Don Delillo - Players

"I love it.”

"He stretches his mouth. It's gotten so he does it an awful lot lately. It's very macabre if you're walking by.”

"Stretching exercises.”

"He wants to do his chin next.”

They drove half an hour before finding a motel, He checked the road map, not certain where they were. Rosemary sat on a corner of the bed, handbag in her lap. He had the map spread over a small desk, his back to her, and he was taking off his shirt as he tried to retrace the route they'd taken.

"When do you have to be back?”

"Whenever.”

"Where-where we met?”

"Right there is fine.”

"Take down the phone number while we're at it. I want to be sure to hear from him. Tell J. that. I was let down. But as long as I hear soon, within a day or two, then that's all right. The money's in a black leather billfold in my jacket. Why don't you count out thirty-five hundred while I'm doing this? Tell J. a day or two. Two at the most. Because I don't know what happens next.”

Eventually he turned toward her, beginning to remove the rest of his clothes. He could see himself across the room, angling in and out of view, in the mirror over the dresser. The light coloring. The sandy hair. The spaces in his gaze. It was a body of effortless length, proportional, spared bunching and sags. Nice, the understated precision of his movements, even to the tugging of a sock. And the satisfactions of moderate contours. Of mildness. Hairless chest and limbs. Middling implement of sex. Interesting, his formal apartness. The distance he'd perfected. He could see it clearly, hands and stance, the median weave of coarse hair, gray eyes eventually steadied on themselves.

She went into the bathroom to undress.

He liked motels, their disengaging aspect, the blank autonomy they offered, an exemption from some vague imperative, perhaps the need to verify one's status.

When Rosemary came out, ten minutes later, she had a plastic phallus harnessed to her body.

A dog sniffed out hidden riches, circling a grassy patch of earth, again and again, making sure, ascertaining place. The gulls were startling, so large at this distance, landing on mounds of garbage, wings beating. She watched them scatter when a second police cruiser pulled up at the edge of the dump. The dog's circles became smaller, more urgent. It was zeroing in, snout down, a little crazy with anticipation. She'd stationed herself at a point where Jack's body was hidden from view by the bulldozer that customarily leveled out the mounds. Smoke rose from charred areas, fitfully. That acrid, acrid smell. She'd stationed herself. She'd chosen carefully. The dog walked off, long gray animal, a corn cob in its mouth.

The gulls stood in garbage, bodies occasionally extended, wings flapping. There were cans of Ajax and Campbell's soup. Maxwell House, Pepsi-Cola, Heinz ketchup, Budweiser. She hated the way gulls walked. They were ugly on the ground, this close, chesty and squat. Burnt garbage. Stinging, bitter, caustic.

Jack was sitting crosslegged. She knew this from the first conditional glimpse. That stump was Jack. While still in the car she'd taken another look that lasted perhaps two full seconds. His head was slumped forward and black and he was badly withered. She wouldn't have known it was Jack except for the note he'd left, telling them where he was, advising them to be prepared. After that second look she was diligent in keeping a large object between herself and Jack's body. First the car and now the bulldozer. He was shriveled and discolored, burned right through, down to muscles, down to tendons, down to nerves, blood vessels, bones. His arms were in front of him, hands crossed at about the same place his ankles were crossed. This had seemed ceremonial, the result of research on his part. She did think that. She thought fifty different things, all passing through each other, illustrated breezes. She recalled wondering whether he'd had to exercise will power to keep his body in that position during the time it took for the fire to negate all semblance of conscious choice. The gulls beat their wings, screeching.

She saw Ethan disengage himself from three policemen and a civilian, this last apparently being the man who operated the bulldozer. Pammy assumed he'd found the body and called the police. Ethan walked over to her. He was chewing gum. There was a strange menace about him, the slackness of his body. He seemed to be walking right into the ground, getting smaller as he approached, more dangerous somehow, as though he no longer possessed the binding force, the degree of concentration, that keeps people from splintering.

"Yeah, it was gasoline," he said. "There's a large tin over on its side right nearby.”

"Burned.”

"He set himself on fire.”

"He poured it over him.”

"Yeah, and lit it.”

She held Ethan by the shirt, twisting the fabric in her fists. An ambulance arrived and the gulls scattered again. Ethan looked off into the trees, thinking of something. Not intently, however. He might have been trying to recall the sequence of events in an anecdote. Or something he was supposed to do, perhaps. Some errand or small task. The men were out of the ambulance. Pammy didn't want to think about the mechanics of what happened next or even hear voices in the distance, or sounds, whatever sounds would have to be made. Several gulls started to leave the ground, rising on their scraggy feet, wings rippling, stirring up air. She let go of Ethan's shirt and turned toward the woods, her hands over her ears.

For a while she held her breath. During this period she could hear, or feel, right under each hand, where it covered her ear, a steady pressuring subroar, oceanic space, brain-deadened, her own coiled shell, her chalky encasement for the world of children, all soft things, the indulgent purr of animals sunning. When she let out her breath, the roar was still there. She'd thought the two were related.

She concentrated on objects. Her hands were clasped behind her neck. There was a reason for this but she didn't want to know what it was. She studied the mossy rocks.

It was driving in on her. It was massing. She felt if she untensed her body something irrevocable, something irrevocable and lunatic, something irrevocable, totally mad, would happen. Nothing had a name. She'd declared everything nameless. Everything was compressed into a block. She fought the tendency to supply properties to this block. That would lead to names.

Ethan came back after a while. They walked toward the car. The ambulance and one of the police cars were gone. He asked her to take his car back to the house. He would go with the policeman. The other man had climbed into the bulldozer and was sitting there, smoking.

"They're very nice. They couldn't have been nicer.”

"You'll be gone how long?”

"They'll take me back as soon as we're finished up. Unless you don't want to go there. You can come with us.”

"Ethan, what did Jack do?”

"I don't know.”

"I mean what did he do?”

At the house she cleaned up. She put things in their original places. She wanted everything to be the way it was when she arrived. The phone rang. It was Lyle. She told him about Jack, beginning a long and at times nearly delirious monologue. She lapsed into accounts of recent dreams. She tried to speak through periods of yawning that were like seizures, some autonomic flux of the nerve apparatus. Lyle calmed her down eventually. He summarized what had happened in short declarative sentences. This seemed to help, breaking the story into coherent segments. It eased the surreal torment, the sense of aberration. To hear the sequence restated intelligibly was at that moment more than a small comfort to her. It supplied a focus, a distinct point into which things might conceivably vanish after a while, chaos and divergences, foes of God.