"Point Omega" - читать интересную книгу автора (DeLillo Don)4Passing into air, it seemed this is what she was meant to do, what she was made for, two full days, no word, no sign. Had she strayed past the edge of conjecture or were we willing to imagine what had happened? I tried not to think beyond geography, every moment defined by the desolation around us. But imagination was itself a natural force, unmanageable. Animals, I thought, and what they do to bodies in the wild, in the mind, no safe place. The day before, with all the phone calls made and everyone alerted, I'd stood outside and seen a car on the horizon floating slowly into motion, rippled in dust and haze, as in a long shot in a film, a moment of slow expectation. It was the local sheriff, broad red face, cropped beard. A helicopter was in the air, he said, trackers were on the ground. First thing he wanted to know was whether there had been any recent deviation in Jessie's normal pattern of behavior. The only deviation, I told him, was the fact that she was missing. I walked him through the house. He seemed to be looking for signs of a struggle. He checked Jessie's room and spoke briefly to Elster, who sat on the sofa throughout, barely able to move, either from medication or lack of sleep. He said nearly nothing and showed confusion at the sight of a uniformed man in the house, large man shrinking the room, badge on his chest, gun at his belt. Outside the sheriff told me that at this point there was no evidence of a crime to investigate. The procedure over time would be to coordinate a program with officials of other counties in order to examine motel records, phone records, car rentals, airline reservations and other matters. I mentioned the caretaker. He said he'd known the man for thirty years. The man was a volunteer naturalist, an expert on local plants and fossils. They were neighbors, he said, and then looked at me and listed a few categories of people in distress, ending with those who come to the desert to commit suicide. Elster agreed to make the call, finally, the one to Jessie's mother. I tested locations for him and the clearest signal was outside, late afternoon, the man facing away from the house. He spoke Russian, his body sagged, it was hard for him to lift his voice above a whisper. There were long pauses. He listened, then spoke again, every word a plea, the response of an accused man, negligent, stupid, guilty. I stood nearby, understanding that his one lapse into awkward English was a helpless mimicry of hers, an expression of shared pain and parental identity. A helicopter appeared in the pale sky to the east and I watched him straighten his back, slowly, head raised, free hand blocking the sun. Later I asked if he'd done what I'd told him to do. He looked away and walked toward his bedroom. I'd told him to raise the subject of Jessie's friend, the man she'd been seeing. Isn't this why her mother had sent her here? I stood at the door to his room. He sat on the bed, one hand raised in a gesture I could not interpret. What's the use or what's the connection or leave me alone. He wanted pure mystery. Maybe it was easier for him, something beyond the damp reach of human motive. I was trying to think his thoughts. Mystery had its truth, all the deeper for being shapeless, an elusive meaning that might spare him whatever explicit details would otherwise come to mind. But these weren't his thoughts. I didn't know what his thoughts were. I barely knew my own. I could think around the fact of her disappearance. But at the heart, in the moment itself, the physical crux of it, only a hole in the air. I said, "Do you want me to call?" "Doesn't make sense. Someone in New York." "It's not supposed to make sense. What makes sense? Missing people never make sense," I said. "What's her name, Jessie's mother? I'll talk to her." It wasn't until the following morning that he agreed to give me her phone number. Busy signal for half an hour, then an angry woman who resisted answering questions from someone she didn't know. The conversation went nowhere for a while. She'd met the man once, didn't know where he lived, how old he was exactly, what he did for a living. "Just tell me his name. Can you do that?" "She has three friends, girls, these names I know. Otherwise who she sees, where she goes, she doesn't listen to names, she doesn't tell me names." "But this man. They went out together, yes. You met him, you said." "Because I insisted. Two minutes he stands here. Then they leave." "But he told you his name, or Jessie did." "Maybe she told me, first name only." She could not recall the name and this made her angrier. I put Elster on the phone and he said something to calm her. It didn't work but I wasn't giving up. I reminded her there was something about this man that she didn't like. Tell me, I said, and she responded ungrudgingly for a change. For a week or longer there were phone calls. When she picked up, the caller put down the phone. She knew it was him, trying to reach Jessie. The ID screen displayed Blocked Caller. It was him every time, putting down