Mao II Part 19

His father. I keep telling you and telling you and telling you.

His mother. I like it better with the sleeves rolled down.

He could hear his breathing change, feel a slowness come upon him, familiar though never felt before, an old slow monotone out of the history of shallow breathing, deeply and totally known.

Measure your head before ordering.

His father. We need to have a confab, Junior.

He knew it completely. The glow, the solus. And it became the motion of the sea, the s.h.i.+p sailing morningward toward the sun.

The gashed hillside above Junieh was cl.u.s.tered with balconied buildings that looked red-fleshed in the early light. Down by the seafront a few open-sided trucks were parked near the disembarking point, stocked with food and drink. Once the pa.s.sengers were all ash.o.r.e the cleaning crew boarded and an old man with a limp took the cabins along the starboard side on the upper deck. When he came to the man lying in the bunk he looked at the bruised and unshaved face and the dirty clothes and he put a gentle hand to the pale throat, feeling for the slightest beat. He said a prayer and went through the man's belongings, leaving the insignificant cash, the good shoes, the things in the bag, the bag itself, but feeling it was not a crime against the dead to take the man's pa.s.sport and other forms of identification, anything with a name and a number, which he could sell to some militia in Beirut.

14.

He heard a car door slam on the gravel road and then the sound of the car driving off and he thought a moment before turning to look out the window behind the kitchen table. Because who could it be coming down on foot? The rare visitor drives in. He was at the sink doing a scouring job on a skillet and couldn't see anyone from this angle but didn't bother changing position because whoever it was would appear in the window sooner or later, somebody selling G.o.d or the wilderness or the end of life on earth, or they wouldn't. The rare visitor comes b.u.mping down the dirt trail in a van or pickup to deliver something or repair something and it is usually a familiar face and scuffed shoes.

Scott did three or four more strokes with the scouring pad and glanced again and it was Karen, of course, looking not so different from the first time he'd ever seen her, a cloud dreamer on a summer's day, someone drifting out of Bill's own head, her tote bag dragging on the ground.

He remained at the sink. He ran the water over the skillet, then scoured some more, then ran the water, then scoured, then ran the water. He heard her come up the steps and open the door. She walked into the hallway and he ran the water, keeping his back to the room.

She said, "I took the taxi from the bus station instead of calling. I had just enough money left for the taxi and the tip and I wanted to arrive totally broke."

"The wind blows the door and look what walks in."

"Actually I have two dollars."

He didn't turn around. He would have to adjust to this. He'd naturally fitted himself to the role, for some years now, of friend abandoned or lover discarded. We all know how the thing we secretly fear is not a secret at all but the open and eternal thing that predicts its own recurrence. He turned off the water and put the skillet in the drain basket and waited.

"Ask me if I'm glad to be back. I missed you. Are you all right?"

"Run into Bill?" he said.

"I sort of kept seeing him, you know? But not really. Did you hear anything?"

"All quiet."

"I came back because I was afraid you wouldn't be all right. And I missed you."

"I've been keeping busy. I've done some things, some organizing."

"You always put a premium on that."

"Same old Scott," he said.

His voice sounded unfamiliar. He thought it was because he hadn't spoken aloud to anyone in some time. But maybe it was the situation. It was dangerous to speak because he didn't know which way a sentence might tend to go, toward one thing or the logical opposite. He could go either way, one reaction as easy as the other. He was not completely connected to what he said and this put an odd and dicey calm in his remarks.

"Of course you might want to be alone," she said. "I know that. I know I left at probably a bad time you were having. But I honestly thought."

"I know."

"We weren't the old dependency."

"It's all right," he said.

"I'm not very good at this type conversation."

"I know. It's all right. We're embarra.s.sed."

"I didn't call from New York and I didn't call from the bus station."

"It's not a station. You always call it a station. It's a little ticket booth inside a drugstore."

"Because I don't trust the telephone," she said.

