Mao II Part 14

He shook out a match and held it.

"Do you know why I believe in the novel? It's a democratic shout. Anybody can write a great novel, one great novel, almost any amateur off the street. I believe this, George. Some nameless drudge, some desperado with barely a nurtured dream can sit down and find his voice and luck out and do it. Something so angelic it makes your jaw hang open. The spray of talent, the spray of ideas. One thing unlike another, one voice unlike the next. Ambiguities, contradictions, whispers, hints. And this is what you want to destroy."

He found he was angry, unexpectedly.

"And when the novelist loses his talent, he dies democratically, there it is for everyone to see, wide open to the world, the s.h.i.+tpile of hopeless prose."

There was no more medication. Ingested and absorbed. He decided so what, don't need it anymore, and he didn't bother finding out what was available over the counter in the pharmacy near the hotel. He wondered if he could get away with charging hotel and meals to Charlie's conglomerate even though he'd severed connections. It was for the good of mankind after all.

You have to climb hills to get a drink.

He kept an eye out for priests and spent half a minute in an ancient church so small it was wedged between columns of a modern tower, a one-man refuge from the rumble of time, candles burning in the cool gloom.

He was often lost. He got lost in the hotel every time he walked out of his room and turned left to get to the elevator, which was consistently to the right. Once he forgot what city he was in and saw an honor guard of four men marching toward him on the sidewalk, going from their guard duty to their barracks, and they carried rifles with fixed bayonets and wore embroidered tunics, pleated skirts and pompom slippers and he knew he wasn't in Milwaukee.

He climbed a hill to a taverna and ordered by pointing at dishes on three other tables. It wasn't that no one spoke English. He forgot they did or preferred not to speak himself. Maybe he liked the idea of pointing. You could get to depend on pointing as a kind of self-enforced loneliness that helps you advance in moral rigor. And he was near the point where he wanted to eliminate things that no longer mattered, things that still mattered, all excess and all necessity, and why not begin with words.

But he tried to write about the hostage. It was the only way he knew to think deeply in a subject. He missed his typewriter for the first time since leaving home. It was the hand tool of memory and patient thought, the mark-making thing that contained his life experience. He could see the words better in type, construct sentences that entered the character-world at once, free of his own disfiguring hand. He had to settle for pencil and pad, working in his hotel room through the long mornings, slowly building chains of thought, letting the words lead him into that bas.e.m.e.nt room.

Find the places where you converge with him.

Read his poems again.

See his face and hands in words.

The foam mat he lives on is one deep stain, a lifetime's convincing stink. The air is dead and swarms with particles, plaster dust lifted off the walls when the sh.e.l.ling is intense. He tastes the air, he feels it settle in his eyes and ears. They forget to untie his wrist from the water pipe and he can't get to the toilet to urinate. The ache in his kidneys is time-binding, it beats with time, it speaks of the ways in which time contrives to pa.s.s ever slower. The person they send to feed him is not allowed to talk.

Who do they send? What does he wear?

The prisoner perceives his own wan image in the world and knows he's been granted the low-status sainthood of people whose suffering makes everyone ashamed.

Keep it simple, Bill.

George cranked open the wooden shutters. Light and noise filled the room and Bill poured another drink. He realized he'd been clear of symptoms ever since he stopped gobbling pills.

"I'm still convinced you ought to get one. Instant corrections," George said. "The text is lightweight, malleable. It doesn't restrict or inhibit. If you're having any trouble with the book you're doing, a word processor can make a vast difference."

"Is your man coming here or not?"

"I'm doing what I can."

"Because I can talk to him there as well as here. Doesn't matter to me."

"Trust me. It matters."

"You put a man in a room and lock the door. There's something serenely pure here. Let's destroy the mind that makes words and sentences."

"I have to remind you. There are different ways in which words are sacred. The precious line of poetry often sits in ignorance of conditions surrounding it. Poor people, young people, anything can be written on them. Mao said this. And he wrote and he wrote. He became the history of China written on the ma.s.ses. And his words became immortal. Studied, repeated, memorized by an entire nation."

"Incantations. People chanting formulas and slogans."

