Mao II Read online

  “We’re wasting all this light.”

  “It’s really very simple.”

  “It isn’t simple. It’s everything in the world that isn’t simple wrapped up in one small bundle.”

  Scott was finished at the sink but stayed there looking into the basin.

  “It’s simple all right. It really is. You just go back up and sit down and do your work.”

  “The women would enjoy it.”

  “I’m only saying what we both know I’m supposed to say.”

  “I could go back up and just sit there. How would you know I was working?”

  “I wouldn’t, Bill.”

  “I could sit there tearing stamps from a twenty-five-dollar roll of stamps with the fucking flag on every stamp.”

  “As long as you’re in the room. I want you in the room, seated.”

  “I’ll tell you what you are,” Bill said.

  Scott reached for a towel and dried his hands but didn’t turn around. He hung the towel on the plastic hook and waited.

  Brita stood outside Bill’s workroom, in the open doorway, looking in. After a moment she reached in and knocked softly on the door even though it was clear the room was empty. She stood motionless and waited. Then she took one step in, looking carefully at the ordinary things inside as if compelled to memorize the details of whatever had escaped the camera—the placement of objects and titles of reference works, the number of pencils in the marmalade jar. Gazing for history’s sake, for the obsessive record of what is on the desk and who is in the snapshots, the oddments that seem so precious to our understanding of the man.

  But all she wanted was a cigarette. She spotted the pack, crossed the room quickly and took one out. There were footsteps on the stairs. She found matches and lit up and when Bill appeared in the doorway she gestured with the cigarette and told him thanks.

  “I thought you were probably gone,” he said.

  “Don’t you know the rules? We wait for dark. Then we go on side roads and no roads to avoid route signs that might tell me where we are.”

  “Scott spent weeks on this.”

  “It takes twice the time, his way.”

  “I think you’re supposed to appreciate the maze aspects.”

  “I’ll try harder. But right now I’m keeping you from your work so we’ll meet at early dinner if this is the plan.”

  Bill moved some papers from a bench near the window and then seemed to forget that he meant to sit there and stood holding the sheaf chest-high.

  “I said things, didn’t I?”

  “About your work mostly.”

  “Hard up for sympathy. And I want to say things now but totally fail. I’ve forgotten how to talk in ordinary ways except to mumble at meals for the salt.”

  “They shouldn’t give it to you.”

  “I’m sixty-three and it hurts.”

  “I’ll never make it to sixty. I see something coming and I see it complete. Slow, wasting, horrible, deep in the body. It’s something I’ve known for years.”

  “Fear has its own ego, hasn’t it?”

  “Do I sound awful?” she said.

  “A little boastful maybe.”

  “What is it you want to say but can’t?”

  “I want to ask you to come back some time. Or tell me where you live. Or stay and talk.”

  “I have no trouble talking. But in this house it’s not so easy. I think there’s an intensity that makes certain subjects a little dangerous. And we don’t have the camera between us. This changes everything, doesn’t it? Scott said six-thirty.”

  “Then it must be true.”

  “He told me how he found you.”

  “I nearly stove in his head the first thirty seconds. He took over fast. Taught himself many wiles and skills. We talk and argue all the time. He gives me perspectives.”

  “And Karen.”

  “Scott says I invented her. But he’s the one who snatched her out of the air. She scares me sometimes. She can scare me and delight me in the space of five words. She’s smart about people. Looks right through us. Watches TV and knows what people are going to say next. Not only gets it right but does their voices.”

  “She came here how long after Scott?”

  “Maybe five years after. She does their voices with a trueness that’s startling. That’s our Karen.”

  Brita lay nearly flat in the long tub, hearing someone chopping wood just below the window. Steam rose up around her. First the crack of the ax, then the soft topple of split logs. She felt a small dim misery stealing through her and wasn’t sure what it meant. If there was any day in her recent working life that might be called special, this was it. Not that she thought any longer of building a career. She had no career, only writers hunched in chairs from here to China. There was little income and only passing public mention of the scheme. Pictures of most of the writers would appear exactly nowhere, others in obscure journals and directories. She was the person who traveled compulsively to photograph the unknown, the untranslated, the inaccessible, the politically suspect, the hunted, the silenced. So it was a form of validation, a rosy endorsement, when a writer like Bill offered to pose for her. Then why this strange off-balance mood? She ran more hot water. She knew it was him down there, breathing hard, chanting with the effort. First the crack, then the soft topple. Keep a distance. He is on some rocking edge. The temperature of the bath was perfect now, almost too hot to bear. She felt sweat break out on her face and she moved more deeply in. Isn’t this why picture-taking is so ceremonial? Steam hung in the room. The heat was profound, deep-going and dulling and close to stopping the heart. She knew he was strong, saw it in his hands and girth, that dockworker’s density of body. She reached for a towel and wiped her face and after a while she stepped out of the tub and went to the window, using the towel to rub vapor off the glass at face level. How could she keep a distance if she’d already taken his picture? This was the partnership, the little misery. Bill was tossing split logs toward the corded wood set under a sagging canopy at the side of the house. The announcement of my dying. She had to rub away vapor several times, standing by the window looking down.

