Mao II Part 13

She talked to the woman who lived in a plastic bag half a block from Brita's building. This person knew some things about bundling and tying. Survival means you learn how to narrow the s.p.a.ce you take up for fear of arousing antagonistic interest and it also means you hide what you own inside something else so that you may seem to possess one chief thing when it is really many things bundled and tied and placed inside each other, a secret universe of things, unwhisperable, plastic bags inside plastic bags, and the woman is somewhere in there too, bagged with her possessions. Karen talked to her about what she ate, did she have a hot meal ever, was there something she needed that I can get for you. Practical talk. The woman looked out at her, dark-eyed and sooty, barely ever responding, showing the soot that deepens into the face and becomes the texture of the person.

It is hard to find a language for unfortunates. One word out of place and their eyes call up a void.

She saw a man weaving through the subway saying, "I have holes in my sides." Not even asking for money or shaking a plastic cup. Just going car to car in that firm-footed pace you learn to adopt in the subway even if you are broken-bodied. She tried to read the Spanish directions about what to do in an emergency. "I have holes in my sides." There must be something about the tunnels and crypts of the city that makes people think they are Jesus.

Uptown there were schoolboys wearing ties as headbands. They widened the neck part to fit around the forehead with the knot near the right ear and the main part drooping over the shoulder. Shooting with their schoolbags. In other words lifting the school-bag to the hip Uzi-style and spraying imaginary fire with their lips pushed out. Only Catholic boys wore uniforms back home. She remembered nuns in station wagons and how she walked among them at a football game. They were in black and white, she was in color.

There were water-main breaks and steam-pipe explosions, asbestos flying everywhere, mud propelled from caved-in pavement, and people stood around saying, "It's just like Beirut, it looks like Beirut."

On the bus you have to push a narrow tape to signal for a stop. English on the buses, Spanish on the subways. Bring hurry-up time to all man.

The saxophonist in white sneakers played in a deep crouch, leaning forward on his toes, knees bent high, the low-slung metal nearly sc.r.a.ping the pavement, buses, cars, trucks, there are magazines for sale on the sidewalk, totally old copies of Life and Look, the generosity of those old covers, the way they seem a pity and a consolation, forgiving us the years between, and the saxman shuts his eyes, nodding to the sounds.

In the loft she looked at a photograph of refugees in a camp, the whole picture out to the edges nothing but boys crowded together, most of them waving urgently, pale palms showing, all looking in the same direction, bareheaded boys, black faces, palms that catch the glare, and you know there are thousands more outside the edges of the picture but in the midst of the visible hundreds who are jammed and pushed together waving, this suffocating picture of ma.s.sed boys, she noticed a single worried adult, one man's head showing at upper right, and he is wearing a knit cap and has his hand near his forehead possibly s.h.i.+elding his eyes from the glare and all the boys are looking in the general direction of the camera and he is standing diagonally and peering over the heads and across the frame and out of the picture. He does not look like an official or a leader. He is part of the ma.s.s but lost there, stuck there on the page that is filled with waving boys, and nowhere in the picture is there a glimpse of ground or sky or horizon, it is only heads and hands, and she wondered if the waving was for food, throw the food, all those grimacing boys looking at the camera. Are there truckloads of food on the other side of the camera or is it just the camera they're waving at, the camera that shows them an opening to the food? A person comes with a camera and they think it means food. And the lost-looking man whose mind is not on the food or the camera but on the crowd, how he might escape before they trample him.

Brita said, "And I don't mind your staying for a while. But we both know I have to kick you out one of these days and it's going to be sooner rather than later. And I'm telling you there is no Bill to be found around here."

"I'm not looking for him face by face in the street. I just need this time away from Scott. I'm looking for Bill kind of in my mind, to think where he might be."

"And you and Scott."

"I really love Scott in most of the ways that count. G.o.d that sounds awful. Forget I said that. We just stopped talking the way we used to. We actually lacked the strength to talk to each other. We silently agreed we are going to let this get as bad as it can get and then see what happens. It was a question of willfully let it fester. All alone in Bill's house. And these are two people who had a constant daily plan for getting things done. Who used to totally talk."