He turned and looked at her and she looked like h.e.l.l. He walked over and put his arms around her. She began to shake and he held her tighter and then stepped back to look at her. She was crying, making the motion or taking the shape, but without tears, her mouth stretched flat, the animated light missing from her eyes, and he put his hand behind her head and drew it softly toward him.

They went for a long walk in the woods beyond the road, single-file along a path and then out into a glade of lady fern. She told Scott she'd brought the pictures with her, the contact sheets of Brita's photographs of Bill. He said nothing but felt an ease, a redress, the partial payment for damage suffered. She said Brita would not publish the pictures without Bill's, or Scott's, consent.

They held each other much of the night, or lay in wettish touch, haphazard, one p.r.o.ne and the other supine, two legs engaged, and talked and did not, or fell away to clear and periodic sleep, or made choppy laboring love, made heaving breath, converged at some steep insidedness, or Karen talked and Scott laughed, delighted at her imitations of the New York speech machine, they blat and cram, they champ and smash, or Scott told her how the lines of her face were printed in his vision so that he saw her sometimes in the middle of a meal, afloat in her own hair like a laser image of some Botticelli modern.

In the morning they drove twenty-two miles to buy a lightbox and magnifier, and twenty-two miles back.

In the afternoon they cleared the desk in the attic and spread out the contacts. There were twelve sheets, each containing thirty-six black-and-white exposures-six strips, six frames per strip. The sheets were eight and a half by eleven inches and each frame was one and a half inches long and one inch high.

Scott and Karen stood at different ends of the desk. They bent over, careful where they put their fingers, and looked at the strips of developed film but not thoroughly or a.n.a.lytically. It was too soon for that.

Karen's hands were clasped behind her back and after a while Scott put his hands in his pockets and this was how they scanned, leaning deeply toward the desk, moving around each other to exchange positions.

In the evening, after early dinner, Scott carried the telephone table up to the attic. He set it at one end of the desk and placed the lightbox on top.

They took turns looking at the sheets. Because the frames followed each other in the original order of exposure, they were able to see how Brita had established rhythms and themes, catching a signal, tracking some small business in Bill's face and working to enlarge it or explain it, make it true, make it him. The pictures of Bill were glimpses of Brita thinking, a little anatomy of mind and eye. Scott thought she wanted something undesigned and casually come-upon, a familiar colloquial Bill. He took the magnifier to frame after frame and saw a photographer who was trying to deliver her subject from every mystery that hovered over his chosen life. She wanted to do pictures that erased his seclusion, made it never happen and made him over and gave him a face we've known all our lives.

But maybe not. Scott didn't want to move too soon into a theory of how much meaning a photograph can bear.

First came the great work of cataloguing the pictures, making lists based on camera angle, subject's expression, part of room, degree of shadow, head shot, head and chest, hands showing or not showing, visible background and so on. What we have in front of us represents one thing. How we a.n.a.lyze and describe and codify it is something else completely.

Although in a way, and at a glance, the differences frame to frame were so extraordinarily slight that all twelve sheets might easily be one picture repeated, like ma.s.s visual litter that occupies a blink.

All the more reason to a.n.a.lyze. Because there really were differences of course-position of hands, placement of cigarette -and it would require time to do a comprehensive survey.

At breakfast Scott said, "There's something I haven't wanted to think about."

"I know what you're going to say."

"We have to be prepared for the possibility that Bill won't return, that we won't ever hear from him again. But I'm not going to be puzzled or resentful."

"Neither am I."

"We can't let our own feelings define his behavior."

"We can't use normal standards."

"Whatever he's done, we have to understand it's something he was preparing for, something he's been carrying all these years."

"He needed to do it."

"And we are absolutely the last people on earth to require an explanation."

"Can we still live here?" Karen said.

"The house is paid for. And he'd want us to live here. And I have money saved from the salary he paid me and this money goes automatically from his account to mine every month and if he didn't want me to keep getting it he would have advised the bank when he went away."

"I can get a job waitressing."

