The Angel Esmeralda - Don Delillo [16]
The view is endlessly fulfilling. It is like the answer to a lifetime of questions and vague cravings. It satisfies every childlike curiosity, every muted desire, whatever there is in him of the scientist, the poet, the primitive seer, the watcher of fire and shooting stars, whatever obsessions eat at the night side of his mind, whatever sweet and dreamy yearning he has ever felt for nameless places faraway, whatever earth sense he possesses, the neural pulse of some wilder awareness, a sympathy for beasts, whatever belief in an immanent vital force, the Lord of Creation, whatever secret harboring of the idea of human oneness, whatever wishfulness and simplehearted hope, whatever of too much and not enough, all at once and little by little, whatever burning urge to escape responsibility and routine, escape his own overspecialization, the circumscribed and inward-spiraling self, whatever remnants of his boyish longing to fly, his dreams of strange spaces and eerie heights, his fantasies of happy death, whatever indolent and sybaritic leanings—lotus-eater, smoker of grasses and herbs, blue-eyed gazer into space—all these are satisfied, all collected and massed in that living body, the sight he sees from the window.
“It is just so interesting,” he says at last. “The colors and all.”
The colors and all.
PART TWO
The Runner(1988)
The Ivory Acrobat (1988)
The Angel Esmeralda (1994)
THE RUNNER
The runner took the turn slowly, watching ducks collect near the footbridge where a girl was scattering bread. The path roughly followed the outline of the pond, meandering through stands of trees. The runner listened to his even breathing. He was young and knew he could go harder but didn’t want to spoil the sense of easy effort in the dying light, all the day’s voices and noises drained out in steady sweat.
Traffic skimmed past. The girl took bread in fragments from her father and pitched them over the rail, holding her hand open like someone signaling five. The runner eased across the bridge. There were two women thirty yards ahead, walking along a path that led out to the street. A pigeon quick-stepped across the grass when the runner approached, leaning into his turn. The sun was in the trees beyond the parkway.
He was a quarter of the way down the path at the west side of the pond when a car came off the road, bouncing onto the sloped lawn. A breeze stirred up and the runner lifted his arms out, feeling the air slip into his T-shirt. A man got out of the car, moving fast. The runner passed an old couple on a bench. They were putting together sections of the newspaper, getting ready to leave. Purple loosestrife was coming into bloom along the near bank. He thought he would do four more laps, close to the edge of his endurance. There was a disturbance back there, over his right shoulder, a jump to another level. He looked back as he ran, seeing the old couple rise from the bench, unaware, and then the car on the grass, out of place, and a woman standing on a blanket looking toward the car, her hands raised, framing her face. He turned forward and ran past the sign that said the park closes at sundown, although there were no gates, no effective way to keep people out. The closing was strictly in the mind.
The car was old and bruised, the right rear fender painted a rustproof copper, and he heard staccato bursts from the exhaust pipe when it drove