Mao II Read online

  Table of Contents

  Title Page

  Copyright Page

  Dedication

  PART ONE

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  PART TWO

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  IN BEIRUT

  FOR THE BEST IN PAPERBACKS, LOOK FOR THE

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  “Mao II triumphs ...

  DeLillo’s gifts—terse, electric dialogue, descriptive passages of insidious beauty—have never been more apparent or put to better use.”—Time

  “Don DeLillo is as remarkable as anyone alive and writing fiction in our time.”—Houston Chronicle

  “DeLillo’s brilliant 10th novel ... writing so piercingly exact, characters so palpable, dialogue so shimmering, that the ideas burn off like summer smoke and become skywriting.”

  —The Philadelphia Inquirer

  “Reading Mao II is like listening to a fine mind exploring its own murky depths.”—St. Louis Post Dispatch

  “One of our most distinctive, and indispensable writers.”

  —The Boston Phoenix

  “DeLillo’s gunfire prose sets you on edge, waiting for the next word-bullet to the brain.”—The San Diego Tribune

  “One of the most frighteningly lucid and original minds in contemporary American fiction.”—The Miami Herald

  “Reading Don DeLillo is the literary equivalent of experiencing a fast-moving evening thunderstorm. If you’re willing to be challenged, Mr. DeLillo will give you more than your money’s worth.”

  —Atlanta Journal

  “With DeLillo we are in the hands of a master.”

  —New York Newsday

  “A taut, intense novel of ideas that pack the menacing warning of a cocked trigger ... DeLillo’s themes are firmly rooted in spare, graphic prose and a gripping narrative.”

  —Virginian Pilot & Star Ledger

  “Another remarkable achievement. Mao II reconfirms DeLillo’s status as a modern master and literary provocateur.”

  —Publishers Weekly

  “A beautifully readable, haunting tale that jolts along at its own unsettling, disjunctive pace.”—San Francisco Chronicle

  “DeLillo’s words, by virtue of their arranger’s consummate skill, are a pleasure to read.”—Arizona Daily Star

  “A riveting novel of ideas ... Some of DeLilla’s most penetrating insights into the relationship between fiction and current events.”

  —The San Diego Union

  “Mr. DeLillo is the preeminent novelist of the political nightmare ... A spellbinding writer.”—The Wall Street Journal

  “A luminous book, full of anger deflected into irony, with moments of hard-earned transcendence.”

  —Kirkus Reviews

  “This is Don DeLillo at his best, on the verge of identifying the ineffable, of capturing the essence of what has been a vague suspicion, of fashioning sentences that themselves seem to contain multitudes.”—The Detroit News

  “Open-ended, resonant, and challenging.”

  —Details

  “His concepts, his thoughts on the relationship between art and terror, are brilliant and original.”—Los Angeles Reader

  “A splendidly written, unnerving book. Quick sentences and brisk dialogue ... Just a tremendous book.”

  —Indianapolis Star

  “A riveting study of the individual and the mob.”

  —Detroit Free Press

  “One of the most original, intelligent, and visionary novelists now writing in America. Mao II contains a series of extraordinary images presented with a complex intensity that no photograph or Warhol silk-screen, or even a film sequence could achieve.”

  —The New York Review of Books

  “Mao II digs deep into themes, with intelligence and insight. The plot roars with force and intent. DeLillo has a gift for capturing dialogue that is a constant revelation.... DeLillo also captures the condition of late-20th-Century culture better than anyone else writing today.” —Baltimore City Paper

  “Don DeLillo is one of the truly enigmatic figures in modern American letters.”—San Francisco Review of Books

  “A dark satire on the manipulation of images by artists, terrorists and news hounds ... he creates scenes of memorable and disturbing clarity.”—Newsweek

  “A funny, fierce novel. For new readers, it’s a perfect introduction to his nervy storytelling. For eager fans, it’s a potent distillation of his themes.”—Boston Sunday Herald

  “DeLillo has staked a claim in the mineral heart of postmodern lit. A Lone Ranger, he fires his perceptions like a beltload of silver bullets.

  His novels are guaranteed I.Q. boosters.”

  —Vanity Fair

  “A consummate craftsman, DeLillo’s prose has a mesmerizing quality, and his elliptical way with dialogue is superb as always.”

  —The San Diego Union

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  MAO II

  Don DeLilio published his first short story when he was twenty-three years old. He has since written thirteen novels, including White Noise (1985), which won the National Book Award. It was followed by Libra (1988), his bestselling novel about the assassination of President Kennedy; Mao II (1991), which won the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction; and the bestselling Underworld (1997), which in 2000 won the Howells Medal of the American Academy of Arts and Letters for the most distinguished work of fiction published in the prior five years. Other novels include Americana, End Zone, and Great Jones Street, all available from Penguin. His most recent novel is Cosmopolis. In 1999, DeLillo was awarded the Jerusalem Prize, given to a writer whose work expresses the theme of freedom of the individual in society; he was the first American author to receive it.