Brita went away to take pictures of writers and left the keys and some money. She gave Karen oral and written instructions for feeding the cat and working the locks and the alarm system and she left phone numbers and dates-San Francisco, Tokyo and Seoul.

She felt the warning aura in the street, the sense that she was glowing, cars and people glowing, the electric s.h.i.+ver down her arm and then the full truth of the pain, the pain in full surround, streaming from the neurons, a brain trail so deep it might crack the skin. She could not see for a number of seconds, maybe half a minute, or could see only glow, intense white shadow, and she stood dizzily where she was and waited for the street to reappear so she might walk out of the glow and come into objects and surfaces and the words that we attach to them.

She took a taxi back to the building. She began taking taxis here and there, yellow cabs driven by fantastically named men from Haiti, Iran, Sri Lanka, the Yemen-names so wondrous she couldn't always tell whether they were printed last name first or in the normal sequence. Karen talked to them. She was loose in the city of overflowing faces and needed to find ways to tell them apart. One man said he was from the Yemen and she tried to imagine where that might be. She talked to Sikhs and Egyptians, calling through the part.i.tion or putting her mouth to the cash slot, asking family questions or what about religious practices, did they pray facing east.

She saw pictures of missing children on shopping bags and milk cartons, on posters stuck to building walls, and then you hear about women who give away babies, leave babies in the trash. She came upon this park, saw it from a cab. She saw the normative life of the planet, businesspeople crossing streets beneath the gla.s.s towers, the life of sitting on buses that take you logically to destinations, the unnerved surface of rolling plausibly along. Saw sleeping bodies in the tunnels and ramps, heads hidden, sooty feet, tightly bundled objects clutched to the knees.

Sony, Mita, Kirin, Magno, Midori.

She saw these soot-faced people pus.h.i.+ng shopping carts filled with bundled things and she thought they were like holy pilgrims marching on endlessly but possibly thinking more and more about how to get through the next ten minutes, their priorities now revealed to them, and never mind Jerusalem.

She began to form pictures of people falling in the street. She'd see a man just walking and then he had a cut head or whatnot, getting up dazed. Or see a man stepping off the curb and form a picture of a car that's bearing down and then he's in the street all bloodied up.

She came upon this park. It was something you come upon and then stop in your tracks. A tent city. Huts and shacks, she was thinking of the word; lean-tos; blue plastic sheeting covering the lean-tos and the networks of boxes and s.h.i.+pping containers that people lived in. A refugee camp or the rattiest edge of some dusty towns.h.i.+p. There was a bandsh.e.l.l with bedding on the stage, a few bodies stirring, a lump of inert bedding suddenly wriggling upward and there's a man on his knees coughing up blood. She walked in a kind of straight-legged bobbing way as if to mock her own shy curiosity or conceal her awe. Stringy blood looping from his mouth. There were bodies shrouded on benches, bedding set out to dry on the fence of the children's pool. And the makes.h.i.+ft shelters draped in blue, the box huts, the charcoal stoves and shaving mirrors, smoke rising from fires set in oil drums. It was a world apart but powerfully here, a set of milling images with breath and flesh and a language everywhere that sounded like multilingual English, like English in grabs and swoops, broken up and cooked. People in stages of rag-wearing, some less badly equipped, belongings bundled in milk crates and shopping carts. She saw a man sitting in a collapsed armchair outside his s.h.i.+pping box and he resembled a sketch of an ordinary homeowner on a shady street before the picture is fully drawn. He talked to himself in an everyday voice, a man with some education, with a history of possessions and relations, this was clear to her. Talking intelligently to himself, making sense, and when he saw Karen standing there he s.h.i.+fted his remarks directly to her as if they'd been having this conversation all along. And from the spot where she stood now, a distance from the bandsh.e.l.l, she could see more bodies stirring, hear the coughing, and she realized the whole deep stage was spread with bedding and there were people moving everywhere, a slowly spreading ripple and moan, or not moving, or lying completely still, half forms, beating hearts, faces and names.

