Mao II (19 page)

She had to walk slowly to accommodate her awe. She went home to feed the cat but returned right away, taking a Jamaican taxi and saying Tompkins Square. It might be ten-plus acres with pigeons walking everywhere but not a single one aloft and even when she tried to kick-scatter several birds they only scurried away at best, not so much as flapping a fitful wing. People in clusters and larger groups, tending toward evening. Somebody cooked meat on a skewer and there was a fight not far away, a man and woman pushing an older man, backing him up, and he slapped at their hands and did a scat step, turning, and fell down hard. The whole thing absorbed into the background. Things fading all the time, hard to retain. A police minicab came by like some Bombay cartoon.

When night came down she was talking to a tall kid wearing a sweatshirt with Coke bottles pictured across the front, row after row. He was selling marijuana at the edge of the park, going, Grass grass grass grass. His voice got lower as he went through the chant, ending in a kitty-cat hiss. People walking by said Omar. He had a long face, sloped forehead and shallow chin and his tightly webbed hair was so close to the scalp and so clearly defined and widely parted it had a maplike contrast and precision.

The fallen man was still down, trying to get something out of his back pocket. An old white came by wearing a rag coat and baseball cap and high sneakers and the two men fell into conversation.

Omar said, “But sometimes you get an EDP and the police come with stun guns and blinding lights.”

“All the paraphernalia.”

“They have a gun that shoots fifty thousand volts. Be surprised how sometimes it only slows the guy down. Shoot him again, gets up again. It’s your adrenaline.”

“What’s an EDP?”

“Motionally disturb person. People taking meth and cocaine is what could do it to you. It’s your adrenaline and your temperature both. Call it getting high is the absolute truth.”

On the bandshell stage people were still getting up, going to sleep, they were sitting there staring, they were zippering sleeping bags and smoking cigarettes and there was a constant rolling drone, statements and set responses that made Karen think of formal prayers, a protocol of half words, dream cries, bursts and murmurs. One voice answered by another, the gasping stab for breath followed by the curse. Fragments of an American flag were fixed to the blue plastic of a sagging lean-to. A man and woman sat under a beach umbrella. A woman peeled an orange. A man slept face down on a bench, shirtless, with Bill’s exact hair color and shoulders and back.

She heard Omar going,
Dime bag dime bag dime bag.

Someone crawled out of a box and got up shaky and walked after her, begging, rough-tailing, a mean slur in his voice, and she felt for the first time since coming here that they could see her, that she wasn’t concealed by the desperation of the place. This wasn’t a public park but some life-and-death terrain where everything is measured for its worth. She realized they saw her. This was a shock. She gave the man a dollar, which he stopped and studied, which he looked at resentfully, talking to himself in the shadows.

She heard a voice beyond the fence, a woman saying clearly, “What a lovely spring night,” and it startled Karen, the speaker’s animation and delight, the distance traveled in a scatter of simple words.

She wondered what if the man hadn’t stopped coming after her when she gave him the dollar. She wondered what if there was no special sum that might have kept him away.

Omar told her, “Once you live in the street, there’s nothing but the street. Know what I’m saying. These people have one thing they can talk about or think about and that’s the little shithole they live in. The littler the shithole, the more it takes up your life. Know what I’m saying. You live in a fuckin’ ass mansion you got to think about it two times a month for like ten seconds total. Live in a shithole, it takes up your day. They cut the shithole in half, you got to go twice as hard to keep it so it’s livable. I’m telling you something I observe.”

She imagined the encrumpled bodies in the lean-tos and tents, sort of formless as to male or female, asleep in sodden clothes on a strip of cardboard or some dragged-in mattress stained with the waste of the ages.

She looked around for Omar but he was gone.

All the odd belongings bundled in a corner, wrapped and tied, many things concealed as one, things inside other things, some infinite collapsible system of getting through a life. She walked through the park, east to west, hearing the rustle and mutter of dreaming souls.