  Bill raised his glass.

  “This place feels like home tonight. There’s a wholeness, isn’t there? A sense of extension and completion. And we all know why. Here’s to guests and what they mean to civilization.”

  He drank and coughed.

  He said, “It’s interesting how ‘guest’ and ‘host’ are words that intertwine. The etymologies are curious. Converging, mixing, reciprocating. Like the human groupings marked by the words. Guests bring ideas from outside.”

  Scott sat facing Brita and spoke to her even when his remarks were meant for Bill.

  “I don’t think she considers herself a guest in the true sense. She came to work.”

  “Damn strange work. Quixotic as hell. But I think I admire her.”

  “You admire her for doing work that often goes unseen. Work that describes a kind of mission, a dedication. Exactly what I’ve been urging you to do. Keep this book out of sight. Build on it. Use it to define an idea, a principle.”

  “What principle?” Brita said.

  “That the withheld work of art is the only eloquence left.”

  “This lamb is very nice,” Bill said.

  Karen came back from the kitchen with bread on a cutting board.

  Scott looked at Brita.

  “Art floats by all the time, part of the common bloat. But if he withholds the book. If he keeps the book in typescript and lets it take on heat and light. This is how he renews his claim to wide attention. Book and writer are now inseparable.”

  “Excuse me but it stinks,” Brita said.

  “He knows I’m right. What puts him on edge is not when I argue with him but when I agree with him. When I bring his little wishes dancing to the surface.”

  Bill kept a bottle of Irish whiskey flush against the right rear leg of his chair and he reached down for it now and refilled his wineglas
s.

  He said, “We want to have a dinner with a theme. We’re four of us tonight. Four is the first square. Foursquare. But we also have a roundness, a rounding-out. Three plus one. And it happens that we’re halfway through April, or month number four.”

  “We were almost five,” Scott said. “A woman tried to give me a baby yesterday. She took it out of her coat. A little thing only hours old.”

  He was staring at Brita.

  “Why didn’t you take it?” Karen said.

  “Because I was on my way to meet Brita at a hotel where babies are not allowed. They have baby detectors at every door. They escort babies to the street.”

  “We could have found a place for it even if we didn’t keep it ourselves. You should have taken it. How could you not take it?”

  “People have always given away their babies. It’s old stuff. I more or less suspect that I was given away. It explains so much,” Scott said.

  “My mother used to talk about God’s compensation,” Brita said. “When her heart began to fail, her rheumatism seemed to ease up. This was her idea of some almighty balance. I wonder about God’s compensation for babies that are given away in the street or left in the garbage or thrown out the window.”

  Karen was talking to Scott about a road sign she’d seen on a walk that morning.

  “Because I feel someone owes me something every time this happens,” Brita said, “but who can it be if there is no God?”

  Scott said, “Karen believes. Bill says he believes but we’re not convinced. ”

  “Our theme is four,” Bill said. “In many ancient languages, God’s name has four letters.”

  Brita poured more wine for herself and Scott.

  “I don’t like not believing. I’m not at peace with it. I take comfort when others believe.”

  “Karen thinks God is here. Like walkin’ and talkin’.”

  “I want others to believe, you see. Many believers everywhere. I feel the enormous importance of this. When I was in Catania and saw hundreds of running men pulling a saint on a float through the streets, absolutely running. When I saw people crawl for miles on their knees in Mexico City on the Day of the Virgin, leaving blood on the basilica steps and then joining the crowd inside, the crush, so many people that there was no air. Always blood. The Day of Blood in Teheran. I need these people to believe for me. I cling to believers. Many, everywhere. Without them, the planet goes cold.”

  Bill spoke into his plate.

  “Did I say how much I like this lamb?”

  “Then eat it,” Scott said.

  “You’re not eating it,” Karen said.

  “I thought I was supposed to look at it. You mean actually eat. As in the dictionary definition.”

  The dining room was small, with unmatched chairs around an oblong table, and there was a fire going in the old brick chimney corner.

  “Do you want me to cut it for you?” Karen said.

  Scott was still looking at Brita.

  “If it’s believers you want, Karen is your person. Unconditional belief. The messiah is here on earth.”

  “He’s here on earth, I’m up there in the sky,” Brita said. “Accumulating mileage.”

  Bill said, “Have you ever flown over Greenland with the rising sun? Four seasons, four major compass headings.”

  He took his whiskey up off the floor.

  Brita said, “I’ve heard about a man and woman who are walking the length of the Great Wall of China, approaching each other from opposite directions. Every time I think of them, I see them from above, with the Wall twisting and winding through the landscape and two tiny human figures moving toward each other from remote provinces, step by step. I think this is a story of reverence for the planet, of trying to understand how we belong to the planet in a new way. And it’s strange how I construct an aerial view so naturally.”

  “Hikers in shaggy boots,” Karen said.

  “No, artists. And the Great Wall is supposedly the only man-made structure visible from space, so we see it as part of the total planet. And this man and woman walk and walk. They’re artists. I don’t know what nationality. But it’s an art piece. It’s not Nixon and Mao shaking hands. It’s not nationality, not politics.”

