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.
Bill 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 shap-ers 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."