Mao II (12 page)

Sirens sounding to the east.

Then he sat near her on the sofa. He leaned toward her and touched the back of his hand to her cheek. She watched a mouse run up the face of a window and disappear. She had a theory the sirens drove them mad.

She said, “In some places where you eat standing up you are forced to look directly into a mirror. This is total control of the person’s responses, like a consumer prison. And the mirror is literally inches away so you can hardly put the food in your mouth without hitting into it.”

“The mirror is for safety, for protection. You use it to hide. You’re totally alone in the foreground but you’re also part of the swarm, the shifting jelly of heads looming over your little face. Bill doesn’t understand how people need to blend in, lose themselves in something larger. The point of mass marriage is to show that we have to survive as a community instead of individuals trying to master every complex force. Mass interracial marriage. The conversion of the white-skinned by the dark. Every revolutionary idea involves danger and reversal. I know all the drawbacks of the Moon system but in theory it is brave and visionary. Think of the future and see how depressed you get. All the news is bad. We can’t survive by needing more, wanting more, standing out, grabbing all we can.”

“Speaking of the future. ”

“You can’t send me out there.”

“I need to sleep, to stop the noise in my head. I feel I’ve known all three of you for years and it’s goddamn tiring actually.”

They were seated far from the one dim light floating over the stove.

“We’ve gone too far into space to insist on our differences. Like those people you talk about on the Great Wall, a man and woman walking toward each other across China. This isn’t a story about seeing the planet new. It’s about seeing people new. We see them from space, where gender and features don’t matter, where names don’t matter. We’ve learned to see ourselves as if from space, as if from satellite cameras, all the time, all the same. As if from the moon, even. We’re all Moonies, or should learn to be.”

She heard the elevator gate smash shut again. Her eyes were closed. But Scott was the one who fell asleep. When she realized this, she eased off the sofa and got a blanket for him. Then she went to the other end of the loft, past the kitchen, and climbed the ladder to her bed.

She took off her sneakers and lay face up with her clothes on, suddenly wide awake. The cat appeared at her elbow, watching. She heard shouting in the street, the night voices that called all the time now, kids who pissed on sleeping men, the woman who lived in garbage bags, wearing them, sleeping inside them, who carried a large plastic bag everywhere, filled with other plastic bags. Brita heard her talking now, her voice carried on the river wind, a rasp of static in the night.

Soon the road replayed itself in her mind, the raveled passage down the hours. It was strange to lie still in a small corner and feel the power of movement, the gull-rush of air over the hood. A sense memory pulsing in the skin. The cat moved past her hand, a shrug of lunar muscle and fur. She heard car alarms going off in sequence, the panic data that fed into her life. Everything feeds in, everything is coded, there is everything and its hidden meaning. Which crisis do I trust? She felt she needed her own hidden meanings to get her through the average day. She reached out and snatched the cat, bringing it onto her chest. She thought her body had become defensive, homesick for lost assurances. It wanted to be a refuge against the way things work, against the force of what is out there. To love and touch, the roundness of these moments was crossed with something wistful now. All sex is a form of longing even as it happens. Because it happens against the crush of time. Because the surface of the act is public, a cross-grain of fear and ruin. She wanted her body to remain a secret of the past, untouched by complexity and regret. She was superstitious about talking to doctors in detail. She thought they would take her body over, name all the damaged parts, speak all the awful words. She lay for a long time with her eyes closed, trying to drift into sleep. Then she rubbed the cat’s fur and felt her childhood there. It was complete in a touch, everything intact, carried out of old lost houses and fields and summer days into the river of her hand.

She slipped under the quilt, turning on her side and facing the wall to prove she was serious. Slowly now, into that helpless half life of self-commentary, the voice film that runs between light and dark. But the time eventually came when she had to admit she was still awake. She threw off the quilt and lay there on her back. Then she climbed down the ladder and went to a window, seeing steam come heaving out of a vent hole in the street. The telephone rang. Like earthwork art, these vapor columns rising all over the city, white and silent in empty streets. She heard the machine switch on and waited for the caller to speak. A man’s voice, sounding completely familiar, sounding enhanced, filling the high room, but she couldn’t identify him at first, couldn’t quite fix the context of his remarks, and she thought he might be someone she’d known years before, many years and very well, a voice that seemed to wrap itself around her, so strangely and totally near.

