Underworld by Don DeLillo
Marvin sat staring at the scoreboard, his cigar slightly shredded at the burnt end.
“I thought we were going to talk baseball.”
“We’re talking baseball. This is baseball. You see the clock,” Marvin said. “Stopped at three fifty-eight. Why? Is it because that’s when Thomson hit the homer off Branca?”
He called him Branker.
“Or because that’s the day we found out the Russians exploded an atom bomb. You know something about that game?”
“What?” Brian said.
“There were twenty thousand empty seats. You know why?”
“Why?”
“You’ll laugh in my face.”
“No, I won’t.”
“It’s all right. You’re my guest. I want you to feel at home.”
“Why so many empty seats for the most important game of the year?”
“Many years,” Marvin said.
“Many years.”
“Because certain events have a quality of unconscious fear. I believe in my heart that people sensed some catastrophe in the air. Not who would win or lose the game. Some awful force that would obliterate—what’s the word?”
“Obliterate.”
“Obliterate. That would obliterate the whole thing of the game. You have to understand that all through the nineteen-fifties people stayed indoors. We only went outside to drive our cars. Public parks were not filled with people the way they later became. A museum was empty rooms with knights in armor where you had one sleepy guard for every seven centuries.”
“In other words.”
“In other words there was a hidden mentality of let’s stay home. Because a threat was hanging in the air.”
“And you’re saying people had an intuition about this particular day.”
“It’s like they knew. They sensed there was a connection between this game and some staggering event that might take place on the other side of the world.”
“This particular game.”
“Not the day before or the day after. Because this was an all-or-nothing game between the two hated rivals of the city. People had a premonition that this game was related to something much bigger. They had the mental process of do I want to go out and be in a big crowd, which if something awful happens is the worst place to be, or should I stay home with my family and my brand-new TV, which common sense says yes, in a cabinet with maple veneer.”
To his surprise Brian did not reject this theory. He didn’t necessarily believe it but he didn’t dismiss it either. He believed it provisionally here in this room located below street level in a frame house on a weekday afternoon in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. It was lyrically true as it emerged from Marvin Lundy’s mouth and reached Brian’s middle ear, unprovably true, remotely and inadmissably true but not completely unhistorical, not without some nuance of authentic inner narrative.
Marvin said, “Which the whole thing is interesting because when they make an atomic bomb, listen to this, they make the radioactive core the exact same size as a baseball.”
“I always thought it was a grapefruit.”
“A regulation major league baseball no less than nine inches in circumference, going by the rule book.”
He crossed his legs, he stuck a finger in his ear and jigged an itch. Marvin had enormous ears. For the first time Brian became aware of music playing somewhere in the house. Maybe he’d been hearing it all along at the assimilated edge, music blended with the room tone, the airplanes drifting into Newark, the faint wail of bullet traffic on the speedways out there—a moderated sorrow, piano work that had the texture of something old and gentled over, a pressed rose faded in a book.
“People sense things that are invisible. But when something’s staring you right in the face, that’s when you miss it completely.”
“What do you mean?” Brian said.
“This Gorbachev that walks around with that thing on his head. It’s a birthmark, what he’s got?”
“Yes, I think so.”
“It’s big. You agree with this?”
“Yes, it’s quite big.”
“Noticeable. You can’t help but notice. Am I right?”
“Yes, you are.”
“And you agree that millions of people see this thing every day in the newspaper?”
“Yes, they do.”
“They open the paper and there’s the man’s head with that amazing mark high on the dome. Agreed?”
“Yes, of course.”
“What does it mean?” Marvin said.
“Why does it have to mean something?”
“You take it at face value.”
“It’s his face,” Brian said. “It’s his head. A blemish, a birthmark.”
“That’s not what I see.”
“What do you see?”
“You asked so I’ll tell you.”
Marvin saw the first sign of the total collapse of the Soviet system. Stamped on the man’s head. The map of Latvia.
He said this straight-faced, how Gorbachev was basically conveying the news that the USSR faced turmoil from the republics.
“You think his birthmark? Wait a minute.”
“Excuse me but if you rotate the map of Latvia ninety degrees so the eastern border goes on top, this is exactly the shape that’s on Gorbachev’s head. In other words when he’s lying in bed at night and his wife comes over to give him a glass of water and an aspirin, this is Latvia she’s looking at.”
Brian tried to conjure the shape of the winestain mark on Gorbachev’s head. He wanted to match it with a memory of geography tests on mellow afternoons, his limbs faintly aching with biological drives and the sweetness of school’s end. The old melodic line came lullabying back, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania. But the map shapes escaped him now, the precise silhouettes of those nestled anatomies.
Marvin was looking at the scoreboard again.
