Read Online Mao II by Don DeLillo - Free Book Online Page B

teeth felt soft today. He needed to sneak to the bedroom and mix up some pink-and-yellow fluoride multivitamins and in the meantime let’s concentrate on the page, tap a letter, then another. He wanted to fuck her loudly on a hard bed with rain beating on the windows. Please Jesus let me work. Every book is a bug-eyed race, let’s face it. Must finish. Can’t die yet. He struck enough keys to make a sentence and thought about going down to say goodbye to her but it would only embarrass them both. Got what she came for, didn’t she? I’m a picture now, flat as birdshit on a Buick. He saw he’d inverted two letters, which he’s been doing a lot of lately, one of many signs there’s something growing on his brain, and he elevated the page and whited out the mistake, then had to wait while the liquid dried. How he punished himself for repeated errors at the machine, eternal misfingerings, how typing mistakes became despair, meaningless flubs bringing a craze to his eyes, and he stared at the white fluid drying and would not resume work until it faded into the page, which was both the punishment and the escape. Her hand on his face, how surprised he’d been to feel so affected by the gesture, the entireness of simple touch. Want to live like other people, eating tricolor pasta in trattorias near the park. Always whiting out and typing in. He looked at the sentence, six disconsolate words, and saw the entire book as it took occasional shape in his mind, a neutered near-human dragging through the house, humpbacked, hydrocephalic, with puckered lips and soft skin, dribbling brain fluid from its mouth. Took him all these years to realize this book was his hated adversary. Locked together in the forbidden room, had him in a chokehold. He examined the immense complexity of changing the ribbon. So many pros and cons, alters and egos. He felt it coming and then sneezed onto the page, nicely, noting blood-spotted matter but thin and sparse. He would not dignify it by calling it snot. She likes my anger. Live at the center of the cubist city, Sunday papers spread everywhere and glossy bagels on a plate. I’m between novels, he used to say, so I don’t mind dying. The problem with his second wife. But never mind. Live near the museums and galleries, stand on movie lines, uncork the wines, redo the rooms, sleep in the gray sheets, loving her, ordering out, let’s order out tonight, walk the dogs, speak the words, hear the doormen whistle down the cabs, rain beating on the windows.
     
     
    Brita was packed and ready anytime. She went downstairs and poured a cup of coffee. She sat at the table and looked around the kitchen. A young woman walked in and softly said Hi. She leaned on the table, using a hand to balance, her left foot raised vaguely off the floor. She had long straight hair, light brown, and a slightly jutting mouth that made her look remorseless.
    “How many pictures did you take?”
    “We talked and worked a while and then I shot some more rolls when we ran out of conversation and then some more after that.”
    “Would you call this an average day or going into the realm of horrid excess?”
    “What’s your name?”
    “Karen.”
    “And you live here.”
    “Scott and I.”
    “I’ll tell you the truth, Karen. I’m not interested in photography. I’m interested in writers.”
    “Then why don’t you stay home and read?”
    She reached for a box of muffins on the countertop and put it down near Brita’s coffee. Then she curled into a chair and played with a stray spoon. She wore a limp blouse over blue jeans and had the body lines of a teenager, the crooks and skews and smeariness, and a way of merging with furniture, a kind of draped indecision.
    Brita said, “I read at home, I read in hotels, I take a book with me on a twenty-minute trip to the dentist. Then I read in the waiting room.”
    “Did you always know you wanted to be a photographer?”
    “I read on planes, I read in laundromats. How old are