Don Delillo - Players

Movies did that to people, awful or not. She got up finally and went into the kitchen. Her face looked recently finished ;an outer surface of raw tissue. She supposed she'd been building up to this. There were baffled pleasures everywhere, whole topographies rearranged to make people react to a mass-market stimulus. No harm done succumbing to a few bogus sentiments. She craved a roast beef sandwich, a cold beer. Nothing here but envelopes of soup.

It was after midnight but there was an all-night delicatessen around the corner. She got dressed and went downstairs, surprised to find the streets anything but empty. The newsstand was still doing business, the deli, the bagel noshery, the pizza-souvlaki joint, the bars, the ice cream store, the hamburger place. It was still warm and people were in shirtsleeves and shorts and denims and tank tops and sandals and house slippers. Some elderly men and women sat outside their apartment building in beach chairs, gesturing, munching olives and nuts. Everyone was eating. Wherever she looked there were mouths moving, people handling food, passing it around, cartons of French fries, sugar cones with double scoops, and talking, hollering, tissue paper drifting in the light air. An average street. Nowhere special. Not a theater in sight to account for all these people. All eating. Oral New York. Declaiming through the slush of mouthfuls of food. Lapping and crunching. Perennial ranter. The babble king of cities. Pammy had to stand in line. The counterman licked his mustache and rolled his eyes.

She emerged with a small bag of groceries. The ghost engines droned everywhere-down sewers, under basement stairways, in air conditioners and cracks in the pavement. All these complicated textures. Clownish taxis bearing down.

Sodium-vapor lamps. The city was unreasonably insistent on its own fibrous beauty, the woven arrangements of decay and genius that raised to one's sensibility a challenge to extend itself. Silhouettes of trees on rooftops. Garbagemen at midnight rimming metal cans along the pavement. And always this brassy demanding, a soul that imposes and burdens and defrauds, half mad, but free with its tribal bounty, sized to immense design.

She walked beneath a flophouse marquee. It read: transients. Something about that word confused her. It took on an abstract tone, as words had done before in her experience (although rarely), subsisting in her mind as language units that had mysteriously evaded the responsibilities of content. Tran-zhents. What it conveyed could not itself be put into words. The functional value had slipped out of its bark somehow and vanished. Pammy stopped walking, turned her body completely and looked once more at the sign. Seconds passed before she grasped its meaning.

It's never quite still, is it? Room static. Inherent nuance and hum. And the woman in the bed. Her even breathing. He doesn't know for a fact that she's asleep. He's never seen her sleeping really. He suspects she does it fitfully. Something about her, an aspect of her willingness to carry out designs, to be utilized, suggests a resistance to the implicating riches of deep sleep. He finds it hard to imagine her reaching a final depth, that warm-blooded slumbrous culmination, the point where sleep becomes the tidal life of the unconscious, a state beyond dreaming. To watch a woman at this stage of sleep, throbbing, obviously in touch with mysteries, never fails to worry him a little. They seem at such times to embody a mode of wholeness, an immanence and unit truth, that his feelings aren't equal to.

He's barefoot and shirtless, stretched in a chair. He wears pants with the belt unfastened. The room is dark. He wonders about the tendency of motels to turn things inward. They're a peculiar invention, powerfully abstract. They seem the idea of something, still waiting to be expressed fully in concrete form.

Isn't there more, he wants to ask. What's behind it all? It must be the traveler, the motorist, the sojourner himself who provides the edible flesh of this concept. Inwardness spiraling ever deeper. Rationality, analysis, self-realization. He spends a moment imagining that this vast system of nearly identical rooms, worldwide, has been established so that people will have somewhere to be afraid on a regular basis. The parings of our various searches. Somewhere to take our fear. He laughs briefly, a nasal burst.

The phone will ring and he will be told to go somewhere. He will be given detailed instructions. The number is known. It has been communicated. Certain assurances have been given. It's just a matter of time. He'll get impatient again, no doubt. He'll resolve to leave. But this time the phone will ring and the voice will give instructions of a detailed nature.

He makes the speech sound m, prolonging it, adding a hint of vibrato after a while. Then he laughs again. First light appears, a sense of it, wholly mental perhaps. He doesn't want day to come, particularly. He makes the sound, not moving his lips, expressionless.

We watch him stand by the bed. The woman has made three visits in the two days he's had the room. She's on her stomach now, one arm up on the pillow, the other by her side. Although he's always known her limits, the unvarying sands of her being, he questions whether his own existence is any more entire. Maybe this amounts to an appreciation of sorts. That the lock of bodies should yield a measure of esteem strikes him as incongruous in this case. He notes her paleness. Downy gloss along her lower spine. She knows things. She isn't deadened to the core. She knows his soul, for instance.

(In that moment, wearing her white plastic toy, that odd sardonic moment, so closely bordering on cruelty, a playlet of brute revelation, she let him know it was as an instrument, a toy herself, that she appeared. Dil-do. A child's sleepy murmur. It was as collaborators that they touched, as dreamers in a sea of pallid satisfaction.)

Her complicity makes it possible for him to remain. He stares at the hollows in her buttocks. Dark divide. The ring of flesh that's buried there. We see him walk to the desk, where he gets the map with the street index attached. He takes it to the chair, stretching his frame.

The idea is to organize this emptiness. In the index he sees Briarfield, Hillsview, Woodhaven, Old Mill, Riverhead, Manor Road, Shady Oaks, Lakeside, Highbrook, Sunnydale, Grove Park, Knollwood, Glencrest, Seacliff and Greenvale. He finds these names wonderfully restful. They're a liturgical prayer, a set of moral consolations. A universe structured on such coordinates would have the merits of substance and familiarity. He becomes a little giddy, blinking rapidly, and lets the map slip to the floor.

After a while he takes off his pants. Careful not to disturb the woman, with whom he is not ready to exchange words or looks, he eases onto the bed. Upper body propped by an elbow, he reclines on his side, facing the telephone. Instinct tells him it will shortly ring. He decides to organize his waiting. This will help pull things into a systematic pattern or the illusion of a systematic pattern. Numbers are best for this. He decides to count to one hundred. If the phone doesn't ring at one hundred, his instinct has deceived him, the pattern has cracked, his waiting has opened out to magnitudes of gray space. He will pack and leave. One hundred is the outer margin of his passive assent.

When nothing happens, he lowers the count to fifty. At fifty he will get up, get dressed, put his things together and leave. He counts to fifty. When nothing happens, he lowers the count to twenty-five.

There's a splatter of brightness at one edge of the window. Minutes and inches later, sunlight fills the room. The air is dense with particles. Specks blaze up, a series of energy storms. The angle of light is direct and severe, making the people on the bed appear to us in a special framework, their intrinsic form perceivable apart from the animal glue of physical properties and functions. This is welcome, absolving us of our secret knowledge. The whole room, the motel, is surrendered to this moment of luminous cleansing. Spaces and what they contain no longer account for, mean, serve as examples of, or represent.