Mao II Read online

“Want to put the cigarette away and smoke some of Scott’s marijuana? Might help you sleep if you’re still upset.”

  “I don’t think I’m ready to sleep just yet.”

  “I never took to dope for some strange finicky whatever reason.”

  “It gives me heart-attack dreams.”

  “Scott uses it mainly to settle him down when he works late on manuscripts or files.”

  “The operational direction right now is up, not down.”

  She bounced a little, making him groan, then sat back on her haunches.

  “He says you are familiar with a number of substances that alter the biochemistry.”

  “These are regulated medications. A doctor writes a prescription. All perfectly statutory.”

  “I definitely feel a stirring under the covers.”

  “Did I ever tell you what my first wife?”

  “Don’t think so. What?”

  “She used to say I was all dick. I spent so much time locked up and was so tight-lipped about my work and eventually about everything else that there was nothing left but raw sex. And we didn’t talk about that either.”

  “Just did it.”

  “She didn’t like writers. I realized this, stupidly, way too late.”

  “If you were stupid, what was she? Marrying a writer.”

  “She expected us to adapt to each other. Women have faith in the mechanics of adjustment. A woman knows how to want something. She’ll take chances to secure the future.”

  “I never think about the future.”

  “You come from the future,” he said quietly.

  She took his cigarette and stubbed it out and then put the ashtray on the floor, sliding it toward the foot of the bed.

  “What’s a heart-attack dream?”

  “Panic. Rapid heartbeat. Then I wake up and I’m not sure if the heartbeat was dreamed or real. Not that dreamed isn’t real.”

  “Everything is real.”

  She shook easily out of the T-shirt, arms unfolding full-length above her head, and Bill almost turned away. Every time she did this, breasts and hair swinging, he felt the shock of seeing something full-measure, almost lost in the force of it. He advanced the action in time to give it stillness and coherence, make it a memory of shape and grace caught unaware. She wouldn’t ever know how deep-reaching that painted moment was when her elbows scissored out and she slipped free of the furled shirt and stretched to a figured yawn, making him forget where he was.

  “I know it’s bad form to ask.”

  “But what?” she said.

  “Does Scott know you come up here?”

  They were working him out of his pajama top, one arm at a time, then had to stop while he had a coughing fit.

  “Is there anything in this house Scott doesn’t know?”

  “That’s what I thought,” he said.

  “The mice are his friends. He knows which window gets the best moonlight on any given night on the lunar calendar.”

  She changed position to lower the bedcovers and undo the drawstring on his pants.

  “And it’s okay with him,” Bill said.

  “I don’t see what choice. I mean he hasn’t shot us yet.”

  “No, he hasn’t.”

  “And he wouldn’t.”

  “No, he wouldn’t, would he?”

  “And anyway and anyway and anyway. Didn’t he bring me here for you?”

  Bill could find no cheery features in this thought. He wanted to believe she’d just found the words tumbling on her tongue, which was how she hit upon much of what she said. But maybe she thought it was true and maybe it was and how interesting for Bill to imagine that he was betraying Scott all along by the other man’s design.

  His cock was dancing in her hand.

  “I think we ought to have our intercourse now.”

  “Yes, dear,” said Bill.

  She went to the chest across the room and took a small package out of the middle drawer. She removed a condom and came back to the bed, straddling Bill’s thighs, and began to outfit him with the device.

  “Who are you protecting, you or me?”

  “It’s just the norm today.”

  He saw how absorbed she was in the task, dainty-fingered and determined to be expert, like a solemn child dressing a doll.

  Scott stood looking around the loft apartment. Columns extended the length of the room. There was a broad plastic sheet slung under the leaky skylight. Brita walked around switching on lights. A small kitchen and dining area and a half-hidden recess of files and shelves. He followed along behind her, turning two lights off. A sofa and some chairs in a cluster. Then a darkroom and printing room with black curtains over the doors. Out the south windows the Trade towers stood cut against the night, intensely massed and near. This is the word “loomed” in all its prolonged and impending force.

