Mao II - Don Delillo [11]
“Every face.”
“Every man and woman who is out there and who is reachable. If someone’s not well known, so much the better. Given a choice, I prefer to search out writers who remain obscure. I get tips all the time, I get names and books from editors and other writers who understand what I’m doing or at least they say they do to make me feel better. A planetary record. For me, it’s a form of knowledge and memory. I’m furnishing my own kind of witness. I try to do it systematically, country by country, but there are always problems. Finding some writers is a problem. And there are many writers in prison. This is always a problem. In some cases I’ve received permission to photograph writers under house arrest. People are starting to know me and this helps sometimes.”
“With authorities.”
“Yes, and writers. They’re willing to see me because they know I’m simply doing a record. A species count, one writer said. I eliminate technique and personal style to the degree that this is possible. Secretly I know I’m doing certain things to get certain effects. But we ignore this, you and I. I’m four years on this project, which by its nature of course there is no end.”
“The question is, what happens to Bill’s pictures?”
“This is completely up to you. I make some pictures available to publishers or the media but only if the writer gives consent. This is how I support the project, along with several grants. I have a travel grant I absolutely depend on. Magazines would do anything to run a photo essay on Bill Gray. But I don’t want to do pictures that make a revelation, that say here he is after all these years. A simple study piece is better. I want to do pictures that are unobtrusive, shy actually. Like a work-in-progress. Not so permanent and finished. Then you look at the contacts and decide what you want me to do with them.”
“These are the answers we were hoping to get.”
“Good. So life goes on.”
“And what happens ultimately to your pictures of writers as a collection?”
“Ultimately I don’t know. People say some kind of gallery installation. Conceptual art. Thousands of passport-size photos. But I don’t see the point myself. I think this is a basic reference work. It’s just for storing. Put the pictures in the basement of some library. If people want to look, they come and ask. I mean what’s the importance of a photograph if you know the writer’s work? I don’t know. But people still want the image, don’t they? The writer’s face is the surface of the work. It’s a clue to the mystery inside. Or is the mystery in the face? Sometimes I think about faces. We all try to read faces. Some faces are better than some books. Or put the pictures in a space capsule, that would be fantastic. Send them into space. Greetings. We are writers of Earth.”
The elevators climb and fall, the clock rotates, the bar slowly turns, the signs appear once more, the traffic lights change, the yellow taxis come and go. Magno, Minolta, Kirin, Sony, Suntory. What does Bill say? The city is a device for measuring time.
“There are kids up there. See them? Around the twentieth floor. Can you believe it?”
“It’s safer than the streets. Leave them alone,” she said.
“The streets. I guess I’m ready now.”
“Then we’ll go.”
They found the car and Scott drove north along the Hudson and across the bridge at Beacon into dusk and secondary roads, connecting briefly with the thruway and then dropping into networks of two-lane blacktops, hours into night, the landscape reduced to what appears in headlights, to curves and grades and the signs for these, and there were dirt roads and gravel roads and old logging trails, there were steep hills and the sleet-spray of pebbles firing up at the car, there were pine stands lit by the moon. Two near strangers in night confinement inside the laboring drone of the small car, coming out of long silences to speak abruptly, out of long thoughts and memory chains and waking dreams and every kind of mindlife, the narrative that races just behind the eyes, their