“People collect, collect, always collecting. There’s people they go after anything out of wartime Germany. Naziana. This is major collectors looking for big history. Does that mean the objects in this room are total trivia? What’s the word I’m looking for that sounds like you’re getting injected with a vaccine in the fleshy part of your arm?”
“Innocuous.”
“Innocuous. What am I, innocuous? This is history, back-page. From back to front. Happy, tragic, desperate.” Marvin shifted his gaze. “In this trunk right here I have the one thing that my whole life for the past twenty-two years I was trying to collect.”
Brian had an inkling.
“I tracked, I searched and finally I found it and bought it, eighteen months ago, and I don’t even put it on display. I keep it in the trunk, out of sight.”
Now it was Brian who looked at the scoreboard.
Marvin said morosely, “It’s the Bobby Thomson home-run ball, which I traced it back starting with rumors in the business. It wasn’t even a business back then, just a few interested parties with someone’s telephone number or first name, the skimpiest kind of lead that I pursued with a fury.”
He paused to light his cigar. It was old and stale and looked like a soybean sausage from the school cafeteria. But Brian understood that a cigar was tribally required, even if the smoke stung his eyes.
For the next three hours Marvin talked about his search for the baseball. He forgot some names and mangled others. He lost whole cities, placing them in the wrong time zones. He described how he followed false leads into remote places. He climbed the stairs to raftered upper rooms and looked in old trunks among the grandmother’s linen and the photographs of the dead.
“I said to myself a thousand times. Why do I want this thing? What does it mean? Who has it?”
Through the narration, the whole wandering epic, skimmed here, protracted there, Brian was confident that the man was slipshod only in the telling. The search itself had clearly been hard, fierce, thorough and consuming.
At one point Marvin hired a man who worked in a photo lab and had access to special equipment. Th
“I looked at a million photographs because this is the dot theory of reality, that all knowledge is available if you analyze the dots.”
There was a slight crackle in his voice that sounded like random radio noise produced by some disturbance of the signal.
He acquired original film. He brought in darkroom equipment. He ate his meals with a magnifier around his neck. The house was filled with contact sheets, glossy prints, there were blowups pinned to clotheslines rigged through several rooms. His wife and child fled to England to visit relatives because Marvin somehow married English.
He hired a private detective with an intermittent nosebleed. They placed ads in the personal columns of sporting magazines, trying to locate people who’d sat in section 35, where the ball went in.
There was the photographic detailwork, the fineness of image, the what-do-you-call-it into littler units.
“Resolution,” Brian said.
And then there was the long journey, the suitcase crawl through empty train stations, the bitter winter flights with ice on the wings, there was the weary traipse, a word he doesn’t hear anymore, the march into people’s houses and lives—the actual physical thing, unphotographed, of liver-spotted hands and dimpled chins and the whole strewn sense of what they remember and forget.
1. The widow on Long Island turning a spoon in her cup.
2. The gospel singer named Prestigious Booker who kept a baseball in an urn that held her lover’s ashes.
3. The ship on the dock in San Francisco—don’t even bring it up.
4. The man in his car in Deaf Smith County, Texas, the original middle of nowhere.
5. A whole generation of Jesus faces. Young men everywhere bearded and sandaled, bearded and barefoot—little peeky spectacles with wire frames.
6. Marvin’s sense of being lost in America, wandering through cities with no downtowns.
7. The woman on Long Island, what’s-her-name, whose husband was at the game—she served instant coffee in cups from a doll museum.
8. The Coptic family in Detroit—never mind, it’s too complicated, riots and fires in the distance, tanks in the streets.
9. The detailed confusion of Marvin’s narrative, people’s memories mixed with his own, shaped to bending time.
10. A tornado touching down, skipping along the treetops in an evil weave, the whole sky filthy with flung debris.
11. Whose husband was in the footage Marvin analyzed, scrambling for the baseball, and all she had in the house was instant.
12. Riding up the side of a building in an elevator that’s transparent.
13. The ship on the dock—please not now.
14. What a mystery all around him, every street deep in some radiant amaze.
Brian listened to all this and he heard the music end and begin again, the same piano piece, and this was not the second time he was hearing it but maybe the eighth or ninth, and he listened to Marvin’s dot theory of reality and felt an underlying force in this theme of the relentless photographic search, some prototype he could not bring into tight definition.
“A thousand times I said. How long do I look? Why do I want it? Where is it?”
He advertised for amateur film footage of the game and acquired a few minutes of crude action that showed a massive pulsing blur above the left-field wall shot by a man in the bleachers. He brought in an optical printer. He rephotographed the footage. He enlarged, repositioned, analyzed. He step-framed the action to slow it down, to combine several seconds of film into one image. He examined the sprocket areas of the film searching for a speck of data, a minim of missing imagery. It was work of Talmudic refinement, zooming in and fading out, trying to bring a man’s face into definition, read a woman’s ankle bracelet engraved with a name.