  PENGUIN BOOKS

  Published by the Penguin Group

  Penguin Group (USA) Inc., 375 Hudson Street, New York, New York 10014, U.S.A.

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  First published in the United States of America by Viking Penguin, a division of

  Penguin Books USA Inc. 1991

  Published in Penguin Books 1992

  Copyright © Don DeLillo, 1991

  All rights reserved

  This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously, and any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.

  Portions of this book first appeared in Esquire and Granta.

  PHOTOGRAPH CREDITS:

  Pages iv-v—Peter Turnley/Black Star; page 1—UPI/Bettm
ann; page 17—Syndication

  International; page 105—© Jean Gaumy/Magnum Photos; page 225—

  Reuters/Bettmann

  eISBN : 978-1-440-67336-8

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  TO GORDON LISH

  Here they come, marching into American sunlight. They are grouped in twos, eternal boy-girl, stepping out of the runway beyond the fence in left-center field. The music draws them across the grass, dozens, hundreds, already too many to count. They assemble themselves so tightly, crossing the vast arc of the outfield, that the effect is one of transformation. From a series of linked couples they become one continuous wave, larger all the time, covering the open spaces in navy and white.

  Karen’s daddy, watching from the grandstand, can’t help thinking this is the point. They’re one body now, an undifferentiated mass, and this makes him uneasy. He focuses his binoculars on a young woman, another, still another. So many columns set so closely. He has never seen anything like this or ever imagined it could happen. He hasn’t come here for the spectacle but it is starting to astonish him. They’re in the thousands now, approaching division strength, and the old seemly tear-jerk music begins to sound sardonic. Wife Maureen is sitting next to him. She is bold and bright today, wearing candy colors to offset the damp she feels in her heart. Rodge understands completely. They had almost no warning. Grabbed a flight, got a hotel, took the subway, passed through the metal detector and here they are, trying to comprehend. Rodge is not unequipped for the rude turns of normal fraught experience. He’s got a degree and a business and a tax attorney and a cardiologist and a mutual fund and whole life and major medical. But do the assurances always apply? There is a strangeness down there that he never thought he’d see in a ballpark. They take a time-honored event and repeat it, repeat it, repeat it until something new enters the world.

  Look at the girl in the front row, about twenty couples in from the left. He adjusts the eyepiece lever and zooms to max power, hoping to see her features through the bridal veil.

  There are still more couples coming out of the runway and folding into the crowd, although “crowd” is not the right word. He doesn’t know what to call them. He imagines they are uniformly smiling, showing the face they squeeze out with the toothpaste every morning. The bridegrooms in identical blue suits, the brides in lace-and-satin gowns. Maureen looks around at the people in the stands. Parents are easy enough to spot and there are curiosity seekers scattered about, ordinary slouchers and loiterers, others deeper in the mystery, dark-eyed and separate, secretly alert, people who seem to be wearing everything they own, layered and mounded in garments with missing parts, city nomads more strange to her than herdsmen in the Sahel, who at least turn up on the documentary channel. There is no admission fee and gangs of boys roam the far reaches, setting off firecrackers that carry a robust acoustical wallop, barrel bombs and ash cans booming along the concrete ramps and sending people into self-protective spasms. Maureen concentrates on the parents and other relatives, some of the women done up touchingly in best dress and white corsage, staring dead-eyed out of tinted faces. She reports to Rodge that there’s a lot of looking back and forth. Nobody knows how to feel and they’re checking around for hints. Rodge stays fixed to his binoculars. Six thousand five hundred couples and their daughter is down there somewhere about to marry a man she met two days ago. He’s either Japanese or Korean. Rodge didn’t get it straight. And he knows about eight words of English. He and Karen spoke through an interpreter, who taught them how to say Hello, it is Tuesday, here is my passport. Fifteen minutes in a bare room and they’re chain-linked for life.

  He works his glasses across the mass, the crowd, the movement, the membership, the flock, the following. It would make him feel a little better if he could find her.

  “You know what it’s as though?” Maureen says.

  “Let me concentrate.”

  “It’s as though they designed this to the maximum degree of let the relatives squirm.”

  “We can do our moaning at the hotel.”

  “I’m simply stating.”

  “I did suggest, did I not, that you stay at home.”

  “How could I not come? What’s my excuse?”

