Mao II - Don Delillo [81]
In his room he noted down expenses on a pad. Then he looked at the pages he’d written and didn’t think he could do any more. It was too hard. It was harder than major surgery and it didn’t even keep you alive. He looked at a picture on the wall and saw everything that existed outside the room he was sitting in and the one he was trying to write about. It was a picture of fishing nets stowed in canvas baskets and it had sex, memories, cravings, names of old friends, principal rivers of the world. Writing was bad for the soul when you got right down to it. It protected your worst tendencies. Narrowed everything to failure and its devastations. Gave your cunning an edge of treachery and your jellyfish heart a reason to fall deeper into silence. He couldn’t remember why he wanted to write about the hostage. He’d done some pages he halfway liked but what was the actual point?
He looked up and said aloud, “Keltner takes his time, tipping a glance at the baseball. Hey what a toss. Like a trolley wire, folks.”
He took off his shoes and socks. He slouched in the chair, his feet on the bed, the writing pad flat in his lap. He needed to talk to a doctor and have a drink. First the drink. But it would hurt to get up, it would hurt to walk to a café and sit down and breathe, it might even hurt to swallow, so we have the classic dilemma here. He should have asked Charlie how he’d stopped drinking. He loved his old friend, he felt an unremitting love all those recent hours they’d spent together in New York and London, felt an unremitting need to leave, get going, shake hands goodbye. Charlie used to talk about growing old on Park Avenue, he saw himself a frail old man in a wheelchair tended by some wordless black nurse in subaudible sneakers. She pushed him ever steadily into the sun. He was so old and brittle he could barely issue a breath but they dressed him up like a small child at a party, they made him look helplessly resplendent in an oversized jacket and a shirt collar that hung off the neck. He saw himself bundled in a blanket in the warmest time of day and the sunniest part of the street. Because when the shadows fell across the sidewalk, the nurse pushed him toward the sun, they went ever sunward, slowly, until he was posed totally still at the corner of a prewar building, taking the sun, this was the sun spot for the next quarter hour, and Charlie used to go pink with shame and delight, conjuring his senile end.
That was the death Bill could be having, almond soap and a redone kitchen and a widow with an answering machine. He loved his old friends but begrudged them something and wanted them to renounce it, whatever it was, so they could all be even once again.
Firecrackers were called salutes.
It was a life consisting chiefly of hair—hair that drifts into the typewriter, each strand collecting dust along its length and fuzzing up among the hammers and interacting parts, hair that sticks to the felt mat the way a winding fiber leeches on to soap so he has to gouge it out with a thumbnail, all his cells, scales and granules, all his faded pigment, the endless must of all this balling hair that’s batched and wadded in the works.
Ought to do some sightseeing while I’m waiting for the ferry. Did he say this aloud? The Turkish Fort, the English Cemetery. He changed position slowly, testing movement and weight shifts in several directions, his face showing strain until he realized he could get up easily. He went to the bathroom and urinated and there was no sign of blood. He lifted his shirt and looked at the original bruise on his abdomen and it hadn’t expanded or changed color. The middle-period pottery, the lace-making village. He looked in the mirror and saw he hadn’t shaved in some days. The scrape