the phone softly, and she could remember him standing in her doorway like someone you see three times a week, a delivery man with groceries, and you still don't know what he looks like. "Last time I see Blocked Caller I pick up the phone and say nothing. Nobody is speaking. We are playing like it's a stupid game. I wait, he says nothing. He waits, I say nothing. Full minute. Then I say I know who you are. Man puts down the phone." "You feel sure it was him." "This is when I tell her she is going away." "And once she went away." "No more phone calls," the mother said. He stopped shaving, I made it a point to shave every day, do nothing different. We waited for news. I wanted to get out, get in the car and join the searchers. But I imagined Elster with a mouthful of sleeping pills, the contents of a bottle. I imagined a soggy lump, a glob, thirty or forty pills compacted and dripping spit. I sat and talked to him about the medications in his cabinet. Only the usual dose, I said. Double-check the directions, heed the warnings. I actually said this, heed the warnings, and the phrase did not seem stilted. I imagined him standing in the doorway of his bathroom, mouth forced partly open by the dense mass, a tentative attempt, a literal taste, one hand on each doorpost, bracing him. Jessie had no cell phone but the police were checking records to see if she'd made or received calls on our phones. They were checking motel registers, reports of crimes in nearby counties and states. "We can't leave." "No, we can't." "What if she comes back?" "One of us has to be here," I said. I was cooking the omelettes now. He seemed to wonder what he was supposed to do with the fork in his hand. I made coffee in the morning, set out bread, cereal, milk, butter and jam. Then I went to his bedroom and talked him out of bed. Nothing happened that was not marked by her absence. He ate sparingly. He moved through the house like someone mopping the floor, taking steps determined by laborious circumstance. He was supposed to be in Berlin in a week, a lecture, a conference, he wasn't clear on the details. He began to see things out of the corner of his eye, the right eye. He'd walk into a room and catch a glimpse of something, a color, a movement. When he turned his head, nothing. It happened once or twice a day. I told him it was physiological, same eye every time, routine sort of dysfunction, minor, happens to people of a certain age. He turned and looked. Someone there but then she wasn't. I was counting the days again as I'd done in the beginning. Days missing. One of us was almost always on the deck, keeping watch. We did this well into the night. It became a ritual, a religious observance, and often, when both of us were out there, completely wordless. We kept the door to her bedroom closed. He began to resemble a recluse who might live in a shack on an abandoned mining site, unwashed old man, shaky, stubbled, caution in his eyes, a fear from one step to the next that someone or something is waiting. He referred to her now as Jessica, the real name, the birth name. He spoke in fragments, opening and closing his hand. I could watch him being driven insistently inward. The desert was clairvoyant, this is what he'd always believed, that the landscape unravels and reveals, it knows future as well as past. But now it made him feel enclosed and I understood this, hemmed in, pressed tight. We stood outside and felt the desert bearing in. Sterile thunder seemed to hang over the hills, stormlight washing toward us. A hundred childhoods, he said obscurely. Meaning what, the thunder maybe, a soft evocative rumble sounding down the years. He asked me for the first time what had happened. Not what I thought or guessed or envisioned. What happened, Jimmy? I didn't know what to tell him. Nothing I might say to him was more or less likely than something else. It had happened, whatever it was, and there was no point thinking back into it, although we would of course, or I would. He had the intimate past to think back to, his and hers and her mother's. This is what he was left with, lost times and places, the true life, over and over. A call late one night, the mother. "I think I know his name." "You think you know." "I was sleeping. Then I wake up with his name. It is Dennis." "You think it is Dennis." "It is Dennis, for sure." "First name Dennis." "This is all I heard, first name. I wake up, just now, it is Dennis," she said. At night the rooms were clocks. The stillness was nearly complete, bare walls, plank floors, time here and out there, on the high trails, every passing minute a function of our waiting. I was drinking, he was not. I wouldn't let him drink and he didn't seem to care. Sunsets were nothing more than dying light now, the dimming of chance. For weeks there had been nothing to do but talk. Now nothing to say. The name sounded ominous, Jessica, sounded like formal surrender. I was the man who'd stood in the dark watching while she lay in bed. Whatever Elster's sense of implication, the nature of his guilt and failure, I shared it. He sat opening and closing