“You left without saying goodbye. Although that’s not why I’m calling. I’m wide awake and need to talk to someone but that’s not why I’m calling either. Do you know how strange it is for me to sit here talking to a machine? I feel like a TV set left on in an empty room. I’m playing to an empty room. This is a new kind of loneliness you’re getting me into, Brita. How nice to say your name. The loneliness of knowing I won’t be heard for hours or days. I imagine you’re always catching up with messages. Accessing your machine from distant sites. There’s a lot of violence in that phrase. ‘Accessing your machine.’ You need a secret code if I’m not mistaken. You enter your code in Brussels and blow up a building in Madrid. This is the dark wish that the accessing industry caters to. I’m sitting in my cane chair looking out the window. The birds are awake and so am I. Another draggy smoked-out dawn with my throat scorched raw but I’ve had much worse. I stopped drinking when you left last night. And I’m speaking slowly now because there’s no sense of a listener, not even the silences a listener creates, a dozen different kinds, dense and expectant and bored and angry, and I feel a little awkward, making a speech to an absent friend. I hope we’re friends. But that’s not why I’m calling. I keep seeing my book wandering through the halls. There the thing is, creeping feebly, if you can imagine a naked humped creature with filed-down genitals, only worse, because its head bulges at the top and there’s a gargoylish tongue jutting at a corner of the mouth and truly terrible feet. It tries to cling to me, to touch and fasten. A cretin, a distort. Water-bloated, slobbering, incontinent. I’m speaking slowly to get it right. It’s my book after all, so I’m responsible for getting it right. The loneliness of voices stored on tape. By the time you listen to this, I’ll no longer remember what I said. I’ll be an old message by then, buried under many new messages. The machine makes everything a message, which narrows the range of discourse and destroys the poetry of nobody home. Home is a failed idea. People are no longer home or not home. They’re either picking up or not picking up. The truth is I don’t feel awkward. It’s probably easier to talk to you this way. But that’s not why I’m calling. I’m calling to describe the sunrise. A pale runny light spreading across the hills. There’s a partial cloud cover, which makes the light seem to hug the land, quiet light, soft, calm, pale, a landglow more than a light from the sky. I thought you’d want to know these things. I thought this is a woman who wants to know these things more than other things that other people might attempt to tell her. The cloud bank is long and slate-gray and altogether fine. There really isn’t any more to say about it. The window is open so I can feel the air. I’m not deeply hung over and so the air does not rebuke me. The air is fine. It’s precisely what it is. I’m sitting in my old cane chair with my feet up on a bench and my back to the typewriter. The birds are fine. I can hear them in the trees nearby and out in the fields, crows in clusters in the fields. The air is sharp and cold and fine and smells altogether as air should smell early on a spring morning when a man is talking to a machine. I thought these are the things this woman wants to hear about. It tries to cling to me, soft-skinned and moist, to fasten its puckery limpet flesh onto mine.”

The machine cut him off.

She realized Scott was right behind her. He leaned against her, ardent and sleepy, hands reaching around, hands and thumbs, thumbs sliding into the belt loops of her jeans. She let her head drop back against his shoulder, concentrating, and he pressed in tight. She yawned and then laughed. He put his hands under her sweater, he undid her belt, leaned in to her, put his hands down along her belly, the watchfulness, the startled alert of the body to every touch. He lifted her sweater up onto her shoulders and rubbed the side of his face against her back. She concentrated, she looked like someone listening for sounds in the wall. She felt everything. She was speculative, waiting, her breathing even and careful, and she moved slowly under his hands and felt the sandy buzz of his face on her back.

She knew he would not say a word, not even going up the ladder, not even the faithful little ladder joke, and she welcomed the silence, the tactful boy lean and pale, climbing her body with a groan.

