Point Omega - Don Delillo [12]
I liked these talks, they were quiet, with eerie depth in every stray remark she made. I stared at her sometimes, waiting for what, a return look, a show of discomfort. She had ordinary features, brown eyes, brown hair that she kept brushing back over her ear. There was something self-determined in her look, a blandness that seemed willed. It was a choice she’d made, to look like this, or so I told myself. Hers was another life, nowhere near mine, and it offered a release from the constant self-tunneling of my time here and also a kind of balance to her father’s grip on my immediate future.
Elster in pajamas came dragging out of his bedroom to join us on the deck, barefoot, coffee mug in hand. He looked at Jessie and then smiled, seeming to remember in his grogginess that there was something he wanted to do. He wanted to smile.
He settled into a chair, speaking slowly, voice faint and scorched, bad night, early morning.
“Before I fell asleep, eventually, was thinking when I was a small kid how I’d try to imagine the end of the century and what a far-off wonder that was and I’d figure out how old I’d be when the century ended, years, months, days, and now look, incredible, we’re here—we’re six years in and I realize I’m the same skinny kid, my life shadowed by his presence, won’t step on cracks on the sidewalk, not as a superstition but as a test, a discipline, still do it. What else? Bites the skin off the edge of his thumbnail, always the right thumb, still do it, loose piece of dead skin, that’s how I know who I am.”
I’d looked once in the medicine cabinet in his bathroom. Didn’t have to open the cabinet door, there was no door. Ranks of bottles, tubes, pillboxes, nearly three shelves’ worth, and a few other bottles, one uncapped, on the lid of the toilet tank, and several printed inserts scattered on a bench, unfolded, showing small bold cautionary typeface.
“Not my books, lectures, conversations, none of that. It’s the goddamn hangnail, it’s the dead skin, that’s where I am, my life, there to here. I talk in my sleep, always did, my mother told me back then and I don’t need anyone to tell me now, I know it, hear it, and this is more significant, somebody should make a study of what people say in their sleep and somebody probably has, some paralinguist, because it means more than a thousand personal letters a man writes in his lifetime and it’s literature as well.”
They weren’t all prescription drugs but most were and all of it was Elster. The lotions, tablets, capsules, suppositories, the pastes and gels and the bottles and tubes they came in and the labels, inserts and price stickers—all this was Elster, vulnerable, and maybe there’s supposed to be something morally degraded about my presence in the room but I didn’t feel guilty, only intent on knowing the man and all those accessories of being, the mood-shifting agents, the habit-forming agents that no one sees or tries to imagine. Not that these things were serious aspects of the true life he liked to refer to, the lost thoughts, the memories that range through decades, the dead skin on the thumb. Still, in a way, here he was in his medicine cabinet, the man himself, marked out clearly in drops, tablespoons and milligrams.
“Look at all this,” he said, not looking at it, the landscape and sky, which he’d indicated with a backwards sweep of the arm.
We didn’t look at it either.
“Day turns to night eventually but it’s a matter of light and darkness, it’s not time passing, mortal time. There’s none of the usual terror. It’s different here, time is enormous, that’s what I feel here, palpably. Time that precedes us and survives us.”
I was becoming accustomed to this, his scale of address, long decades of thinking and speaking about transcendent matters.