Don DeLillo - Americana

"I'm surprised you people have decided to stay on," I said. "I thought you'd get tired of this place. I didn't think this thing I'm doing would take this long."

"Nobody decided to stay on," he said. "We never discussed it. We've never discussed anything and nobody's made any decisions that I know of. We just stayed on."

"But aren't you tired of this place?"

"I never thought about it. Anyway where would we go without you? You're leading this expedition."

"I don't think that's in effect anymore. It's just that I didn't think it would take this long to do this thing I'm doing."

"Nobody's talked about moving on," he said.

"What about your book?"

"There is no book, Davy. There's eleven pages and seven of them don't have any words on them. And I'm not making any great claims for the other four."

"I thought you were writing all the time you were up in Maine. How long were you up there?"

"Almost a year," he said.

"What did you do all that time?"

"I don't know. I really don't remember much of it. I guess I was stoned most of the time. I think I blew a fuse or something. My head went dead. That's the only way to put it. Something in there burned out and blew away. Went dead."

"And you were in that garage for a whole year. And you weren't doing anything."

"I was doing something. I was killing my head."

"All right," I said. "Pike's barking in his sleep. He doesn't care where he is as long as he's got a bottle at his elbow. You don't have any novel in the works and you're in no hurry to get back to Maine or anywhere else. But what about Sully?"

"You'll have to ask her. I told you, nobody discusses anything in our family. We're a very tightlipped bunch."

"How long's your money going to hold out?"

"The lady's been picking up tabs the last ten days or so."

"I didn't know that," I said. "I wish I could lend you some money but I'm not fixed too well myself. I guess I'm out of a job by this time."

"I was wondering about that. I'd talk to the lady if I were you."

We jogged some more, drinking in the cool air, drinking it and snorting it out again, throwing punches at the wind. Then the four of us sat around the table in the camper making small sounds with our feet and elbows.

"I was wondering about that," Sullivan said. "I seemed to remember that you were due in the Southwest sometime last week but I wasn't sure. You didn't say anything."

"I've been busy."

"That was a good job, David."

"I was making twenty-four five. Look, I need you one more time for the thing."

"I'll be here," she said.

"He took my glasses away and tucked me in bed," Brand said. "It wasn't as much fun as I thought it might be. That Carol what's-her-name Deming. She got a little bit weird at the end. What's the point of the whole thing anyway?"

"Go play with your doll," I said.

Austin dressed as he had for the first sequence. I was wearing a lime nylon turtleneck and a pair of chinos with stovepipe stripes.

"Then the lame girl in Florence was real," he said.

"That's right. It took the edge off meeting my ex-wife. We'd been hinting to each other about a possible reconciliation. But the lame girl caused a strange kind of shift in my thinking.

Hard to explain. My ex-wife's parents were in Germany at the time. The lame girl was German. Then late in the day my ex-wife started limping. None of it meant anything. But it confused me somewhat. I tried to tie it all together. But it wouldn't quite tie. It was just enough to throw things off. The lame girl was homely and that didn't help matters."

"You tell me some things but not others. Why I'm in this uniform again for instance."

"Did Fred Zinnemann tell Burt Lancaster?"

"I'm used to doing what I'm told at McCompex," he said. "But there's no reason why you can't be a little less grudging."

"Up against the wall, motherfucker."

It was his final scene. I sighted on him standing against the printed black words. Then I narrated, making it up as I went along.

"The year is 1999. You are looking at a newsreel of an earlier time. A man is standing in a room in America. It is you, David, more or less. What can the two of you say to each other? How can you empty out the intervening decades? It's possible to put your hand to a movie screen and come away with a split second of light, say a taxicab turning a corner, and it's right there on your thumb, Forty-ninth Street and Madison Avenue. You can talk to the screen and it may answer. You barely remember the man you're looking at. Ask him anything. He knows all the answers. That's why he's silent. He has come through time to answer your questions. He is standing still but moving. He is silent with answers. You have twenty seconds to ask the questions." (I held on Austin Wakely, motionless against the wall, expressionless, and quietly I counted off the seconds-one through twenty.) "We come now to the end of the recorded silence."

Austin and I shared a bottle of warm Coke.

"Listen," I said. "Can you do something for me?"

"What's that?"

"Get me Drotty. I want Drotty for one hour."

"Why was he killed?"

"He made a clerical error. He messed up some sort of minor detail. Details cause trouble. He used to say that."

"How was he killed?"

"How are most businessmen killed? Their hearts fail and they fall down on the rug. He had heart failure with minor variations. No one can say his death was meaningless."

"What will you do now?"

"I'll go to Topeka, Kansas."

"Why there?"

"I've always wanted to sit in a laundromat in Topeka, Kansas. I think it has something to do with prenatal memories."

"Do you plan to get in touch with your family?"

"I prefer to let the bitterness linger. Any kind of contact at this point would only be confusing all around."

"Are you certain they're still bitter?"

"All but my brother. He never felt that way toward me."

"Will you get in touch with him, then?"

"No."

"Why not?"

"I'm afraid to see what has happened to him by this time."

"The camera appreciates your willingness to appear before it under such difficult circumstances."

I have tried up to now to avoid any grand revelations concerning the professionals in the cast. Carol and Austin were mixed things to me. I'm not sure exactly when I realized they could be valuable but I do know that the idea grew, in one form or another, out of first impressions. In Austin's case, appearance and age were vital; the fact that he was an actor meant nothing. Carol, both overflowing and annoyingly recessive, seemed, actress or not, to possess a talent for shading every moment, for moving across one's mental landscape like a teasing pattern of sunshine and cloud; it was a difficult talent, defying analysis and frustrating to witness until it displayed itself before the camera, a petty and even neurotic talent for concealing things not worth concealing, or for pretending to conceal, or pretending to disclose, or for dropping hints or sly eyelashes, a pain in the neck in other words, and perfect.

If these two people have seemed remote up to now, even indecipherable, mainly the girl, it should be understood that I did not want to understand them too well. They were mixed things to me, living people qualified (perhaps enlarged) by my own past, by my fantasies, mirror-seeking, honors, shames, and by those I loved or failed to love. Knowing them too well would have confused the issue, and the alter-issue, and the issue's bride, and the sister of the issue. And so I've tried to set them down as I knew them then, or failed to know them.

Now, in retrospect, and briefly, I think I can say that Carol was simply a lost girl trying to make the best of invisibility. Even her hair seemed questionably blond. It is worth pointing out that the moment she first appeared before my camera I ceased to care about her other roles, all those fluent ambiguities which at first had seemed so appealing and then so disturbing the night she talked me under the table at Buster's Bar amp; Grill. The camera chewed up these parts and spat them out. Carol was the best performer in the cast because she was the most consistently invisible.