Underworld by Don DeLillo

  “I was the type girl,” Acey said, “I was always in a hurry to grow up. Now I guess I’m here, officially. This city is the ticking clock. Makes me panic but I’m ready.”

  What Klara admired most was the seeming ease of address, the casually ravishing way Acey laid down paint. Saturated undercoats and beautiful flesh browns, skin strokes in every sort of unnameable shade and many grays as well, glaucous and sky smoke, because it’s always winter in Chicago and the gang members belong to their terrain, to the pale brick and iced-over windows, and in this sense they could be brothers to the olive-skinned men in the frescoed gloom of some Umbrian church—Acey had the calm and somber eye of a cinquecentist.

  She was talking on the phone to Esther Winship.

  Esther said, “Dear god why?”

  “Because it’s easier and quicker.”

  “But I haven’t been on a subway in thirty years.”

  “Good. I want to feel superior.”

  They took the Dyre Avenue line. The train was marked with graffiti outside and in, slapdash and depressing, Klara thought. She did not like the idea of tagging trains. It was the romance of the ego, poor kids playing out a fantasy of meretricious fame.

  “I thought it would be stifling hot,” Esther said. “I thought I’d suffocate in my seat.”

  She said this in a grim whisper, afraid that someone might overhear and take offense somehow. In the subway, words have a charged quality they don’t carry elsewhere.

  “It’s called air conditioning,” Klara whispered back.

  “I’m completely stunned.”

  Esther liked to sound stupidly out of touch—it sealed her in a safer frame of reference.

  Two stops into the Bronx their train took on passengers and another train pulled into the downtown side and Klara felt a poke in the ribs. It was Esther, thrusting an elbow to get her attention because the other train was one of his, Moonman’s, every car spray-painted top to bottom with his name and street number. And Klara had to admit this particular kid knew how to make an impact. The train came bopping into the old drab station like some blazoned jungle of wonders. The letters and numbers fairly exploded in your face and they had a relationship, they were plaited and knotted, pop-eyed cartoon humanoids, winding in and out of each other and sweaty hot and passion dancing—metallic silver and blue and cherry-bomb red and a number of neon greens.

  Esther whispering out of her clenched jaw.

  “That’s him, that’s him, that’s him.”

  That was his train all right but they never found the young man himself. They looked for the address Esther had acquired from a reporter who’d done a story on graffiti writers. Moonman had not told the guy what his real name was or where he lived—only his age, sixteen. The address came from another kid, who claimed to be in Moonman’s crew, and the two women searched it out, walking across a terrain of torched buildings, whole blocks leveled by arson, and there were buildings still burning in the distance. They stopped and watched. Three or four buildings oozing lazy smoke. No sign of fire engines or anxious people grouped behind barricades. Just a few passersby, it seemed from here, routinely occupied. They watched in silence and it was hard to bridge the distance. They couldn’t quite place the thing in context. It was like a newsreel of some factional war in a remote province, where generals cook the livers of their rivals and keep them in plastic baggies. A thing totally spooked by otherness.

  Esther finally spoke. “This is where you used to live?”

  “No. I lived about a mile north of here.”

  “Still, I have to show you more respect.”

  “Thank you, Esther. But it wasn’t like this at the time.”

  “Still, I have to make an effort to be nicer to you.”

  “You do that,” Klara said.

  They knew it wasn’t a good idea to stand around indefinitely and when they reached 157th Street and looked for the young man’s address, they found there was no such number.

  They went into a couple of bodegas and asked at the check-cashing place.

  People said, “Mooney, who’s Mooney?” They said, “What kind of Mormon? There’s no Mormons here.”

  And the women said, “No, no, no, no. Moonman. Moonman uno cinco siete.” And they made spray-paint gestures and said, “Graffiti, graffiti.”

  And Esther wore a safari jacket like some network correspondent looking for rebels in the smoky hills and who could blame her, really.

  “You look a little Chinese tonight,” Miles said.