"In Mao's China a man walking along with a book in his hand was not seeking pleasure or distraction. He was binding himself to all Chinese. What book? Mao's book. The Little Red Book of Quotations. The book was the faith that people carried everywhere. They recited from it, brandished it, they displayed it constantly. People undoubtedly made love with the book in their hands."

"Bad s.e.x. Rote, rote, rote."

"Of course. I'm surprised to hear you offer these trite responses. Of course rote. We memorize works that serve as guides to conducting a struggle. In committing a work to memory we make it safe from decay. It stands untouched. Children memorize parts of stories their parents tell them. They want the same story again and again. Don't change a word or they get terribly upset. This is the unchanged narrative every culture needs in order to survive. In China the narrative belonged to Mao. People memorized it and recited it to a.s.sert the destiny of their revolution. So the experience of Mao became uncorruptible by outside forces. It became the living memory of hundreds of millions of people. The cult of Mao was the cult of the book. It was a call to unity, a summoning of crowds where everyone dressed alike and thought alike. Don't you see the beauty in this? Isn't there beauty and power in the repet.i.tion of certain words and phrases? You go into a room to read a book. These people came out of their rooms. They became a book-waving crowd. Mao said, 'Our G.o.d is none other than the ma.s.ses of the Chinese people.' And this is what you fear, that history is pa.s.sing into the hands of the crowd."

"I'm not a great big visionary, George. I'm a sentence-maker, like a donut-maker only slower. Don't talk to me about history."

"Mao was a poet, a cla.s.sless man dependent on the ma.s.ses in important ways but also an absolute being. Bill the sentence-maker. I can see you living there actually, wearing the wide cotton trousers, the cotton s.h.i.+rt, riding the bicycle, living in one small room. You could have been a Maoist, Bill. You would have done it better than I. I've read your books carefully and we've spent many hours talking and I can easily see you blending into that great ma.s.s of blue-and-white cotton. You would have written what the culture needed in order to see itself. And you would have seen the need for an absolute being, a way out of weakness and confusion. This is what I want to see reborn in the rat warrens of Beirut."

George's wife came in with coffee and sweets on a tray.

"The question you have to ask is, How many dead? How many dead during the Cultural Revolution? How many dead after the Great Leap Forward? And how well did he hide his dead? This is the other question. What do these men do with the millions they kill?"

"The killing is going to happen. Ma.s.s killing a.s.serts itself always. Great death, unnumbered dead, this is never more than a question of time and place. The leader only interprets the forces."

"The point of every closed state is now you know how to hide your dead. This is the setup. You predict many dead if your vision of the truth isn't realized. Then you kill them. Then you hide the fact of the killing and the bodies themselves. This is why the closed state was invented. And it begins with a single hostage, doesn't it? The hostage is the miniaturized form. The first tentative rehearsal for ma.s.s terror."

"Some coffee," George said.

Bill looked up to thank the woman but she was gone. They heard a series of noises in the distance, small blowy sounds gathered in the wind. George stood and listened carefully. Four more soft thuds. He went out to the balcony for a moment and when he came back he said these were small explosive charges that a local left-wing group attached to the unoccupied cars of diplomats and foreign businessmen. They liked to do ten or twelve cars at a time. It was the music of parked cars.

He sat down and looked closely at Bill.

"Eat something."

"Maybe later. Looks good."

"Why are you still here? Don't you have work to do back home? Don't you miss your work?"

"We don't talk about that."

"Drink your coffee. There's a new model that Panasonic makes and I absolutely swear by it. It's completely liberating. You don't deal with heavy settled artifacts. You transform freely, fling words back and forth."

Bill laughed in a certain way.

"Look. What happens if I go to Beirut and complete this spiritual union you find so interesting? Talk to Ras.h.i.+d. Can I expect him to release the hostage? And what will he want in return?"

"He'll want you to take the other man's place."

"Gain the maximum attention. Then release me at the most advantageous time."

"Gain the maximum attention. Then probably kill you ten minutes later. Then photograph your corpse and keep the picture handy for the time when it can be used most effectively."

"Doesn't he think I'm worth more than my photograph?"

"The Syrians are doing sweeps of the southern suburbs, looking for hostages. Hostages have to be moved all the time. Ras.h.i.+d frankly can't be bothered."