Brian was shamed by other men’s obsessions. They exposed his own middling drift, the voice he heard, soft, faint and faraway, that told him not to bother.
Marvin’s wife and child came home and went away again. The house had become a booby hatch of looming images. The isolated grimace, the hair that juts from the mole on the old man’s chin. Every image teeming with crystalized dots. A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide inside the smallest event.
This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rambling past. It makes reality come true.
Marvin Lundy opened the trunk.
The baseball was wrapped in tissue paper inside an old red-and-white Spalding box. There were deep stacks of photographs and correspondence and other material related to the search. Birth certificates, passports, affidavits, handwritten wills, detailed lists of people’s possessions, there were bloodstained garments in Ziploc bags.
He took some still frames out of a manila envelope and showed them to Brian.
This was a sequence that involved the scramble for the ball, people in bevies, Marvin said, scratching and grabbing, and a man in the last photo standing starkly alone, white-shirted, looking down at the exit ramp, looking hard, glaring at someone, probably at the person who’d come away with the ball, but Marvin could not find a way, for all his mastery of the dots, to rotate the heads of the people on the ramp so he could see the face of the individual in question.
“But you identified the man in the white shirt.”
“From running the picture in the back of magazines where they did waterbeds and dirty personals.”
“And you went to see the wife.”
“This is many years after the game. What happened he died. The widow sits in a cold house turning a spoon in her tiny cup. I try to find out what he might have said to her about the game, the ball, anything. What game, she says. I try to explain the extenuations of the thing. But it’s more than twenty years later. What game, what ball?”
A woman came down the stairs carrying coffee and cheesecake on a tray. She seemed to issue from Marvin’s story, a recollected figure taking material form. Marvin shut the trunk so she could place the tray on top. She was his daughter, Clarice, determined to tend to dad whatever his objections.
“I didn’t hear you come in. She comes in like she’s Chinese, with muffled feet.”
“You were talking. I could be an armed robbery in progress, you wouldn’t hear a thing.”
She was in her late twenties, blondish and gym-fit. She told Brian she lived ten minutes away by car and worked as a court stenographer. He thought he could easily fall in love with the sitcom tilt in her voice and the swerve of her thigh lines under the linen skirt.
“We’re almost finished here, Clarice.”
“In a hundred grueling hours. Your guest may have other things he needs to do.”
“What could he have?”
“It’ll be dark soon.”
“Dark, light. These are words.”
The baseball box was on its side among scattered photographs on the floor and the ball had dribbled out, still crinkled in tissue. Clarice pulled up a chair and she and Marvin finished the story, more or less, through mouthfuls of cheesecake.
“For how many years, Clarice, I’m looking for a man named Jackson or Judson?”
“Get to the point,” she said.
“Because there were roundabout hints that pointed to him as someone I should be interested in. And the ball has a history by this time that I’ve been inching along, where different things match and join. But I can’t locate the man or even—what?”
“Ascertain,” Brian said.
“His correct name. By this time, forget the footage—I’m using rumors and dreams. There’s an ESP of baseball, an underground what, a consciousness, and I’m heari
“Faster, daddy, faster.”
“Meanwhile there’s this woman. I’m trying to find Judson Jackson Johnson and there’s this woman who got my name from the memorabilia market and she’s been calling me long-distance collect day and night. She says she used to own the thing I’m looking for. Mysteriously missing for years, she says, from the little locked box where she used to keep it.”
“Genevieve Rauch.”
“Whose name I can never.”
“Genevieve Rauch,” his daughter said. “And the two of them try to establish the basic, you know.”
“Indicators,” Brian said.
“That would make her baseball at least a remote possibility.”
“The marks and scratches,” Marvin said. “The trademark if it’s correct. The signature of the league president who was in office at the time. Her memory is iffy. I make some leeway, then she talks about something else. This is a woman she has an extra chromosome for changing the subject. A thousand times I’m tempted to hang up the phone.”
“Then it happens,” Clarice said.
“A man in his car.”
“A man’s driving along in his car, someone shoots him dead. Turns out the victim is the long-lost former husband of Genevieve Rauch. Turns out further his name is Juddy Rauch, Judson Rauch. So the two rivers meet. Took a homicide to reveal the connection.”
Marvin lowered his head to the trunk top to sip his coffee and Brian stared into the weave of his woeful toupee.
“When I had my stomach I used to eat this cheesecake unconscious.”
Clarice explained how he went to Deaf Smith County, Texas, where he hired a local lawyer on behalf of Genevieve Rauch and finally located the baseball sealed in a baggie and vouchered and numbered and stored in the property clerk’s office. Impounded by the police along with the body, the car, all the things in the car, of which this was one, crammed in a cardboard box filled with junky odds and ends.