Don DeLillo by Great Jones Street Read Free Book Online

by-passes and interchanges. Their voices nearly cracked with unprecedented mad lyricism as they gave their authoritative reports. It was real snow and it was falling now, at this identifiable point in time. Motorists, pedestrians, vehicular traffic, suburban thoroughfares, snow emergency routes, snow removal equipment, sanitation crews, salt spreaders, accumulations, bridges and tunnels and airports. Snow was coming down out of the sky. It was falling on the city and on the countryside. Big white snow.
    Then it stopped. Everywhere the snow stopped falling. The announcers tried to calm themselves. Their disappointment wasn’t easy to conceal. Disaster and its various joys had made them hoarse, brought them close to sobs, and now they had to dig themselves out of this massive ecstasy. It was a letdown for everyone. A pre-recorded church service came on and then there was a knock and Fenig appeared at the door, hooded, carrying two paper cups by their shaky handles, his face framed in rising smoke. It was about midnight. I turned off the radio. The house was quiet and no traffic moved on the street. I was beginning to feel completely awake. Fenig seemed tired, bent forward in a chair, slowly knocking his knees together.
    “Good coffee,” I said.
    “It’s not instant. I never drink instant.”
    “I don’t think I have anything in the house to eat in case you’re hungry.”
    “It’s not hunger that gnaws at me, Bucky. It’s a strange kind of fatigue. I get this way from not working. I can’t get any work done. But it’s not really fatigue. It’s non-fatigue, worse in every way. I’ve had an unproductive eight hours at the typewriter and I haven’t sold a thing in almost two weeks. There’s no worse feeling than the feeling you get from being unproductive. I jabbed away at that machine all day and nothing happened. Same few sentences. Where’s your sugar?”
    “I don’t know. Maybe in that cupboard. But I doubt it.”
    “Never mind, I’ll drink it bitter. I threw my sugar away because it had a little shriveled corpse in it. Roach-family type thing. You get any down here?”
    “I haven’t noticed.”
    “I’ve written millions of words,” he said. “Every one of them is in that trunk upstairs. I’ve got copies of everything I’ve written since the beginning. Do you want to know when the beginning was? Before you were born. I had my first story published before you were born. When were you born, just out of curiosity?”
    “A few weeks from now twenty-six years ago.”
    “I had my first story published before you were born.”
    “But nothing lately.”
    “But nothing lately and that’s what counts. It’s really fatiguing. All day at the typewriter to type the same few sentences. Were they mediocre sentences? I frankly don’t know the answer to that. My response to that has to be that I honestly and truly do not know. Maybe I’ll know tomorrow. Maybe never.”
    “You haven’t been pacing,” I said.
    “I haven’t been pacing.”
    “At least I haven’t noticed.”
    “I haven’t been pacing and that’s because it hasn’t worked lately. I have to change my routine. I have to make an alteration in my format. These things are tricky things. The market’s out there spinning like a big wheel, full of lights and colors and aromas. It’s not waiting for me. It doesn’t care about me. It ingests human arms and legs and it excretes vulture pus. But I understand that. I’m attuned to that.”
    “Do you hear anything?”
    “No,” he said.
    “Hear that?”
    “It’s just the kid. Downstairs. The retarded boy. Micklewhite. Her deformed kid.”
    “What’s he doing?”
    “Dreaming.”
    “I’ve never heard a sound like that.”
    “That’s the way she says he dreams. That’s the sound that comes out when he’s having a dream. Good thing it’s not too loud.”
    “You were saying something,” I said.
    “The big wheel.”
    “I don’t remember that.”
    “The big wheel’s spinning out