Point Omega - Don Delillo [25]
“You feel sure it was him.”
“This is when I tell her she is going away.”
“And once she went away.”
“No more phone calls,” the mother said.
He stopped shaving, I made it a point to shave every day, do nothing different. We waited for news. I wanted to get out, get in the car and join the searchers. But I imagined Elster with a mouthful of sleeping pills, the contents of a bottle. I imagined a soggy lump, a glob, thirty or forty pills compacted and dripping spit. I sat and talked to him about the medications in his cabinet. Only the usual dose, I said. Double-check the directions, heed the warnings. I actually said this, heed the warnings, and the phrase did not seem stilted. I imagined him standing in the doorway of his bathroom, mouth forced partly open by the dense mass, a tentative attempt, a literal taste, one hand on each doorpost, bracing him.
Jessie had no cell phone but the police were checking records to see if she’d made or received calls on our phones. They were checking motel registers, reports of crimes in nearby counties and states.
“We can’t leave.”
“No, we can’t.”
“What if she comes back?”
“One of us has to be here,” I said.
I was cooking the omelettes now. He seemed to wonder what he was supposed to do with the fork in his hand. I made coffee in the morning, set out bread, cereal, milk, butter and jam. Then I went to his bedroom and talked him out of bed. Nothing happened that was not marked by her absence. He ate sparingly. He moved through the house like someone mopping the floor, taking steps determined by laborious circumstance.
He was supposed to be in Berlin in a week, a lecture, a conference, he wasn’t clear on the details.
He began to see things out of the corner of his eye, the right eye. He’d walk into a room and catch a glimpse of something, a color, a movement. When he turned his head, nothing. It happened once or twice a day. I told him it was physiological, same eye every time, routine sort of dysfunction, minor, happens to people of a certain age. He turned and looked. Someone there but then she wasn’t.
I was counting the days again as I’d done in the beginning. Days missing. One of us was almost always on the deck, keeping watch. We did this well into the night. It became a ritual, a religious observance, and often, when both of us were out there, completely wordless.
We kept the door to her bedroom closed.
He began to resemble a recluse who might live in a shack on an abandoned mining site, unwashed old man, shaky, stubbled, caution in his eyes, a fear from one step to the next that someone or something is waiting.
He referred to her now as Jessica, the real name, the birth name. He spoke in fragments, opening and closing his hand. I could watch him being driven insistently inward. The desert was clairvoyant, this is what he’d always believed, that the landscape unravels and reveals, it knows future as well as past. But now it made him feel enclosed and I understood this, hemmed in, pressed tight. We stood outside and felt the desert bearing in. Sterile thunder seemed to hang over the hills, stormlight washing toward us. A hundred childhoods, he said obscurely. Meaning what, the thunder maybe, a soft evocative rumble sounding down the years.
He asked me for the first time what had happened. Not what I thought or guessed or envisioned. What happened, Jimmy? I didn’t know what to tell him. Nothing I might say to him was more or less likely than something else. It had happened, whatever it was, and there was no point thinking back into it, although we would of course, or I would. He had the intimate past to think back to, his and hers and her mother’s. This is what he was left with, lost times and places, the true life, over and over.
A call late one night, the mother.
“I think I know his name.”
“You think you know.”
“I was sleeping. Then I wake up with his name. It is Dennis.”
“You think it is Dennis.”
“It is Dennis, for sure.