  “Jason used to call me the chink.”

  She said this in her small voice. She looked and sounded small to herself. People were getting bigger, she was getting smaller, going more or less invisible. If Miles were not here, how long would it take the waiter to wait on her?

  “Jason. I know a Jason?”

  “Jason my second husband. Jason Vanover.”

  They were eating seafood on Mulberry Street in a place Miles liked to come to because a mobster had been killed here, shot in the head by a couple of guys from a rival family, or his own family maybe, or a family from out of town.

  “You’re always mentioning people that I don’t know and that I never heard of and you mention them,” he said, “in a way that makes me think I’m supposed to know who you’re talking about when as a matter of fact I couldn’t possibly.”

  “It’s true, I do that.”

  “People go by me in a blur.”

  “It’s just that I feel if I know someone, it’s automatic that the person I’m talking to about that individual should also know him, by some human arithmetic,” she said.

  Miles had a cold, he always had a cold, it went unnoticed, went without saying, he had coughing jags and slightly woozy eyes, completely unremarked by people who knew him—it was part of the irregular life, the general unhealth, half meals and travel and erratic sleep.

  He looked around for particular silhouettes, hefty men in suits who might be connected.

  “I used to look more Chinese when my hair was shorter,” she said.

  “What did he do?”

  “He was a market analyst, a risk-taker with his own and other people’s money, and a sailor, we used to sail for weeks at a time, a yachtsman. That was the best thing about our marriage. When we shared the ketch everything fell into place. He had a ketch he named High Finance.”

  “You on a boat?”

  “We knew we had to cooperate. We had to live in close quarters. Take turns at the wheel, in the galley, share the head, stow the equipment, coil the lines, keep things in their place. Yes, me on a boat. We were disciplined. We respected the boat and the elements. We had a pretty good marriage as long as we were aboard.”

  They walked over to the loft. A supermarket cart stood in the middle of the street and cars went around it and a man rose from the shadow of a loading platform murmuring a plea to Jesus.

  They shared a joint and watched a newsclip of Nixon waving on TV.

  “Acey told me she was at a party and she said to a man, What do men really want from women, and he said, Blowjobs, and she said, You can get that from men.”

  “In six months Acey will be too famous to live,” Miles said. “She’ll be assassinated walking out of a disco.”

  It wasn’t quite the time for her to go back to work but it was beginning to be the time. Something in her skin began its anxious leap, some need to handle and shape, only deeper really—some need so whole she could sit alone in the loft and be a little wary of it.

  “Yes, walking out of a disco,” she said. “And then you’ll want to take me dancing there.”

