Don DeLillo - End Zone

I walked back to Staley Hall. In the dining room I saw Bloomberg sitting with Spurgeon Cole. I put some corn flakes on a tray and joined them.

"How's Coach?" Spurgeon said.

"He's progressing as anticipated."

"I have a feeling," Bloomberg said, "that's he's about ready to shuffle off these mortal coils, as they say in show business."

"How does it feel being captain, Gary?"

"I get to go out for the coin toss. I've always wanted to be part of that. It's tremendously ceremonial without being too pompous."

"He's wearing the dark glasses again," Spurgeon said. "He hasn't worn them in months. Now he's wearing them."

"I know all about it. I have no comment."

"It must mean something, Gary. Dark glasses indoors in the dead of winter."

"It doesn't mean anything. Look at Steeples. Steeples is going around with a gold glove on his hand. What the hell does that mean?"

"Steeples has some kind of infection. It's ugly as hell apparently. He was exposed to something. It's a sort of burn plus a sort of infection. He just wants to keep it hidden."

"Is that all you're eating?" Bloomberg said to me.

"It contains vitamin B, iron and niacin."

"I'm up to threeosix," he said. "The new mind expands with the old body. I feel more alert every day. I feel revitalized."

Bing Jackmin came over and sat down. His tray held baked ham, mashed potatoes, salad and pound cake. He was looking at me intensely.

"Did you talk to Coach?"

"Give me time," I said.

"There is no time."

"Can't you start growing it and then either keep it going or terminate it when I find out what the word is?"

"Terminate what?" Spurgeon said.

"His excess hair. He wants a beard. Does anybody know what the prevailing attitude is on excess hair?"

"Excess hair is acceptable if it doesn't exceed accepted standards," Spurgeon said.

"There's your answer, Bing."

"I am interested in certain aspects of global violence," Bloomberg said.

"Pass the salt," Bing said.

"This meat," Spurgeon said. "There's something wrong with this meat."

Bloomberg cleared his throat.

"I am an anguished physicist. I take long walks in the country. From time to time I have second thoughts about the supermegaroach aerosol bomb which can kill anything that moves on the whole earth in a fraction of a microsecond and which I alone invented and marketed. As I walk the peaceful country lanes of the Institute for Abstract Speculation and Sneak Attacks way out there in an unmarked site somewhere in the Pacific Northeast, a television crew films my every step. The director asks me to gaze up over the treetops and to squint slightly into the late afternoon sun. At such moments I think of my roachbomb and I am filled with a sense of deep humility and also with a feeling of fantastic bloodsucking power. And I am reminded of the comforting words of the famed celestial song of the Hindus. What is this crime I am planning, O Krishna? So you see, my friends, I am not without a sense of history nor of personal responsibility. I have a human side and I love the classics. As I smoke my pipe and play a quiet game of chess with my lovely wife, the mother of three fine boys by a previous marriage, I like to ruminate on the nature of man. What brought us forth from the primordial slime? Whither are we headed? What is the grand design? And pondering these vast questions over cheese and port, I come to the realization that one terminal bomb more or less makes small difference in this everexpanding universe of ours."

"Would somebody please pass the salt," Bing said.

"I am interested in the violent man and the ascetic. I am on the verge of concluding that an individual's capacity for violence is closely linked with his ascetic tendencies. We are about to rediscover that austerity is our true mode. In our future meditations we may decide to seek the devil's death. In our silence and terror we may steer our technology toward the metaphysical, toward the creation of some unimaginable weapon able to pierce spiritual barriers, to maim or kill whatever dark presence envelops the world. You will say this seems an unlikely matter to engage the talents of superrational man. But it is precisely this kind of man who has been confronting the unreal, the paradoxical, the ironic, the satanic. After all, the ultimate genius of modern weapons, from the purely theoretical standpoint, is that they destroy the living. We can go on from there to frame any number of provocative remarks but we will resist the temptation. We all know that life, happiness, fulfillment come surging out of particular forms of destructiveness. The moral system is enriched by violence put to positive use. But as the capacity for violence grows in the world, the regenerative effects of specific violent episodes become less significant. The capacity overwhelms everything. The mere potential of one form of violence eclipses the actuality of other forms. I am interested in these things. I am also interested in the discontinuation of contractions. Medial letters are as valid as any others. I have already begun to revise my speech patterns accordingly."

