Mao II Part 9

"I'm polishing. That's what I'm doing."

"I want this book, you b.a.s.t.a.r.d."

They stirred in their chairs. Charlie flexed his right knee, grimacing. They got to their feet at the same time and stretched, working their shoulder muscles. Bill looked out the east window into a sky mural of bridge spans and ship cranes, factory smoke over Queens.

"You're not the hermit, the woodsman-writer, you're not the crank with a native vision. You're the hunted man. You don't write political novels or books steeped in history but you still feel the clamor at your back. This is the conflict, Bill."

"I think I got rooked on these shoes."

"You'll call me about London at home tonight. Here's my number. Or tomorrow at the absolute latest, right here, by noon if possible. I'm taking a night flight. It's something I think you need to do. Remember. One less writer in the hands of killers."

The guard was waiting in the reception area. Bill asked him where the men's room was. The guard had a key and stood by the drying machine as Bill went through his pockets looking for the tin with his mixed medications. He took precut segments of three brands of amphetamine tablets out of the tin. The colors were a blue, a white and a pink. He placed them on his tongue but when he realized the tap would not deliver water unless he kept his hand on the valve he took the pill fragments out of his mouth so he could ask the guard to turn on the cold water for him. The guard was willing to do this. Bill put the pieces back on his tongue, cupped his hands under the spout and brought the water to his mouth and drank, throwing back his head when he swallowed. The guard looked at him as if to ask whether everything had gone as planned. Bill nodded and they went out to the elevator and rode to the lobby together.

Bill stood near the entranceway, about fifty feet from the oval desk and directly in front of the register that listed the building's occupants. He could see Scott waiting just outside, standing at the far end of a shop window that jutted at an angle from the recessed entranceway, forming a border extending to the sidewalk. He carried a small package, books probably, and had his back to the shop window. Bill stepped away from the gla.s.s doors and smoked a cigarette. He stood in thought, his arms folded and his head c.o.c.ked slightly left. His gaze seemed to end at the tip of the cigarette dangling from his right hand. When he peered out again, Scott was nearer the entranceway but had turned to look in the shop window. Bill walked across the front of the lobby past two sets of revolving doors. He exited by the last single door, peeling the visitor's badge from his lapel and moving out onto the sidewalk, where he joined the surge of the noontime crowd.

PART TWO.

8.

The boy took off the prisoner's hood when he came to feed him. The boy also wore a hood, a crude cloth piece with ragged slashes at the eyes.

Time became peculiar, the original thing that is always there. It seeped into his fever and delirium, into the question of who he was. When he spat up blood he watched the pink thing slug into the drain and it carried time quivering in it.

It made the prisoner anxious, not knowing why the boy needed to be concealed.

They drove him here in a car with a missing door. He saw an old man with no shirt who was stuck to a coil of military wire in a sewage meadow somewhere.

Be alert and note the details said the conscientious tape running in his head, the voice that whispers you are smarter than your captors.

The prisoner felt the boy come close to pull away his hood and stuff his face with food and he looked into the eyeholes of the boy's own hood.

Time permeated the air and food. The black ant crawling up his leg carried time's enormity, the old slow all-knowing pace.

Poor old guy probably lost at night wanders dizzy into the wire, senile, shirtless, pinned, still living.

He waited for the moment when he could count the launched rockets flashing. When he heard the rockets he also saw the flash although he wore a hood that had no eyeholes.

He was new at this and eager to succeed. All the time he chewed his food he estimated meters wall to wall. Measure the walls, then the bricks in the walls, then the mortar between the bricks, then the hairline cracks in the mortar. See it as a test. Show them how advanced you are.

He saw laundry lines going through sh.e.l.l holes in gray masonry, looking through the missing door.

The boy pulled away the hood and fed him by hand, always too fast, pushing food into his mouth before he was finished chewing the previous handful.

He conceded the fact of his confinement. He admitted to the presence of the plastic wire they'd used to fasten his wrist to the water-supply pipe. He conceded the hood. His head was covered with a hood.

The prisoner was full of plans. With time and tools he would learn Arabic and impress his captors and greet them in their language and have basic conversations, once they gave him the tools to teach himself.

The boy tortured him sometimes. Knocked him down, told him to stand. Knocked him down, told him to stand. The boy tried to pull his teeth out of his mouth with his bare hands. The pain extended long past the boy's departure from the room. This was part of the structure of time, how time and pain became inseparable.