In the morning she began to forage for redeemable bottles and cans, anything she could find in trash baskets or curbside, in garbage bags massed in restaurant alleyways. Bottles, matchbooks, swayback shoes, whatever usable cultural deposit might be shut away in the dark. She took these things to the park and left them at the openings of lean-tos or stuck them just inside if she was sure no one was there. She slipped into those stinking alleyways and undid the twists on garbage bags and dumped out the garbage and took the bags. It was not a whole lot different from selling sweet williams in the lobby of the Marriott. She stood on garbage cans and went through dumpsters at demolition sites, salvaging plasterboard and nails, strips of plywood. Bottles and cans were her main mission, things that could be turned into money.

A man showed her his mutilated arm and asked for spare change. She found broken umbrellas, bruised fruit that was edible when washed. She washed the fruit and took it to the park. She took everything to the park. She placed things inside the huts. She saw people turning park benches into homes with walls and tilted roofs. Someone vomited loudly against the side of the maintenance building and she saw the parks department man in his khaki trappings walk by with nary a glance. A routine spatter of greensick sliding down a wall. She watched the people in the bandshell struggle out of their bedding, humped and gasping, looking up dazed into the span of light and sky that hung above the blue encampment.

Only those sealed by the messiah will survive.

B
ill stood outside a shop that sold religious articles. Many medallion images of sacred figures with shiny disks behind their heads. They’ve got their game together here, he thought. Name many saints, get them in the windows, do not stint on halos, crosses, shields or swords. The priests were damn impressive too. He saw them everywhere, round-hatted and intensely bearded, wrapped in floating robes. Sturdy men every one. Even the elderly were healthy-looking. Bill thought they were deathless in a way, fixed to national memory, great black ships of faith and superstition.

In his room he thought about the hostage. He tried to put himself there, in the heat and pain, outside the nuance of civilized anxiety. He wanted to imagine what it was like to know extremes of isolation. Solitude by the gun. He read Jean-Claude’s poems many times. The man remained invisibly Swiss. Bill tried to see his face, hair, eye color, he saw room color, faded paint on the walls. He pictured precise objects, he made them briefly shine with immanence, a bowl for food, a spoon constructed out of thought, perception, memory, feeling, will and imagination.

Then he went to see George Haddad.

“What are you drinking, Bill?”

“A small quantity of the local brandy poured gently into a short glass.”

“What do we want to talk about today?”

“Semtex H.”

“I can tell you I had nothing to do with setting off the explosive in that building.”

“But you know who did it.”

“I’m one man. I deal in concepts. This business of hostages is rife with factional complexity. Don’t assume I know important things. I know very little in fact.”

“But you have relationships with people who know a great deal.”

“Special Branch would say so.”

“And someone thought it might be interesting to look more carefully at the available writers.”

George looked up. He wore a wrinkled white shirt with the collar open and the sleeves rolled up, an undershirt visible beneath the sheer material. Bill watched him take a walk around the room and come back to his scotch and soda.

“It was just in the talking stage,” he said finally. “One man released in Beirut, another taken in London. Instantaneous worldwide attention. But it was thought the British would be quick to act if they found out where you were being held. Unacceptable danger. For the hostage-takers and for you.”

“Don’t look so sad,” Bill said.

“Your safety was foremost in mind. And your release would have come in a matter of days. These things were discussed at a certain level, hastily. I admit it.”

“Then the bomb went off. The more I think about it, the more sense it makes. I didn’t expect an explosion. But the second it happened I stood in the blast and it seemed completely logical. It seemed legitimate and well argued. From the beginning there was something in this situation that spoke to me directly. Beyond a poetry reading to lend aid to a fellow writer. When Charlie finished explaining, I felt a recognition. Then again in London. I knew who you were before we were introduced. I picked that speck of glass out of my hand and I felt it had been there all my life.”

“No one knew you would be anywhere near that building.”

