Point Omega - Don Delillo [0]
NOVELS
Americana
End Zone
Great Jones Street
Ratner’s Star
Players
Running Dog
The Names
White Noise
Libra
Mao II
Underworld
The Body Artist
Cosmopolis
Falling Man
PLAYS
The Day Room
Valparaiso
Love-Lies-Bleeding
POINT OMEGA
A NOVEL
Don DeLillo
SCRIBNER
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This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2010 by Don DeLillo
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First Scribner hardcover edition February 2010
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DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING
Manufactured in the United States of America
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Library of Congress Control Number: 2009042232
ISBN 978-1-4391-6995-7
eISBN-13: 978-1-4391-6997-1
POINT OMEGA
2006
LATE SUMMER / EARLY FALL
Anonymity
September 3
There was a man standing against the north wall, barely visible. People entered in twos and threes and they stood in the dark and looked at the screen and then they left. Sometimes they hardly moved past the doorway, larger groups wandering in, tourists in a daze, and they looked and shifted their weight and then they left.
There were no seats in the gallery. The screen was free-standing, about ten by fourteen feet, not elevated, placed in the middle of the room. It was a translucent screen and some people, a few, remained long enough to drift to the other side. They stayed a moment longer and then they left.
The gallery was cold and lighted only by the faint gray shimmer on the screen. Back by the north wall the darkness was nearly complete and the man standing alone moved a hand toward his face, repeating, ever so slowly, the action of a figure on the screen. When the gallery door slid open and people entered, there was a glancing light from the area beyond, where others were gathered, at some distance, browsing the art books and postcards.
The film ran without dialogue or music, no soundtrack at all. The museum guard stood just inside the door and people leaving sometimes looked at him, seeking eye contact, some kind of understanding that might pass between them and make their bafflement valid. There were other galleries, entire floors, no point lingering in a secluded room in which whatever was happening took forever to happen.
The man at the wall watched the screen and then began to move along the adjacent wall to the other side of the screen so he could watch the same action in a flipped image. He watched Anthony Perkins reaching for a car door, using the right hand. He knew that Anthony Perkins would use the right hand on this side of the screen and the left hand on the other side. He knew it but needed to see it and he moved through the darkness along the side wall and then edged away a few feet to watch Anthony Perkins on this side of the screen, the reverse side, Anthony Perkins using the left hand, the wrong hand, to reach for a car door and then open it.
But could he call the left hand the wrong hand? Because what made this side of the screen any less truthful than the other side?
The guard was joined