She had to walk slowly to accommodate her awe. She went home to feed the cat but returned right away, taking a Jamaican taxi and saying Tompkins Square. It might be ten-plus acres with pigeons walking everywhere but not a single one aloft and even when she tried to kick-scatter several birds they only scurried away at best, not so much as flapping a fitful wing. People in cl.u.s.ters and larger groups, tending toward evening. Somebody cooked meat on a skewer and there was a fight not far away, a man and woman pus.h.i.+ng an older man, backing him up, and he slapped at their hands and did a scat step, turning, and fell down hard. The whole thing absorbed into the background. Things fading all the time, hard to retain. A police minicab came by like some Bombay cartoon.

When night came down she was talking to a tall kid wearing a sweats.h.i.+rt with c.o.ke bottles pictured across the front, row after row. He was selling marijuana at the edge of the park, going, Gra.s.s gra.s.s gra.s.s gra.s.s. His voice got lower as he went through the chant, ending in a kitty-cat hiss. People walking by said Omar. He had a long face, sloped forehead and shallow chin and his tightly webbed hair was so close to the scalp and so clearly defined and widely parted it had a maplike contrast and precision.

The fallen man was still down, trying to get something out of his back pocket. An old white came by wearing a rag coat and baseball cap and high sneakers and the two men fell into conversation.

Omar said, "But sometimes you get an EDP and the police come with stun guns and blinding lights."

"All the paraphernalia."

"They have a gun that shoots fifty thousand volts. Be surprised how sometimes it only slows the guy down. Shoot him again, gets up again. It's your adrenaline."

"What's an EDP?"

"Motionally disturb person. People taking meth and cocaine is what could do it to you. It's your adrenaline and your temperature both. Call it getting high is the absolute truth."

On the bandsh.e.l.l stage people were still getting up, going to sleep, they were sitting there staring, they were zippering sleeping bags and smoking cigarettes and there was a constant rolling drone, statements and set responses that made Karen think of formal prayers, a protocol of half words, dream cries, bursts and murmurs. One voice answered by another, the gasping stab for breath followed by the curse. Fragments of an American flag were fixed to the blue plastic of a sagging lean-to. A man and woman sat under a beach umbrella. A woman peeled an orange. A man slept face down on a bench, s.h.i.+rtless, with Bill's exact hair color and shoulders and back.

She heard Omar going, Dime bag dime bag dime bag.

Someone crawled out of a box and got up shaky and walked after her, begging, rough-tailing, a mean slur in his voice, and she felt for the first time since coming here that they could see her, that she wasn't concealed by the desperation of the place. This wasn't a public park but some life-and-death terrain where everything is measured for its worth. She realized they saw her. This was a shock. She gave the man a dollar, which he stopped and studied, which he looked at resentfully, talking to himself in the shadows.

She heard a voice beyond the fence, a woman saying clearly, "What a lovely spring night," and it startled Karen, the speaker's animation and delight, the distance traveled in a scatter of simple words.

She wondered what if the man hadn't stopped coming after her when she gave him the dollar. She wondered what if there was no special sum that might have kept him away.

Omar told her, "Once you live in the street, there's nothing but the street. Know what I'm saying. These people have one thing they can talk about or think about and that's the little s.h.i.+thole they live in. The littler the s.h.i.+thole, the more it takes up your life. Know what I'm saying. You live in a f.u.c.kin' a.s.s mansion you got to think about it two times a month for like ten seconds total. Live in a s.h.i.+thole, it takes up your day. They cut the s.h.i.+thole in half, you got to go twice as hard to keep it so it's livable. I'm telling you something I observe."

She imagined the encrumpled bodies in the lean-tos and tents, sort of formless as to male or female, asleep in sodden clothes on a strip of cardboard or some dragged-in mattress stained with the waste of the ages.

She looked around for Omar but he was gone.

All the odd belongings bundled in a corner, wrapped and tied, many things concealed as one, things inside other things, some infinite collapsible system of getting through a life. She walked through the park, east to west, hearing the rustle and mutter of dreaming souls.