"I think we'll be all right. We're in Bill's house. His books and papers are all around us. It depends on his family. When they find out the situation, they may try to sell the house out from under us. They may try to sell his papers, get the new book published. Every scenario of total disaster I've ever imagined. And there's the question of royalties from the other two books."

"We won't worry now," she said.

"There's the complex question of who's ent.i.tled."

"He lived with us, not them."

"He left no instructions."

"We're the ones who made it possible for Bill to devote his whole time to writing."

"We removed every obstacle. It's true."

"So shouldn't they let us live here if we promise to keep things just as they are and do Bill's work?"

Scott laughed.

"The night of the lawyers is approaching. The long knives are coming out. Blood and slogans on all the walls."

"They can own the house," Karen said. "But they should let us live here. And we keep the ma.n.u.script and we keep the pictures."

Scott leaned toward her to sing a bit of old Beatles, a line about carrying pictures of Chairman Mao.

Then he sat in the attic alone through the rainy morning, hunched over the lightbox, making notes.

He had the secret of Bill's real name.

He had the photographs, the great work of describing and cataloguing.

He had the ma.n.u.script of Bill's new novel, the entire house filled with pages, pages spilling into the shed that ab.u.t.ted the back of the house, a whole bas.e.m.e.nt containing pages.

The ma.n.u.script would sit. He might talk to Charles Everson, just a word concerning the fact that it was finished. The ma.n.u.script would sit, and word would get out, and the ma.n.u.script would not go anywhere. After a time he might take the photographs to New York and meet with Brita and choose the pictures that would appear. But the ma.n.u.script would sit, and word would travel, and the pictures would appear, a small and deft selection, one time only, and word would build and spread, and the novel would stay right here, collecting aura and force, deepening old Bill's legend, undyingly.

The nice thing about life is that it's filled with second chances. Quoting Bill.

IN BEIRUT.

Her driver tells her three stories.

First one, people are burning tires. In the midst of car bombs and street skirmishes and the smash of long-range field guns and buildings coming down and whole areas lost in smoke, people are burning tires to drive away mosquitoes and flies.

Second, a pair of local militias are firing at portraits of each other's leader. These are large photographs pasted to walls or hanging from awning poles in the vegetable souks and they are shot up and ripped apart, some pictures large enough to swing from a wire strung over the street, and they are shot up and quickly replaced and then ripped apart again. There is a new exuberance in these particular streets, based on this latest form of fighting.

Last, they are making bombs that contain flooring nails and roofing nails. The police are finding quant.i.ties of common nails, nails sprayed and dashed and driven into the bodies of victims of random blasts.

Brita waits for the point of story number three. Isn't there supposed to be an irony, some grim humor, some sense of the peculiar human insistence on seeing past the larger madness into small and skewed practicalities, into off-shaded moments that help us consider a narrow hope? This business about the nails doesn't do a thing for her. And she's not so crazy about the other stories either. She has come here already tired of these stories, including the ones she has never heard. They're all the same and all true and it is sad that they are necessary. And they almost always exasperate her, especially the stories about terror groups that issue press credentials.

They are driving past the rubble of the racetrack's arched facade. Then they are going the wrong way down a one-way street but it doesn't matter. All the streets are right and wrong. She sees cars burnt skinless, water flying gloriously from broken mains. Street life as well, vendors, wooden carts, a man selling radios and shoes from the hood of his car. There are balconies dangling vertically from sh.e.l.led buildings. Then they are going into the slums near the refugee camps. Cars wrapped in posters of Khomeini, whole cars postered except for a s.p.a.ce on the driver's side of the winds.h.i.+eld. Sandbagged shops and mounds of uncollected garbage. She sees a street vendor's little homemade city of Marlboro cartons, the neat stacks of cigarettes a wistful urban grid of order and deployment.

Brita is on a.s.signment for a German magazine, here to photograph a local leader named Abu Ras.h.i.+d. He is hidden somewhere deep in these shot-up streets where weeds and wild hibiscus crowd out of alleyways and the women wear headscarves and stand on line, long lines everywhere for food, drinking water, bedding, clothing.

