Don DeLillo - Great Jones Street

"They'll give you first of all a bonus. Second a percentage. Third the option to invest You get the bonus no matter how marketable the product turns out to be. They're putting pressure on me, Bucky. I'd like to resolve this thing."

When I woke up, Azarian was at the window looking out at the snow. I had no idea how long I'd slept. There were noises on the street, men unloading a truck. The woman leaned against the door frame, coat opened. I sat up in bed and stared at her, knowing it wasn't Azar-ian's security she was responsible for, nor mine. It seemed she was part of the pressure they were putting on him. Hair worn short. Caved face. Slender imperial neck. Hurdler's fused body. All in all a well-crafted piece of smoked glass and chrome. Azarian opened the window, scooped some snow off the ledge and tasted it.

"Needs seasoning," he said. "Want a bite?"

"Close the window."

"Epiphany used to sing in supper clubs, according to the data on her. Did I tell you that? Supper clubs. I didn't know places like that existed anymore. Must have been a weird scene. She acted in exploitation movies for six or seven months. A real pro-fessional. She did some modeling here and there. It's been a hard road. All that pro-fessionalism. It does things to people. Makes them hard."

"It don't faze Piffany," she said. "Nothing faze Tiffany."

Azarian looked at her a while longer, then turned to me.

"So nobody knows where the product is."

"True."

"Including the people who were holding it."

"True again."

"I believe you, Bucky. You wouldn't mislead me in a situation like this. At least I can report back with a definite answer. No more skip-this and wait-on-that. I was tired of the whole thing. No more now."

"Are you afraid?" I said.

"Of everything. More than ever. Constantly."

Into boiling water I dropped the plastic pouch lumpy with beef chunks and frozen noodles. I watched it slide down the side of the pot as the water stilled for a moment before resuming its furor. There was no clock that worked, no way to measure the fourteen minutes deemed necessary for thawing and the regeneration of flavor. I counted to sixty a total of seven times, then multiplied by two and removed the pouch, cutting it open with a pair of rusty blunt grooming scissors found protruding from a beer can, one blade in each triangular incision. I waited for the long-dormant odor of goulash to be broadcast to my nose, smoke of herdsman's meat, but the air held little more than a limp whiff of carrots. I plopped contents into cornflake bowl and set to eating, eyes off the food, teeth working mechanically. I tried in fact to close off all my senses to this dim experience. Abused longhorns stuffed in pouches. Ceremonial flesh injected with cursed preservatives. Eating myself: lessons in the effects of auto-cannibalism. I tried to erase taste-memory from my lips with a two-ply paper towel, floral bordered. Then I got up and answered the telephone, chilled by the feel of the earpiece.

"It's your manager, who loves you. Don't ask where I am. They tell me you've been on my trail, telephonically speaking. What I would call a sudden turn of events. You looking for me."

"Where are the tapes?"

"What tapes?"

"You had somebody go through this apartment. Trans-paranoia owns a key. I remember that. And I know you've got the tapes."

"What tapes?" he said. "I want to hear you say the whole thing. What tapes? Tell me in my ear."

"Mountain tapes."

"So those tapes. So those are the tapes you're referring to when you say I have the tapes."

"Where are they, Glob?"

"I don't have them."

"Of course you have them."

"Of course I have them. I've been thinking about those things every day for over a year now. Once you walked off the tour, I stopped thinking and started lusting. I got itchy fingered. I got wild. You walked off the goddamn tour, Bucky. You took away my action. We needed product, see. You were failing to deliver product. Product is something that matters deeply. You owed us product. Contracts in our files specified what product you owed, when it was due, how it was to be presented. This was not a question of a few thousand dollars gurgling down the drain. We're a parent corporation. We've got subsidiaries and affiliates all over the place. Do you know what they're constantly doing? They're yowling for their food. Feed me, feed me. Enormous sums of money were involved in your disappearing act. All these companies with their mouths opened wide for the worm breakfast, the worm lunch, the worm dinner. I needed the tapes to keep some kind of action going. Create demand for exotic product. Keep the public salivating. So I had a man hang around from time to time. Whenever you left the building he called me and I got down there quick-quick and snooped around hoping against hope to find the famous tapes. We also spent two days covering every inch of your mountain place. But I figured you were sitting on them. I figured they were right there in Opel's apartment. Trouble was you never left for very long. I couldn't give the place a professional Bogart-movie kind of going over. I entered on tiptoes and lifted up here and looked in there, dainty as a parakeet, covering my tracks before I even made any tracks. The night I finally got to the package was some terrific night because I don't know how many guys go charging up and down the stairs making animal sounds and stomping with their feet. Doors being smashed open and all kinds of commotion below me and then above me and there I am on tippytoes in the middle of the room with this package in my arms which I know contains the mountain tapes and this Mongol horde is racing up and down the stairs making sounds of conquest. I thought sure they'd break in on me and confiscate the object. When they left I heaved three long sighs and blessed myself in the Russian manner, right shoulder first, which my original wife used to do almost constantly before she got pissed off at God and started drinking vodka gimlets. Three sighs of relief. Thank you, Jesus, for letting me find the mountain tapes and for not letting those cuckoos come in here and butcher me, a poor senior executive performing his humble task." "That's what amazes me," I said. "The fact that you'd go to all that trouble. Your money, your position, your reputation. You more or less own this building, Globke."

"You don't understand, Bucky. You never carried ob-noxiousness to its logical conclusion. Nothing is too personally distasteful for me to get involved in as long as it helps create a new product or extends the life of an existing product. Besides I don't want to get detached. Middle age and overweightness. These are enemies you can't fight from a swivel chair. Why do you think I don't have a chauffeur when my counterparts in the industry on both coasts have chauffeurs? I don't want to get detached. I want the challenge of traffic. I want to get down on my hands and knees and butt heads with the opposition. Action, action, action. It paid off, didn't it? I got the tapes, right? It was worth the trouble, wasn't it?"

"I was about ready to hand them over," I said. "I was ready to come back out."

"That pleases and delights me, Bucky. To think we're back in the old synchromesh pattern."

"I had to figure something out before I handed them over. I knew the tapes were a perfect answer in one sense. They were something unexpected, undreamed of, a whole new direction. But I can't go out before crowds and do those same songs. The effect of the tapes is that they're tapes. Done at a certain time under the weight of a certain emotion. Done on the spot and with many imperfections. This material can't be duplicated in a concert situation. So the tapes can be released, sure. But how do I get released? How do I get back out before crowds? I don't know how to work that little trick."