his hand. When he heard helicopters beating down out of the sun, he looked up, surprised, always, then remembered why they were there. We were often testing locations for cell phone reception, one of us facing one way, one of us the other, inside the house, outside, calling and getting calls, phone to one ear, free hand to the other, he is on the deck, I am forty yards down the path. I tried not to watch us when we did this. I wanted to stay within it, where the dance was a practical matter. I wanted to be free of seeing. I began to use the old handweights he'd found earlier. I stood in my room lifting and counting. I called the park rangers and the sheriff. I could not forget what the sheriff had said. People come to the desert to commit suicide. I knew I had to ask Elster if she'd ever showed tendencies. Jessica. Was she seeing a doctor? Did she take antidepressants? Her airline kit was still in the bathroom we'd shared. I found nothing, talked to her father, called her mother, learned nothing from either that might indicate a drift in that direction. I lifted the handweights one at a time, then both at once, twenty reps one way, ten the other, lifting and counting, on and on. I led him out to the deck and put him in a chair. He was in pajamas and old tennis shoes, unlaced, his eyes seeming to trace a single thought. This is where he fixed his gaze now, not on objects but thoughts. I stood behind him with a pair of scissors and a comb and told him it was time for a haircut. He turned his head slightly, in inquiry, but I repositioned it and began to trim his sideburns. I talked as I worked. I talked in a kind of audiostream, combing and cutting through the tangled strands on one side of his head. I told him this was different from shaving. The day would come when he'd want to shave and he'd have to do it himself but the hair on his head was a question of morale, his and mine. I said many empty things that morning, matter-of-factly, half believing. I removed the wormy rubberband from the weave of braided hair at the back of his neck and tried to comb and trim. I kept skipping to other parts of the head. He spoke about Jessie's mother, her face and eyes, his admiration, voice trailing off, low and hoarse. I felt compelled to trim the hair in his ears, long white fibers curling out of the dark. I tried to unsnarl every inch of matted vegetation before I cut. He spoke about his sons. You don't know this, he said. I have two sons from the first marriage. Their mother was a paleontologist. Then he said it again. Their mother was a paleontologist. He was remembering her, seeing her in the word. She loved this place and so did the boys. I did not, he said. But this changed over the years. He began to look forward to his time here, he said, and then the marriage broke up and the boys were young men and that was all he was able to say. I stood to the side, head tilted, and studied my handiwork. I'd forgotten to drape a towel over his upper body and there were cuttings everywhere, hair on his face, neck, lap and shoulders, hair in his pajamas. I said nothing about the sons. I just kept cutting. If I had to give him a shower, I'd give him a shower. I'd stick his head in the kitchen sink and wash his hair. I'd scrub out the sour odor he carried with him. I told him I was almost done but I wasn't almost done. Then I realized there was something else I'd forgotten, some sort of brush to whisk away all this hair. But I didn't go inside to find one. I just kept cutting, combing out and cutting. The call came early. Searchers had found a knife in a deep ravine not far from an expanse of land called the Impact Area, entry prohibited, a former bombing range littered with unexploded shells. They'd secured a perimeter around the object and were expanding the search. The ranger was careful not to refer to the knife as a weapon. Could be a hiker's or camper's, any number of uses. He set the approximate location of a dirt road that approached the site and when we finished talking I found Elster's map and quickly spotted the Impact Area, a large swatch of geometry with squared-off borders. There were thin wavery lines to the west-canyons, washes and mine roads. Elster was in his room sleeping and I leaned over the bed and listened to him breathe. I don't know why I closed my eyes when I did this. Then I checked his medicine cabinet to make sure the number of pills and tablets in various bottles had not diminished by a noticeable amount. I made coffee, set a place for him and left a note saying I'd gone into town. Blade seemed free of blood, the ranger had said. I drove toward town and then veered east for a time and finally down toward the area in question. I left the paved road and followed a rutted track into a long sandy wash. Soon there were tall seamed cliff walls crowding the car and it wasn't long before I reached a vehicle dead end. I put on my hat, got out and felt the heat, the brunt, the force of it. I opened the trunk and raised the top of the cooler where a couple of water bottles lay in melted ice. I didn't know how far I was from the