And there were authorities to impress as well. At his release they would take him to a secret place and recite their questions in the same voice he heard on the instruction tape and he would impress the authorities with his recall of detail and his a.n.a.lysis of facets and aspects and they would quickly determine the location of the building and the ident.i.ty of the group that held him.

He knew it was evening by the war noise. In the early weeks it began at sundown. First the machine-gun clatter, then car horns blowing. It's interesting to think of traffic jams caused by war. Everything is normal in a way. All the usual cursing complaints.

The boy had him lie on his back with legs bent up and he beat the bottoms of the prisoner's feet with a reinforcing rod. The pain made it hard for him to sleep and this stretched and deepened time, gave it a consciousness, a quality of ingenious and pervasive presence.

He thought of the no-shirt man caught on the wire. His memories didn't extend past the moment of abduction. Time started there except for small dim s.n.a.t.c.hes, summer flashes, compact moments in a house somewhere.

But even with authorities, what do authorities know, did he really expect authorities to learn important things from the length and width of a brick even if there were bricks to count and measure and there weren't, or meaningful sounds that barely petered through the walls.

There was no sequence or narrative or one day that leads to another. He saw a bowl and spoon at the edge of his foam mattress but the boy continued to feed him by hand. Sometimes the boy forgot to replace the hood after mealtime. This made the prisoner anxious.

The mortars came next, a sound of dust in the heavy crumple of the sh.e.l.ls, slow-motion dust, dust specks colliding by the millions.

It was hard to think about women except desperately and incompletely. If they could send him a woman, just once, for half a second, so he could set eyes on her.

The only meaningful sound he heard was the VCR on the floor above. They were looking at videos of the war in the streets. They wanted to see themselves in their scuffed khakis, the vivid streetwise troop, that's us, firing nervous bursts at the militia down the block.

The ants and baby spiders transported time in its vastness and discontent and when he felt something crawling on the back of his hand he wanted to speak to it, explain his situation. He wanted to tell it who he was because this was now a matter of some confusion. Cut off from people whose voices were the ravel of his being, growing scant and pale because there was no one to see him and give him back his body.

The boy forgot to replace the hood after meals, he forgot the meals, the boy was the bearer of randomness. The last sense-making thing, the times for meals and beatings, was in danger of collapse.

If they could send a woman wearing stockings who might whisper the word "stockings." This would help him live another week.

Then what he was waiting for, the sound-flash of the big Grad rockets sliding off multibarreled launchers, twenty thirty maybe forty at a time in the incandescent dusk of a major duel across the Green Line.

He wanted paper and something to write with, some way to sustain a thought, place it in the world.

He refused to exercise or count bricks or make up bricks that he might measure and count. He talked aloud to his father early in the morning, after the war died down. He told his father where he was, how positioned, how tied to a pipe, where in present pain, how in spirit, but with a.s.surances that he was hopeful of rescue as they say on the instruction tape of Western man.

He tried to make them up, women in nets and straps, but could only manage drifting images, half finished.

There was something about the sound of launched rockets that induced a cortical flash, the brainlight under the hood that meant the Christians and the Muslims, that meant the sky was glowing, the city banded in rhapsodies of light and fire all the way to morning, when men came out of stifling shelters in their underwear to sweep away the rubble and buy bread.

There was no one to remind him who he was. The days were not connected. The prisoner sensed the vanish of the simplest givens. He began to identify with the boy. As all his voices fled he thought he might be somewhere in the boy.

He tried to repeat the old stories, s.e.x with a shadowy woman on a pa.s.senger jet crossing the ocean at night (and it has to be night and it has to be water) or encounters in unexpected places with women in tight things, crisscrossed with black straps, sealed for his unsealing, but he couldn't seem to do it, braced and cinctured, women stuck fast in the middle of a thought.

No one came to interrogate him.

He looked through the missing door and there were kids playing in the rubble and a gun at the side of his neck and he kept telling himself I am riding in a car with a missing door.

The old stories tried and true. s.e.x with a shadowy woman on a stairway in an empty building on a rainy day. The more ba.n.a.l, the more commonplace, the more predictable, the triter, the staler, the dumber, the better. The only thing he didn't have time for was originality. He wanted the same junior fantasies the boy had, sucking on the images that would trail them into middle age, into the final ruin, those sad little picture-stories so dependable and true.