We were all laughing, not knowing exactly why. Maybe we thought Bloomberg was crazy. Or maybe we laughed because it was the only reaction we could trust, the only one that could keep us at a safe distance. Anatole, replying to the laughter, tapped his spoon against the plastic tray to his right. I finished my corn flakes and proceeded, as arranged, to the library.

Myna was sitting alone in one of the rooms downstairs. Her table was covered with books, all abandoned there, many left open (a breach in their solemnity), massive volumes in tiny lines of print. Beyond the table were long high stacks, reeking a bit of perspiration (presumably human), the 900 series, history in its smelliest caparisons, each dark aisle boobytrapped with a metal stool or two. It was fairly pleasant to be there, the library as womb, fluorescent refuge from chaos or rain. Myna was reading Zap Comix. I sat next to her, then reached across the table and pulled a book toward me. It was a dictionary, opened to facing pages that began with Kaaba and ended with kef. Myna looked different somehow. I hadn't seen her in about a week and it took me a couple of seconds to realize that her face was much more clear, almost completely blotchless. She leaned toward the dictionary. We read the definitions to each other for a while. Some of them were extremely funny. Then we selected certain words to read aloud. We read them slowly, syllable by syllable, taking turns, using at times foreign or regional accents, then replaying the sounds, perhaps backward, perhaps starting with a middle syllable, and finally reading the word as word, overpronouncing slightly, noses to the page as if in search of protomorphic spoor. Some of the words put Myna into a state of mild delirium; she thought their beauty almost excessive. We kept reading for half an hour. The words were ways of touching and made us want to speak with hands. We went into a far corner of the high stacks. There I started taking off her dress. The great cumulus breasts came rolling out of handbeaded blue Victorian velvet. We laughed loudly, then tried to quiet each other with soft punches to the arm. A button fell to the floor, rolling unsteadily into a distant corner. I made bubbling noises, rubbing my face in her breasts, scratching an itch just under my eye with her left nipple. Together we got the dress down over her hips, hitting each other lightly to warn the laughter off, and in time it was at her feet. I made strange noises of anticipation (gwa, gwa) and this made her hit me with both hands, but weakly because of the laughter rocking inside her. We heard something at the doorway and made faces at each other, exaggerated frightmasks, and I looked past her and through the slightly tilted rows of books, tilts and countertilts, angles commenting on other angles, centuries misplaced by slumbering hands, the entire selfcontradictory mass looming humorously over my darling's epic breasts. There was no one in the doorway. I plucked a chord or two on the tense elastic of her iridescent panties. Sign of tiny pink ridges, waveshaped, about her buoyant waist. We kissed and bit. She tickled certain vulnerable areas below my ribs. We touched, patted and licked. It may be impossible to explain why it seemed so very important to get her completely naked. Our hands rolled the pants past her hips and thighs. To mark the event I brought new noises to the room, vowel sounds predominating. Myna stepped away from the clothes, aware of the moment's dynamics, positing herself as the knowable word, the fleshmade sigh and syllable. She was beautiful, broad as a manysectioned cubistic bather, conceptually new, cloudbosomed, ultimate. To be forever loved in ways unworthy. In seconds we would be ingathered, amassment of hair and limbs, unbrokenly focused, hunting each other in the melting cave. Some one or thing at the doorway's edge. No: closer. A woman lurking in the stacks. I could see her, four rows away, shoulder to nose between the shelves. I gestured to Myna of the danger nearby. Then I tried to help her get into her clothes, accidentally bumping her once with my knee so that she fell forward over a stool. We looked at each other, not knowing whether to be alarmed by the approaching footsteps, or amused, or merely indifferent. I directed her toward a small alcove in which was placed a bust of some unnamed immortal. Then I opened a book and began to read in a soft voice a number of reflections on an ancient war I had never even heard of until that moment. The woman was Mrs. Berry Trout, an administrator of some kind. She gave me an unloving look.