Mao II

by Don DeLillo

“When I read Bill I think of photographs of tract houses at the edge of the desert. There’s an incidental menace. That great Winogrand photo of a small child at the head of a driveway and the fallen tricycle and the storm shadow on the bare hills.”

“Bill is at the height of his fame. Ask me why. Because he hasn’t published in years and years and years. When his books first came out, and people forget this or never knew it, they made a slight sort of curio impression. I’ve seen the reviews. Bric-a-brac, like what’s this little oddity. It’s the years since that made him big. Bill gained celebrity by doing nothing. The world caught up. Reprint after reprint. We make a nice steady income, most of which goes to his two ex-wives and three ex-children. We could make a king’s whatever, multimillions, with the new book. But it would be the end of Bill as a myth, a force. Bill gets bigger as his distance from the scene deepens.”

He had coffee and a sandwich at his desk. Then tapped on the keys, hearing an old watery moan deep in the body. How the day’s first words set off physical alarms, a pule and fret, the resistance of living systems to racking work. Calls for a cigarette, don’t you think? He heard them come down the stairs and pictured them making an effort not to creak, setting their feet down softly, shoulders hunched. Let’s not disturb the family fool in the locked room.

Every book is a bug-eyed race, let’s face it. Must finish. Can’t die yet. He struck enough keys to make a sentence and thought about going down to say goodbye to her but it would only embarrass them both. Got what she came for, didn’t she? I’m a picture now, flat as birdshit on a Buick.

She wore a limp blouse over blue jeans and had the body lines of a teenager, the crooks and skews and smeariness, and a way of merging with furniture, a kind of draped indecision.

“I haven’t known many people with careers. It sounds so important. Having a career. Do you keep a bottle of vodka handy in your freezer?” “Yes, I do.”

What puts him on edge is not when I argue with him but when I agree with him. When I bring his little wishes dancing to the surface.”

“I want others to believe, you see. Many believers everywhere. I feel the enormous importance of this. When I was in Catania and saw hundreds of running men pulling a saint on a float through the streets, absolutely running. When I saw people crawl for miles on their knees in Mexico City on the Day of the Virgin, leaving blood on the basilica steps and then joining the crowd inside, the crush, so many people that there was no air. Always blood. The Day of Blood in Teheran. I need these people to believe for me. I cling to believers. Many, everywhere. Without them, the planet goes cold.”

“I’ve heard about a man and woman who are walking the length of the Great Wall of China, approaching each other from opposite directions. Every time I think of them, I see them from above, with the Wall twisting and winding through the landscape and two tiny human figures moving toward each other from remote provinces, step by step. I think this is a story of reverence for the planet, of trying to understand how we belong to the planet in a new way. And it’s strange how I construct an aerial view so naturally.” “Hikers in shaggy boots,” Karen said. “No, artists. And the Great Wall is supposedly the only man-made structure visible from space, so we see it as part of the total planet. And this man and woman walk and walk. They’re artists. I don’t know what nationality. But it’s an art piece. It’s not Nixon and Mao shaking hands. It’s not nationality, not politics.”

“When I think of China, what do I think of?” “People,” Karen said. “Crowds,” Scott said. “People trudging along wide streets, pushing carts or riding bikes, crowd after crowd in the long lens of the camera so they seem even closer together than they really are, totally jampacked, and I think of how they merge with the future, how the future makes room for the nonachiever, the nonaggressor, the trudger, the nonindividual. Totally calm in the long lens, crowd on top of crowd, pedaling, trudging, faceless, sort of surviving nicely.”

“Bill has the idea that writers are being consumed by the emergence of news as an apocalyptic force.” “He told me, more or less.” “The novel used to feed our search for meaning. Quoting Bill. It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don’t need the novel. Quoting Bill. We don’t even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings.”

“You left without saying goodbye. Although that’s not why I’m calling. I’m wide awake and