Free Players by Don DeLillo

coded model of exactitude. One second of study, a glance was all it took to return to him an impression of reality disconnected from the resonance of its own senses. Aggression was refined away, the instinct to possess. He saw fractions, decimal points, plus and minus signs. A picture of the competitive mechanism of the world, of greasy teeth engaging on the rim of a wheel, was nowhere in evidence. The paper contained nerve impulses: a synaptic digit, a phoneme, a dimensionless point. He knew that people want to see their own spittle dripping from the lacy openwork of art. On the slip of paper in his hand there was no intimation of lives defined by the objects around them, morbid tiers of immortality. Inked figures were all he saw. This was property in its own right, tucked away, his particular share (once removed) of the animal body breathing in the night.
    When Pammy got home, he wasn’t there. This was disappointing. Lately she’d found that the nutritive material for their sex life was often provided by others, whoever happened to be present at a party or other gathering. She wonderedwhether she’d become too complex to care whether the others were gay or straight. It would be nice, so nice if he walked in right now. When she realized how late it was, she grew angry. Soon she was doing what she always did when she was mad at Lyle. She began to clean the apartment. First she mopped the kitchen, then the bathroom. She swept up in the living room and, once the kitchen floor was dry, quickly did the dishes. It was an intricate cycle of expiation and virtue, a return to self-discipline. Whenever things went badly between them, she took it as a preview, seeing herself alone in a brilliantly well-kept apartment, everything in place, everything
white
somehow, a sense of iron-fisted independence clearly apparent in all this organization. In the middle of the night, obviously too late to vacuum, she took a shower, put on her pajamas and sat reading in bed, feeling good about herself.
    Lyle came home.
    “Your face is splotched,” he said.
    “You’ll get hit.”
    “What are you doing up? You’re still up. It’s unbelievably late. I’ve never seen it so late. It’s really late out there. You should see. Go to the window and look. No, don’t. You won’t learn a thing that way. Stay where you are.”
    “He feels like talking.”
    “I was downtown. I walked around down there till now. What was it like, she asked. Well, to begin with, it was cool finally, a rivery breeze, and no one around, nothing, a drunk or two early on but later nothing, a car, another car, another car, looking for the tunnel. The district, outwardly, is like the end of organized time—outwardly, mind you. At night I mean it’s like somebody forgot something. They went away. Themystery, right, of why everybody left these gorgeous pueblos.”
    “Inwardly?”
    “Things happening. Little men in eyeshades.”
    “Fascinating, these insights of his.”
    “What is it, Splotch? Annoyed at my lack of consideration? I called. You weren’t here.”
    “We ought to go out more.”
    “There’s nothing out there. That’s my point. Everybody went away. You can hear doors blowing shut in the wind. The scientists are mystified.”

7
    Lyle cultivated a quality of self-command. As a corollary to this extreme presence of mind, he built a space between himself and most of the people he was likely to deal with in the course of daily events. He was aware of his studied passage down the corridors of his firm’s offices. Happily he parodied his own manner, swiveling toward a face and beaming an anemic look right past it. It was satisfying to stand on the floor, say, during a lull in trading, or after hours in a bar in the district, and note how some people subtly exhibited their relative closeness to him while others, sensing his apartness or knowing it for fact, were diligent in keeping ritual distances.
    The waiter, at six feet four, let his head slip down a notch