  “I will make tea for the travelers.”

  “Now I finally feel I’ve seen New York inside and out, just standing here in this space and looking through the window.”

  “When it rains out, it also rains in.”

  “Brita, despite whatever inconvenience.”

  “It’s small as these places go. But I can’t afford it anymore. And I have to look at the million-storey towers.”

  “One has an antenna.”

  “The male.”

  “Tea is perfect, thank you.”

  In the kitchen she took things out of cabinets and drawers, an object at a time, feeling as though she’d been away for a month, six weeks, a sense of home folding over her now. These cups and spoons made her feel intact again, reclaimed her from the jet trails, the physics of being in transit. She was so weary she could hear it, a ringing in the bones, and she had to keep reminding herself she’d been gone for less than two days. Scott stood at a table across the room looking at strewn magazines and commenting more or less uncontrollably.

  The elevator clanked through the building, the old green iron gate smashing and rattling in the night.

  They drank their tea.

  “What makes this city different is that nobody expects to be in one place for ten minutes. Everybody moves all the time. Seven nameless men own everything and move us around on a board. People are swept out into the streets because the owners need the space. Then they are swept off the streets because someone owns the air they breathe. Men buy and sell air in the sky and there are bodies heaped together in boxes on the sidewalk. Then they sweep away the boxes.”

  “You like to overstate.”

  “I overstate things to stay alive. This is the point of New York. I completely love and trust this city but I know the moment I stop being angry I’m finished forever.”

  Scott said, “I used to eat alone. It made me ashamed, having no one to eat with. But not only alone—standing up. This is one of the haunting secrets of our time, that we are willing to eat standing up. I used to stand because it’s more anonymous, it suited the way I felt about being in the city. Hundreds of thousands of people eating alone. They eat alone, they walk alone, they talk to themselves in the street in profound and troubled monologues like saints in the depths of temptation.”

  “I’m getting very sleepy,” Brita said.

  “I don’t want to get back in the car right now.”

  “You’re the driver, Scott.”

  “I don’t think I can drive another fifteen feet.”

  He got up and turned off another light.

  Sirens sounding to the east.

  Then he sat near her on the sofa. He leaned toward her and touched the back of his hand to her cheek. She watched a mouse run up the face of a window and disappear. She had a theory the sirens drove them mad.

  She said, “In some places where you eat standing up you are forced to look directly into a mirror. This is total control of the person’s responses, like a consumer prison. And the mirror is literally inches away so you can hardly put the food in your mouth without hitting into it.”

  “The mirror is for safety, for protection.
You use it to hide. You’re totally alone in the foreground but you’re also part of the swarm, the shifting jelly of heads looming over your little face. Bill doesn’t understand how people need to blend in, lose themselves in something larger. The point of mass marriage is to show that we have to survive as a community instead of individuals trying to master every complex force. Mass interracial marriage. The conversion of the white-skinned by the dark. Every revolutionary idea involves danger and reversal. I know all the drawbacks of the Moon system but in theory it is brave and visionary. Think of the future and see how depressed you get. All the news is bad. We can’t survive by needing more, wanting more, standing out, grabbing all we can.”

  “Speaking of the future. ”

  “You can’t send me out there.”

  “I need to sleep, to stop the noise in my head. I feel I’ve known all three of you for years and it’s goddamn tiring actually.”

  They were seated far from the one dim light floating over the stove.

  “We’ve gone too far into space to insist on our differences. Like those people you talk about on the Great Wall, a man and woman walking toward each other across China. This isn’t a story about seeing the planet new. It’s about seeing people new. We see them from space, where gender and features don’t matter, where names don’t matter. We’ve learned to see ourselves as if from space, as if from satellite cameras, all the time, all the same. As if from the moon, even. We’re all Moonies, or should learn to be.”

