from Don DeLillo, Mao II:
The taxi swung onto Southwark Bridge. Bill had the poems in his lap and occasionally raised a page to his face, muttering lines. A soft warm rain made shaded patterns on the river, bands of wind-brushed shimmer.
Charlie said, "About this fellow."
"Who?"
"The fellow in Athens who initiated the whole business. I'd like to get your sense of the man."
"Is he Lebanese?"
"Yes. A political scientist. He says he's only an intermediary, with imperfect knowledge of the group in Beirut. Claims they're eager to release the hostage."
"Are they a new fundamentalist element?"
"They're a new communist element."
"Are we surprised?" Bill said.
"There's a Lebanese Communist Party. There are leftist elements, I understand, aligned with Syria. The PLO has always had a Marxist component and they're active again in Lebanon."
"So we're not surprised."
"We're not unduly surprised."
"I depend on you to tell me when we're surprised."
Two detectives met them in a deserted street not far from Saint Saviours Dock. There was renovation in progress in the area but the buildings here were still intact, mainly red brick structures with hoists and loading bays. They approached an old grain-warehouse leased to a plumbing-supply firm that had just gone out of business. The police had arranged entry and there was still a working telephone.
The four men went inside. They checked the open space being used for the conference. A rostrum, folding chairs, auxiliary lighting. Then they went into the main office and Charlie telephoned his colleagues and told them to load the bus and come ahead. Bill looked around for a toilet. Seconds after Charlie hung up, the phone rang. One of the detectives answered and all of them could hear the voice at the other end shouting, "Bomb, bomb, bomb," and the man's accent made it sound like boom boom boom. This seemed pretty funny to Bill, who had to take a leak and saw no reason to do it in the street.
The call annoyed the detectives. One of them anyway. The other just gazed across the office at a bookshelf filled with specification manuals. Bill found a toilet and was the last one out. One detective took up a position near the front door and the second man moved their car about fifty yards up the street and then called headquarters.
Charlie said, "I wish I understood the point."
He and Bill went across the street and waited for the bomb unit to arrive and search the building.
"The point is control," Bill said. "They want to believe they have the power to move us out of a building and into the street. In their minds they see a hundred people trooping down the fire stairs. I told you, Charlie. Some people make bombs, some people make phone calls."
Soon they were talking about something else. The rain stopped. Charlie crossed the street, said something to the detective and came back shrugging. They talked about a book Charlie was doing. They talked about the day Charlie's divorce became final, six years earlier. He recalled the weather, the high clear sky, distanceless, flags whipping on Fifth Avenue and a movie actress getting out of a taxi. Bill reached for his handkerchief. The blast made him jerk half around but he didn't leave his feet or go back against the wall. He felt the sound in his chest and arms. He jerked and ducked, shielding his head with his forearm, windows blowing out. Charlie said goddamn or go down. He turned his back to the blast wave, bracing himself against the wall with his elbows, hands clasped behind his head, and Bill knew he would have to remember to be impressed. He also knew it was over, nothing worse coming, and he straightened up slowly, looking toward the building but reaching out to touch Charlie's arm, make sure he was still there, standing and able to move. The detective across the street was in a deep crouch, fumbling with the radio on his belt. The street was filled with glass, snowblink-ing. The second detective remained in the car a moment, calling in, and then walked toward his partner. They looked over at Charlie and Bill. Dust hung at the second-storey level of the warehouse. The four men met in the middle of the street, glass crunching under their shoes. Charlie brushed off his lapels.
The bomb experts arrived and then the press bus and some publishing people, more detectives, and Bill sat in the back of the unmarked police car while Charlie huddled with different groups making new plans.
About an hour later the two men sat under the vaulted skylight in a dining room at the Chesterfield, eating the sole.
from Bret Easton Ellis, Glamorama:
...the gore, some of it burned-all of this matters just as much. It's really about the will to accomplish this destruction and not about the outcome, because that's just decoration.
A stunned silence and then—among the conscious covered with blood, not always their own—the screaming starts.