The food was usually takeout, coming in a bag with Arabic letters and a logo of three red chickens standing in a row.

No, he didn't hate the boy, who had sc.r.a.ppy hands and chewed-up fingers and was not the author of his lonely terror. But he did hate him, didn't he, or did he, or not?

Soon, though, he felt these talks with his father were a form of exercise, of self-improvement, and he stopped talking, he let this last voice flee, he said okay and fell to mumbling.

He thought of the no-shirt man on the razor wire and saw him turning neon in the gorgeous dawn of the war.

In the beginning, what?

In the beginning there were people in many cities who had his name on their breath. He knew they were out there, the intelligence network, the diplomatic back-channel, technicians, military men. He had tumbled into the new culture, the system of world terror, and they'd given him a second self, an immortality, the spirit of Jean-Claude Julien. He was a digital mosaic in the processing grid, lines of ghostly type on microfilm. They were putting him together, storing his data in starfish satellites, bouncing his image off the moon. He saw himself floating to the far sh.o.r.es of s.p.a.ce, past his own death and back again. But he sensed they'd forgotten his body by now. He was lost in the wavebands, one more code for the computer mesh, for the memory of crimes too pointless to be solved.

Who knew him now?

There was no one who knew him but the boy. First his government abandoned him, then his employer, then his family. And now the men who'd abducted him and kept him sealed in a bas.e.m.e.nt room had also forgotten he was here. It was hard to say whose neglect troubled him most.

Bill sat in a small apartment above a laundromat about a mile east of Harvard Square. He wore a sweater over his pajamas and an old terry-cloth robe over the sweater.

His daughter Liz made dinner and talked to him through a serving hatch stacked with magazines and play scripts.

"It's impossible to save a nickel so I don't even think about moving out of here. I'm at the point where I feel lucky to at least be doing something I like."

"And never mind the little miseries."

"But watch out for the big ones."

"Last time I was here."

"Right."

"You look a lot better, kid."

"Last time was a crisis. Which I see you found your robe and pajamas. Always leaving things, Daddy."

"I take after you."

He was barefoot, reading a newspaper.

"And let someone know you're coming for G.o.d's sake. I could have met you at the airport."

"Spur of the moment. I figured you were working."

"Monday's off."

"I'll bet you're good at your job."

"Tell them. I'm going to be like thirty any minute and I'm still trying to lose the word 'a.s.sistant.' "

"Now, look, about the inconvenience. I'm out of here tomorrow. "

"The sofa's yours as long as you want it. Stay a while. I'd like you to."

"You know me."

"We're all going to Atlanta for Memorial Day. I'll be able to report on the rare visit of the Mythical Father."

"You'll ruin their weekend."

"Why don't you ask me how they're doing?"

"I don't give a d.a.m.n."

"Thank you."

"I've reached a long-distance agreement with those two about the value of not giving a d.a.m.n. ESP. We're in perfect unspoken communication."

He put down one section of the paper and started on another.

"They're interested in what you're doing," she said.

"What am I doing? I'm doing what I always do. How could anyone be interested in that?"

"You're still a popular subject. Except with Mother of course. She doesn't want to hear about it."

"Neither do I, Lizzie."

"But it comes up. We're like little brown doggies gnawing and pulling at the same spitty rag."

"Report that my drinking is completely under control."

"What about your remoteness?"

"What about it?" he said.

"Your anger. The airs.p.a.ce we weren't allowed to enter when you were brooding. What about your vanishing act?"

"Look, why even bother with me if you really believe I was all that difficult?"

"I don't know. Maybe I'm a coward. I can't bear the thought that bad feelings might harden between us and I'll grow old always regretting. And maybe it's because there are no kids in my future. I don't have to live my life as a history lesson in how not to be like my father. There won't be anyone I can f.u.c.k up the way you did the job on Sheila and Jeff."

She put her head into the opening between the rooms, showing a sly smile.

"We don't think your behavior had anything to do with writing. We think the Mythical Father used writing as an excuse for just about everything. That's how we a.n.a.lyze the matter, Daddy. We think writing was never the burden and the sorrow you made it out to be but as a matter of fact was your convenient crutch and your convenient alibi for every possible failure to be decent."