Mao II - Don Delillo [37]
“Speaking of the future. ”
“You can’t send me out there.”
“I need to sleep, to stop the noise in my head. I feel I’ve known all three of you for years and it’s goddamn tiring actually.”
They were seated far from the one dim light floating over the stove.
“We’ve gone too far into space to insist on our differences. Like those people you talk about on the Great Wall, a man and woman walking toward each other across China. This isn’t a story about seeing the planet new. It’s about seeing people new. We see them from space, where gender and features don’t matter, where names don’t matter. We’ve learned to see ourselves as if from space, as if from satellite cameras, all the time, all the same. As if from the moon, even. We’re all Moonies, or should learn to be.”
She heard the elevator gate smash shut again. Her eyes were closed. But Scott was the one who fell asleep. When she realized this, she eased off the sofa and got a blanket for him. Then she went to the other end of the loft, past the kitchen, and climbed the ladder to her bed.
She took off her sneakers and lay face up with her clothes on, suddenly wide awake. The cat appeared at her elbow, watching. She heard shouting in the street, the night voices that called all the time now, kids who pissed on sleeping men, the woman who lived in garbage bags, wearing them, sleeping inside them, who carried a large plastic bag everywhere, filled with other plastic bags. Brita heard her talking now, her voice carried on the river wind, a rasp of static in the night.
Soon the road replayed itself in her mind, the raveled passage down the hours. It was strange to lie still in a small corner and feel the power of movement, the gull-rush of air over the hood. A sense memory pulsing in the skin. The cat moved past her hand, a shrug of lunar muscle and fur. She heard car alarms going off in sequence, the panic data that fed into her life. Everything feeds in, everything is coded, there is everything and its hidden meaning. Which crisis do I trust? She felt she needed her own hidden meanings to get her through the average day. She reached out and snatched the cat, bringing it onto her chest. She thought her body had become defensive, homesick for lost assurances. It wanted to be a refuge against the way things work, against the force of what is out there. To love and touch, the roundness of these moments was crossed with something wistful now. All sex is a form of longing even as it happens. Because it happens against the crush of time. Because the surface of the act is public, a cross-grain of fear and ruin. She wanted her body to remain a secret of the past, untouched by complexity and regret. She was superstitious about talking to doctors in detail. She thought they would take her body over, name all the damaged parts, speak all the awful words. She lay for a long time with her eyes closed, trying to drift into sleep. Then she rubbed the cat’s fur and felt her childhood there. It was complete in a touch, everything intact, carried out of old lost houses and fields and summer days into the river of her hand.
She slipped under the quilt, turning on her side and facing the wall to prove she was serious. Slowly now, into that helpless half life of self-commentary, the voice film that runs between light and dark. But the time eventually came when she had to admit she was still awake. She threw off the quilt and lay there on her back. Then she climbed down the ladder and went to a window, seeing steam come heaving out of a vent hole in the street. The telephone rang. Like earthwork art, these vapor columns rising