Fifty-one injured. Four people will never walk again. Three others are severely brain-damaged. Along with the driver of the BMW, thirteen are dead, including an older man who dies, blocks away, of a heart attack at the time of the blast. (A week later a teacher's assistant from Lyons will die from head injuries, raising the number of dead to fourteen.) By the time the flashing blue lights of ambulances start arriving at the darkening scene, the film crew has packed up and disappeared and will show up later in the week at another designated spot. Without staring through the lens of the cameras, everything at that distance looks tiny and inconsequential and vaguely unreal to them. You can tell who is dead and who is not only by the way the bodies look when they're picked up.
And later that night at a very cool, sexy dinner in an upstairs room at the Hôtel Crillon, past a door flanked by dark-haired, handsome guards, Tammy mingles with Amber Valletta, Oscar de la Renta, Gianfranco Ferré, Brad Renfro, Christian Louboutin, Danielle Steel, the Princess of Wales, Bernard Arnault and various Russians and Vogue editors and everyone is into very serious slouching and some people just got back from Marrakech—a few less jaded because of that trip—and others pay their respects to Tammy as she huddles in a corner gossiping with Shalom Harlow about how all the girls are dating so many inappropriate people (nobodies, gangsters, fishermen, boys, members of the House of Lords, Jamaicans with whom they have no rapport) and Tammy's fanning herself with an invitation to a party at Queen that a boy who looks just like Christian Bale offered her but she's going to bypass it in favor of one in the 16th arrondissement that Naomi's throwing and then sashimi's served and more cigarettes are bummed then lit and Tammy leans into John Galliano and whispers "You're so nuts, baby" and she's drinking too much red wine and switches to Coke and more than one lesbian vaguely comes on to her and someone wearing a kimono asks how Bruce Rhinebeck is and Tammy, gazing at a figure prancing by in the darkness, answers "Wait" dreamily because she's realizing it's really just another difficult evening.
...After walking a block Bentley cuts across Boulevard Saint-Germain and hops into the black Citroën waiting at the curb, and as he smiles a shadow Crosses his face.
A telephoto lens slowly moves in on the Prada backpack sitting on Brad's lap.
The force of the first explosion propels Brad into the air. A leg is blown off from the thigh down and a ten-inch hole is ripped open in his abdomen and his mangled body ends up lying in the curb on Boulevard Saint-Germain, splashing around in its own blood, writhing into its death throes. The second bomb in the Prada backpack is now activated.
Dean and Eric, both spattered with Brad's flesh and bleeding profusely from their own wounds, manage to stumble over to where Brad has been thrown, screaming blindly for help, and then, seconds later, the other blast occurs.
This bomb is much stronger than the first and the damage it causes is more widespread, creating a crater thirty feet wide in front of Café Flore.
Two passing taxis are knocked over, simultaneously bursting into flame.
What's left of Brad's corpse is hurled through a giant Calvin Klein poster on a scaffolding across the street, splattering it with blood, viscera, bone.
Eric is blown through the window of the Emporio Armani boutique across the street.
Dean's body is spun onto a spiked railing that separates the sidewalk from the boulevard and hangs there, jackknifed.
Shrapnel spreads out in all directions, hitting a middle-aged woman sitting inside the café, spraying into her neck, face and chest, killing her within moments.
A Japanese woman who had been sitting next to Brad's table stumbles, dazed, out of the smoke, both arms blown off at the elbow, before collapsing into the debris on the sidewalk.
A young Armenian lies half on the street, half on the sidewalk, his head blown apart, his moped still between his legs.
A severed arm dangles from the edge of the white overhang and large clumps of flesh are splattered across the Café Flore sign.
From behind the cameras on rooftops and inside various vans so much of it is the usual: bleeding people running out of thick black smoke, the screams of the wounded and dying, a man crawling along the boulevard vomiting blood, gasping for air, charred bodies hanging out of cars that happened to pass by Café Flore in the instant the bombs went off, shopping bags standing in blood outside the entrance. The shock, the sirens, a hundred wounded—it's all so familiar. The director is relying on a top-notch editor to put the footage together and he tells the crew it's time to move on. As the Range Rover drives quickly past the scene, crossing in front of the black Citroën, Bentley briefly notices a woman lying on the sidewalk screaming, her thigh torn open, and while lighting a cigarette he tells the director, "Take me back to Les Bains, s'il vous plaît," where he listens to Jeanne Tripplehorn blab away about the cheese puffs at Taillevent for an hour and Bentley tells her he disapproves of interracial relationships.
Posted by blicero at 12:34 PM
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