Don DeLillo - Americana

We were nearing the end of the first week, determined not to stray even for a moment beyond the borders of our native land, carefully avoiding all those big footprint lakes and the specter of guiltless Canada. Sullivan slept up front, in the part of the camper that extended over the cab. Pike did most of the cooking. Brand did most of the driving. I yelled and read aloud from road maps.

With us all the way had been Sullivan's three-antenna marine-band hi-fi portable radio, a never-ending squall of disc jockey babytalk, commercials for death, upstate bluegrass Jesus, and as we drove through the cloverleaf bedlams and past the morbid gray towns I perceived that all was in harmony, the stunned land feeding the convulsive radio, every acre of the night bursting with a kinetic unity, the logic beyond delirium.

When it rained Sullivan put on her old buttonless trench-coat even though we were inside the camper. What a mysterious and sacramental journey, I thought, not knowing most of the time where we were, depending on Pike to get us from place to place. Every time I saw a river I thought it was the Mississippi. Every gas station attendant we talked to was named Earl.

I taped many of our conversations.

"This big blue yawning country," Brand said early one evening over sandwiches. "I want to piss on all the trees, tumble downhills, chase jackrabbits, climb up rooftops, crucify myself on TV aerials. I want to say hi neighbor to everybody we meet. It's beautiful. It's too much. Baby, it's wild. It's the strangest, wildest, freakingest country in history. Davy, keep me bland."

"Tell us about your novel," Sullivan said.

"Writers never talk about work in progress," I said. "Isn't that right, Bobby? It destroys the necessary tension. If they talked about it, they wouldn't have to write it anymore. Essentially people write to break the tension. Right, Brand? If the creative tension is broken prematurely, the original motivation is lost. I'm surprised to hear you ask a question like that, Sully. You of all people."

"It's about a man who turns into a woman," Brand said. "He's the former president of the United States. He's completed his two terms but he's still very popular and he's always speaking at important banquets. At the same time he's turning into a woman. He's beginning to grow breasts and his genitals are shrinking. His voice is becoming high and faggy. He wears a garter belt for the secret thrill it gives him. He's a WASP, the ex-president. But de new president is black. He's patterned after Sonny Liston. He's very hip and magical. He turns on every night and he's making it with all the wives and daughters of the southern senators and even with some of the senators themselves. It'll be over a thousand pages long. It's called Coitus Interruptus. The theme is whatever you want it to be because appearance is all that matters, man. The whole country's going to puke blood when they read it."

"I want to talk about this idea I've got for a movie," I said.

"We're all ears," Pike said.

"I'm thinking of making a long messy autobiographical-type film, part of which I'd like to do out here in the Midwest, if that's where we are-a long unmanageable movie full of fragments of everything that's part of my life, maybe ultimately taking two or three or more full days to screen and only a minutely small part of which I'd like to do out here. Pick out some sleepy town and shoot some film."

"How long will that take?" Sullivan said. "You'll be filming Indians in a couple of weeks."

"We've got time. The part I want to do now will take only two or three days. Either three days or seventeen years. I'll use available light. I don't care how primitive it is technically. Besides, I won't be filming Indians personally. I won't actually be handling a camera. My job will be to supervise and be supervised. The movie I want to make will be a different kind of thing completely. I'm just starting to get it straightened out in my head. It's funny how it came to me. I saw a woman trimming a hedge. Almost immediately it became something, else. And it's still changing."

"I wasn't finished talking about my novel," Brand said.

Pike was exploring his ear with a toothpick wrapped in tissue paper. When he was done he went up front to drive.

It was dusk now, bent rust powdering the western sky, neon-blooming motels, the dull sulfuric cast of roadlights, a jalopy abandoned in a field, hood raised like the peak of a baseball cap, a scene from the rural thirties. Sullivan hummed a medley of what appeared to be antiwar tunes. Brand was curled up with his British-made rolling machine and Zig-Zag cigarette paper. We seemed to be passing a resort area now. There were the white toy cottages with pink shutters from Hansel and Gretel and the filling stations of the back streets of small towns with a lone old pump and a dog asleep in grease. I remembered to turn off the tape recorder. Then I turned on the radio. Ali Akbar Khan was performing an evening raga, a sad liquid joy spilling from the strings of his sarod, and I thought of a blind Bengali walking a tightrope over nothing. I began in the dark and would no doubt end the same way. But somewhere between beginning and end there would have to be an attempt to explain the darkness, if only to myself, no matter how strange a form the explanation would take, and regardless of consequence. Maybe it was her hair. Maybe it was the way she moved as she cut the hedge, with the beautifully stylized bearing of a child who knows she is being watched. Sullivan kept on humming. A police helicopter appeared over the trees and went beating past us down the highway. Brand sucked smoke deep into his body.

"Where the fuck have all the flowers gone," he sang, hurrying the words to make them fit.

Pike turned onto a side road and eventually pulled into an A amp;P parking lot, fitting the camper between two station wagons waiting to be gorged. We entered by the great glass omniscient door, which knew we were coming and opened of itself. Brand and I peeled off from the others and followed a dark attractive woman down a side aisle to the peaches and plums. Her fingers skipped among the peaches, testing and prodding, and we moved alongside, our cart nudging her cart.

"Peaches," Brand said.

She gave us no sign.

"Look at the word come out of my mouth all moist and fuzzy. Peaches. It's the perfect word for the perfect thing. Now we're all standing here. If we all watch my lips, we'll all see it come out. Peaches. What do you think, miss, if that's your name. Should we pick up a pound or two? We're just a couple of good-looking guys from the East Coast, especially him. Listen, I've got some grass back at the plastic bitch."

She moved over to the plums and we followed. She was tall and her hips swung terrifically behind the shopping cart.

"Come on back to the truck with us and let loose for a while. We'll eat plums and smoke dope. I'm writing a novel using the direct interior monologue technique."

She looked around for a rescuer and I studied the plum in her fine Mediterranean hand. She was the kind of woman you imagine meeting in Port Said, older, wiser than you, pig-mented of earth and made of many bloods, amused at your blond boyish Yankee ways, dispensing shattering truth in short sentences, and here she was, incredibly, among the plums of Middle America.

"Air is not invisible," Brand said.

She soon vanished. We put our cart into reverse. The shelves were long and brilliant, and I thought of my father. This was his spangled ark, cans of dessert-whip with squiggly pricklike tops, mythology and thunderbolts, the green giant's loins, buckets of power and white beyond white, trauma in the rectangles of evangelistic writ. (You have to move the merch off the shelves.) A baby sat in a grocery cart, crying; his mother gave him a stalk of celery to play with and he was content. "Who loves mommy," she said. "Say who loves her, stinky-pants. Baby loves mommy. Yes, baby loves mommy. Say it, stinky-pants. Baby loves mommy. Yes, yes, yes." Women put their heads into monstrous freezers and came out alive. Checkout girls moved their hips against the cash registers. An old lady fell down.