In the morning she began to forage for redeemable bottles and cans, anything she could find in trash baskets or curbside, in garbage bags ma.s.sed in restaurant alleyways. Bottles, matchbooks, swayback shoes, whatever usable cultural deposit might be shut away in the dark. She took these things to the park and left them at the openings of lean-tos or stuck them just inside if she was sure no one was there. She slipped into those stinking alleyways and undid the twists on garbage bags and dumped out the garbage and took the bags. It was not a whole lot different from selling sweet williams in the lobby of the Marriott. She stood on garbage cans and went through dumpsters at demolition sites, salvaging plasterboard and nails, strips of plywood. Bottles and cans were her main mission, things that could be turned into money.

A man showed her his mutilated arm and asked for spare change. She found broken umbrellas, bruised fruit that was edible when washed. She washed the fruit and took it to the park. She took everything to the park. She placed things inside the huts. She saw people turning park benches into homes with walls and tilted roofs. Someone vomited loudly against the side of the maintenance building and she saw the parks department man in his khaki trappings walk by with nary a glance. A routine spatter of greensick sliding down a wall. She watched the people in the bandsh.e.l.l struggle out of their bedding, humped and gasping, looking up dazed into the span of light and sky that hung above the blue encampment.

Only those sealed by the messiah will survive.

11.

Bill stood outside a shop that sold religious articles. Many medallion images of sacred figures with s.h.i.+ny disks behind their heads. They've got their game together here, he thought. Name many saints, get them in the windows, do not stint on halos, crosses, s.h.i.+elds or swords. The priests were d.a.m.n impressive too. He saw them everywhere, round-hatted and intensely bearded, wrapped in floating robes. St.u.r.dy men every one. Even the elderly were healthy-looking. Bill thought they were deathless in a way, fixed to national memory, great black s.h.i.+ps of faith and superst.i.tion.

In his room he thought about the hostage. He tried to put himself there, in the heat and pain, outside the nuance of civilized anxiety. He wanted to imagine what it was like to know extremes of isolation. Solitude by the gun. He read Jean-Claude's poems many times. The man remained invisibly Swiss. Bill tried to see his face, hair, eye color, he saw room color, faded paint on the walls. He pictured precise objects, he made them briefly s.h.i.+ne with immanence, a bowl for food, a spoon constructed out of thought, perception, memory, feeling, will and imagination.

Then he went to see George Haddad.

"What are you drinking, Bill?"

"A small quant.i.ty of the local brandy poured gently into a short gla.s.s."

"What do we want to talk about today?"

"Semtex H."

"I can tell you I had nothing to do with setting off the explosive in that building."

"But you know who did it."

"I'm one man. I deal in concepts. This business of hostages is rife with factional complexity. Don't a.s.sume I know important things. I know very little in fact."

"But you have relations.h.i.+ps with people who know a great deal."

"Special Branch would say so."

"And someone thought it might be interesting to look more carefully at the available writers."

George looked up. He wore a wrinkled white s.h.i.+rt with the collar open and the sleeves rolled up, an unders.h.i.+rt visible beneath the sheer material. Bill watched him take a walk around the room and come back to his scotch and soda.

"It was just in the talking stage," he said finally. "One man released in Beirut, another taken in London. Instantaneous worldwide attention. But it was thought the British would be quick to act if they found out where you were being held. Unacceptable danger. For the hostage-takers and for you."

"Don't look so sad," Bill said.

"Your safety was foremost in mind. And your release would have come in a matter of days. These things were discussed at a certain level, hastily. I admit it."

"Then the bomb went off. The more I think about it, the more sense it makes. I didn't expect an explosion. But the second it happened I stood in the blast and it seemed completely logical. It seemed legitimate and well argued. From the beginning there was something in this situation that spoke to me directly. Beyond a poetry reading to lend aid to a fellow writer. When Charlie finished explaining, I felt a recognition. Then again in London. I knew who you were before we were introduced. I picked that speck of gla.s.s out of my hand and I felt it had been there all my life."

"No one knew you would be anywhere near that building."

