Mao II - Don Delillo [62]
Omar told her, “Once you live in the street, there’s nothing but the street. Know what I’m saying. These people have one thing they can talk about or think about and that’s the little shithole they live in. The littler the shithole, the more it takes up your life. Know what I’m saying. You live in a fuckin’ ass mansion you got to think about it two times a month for like ten seconds total. Live in a shithole, it takes up your day. They cut the shithole in half, you got to go twice as hard to keep it so it’s livable. I’m telling you something I observe.”
She imagined the encrumpled bodies in the lean-tos and tents, sort of formless as to male or female, asleep in sodden clothes on a strip of cardboard or some dragged-in mattress stained with the waste of the ages.
She looked around for Omar but he was gone.
All the odd belongings bundled in a corner, wrapped and tied, many things concealed as one, things inside other things, some infinite collapsible system of getting through a life. She walked through the park, east to west, hearing the rustle and mutter of dreaming souls.
In the morning she began to forage for redeemable bottles and cans, anything she could find in trash baskets or curbside, in garbage bags massed in restaurant alleyways. Bottles, matchbooks, swayback shoes, whatever usable cultural deposit might be shut away in the dark. She took these things to the park and left them at the openings of lean-tos or stuck them just inside if she was sure no one was there. She slipped into those stinking alleyways and undid the twists on garbage bags and dumped out the garbage and took the bags. It was not a whole lot different from selling sweet williams in the lobby of the Marriott. She stood on garbage cans and went through dumpsters at demolition sites, salvaging plasterboard and nails, strips of plywood. Bottles and cans were her main mission, things that could be turned into money.
A man showed her his mutilated arm and asked for spare change. She found broken umbrellas, bruised fruit that was edible when washed. She washed the fruit and took it to the park. She took everything to the park. She placed things inside the huts. She saw people turning park benches into homes with walls and tilted roofs. Someone vomited loudly against the side of the maintenance building and she saw the parks department man in his khaki trappings walk by with nary a glance. A routine spatter of greensick sliding down a wall. She watched the people in the bandshell struggle out of their bedding, humped and gasping, looking up dazed into the span of light and sky that hung above the blue encampment.
Only those sealed by the messiah will survive.
11
Bill stood outside a shop that sold religious articles. Many medallion images of sacred figures with shiny disks behind their heads. They’ve got their game together here, he thought. Name many saints, get them in the windows, do not stint on halos, crosses, shields or swords. The priests were damn impressive too. He saw them everywhere, round-hatted and intensely bearded, wrapped in floating robes. Sturdy men every one. Even the elderly were healthy-looking. Bill thought they were deathless in a way, fixed to national memory, great black ships of faith and superstition.
In his room he thought about the hostage. He tried to put himself there, in the heat and pain, outside the nuance of civilized anxiety. He wanted to imagine what it was like to know extremes of isolation. Solitude by the gun. He read Jean-Claude’s poems many times. The man remained invisibly Swiss. Bill tried to see his face, hair, eye color, he saw room color, faded paint on the walls. He pictured precise objects, he made them briefly shine with immanence, a bowl for food, a spoon constructed out of thought, perception, memory, feeling, will and imagination.
Then he went to see George Haddad.
“What are you drinking, Bill?”
“A small quantity of the local brandy poured gently into a short glass.”
“What do we want to talk about today?”