Point Omega - Don Delillo [10]
He compared the evolution of a word to that of organic matter.
He pointed out that words were not necessary to one’s experience of the true life.
Toward the end of the commentary he wrote about select current meanings of the word rendition—interpretation, translation, performance. Within those walls, somewhere, in seclusion, a drama is being enacted, old as human memory, he wrote, actors naked, chained, blindfolded, other actors with props of intimidation, the renderers, nameless and masked, dressed in black, and what ensues, he wrote, is a revenge play that reflects the mass will and interprets the shadowy need of an entire nation, ours.
I stood in a corner of the deck, out of the sun, and asked him about the essay. He waved it away, the entire subject. I asked him about the first and last sentences. They seem out of place in the larger context, I said, where crime and guilt don’t get mentioned. The incongruity is pretty striking.
“Meant to be.”
Meant to be. Okay. Meant to unsettle critics of the administration, I said, not the decision makers. Flat-out ironic.
He sat in an old reclining chair he’d found in the shed behind the house, a beach chair out of its element, and he opened one eye in lazy disdain, measuring the fool who states the obvious.
Okay. But what had he thought of the charge that he’d tried to find mystery and romance in a word that was being used as an instrument of state security, a word redesigned to be synthetic, concealing the shameful subject it embraced.
But I didn’t ask this question. Instead I went inside and poured two glasses of ice water and came back out and sat in the chair alongside him. I wondered if he was right, that the country needed this, we needed it in our desperation, our dwindling, needed something, anything, whatever we could get, rendition, yes, and then invasion.
He held the cold glass to the side of his face and said he was not surprised by the negative response. The surprise came later, when he was contacted by a former university colleague and invited to a private meeting at a research institute just outside Washington. He sat in a paneled room with several others including the deputy director of a strategic assessment team that did not exist in any set of official records. He didn’t mention the man’s name, either because this was the kind of sensitive detail that must remain within the walls of a paneled room or because he knew that the name would mean nothing to me. They told Elster that they were seeking an individual of his interdisciplinary range, a man of reputation who might freshen the dialogue, broaden the viewpoint. His time in government would follow, interrupting a series of lectures he was giving in Zurich on what he called the dream of extinction, and after two years and part of another here he was, again, in the desert.
There were no mornings or afternoons. It was one seamless day, every day, until the sun began to arc and fade, mountains emerging from their silhouettes. This is when we sat and watched in silence.
At dinner later the silence held. I wanted to hear rain drumming down. We ate lamb chops that he’d grilled over charcoal on the deck. I ate head down, face in the plate. It was the kind of silent spell that’s hard to break, becoming more dense with every bite we took. I thought about the dead time, the sense of self-entrapment, and I listened to us chew our food. I wanted to tell him how good it tasted but he’d cooked the chops too long, all traces of sweaty pink lost in flame. I wanted to hear wind in the hills, bats scratching in the eaves.
This was day twelve.
He looked at the beer glass in his hand and announced that his daughter would be coming to visit. It was like hearing that the earth had shifted on its axis, spinning night back into budding day. Significant news, someone else, a face and voice, called Jessie, he said, an exceptional mind, otherworldly.