  Her mother took her downtown, her and Rochelle, her best friend, and they ate lunch at the automat near Times Square, where the front window was stained glass and the milk came out of the mouth of a bronzed fish. They watched matinee crowds enter theaters and her mother made comments on the ladies’ hats. They looked in shop windows of the better sort. Her mother took them into fine hotels and office buildings, marched them right in and showed
them the moldings and engravings in the lobbies, the carved wood on elevator doors. And they stood outside a skyscraper on Fifth Avenue, it was probably 1934 and the Japanese were entrenched in Manchuria and they looked straight up the face of the building and walked through the polished lobby and it was the Fred F. French Building, which intrigued the girls because who on earth was Fred F. French, and Klara’s mother, who knew things, who worked for a social service agency and studied child psychology, who followed world events and worried about China, who planned these outings systematically, did not have a clue to the identity of Fred F. French, and this intrigued the girls even more, intrigued and amused them, they were thirteen and fourteen and everything amused them. They rode home on the Third Avenue el, rattlebanging up Manhattan and through the Bronx, looking out the train windows into tenement apartments on both sides, hundreds of film-flickering lives shooting past their eyes forty feet above the street, and Rochelle might see an undershirted man leaning tousled out his window and, Maybe that’s Fred F. French, she’d say, he’s had a streak of bad luck, ha ha, and that was the end of that, Klara said to Miles—they were in bed playing cards in the loft, until three or four years later when the girls left a high school dance with two boys who weren’t even in their high school, interlopers from the north, and the four of them slipped into somebody’s parked car at the dark end of the street and they puffed a couple of cigarettes and talked and smooched and necked and petted. Klara and one boy were huddled in the front seat and Rochelle had the other boy in the roomy rear, boy-crazy Rochelle putting on a show of tonguing and seat-slithering, actually raising dust from the upholstery, and she wore a smoky look that distracted the front-seat partners and made them stop and watch. There was just enough light to watch. And it went on toward the outer limits of what a girl is willing to commit herself to, even a boy-crazy minx like Rochelle. The boy in the backseat was in a bundled frenzy by now and Rochelle’s look contained a complicated betrayal, it was smoky and deadly and cool and it seemed to be saying to Klara that their friendship, the best and deepest there could ever be, was about to enter a strange and disturbing phase, the intricate thing of men and sex and personal needs. There was a flurry of hands and knees, there was all that stuff of backseats and body angles and what you’re wearing, the whole grabby flare-up of sex in the dark. She heard panty-band elastic snapping. She thought she heard the boy’s finger actually enter the fleshy pocket between Rochelle’s legs, a palpatory sea suck, the wetness, the slaver of long stupefying kisses, that whole thing of having a strand of his hair in your mouth that you can’t exactly locate, and it was abruptly and bitterly clear that Rochelle had done this before, gone this far and more, and what a shock to Klara, detecting such experience in her best friend’s eyes, and she watched in a clinical spell, she looked and listened—what a stark thing a secret is when it belongs to someone else.

  Now she knew what people meant by experience, the way they used the word experience, and the form it took was not sex but knowledge, and the knowledge was not hers but her friend’s—how it twisted her insides and made her feel puppyish and dumb.

  She heard Rochelle mutter something like, Time to take the rubber out of your wallet, Bob, or she might have said Rob, but instead of a pale flexible sheath the boy took out his living thing, stiff and pulsing and ultraviolet, there it was, suddenly unbuttoned and in the world, pretty much the configuration Klara had imagined but so hot and real, independently alive, unyoked to the host, to the bearer, the wearer, and Rochelle was nervous because the boy did not have a rubber and Klara was nervous because the Japanese might invade China.

  Miles cut the cards and listened.

  And at the all-crucial moment Rochelle Abramowicz looked over the boy’s shoulder into the eyes of Klara Sachs and said to her, thoughtfully, What do you think the F stands for?

  And Klara said, What F?

  And Rochelle said, The F in Fred F. French.

  This was a good thing to say, maybe it was the best thing anyone had ever said, then or now, under the circumstances, and it made them friends again. They dissolved, as the saying goes, in laughter, they practically disappeared into their constituent elements, into atoms and molecules, a couple of girls in a gangster Packard, blown forward in time, and Klara stood on the roof sipping tepid wine and hearing people say, We need theater, and she knew she would tell this story to Miles and she also knew she could never again have a friend like Rochelle or a mother like her mother for that matter and she looked across ledges and parapets to the old skyscraper with the massed midsection and the sunburst paneling, ten blocks north, and thought how wonderful it was, what an accidental marvel to come upon a memory floating at the level of a glazed mosaic high on a mid-town tower—the old spoked sun that brings you luck.

  2

  * * *

  The poets of the old nations of the basin told stories about the wind.

  Matt Shay sat in his cubbyhole in a concrete space about the size of a basketball court, somewhere under the gypsum hills of southern New Mexico.

  This operation was called the Pocket.

  There were people here who weren’t sure whether they were doing weapons work. They were involved in exploratory research and didn’t know exactly what happened to their findings, their simulations, the results they discovered or predicted. This is one of the underlying themes of the systems business, where all the work connects at levels and geographic points far removed from the desk toil and lab projects of the researchers.

