Don DeLillo - End Zone

After class Myna invited Zapalac to our picnic that afternoon. I collected my mail and went to my room. Bloomberg was silently asleep, curled about the pillow in a dream. There was a letter in my father's handwriting. It concerned my trip home at Christmastime, still about a month away.

Flying is easy if you keep alert and know what you're doing. When you get to the MidlandOdessa airport, go straight to the ticket counter of the airline you're flying. If the airport there is too small to have separate ticket counters, go to the single allpurpose counter. All right, you're at the counter now. You hand the person the ticket and you put your suitcase on the weight machine. (Carry your ticket in the inside left pocket of your jacket. That's the best place because you're righthanded and you'll be able to reach it easier. It's also safe from anybody with ideas on their mind. They go looking for credit cards to steal mostly. You don't have one yet.) The airline employee will write on your ticket and stamp some things on it purely for airline use and then he'll give you back the ticket and tell you the gate number to go to. Go at once to that gate. If you fool around and start exploring the airport or wandering off somewhere like you always do, you're going to miss your plane. So head for the gate right off the bat and avoid headaches later on. If you have trouble finding the gate, ask someone in authority. That usually means uniformed personnel. When you find the gate, you give your ticket to the man on duty and he sends you aboard the plane. (Your luggage is already on.) Try to get a window seat so you can look out. Don't go to the bathroom until after the plane takes off. Follow similar procedures to the abovementioned at the Dallas and NYC airports. We'll be at the airport in Saranac Lake to meet you when you land. If there's any foulup, I'm telling your Aunt Helen where we'Û be. So if you don't see us, call your Aunt Helen and she'll know where we are. She's staying home that day on purpose. Don't forget to ask her about her wisdom tooth. And be sure you carry some land of identification in case of a crash.

For some reason the letter was signed by my mother (Love, Mom). I put it away and got the dictionary. It was time to add a new word to my vocabulary. My word for the day was apotheosis. I looked out the window and repeated to myself the word and its meaning. I used it in three different sentences. I liked the word. It was a particularly beautiful word to be memorizing while looking across the smoldering flannel plain to the tender seam of earth and sky. It was a word lavish with sunlight, with the gods' gladsome songs, the golden power of the sun. I got a blanket and went out to meet Myna.

We ate some fruit and discussed Mexico. She seemed serious about going. 'She wanted to live in a house that jutted out over a high crag, a house with gardens inside and out. We'd grow our own food, get high whenever we wanted, and read the lives of the saints to each other through the terrifying nights. Zapalac joined us then, loudly, dropping to the blanket as if expecting a sudden burst of smallarms fire. His face split into a warm smile, teeth creamy and even, a filament of spittle fluttering between upper and lower sets.

"I'm glad to be here," he said. "With me it's a constant and neverending race to get from someplace of no particular distinction to someplace where you were better off before you got there. But this is different. A real, an actual picnic."

"We do it a lot," Myna said. "It's nice to get away, even a few yards."

"This whole place, no exaggeration, is close to› unbelievable. From the first day I arrived I figured any minute now the word will go out and everybody will wake up one morning and get out of bed and put on a uniform, an actual military uniform, because everybody will know that the word is out, everybody but me, and they'll see me walking 'around in my frayed twobutton suit that I've worn since high school with moths circling me like vultures ever since and they'll stand me up at a very choice spot against the nearest wall and let me have it. Granted I'm a little bit paranoid. But I've got a nose for terror. I can sense it. I can hear the engines revving. Still, I like it better here than in the Midwest where I was teaching last and where I came across nothing but insanely neat, wellgroomed and punctual Republicans. It nearly killed me, the sight of them all, because I get a lift out of, if anything, the confusions, the potential for disorganization in things and people. But my wife is from the Midwest, my wifetobe if we ever get to see each other again in order to get married, meaning who knows when they'll put on their uniforms and feed me to the dingo dogs out there or whatever they're called, and she's just like the rest of them so I think a certain amount of unpredictability is going to be introduced into her life that she didn't know was lurking on the back steps. Those people know their place. They're masters of the categories of things. They've been raised to believe everything they're told by their elders. They do things in alphabetical order. They know their place. They've known it since early childhood. Drummed into them by respectable parents. The same people who are ripping up the forests with their engines, their moneybuilding machines. But imagine. To respect your elders. It's remarkable, isn't it?"

"I never forget that they're the enemy," Myna said.

"Gary Harkness-is that your name?"

"Right."

"A football player."

"That's right."

"Fantastic," Zapalac said. "What I wouldn't give to be an ace quarterback for the Denver Broncos. I love sports. I love football. I reject the notion of football as warfare. Warfare is warfare. We don't need substitutes because we've got the real thing. Football is discipline. It's team love. It's reason plus passion. The crowds are fantastic. They jump and scream. Hockey, I love hockey. Basketball, too much sweating goes on where you can see it. It's a sweating sport, an armpit sport. But football, I love football. I'm crazy for it. I wallow in it."

"The real needs of man," I said.

"Fantastic," he said.

"Have an orange," Myna said.

"What you were saying earlier about what scares you. Where the true danger is. Something about patriotic manifestations."

"Let me just simply mention flagwaving and the insane repetitive ritualizing that goes on every time a flag is hiked up a pole or some veterans of Gettysburg come hobbling along with their medals, their stickpins, their poppies, their flags, their hats, their banners, their bumper stickers, or some simple sports event where you look up suddenly and there's sixteen thousand Shriners and Masons with their comical Turkish hats and they're covering every inch of the playing field with, in the middle of them all, three hundred and eightyfive high school 'girls dressed in red, white and blue who are prostrating themselves on the cold earth as they assume the shape of an American flag being dragged through yak dung by syphilitic foreign students and off to the side there's some crippled television personality in a wheelchair and pulleys singing the national anthem as the cystic fibrosis child of the month poses in the nude for the cover of Life. I tend to worry about such spectacles."

"Back in my hometown I took a walk one morning and I kept seeing the same word everywhere I went. Store ' windows. Leaflets in the street. Advertising space on walls. I kept seeing it for about two weeks. militarize. It was everywhere-printed, written, scribbled, chalked on walls. I didn't know what it was all about."

"I would have gone into bidding," Zapalac said. "That kind of word, I would have taken food and water and gone into the mountains."

"I would have gone to Mexico," Myna said. "Here, eat this orange, Zap."

"That kind of word, I don't hang around to find out what it all means. I'm a little guy. I look slightly Oriental. I look a little bit Mexican. I've been taken for an Iraqi and I've been taken for a Jew. I don't trust a place where that kind of ize word appears. Ize words make me nervous. I go underground. I go into the mountains."