Don DeLillo - Americana

"I hope you got what you want," he said.

"It should be okay. This camera was designed for sports, nature, news, that kind of thing. I may need you one more time."

"Can I ask a question?" "That's all for today, gentlemen."

He laughed at that and then reached out a hand to help me to my feet.

Pike slept in the back of the camper. Brand and I were up front, waiting for Sullivan in the parking lot of a supermarket. I saw a group of women standing by a station wagon. There were seven of them, pushing cartons and shopping bags over the open tailgate into the rear of the car. Celery stalks and boxes of Gleem stuck out of the bags. I took the camera from my lap, raised it to my eye, leaned out the window a bit, and trained it on the ladies as if I were shooting. One of them saw me and immediately nudged her companion but without taking her eyes off the camera. They waved. One by one the others reacted. They all smiled and waved. They seemed supremely happy. Maybe they sensed that they were waving at themselves, waving in the hope that someday if evidence is demanded of their passage through time, demanded by their own doubts, a moment might be recalled when they stood in a dazzling plaza in the sun and were registered on the transparent plastic ribbon; and thirty years away, on that day when proof is needed, it could be hoped that their film is being projected on a screen somewhere, and there they stand, verified, in chemical reincarnation, waving at their own old age, smiling their reassurance to the decades, a race of eternal pilgrims in a marketplace in the dusty sunlight, seven arms extended in a fabulous salute to the forgetfulness of being. What better proof (if proof is ever needed) that they have truly been alive? Their happiness, I think, was made of this, the anticipation of incontestable evidence, and had nothing to do with the present moment, which would pass with all the others into whatever is the opposite of eternity. I pretended to keep shooting, gathering their wasted light, letting their smiles enter the lens and wander the camera-body seeking the magic spool, the gelatin which captures the image, the film which threads through the waiting gate. Sullivan came out of the supermarket and I lowered the camera. I could not help feeling that what I was discovering here was power of a sort.

In the evening we sat in the camper on Howley Road and listened to the radio. A war summary came on. I did not listen to the news, merely to the words themselves, the familiar oppressive phrases. It was like the graytalk of the network- not what something meant and often not its opposite.

"Who wants to be in my novel?" Brand said. "It'll cost you fifty dollars and I'm in a position to guarantee immortality."

"I want to be made a brain surgeon," Pike said.

"Eighty dollars even."

"A lover," I said. "Make me a great lover."

"A hundred and fifty dollars gets you into bed with the female character of your choice."

"Are you in the book?" I said to Sullivan.

"You're all in it," Brand said. "Everybody's in it."

"Put me down for the one-fifty then."

"You'll be wanting change," Sullivan said.

"I don't think so."

"Because I had an affair in someone else's novel many years ago. My partner found it less than satisfactory. He was a naval officer with heaps of experience. Of course I was just a girl then."

"Make me a brain surgeon with unsteady hands," Pike said. "You can build suspense around a theme like that."

"Suspense is no longer relevant," I said.

"Bullthrow," Pike shouted. "That's bullthrow."

"Easy," Sullivan said.

"Pike's pique reaches mountainous proportions," I said, very pleased with myself.

"Bullthrow."

The words issued smoothly from an intelligent face (no doubt), running on past some reverse point of tolerance, and soon they seemed to generate an existence of their own, to demand an independence, to live in a silhouette of meaning more subtle, more cunning than the intelligence which bred them might ever know. We listened quietly for a while. The announcer said he had accidentally read the previous day's dispatch.

"I have fantasies about falling in love with a Vietnamese girl," Brand said. "But then she dies of a funny disease and I spend the rest of my life in pain."

The northern monsoon clouds were lifting. The killer teams were sweeping the villages. At night you could see the tracers streaking across the free-fire zones. There are twenty rounds to a magazine.

"America can be saved only by what it's trying to destroy," Sullivan said.

I spent much of the next two days in the library, doing research, thinking, worrying, writing monologues and dialogues. I walked over to the camper late in the afternoon of the second day and found Pike alone. I reported my plans to visit Chicago. Then I talked him into driving me up and down one of the quiet old streets in town while I shot some footage out the front window. I instructed him to drive at a walking speed or even less. I didn't have clamps with which to fasten the camera to the door frame and I wanted as little movement as possible. Also I liked the idea of drawing out the rows of houses, extending them in time, understanding them as more important in their appearances than in the voices and sorrows they contained. It was an interview in the new language. And with no people in sight I was able to shoot at higher than normal speeds, reducing vibration and prolonging the scene even more. By inches we moved along the street, each silent and lovely home a slow memorial to some shrill inner moment unquieted by time.

There is a motel in the heart of every man. Where the highway begins to dominate the landscape, beyond the limits of a large and reduplicating city, near a major point of arrival and departure: this is most likely where it stands. Postcards of itself at the desk. One hundred hermetic rooms. The four seasons of the year in aerosol cans inside the medicine chest. Repeated endlessly on the way to your room, you can easily forget who you are here; you can sit on your bed and become man sitting on bed, an abstraction to compete with infinity itself; out of such places and moments does modern chaos raise itself to the level of pure mathematics. Despite its great size, the motel seems temporary. This feeling may rise simply from the knowledge that no one lives here for more than one or two days at a time. Then, too, it may be explained by the motel's location, that windy hint of mystery encircling a lone building fixed in what was once a swamp; a cold gale blows from the lake or bay, sunlight cracks on the wingtips of distant planes, ducks tack upwind, and nowhere is there a sign of a human on foot. The motel seems to have been built solely of bathroom tile. The bedsheets are chilly and faintly damp. There are too many hangers in the closet, as if management were trying to compensate for a secret insufficiency too grievous to be imagined. From small gratings in the wall comes a steady and almost unendurable whisper of ventilation. But for all its spiritual impoverishments, this isn't the worst of places. It embodies a repetition so insistent and irresistible that, if not freedom, then liberation is possible, deliverance; possessed by chaos, you move into thinner realms, achieve refinements, mathematical integrity, and become, if you choose, the man on the bed in the next room. The forest lodge, the suite of mauve rooms, the fleabag above the hockshop, the borrowed apartment-all too personal, the unrecurring moment. Men hold this motel firmly in their hearts; here flows the dream of the confluence of travel and sex.

Edwina Meers was staying at such a motel near O'Hare Airport, roughly seventeen miles from the center of Chicago. Meredith had given me the name of the place and I had called Edwina and Charles and told them to expect me. Then I had borrowed Glenn Yost's car, a gray spastic Pontiac, and headed north in the night. It was good to be on the road again, daring the logic of the white line. Many trailer trucks went by, bearing the license plates of a dozen states, and the car rocked in their wind. I was part of the commerce, the romance of long-haul freight, the epic striding song of the Triple A travel guides.