Don Delillo - Players

It was dark. There were two hundred people in the streeet. Jack stepped onto the narrow platform at the back of one of the fire engines. He swung out from the vertical bar. The gaiety they'd brought into the street dissolved in minutes. Ethan and Pam started off down the block but Jack didn't want to get off the fire truck. He shouted commands and made wailing noises. Nobody paid much attention. The man with the needle beneath his lip came out with the last of the plants. Firemen dragged a hose around the corner. Ethan stood looking at Jack, a steadying distance in his gaze.

"I wonder what happened to the rain they predicted," Pammy said.

Jack came along finally. They turned a corner and headed south, moving toward Canal Street and the possibility of a taxi. Standing outside the cast-iron buildings were large cardboard cylinders that contained industrial sweepings from the factory lofts. Jack charged one of them, shoulder-first, knocking it down. They followed along quietly as he ranged both sides of the street, crashing into containers. Just past Grand he hurdled an overturned container and veered neatly, forearm out front, body set low, to run into a metal garbage can. Pammy, eventually, noted that Ethan hadn't altered stride and she had to hurry to catch up with him. Jack was sitting in the gutter, holding his knee. The can was on its side, rolling only slightly back and forth, much of its contents still within, an indication of weight. To Pammy it made sense in a way. He'd always appeared to have reserves of uncommitted energy. A hitter of garbage cans. She watched him get to his feet, raggedly. Although there was no sign of an empty cab, Ethan leaned into the sparse traffic, arm high in the air.

"Does he do this often?”

"Tuesdays and Thursdays," Ethan said. "The rest of the week he speaks in tongues.”

Lyle sometimes carried yellow teleprinter slips with him for days. He saw in the numbers and stock symbols an artful reduction of the external world to printed output, the machine's coded model of exactitude. One second of study, a glance was all it took to return to him an impression of reality disconnected from the resonance of its own senses. Aggression was refined away, the instinct to possess. He saw fractions, decimal points, plus and minus signs. A picture of the competitive mechanism of the world, of greasy teeth engaging on the rim of a wheel, was nowhere in evidence. The paper contained nerve impulses: a synaptic digit, a phoneme, a dimen-sionless point. He knew that people want to see their own spittle dripping from the lacy openwork of art. On the slip of paper in his hand there was no intimation of lives defined by the objects around them, morbid tiers of immortality. Inked figures were all he saw. This was property in its own right, tucked away, his particular share (once removed) of the animal body breathing in the night.

When Pammy got home, he wasn't there. This was disappointing. Lately she'd found that the nutritive material for their sex life was often provided by others, whoever happened to be present at a party or other gathering. She wondered whether she'd become too complex to care whether the others were gay or straight. It would be nice, so nice if he walked in right now. When she realized how late it was, she grew angry. Soon she was doing what she always did when she was mad at Lyle. She began to clean the apartment. First she mopped the kitchen, then the bathroom. She swept up in the living room and, once the kitchen floor was dry, quickly did the dishes. It was an intricate cycle of expiation and virtue, a return to self-discipline. Whenever things went badly between them, she took it as a preview, seeing herself alone in a brilliantly well-kept apartment, everything in place, everything white somehow, a sense of iron-fisted independence clearly apparent in all this organization. In the middle of the night, obviously too late to vacuum, she took a shower, put on her pajamas and sat reading in bed, feeling good about herself.

Lyle came home.

"Your face is splotched," he said.

"You'll get hit.”

"What are you doing up? You're still up. It's unbelievably late. I've never seen it so late. It's really late out there. You should see. Go to the window and look. No, don't. You won't learn a thing that way. Stay where you are.”

"He feels like talking.”

"I was downtown. I walked around down there till now. What was it like, she asked. Well, to begin with, it was cool finally, a rivery breeze, and no one around, nothing, a drunk or two early on but later nothing, a car, another car, another car, looking for the tunnel. The district, outwardly, is like the end of organized time-outwardly, mind you. At night I mean it's like somebody forgot something. They went away. The mystery, right, of why everybody left these gorgeous pueblos.”

"Inwardly?”

"Things happening. Little men in eyeshades.”

"Fascinating, these insights of his.”

"What is it, Splotch? Annoyed at my lack of consideration? I called. You weren't here.”

"We ought to go out more.”

"There's nothing out there. That's my point. Everybody went away. You can hear doors blowing shut in the wind. The scientists are mystified.”

Lyle cultivated a quality of self-command. As a corollary to this extreme presence of mind, he built a space between himself and most of the people he was likely to deal with in the course of daily events. He was aware of his studied passage down the corridors of his firm's offices. Happily he parodied his own manner, swiveling toward a face and beaming an anemic look right past it. It was satisfying to stand on the floor, say, during a lull in trading, or after hours in a bar in the district, and note how some people subtly exhibited their relative closeness to him while others, sensing his apartness or knowing it for fact, were diligent in keeping ritual distances.

The waiter, at six feet four, let his head slip down a notch as he took their orders.

"I want something outer spacelike," Lyle said. "What's a zombie? Bring me one of those.”

Rosemary Moore had a Scotch and water. Her boss, Larry Zeltner, ordered gin and tonic for himself and also for the two young women, known to Lyle only as Jackie and Gail. He'd come upon them in the elevator as he and Rosemary were leaving the office. Zeltner suggested they all go for a drink. Lyle quickly agreed, trying to indicate that he and Rosemary had entered die elevator together by chance, just as the others had.

"It's what I said this morning," Zeltner said. "It's what I always say: who'll do it? Get somebody to do it and I'm with you. Otherwise goodbye. Then there's the situation, how do we total, who's reconciling, where do you tighten up the indicators?”

Lyle made a point of conversing with Jackie, who was unattractive. He didn't know why he took this precaution or what, exactly, it meant. Somehow it seemed a safe course. He finished his drink before the others were halfway through with theirs. Jackie appeared to be studying him as she spoke, measuring his attentiveness or wondering why his replies had dwindled to simple nods of the head, three every ten seconds. Rosemary said she had to leave. He emptied his face of indications. Zeltner told her not to bother with money; it was his treat, et cetera. Lyle watched her walk out the door. She hadn't implied to the others, in any manner at all, that she'd ever spoken a word to him before this evening. He wasn't sure whether this was by specific design or part of a social code that prevailed in all her relations with others.

"Yumpin' yimminy," he said. "My train to catch. Have to go out to the boonies to see this friend of mine's wife with all kinds of problems. Jesus, hospitals, I hate them. Kid is all screwed up. Wife may be serious. I told him I'd be out tonight. Larry, lunch, without fail, the soonest.”