  She heard the elevator gate smash shut again. Her eyes were closed. But Scott was the one who fell asleep. When she realized this, she eased off the sofa and got a blanket for him. Then she went to the other end of the loft, past the kitchen, and climbed the ladder to her bed.

  She took off her sneakers and lay face up with her clothes on, suddenly wide awake. The cat appeared at her elbow, watching. She heard shouting in the street, the night voices that called all the time now, kids who pissed on sleeping men, the woman who lived in garbage bags, wearing them, sleeping inside them, who carried a large plastic bag everywhere, filled with other plastic bags. Brita heard her talking now, her voice carried on the river wind, a rasp of static in the night.

  Soon the road replayed itself in her mind, the raveled passage down the hours. It was strange to lie still in a small corner and feel the power of movement, the gull-rush of air over the hood. A sense memory pulsing in the skin. The cat moved past her hand, a shrug of lunar muscle and fur. She heard car alarms going off in sequence, the panic data that fed into her life. Everything feeds in, everything is coded, there is everything and its hidden meaning. Which crisis do I trust? She felt she needed her own hidden meanings to get her through the average day. She reached out and snatched the cat, bringing it onto her chest. She thought her body had become defensive, homesick for lost assurances. It wanted to be a refuge against the way things work, against the force of what is out there. To love and touch, the roundness of these moments was crossed with something wistful now. All sex is a form of longing even as it happens. Because it happens against the crush of time. Because the surface of the act is public, a cross-grain of fear and ruin. She wanted her body to remain a secret of the past, untouched by complexity and regret. She was superstitious about talking to doctors in detail. She thought they would take her body over, name all the damaged parts, speak all the awful words. She lay for a long time with her eyes closed, trying to drift into sleep. Then she rubbed the cat’s fur and felt her childhood there. It was complete in a touch, everything intact, carried out of old lost houses and fields and summer days into the river of her hand.

  She slipped under the quilt, turning on her side and facing the wall to prove she was serious. Slowly now, into that helpless half life of self-commentary, the voice film that runs between light and dark. But the time eventually came when she had to admit she was still awake. She threw off the quilt and lay there on her back. Then she climbed down the ladder and went to a window, seeing steam come heaving out of a vent hole in the street. The telephone rang. Like earthwork art, these vapor columns rising all over the city, white and silent in empty streets. She heard the machine switch on and waited for the caller to speak. A man’s voice, sounding completely familiar, sounding enhanced, filling the high room, but she couldn’t identify him at first, couldn’t quite fix the context of his remarks, and she thought he might be someone she’d known years before, many years and very well, a voice that seemed to wrap itself around her, so strangely and totally near.

