricky half smiles and then put his hands squarely on my shoulders and said in his small monotone, "We had a bet when you would come. Five drachmas.”"I tried to call the hotel, tried to call the restaurant, couldn't get through.”"I lost," he said.I gave him a sideways toss and put him down. Kathryn went inside to heat pots of water that she would add to their baths."I liked the pages you sent. But your concentration fell off once or twice. Your hero went out in a blizzard wearing his rubbery Ingersoll.”"What's wrong with that? It was the heaviest thing he had.That was the point.”"I think you meant Mackintosh. He went out in a blizzard wearing his rubbery Mackintosh.”"I thought a Mackintosh was a boot. He wouldn't go out with one Mackintosh. He'd wear Mackintoshes.”"He'd wear Wellingtons. A Wellington is a boot.”"Then what's a Mackintosh?”"A raincoat.”"A raincoat. Then what's an Ingersoll?”"A watch.”"A watch," he said, and I could see him store these names and the objects they belonged to, for safekeeping."Your characters are good. I'm learning things I didn't know.”"Can I tell you what Owen says about character?”"Of course you can tell me. You don't have to ask permission, Tap.”"We're not sure you like him.”"Don't be cute.”He bobbed his head like a senile man in the street having a silent argument with himself. In his miscellany of gestures and expressions, this one meant he was feeling a little sheepish."Come on," I said. "Tell me.”"Owen says 'character' comes from a Greek word. It means 'to brand or to sharpen.' Or 'pointed stake' if it's a noun.”"An engraving instrument or branding instrument.”"That's right," he said."This is probably because 'character' in English not only means someone in a story but a mark or symbol.”"Like a letter of the alphabet.”"Owen pointed that out, did he? Thanks a lot, Owen.”Tap laughed at my tone of pre-empted father."You know something?" I said. "You're beginning to look a little Greek.”"No, I'm not.”"Do you smoke yet?”He decided he liked this idea and made smoking gestures and talking gestures. He spoke a few sentences in Ob, a coded jargon he'd learned from Kathryn. She and her sisters spoke Ob as children and now Tap used it as a kind of substitute Greek or counter-Greek.Kathryn came out with two handfuls of pistachio nuts for us. Tap cupped his hands and she let one set slowly run out, raising her fist to lengthen the spill. We watched him smile as the nuts clicked into his hands.Tap and I sat cross-legged on the roof. Narrow streets ran down to the square, where men sat against the walls of buildings, under the Turkish balconies, looking wine-stained in the setting sun.We ate our nuts, putting the shell remnants in my breast pocket. Above the far curve of the village was a ruined windmill. The terrain was rocky, dropping steeply to the sea. A woman stepped laughing from a rowboat, turning to watch it rock. The broad motion made her laugh again. There was a boy eating bread at the oars.We watched a deliveryman, powdered white, carry flour sacks on his head into the bakery. He had an empty sack folded over the top of his head to keep flour out of his hair and eyes and he looked like a hunter of white tigers, wearing the skins.

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