"I'm not a great big visionary, George. I'm a sentence-maker, like a donut-maker only slower. Don't talk to me about history."
"Mao was a poet, a classless man dependent on the masses in important ways but also an absolute being. Bill the sentence-maker. I can see you living there actually, wearing the wide cotton trousers, the cotton shirt, riding the bicycle, living in one small room. You could have been a Maoist, Bill. You would have done it better than I. I've read your books carefully and we've spent many hours talking and I can easily see you blending into that great mass of blue-and-white cotton. You would have written what the culture needed in order to see itself. And you would have seen the need for an absolute being, a way out of weakness and confusion. This is what I want to see reborn in the rat warrens of Beirut."
George's wife came in with coffee and sweets on a tray.
"The question you have to ask is, How many dead? How many dead during the Cultural Revolution? How many dead after the Great Leap Forward? And how well did he hide his dead? This is the other question. What do these men do with the millions they kill?"
"The killing is going to happen. Mass killing asserts itself always. Great death, unnumbered dead, this is never more than a question of time and place. The leader only interprets the forces."
"The point of every closed state is now you know how to hide your dead. This is the setup. You predict many dead if your vision of the truth isn't realized. Then you kill them. Then you hide the fact of the killing and the bodies themselves. This is why the closed state was invented. And it begins with a single hostage, doesn't it? The hostage is the miniaturized form. The first tentative rehearsal for mass terror."
"Some coffee," George said.
Bill looked up to thank the woman but she was gone. They heard a series of noises in the distance, small blowy sounds gathered in the wind. George stood and listened carefully. Four more soft thuds. He went out to the balcony for a moment and when he came back he said these were small explosive charges that a local left-wing group attached to the unoccupied cars of diplomats and foreign businessmen. They liked to do ten or twelve cars at a time. It was the music of parked cars.
He sat down and looked closely at Bill.
"Eat something."
"Maybe later. Looks good."
"Why are you still here? Don't you have work to do back home? Don't you miss your work?"
"We don't talk about that."
"Drink your coffee. There's a new model that Panasonic makes and I absolutely swear by it. It's completely liberating. You don't deal with heavy settled artifacts. You transform freely, fling words back and forth."
Bill laughed in a certain way.
"Look. What happens if I go to Beirut and complete this spiritual union you find so interesting? Talk to Rashid. Can I expect him to release the hostage? And what will he want in return?"
"He'll want you to take the other man's place."
"Gain the maximum attention. Then release me at the most advantageous time."
"Gain the maximum attention. Then probably kill you ten minutes later. Then photograph your corpse and keep the picture handy for the time when it can be used most effectively."
"Doesn't he think I'm worth more than my photograph?"
"The Syrians are doing sweeps of the southern suburbs, looking for hostages. Hostages have to be moved all the time. Rashid frankly can't be bothered."
"And what happens if I get on a plane right now and go home?"
"They kill the hostage."
"And photograph his corpse."
"It's better than nothing," George said.
Brita watched the in-flight movie and listened to some brawling jazz on the earphones. The movie seemed subjective, slightly distracted, the screen suspended in partial darkness and specked and blotched by occasional turbulence and the sound track strictly optional. She thought movies on planes were different for everybody, little floating memories of earth. She had a magazine on her food tray with a soft drink and peanuts and she flipped pages without bothering to look at them. A man across the aisle talked on the telephone, his voice leaking into her brain with the bass line and drums, all America unreeling below.
She was thinking that she'd let Karen stay in her apartment and look after her cat and she didn't even know the girl's last name.
She was thinking that everything that came into her mind lately and developed as a perception seemed at once to enter the culture, to become a painting or photograph or hairstyle or slogan. She saw the dumbest details of her private thoughts on postcards or billboards. She saw the names of writers she was scheduled to photograph, saw them in newspapers and magazines, obscure people climbing into print as if she carried some contagious glow out around the world. In Tokyo she saw a painting reproduced in an art journal and it was called Skyscraper III, a paneled canvas showing the World Trade Center at precisely the angle she saw it from her window and in the same dark spirit. These were her towers, standing windowless, two black latex slabs that consumed the available space.
The man on the phone was saying, "One o'clock your time tomorrow."
Interesting. Brita had a one o'clock appointment the next day with a magazine editor who'd been pressing her for a meeting and she suspected that he'd heard about a certain set of pictures.
She was thinking that she would have to develop those rolls of film. But it troubled her, the memory of Bill's face in the last stages of the morning. There was some terrible brightness in the eye. She'd never seen a man lapse so wholly into his own earliest pain. She thought there were lives that constantly fell inward, back to first knowing, back to bewilderment, and this was the reference for every bleakness that passed across the door.
An attendant took her empty cup.
She was thinking that she felt guilty about Scott. It was a case of misdirected sex, wasn't it, and all the time they were together she was the woman naked from the bath looking down at the writer chopping wood. Strange how images come between the physical selves. It made her sad for Scott. She tried to call him once, looking at upstate maps and making an effort to remember road signs and finally calling information in several counties. But there was no Scott Martineau listed or unlisted and Bill Gray did not exist at any level and Karen had no last name.
The face on the screen belonged to an actor who lived in her building. He owed her a hundred and fifty dollars and three bottles of wine and she realized for the first time that she'd never get paid, seeing his face in the half light, with jazz racing in her brain.
She was thinking that one of the writers she'd tried to photograph in Seoul had nine years left in his sentence for subversion, arson and acting like a communist. They wouldn't let her see him and she became angry and cursed the bastards. Shameless artistic ego, all wrong, but she thought it was important to get his face on a strip of film, see his likeness rise to the ruby light in the printing room seven thousand miles from his cell.
She'd entrusted her home, her work, her wine and her cat to a ghost girl.
The child at the end of the row raised the shade and she was thinking that she didn't want to look at the magazine in front of her because she might see something from her life in there. She was strapped in, sealed, five miles aloft, and the world was so intimate that she was everywhere in it.