Mao II - Don Delillo [61]
She had to walk slowly to accommodate her awe. She went home to feed the cat but returned right away, taking a Jamaican taxi and saying Tompkins Square. It might be ten-plus acres with pigeons walking everywhere but not a single one aloft and even when she tried to kick-scatter several birds they only scurried away at best, not so much as flapping a fitful wing. People in clusters and larger groups, tending toward evening. Somebody cooked meat on a skewer and there was a fight not far away, a man and woman pushing an older man, backing him up, and he slapped at their hands and did a scat step, turning, and fell down hard. The whole thing absorbed into the background. Things fading all the time, hard to retain. A police minicab came by like some Bombay cartoon.
When night came down she was talking to a tall kid wearing a sweatshirt with Coke bottles pictured across the front, row after row. He was selling marijuana at the edge of the park, going, Grass grass grass grass. His voice got lower as he went through the chant, ending in a kitty-cat hiss. People walking by said Omar. He had a long face, sloped forehead and shallow chin and his tightly webbed hair was so close to the scalp and so clearly defined and widely parted it had a maplike contrast and precision.
The fallen man was still down, trying to get something out of his back pocket. An old white came by wearing a rag coat and baseball cap and high sneakers and the two men fell into conversation.
Omar said, “But sometimes you get an EDP and the police come with stun guns and blinding lights.”
“All the paraphernalia.”
“They have a gun that shoots fifty thousand volts. Be surprised how sometimes it only slows the guy down. Shoot him again, gets up again. It’s your adrenaline.”
“What’s an EDP?”
“Motionally disturb person. People taking meth and cocaine is what could do it to you. It’s your adrenaline and your temperature both. Call it getting high is the absolute truth.”
On the bandshell stage people were still getting up, going to sleep, they were sitting there staring, they were zippering sleeping bags and smoking cigarettes and there was a constant rolling drone, statements and set responses that made Karen think of formal prayers, a protocol of half words, dream cries, bursts and murmurs. One voice answered by another, the gasping stab for breath followed by the curse. Fragments of an American flag were fixed to the blue plastic of a sagging lean-to. A man and woman sat under a beach umbrella. A woman peeled an orange. A man slept face down on a bench, shirtless, with Bill’s exact hair color and shoulders and back.
She heard Omar going, Dime bag dime bag dime bag.
Someone crawled out of a box and got up shaky and walked after her, begging, rough-tailing, a mean slur in his voice, and she felt for the first time since coming here that they could see her, that she wasn’t concealed by the desperation of the place. This wasn’t a public park but some life-and-death terrain where everything is measured for its worth. She realized they saw her. This was a shock. She gave the man a dollar, which he stopped and studied, which he looked at resentfully, talking to himself in the shadows.
She heard a voice beyond the fence, a woman saying clearly, “What a lovely spring night,” and it startled Karen, the speaker’s animation and delight, the distance traveled in a scatter of simple words.
She wondered what if the man hadn’t stopped coming after her when she gave him the dollar. She