Point Omega - Don Delillo [30]
I hated freeway driving, traffic heavier now, cars shooting across lanes. I kept my eyes on the road. I didn’t want to look at him, didn’t want to hear any questions or speculations. I was thinking six things at once. The mother. She remembered his name in her sleep. I was thinking someone’s returning my call. That’s all it was, all it could be, someone I knew returning my call of last evening or earlier this morning, friend, colleague, landlord, weak signal, failed transmission. What did it mean? It meant that soon the city would be happening, nonstop New York, faces, languages, construction scaffolds everywhere, the stream of taxis at four in the afternoon, off-duty signs lighted.
I thought of my apartment, how distant it would seem even when I walked in the door. My life at a glance, everything there, music, movies, books, the bed and desk, the seared enamel around the burners on the stove. I thought of the telephone ringing as I entered.
Anonymity 2
September 4
Norman Bates, scary bland, is putting down the phone.
The man stood at the wall thinking ahead. He’d started doing this, jumping scenes, speeding through scenes mentally, visually, with closing time not too far off. He didn’t want to check his watch. He tried to contain his impatience, to direct every energy toward the screen, see what is happening now.
The door easing everlastingly open.
The strip of interior light spreading across the floor as the door continues to move.
The shadow of the door vanishing under the door.
These abstract moments, all form and scale, the carpet pattern, the grain of the floorboards, binding him to total alertness, eye and mind, and then the overhead shot of the landing and the attack on Arbogast.
His visits to the gallery mingled seamlessly in memory. He could not recall on which day he’d watched a particular scene or how many times he’d watched certain scenes. Could they be called scenes, becalmed as they were, the raw makings of a gesture, the long arc of hand to face?
He was in place, as always, his place, in body contact with the north wall. People in uneasy passage, in and out. They would stay longer, he thought, if there were chairs or benches here. But any kind of seating arrangement would sabotage the concept. The bare setting, and the darkness, and the chill air, and the guard motionless at the door. The guard purified the occasion, made it finer and rarer. But what was he guarding? The silence maybe. Or the screen itself. They might climb the screen and claw it, tourists from the movie malls.
Standing was part of the art, the standing man participates. That was him, sixth straight day he’d been here, last day of the installation. He would miss being in this room, free at times to walk around the screen and to observe from the reverse side, to note the left-handedness of people and objects. But always back to the wall, in physical touch, or he might find himself doing what, he wasn’t sure, transmigrating, passing from this body into a quivering image on the screen.
The dull parts of the original movie were not dull anymore. They were like everything else, outside all categories, open to entry. This is what he wanted to believe. But he yielded to the screen more readily at certain times. He conceded this, the screen empty of characters, the screen that reveals a stuffed bird or a single human eye.
Three children entered, two boys and a girl, interchangeably blond, with a woman behind them.
He could not understand why the detective, Arbogast, clearly stabbed once below the heart, goes hurtling down the stairs with stab wounds on his face. Maybe the viewer is expected to imagine a second and third and fourth knife slash but he wasn