Point Omega - Don Delillo [13]
She said, “The usual terror. What’s the usual terror?”
“Doesn’t happen here, the minute-to-minute reckoning, the thing I feel in cities.”
It’s all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers everywhere, he said, train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras. It’s all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.
“The film,” I said.
He looked at me.
“Man at the wall.”
“Yes,” I said.
“Up against the wall.”
“No, not as an enemy but a kind of vision, a ghost from the war councils, someone free to say whatever he wants, unsaid things, confidential things, appraise, condemn, ramble. Whatever you say, that’s the film, you’re the film, you talk, I shoot. No charts, maps, background information. Face and eyes, black-and-white, that’s the film.”
He said, “Up against the wall, motherfucker,” and gave me a hard look. “Except the sixties are long gone and there are no more barricades.”
“Film is the barricade,” I told him. “The one we erect, you and I. The one where somebody stands and tells the truth.”
• • •
“I never know what to say when he talks like that.”
“He’s been talking to students all his life,” I said. “He doesn’t expect anybody to say anything.”
“Every second’s the last breath he takes.”
“Sits and thinks, that’s what he’s here for.”
“And this movie you want to make.”
“Can’t do it alone.”
“But isn’t there a real movie you’d rather do? Because how many people will want to spend all that time looking at something so zombielike?”
“Right.”
“Even if he ends up saying interesting things, it’s something they could read in a magazine.”
“Right,” I said.
“Not that I go much to movies. I like old movies on television where a man lights a woman’s cigarette. That’s all they seemed to do in those old movies, the men and women. I’m normally so totally disregardless. But every time I see an old movie on television, I keep a sharp eye out for a man lighting a woman’s cigarette.”
I said, “Footsteps in movies.”
“Footsteps.”
“Footsteps in movies never sound real.”
“They’re footsteps in movies.”
“You’re saying why should they sound real.”
“They’re footsteps in movies,” she said.
“I took your father to a movie once. Called 24 Hour Psycho. Not a movie but a conceptual art piece. The old Hitchcock film projected so slowly it takes twenty-four hours to screen the whole thing.”
“He told me.”
“What did he tell you?”
“He told me it was like watching the universe die over a period of about seven billion years.”
“We were there ten minutes.”
“He said it was like the contraction of the universe.”
“The man thinks on a cosmic scale. We know this.”
“The heat death of the universe,” she said.
“I thought he’d be interested. We were there and gone, ten minutes, he fled and I followed. Didn’t talk to me all the way down six flights. He was using a cane then. Slow journey down, escalators, crowds, corridors, finally stairs. Not one word.”
“I saw him that night and he told me. I thought I might want to see it. The whole point of nothing happening,” she said. “The point of waiting just to be waiting. Next day I went.”
“You stayed awhile?”
“I stayed awhile. Because even when something happens, you’re waiting for it to happen.”
“How long did you stay?”
“I don’t know. Half an hour.”
“That’s good. Half an hour’s good.”
“Good, bad, whatever,” she said.
• • •
Elster said, “When she was a child, she used to move her lips slightly, repeating inwardly what I was saying or what her mother was saying. She’d look very closely. I’d speak, she’d look, trying to anticipate my remarks word for word, nearly syllable for syllable. Her lips would