Mao II - Don Delillo [36]
“Who are you protecting, you or me?”
“It’s just the norm today.”
He saw how absorbed she was in the task, dainty-fingered and determined to be expert, like a solemn child dressing a doll.
Scott stood looking around the loft apartment. Columns extended the length of the room. There was a broad plastic sheet slung under the leaky skylight. Brita walked around switching on lights. A small kitchen and dining area and a half-hidden recess of files and shelves. He followed along behind her, turning two lights off. A sofa and some chairs in a cluster. Then a darkroom and printing room with black curtains over the doors. Out the south windows the Trade towers stood cut against the night, intensely massed and near. This is the word “loomed” in all its prolonged and impending force.
“I will make tea for the travelers.”
“Now I finally feel I’ve seen New York inside and out, just standing here in this space and looking through the window.”
“When it rains out, it also rains in.”
“Brita, despite whatever inconvenience.”
“It’s small as these places go. But I can’t afford it anymore. And I have to look at the million-storey towers.”
“One has an antenna.”
“The male.”
“Tea is perfect, thank you.”
In the kitchen she took things out of cabinets and drawers, an object at a time, feeling as though she’d been away for a month, six weeks, a sense of home folding over her now. These cups and spoons made her feel intact again, reclaimed her from the jet trails, the physics of being in transit. She was so weary she could hear it, a ringing in the bones, and she had to keep reminding herself she’d been gone for less than two days. Scott stood at a table across the room looking at strewn magazines and commenting more or less uncontrollably.
The elevator clanked through the building, the old green iron gate smashing and rattling in the night.
They drank their tea.
“What makes this city different is that nobody expects to be in one place for ten minutes. Everybody moves all the time. Seven nameless men own everything and move us around on a board. People are swept out into the streets because the owners need the space. Then they are swept off the streets because someone owns the air they breathe. Men buy and sell air in the sky and there are bodies heaped together in boxes on the sidewalk. Then they sweep away the boxes.”
“You like to overstate.”
“I overstate things to stay alive. This is the point of New York. I completely love and trust this city but I know the moment I stop being angry I’m finished forever.”
Scott said, “I used to eat alone. It made me ashamed, having no one to eat with. But not only alone—standing up. This is one of the haunting secrets of our time, that we are willing to eat standing up. I used to stand because it’s more anonymous, it suited the way I felt about being in the city. Hundreds of thousands of people eating alone. They eat alone, they walk alone, they talk to themselves in the street in profound and troubled monologues like saints in the depths of temptation.”
“I’m getting very sleepy,” Brita said.
“I don’t want to get back in the car right now.”
“You’re the driver, Scott.”
“I don’t think I can drive another fifteen feet.”
He got up and turned off another light.
Sirens sounding to the east.
Then he sat near her on the sofa. He leaned toward her and touched the back of his hand to her cheek. She watched a mouse run up the face of a window and disappear. She had a theory the sirens drove them mad.
She said, “In some places where you eat standing up you are forced to look directly into a mirror. This is total control of the person’s responses, like a consumer prison. And the mirror is literally inches away so you can hardly put the food in your mouth without hitting into it.”
“The mirror is for safety, for protection. You use it to hide. You’re totally alone in the foreground but you’re also part of the swarm, the shifting jelly of heads looming over your little face. Bill doesn’t understand how people need to blend in, lose themselves in something larger. The point of mass marriage