Her driver is a man about sixty who p.r.o.nounces the second b in bomb. He has used the word about eleven times and she waits for it now, softly repeating it after him. The bomb. The bombing. People in Lebanon must talk about nothing but Lebanon and in Beirut it is clearly all Beirut.

A beggar approaches the car, chanting, one eye shut, chicken feathers stapled to his s.h.i.+rt. The driver blows the horn at a guy who carries a bayonet in an alligator scabbard and the horn plays the opening bars of "California Here I Come."

The streets run with images. They cover walls and clothing-pictures of martyrs, clerics, fighting men, holidays in Tahiti. There is a human skull nailed to a stucco wall and then there are pictures of skulls, there is skull writing, there are boys wearing T-s.h.i.+rts with ill.u.s.trated skulls, serial grids of blue skulls. The driver translates the wall writing and it is about the Father of Skulls, the Blood Skulls of Hollywood U.S.A., Arafat Go Home, the Skull Maker Was Here. The Arabic script is gorgeous even in hasty spray paint. It is about Suicide Sam the Car Bomb Man. It says Ali 21. It says Here I Am Again Courtesy Ali 21. The car moves slowly through narrow streets and up into dirt alleys and Brita thinks this place is a millennial image mill. There are movie posters everywhere but no sign of anything resembling a theater. Posters of bare-chested men with oversized weapons, grenades lashed to their belts and cities burning in the background. She looks through sh.e.l.l holes in a building wall and sees another ruined building with an exposed room containing three stoned men sitting on a brand-new sofa. There are boys tattooed with skulls who work the checkpoints wearing pieces of Syrian, American, Lebanese, French and Israeli uniforms and toting automatic rifles with banana clips.

The driver shows Brita's press card and the boys look in at her. One of them says something in German and she has to resist the totally stupid impulse to offer him money for his cap. He wears a great-looking cap with a bent blue peak that she would love to give to a friend in New York.

The car moves on.

She does not photograph writers anymore. It stopped making sense. She takes a.s.signments now, does the interesting things, barely watched wars, children running in the dust. Writers stopped one day. She doesn't know how it happened but they came to a quiet end. They stopped being the project she would follow forever.

Now there are signs for a new soft drink, c.o.ke II, signs slapped on cement-block walls, and she has the crazy idea that these advertising placards herald the presence of the Maoist group. Because the lettering is so intensely red. The placards get bigger as the car moves into deeply cramped s.p.a.ces, into many offending smells, open sewers, rubber burning, a dog all ribs and tongue and lying still and gleaming with green flies, and the signs are cl.u.s.tered now, covering almost all the wall s.p.a.ce, with added graffiti that are hard to make out, overlapping swirls, a rage in crayon and paint, and Brita gets another crazy idea, that these are like the big character posters of the Cultural Revolution in China-warnings and threats, calls for self-correction. Because there is a certain physical resemblance. The placards are stacked ten high in some places, up past the second storey, and they crowd each other, they edge over and proclaim, thousands of Arabic words weaving between the letters and Roman numerals of the c.o.ke II logo.

A man is standing in a devastated square. The car comes to a stop and Brita slings her equipment bag over a shoulder and gets out. The driver hands her the press credentials. It is clear she is supposed to follow the other man. He is older than the driver and she notes that he is missing half his right ear. He wears slippers and carries a plastic water bottle. There are people living in the ruins among powdery hills of gypsum. Where there are cars at all, parked snug to walls, they either have no plates or are cleanly stripped, going brown in the sun like fruit rinds. She sees a family living in a vehicle that is a cross between a wagon and a pickup but without wheels, sunk to the axle in dust. Her guide carries the water bottle tucked up near his armpit and leads her without a word directly into a collapsed building. She lowers her head and follows in the dimness over fallen masonry. Wires dangle everywhere and the dust smells sour. They exit through the remains of a butcher shop and cross an alley to the next building, which may have been a small factory once. It seems intact except for sh.e.l.l scars and broken windows and they enter through a large steel door complete with cross-bracing.