"And what happens if I get on a plane right now and go home?"

"They kill the hostage."

"And photograph his corpse."

"It's better than nothing," George said.

Brita watched the in-flight movie and listened to some brawling jazz on the earphones. The movie seemed subjective, slightly distracted, the screen suspended in partial darkness and specked and blotched by occasional turbulence and the sound track strictly optional. She thought movies on planes were different for everybody, little floating memories of earth. She had a magazine on her food tray with a soft drink and peanuts and she flipped pages without bothering to look at them. A man across the aisle talked on the telephone, his voice leaking into her brain with the ba.s.s line and drums, all America unreeling below.

She was thinking that she'd let Karen stay in her apartment and look after her cat and she didn't even know the girl's last name.

She was thinking that everything that came into her mind lately and developed as a perception seemed at once to enter the culture, to become a painting or photograph or hairstyle or slogan. She saw the dumbest details of her private thoughts on postcards or billboards. She saw the names of writers she was scheduled to photograph, saw them in newspapers and magazines, obscure people climbing into print as if she carried some contagious glow out around the world. In Tokyo she saw a painting reproduced in an art journal and it was called Skysc.r.a.per III, a paneled canvas showing the World Trade Center at precisely the angle she saw it from her window and in the same dark spirit. These were her towers, standing windowless, two black latex slabs that consumed the available s.p.a.ce.

The man on the phone was saying, "One o'clock your time tomorrow. "

Interesting. Brita had a one o'clock appointment the next day with a magazine editor who'd been pressing her for a meeting and she suspected that he'd heard about a certain set of pictures. She was thinking that she would have to develop those rolls of film. But it troubled her, the memory of Bill's face in the last stages of the morning. There was some terrible brightness in the eye. She'd never seen a man lapse so wholly into his own earliest pain. She thought there were lives that constantly fell inward, back to first knowing, back to bewilderment, and this was the reference for every bleakness that pa.s.sed across the door.

An attendant took her empty cup.

She was thinking that she felt guilty about Scott. It was a case of misdirected s.e.x, wasn't it, and all the time they were together she was the woman naked from the bath looking down at the writer chopping wood. Strange how images come between the physical selves. It made her sad for Scott. She tried to call him once, looking at upstate maps and making an effort to remember road signs and finally calling information in several counties. But there was no Scott Martineau listed or unlisted and Bill Gray did not exist at any level and Karen had no last name.

The face on the screen belonged to an actor who lived in her building. He owed her a hundred and fifty dollars and three bottles of wine and she realized for the first time that she'd never get paid, seeing his face in the half light, with jazz racing in her brain.

She was thinking that one of the writers she'd tried to photograph in Seoul had nine years left in his sentence for subversion, arson and acting like a communist. They wouldn't let her see him and she became angry and cursed the b.a.s.t.a.r.ds. Shameless artistic ego, all wrong, but she thought it was important to get his face on a strip of film, see his likeness rise to the ruby light in the printing room seven thousand miles from his cell.

She'd entrusted her home, her work, her wine and her cat to a ghost girl.

The child at the end of the row raised the shade and she was thinking that she didn't want to look at the magazine in front of her because she might see something from her life in there. She was strapped in, sealed, five miles aloft, and the world was so intimate that she was everywhere in it.

He stepped off the curbstone and took about seven strides and when he heard the car braking he had time to take one step in reverse and turn his head. He saw worry beads dangling from the rearview mirror of a car coming the other way and then the first car hit him. He walked sideways in a burlesque quickstep, arms pumping, and went down hard, striking his left shoulder and the side of his face. He tried to get up almost at once. People came to help him, a small crowd collecting. Already there was a clamor of blowing horns. He got to his knees, feeling stupid, holding up a hand in rea.s.surance. Someone lifted him under the shoulder and he stood up nodding. He dusted off his clothes, feeling his left hand burn but refusing to look just yet. He smiled tightly at the faces, watching them recede. Then he turned and went back to the sidewalk and looked for a place to sit. People walked around him and the sun beat down. He closed his eyes and faced up into it. Traffic was moving now but in the distance they still leaned on their horns, raising a wail, a lingering midday awe. The sun was a mercy on his face.

