Point Omega - Don Delillo [14]
Jessie was sitting across the table as he was speaking. We were eating omelettes, we ate omelettes nearly every night now. He was proud of his omelettes and tried to get her to watch as he broke the eggs, beat them with a fork and so on, talking all the way through the seasoning and olive oil and vegetables, enunciating the word frittata, but she wasn’t interested.
“It was as though she was a foreigner learning English,” he said. “She was right in my face, trying to define the words I was uttering, to absorb them and process them. She was looking, thinking, repeating, interpreting. Looking at my mouth, studying my lips, moving her lips. I have to tell you I was disappointed when she stopped doing this. Someone who truly listens.”
He was looking at her, smiling.
“She talked to people then, strangers. Still does sometimes. You still do sometimes,” he said. “Who do you talk to?”
Jessie shrugging.
“People on line at the post office,” he said. “Nannies with children.”
She chewed her food, head down, using the fork to twirl the omelette on the plate before she cut it.
We shared a bathroom, she and I, but she rarely seemed to be in there. A small airline kit, the only trace of her presence, was tucked into a corner of the windowsill. She kept soap and towels in her bedroom.
She was sylphlike, her element was air. She gave the impression that nothing about this place was different from any other, this south and west, latitude and longitude. She moved through places in a soft glide, feeling the same things everywhere, this is what there was, the space within.
Her bed was never made. I opened the bedroom door and looked several times but did not enter.
We sat out late, scotch for both of us, bottle on the deck and stars in clusters. Elster watched the sky, everything that came before, he said, there to see and map and think about.
I asked him whether he’d been to Iraq. He needed to consider the question. I didn’t want him to believe that I knew the answer and was asking the question in order to challenge the breadth of his experience. I didn’t know the answer.
He said, “I hate violence. I fear the thought of it, won’t watch violent movies, turn away from news reports on television that show dead or wounded people. I had a fight, I was a kid, I went into spasms,” he said. “Violence freezes my blood.”
He told me that he had all-source clearance, or access to every sensitive sliver of military intelligence. I knew this wasn’t true. It was in his voice and face, a bitter wishfulness, and I understood of course that he was telling me things, true or not, only because I was here, we were both here, in isolation, drinking. I was his confidant by default, the young man entrusted with the details of his makeshift reality.
“I talked to them one day about war. Iraq is a whisper, I told them. These nuclear flirtations we’ve been having with this or that government. Little whispers,” he said. “I’m telling you, this will change. Something’s coming. But isn’t this what we want? Isn’t this the burden of consciousness? We’re all played out. Matter wants to lose its self-consciousness. We’re the mind and heart that matter has become. Time to close it all down. This is what drives us now.”
He refilled his glass and passed me the bottle. I was enjoying this.
“We want to be the dead matter we used to be. We’re the last billionth of a second in the evolution of matter. When I was a student I looked for radical ideas. Scientists, theologians, I read the work of mystics through the centuries, I was a hungry mind, a pure mind. I filled notebooks with my versions of world philosophy. Look at us today. We keep inventing folk tales of the end. Animal diseases spreading, transmittable cancers. What else?”
“The climate,” I said.
“The climate.”
“The asteroid,” I said.
“The asteroid, the meteorite. What else?”
“Famine, worldwide.”
“Famine,” he said. “What else?”
“Give me a minute.”
“Never mind. Because this isn’t interesting to me. I have no use for this. We need to think beyond this.”
I didn