“No.” She glared emphatically. “I have to deaden myself, pursue sensation until I reach insensibility. It isn’t the volcano erupting. It’s the lava after it’s gone cold.”
“I like a good aphorism.”
Delvino just inside the door, shiny as a wax-sprayed supermarket apple. Predatory eyes. The roving reporter. He affected leather-trimmed suspenders and his normally invasive geniality inappropriate for any situation.
“Can I help you?” Ellen said without much noticing him.
“Probably to see me,” I mumbled, starting out.
But Delvino came further in. “Good seeing both of you together. Chemistry is so very important. We’ve always felt that.”
“Yeah. We were just volleying a few ideas back and forth.”
“Exactly. This is a cooperative.”
Ellen had measured him out by now and sat, short hands in wide lap, like a houseguest in an uncomfortable chair. Nowhere the small rote defiance I might have expected.
“I don’t think you and I have been to the same parties,” she said.
Delvino did not move or smile, a mandarin. “I wouldn’t guess you care for parties.”
The glass beads at her wrist clicked like a tapped phone line. “Birthday parties, political parties. Do you suppose it’s because I’m too easily embarrassed? I like to walk downtown and pretend I’m from a foreign country.”
Delvino nodded, still not smiling. But he moved now, across and around the Panelyte rectangle, face molded in aimlessness. He riffled papers, weighed things and turned them, traced surfaces; not in purposive inspection, it seemed, but with the restful, not restive curiosity of someone waiting for an appointment.
“No grid overlays?” he said at last.
“I can do them in my head,” Ellen whispered.
“I’m the man for taking care of glitches. Anything else I should know about?”
I imagined Delvino taking an extension course in Interrogation taught by an ex-Miami cop, more recently Tenneco chief of security in Guayaquil, Ecuador. Delvino’s contempt for the other students is so complete, so automatic, that he is unaware of it. He takes voluminous notes, does outside reading, gets an A.
“You’re sure?” he was saying. “Resentments you might have been saving up?”
“I don’t save them,” Ellen said. “I spend them right away.”
Delvino’s laughter was something that came all in one burst. He cocked an appreciative index finger at her.
“Can we keep each other up to date? Can we do that?” He swung round in the doorway, twinkling. “Have a good weekend, you two.”
Ellen came up out of the chair and shoved me back. “You were a big help.”
“What, I think he really likes you.”
“Don’t be an asshole.”
Hoisting a jangly black shoulder bag, she curved her mouth in exasperation. “Some watchdog you are.”
“That’s rich. Since when am I in any position to…Where you going?”
“Home. Where the heart is.”
“But the buses don’t run till…”
“So I’ll call a taxi,” her voice fading down the hall. “I can afford it.”
Today’s dialogue all ominous and overcareful. And where was the heart? More propaganda. Rumbling, as of a distant waterfall. Was this work? I was supposed to lead myself to conclusions. All right: Ellen’s father was craven. Her chair was still warm. And I had placed myself at such a remove it had made her angry. My theoretics again, my pulled punches. But after all, where really was the heart?
Back inside my own rectangle, which I should never have left, I found materials relevant to the SENSITIVE project. Impressive speed on the part of my 3T man. I looked over the précis codes and inserted the first tape.
“There is nothing wrong with your television set. We are controlling transmission. For the next hour we will control everything you see and hear and think. You are watching a drama that reaches from the inner mind to…The Outer Limits!”
This seemed antithetical to what those midwest telecrats were hoping to sell and I went no further. Why not confabulate a report? All propaganda is information. Would anyone care? Would anyone notice the intrusion of manifesto?
“From this image of a distrustful electorate it is possible to proceed almost syllogistically to a translation of the core values individuality, mobility, diversity as solipsism, instability, product differentiation.”
Would anyone, and certainly I include myself, be able to look at a straight line and see the arc of an infinite circle?
So I sit here in the dwindling afternoon watching a Japanese cartoon about a cow that plays the banjo. I feel indistinct and confused. Distinctions blur and sure dimensions are made unrecognizably soft. I have an aphorism for Delvino: One must ignore the obvious and look for the pertinent. Quite tidy and wise. But what are its applications, if any? The cow sings “Jimmy Crack Corn” with a circular mouth that expands and contracts. I think of a poisonous anemone. Not pertinent, not interesting, but habitual. Jumpcuts, static — memories are made of this. I cannot visualize what is invisible above me, the angle of sun at this hour and how it might intersect with an expanse of tinted glass. But I can see words hanging bannerlike in the recirculated air: subtext cipher indoctrinate. Not penetrating, not even palliative. An empty, reflexive habit of coloring /covering over, then discovering a secret underneath. I wish Ellen could share some of her insensibility. I wish, I wish.
Fountains of plastic foliage, a fermenting sugar smell from crushed candy and spilled pop. The lounge is quiet. I close my eyes and concentrate on the texture of the upholstery.
Foley skids in, hangs furtively by the vending machines like he’s planning to bust them open, then sits next to me and talks with a copy of Architectural Digest in front of his face. He says he’s being watched. Light beams aimed at his apartment window, probably a transmitter somewhere in his car.
“Come on, why would they bother you? You’ve got seniority.”
“Exactly it.”
He mentions stress tests, voice printing. His hand digs at my shoulder.
“You may be next,” he says. “I just wanted you to have the information.”
I watch him hurry away. I think how good it will be to get out of here and into the barren landscapes, traces of lava long gone cold.
30
THE DODGERS WERE FILLING the ballpark in spite of first-stage smog alerts. A Russian defector and paladin of the cello washed up on Seal Beach. Daily Variety reported that a certain TVIP had decided on a career change after waking in the middle of the night with bleeding palms. I had been back from Las Vegas six weeks, moving from couch to couch, wearing out the patience of friends, most of whom were Violet’s to begin with. Time was heavy. I spent a good deal of it trodding hillside neighborhoods, eating fruit out of the yards. Even pampered housedogs could sense my inner funk, growling and showing their teeth as I passed.
I cataloged my pretensions and deceptions in rigorous, forensic detail. I overlapped and interlocked disparate strands like a weaverbird building its nest. Nothing was too distant in time for my construction, too petty, too confused. In this I began to take a habitual type of pleasure, began to anticipate the warming rush that came with a newly incorporated perfidy. But at the same time I recognized that all my raveling up was pulling me to pieces, and uselessly.
Violet, usually at the high end of the spectrum, advised normalcy. “Not simplistic; simplified. Otherwise, you’re boring anyone that comes near you.”
“To philosophize is to learn to die,” I quoted.
“Why not try something new?”
A little later I drifted into Bullock’s, and here, where sedative music played, I saw the effort that went into choosing towels that would coordinate with bathroom decor, the ecstasy of a first bathing suit. I saw newlyweds frightened by the price of sofas, an old woman icily dissatisfied with the gift wrapping of a pen-and-pencil set. This normalcy was so dreamy, so foreign, as to seem almost paradisiacal. All I could do was watch.