Point Omega - Don Delillo [26]
“First name Dennis.”
“This is all I heard, first name. I wake up, just now, it is Dennis,” she said.
At night the rooms were clocks. The stillness was nearly complete, bare walls, plank floors, time here and out there, on the high trails, every passing minute a function of our waiting. I was drinking, he was not. I wouldn’t let him drink and he didn’t seem to care. Sunsets were nothing more than dying light now, the dimming of chance. For weeks there had been nothing to do but talk. Now nothing to say.
The name sounded ominous, Jessica, sounded like formal surrender. I was the man who’d stood in the dark watching while she lay in bed. Whatever Elster’s sense of implication, the nature of his guilt and failure, I shared it. He sat opening and closing his hand. When he heard helicopters beating down out of the sun, he looked up, surprised, always, then remembered why they were there.
We were often testing locations for cell phone reception, one of us facing one way, one of us the other, inside the house, outside, calling and getting calls, phone to one ear, free hand to the other, he is on the deck, I am forty yards down the path. I tried not to watch us when we did this. I wanted to stay within it, where the dance was a practical matter. I wanted to be free of seeing.
I began to use the old handweights he’d found earlier. I stood in my room lifting and counting. I called the park rangers and the sheriff. I could not forget what the sheriff had said. People come to the desert to commit suicide. I knew I had to ask Elster if she’d ever showed tendencies. Jessica. Was she seeing a doctor? Did she take antidepressants? Her airline kit was still in the bathroom we’d shared. I found nothing, talked to her father, called her mother, learned nothing from either that might indicate a drift in that direction.
I lifted the handweights one at a time, then both at once, twenty reps one way, ten the other, lifting and counting, on and on.
I led him out to the deck and put him in a chair. He was in pajamas and old tennis shoes, unlaced, his eyes seeming to trace a single thought. This is where he fixed his gaze now, not on objects but thoughts. I stood behind him with a pair of scissors and a comb and told him it was time for a haircut.
He turned his head slightly, in inquiry, but I repositioned it and began to trim his sideburns. I talked as I worked. I talked in a kind of audiostream, combing and cutting through the tangled strands on one side of his head. I told him this was different from shaving. The day would come when he’d want to shave and he’d have to do it himself but the hair on his head was a question of morale, his and mine. I said many empty things that morning, matter-of-factly, half believing. I removed the wormy rubberband from the weave of braided hair at the back of his neck and tried to comb and trim. I kept skipping to other parts of the head. He spoke about Jessie’s mother, her face and eyes, his admiration, voice trailing off, low and hoarse. I felt compelled to trim the hair in his ears, long white fibers curling out of the dark. I tried to unsnarl every inch of matted vegetation before I cut. He spoke about his sons. You don’t know this, he said. I have two sons from the first marriage. Their mother was a paleontologist. Then he said it again. Their mother was a paleontologist. He was remembering her, seeing her in the word. She loved this place and so did the boys. I did not, he said. But this changed over the years. He began to look forward to his time here, he said, and then the marriage broke up and the boys were young men and that was all he was able to say.
I stood to the side, head tilted, and studied my handiwork. I’d forgotten to drape a towel over his upper body and there were cuttings everywhere, hair on his face, neck, lap and shoulders, hair in his pajamas. I said nothing about the sons. I just kept cutting. If I had to give him a shower, I’d give him a shower. I’d stick his head in the kitchen sink and wash his hair. I’d scrub out the sour odor he carried with him. I told him I was almost