Don DeLillo: Americana

We went back to the office. In the early afternoon it was always quiet, the whole place tossing slowly in tropical repose, as if the building itself swung on a miraculous hammock, and then the dimming effects of food and drink would begin to wear off and we would remember why we were there, to buzz and chime, and all would bend to their respective machines. But there was something wonderful about that time, the hour or so before we remembered. It was the time to sit on your sofa instead of behind the desk, and to call your secretary into the office and talk in soft voices about nothing in particular- films, books, water sports, travel, nothing at all. There was a certain kind of love between you then, like the love in a family which has shared so many familiar moments that not to love would be inhuman. And the office itself seemed a special place, even in its pale yellow desperate light, so much the color of old newspapers; there was the belief that you were secure here, in some emotional way, that you lived in known terrain. If you had a soul, and it had the need to be rubbed by roots and seasons, to be comforted by familiar things, then you could not walk among those desks for two thousand mornings, nor hear those volleying typewriters, without coming to believe that this was where you were safe. You knew where the legal department was, and how to get a package through the mailroom without delay, and whom to see about tax deductions, and what to do when your water carafe sprang a leak. You knew all the things you wouldn't have known if you had suddenly been placed in any other office in any other building anywhere in the world; and compared to this, how much did you know, and how safe did you feel, about, for instance, your wife? And it was at that time, before we remembered why we were there, that the office surrendered a sense of belonging, and we sat in the early afternoon, pitching gently, knowing we had just returned to the mother ship.

There was a phone ringing in the corridor. Nobody bothered to pick it up. Then another one began ringing. I walked slowly around my office, stretching as I went. I tried to remember whether Burt or Kirk had ever acted in an office film, one of those dull morality tales about power plays and timid adulteries. I noticed a memo on my desk. I knew immediately, from the brevity of the message, that it was another of the strange memos that had been appearing at irregular intervals for over a year. I picked it up and read it.

To: Tech Unit B

From: St. Augustine

And never can a man be more disastrously in death than when death itself shall be deathless.

Nobody knew who sent these memos. Investigations had been made, people questioned, but nothing came of it. Whoever sent them had to overcome two difficulties. He had to get into the multilith room and run off enough copies for our entire sub-section without being discovered. And he had to distribute the memos, one by one, to every desk and office in the area. The multilith operators had been cleared of any suspicion and so had all the mailboys. No one had ever seen these particular memos delivered; they simply appeared, either in the morning or the early afternoon. This was the first of the St. Augustines. Previous memos had borne messages from Zwingli, Lévi-Strauss, Rilke, Chekhov, Tillich, William Blake, Charles Olson and a Kiowa chief named Satanta. Naturally the person responsible for these messages became known throughout the company as the Mad Memo-Writer. I never referred to him that way because it was much too obvious a name. I called him Trotsky. There was no special reason for choosing Trotsky; it just seemed to fit. I wondered if he was someone I knew. Everybody seemed to think he was probably a small grotesque man who had suffered many disappointments in life, who despised the vast impersonal structure of the network and who was employed in our forwarding department, the traditional repository for all sex offenders, mutants and vegetarians. They said he was most likely a foreigner who lived in a rooming house in Red Hook; he spent his nights reading an eight-volume treatise on abnormal psychology, in small type, and he told his grocer he had been a Talmudic scholar in the old country. This was the consensus and maybe it had a certain logic. But I found more satisfaction in believing that Trotsky was one of our top executives. He made eighty thousand dollars a year and stole paper clips from the office.

I sat at my desk and with a ballpoint pen traced the outline of my left hand on a blank piece of note paper. Then I called Sullivan but she didn't answer the phone. I walked around the office some more and looked out into the corridor. Many of the girls were back at work, unhooding their typewriters and storing squalid Kleenex in the bottom drawers of their desks where it would rest with old love letters, rag dolls, and pornographic books their bosses had given them in the spirit of the new liberalism, and also to see if anything would happen. I closed the door. Then I unzipped my pants and took out my cock. I walked around the office like that for a while. It felt good. I put it back and then filed Trotsky's memo in the folder that held all of his other work as well as some poems I had written in the office from time to time and some schizo-grams from girls I knew. (hello from the scenic coast of nebraska.) I opened the door. Binky was at her desk. She took a sandwich and a paper container out of a white bag. The sandwich, when she unwrapped it, looked wet and gummy. There was something very touching about that moment.

"Welcome back to the big rock candy mountain."

"Hi," she said. "I spent two solid hours at goddamn Saks without buying a thing. And now I'm about to eat a Coca-Cola sandwich. Merry Christmas."

"Trotsky struck again."

"I saw it," she said. "I still think it's you."

She knew that would flatter me. Often she said things that seemed intended to do me some good. I never knew why. In many ways Binky was a good friend to me and I used to wonder what would happen if I tried, in the jargon of the day, to complicate our relationship. Once, working late in the office, she removed her shoes while taking dictation. The sight of a woman taking off her shoes has always stirred me, and I kissed her. That was all, a kiss between paragraphs, but maybe it wasn't mere tenderness which made me do it, nor a desire to challenge the blandness of our attachment. Maybe it was just another of my ego-moments. It was only several days before that I had learned about Binky and Weede.

"Come on in," I said.

She brought her lunch with her and we sat on the sofa.

"Phelps Lawrence just got bounced," she said.

"I heard."

"There's a rumor that Joyner's next."

"Joyner started it," I said. "It's part of his survival kit. If he's not careful it's going to blow up in his face one of these days."

"Jody thinks it's the beginning of a purge. There's been a rash of confidential memos. She thinks Stennis might be forced to resign. But keep it quiet. She made me promise not to breathe a word."

"I've noticed all the closed doors. Sometimes I think they close their doors just to frighten us. Everybody knows closed doors mean secret discussions and secret discussions mean trouble. But maybe they're in there watching guitar lessons on Channel 31."

"Grove Palmer is getting a divorce," Binky said.

Suddenly I realized that I hadn't brushed my teeth after lunch. I kept some toothpaste and a toothbrush in my office and always brushed my teeth after a lunch that included a few drinks. The washroom after lunch was always full of men brushing their teeth and gargling with mouth wash. There were times when I thought all of us at the network existed only on videotape. Our words and actions seemed to have a disturbingly elapsed quality. We had said and done all these things before and they had been frozen for a time, rolled up in little laboratory trays to await broadcast and rebroadcast when the proper time-slots became available. And there was the feeling that somebody's deadly pinky might nudge a button and we would all be erased forever. Those moments in the washroom, with a dozen men sawing away at their teeth, were perhaps the worst times of all. We seemed to be no more than electronic signals and we moved through time and space with the stutter and shadowed insanity of a TV commercial.