Point Omega - Don Delillo [21]
I said, “The camera’s on a tripod. I sit alongside. You look at me, not at the camera. I use available light. Is there noise from the street? We don’t care. This is primate filmmaking. The dawn of man.”
A faint smile. He knew I was only talking. The reason for being here had begun to fade. I was simply here, only talking. I wanted to lose the notion of going back there, to responsibility, old woes, to the burn of beginning something that would lead nowhere. How many beginnings before you see the lies in your excitement? One day soon all our talk, his and mine, will be like hers, just talk, self-contained, unreferring. We’ll be here the way flies and mice are here, localized, seeing and knowing nothing but whatever our scanted nature allows. A dim idyll in the summer flatlands.
“Time falling away. That’s what I feel here,” he said. “Time becoming slowly older. Enormously old. Not day by day. This is deep time, epochal time. Our lives receding into the long past. That’s what’s out there. The Pleistocene desert, the rule of extinction.”
I thought of Jessie sleeping. She would close her eyes and disappear, this was one of her gifts, I thought, she drops into immediate sleep. Every night the same. She sleeps on her side, curled up, embryonic, barely breathing.
“Consciousness accumulates. It begins to reflect upon itself. Something about this feels almost mathematical to me. There’s almost some law of mathematics or physics that we haven’t quite hit upon, where the mind transcends all direction inward. The omega point,” he said. “Whatever the intended meaning of this term, if it has a meaning, if it’s not a case of language that’s struggling toward some idea outside our experience.”
“What idea?”
“What idea. Paroxysm. Either a sublime transformation of mind and soul or some worldly convulsion. We want it to happen.”
“You think we want it to happen.”
“We want it to happen. Some paroxysm.”
He liked this word. We let it hang there.
“Think of it. We pass completely out of being. Stones. Unless stones have being. Unless there’s some profoundly mystical shift that places being in a stone.”
Our rooms had a common wall, hers and mine, and I imagined myself lying in bed, in shallow awareness, half hallucinatory, there’s a word for this, and I tried to think of the word on two levels, seated on the deck and sprawled in bed, hypnagogic, that was it, and there is Jessie only a meter away, serenely dreaming.
“Enough for one night,” he said. “Enough and enough.”
He seemed to be looking for a place to put his glass. I took it from him and watched him go inside and soon his bedroom light went out.
Or wide awake, can’t sleep, both of us, and she is lying on her back, legs apart, and I am sitting up and smoking although I haven’t had a cigarette in five years, and she is wearing whatever she wears when she goes to bed, T-shirt to the thighs.
I was still holding Elster’s glass. I put it on the deck and finished my drink, slowly, and set the glass down next to his. I went inside and turned off a couple of lights and then stood outside her room. There was space between door and jamb and I eased the door open and stood there, waiting for the dark to soften to the point where I could make out shapes. Then there she was, in bed, but it took some time before I realized she was looking at me. She was under the bedsheet looking straight at me and then she turned on her side and faced the far wall, pulling the sheet up to her neck.
Another moment passed before I drew the door quietly back to its original position. I went outside again and stood at the rail awhile. Then I adjusted the reclining chair to full length and lay flat on my back, eyes shut, hands on chest, and tried to feel like nobody nowhere, a shadow that’s part of the night.
Elster drove in grim silence. This was routine. Even with no traffic, there were forces massed in opposition, depending on day and time—road conditions, threat