Free Mao II by Don DeLillo Page A

these people were alive today. All the famous were either dead or used up. A pickup he was riding in caught fire just west of Fort Wayne and it seemed all right, it seemed appropriate, things were too vivid not to enter deeper states. He was elated, worked to a sensory howl, flying past the low stink of day-to-day. A driver had chest pains outside Toledo and Scott drove him to a hospital, feeling talkative, telling the man the plot of a movie he’d seen last week. The car handled well and he gained in being as he drove, cornering sweetly. I’m glad we had this chance to talk, he said, jogging alongside the gurney as attendants hustled the man into white light. Three days later he had a job in the mailroom at the house that published Bill Gray’s books.
    How he made friends. How he learned that the letters Bill sent in to be remailed came in a nine-by-twelve manila envelope addressed to the head of the mailroom, a friendly sleepy former IRA man named Joe Doheny, who opened the envelope and processed the letters in the normal way. Scott waited, living at the Y, eating his meals standing up at narrow counters set along streetside windows so he could watch the march of faces and pathologies, people going by in trance states and dancing manias, the crosstown stream of race and shape and ruin, and in these hard streets even the healthy and well-dressed looked afflicted. Because they were sliding deeper into their own lives. Because they knew the future would not take them. Because they refused to give themselves the necessary narrow structure, the secret destiny. After some weeks he spotted a manila envelope addressed to Joe Doheny in Bill’s close-woven hand. There was no return address of course but Scott looked at the postmark and then went to the library and lugged an atlas to a table and found that the town in question—he did not reveal its name to Brita—was about two hundred miles outside the gates of the medieval city. He was not necessarily relieved to learn that Bill was only hours from New York. It would be just as easy to go to Chad or Borneo or the Himalayas, with perhaps a greater gain in being.
    He took a bus part of the way and then hitchhiked on secondary roads, carrying a sleeping bag and other basics. He walked around town and watched the market and the post office, five weekends of vain surveillance. Not that he minded. He had a life now and that’s what mattered. He was in Bill’s material mesh, drawing the same air, seeing things Bill saw. He did not ask people if they knew who Bill was or where he lived. He was a backpacker on the amble, determined to go unnoticed. After weekend five he quit his job and lived in campgrounds in the area and saw a man who had to be Bill getting out of a car in front of the hardware store, only eight days after he’d left the city for good.
    “Why did it have to be Bill?”
    “Had to be. Not the slightest doubt. How can a photographer ask a question like that? Doesn’t his work, his life show on his face? Are there other people in that one small rural area who might possibly look as though they’d written those books? No, had to be him. Stocky, running his hand through his hair. Walking toward me. Making his way down the street. Becoming more familiar with every step. Had to be Bill and he was coming right at me and I seemed to need oxygen. Important parts of my body were closing down.”
    How he stepped up to Bill and told him who he was, the persistent letter-writer, and made an effort to speak slowly and clearly in complete sentences, feeling his mouth dry out and hearing the words come bouncing hollow off his tongue. Hearing the heart noise, a deep staccato in the chest that he’d heard only once before, climbing for hours in mountain country in extreme heat, the sound of blood driving through the aorta and jarring the heart. How he managed to say as Bill’s eyes narrowed to rifleman’s slits that he wondered if the writer had ever thought an assistant might