Don DeLillo: End Zone

"Here's the way I have it figured," I said. "I have it figured that you came here because of Creed, because he convinced you that he could make a complete football player out of you. Or more than that. It was more, wasn't it? There was something in Creed that appealed to you. Not appealed to you-hit you, struck you as being important. He conveyed some kind of message that caught you just right, the same message I got, the sense of some awful kind of honesty that might flow back and forth between you. There's something chilling about Creed. He seems always to be close to a horrible discovery about himself. He's one of those men who never stops suffering, am I right, and he takes you in on it. If you're in his presence at all, you're almost sure to perceive that he's in some kind of pain. He allows you to get fairly close to it, not all the way but fairly close. And this is what makes you trust him or at least relate to him if you're even slightly sensitive to the man's reality, to that awful honesty he conveys. Am I right or not?"

"I'd have to put that whole subject in historical perspective," Taft said.

"I'm anxious. I'm eager to hear it."

"When it became known that I was leaving Columbia, a whole bunch of people started coming around. An aggregation. Just a whole bunch of them. Prospectors. Canny little men. Appraisers. All with wrinkles around their eyes and friendly enough smiles that you could see them put the brakes to. They came from all over. They came from the swamps, from the mountains, from the plains, from the lakes. In ten days I heard every variation on every regional accent you can imagine. And it was football all the way. It was facilities, plant, tradition, pride, status. It was which conference is best. It was intersectional rivalry and postseason games. Those people could talk football for six hours straight, ten hours, one whole complete weekend. All but Creed. Those people were all the same, compilers of digits, body counters. Friendly enough. But all in that area."

"Then Big Bend walked in."

"Creed was too much. He was part Satan, part Saint Francis or somebody. He offered nothing but work and pain. He'd whisper in my ear. He'd literally whisper things in my ear. He'd tell me he knew all the secrets but one-what it was like to be black. We'd teach each other. We'd work and struggle. At times he made it sound like some kind of epic battle, him against me, some kind of gigantomachy, two gods at war. Other times he'd sweettalk me-but not with prospects of glory. No, he'd tell me about the work, the pain, the sacrifice. What it might make of me. How I needed it. How I secretly wanted it. He was going to work me into the ground. He was going to teach me how to get past my own limits. Mind and body. He stressed that more than once. Mind and body. And it would be all work, pain, fury, sweat. No time for nonessential things. We would deny ourselves. We would get right down to the bottom of it. We would find out how much we could take. We would learn the secrets."

"He sold you on pain and sacrifice," I said. "You have to give the man credit for a novel approach. He knew his quarry. He knew how to get you, Taft. No brothers down here. No sisters. No sporting press to record your magic. No cameras. He got you on pain. He knew just what he was doing. I give the man credit. He got you on selfdenial, on being alone, on geography."

"Don't make it sound so unnatural, Gary. This place isn't as bad as all that. There are counterbalances of one kind or another."

"I know," I said. "I'm very aware of that. But tell me how it ended. Did you and Creed teach each other? Did you get down to the bottom of it? Does he know you're through with football?"

"I continue to instruct myself in certain disciplines. So in that sense I'm still working my way down to the bottom of it. Creed knows I'm not playing football anymore. He's known for quite a while. He said he was expecting it. I told him I knew he was. We were in that room of his. He's so inside himself, that man. I don't think he sees any need for mobility. I mean whatever it is, it'll come to him. I think that's the way he sees it. It'll come or it won't. I doubt he cares very much. But I'm feeling better about things now that I'm through with football. It was time to cut it loose. I feel better every day."

"What did you teach each other?"

"That kind of question gets us into areas where it's hard to avoid sounding ridiculous. In short we taught each other nothing. That summarizes it pretty neatly, I think. And now it's almost time to face Mecca."

"You're staying here, I assume. Football or no football. There are so many arguments against this place that I assume you're staying."

"I've got this room fixed up just the way I want it."

"Of course. This room. Absolutely."

"I'm not being evasive, Gary. Or keeping traditional distances. I want you to take me literally. Everything I've said is to be taken literally. I've got this room fixed up just the way I want it. It's a well proportioned room. It has just the right number of objects. Everything is exactly where it should be. It took me a long time to get it this way. Before I came here, I told Creed there was one condition. I room alone. I had to have that, I told him. I guess everybody thought they kept me separated in the name of racial sensitivity. But that wasn't it at all. It was my idea from the beginning. It was the only demand I ever made of Creed. I room alone."

"Two clocks," I said.

"Only a seeming excess. They correct each other. Between them, a balance is arrived at, a notion of how much space has to be reconstructed. Space meaning difference between disagreeing hands."

"Three gray pencils in an exmarmalade jar on a small, probably oak desk."

"A certain play of shapes. The words on the old marmalade jar. The fact that pencils diminish with use. Affinity of materials."

"A radio."

"The place where words are recycled. The place where villages are burned. That's my Indochina. I listen only at certain tunes of day for certain periods of time. When time's up, I bring it into silence. It's almost a ceremony."

"Small mark on wall left by tape."

"I believe in static forms of beauty," he said. "I like to measure off things and then let them remain. I try to create degrees of silence. Things in this room are simple and static. They're measured off carefully. When I change something slightly, everything changes. The change becomes immense. My life in here almost resembles a certain kind of dream. You know the way objects in dreams sometimes acquire massive significance. They resound somehow. It's easy to fear objects in dreams. It gets like that in here at times. I seem to grow smaller at times and the room appears almost to lengthen. The spaces between objects become a little bit frightening. I like the colors in here, the way they never move, never change. The room tone changes though. There's a hum at times. There's a low roar. There's a kind of dumb brute chant. I think the room tone changes at different times of day. Sometimes it's oceanic and there's other times when it's just barely there, a sort of small pulse in an attic. The radio is important in this regard. The kind of silence that follows the playing of the radio is never the same as the silence that precedes it. I use the radio in different ways. It becomes almost a spiritual exercise. Silence, words, silence, silence, silence."

"My roommate wets the bed," I said. "It's a little hard for me to evolve any kind of genuine stasis under the circumstances. Somehow pee is inimical to stasis. Although I wouldn't want to have to prove it phenomenologically, if that's the word I want."

"I can see your difficulty."

"What about books, Taft? How do they enter into the scheme? I have a problem in that regard. I like to read about mass destruction and suffering. I spend a lot of time reading stuff that concerns thermonuclear war and things that pertain to it. Horrible diseases, fires raging in the inner cities, crop failures, genetic chaos, temperatures soaring and dropping, panic, looting, suicides, scorched bodies, arms torn off, millions dead. That kind of thing."