"Don't look so sad."

"I'm in a very delicate position," George said. "I want it to end here, you see. We gather a few press people, you make a statement supporting the movement, the hostage is freed, we all shake hands. Provided I'm able to convince you that the movement is worth supporting."

"But that's not your major problem, is it?"

"Actually no."

"You're getting pressure from Beirut. They don't want it to end here."

"They may yet come round to my way of thinking. He comes to Athens, meets you, speaks to the press. It appeals to my sense of correspondence, of spiritual kins.h.i.+p. Two underground figures. Men of the same measure in a way."

There was a rattling at the door and George's wife and teenage daughter came in. Bill stood partway up for introductions. There was a moment of nods and shy smiles and then they were gone down the hall.

"He calls himself Abu Ras.h.i.+d. I honestly think you'd be fascinated by the man."

"Isn't it always the case?"

"And I'm still hopeful he'll turn up here."

"But in the meantime."

"We're here to talk."

"To have a dialogue."

"Exactly," George said.

"For some time now I've had the feeling that novelists and terrorists are playing a zero-sum game."

"Interesting. How so?"

"What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence ma.s.s consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous."

"And the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art."

"I think the relations.h.i.+p is intimate and precise insofar as such things can be measured."

"Very nice indeed."

"You think so?"

"Completely marvelous."

"Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the new tragic narrative."

"And it's difficult when they kill and maim because you see them, honestly now, as the only possible heroes for our time."

"No," Bill said.

"The way they live in the shadows, live willingly with death. The way they hate many of the things you hate. Their discipline and cunning. The coherence of their lives. The way they excite, they excite admiration. In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act. There's too much everything, more things and messages and meanings than we can use in ten thousand lifetimes. Inertia-hysteria. Is history possible? Is anyone serious? Who do we take seriously? Only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith. Everything else is absorbed. The artist is absorbed, the madman in the street is absorbed and processed and incorporated. Give him a dollar, put him in a TV commercial. Only the terrorist stands outside. The culture hasn't figured out how to a.s.similate him. It's confusing when they kill the innocent. But this is precisely the language of being noticed, the only language the West understands. The way they determine how we see them. The way they dominate the rush of endless streaming images. I said in London, Bill. It's the novelist who understands the secret life, the rage that underlies all obscurity and neglect. You're half murderers, most of you."

He found the thought happy and attractive and he smiled through Bill's hand-wagging and the motion of his shaking head.

"No. It's pure myth, the terrorist as solitary outlaw. These groups are backed by repressive governments. They're perfect little totalitarian states. They carry the old wild-eyed vision, total destruction and total order."

"Terror is the force that begins with a handful of people in a back room. Do they stress discipline? Are they implacable in their will? Of course. I think you have to take sides. Don't comfort yourself with safe arguments. Take up the case of the downtrodden, the spat-upon. Do these people feel a yearning for order? Who will give it to them? Think of Chairman Mao. Order is consistent with permanent revolution."

"Think of fifty million Red Guards."

"Children actually, Bill. It was about faith. Luminous, sometimes stupid, sometimes cruel. Look today. Young boys everywhere posing with a.s.sault rifles. The young have a cruelty and unyieldingness that's fully formed. I said in London. The more heartless, the more visible."

"And the harder it becomes to defend a thing, the more you relish your position. Another kind of unyielding."

They had another drink, sitting crouched, face to face, with motorcycles going by in the bra.s.sy street.

"Is it a little Maoist band you're speaking for, George?"

"It's an idea. It's a picture of Lebanon without the Syrians, Palestinians and Israelis, without the Iranian volunteers, the religious wars. We need a model that transcends all the bitter history. Something enormous and commanding. A figure of absolute being. This is crucial, Bill. In societies struggling to remake themselves, total politics, total authority, total being."

"Even if I could see the need for absolute authority, my work would draw me away. The experience of my own consciousness tells me how autocracy fails, how total control wrecks the spirit, how my characters deny my efforts to own them completely, how I need internal dissent, self-argument, how the world squashes me the minute I think it's mine."