Point Omega - Don Delillo [29]
I kept glancing over. He sat back, eyes wide, and I talked to him the way I had when I was cutting his hair, rambling through that long morning, trying to keep him company, distract us both. But there was nearly no one to talk to now. He seemed beyond memory and its skein of regret, a man drawn down to sparest outline, weightless. I drove and talked, telling him about our flight, reporting our flight number, pointing out that we were wait-listed, reciting time of departure, time of arrival. Blank facts. In the sound of my words I thought I heard a flimsy strategy for returning him to the world.
The road began to climb, landscape going green around us, scattered houses, a trailer camp, a silo, and he started coughing and gasping, struggling to bring up phlegm. I thought he might choke. The road was tight and steep, guardrail at the edge, and there was nothing for me to do but keep going. He ejected the mess finally, hawked it up and spewed it into his open hand. Then he looked at it wobbling there and so did I, briefly, a thick stringy pulsing thing, pearly green. There was no place to put it. I managed to yank a handkerchief out of my pocket and toss it over. I didn’t know what he saw in that handful of mucus but he kept looking.
We passed a row of live oaks. Then he croaked a few words.
“One of the ancient humors.”
“What?”
“Phlegm.”
“Phlegm,” I said.
“One of the ancient and medieval humors.”
The hanky sat on his thigh. I reached over and grabbed it, eyes on the road, and shook it out and placed it on his hand, over the blob. A helicopter passed somewhere behind us and I looked in the rearview mirror and then over at Elster. He didn’t move, he sat with hand extended, draped in the cloth. Leaving her behind. We listened to the sound of the rotor dying away in the distance. He cleaned the mess from his hand and then crumpled the handkerchief and dropped it to the mat between his feet.
We drove in silence behind a motorboat being towed by a black pickup. I thought of his remarks about matter and being, those long nights on the deck, half smashed, he and I, transcendence, paroxysm, the end of human consciousness. It seemed so much dead echo now. Point omega. A million years away. The omega point has narrowed, here and now, to the point of a knife as it enters a body. All the man’s grand themes funneled down to local grief, one body, out there somewhere, or not.
We passed through pinewoods and along a lake, small birds flying low to the water. His eyes were closed and his breathing a steady nasal hum. I tried to think about the future, unknown weeks and months ahead, and I realized what it was that had passed out of mind until this moment. It was the film. I remembered the film. Here it is again, man and wall, face and eyes, but not another talking head. On film the face is the soul. The man is a soul in distress, as in Dreyer or Bergman, a flawed character in a chamber drama, justifying his war and condemning the men who made it. It would never happen now, not a single frame. He would not have the firmness of will or the sheer heart for it and neither would I. The story was here, not in Iraq or in Washington, and we were leaving it behind and taking it with us, both.
The road began to descend toward the freeway now. He was belted in like a child, asleep. I thought about the airport, the luggage, getting him a wheelchair. I thought about the medieval humors. I kept looking at him, checking on him.
There we were, coming out of an empty sky. One man past knowing. The other knowing only that he would carry something with him from this day on, a stillness, a distance, and he saw himself in somebody’s crowded loft, where he puts his hand to the rough surface of an old brick wall and then closes his eyes and listens.
Soon we were headed west, cars and trucks in clusters, rattling traffic, four lanes, and my cell phone rang. I paused a moment, then snatched