Mao II - Don Delillo [73]
She followed a man who looked like Bill but he turned out on further inspection to be not a writer type at all.
She took the gentlest possible care of the food-encrusted spoon from the art gallery. She kept it on a shelf, clearing some of the books so it could sit undisturbed and in open sight but also out of the sun. She was worried about the food. If the food was somehow touched or rubbed by another object or if it was softened by warm air, it might crumble off the spoon and this would be a defacement she didn’t think she could bear. The spoon and food were one.
She spoke sincerely to a couple in the park, a man and woman textured in soot. They sat on a mattress inside their box hut. Karen squatted at the opening, her fingertips touching the ground, and there was a plastic bag that was the entrance curtain sort of draped over her shoulder.
Our task is to prepare for the second coming.
The world will be a universal family.
We are the spiritual children of the man I talked about from far away.
We are protected by the total power of our true father.
We are the total children.
All doubt will vanish in the arms of total control.
Omar Neeley was fourteen. She walked with him past the Ukrainian Jesus on the church façade. They walked past the AIDS hotel. She realized she didn’t know where he lived or if he had parents or siblings. She used to think siblings were strictly white and middle-class due to something in the nature of the word. They walked past the black cube sculpture that was balanced on a point. It had ten men sleeping beneath it with their shopping bags and shopping carts alongside, with crutches lying beside some of them, some arms and legs in casts. Omar was supposed to help her carry plasterboard left at a demolition site. Take it to the park. But down one of the factory streets two men in undersized hats came up, those little fedora hats and muscle T-shirts. She felt the contact in the air, the streak of meaning that takes the blood out of your face. But all they did was talk. They talked to Omar in figures of speech she couldn’t make out. Then they walked along with him and he never looked back, and they walked and he went with them. What about my plasterboard. One of them talked to him with a hand on his arm and he walked along with that jangling gait, big for his age.
People with supermarket carts. When did these things come out of the stores and into the streets? She saw these things everywhere, pushed, dragged, lived in, fought over, unwheeled, bent, rolling haywire, filled with living trivia, the holistic dregs of everything if that is correctly put. She talked to the woman in the plastic bag, offering to get a shopping cart for her, which is something I might be able to do. The woman spoke out at her from inside the bag, spoke in raven song, a throttled squawk that Karen tried to understand. She realized she understood almost no one here, no one spoke in ways she’d ever heard before. The whole rest of her life had been one way of hearing and now she needed to learn another. It was a different language completely, unwritable and interior, the rag-speak of shopping carts and plastic bags, the language of soot, and Karen had to listen carefully to the way the woman dragged a line of words out of her throat like hankies tied together and then she tried to go back and reconstruct.
The woman seemed to be saying, “They have buses in this city that they crouch for wheelchairs. Give us ramps for people living in the street. I want buses that they crouch for us.”
She seemed to say, “I want my own blind dog that it’s allowed in the movies.”
But maybe it was something else completely.
There are people gathering in clusters everywhere, coming out of mud houses and tin-roof shanties and sprawling camps and meeting in some dusty square to march together to a central point, calling out a name, collecting many others on the way, some are running, some in bloodstained shirts, and they reach a vast open space that they fill with their pressed bodies, a word or name, calling