  Matt used to do consequence analysis, figuring out the lurid mathematics of a nuclear accident or limited exchange. He worked with data from real events. There was the thing that fell to earth on Albuquerque in 1957, a thermonuclear bomb of jumbo tonnage mistakenly released from a B-36—nobody’s perfect, okay—and landing in a field within the city limits. The conventional explosives detonated, the nuclear package did not. The incident remained a secret to this day, seventeen years later, as Matty sat in his cubicle reading a camping guide.

  He’d been in the Pocket for five months and was definitely doing weapons work but of the soft-core type, involved with safing mechanisms mainly, his face pressed to a computer screen. He wasn’t sure how he felt about this. He’d wanted to do weapons, he’d wanted the edge, the identity, the sense of honing his silhouette, knowing himself a little better—a secret installation in the desert.

  They named it the Pocket after a creature called the pocket gopher that lives in tunnels it frantically digs under the furrowed dunes.

  The dune fields, the alkali flats, the whiteness, the whole white sea-bottomed world, the lines of white haze in the distance, the six-thousand-year-old mummified baby found in a cave near White City, yes, and there were animals that bleached themselves white over the eons, a once-brown mouse that color-matched itself to the gypsum drifts to escape the gaze of predators.

  The wind blew out of the Organ Mountains, busting up to fifty miles an hour, refiguring the dunes and turning the sky an odd dangerous gray that seemed a type of white gone mad.

  And the men and women of the Pocket, mainly men and mainly single, with only a small cluster of marrieds and their albino, was the joke, children—they lived in semiattached bungalows at the edge of the missile range and listened to the wind that the sages of the old nations spoke about, evolving metaphors and philosophies, and it recrested the dunes, blowing steadily, sometimes, for days.

  Do you work with sound waves? Do you gauge the effects of blast on delivery aircraft? Do you do physics packages and dream about a girl back in Georgia, the one who put her hand in your pants at the drive-in near the swamp? Do you long to see a fireball, an actual test shot—they are outlawed of course by now, atmospheric blasts, but you wish you’d seen one of the monster shots that vapored an atoll way back when.

  He ate lunch in the underground mess with Eric Deming, a tall shuffly man in his early thirties, a couple of years younger than Matt, and one of the bombheads.

  There was a droop to Eric’s shoulders and cloth
es. He tended to eat with his hands—french fries, sure, but also lettuce, beets, boiled rice, corn niblets, anything he could pincer and lift in units.

  “When’s Janet coming?”

  “Soon. We’re working out the details,” Matt said.

  “Will you show her to us? We haven’t seen a woman from the outside world.”

  “You’re in Alamogordo all the time.”

  “That’s not outside. You have to go a thousand miles before you’re outside. You know that. In this state, Matty.”

  “She’s not coming here.”

  “Okay but in this state do you know the percentage of people who have security clearance? Isn’t that why we love it?”

  “We’re meeting somewhere west of here and then we’re going camping. Remote remote remote. If I can talk her into it. She’s not eager to do this, Janet.”

  Eric worked in a lab area that Matt was not cleared to enter. He used to work with radioactive materials inside a sealed glove box. He wore protective gloves, he wore overgloves attached to his sleeves, he wore layers of treated clothing equipped with a number of film badges and rad-detectors and he worked with bomb components—the neutron initiator, the detonators, the subcritical pieces, the visceral heat inside the warhead.

  He was doing something else now and Matt didn’t know what it was. He wore a Q badge with yellow edges and spread astounding rumors.

  • • •

  The bombheads loved their work but weren’t necessarily pro-bomb, walking around with megadeath hard-ons. They were detail freaks. They were awed by the inner music of bomb technology. Matt watched them. He went to their parties and learned their language. They carried an afterglow of sixties incandescence, a readiness to give themselves compulsively to something.

  They thought he was angling for a transfer in, ready to become one of them, wear the coded badge, the Q-sensitive access that would get him through the last gate and into the tunnel that led to bomb design.