search site and tried to call the ranger but there was no signal. I moved around squat boulders dislodged from the heights by flash flooding or seismic events. The rough path here looked and felt like crumbled granite. Every so often I'd stop and look up and see a sky that seemed confined, compressed. I spent long moments looking. The sky was stretched taut between cliff edges, it was narrowed and lowered, that was the strange thing, the sky right there, scale the rocks and you can touch it. I started walking again and came to the end of the tight passage and into an open space choked at ground level with brush and stony debris and I half crawled to the top of a high rubble mound and there was the whole scorched world. I looked out into blinding tides of light and sky and down toward the folded copper hills that I took to be the badlands, a series of pristine ridges rising from the desert floor in patterned alignment. Could someone be dead in there? I could not imagine this. It was too vast, it was not real, the symmetry of furrows and juts, it crushed me, the heartbreaking beauty of it, the indifference of it, and the longer I stood and looked the more certain I was that we would never have an answer. I had to get out of the sun and skidded back down to flat land and a wedge of shade, where I took the water bottle out of my back pocket. I tried again to call the ranger. I wanted him to tell me where I was. I wanted to know where he was, with precise directions this time. I wanted to reach the scene just to see, to feel what was there. I assumed the knife was on its way to a crime lab somewhere in the county. I assumed the sheriff had acted on the information I'd given him about the phone calls that Jessie's mother had been getting from the Blocked Caller. Dennis. I thought of him as Dennis X. Was there legal cause to trace the phone calls? Did the mother remember the man's name correctly? Would the father still be in bed, swallowed by memories, immobilized, when I walked into the house? The water was lukewarm and chemical, broken down to molecules, and I drank some and poured the rest over my face and down my shirt. I walked back into the wash under the shallow line of sky and then stopped and put my hand to the cliff wall and felt the tiered rock, horizontal cracks or shifts that made me think of huge upheavals. I closed my eyes and listened. The silence was complete. I'd never felt a stillness such as this, never such enveloping nothing. But such nothing that was, that spun around me, or she did, Jessie, warm to the touch. I don't know how long I stood there, every muscle in my body listening. Could I forget my name in this silence? I took my hand off the wall and put it to my face. I was sweating heavily and licked the moist stink off my fingers. I opened my eyes. I was still here, in the outside world. Then something made me turn my head and I had to tell myself in my astonishment what it was, a fly, buzzing near. I had to say the word to myself, That night I could not sleep. I fell into reveries one after another. The woman in the other room, on the other side of the wall, sometimes Jessie, other times not clearly and simply her, and then Jessie and I in her room, in her bed, weaving through each other, turning and arching sort of sealike, wavelike, some impossible nightlong moment of transparent sex. Her eyes are closed, face unfrozen, she is Jessie at the same time that she is too expressive to be her. She seems to be drifting outside herself even when I bring her into me. I'm there and aroused but barely see myself as I stand at the open door watching us both. I looked at him. The face was gradually sinking into the dense framework of the head. He was in the passenger seat and I said the words quietly. "Seat belts." He seemed to listen belatedly, knowing I'd spoken but failing to gather a meaning. He was beginning to resemble an x-ray, all eye sockets and teeth. "Seat belts," I said again. I buckled up and waited, watching him. We were taking the rented car, mine. I'd hosed down the car. I'd packed the bags and put them in the trunk. I'd made a dozen phone calls. He nodded this time and began to reach toward the strap over his right shoulder. We were leaving her behind. This was hard to think about. We'd agreed at the beginning that one of us had to be here, always. Now an empty house into fall and through winter and no chance he'd ever return. I unbuckled my seat belt and leaned over to help him strap in. Then I drove into town to fill up the tank and soon we were out again moving through fault zones and between stands of swirled rock, the history that runs past the window, mountains forming, seas receding, Elster's history, time and wind, a shark's tooth marked on desert stone. It was right to take him out of there. He'd be shivered down to a hundred pounds if we were to stay. I would take him to Galina, that was her name, the mother, and entrust the man to her compassion. Look at him, frail and beaten. Look at him, inconsolably human. They were together in this, I told myself. She would want to share the ordeal, I