Mao II - Don Delillo [91]
“We won’t worry now,” she said.
“There’s the complex question of who’s entitled.”
“He lived with us, not them.”
“He left no instructions.”
“We’re the ones who made it possible for Bill to devote his whole time to writing.”
“We removed every obstacle. It’s true.”
“So shouldn’t they let us live here if we promise to keep things just as they are and do Bill’s work?”
Scott laughed.
“The night of the lawyers is approaching. The long knives are coming out. Blood and slogans on all the walls.”
“They can own the house,” Karen said. “But they should let us live here. And we keep the manuscript and we keep the pictures.”
Scott leaned toward her to sing a bit of old Beatles, a line about carrying pictures of Chairman Mao.
Then he sat in the attic alone through the rainy morning, hunched over the lightbox, making notes.
He had the secret of Bill’s real name.
He had the photographs, the great work of describing and cataloguing.
He had the manuscript of Bill’s new novel, the entire house filled with pages, pages spilling into the shed that abutted the back of the house, a whole basement containing pages.
The manuscript would sit. He might talk to Charles Everson, just a word concerning the fact that it was finished. The manuscript would sit, and word would get out, and the manuscript would not go anywhere. After a time he might take the photographs to New York and meet with Brita and choose the pictures that would appear. But the manuscript would sit, and word would travel, and the pictures would appear, a small and deft selection, one time only, and word would build and spread, and the novel would stay right here, collecting aura and force, deepening old Bill’s legend, undyingly.
The nice thing about life is that it’s filled with second chances. Quoting Bill.
IN BEIRUT
Her driver tells her three stories.
First one, people are burning tires. In the midst of car bombs and street skirmishes and the smash of long-range field guns and buildings coming down and whole areas lost in smoke, people are burning tires to drive away mosquitoes and flies.
Second, a pair of local militias are firing at portraits of each other’s leader. These are large photographs pasted to walls or hanging from awning poles in the vegetable souks and they are shot up and ripped apart, some pictures large enough to swing from a wire strung over the street, and they are shot up and quickly replaced and then ripped apart again. There is a new exuberance in these particular streets, based on this latest form of fighting.
Last, they are making bombs that contain flooring nails and roofing nails. The police are finding quantities of common nails, nails sprayed and dashed and driven into the bodies of victims of random blasts.
Brita waits for the point of story number three. Isn’t there supposed to be an irony, some grim humor, some sense of the peculiar human insistence on seeing past the larger madness into small and skewed practicalities, into off-shaded moments that help us consider a narrow hope? This business about the nails doesn’t do a thing for her. And she’s not so crazy about the other stories either. She has come here already tired of these stories, including the ones she has never heard. They’re all the same and all true and it is sad that they are necessary. And they almost always exasperate her, especially the stories about terror groups that issue press credentials.
They are driving past the rubble of the racetrack’s arched façade. Then they are going the wrong way down a one-way street but it doesn’t matter. All the streets are right and wrong. She sees cars burnt skinless, water flying gloriously from broken mains. Street life as well, vendors, wooden carts, a man selling radios and shoes from the hood of