Don DeLillo - Americana

"Is there anything else you'd like to tell the camera?"

"Simply hello. Hello to myself in the remote future, watching this in fear and darkness. Hello to that America, whatever it may be doing or undoing. I hope you've finally become part of your time, David. You were always a bit behind, held back by obsolete sensibilities."

"Do you have any particular ambition in life?"

"To get out of it alive."

"Thank you," I said.

I shut down all systems, tape and film, and we talked for a while on subjects of no interest to either of us. Then Austin left and I took a blank piece of paper, crumpled it into a tight sphere and began tossing jump shots at the wastebasket. I pretended to be Oscar Robertson against Jerry West. An hour later I banked in a long left-hand hook and went to bed. It was the eighth anniversary of my mother's death.

I bought a hat, the first I had owned since childhood, a gray plaid bop cap which I wore with a magical child's belief in the infinities of common things. During the drive from New York to Maine I had worn at times a khaki fatigue cap, borrowed from Pike, but he had taken it back and buried it in his sea bag; no war games allowed with his private battle gear. On the hotel bed I rested, cap over my eyes. A full morning brushed through the shuddering blinds. Fellini, master of hats and noses, understands the philosophical nature of costume. My twenty-eight years in the movies. Making of a life so easily made that a hat on the head could become the man. The hat wore me. Arrivato Zampanó: the trailer and the road, her flawed boy's body announcing the strongman, and he in chains, bellowing. My teeth clicking in the dark at the Bleecker Street Cinema as they dance across the sky, a necklace of chessmen, hands locked in the northern dawn. Eyes closed, I inhaled some industrial gloom from the hat's soft lining, L. S. Stratford Ltd., bit of Finney falling down the stairs. I looked between the cracks inside the dark. Burt Lancaster toweling his chest: (and we live there, grubbing, in the pores). Bell looking at the poster of Belmondo looking at the poster of purposeful Bogart. Old man on the swing, Watanabe, singing to his unseen infancy. I took a walk around the bed, missing those stale chambers on the West Side, nicely epicene in their way, a touch of seedy glamour drifting in off Needle Park, pale tapering men who live for the films of the thirties. Shane rides toward the immaculate mountains.

I walked out to Howley Road, a cool night frozen over with stars. The light was on inside the camper and as I approached there worked up through my stomach the boy's delightful feeling of being a scout moving into enemy territory, moving through the darkness toward an outpost where the unsuspecting enemy sits smoking, just seconds from silent expert death.

"Today's my birthday," Brand said. "We're trying to think of ways to celebrate."

"How old are you?"

"Thirty."

"You're two years older than I am. What's it like to be thirty? A friend of mine told me three things happened when he reached thirty. He gained weight around the middle. He stopped reading novels. And he had a recurring year-long dream about a tapeworm in his stomach that gets so big it begins literally to outgrow him. It feeds on his vital organs, getting bigger as he gets smaller and weaker, until finally when it works its way out of his mouth, eating his gums and teeth in the process, it weighs about one hundred and eighty pounds, most of it him, and he's down to thirty pounds of bone and translucent skin and he falls on the floor and sees the huge slimy jaws of the tapeworm fitting themselves around his head as he wakes up. Warren Beasley told me that story, the radio personality."

"What do you mean he stopped reading novels?" Brand said.

"That's what he told me. I don't know what he meant by it."

"I'm taking all the slang out of my book. I'm inventing new slang."

"Sully, have you seen Ikiru by any chance?"

"Wait a minute, Davy, we're talking about novels. I plan to take out the slang and replace it with new forms, new modes. Maybe I'll eliminate language itself. It may be possible to find a completely new mode. I've been thinking about this lately. I'd like your opinion."

"In my little home movie, the thing I'm doing, I haven't reduced the value of language at all. I've reinforced it, in fact. What I've reduced is movement, the kind of movement that tells a story or creates a harmony. I want language to evolve from static forms. The film is a sort of sub-species of the underground. What I'm shooting now is just a small segment of what will eventually include more general matter-funerals, traffic jams, furniture, real events, women, doors, windows. Auto-fiction. Actors, people playing themselves, lines of poetry. When I'm done I'd like to put the whole thing in a freezer and then run it uncut thirty years from now."

"I'll be sixty then," Brand said.

"I'll be dirt," Pike said.

"Sully, I wonder if you'd be willing to appear in the movie. It won't take long. We can do it tomorrow. A brief scene. I know I haven't been spending much time around here lately but it's only because I've been so busy. I'm very grateful that nobody's complained about the number of days we've been spending here. So will you do it? A brief scene. Speak to me, sad-eyed lady of the lowlands."

"Of course, David. Anything for you."

Brand wanted to arm-wrestle. We locked hands and exchanged iron glares. I didn't know whether or not he was serious. He began to exert pressure and I put my head down and concentrated, trying to keep my elbows square on the table. For several minutes we strained, giving and taking little. My forearm was tense, muscles humming, and I put everything I had into one pivotal offensive, all my strength, a vein leaping in my wrist, his arm starting to give, elbow losing traction; then he stiffened suddenly and we were stalemated again and Sullivan was standing over us holding a strange painted wood-and-wire doll.

"It's your birthday present," she said. "I made it for you this afternoon. It's a doll-god of India. A menacing bitchy hermaphroditic divinity."

"I think I'm afraid of it," Brand said.

The grass was wet and the steel supports of the swings behind the bandstand in the park were dull silver in the clear morning. This from the twelfth year, boys on sleds seen through gauze in slow motion, their round steaming faces fading in the snow, the great love I had for my heavy boots and their rusty interlocking buckles; entering winter, pure and empty, sea-creature (brain) pulsing in the cookie jar, art and science of the shovelers of snow, the rocking chair's steady knocks thundering through the house, her hands clenching the edges of the armrests, knuckles white, and I wondered how that worked, whether blood stayed dammed in the veins of the hand or moved up the arm waiting for the hand to go soft, rocking in her darkness, snow softly dropping. But there was no snow now and I would have to shoot by daylight. Sullivan stood behind one of the swings, no questions asked or explanations offered, a woman, a figure in a landscape although snow was impossible and disease did not blast her cells, an actor, a woman nonetheless whose generating force took from the camera some of its power, weakening thankfully what was for me an all too overarching moment. Birds rested on the chimneys of several homes, starlings or wrens, neo-pterodactyls for all I knew, Iowa for all I knew, Alexandria, Kamakura, and through the eyepiece I saw pass behind her a blue panel truck with the single word Smith in white across the side. Nearer Iowa then and more than small comfort. Eight o'clock in the morning. Turned-up bowl of the bandstand. Trees and wet grass. Sand impacted in the sandbox by last night's late rain. Gulley of an outflung leg. Four-finger handprint. Pail's perfect circle. I adjusted the wind filter and she sat on the swing now, a nautical creak working down the links of the chains, tips of her fingers lightly touching them. She began to rise toward me, nothing in her eyes.