  “You left without saying goodbye. Although that’s not why I’m calling. I’m wide awake and need to talk to someone but that’s not why I’m calling either. Do you know how strange it is for me to sit here talking to a machine? I feel like a TV set left on in an empty room. I’m playing to an empty room. This is a new kind of loneliness you’re getting me into, Brita. How nice to say your name. The loneliness of knowing I won’t be heard for hours or days. I imagine you’re always catching up with messages. Accessing your machine from distant sites. There’s a lot of violence in that phrase. ‘Accessing your machine.’ You need a secret code if I’m not mistaken. You enter your code in Brussels and blow up a building in Madrid. This is the dark wish that the accessing industry caters to. I’m sitting in my cane chair looking out the window. The birds are awake and so am I. Another draggy smoked-out dawn with my throat scorched raw but I’ve had much worse. I stopped drinking when you left last night. And I’m speaking slowly now because there’s no sense of a listener, not even the silences a listener creates, a dozen different kinds, dense and expectant and bored and angry, and I feel a little awkward, making a speech to an absent friend. I hope we’re friends. But that’s not why I’m calling. I keep seeing my book wandering through the halls. There the thing is, creeping feebly, if you can imagine a naked humped creature with filed-down genitals, only worse, because its head bulges at the top and there’s a gargoylish tongue jutting at a corner of the mouth and truly terrible feet. It tries to cling to me, to touch and fasten. A cretin, a distort. Water-bloated, slobbering, incontinent. I’m speaking slowly to get it right. It’s my book after all, so I’m responsible for getting it right. The loneliness of voices stored on tape. By the time you listen to this, I’ll no longer remember what I said. I’ll be an old message by then, buried under many new messages. The machine makes everything a message, which narrows the range of discourse and destroys the poetry of nobody home. Home is a failed idea. People are no longer home or not home. They’re either picking up or not picking up. The truth is I don’t feel awkward. It’s probably easier to talk to you this way. But that’s not why I’m calling. I’m calling to describe the sunrise. A pale runny light spreading across the hills. There’s a partial cloud cover, which makes the light seem to hug the land, quiet light, soft, calm, pale, a landglow more than a light from the sky. I thought you’d want to know these things. I thought this is a woman who wants to know these things more than other things that other people might attempt to tell her. The cloud bank is long and slate-gray and altogether fine. There really isn’t any more to say about it. The window is open so I can feel the air. I’m not deeply hung over and so the air does not rebuke me. The air is fine. It’s precisely what it is. I’m sitting in my old cane chair with my feet up on a bench and my back to the typewriter. The birds are fine. I can hear them in the trees nearby and out in the fields, crows in clusters in the fields. The air is sharp and cold and fine and smells altogether as air should smell early on a spring morning when a man is talking to a machine. I thought these are the things this woman wants to hear about. It tries to cling to me, soft-skinned and moist, to fasten its puckery limpet flesh onto mine.”

  The machine cut him off.

  She realized Scott was right behind her. He leaned against her, ardent and sleepy, hands reaching around, hands and thumbs, thumbs sliding into the belt loops of her jeans. She let her head drop back against his shoulder, concentrating, and he pressed in tight. She yawned and then laughed. He put his hands under her swe
ater, he undid her belt, leaned in to her, put his hands down along her belly, the watchfulness, the startled alert of the body to every touch. He lifted her sweater up onto her shoulders and rubbed the side of his face against her back. She concentrated, she looked like someone listening for sounds in the wall. She felt everything. She was speculative, waiting, her breathing even and careful, and she moved slowly under his hands and felt the sandy buzz of his face on her back.

  She knew he would not say a word, not even going up the ladder, not even the faithful little ladder joke, and she welcomed the silence, the tactful boy lean and pale, climbing her body with a groan.

  7

  Bill opened the door in the middle of traffic, the thick choked blast of yellow metal, and he walked out into it. Scott called after him to wait, stay, watch out. He moved between stalled cabs where drivers sat slumped in the gloom like inmates watching daytime TV. Scott shouted out a place and a time to meet. Bill threw back a wave and then stood at the edge of the one active lane until there was an opening to the sidewalk.

  The rush of things, of shuffled sights, the mixed swagger of the avenue, noisy storefronts, jewelry spread across the sidewalk, the deep stream of reflections, heads floating in windows, towers liquefied on taxi doors, bodies shivery and elongate, all of it interesting to Bill in the way it blocked comment, the way it simply rushed at him, massively, like your first day in Jalalabad, rushed and was. Nothing tells you what you’re supposed to think of this. Well, it was his first day in New York in many years and there was no street or building he wanted to see again, no old haunt that might rouse a longing or sweet regret.

  He found the number and approached an oval desk in the lobby, where two security officers sat behind a bank of telephones, TV monitors and computer displays. He gave his name and waited for the woman to check a visitors’ list on the swivel screen. She asked him some questions and then picked up a phone and in a couple of minutes a uniformed man appeared to escort Bill to the proper floor. The woman at the desk gave the man a visitor’s badge, an adhesive piece of paper, which he fastened to Bill’s lapel.