  “Yak-hair boots,” Scott said.

  “Those shaggy boots they wear in the land of the blue snow or whatever.”

  “When I think of China, what do I think of?”

  “People,” Karen said.

  “Crowds,” Scott said. “People trudging along wide streets, pushing carts or riding bikes, crowd after crowd in the long lens of the camera so they seem even closer together than they really are, totally jampacked, and I think of how they merge with the future, how the future makes room for the nonachiever, the nonaggressor, the trudger, the nonindividual. Totally calm in the long lens, crowd on top of crowd, pedaling, trudging, faceless, sort of surviving nicely.”

  Karen reached across the table and cut Bill’s lamb into neat pieces for him.

  “I was telling Scott,” she said. “What was I saying?”

  “They have a security detail trained in babies,” Scott said. “A nationwide chain of baby-proof hotels.”

  “I was saying about this official orange sign of the state.”

  Brita gave a delayed laugh, scanning the table for cigarettes.

  “I believe in the God of the stumblebum,” Bill said. “The waitress with a throbbing tooth.”

  Scott laughed because Brita was laughing.

  He cut some bread.

  He said, “The book is finished but will remain in typescript. Then Brita’s photos appear in a prominent place. Timed just right. We don’t need the book. We have the author.”

  “I am in pain,” Brita said. “Pour more wine.”

  She laughed, turning in her chair to scan the room for cigarettes.

  Scott laughed.

  Bill looked at his food, seeming to know it was changed somehow.

  “Or maybe not a prominent place,” Scott said. “Maybe a little journal in the corn belt.”

  “No, no, no, no,” Karen said. “Let’s imagine Bill on TV. He is on the sofa talking.”

  “We have the pictures, let’s use them to advantage. The book disappears into the image of the writer.”

  “No, wait, he is sitting in a chair facing a host in a chair, leaning real close, a bespectacled host with his chin in his fist.”

  “Did you actually see the baby?” Brita said.

  Scott laughed and this made Brita laugh.

  Bill said, “Our theme is four. Earth, air, fire and water.”

  “What’s the Day of Blood?” Karen said. “Not that I couldn’t easily guess.”

  Scott didn’t take his eyes off Brita.

  “Bill has the idea that writers are being consumed by the emergence of news as an apocalyptic force.”

  “He told me, more or less.”

  “The novel used to feed our search for meaning. Quoting Bill. It was the great secular transcendence. The Latin mass of language, character, occasional new truth. But our desperation has led us toward something larger and darker. So we turn to the news, which provides an unremitting mood of catastrophe. This is where we find emotional experience not available elsewhere. We don’t need the novel. Quoting Bill. We don’t even need catastrophes, necessarily. We only need the reports and predictions and warnings.”

  Karen watched Bill touch his fork to a piece of meat.

  He said, “I know the road sign you mean. The one for the deaf child. ”

  “And it’s not homemade. It’s official orange and black and they put it there for one child who can’t hear a car or truck bearing down on her. When I saw that I thought DEAF CHILD. I thought the state that erects a sign for one child can’t be so awful and unfeeling.”

  “Yes, it’s a nice sign. It’s nice to think about a child with her own sign. But this wholly ridiculous contention I’ve been hearing. Disappear the book. Define a principle. Do I have the words right? Are those the words?�
��

  He lifted the bottle and held the glass in his lap and poured while talking.

  “Keep the book. Hide the book. Make the writer the book. I totally fail.”

  “Why are you still writing if you know the book is finished and we all know the book is finished and we all know you’re still writing?”

  “Books are never finished.”

  “Plays are never finished. Books are finished.”

  “I’ll tell you when a book is finished. When the writer keels over with a great big thump.”

  Karen said, “I’m enlivened by the road sign every time I see it.”

  “As many books as a writer has published, those are the books he keeps on writing plus the one in his typewriter. Old books haunt the blood.”

  Brita poured more wine.

  “I’m driving, thank you,” Scott said.

  He drank.

  Bill drank and coughed.

  Brita waited for him to take out his cigarettes.

  “You can’t let the book be seen,” Scott said. “It’s all over if you do. The book is a grossity. We have to invent words to describe the corpulence, the top-heaviness, the lack of discernment, pace and energy.”

  “Kid thinks he owns my soul.”

  “He knows. It’s a master collapse. It’s a failure so deep it places suspicion on the great early work. People will look at the great early work in a new way, searching for signs of weakness and muddle.”

  “The book appears. I’m going to do it. Sooner than anyone thinks.”

  Scott was looking at Brita.

  “He knows I’m right. He just hates it when we agree. His words in my mouth. It drives him crazy. But I’m only trying to secure his rightful place.”

  Bill was looking for something to knock over, a thing, a suitable object he might swat off the table and break into pieces.

  “I think we need a pet in this household,” Karen said.

  Scott wiped bread crumbs off the edge of the table into his hand.

  “I’m only saying what he deep down wants me to say.”

  Karen looked at Brita.

  They changed seats and Karen sat close to Bill, pushing her chair against his.

  “Now do we want a dog or a cat?” she said in someone else’s voice.