“Don’t look so sad.”

“I’m in a very delicate position,” George said. “I want it to end here, you see. We gather a few press people, you make a statement supporting the movement, the hostage is freed, we all shake hands. Provided I’m able to convince you that the movement is worth supporting.”

“But that’s not your major problem, is it?”

“Actually no.”

“You’re getting pressure from Beirut. They don’t want it to end here.”

“They may yet come round to my way of thinking. He comes to Athens, meets you, speaks to the press. It appeals to my sense of correspondence, of spiritual kinship. Two underground figures. Men of the same measure in a way.”

There was a rattling at the door and George’s wife and teenage daughter came in. Bill stood partway up for introductions. There was a moment of nods and shy smiles and then they were gone down the hall.

“He calls himself Abu Rashid. I honestly think you’d be fascinated by the man.”

“Isn’t it always the case?”

“And I’m still hopeful he’ll turn up here.”

“But in the meantime.”

“We’re here to talk.”

“To have a dialogue.”

“Exactly,” George said.

“For some time now I’ve had the feeling that novelists and terrorists are playing a zero-sum game.”

“Interesting. How so?”

“What terrorists gain, novelists lose. The degree to which they influence mass consciousness is the extent of our decline as shapers of sensibility and thought. The danger they represent equals our own failure to be dangerous.”

“And the more clearly we see terror, the less impact we feel from art.”

“I think the relationship is intimate and precise insofar as such things can be measured.”

“Very nice indeed.”

“You think so?”

“Completely marvelous.”

“Beckett is the last writer to shape the way we think and see. After him, the major work involves midair explosions and crumbled buildings. This is the new tragic narrative.”

“And it’s difficult when they kill and maim because you see them, honestly now, as the only possible heroes for our time.”

“No,” Bill said.

“The way they live in the shadows, live willingly with death. The way they hate many of the things you hate. Their discipline and cunning. The coherence of their lives. The way they excite, they excite admiration. In societies reduced to blur and glut, terror is the only meaningful act. There’s too much everything, more things and messages and meanings than we can use in ten thousand lifetimes. Inertia-hysteria. Is history possible? Is anyone serious? Who do we take seriously? Only the lethal believer, the person who kills and dies for faith. Everything else is absorbed. The artist is absorbed, the madman in the street is absorbed and processed and incorporated. Give him a dollar, put him in a TV commercial. Only the terrorist stands outside. The culture hasn’t figured out how to assimilate him. It’s confusing when they kill the innocent. But this is precisely the language of being noticed, the only language the West understands. The way they determine how we see them. The way they dominate the rush of endless streaming images. I said in London, Bill. It’s the novelist who understands the secret life, the rage that underlies all obscurity and neglect. You’re half murderers, most of you.”

He found the thought happy and attractive and he smiled through Bill’s hand-wagging and the motion of his shaking head.

“No. It’s pure myth, the terrorist as solitary outlaw. These groups are backed by repressive governments. They’re perfect little totalitarian states. They carry the old wild-eyed vision, total destruction and total order.”

“Terror is the force that begins with a handful of people in a back room. Do they stress discipline? Are they implacable in their will? Of course. I think you have to take sides. Don’t comfort yourself with safe arguments. Take up the case of the downtrodden, the spat-upon. Do these people feel a yearning for order? Who will give it to them? Think of Chairman Mao. Order is consistent with permanent revolution.”

“Think of fifty million Red Guards.”

“Children actually, Bill. It was about faith. Luminous, sometimes stupid, sometimes cruel. Look today. Young boys everywhere posing with assault rifles. The young have a cruelty and unyieldingness that’s fully formed. I said in London. The more heartless, the more visible.”

“And the harder it becomes to defend a thing, the more you relish your position. Another kind of unyielding.”

They had another drink, sitting crouched, face to face, with motorcycles going by in the brassy street.

“Is it a little Maoist band you’re speaking for, George?”