Don DeLillo: Great Jones Street

Slowly along Great Jones, signs of commerce became apparent, of shipping and receiving, export packaging, custom tanning. This was an old street. Its materials were in fact its essence and this explains the ugliness of every inch. But it wasn't a final squalor. Some streets in their decline possess a kind of redemptive tenor, the suggestion of new forms about to evolve, and Great Jones was one of these, hovering on the edge of self-revelation. Paper, yarn, leathers, tools, buckles, wire-frame-and-novelty. Somebody unlocked the door of the sandblasting company. Old trucks came rumbling off the cobblestones on Lafayette Street. Each truck in turn mounted the curb, where several would remain throughout the day, listing slightly, circled by heavy-bellied men carrying clipboards, invoices, bills of lading, forever hoisting their trousers over their hips. A black woman emerged from the smear of an abandoned car, talking a scattered song. Wind was biting up from the harbor.

I had the door half-open, on my way out for food, when someone spoke my name from the top of the next landing. It was a man about fifty years old, wearing a hooded sweat shirt. He was sitting on the top step, looking down at me.

"I've been waiting for you," he said. "I'm your upstairs neighbor. Eddie Fenig. Ed Fenig. Maybe you've heard of me. I'm a writer, which gives us something a little bit in common, at least retroactively. I write under my full name. Edward B. Fenig. You're tops in your trade, Bucky, looking at your old lyrics, never having attended a live performance. So when I saw you from my window yesterday when you were crossing the street this way, I was naturally delighted. Sheer delight, no exaggeration. Maybe you've heard of me. I'm a poet. I'm a novelist. I'm a mystery writer. I write science fiction. I write pornography. I write daytime dramatic serials. I write one-act plays. I've been published and/or produced in all these forms. But nobody knows me from shit."

Americans pursue loneliness in various ways. For me, Great Jones Street was a time of prayerful fatigue. I became a half-saint, practiced in visions, informed by a sense of bodily economy, but deficient in true pain. I was preoccupied with conserving myself for some unknown ordeal to come and did not make work by engaging in dialogues, or taking more than the minimum number of steps to get from place to place, or urinating unnecessarily.

Again I had a visitor, four days into unbroken solitude, a reporter this time, flamboyantly bald and somewhat dwarfish, dressed in sagging khaki, drifts of hair from outlying parts of his head adorning the frames of his silver-tinted glasses, an emblem on the sleeve of his battle jacket – running dog news service.

"Where do you want to sit?"

"Your manager told us you were approachable," he said. "We've known for seventy-two hours where you were located but we didn't want to make a move until we got ahold of Globke. We don't operate mass-media-crash-style. We wanted Globke's version of your frame of mind in terms of were you or were you not approachable. Ill take this chair and we can put the tape recorder right here."

"No tape," I said.

"That's what we anticipated."

"No notes either."

"No notes?"

"Note-taking's out."

"You want some kind of accuracy, don't you?"

"No," I said.

"Then what do you want?"

"Make it all up. Go home and write whatever you want and then send it out on the wires. Make it up. Whatever you write will be true."

"We know it's asking a lot to expect an interview, even a brief one, which is what we assure you is what we want, but maybe a statement will have to do. Will you give us a statement?"

"A statement about what?"

"Anything at all," he said. "Just absolutely anything. For instance the rumors. What about the rumors?"

"They're all true."

"Okay, but what about authorities in Belgium?"

"Does Globke have Belgium under contract? If Globke doesn't have it under contract, whatever it is, I'd be guilty of malfeasance in discussing it publicly."

"Authorities in Belgium want to question you about your alleged financial involvement in a planeload of arms confiscated in Brussels that was supposedly on its way to either this or that trouble-spot, depending on which rumor you believe."

"Do you know what the word malfeasance means? This is a word that carries tremendous weight in a court of law. Much more weight than misfeasance or non-feasance."

"Okay, but what about the damage to your vocal chords from the continuous strain and the story that you'll never perform in public again?"

"You decide, "I said. "Whatever you write will be true. I'll confirm every word."

"Okay, but what about Azarian? Azarian says he's reorganizing the group along less radical musical lines. Will you make a statement about that?"

"Yes," I said.

"What's your statement?"

"Azarian has been horribly disfigured in a gruesome accident. His face is being reconstructed with skin and bone taken from the faces of volunteers. His voice is not his voice. It belongs to a donor. What Azarian seems to be saying is really being said by another person's vocal chords."

"That's the other thing. An accident. You were in an accident and you're hidden away in some rich private clinic in south central Maryland. The accident thing was interesting to us, ideologically. An accident for somebody like you is the equivalent of prison for a revolutionary. We were kind of rooting for an accident. Which is, wow, really weird. But that's what happens. You get into guerrilla ideology, you find yourself trying to handle some pretty unwholesome thoughts."

"There's no such region as south central Maryland."

"Okay, but listen to this on the subject of accidents. We got a tip from I won't say what source that your manager was about to leak word of an accident. We figure he wanted to co-opt all the other accidents. He wanted exclusive rights to your accident. Anyway his story had you half-dead when a schooner piled into some rocks during a storm off the coast of Peru. First you're missing and presumed drowned. Then you're half-dead aboard a rescue vessel. And Peru does have a coast because I was there two years ago Christmas. But he dropped the idea for whatever reason. This is pretty sophisticated stuff, Bucky. I mean there's rumor, there's counter-rumor, there's manipulation, and there's, you know, this ultra-morbid promotional activity. What's it all mean?"

"The plain man of business is gone from the earth."

"Before I forget," he said, "we'd like to add your name to a list of sponsors that we use on all correspondence pertaining to the black captive insurrection fund. The other names are on this sheet. Should I leave it and you can get back to us or do you want to look at it now? It's up to you.whatever you want me to do with it."

"Tear it in four equal pieces," I said.

"Okay, can we get on to some more statements now?"

"I don't think so, no."

"We'd like a short statement about your present whereabouts."

I'm wherever you want me to be."

"We know where you are at this point. We want to know what you're doing here."

"Nothing."

"But why here?" he said. "Will you make a statement about that?"

"You know where you are in New York. You're in New York. It's New York. This fact is inescapable. In other places I didn't always know where I was. What is this, Ohio or Japan? I wanted to be in one place. An identifiable place."

"Okay, but you've got a studio-equipped house in the mountains and it's almost inaccessible to anybody who doesn't have a detailed map. We still don't see why you're here rather than there. You've lived there. It must be identifiable."

"How tall are you?" I said.

"Six feet even."

"Incredible."

"It's the way I hunch."