Don DeLillo: Great Jones Street

"Fire! Hey, fire!"

The great doors of the firehouse would slowly come open. I'd get a glimpse of the big machine, fire-engine red, rigged with shiny appliances. Then tiny men in black booties would appear, edging out onto the sidewalk, lifting their beady eyes to my window.

"Fire!" I'd shout. "Hey, fire, fire!"

One small man would take several steps forward, moving into the light shed by a streetlamp. He'd tug at his booties for a second. Then he'd look back up at my window.

"Water," he would say, barely above a whisper.

A moment would pass and then his little comrades, standing all around him now, would commence whispering, as if by prearranged signal:

"Water, water, water, water, water."

Finally all the tiny men would return to the firehouse and the vaulted doors would slowly close behind them.

A telephone that's disconnected, deprived of its sources, becomes in time an intriguing piece of sculpture. The business normally transacted is more than numbed within the phone's limp ganglia; it is made eternally irrelevant. Beyond the reach of shrill necessities the dead phone disinters another source of power. The fact that it will not speak (although made to speak, made for no other reason) enables us to see it in a new way, as an object rather than an instrument, an object possessing a kind of historical mystery. The phone has made a descent to total dumbness, and so becomes beautiful.

Opel's phone was out of order and Azarian came down without calling and was waiting for me in the hall, numbed by cold, when I got back from Thirteenth Street, where I'd gone to buy some clothes. He stood against the mailboxes, arms strait-jacketed in crushed velvet. Somehow he managed to invest the simple act of sniffling with an element of gravest accusation. I led him upstairs. Without uncrossing his arms from his chest, he dropped into a chair.

"The apocalyptic crotch himself."

"Don't be funny," he said. "Do that one thing for me Bucky. Avoid all funny stuff. I'm cold and tired. I neec to be talked to seriously. Jet lag, fear, anxiety, depres sion. You know my history."

"Want some cocoa? Good and hot."

"Sure, yeah, okay."

"I don't have any."

"I thought you were with Opel Hampson in Morocco.'

"Is she in Morocco?" I said.

"Globke finally told me you were here."

"How about hot tea? Steaming hot Lipton's tea. Fresl from the grocer's shelf."

"Do you have any?"

"No."

"Frankly I wasn't knocked out by grief when you left, Bucky. But I was wrong. We kind of need you. The last year or so I've been in a state of deep fear nearly one hundred per cent of the time. All kinds of fears of this and that. Mostly unexplained fears. When you left the group I frankly expected the anxieties to lift like a fog. But I was wrong. I'm more afraid than ever. All the tremendous tensions you created with your presence have gotten even worse now that you're gone. I'm afraid all the time."

"Afraid of what?"

"You know my history," Azarian said. "Fears, anxieties, apprehensions, dreads, terrors, cowerings and panics. Don't ask me afraid of what. Afraid of everything, I guess. Everything, nothing, something, anything. I came east for a reason. Really two reasons. Both pretty scary."

"Tell me."

"First I want to know your intentions. I feel I have a right to that. The band's in flux. Before I can take any definite action and relieve my mind of some of the fear, I have to know whether or not you're thinking about returning. Some idea of your state of mind would be a great help to me at this point. They thought you'd been murdered. Dodge actually thought that. I told him he was crazy. So we talked to Globke to get some kind of idea. We talked to him together. Then we talked to him one by one along the line at different stages. He didn't tell us anything definite till last night. So I came in from Phoenix. Rotten shitty flight. Dodge's mother's been trying to contact you. She's some kind of whatever-you-call-them. Beyond the grave. See, Dodge told her you were dead. So she tried to contact you."

"Any luck?"

"She got your brother, she said. Did you ever have a brother?"

"No."

"That's what Dodge told her. Weird fucking woman."

"I'm kind of busy," I said. "If you could tell me what you want."

"Busy doing what? What could you be doing in a place like this that you could call busy?"

"Tell me what you want," I said.

"I want to know your intentions. I want to know if you're coming back, and when, and in what exact role. In what capacity. Let's face it, you haven't done anything new in a long time and pressure's been building up over that fact and in the meantime I'm ready to go into a studio with material I've been working on for about the last two years that we've never recorded. I'm ready for a whole lot of things. But I can't just go ahead. I'm tied down by prearrangements, by clauses, by small print, by multiple deals and counterdeals. Everything's locked up tight. So this is the necessary first step. Finding out your intentions."

"I have no intentions."

"You do so have intentions. Everybody has intentions, Looks like I was right about you."

"In what way?"

"I told them you cracked up," he said. "Dodge was running around with the murder story. They all believed him. I told them you just ran off to hide. You cracked up. You couldn't take it anymore and you went off to Morocco to hide. I told them that."

"You were mistaken."

"Dodge said Bucky's not the type. Last man to crack'll be Bucky. We'll all fall apart but not him. Well, bullshit, they were wrong. I saw what happened in the lounge in that airport, wherever we were, Denver, just before the Astrodome riot."

"What happened?" I said.

"I saw what happened."

"What happened?"

"I didn't tell anybody because I figured it was your own private business. I didn't even tell them after you disappeared and they were going around believing you'd been murdered. You cracked up pure and simple. I told them that much but nothing else."

"What happened?" I said.

"It caught my eye in all that crush just before we boarded. You were on your knees making faces at some old woman in a wheelchair. I knew it wasn't a joke. It was too unreal for that. You were sweating and babbling and making incredible unreal faces at the old woman. I've never seen anyone sweating the way you were. Laughing and babbling and down on your knees. Laughing-crying. I'll never forget it. A few other people saw it too but nobody knew how to react. It was too unreal. And besides you were in tears. So nobody knew what was what. There was no reality. There was no way to know what to do. Then somebody wheeled the old lady away and you got up and it was over."

"Strange."

"You hadn't said more than five words in about a week and a half, Bucky. I mean the whole grinding insanity of the tour. I mean the incredible sick aspects of it. I mean the whole morbid fantasy. This could smash anybody into little pieces. And being who you were, of course. That whole other myth. Who you were and what you represented. That particular inhuman pressure. When I first saw you on the floor like that, it didn't really seem that unusual. I knew it wasn't a joke but I didn't think it was serious either. I mean that's the tour. That's what happens on the tour."

"Strange," I said.

Azarian's sadness filled the space between us. He leaned forward in the chair now, exploring my eyes, trying in his intensity to make me remember, to make me see my own face, as if this remembering could be a clean breeze through his sadness. He clenched both fists, lined them up against his lips and blew heat and energy into the resulting tunnel.

"That brings us to reason number two why I'm here," he said. "Happy Valley Farm Commune is holding something I'm -willing to lay out money for. I represent certain interests. These interests happen to know you're in touch with Happy Valley. So they're making the offer to you through me."