There was something at stake in these sentences he wrote about the bas.e.m.e.nt room. They held a pause, an anxious s.p.a.ce he began to recognize. There's a danger in a sentence when it comes out right, a sense that these words almost did not make it to the page. He forgot to shave or leave his clothes in the laundry bag for the maid or he left his clothes but did not fill out the itemized slip. He came back to the room and looked at his clothes in the plastic bag and wondered whether they were clean or dirty. He took them out and held them to the light and saw bloodstains here and there and put them back in the bag to await the disposition of the maid. The work had a stunned edge, a kind of whiteness. He put antiseptic cream on his sc.r.a.ped hand and took warm baths to ease the scattered aches. Even if he'd remembered to shave, he could have done only half his face. A crescent stain extended from his left eye to his jaw and it was s.h.i.+ny and ripe and looked impressively living. He smoked and wrote, thinking he might never get it right but feeling something familiar, something fallen into jeopardy, a law of language or nature, and he thought he could trace it line by line, the shattery tension, the thing he'd lost in the sand of his endless novel.

He learned how to p.r.o.nounce the word Metaxa, with the accent on the last syllable, and the harsh taste of the brandy began to make sense.

In London there were doctors nearby when he ate breakfast. Here he had priests buying apples in the market. He went into a church in the Plaka and saw a curious set of metal emblems strung beneath an icon of some armor-clad saint. The objects depicted body parts mainly but there were soldiers and sailors embossed on some of the badges, there were naked babies and Volkswagens, there were houses, cows and donkeys. Bill decided these things were votive tokens. If you had an ear infection or heart trouble you requested supernatural aid by buying a ready-made emblem with a heart on it or an ear or a breast, they had b.r.e.a.s.t.s, Bill saw, if you had cancer, and then you simply placed the thing near the appropriate saint. The idea extended to a thousand conditions or calamities that might strike your loved ones or your possessions and it made good sense in principle, it made your appeal specific and dynamic, it inspired a democracy of icons, but he thought he might like to go into a shop and buy a token for the whole man and hang it near the appropriate saint. They had saints for everything from smallpox to animal attacks but he doubted there was a patron of the whole man, body, soul and self, and he also had a peculiar twinge deep in his right side, a pang he liked to call it, that he doubted they'd found a saint for, or designed a medal he might buy in a store.

George said, "We have to see a doctor, don't we?"

"It's all right."

"But your face. Don't we have to see a doctor for this? Let me call."

"It's healing normally. Gets better every day."

"Did you get the driver's name?"

"I don't want his name."

"He hit you, Bill."

"It wasn't his fault."

"Let me call someone. You should report this. Don't we have to talk to someone for a thing like this?"

"Get me a drink, George."

They talked into early evening. Then they sat on the terrace watching the streetlights come on, a thousand cars a minute racing toward the gulf in tailing red streamers, the mortal sadness of an ordinary dusk. George's daughter came out and slouched against the rail, an unhappy girl in jeans.

"I worry about you, Bill."

"Do me a favor. Don't."

"Why have you involved yourself in this?"

"It was your idea."

"But you've come along so readily."

"True enough."

"Let me call someone for your face. Jasmine, get the little book with the phone numbers."

"It's late. I'll see a doctor in the morning."

"This is a promise," George said.

"Yes. "

"And it won't be in Beirut. The airport is closed again due to heavy fighting. I've been in touch with Ras.h.i.+d. He could arrange to get out by boat and then fly here from Cyprus but now sea travel is also very dangerous and I don't think he wants to come here anyway. This is deeply disappointing. I was looking forward to working with you on this."

"And Jean-Claude?"

"Who is that?"

"That's the hostage, George."

"Don't tell me his name."

"You know his name."

"Slipped my mind. Forgotten. Gone forever."

The girl stood behind her father, hands on his shoulders, softly, miserably ma.s.saging.

"How will they kill him?"

"Go home, Bill, and do your work. I enjoy these talks but there's no longer any reason for you to be here. And think about what I told you. A word processor. The keyboard action is effortless. I promise you. This is something you dearly need."