Mao II - Don Delillo [69]
George said, “We have to see a doctor, don’t we?”
“It’s all right.”
“But your face. Don’t we have to see a doctor for this? Let me call.”
“It’s healing normally. Gets better every day.”
“Did you get the driver’s name?”
“I don’t want his name.”
“He hit you, Bill.”
“It wasn’t his fault.”
“Let me call someone. You should report this. Don’t we have to talk to someone for a thing like this?”
“Get me a drink, George.”
They talked into early evening. Then they sat on the terrace watching the streetlights come on, a thousand cars a minute racing toward the gulf in tailing red streamers, the mortal sadness of an ordinary dusk. George’s daughter came out and slouched against the rail, an unhappy girl in jeans.
“I worry about you, Bill.”
“Do me a favor. Don’t.”
“Why have you involved yourself in this?”
“It was your idea.”
“But you’ve come along so readily.”
“True enough.”
“Let me call someone for your face. Jasmine, get the little book with the phone numbers.”
“It’s late. I’ll see a doctor in the morning.”
“This is a promise,” George said.
“Yes. ”
“And it won’t be in Beirut. The airport is closed again due to heavy fighting. I’ve been in touch with Rashid. He could arrange to get out by boat and then fly here from Cyprus but now sea travel is also very dangerous and I don’t think he wants to come here anyway. This is deeply disappointing. I was looking forward to working with you on this.”
“And Jean-Claude?”
“Who is that?”
“That’s the hostage, George.”
“Don’t tell me his name.”
“You know his name.”
“Slipped my mind. Forgotten. Gone forever.”
The girl stood behind her father, hands on his shoulders, softly, miserably massaging.
“How will they kill him?”
“Go home, Bill, and do your work. I enjoy these talks but there’s no longer any reason for you to be here. And think about what I told you. A word processor. The keyboard action is effortless. I promise you. This is something you dearly need.”
He went to his room and tried to get some sleep. There was a line he kept repeating to himself that had the mystery and power he’d felt nowhere else but in the shared past of people who had loved each other, who lived so close they’d memorized each other’s warts and cowlicks and addled pauses, so the line was not one voice but several and it spoke a more or less nonsensical theme, it was a line for any occasion or none at all, mainly meant to be funny but useful also in grim times to remind them that words stick even as lives fly apart.
Measure your head before ordering.
It was the line that says everything. All the more appropriate and all the funnier because outsiders did not understand and all the better finally because there was nothing to understand.
At six in the morning he was walking the streets, checked out, hobbling. Every ten paces he looked back for a taxi. He had this one pair of pants he’d been wearing since New York and it was smeared at the knees with blood from his scraped hand and he still had Charlie’s tight old tweed jacket and Lizzie’s overnight bag and the razor he’d bought in Boston, although he wasn’t using it, and the shoes he’d bought the day before the razor, finally broken in.
He was in a residential area now, completely lost. A man in an undershirt dragged three garbage bags across the street. A clean light soaked into the shaggy bark of a eucalyptus and it was a powerful thing to see, the whole tree glowed, it showed electric and intense, the branches ran to soft fire, the tree seemed revealed. The man dumped the bags at the corner and came back across