  “I see a lot of faces that don’t look American. They send them out in missionary teams. Maybe they think we’ve sunk to the status of less developed country. They’re here to show us the way and the light.”

  “And make sharp investments. After, can we take in a play?”

  “Let me look, okay. I want to find her.”

  “We’re here. We may as well avail ourselves.”

  “It’s hard for the mind to conceive. Thirteen thousand people.”

  “What are you going to do when you find her?”

  “Who the hell thought it up? What does it mean?”

  “What are you going to do when you find her? Wave goodbye?”

  “I just need to know she’s here,” Rodge says. “I want to document it, okay.”

  “Because that’s what it is. If it hasn’t been goodbye up to this point, it certainly is now.”

  “Hey, Maureen? Shut up.”

  From the bandstand at home plate the Mendelssohn march carries a stadium echo, with lost notes drifting back from the recesses between tiers. Flags and bunting everywhere. The blessed couples face the infield, where their true father, Master Moon, stands in three dimensions. He looks down at them from a railed pulpit that rides above a platform of silver and crimson. He wears a white silk robe and a high crown figured with stylized irises. They know him at molecular level. He lives in them like chains of matter that determine who they are. This is a man of chunky build who saw Jesus on a mountainside. He spent nine years praying and wept so long and hard his tears formed puddles and soaked through the floor and dripped into the room below and filtered through the foundation of the house into the earth. The couples know there are things he must leave unsaid, words whose planetary impact no one could bear. He is the messianic secret, ordinary-looking, his skin a weathered bronze. When the communists sent him to a labor camp the other inmates knew who he was because they’d dreamed about him before he got there. He gave away half his food but never grew weak. He worked seventeen hours a day in the mines but always found time to pray, to keep his body clean and tuck in his shirt. The blessed couples eat kiddie food and use baby names because they feel so small in his presence. This is a man who lived in a hut made of U.S. Army ration tins and now he is here, in American light, come to lead them to the end of human history.

  The brides and grooms exchange rings and vows and many people in the grandstand are taking pictures, standing in the aisles and crowding the rails, whole families snapping anxiously, trying to shape a response or organize a memory, trying to neutralize the event, drain it of eeriness and power. Master chants the ritual in Korean. The couples file past the platform and he sprinkles water on their heads. Rodge sees the brides lift their veils and he zooms in urgently, feeling at the same moment a growing distance from events, a sorriness of spirit. But he watches and muses. When the Old God leaves the world, what happens to all the unexpended faith? He looks at each sweet face, round face, long, wrong, darkish, plain. They are a nation, he supposes, founded on the principle of easy belief. A unit fueled by credulousness. They speak a half language, a set of ready-made terms and empty repetitions. All things, the sum of the knowable, everything true, it all comes down to a few simple formulas copied and memorized and passed on. And here is the drama of mechanical routine played out with living figures. It knocks him back in awe, the loss of scale and intimacy, the way love a
nd sex are multiplied out, the numbers and shaped crowd. This really scares him, a mass of people turned into a sculptured object. It is like a toy with thirteen thousand parts, just tootling along, an innocent and menacing thing. He keeps the glasses trained, feeling a slight desperation now, a need to find her and remind himself who she is. Healthy, intelligent, twenty-one, serious-sided, possessed of a selfness, a teeming soul, nuance and shadow, grids of pinpoint singularities they will never drill out of her. Or so he hopes and prays, wondering about the power of their own massed prayer. When the Old God goes, they pray to flies and bottletops. The terrible thing is they follow the man because he gives them what they need. He answers their yearning, unburdens them of free will and independent thought. See how happy they look.

  Around the great stadium the tenement barrens stretch, miles of delirium, men sitting in tipped-back chairs against the walls of hollow buildings, sofas burning in the lots, and there is a sense these chanting thousands have, wincing in the sun, that the future is pressing in, collapsing toward them, that they are everywhere surrounded by signs of the fated landscape and human struggle of the Last Days, and here in the middle of their columned body, lank-haired and up-close, stands Karen Janney, holding a cluster of starry jasmine and thinking of the bloodstorm to come. She is waiting to file past Master and sees him with the single floating eye of the crowd, inseparable from her own apparatus of vision but sharper-sighted, able to perceive more deeply. She feels intact, rayed with well-being. They all feel the same, young people from fifty countries, immunized against the language of self. They’re forgetting who they are under their clothes, leaving behind all the small banes and body woes, the daylong list of sore gums and sweaty nape and need to pee, ancient rumbles in the gut, momentary chills and tics, the fungoid dampness between the toes, the deep spasm near the shoulder blade that’s charged with mortal reckoning. All gone now. They stand and chant, fortified by the blood of numbers.