Mao II - Don Delillo [32]
In the van all clothing was the same, dumped in a pile and washed together, then given out so many items per person, never mind original owner or previous wearer. This was the truth of the body common. But it sure gives you a strange feeling, wearing someone else’s socks and another person’s underwear. Gives you the jumps, the cold creeps. Makes you want to walk along a little shriveled inward so you don’t touch the clothes you’re in.
And she was selling peanuts on the street, which she couldn’t help feeling was a personal comedown after flowers. A guilty and dangerous thought. And her peanut team was made up of fairly purposeless sisters, roaming the land without the rooted point of view that their unison prayers affected the lives of every single person on the planet.
And she often thought of her husband, Kim, who was attached to a mission in England, the husband she didn’t know. The separation would end in six months but only if each of them brought three new members into the church.
She believed deeply in Master and still thought of herself as a seeker, ready to receive what was vast and true. But she missed simple things, parents’ birthdays, a rug underfoot, nights when she didn’t have to sleep in a zipped bag. She began to think she was inadequate to the strict plain shapes of churchly faith. Head pains hit her at the end of the day. They came with a shining, an electrochemical sheen, light from out of nowhere, brain-made, the eerie gleam of who you are.
Scott took her to a motel and listened to her talk for much of the night. She peed with the door open and he thought, How fantastic. No sex however just yet. She talked in ten-minute spasms. She could not sleep or was afraid to. He kept going to the machine in the corridor to get her soft drinks and came back expecting to find her gone, a curtain blowing through the open window, except the curtains were too heavy to blow and the windows didn’t open anyway.
Then action, bodies moving through the night. Because just as she was beginning to doubt and fear and mind-wander, she stepped out of the van on a cloud-banded evening and three men detached themselves from a playground wall and approached, two strangers and her tank-top cousin Rick, a football player with a clean-shaven head except for one wavy lock right on top, dyed y’know like parrot-green. The other guys wore suits and showed a certain weary expertise. Frankly it’s hard to know what to say to people who come off a wall in a nameless town and your own bulging cousin has a look that’s unreadable.
They stuffed her in a car and took her to a motel room, where her father sat waiting in a fire-retardant chair, oddly in his stocking feet. There was a lot of emotional talk, tabloid-type reassurances about love and mother and home, and she listened craftily, moved and bored more or less together, and Daddy cried a little and kissed her and put on his shoes and then left with Rick, who’d put his hand in her panties when they were ten, a memory that hung between them like the musky scent of a sniffed finger, and here was Scott in his own motel marveling at the underwear theme that coursed through this young woman’s life.
Brita sat with her head back on the padded rest and her eyes closed, hearing his voice go louder when he turned her way.
The two men deprogrammed her eighteen hours a day for eight days. They cited case histories. They repeated key phrases. They played tapes and showed movies on the wall. The shades were drawn all the time and the door stayed locked. No clocks or watches anywhere. They left when she slept or tried to sleep and a local churchwoman arrived and sat in a chair with a headset on, listening to songs of the humpbacked whales.
In these quiet moments of near sleep she sometimes loved her parents and was stirred by the drama of abduction.
You were brainwashed.
You were programmed.
You have the transfixed gaze.
Other times she hated everyone involved and thought it was the logical brutal extension of parent-child, locked in a room and