Mao II - Don Delillo [80]
He walked along the palm-lined seafront past cafés and shops. The pang in his side was deeper and steadier now, right front upper abdomen. He was getting to know it well. Sometimes a pain feels familiar even as it hits you for the first time. Certain conditions seem to speak out of some collective history of pain. You know the experience from others who have had it. Bill felt joined to the past, to some bloodline of intimate and renewable pain.
He took a table and ordered a brandy. There were lights strung across the promenade and he thought he might sit here all day waiting for dusk, for the sea breeze to freshen and the lights to come on, colored bulbs attached to wires that trailed and looped among the palms. And then sit here some more, sit into early morning with his Metaxa, a medicine dating nobly to the nineteenth century, and come back at noon or so and sit a while longer, waiting for a story to circulate that the ferry was running again.
He didn’t really think he would have ended among the dead, injured or missing. He was already injured and missing. As for death, he no longer thought he would see it come from the muzzle of a gun or any other instrument designed to be lethal. This was a thing he used to brood about. Shot by someone. Not a thief or deer hunter or highway sniper but some dedicated reader. He felt a touch of anticipation at times, seeing the bleak thing happen. He had put himself in deep seclusion and a certain forceful logic made it possible that some lonely young man might see a mission here. There were the camera-toters and the gun-wavers and Bill saw barely a glimmer of difference. An undersized kid with pinkish eyes, self-creating, an only child (as Bill began to see him) who lives in full-length mirrors and comes upon a novel that speaks to him in dangerous and radiant ways. Scott was not one of these. He had an enterprise and wit that scattered the darker spirits but it was also true that he’d popped out of a package, gasping for air, showing a need to consume whatever is left after he has read the books and collected the rumors. Then there was the finger Bill had received in the mail. He kept it around a while, a ring finger he guessed, gone mummy-brown, and he used to look at it and wonder what it meant. But that was long ago and he’d lost the feeling he might walk out of the post office and see a slight lad come diagonally toward him, showing the roguish smile he’s been preparing for weeks.
He felt like calling up what’s-her-face, the photographer, and talking to her machine.
He started back to his hotel. His leg didn’t hurt much and his left shoulder, where he’d struck the pavement when the car hit him, felt altogether fine. But there was pain in the other shoulder now. He stopped in the lobby of one of the larger hotels to pick up a Paris Herald and saw a sign welcoming a group of veterinarians from Britain. Among the doctors again. The newspaper said thousands were leaving Beirut to escape the fighting. Coffins were stacked at cemetery entrances because there was no more room for the dead. Outside the city they were burying people in clusters, two or three bodies to a grave. Skulls were spray-painted on the walls of ruined buildings and there wasn’t any water and the rats were getting bigger and the power grid was down.
Bill believed he faced no danger there. Isolation only, unsparing, stony, true, the root thing he’d been rehearsing all these years. And if the ferry didn’t run, maybe the hydrofoil would, lifting above the sea chop and maneuvering through the fire of massed batteries. And maybe it wouldn’t. But there was a chance the airport would reopen. He’d sit aboard a ghostly flight with six or seven tense Beirutis, refugees in reverse, going home to terror on every level.
On the street he tried to recall the name of his hotel so he could ask someone where the