B
ill opened the door in the middle of traffic, the thick choked blast of yellow metal, and he walked out into it. Scott called after him to wait, stay, watch out. He moved between stalled cabs where drivers sat slumped in the gloom like inmates watching daytime TV. Scott shouted out a place and a time to meet. Bill threw back a wave and then stood at the edge of the one active lane until there was an opening to the sidewalk.

The rush of things, of shuffled sights, the mixed swagger of the avenue, noisy storefronts, jewelry spread across the sidewalk, the deep stream of reflections, heads floating in windows, towers liquefied on taxi doors, bodies shivery and elongate, all of it interesting to Bill in the way it blocked comment, the way it simply rushed at him, massively, like your first day in Jalalabad, rushed and was. Nothing tells you what you’re supposed to think of this. Well, it was his first day in New York in many years and there was no street or building he wanted to see again, no old haunt that might rouse a longing or sweet regret.

He found the number and approached an oval desk in the lobby, where two security officers sat behind a bank of telephones, TV monitors and computer displays. He gave his name and waited for the woman to check a visitors’ list on the swivel screen. She asked him some questions and then picked up a phone and in a couple of minutes a uniformed man appeared to escort Bill to the proper floor. The woman at the desk gave the man a visitor’s badge, an adhesive piece of paper, which he fastened to Bill’s lapel.

There was another checkpoint at the elevator bank and they passed without delay and rode an express to the top of the building and when the door came open there was Charlie Everson in a bright tie, waiting. He squeezed Bill’s arms at the biceps and looked squarely into his face. Neither man said a word. Then Charlie nodded to the guard and led Bill through a door opposite the reception room. They walked down a long corridor lined with book jackets and went into a large sunny office filled with plant life and polished surfaces.

“Where’s your Bushmills?” Bill said. “A bite of the single-malt will do just fine.”

“I’m not drinking these days.”

“But you keep something in the cabinet for visiting writers.”

“Ballygowan. It’s water.”

Bill looked at him hard. Then he sat down and undid the laces on his shoes, which were new and tight.

“Bill, it’s hard to believe.”

“I know. So many years, so fast, so strange.”

“You look like a writer. You never used to. Took all these years. Do I recognize the jacket?”

“I think it’s yours.”

“Is it possible? The night Louise Wiegand got drunk and insulted my jacket.”

“And you took it off.”

“I threw it right down.”

“And I said I need a jacket and I did need a jacket and she said or someone said take this one.”

“Wasn’t me. I liked that jacket.”

“It’s a nice old tweed.”

“Doesn’t fit.”

“I’ve worn it maybe four times.”

“She gave you my jacket.”

“Louise was damn nice that way.”

“She’s dead, you know.”

“Don’t start, Charlie.”

“What do you hear from Helen?”

“Speaking of dead? Nothing.”

“I always liked Helen.”

“You should have married her,” Bill said. “Would have saved me a ton of trouble.”

“She wasn’t the trouble. You were the trouble.”

“Either way,” Bill said.

Charlie’s face was broad, with a healthy flush, the windburn that fills the mirror behind the yacht-club bar. Thin pale hair cut short. The custom suit. The traditional loud tie that preserved a link to collegiate fun, that reminded people he was still Charlie E. and this was still supposed to be the book business, not global war through laser technology.

“Those years seem awfully clear to me. And they keep adding on. New things come back all the time. I find myself recalling scraps of dialogue from 1955.”

“Be careful, you’ll end up writing this stuff down.”

“If I live and live and live, boringly into my middle eighties, I wonder how much I’ll be able to add to the pleasure of those memories, the intense conversations, all those endless dinners and drinks and arguments we all had. We used to come out of a bar at three a.m. and talk on a street corner because there was so much we still had to say to each other, there were arguments we’d only scratched the surface of. Writing, painting, women, jazz, politics, history, baseball, every damn thing under the sun. I never wanted to go home, Bill. And when I finally got home I couldn’t sleep. The talk kept buzzing in my head.”