Mao II - Don Delillo [10]
He watched Broadway float into the curved window and felt as if blocks of time and space had come loose and drifted. The misplaced heartland hotel. The signs for Mita, Midori, Kirin, Magno, Suntory—words that were part of some synthetic mass language, the esperanto of jet lag. And the tower under construction across the street, webbed and draped against the weather, figures moving fleetly past gaps in the orange sheeting. He saw them clearly now, three or four kids playing on the girders, making the building seem a ruin, an abandonment.
“I also have to tell you I don’t understand the drill. I would prefer to get there on my own.”
“Get where? You wouldn’t know where you were going.”
“You could tell me, couldn’t you?” she said.
“Bill insists we do it this way.”
“A little melodramatic maybe?”
“Bill insists. Besides, we’re very hard to find.”
“All right. But for the man’s own peace of mind, why not choose a neutral site? That way there’s no problem over disclosure. His whereabouts remain secret.”
“I don’t think you’ll have very much to disclose. And Bill knows you won’t talk anyway.”
“How does he know?”
“We saw the piece about you in Aperture. That’s how we decided you were the one. And he couldn’t meet you somewhere else because he doesn’t go anywhere else, except to hide from the book he’s doing.”
“I do love his books. They really mattered to me. And he hasn’t been photographed in what? We must be speaking in the multi decades. So why don’t I just relax?”
“Why don’t you just relax?” Scott said.
Above the bar area there was a clock rotating in an openwork tower. From the table he could see through the bare trellis and clock framework to the elevators. He thought he could easily sit all afternoon watching the elevators rise and drop, clear pods ringed with pinpoint lighting. They moved soundlessly, clinging to the surface of a vast central cylinder. Everything was moving, everything was slowly turning, there was music coming from somewhere. He watched the people inside the elevators, deftly falling. High up, on the walkways, an occasional figure looking down, head and upper body. He wondered if the thing the woman tried to give him in the street might be a newborn child. The same musical phrase over and over, coming from somewhere.
“You photograph only writers now.”
“Only writers. I frankly have a disease called writers. It took me a long time to find out what I wanted to photograph. I came to this country it’s fifteen years. To this city actually. And I roamed the streets first day, taking pictures of city faces, eyes of city people, slashed men, prostitutes, emergency rooms, forget it. I did this for years. Many times I used a wide-angle lens and pressed the shutter release with the camera hanging at my chest from a neck strap so I wouldn’t attract the wrong kind of attention, thank you very much. I followed derelicts practically to their graves. And I used to go to night court just to look at faces. I mean New York, please, this is my official state religion. But after years of this I began to think it was somehow, strangely—not valid. No matter what I shot, how much horror, reality, misery, ruined bodies, bloody faces, it was all so fucking pretty in the end. Do you know? And so I had to work out for myself certain complicated things that are probably very simple. You reach a certain age, isn’t that the way it works? Then you know what you want to do at last.”
She was eating roasted nuts from her loosely clenched fist, popping one at a time and drinking peppered vodka.
“But isn’t it restful here?” he said. “I’m mesmerized by the elevators. It might be a new addiction.”
“Give me a break,” she said, and her slight accent and the worn-out catch phrase and the formal way she offered it, without crunching the first two words together, made him very happy.
“Only writers.”
“Only writers,” she said.
“And you’re making a record, a kind of census in still pictures.”
“I will just keep on photographing writers, every one I can reach, novelists, poets, playwrights. I am on the prowl, so to speak. I