told myself. But I hadn't called her yet to say that we were heading home. Galina was the call I was afraid to make. I kept glancing over. He sat back, eyes wide, and I talked to him the way I had when I was cutting his hair, rambling through that long morning, trying to keep him company, distract us both. But there was nearly no one to talk to now. He seemed beyond memory and its skein of regret, a man drawn down to sparest outline, weightless. I drove and talked, telling him about our flight, reporting our flight number, pointing out that we were wait-listed, reciting time of departure, time of arrival. Blank facts. In the sound of my words I thought I heard a flimsy strategy for returning him to the world. The road began to climb, landscape going green around us, scattered houses, a trailer camp, a silo, and he started coughing and gasping, struggling to bring up phlegm. I thought he might choke. The road was tight and steep, guardrail at the edge, and there was nothing for me to do but keep going. He ejected the mess finally, hawked it up and spewed it into his open hand. Then he looked at it wobbling there and so did I, briefly, a thick stringy pulsing thing, pearly green. There was no place to put it. I managed to yank a handkerchief out of my pocket and toss it over. I didn't know what he saw in that handful of mucus but he kept looking. We passed a row of live oaks. Then he croaked a few words. "One of the ancient humors." "What?" "Phlegm." "Phlegm," I said. "One of the ancient and medieval humors." The hanky sat on his thigh. I reached over and grabbed it, eyes on the road, and shook it out and placed it on his hand, over the blob. A helicopter passed somewhere behind us and I looked in the rearview mirror and then over at Elster. He didn't move, he sat with hand extended, draped in the cloth. Leaving her behind. We listened to the sound of the rotor dying away in the distance. He cleaned the mess from his hand and then crumpled the handkerchief and dropped it to the mat between his feet. We drove in silence behind a motorboat being towed by a black pickup. I thought of his remarks about matter and being, those long nights on the deck, half smashed, he and I, transcendence, paroxysm, the end of human consciousness. It seemed so much dead echo now. Point omega. A million years away. The omega point has narrowed, here and now, to the point of a knife as it enters a body. All the man's grand themes funneled down to local grief, one body, out there somewhere, or not. We passed through pinewoods and along a lake, small birds flying low to the water. His eyes were closed and his breathing a steady nasal hum. I tried to think about the future, unknown weeks and months ahead, and I realized what it was that had passed out of mind until this moment. It was the film. I remembered the film. Here it is again, man and wall, face and eyes, but not another talking head. On film the face is the soul. The man is a soul in distress, as in Dreyer or Bergman, a flawed character in a chamber drama, justifying his war and condemning the men who made it. It would never happen now, not a single frame. He would not have the firmness of will or the sheer heart for it and neither would I. The story was here, not in Iraq or in Washington, and we were leaving it behind and taking it with us, both. The road began to descend toward the freeway now. He was belted in like a child, asleep. I thought about the airport, the luggage, getting him a wheelchair. I thought about the medieval humors. I kept looking at him, checking on him. There we were, coming out of an empty sky. One man past knowing. The other knowing only that he would carry something with him from this day on, a stillness, a distance, and he saw himself in somebody's crowded loft, where he puts his hand to the rough surface of an old brick wall and then closes his eyes and listens. Soon we were headed west, cars and trucks in clusters, rattling traffic, four lanes, and my cell phone rang. I paused a moment, then snatched it off my hip and said yes. No response. I said yes, glancing at the screen. I hated freeway driving, traffic heavier now, cars shooting across lanes. I kept my eyes on the road. I didn't want to look at him, didn't want to hear any questions or speculations. I was thinking six things at once. The mother. She remembered his name in her sleep. I was thinking someone's returning my call. That's all it was, all it could be, someone I knew returning my call of last evening or earlier this morning, friend, colleague, landlord, weak signal, failed transmission. What did it mean? It meant that soon the city would be happening, nonstop New York, faces, languages, construction scaffolds everywhere, the stream of taxis at four in the afternoon, off-duty signs lighted. I thought of my apartment, how distant it would seem even when I walked in the door. My life at a glance, everything there, music, movies, books, the bed and desk, the seared enamel around the burners on the stove. I thought of the telephone ringing as I entered. |
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