Mao II - Don Delillo [56]
10
Scott was still doing lists, moving toward late May now, making lists of things that needed doing, doing the things, going along project by project, room by room. Of course the lists of things were also things. An item on a list might generate a whole new list. He knew if he wasn’t careful he’d get mired in a theory of lists and lose sight of the things that needed doing. There was pleasure in lists, taut and clean. Making the list, crossing off the items as you complete the tasks. It was a small whole contentment, a way of working toward a new reality.
He knew where Karen was but not a word from son of a bitch Bill.
He went through the house, noting things that needed doing, determined to do them, bills, mail, some minor caulking and scraping, all the rearranging of papers. The point of these lists and tasks seemed to be that when you performed each task and crossed off the corresponding item on the list and when you crumpled and discarded all the lists and stood finally and self-reliantly in a list-free environment, sealed from worldly contact, you were proving to yourself that you could go on alone.
He sat at the desk in the workroom now, cleaning the typewriter. He blew on the keys, using a damp rag to lift dust and hair from the felt pad. He opened the drawer to his left, thinking of the next major item on his list, a plan to reorganize reader mail. The drawer held a couple of old wristwatches and some stamps, rubber bands, erasers and foreign coins.
Bill was not a list-making novelist. He thought sentences lost their heft and edge when they were stretched too far and he didn’t seem to find the slightest primal joy in world-naming or enumerating, in penetrating the relatedness of things or words, those breathy sentences that beat with new exuberance.
Scott stood and looked at the wall charts, the blueprints of Bill’s long book. In over eight years here, he’d never had so close a look. Large foxed sheets filled with mystical graffiti. Even the tape that fixed the paper to the wall was sun-stained and coming loose. These were interesting things to study, all the arrows and scribbles and pictographs, the lines that connected dissimilar elements. Something primitive and brave-natured here. At least that’s how it looked to Scott, examining each sheet. Themes and characters attempting to draw together, linked in squiggles and dash trails, an obsessive need to meet and maintain. Bill’s long-suffering book. And Bill’s own scratchy voice in one of his clear-souled semidrunks of some years ago, saying, “Stories have no point if they don’t absorb our terror.”
Charles Everson was not returning calls. Not that he knew where Bill was and not that he would tell Scott even if he knew. No one knew. This was the essence of Bill’s disappearance as Scott understood it. Scott understood it as a kind of simulated death.
He sat at the desk again, putting his face to the keys and blowing hard.
Bill had his picture taken not because he wanted to come out of hiding but because he wanted to hide more deeply, he wanted to revise the terms of his seclusion, he needed the crisis of exposure to give him a powerful reason to intensify his concealment. Years ago there were stories that Bill was dead, Bill was in Manitoba, Bill was living under another name, Bill would never write another word. These were the world’s oldest stories and they were not about Bill so much as people’s need to make mysteries and legends. Now Bill was devising his own cycle of death and resurgence. It made Scott think of great leaders who regenerate their power by dropping out of sight and then staging messianic returns. Mao Zedong of course. Mao was pronounced dead many times in the press—dead or senile or too sick to run a revolution. Scott had recently come across a photograph of Mao taken in the course of his famous nine-mile swim at the age of seventy-two, following a long