Don Delillo - Players

"It's this uncertainty over sources and ultimate goals," Kin-near said. "It's everywhere, isn't it? Mazes, you're correct. Intricate techniques. Our big problem in the past, as a nation, was that we didn't give our government credit for being the totally entangling force that it was. They were even more evil than we'd imagined. More evil and much more interesting. Assassination, blackmail, torture, enormous improbable intrigues. All these convolutions and relationships. Assorted sexual episodes. Terribly, terribly interesting, all of it. Cameras, microphones, so forth. We thought they bombed villages, killed children, for the sake of technology, so it could shake itself out, and for certain abstractions. We didn't give them credit for the rest of it. Behind every stark fact we encounter layers of ambiguity. This is all so alien to the liberal spirit. It's a wonder they're bearing up at all. This haze of conspiracies and multiple interpretations. So much for the great instructing vision of the federal government.”

He turned from the target to face Lyle, who stood on the other side of the table.

"What really happened?" Kinnear said. "Who ordered the wiretaps? Why were the papers shredded and what did they say? Why does this autopsy report differ from that one? Was it one bullet or more? Who erased the tapes? Was so-and-so's death an accident or murder? How did organized crime get involved-who let them in? How deeply are the corporations involved in this or that mystery, this or that crime, these murders, these programs of systematic torture? Who ordered these massive surveillance programs? Who wrote the anonymous letters? Why did these witnesses drop out of sight? Where are the files? Where are the missing bullet fragments? Did this suspect work for the intelligence service or didn't he? Why do these four eyewitness accounts clash so totally? What happened, Lyle, on the floor that day?”

"I thought I'd get around to asking you.”

"I wasn't there," J. said. "You were there. I didn't even know it was supposed to happen. They did it on their own. A brother-sister act.”

"You want to know what happened.”

"What happened, Lyle? How many shots were fired? Who did the shooting? Was it one person or more? Did you see a gun? What did the suspect or suspects look like?”

Kinnear paused here, summoning forensic energy for the windup.

"When governments become too interesting, the end is in sight. Their fall is contained not in their transgressions, obviously, but in the material that flows from these breaches, one minute sinister and vicious, the next nearly laughable. Governments mustn't be that interesting. It unsettles the body politic. I almost want to say they had too much imagination. That's not quite it, though, is it?”

"Fantasies.”

"They had too many fantasies. Right. But they were our fantasies, weren't they, ultimately? The whole assortment. Our leaders simply lived them out. Our elected representatives. It's fitting, then, no more than fitting, and we were stone blind not to guess at it. All we had to do was know our own dreams.”

"You ought to take this lecture on tour," Lyle said. "They pay well.”

"I sense you're enjoying this. You need this, don't you? A sense of structure. A logical basis for further exposition.”

Lyle heard footsteps right over him. A door closed, causing slight vibrations. He picked up what he thought might be an M-16. It was heavier than he'd expected. He held it at belly level, bouncing it lightly in his hands. Through a small window high on the wall he could see beyond the latticework that skirted the back porch. Marina was unfolding a beach chair in half shade. The weapon made him uneasy. The simple feel of it contained the severity of its ends. G-g-g-gun, he thought. No doubting its authority. Down to the smallest spiral groove it was clearly a device cut and shaped to function with chill precision. Memory of a toy's coppery taste on his tongue. The thing was near perfect. It could kill a man before the color of its stock registered in his mind. He put it down, deciding Kinnear was homosexual.

Later he sat out back with Marina. He didn't know who anyone was, really, but it didn't seem odd that he was here. He could have napped in his chair, easily, one hand cupped above the grass. Marina was reading a newspaper. She kept chopping at it to keep it compact in the wind.

"I'd like to ask if I can.”

"What?”

"Why, exactly, you chose the Exchange to hit? Or is that too obvious?”

"The fact of George.”

"He gave you access.”

"They get threats. They're aware. Guards every few feet.

But having someone on the floor. It was handed to us. We knew we would do something. Rafael wanted to disrupt their system, the idea of worldwide money. It's this system that we believe is their secret power. It all goes floating across that floor. Currents of invisible life. This is the center of their existence. The electronic system. The waves and charges. The green numbers on the board. This is what my brother calls their way of continuing on through rotting flesh, their closest taste of immortality. Not the bulk of all that money. The system itself, the current. That's Rafael. The doctor of philosophy approach to bombing. 'Financiers are more spiritually advanced than monks on an island.' Rafael. It was this secret of theirs that we wanted to destroy, this invisible power. It's all in that system, bip-bip-bip-bip, the flow of electric current that unites moneys, plural, from all over the world. Their greatest strength, no doubt of that.”

"What did Kinnear think of this?”

"They have money. We have destruction. What?”

"J.-what did he think?”

She looked back at the newspaper. Lyle felt it was important to ask questions that would not disappoint her. He may have missed right there. Kinnear was standing in the window above them, a telephone in his hand.

"It would have appealed to him if he had known. Not the bombing of itself. The thinking behind it. He would have discussed, discussed, discussed. J. is all theory. He's waiting for the instruments of world repression to fall apart on their own. It will happen mystically in a pink light. The people will step in and that will be that. One way of betraying the revolution is to advance theories about it. We don't only make doctrines, my brother and I. We're here to destroy. When we did the dynamite in Brussels, the embassy, it was beautiful because we were technicians completing an operation. In and out. The cleanest piece of work imaginable. Theory is an effete diversion. Its purpose is to increase the self-esteem of the theorists. The only worthwhile doctrine is calculated madness.”

"Impossible to anticipate.”

"Is one permitted to say 'moneys'-the plural?”

"Absolutely," he said.

In the early evening she drove him to a subway station. He had a long conversation with himself, internal. One voice was Lyle as a former astronaut who'd walked on the surface of the moon. The other voice was Lyle as a woman, interviewing the astronaut in a TV studio. The astronaut persona spoke movingly of weightlessness as a poetic form of anxiety and isolation. Somewhere at the top of the original Lyle's head, the interviewer smiled and cleared her throat. They drove past houses, more houses. Then they were on Main Street, Flushing.

"Rosemary doesn't know me as Vilar. She knows me as Marina Ramirez.”

"Okay, good.”

"But you know me as Vilar.”

"Correct.”

The woman persona asked questions about colors and shapes, loneliness among the stars. Will we ever walk on Mars, she said. There were waits for lights to change. The conversation trailed off. He felt stupid, having had it. Marina was watching him as she glided to a stop behind a line of other cars.

"We still have the intent to hit Eleven Wall.”