The Angel Esmeralda - Don Delillo [74]
There were gaps in the silence, a feeling of stop and go. She was looking past him. She had the face and eyes of someone distant in time, a woman in a painting, curtains hanging in loose folds. He wanted one of them to say something.
He said, “The faucets in the men’s toilet aren’t working.”
This seemed incomplete.
“I came in here,” he said, “to wash my hands.”
He didn’t know what would happen next. The white glare of the toilet was deathly. He felt sweat working along his shoulders and down his back. Even if she wasn’t facing him directly, he was in her sightline. What would happen if she looked at him straight on, eye to eye? Is this the contact she feared, the look that triggers the action?
Neither person moved, he thought.
He nodded to her, absurdly. Her face and hands were still wet. She stood with one arm bent in front of her but it didn’t seem defensive to him. She was not fending, staving off. She was just caught in midmotion, the other arm at her side, palm of hand flat against the wall.
He tried to imagine what he looked like to her, man of some size, some years, but what did he look like to anyone? He had no idea.
He felt a kind of tremor in his right arm. He thought it might begin shaking. He clenched his fist, just to see if he could do it. The thing to do was to make himself known, tell her who he was, for both of them to hear.
He said, “I keep thinking of a Japanese movie I saw about ten years ago. It was sepia tone, like grayish brown, three and a half hours plus, an afternoon screening in Times Square, theater gone now, and I can’t remember the title of the movie. This should drive me crazy but it doesn’t. Something happened to my memory somewhere along the way. It’s because I don’t sleep well. Sleep and memory are intertwined. There’s a bus being hijacked, people dead, I was the only person in the theater. The theater was located down under a monster store selling CDs, DVDs, headsets, videocassettes, all kinds of audio equipment, and you go into the store and down some stairs and there’s a movie theater and you buy a ticket and go in. I used to know everything about every movie I ever saw but it’s all fading away. It embarrasses me to say three and a half hours. I should be talking about minutes, the exact number of minutes that make up the running time.”
His voice sounded peculiar. He could hear it as though he were listening to someone else speaking. It was a steady voice, without inflection, a flat low drone.
“The lobby and theater were both deserted. Nobody anywhere. Was there a refreshment stand? This much I remember, the experience itself, alone in this place watching a movie in a language I don’t understand, with subtitles, down under the street, eerie and tomblike, passengers dead, hijacker dead, driver survives, some kids survive. I used to know every title of every foreign film in English plus the original language. But my memory’s shot. One thing doesn’t change for you and me. We arrange the day, don’t we? It’s all compiled, it’s organized, we make sense of it. And once we’re in our seats and the feature begins, it’s like something we always knew, over and over, but we can’t really share it with others. Stanley Kubrick grew up in the Bronx but nowhere near where you live. Tony Curtis, the Bronx, Bernard Schwartz. I’m from Philadelphia, myself, originally. I saw The Passenger at Cinema Nineteen. The old memories outlive the new ones, Nineteenth Street and Chestnut. There was a huge fat man in the lobby, the oneten show, wearing shoes with the toe caps cut away and no socks. I don’t think people looked at his toes. Nobody wanted to do that. Then I came to New York and