Underworld by Don DeLillo
The phone was ringing. He looked at it and lifted the receiver, they call it a handset now. He was finally selling the house to go live in Clarice’s apartment building, the daughter and son-in-law up on four, the father down on three in an easy-to-manage flat with bananas going brown on the windowsill. He would take showers sitting down while Clarice and Carl went running on their running machine upstairs, they were training to live forever.
“I’m calling from Phoenix,” said the voice.
“The city or the bird?”
“Some months ago a man I know. Ten or eleven months ago. Paid you a visit.”
“I wouldn’t recall.”
“Named Brian Glassic.”
“If you tortured me, I wouldn’t remember. I have people they come here half a dozen times. I see them on the street they could be garment bags on their way to the airport. I function inside my mind.”
“In any case he recently mentioned the visit. I wonder what you can tell me about the baseball in the trunk.”
They would knock on his door to see if he was all right. He’d poke his head past the shower curtain. All right, I’m fine, all right.
“You’re a loyal fan retired in Arizona with a heart valve they implanted with dacron cuffs and you developed a sweetness for the old days. You spent your career in mergers and what, acquisitions. Made millions but you’re still dissatisfied. You want one last acquisition that’s personal from the heart.”
“Brian said it might go like this.”
“You want to talk about the ball, you get approximated first. The fact is I’m ready to sell. People know this. I get calls from men with grainy voices. They have polymer packed in their gums. They have openings that were drilled in their sides for human waste to detour. They come home from the hospital echo-dopplered. I hear from men with quadruple bypass, with nitroglycerin in their bloodstream that you manufacture dynamite.”
“I’m not a fan anymore. I don’t follow the teams.”
“I’m in the category myself where I’m undergoing tests. This means I have cancer recurring in so many parts of my body the doctor gives me group rates. Don’t worry, you’re not supposed to laugh. I’m trying to make you feel bad.”
“And you’re a Dodger fan, yes?”
“From before I was born.”
“Raised in Brooklyn?”
“Raised in Brooklyn, get my cheesecake in the Bronx, go to the Lower East Side for this and that.”
“A Dodger fan. But you’ve reproduced the Polo Grounds scoreboard in your basement.”
“To remind me,” Marvin said. “Or prepare me. I forget which.”
“I’m not retired. And I haven’t made millions. And I don’t know exactly why I want to buy the ball.”
This was good. Marvin liked this. It was good to hear from someone who was not palpitating in his mind for the old Giants or the old New York. They have stools you can buy in surgical supply outlets that you place in your shower so you can sit and do the far-flung parts of your body without falling and breaking a hip, which he saw one day on the hip replacement channel, with molded seats and nonskid legs. They have a channel for every body part.
“You call me out of nowhere,” Marvin said. “And you want to do a deal. But you don’t know why.”
“That’s right,” said the voice.
Good. Because this was Marvin’s situation for a long time. This was Marvin’s exact status. For years he didn’t know why he was chasing down exhausted objects. All that frantic passion for a baseball and he finally understood it was Eleanor on his mind, it was some terror working deep beneath the skin that made him gather up things, amass possessions and effects against the dark shape of some unshoulderable loss. Memorabilia. What he remembered, what lived in the old smoked leather of the catcher’s mitt in the basement was the touch of his Eleanor, those were his wife’s eyes in the oval photographs of men with handlebar mustaches. The state of loss, the fact, the facticity in its lonely length. This was a word he never thought he’d need to use but here it was, crouched for years in his secluded brain, coming out to elongate the loss.
“I have a mushroom-shaped tumor.”
“Yes.”
“The doctor calls it a fungating mass.”
“I don’t know that term.”
“I don’t know it either. It’s not in the dictionary because I looked in two dictionaries. When they get their terms outside the dictionary, it means they’re telling you goodbye.”
They went to Chinatown. They went to the Jersey shore and ate harpooned swordfish, which it’s tastier when the fish dies unstrangled by a net, with olive oil and capers, the last great fish thing on the planet.
“I have to tell you first thing. I don’t have the what-do-you-call completely established.”
“The lineage.”
“The lineage. I don’t have the lineage all the way.”
He told the caller some things about the ball. He said he would make a long story short. Then he made it long. He entertained the man, why not? And he saw it coming even as he did the bits and routines, delivered the reliable lines. Clarice would have to rent a hospital bed for the apartment, high sides so he wouldn’t tumble to the floor. Strangers would come to wash his genitals, immigrants from countries on the travel channel, they had lives of their own that he could not imagine a single minute of. He would forget how to eat, how to say simple words. His body would lie there trying to put together the needed elements to take a breath. An oxygen tube in his nose and bananas on the windowsill, he hates them when they’re spotted and soft. Clarice speaking slowly, putting a cool cloth to his naked head. All right, I’m fine, all right. Carl in his pressed white shorts and tube socks, a stockbroker disguised as a boy.
“Do we want to talk about price?” said the voice.
The word for water is water but he wouldn’t be able to say it. The body forgets the basic things. He talked on the phone to Phoenix and looked at his windbreaker hanging on a chair.
They went to the Jersey shore. They made love, they made salads. This was when the terms were in the dictionary.
That night he ate half a cantaloupe with grapes clustered in the scooped-out part. This is how they sold it in the supermarket, packed in clinging wrap.
5
* * *
When people tell rat stories, the rat is always tremendous. It’s a drag-belly rat the size of a cat because this is a satisfying rhyme. There was a fair amount of rat lore in these streets when Nick Shay was growing up. Not that rats were frequently seen. They were heard in the walls and down the yards, indelible half fictions, running across rooftops in the moon. Enormous rats with rat-brown fur. There were rats in sewers and demolition sites and coal bins, a rustling in the flung garbage of empty lots.
He got out of a taxi near the building where his mother lived. The building was not here thirty, forty years ago, a large brown structure, tall and broad and defined by a sense of fortification—fences and ramps, cameras angled from the brickwork.
This used to be a row of five-story buildings, tenements, and that’s where he saw the rat, wet and dead, lying next to a coal pile on the sidewalk. He was nine or ten at the time and the incident came back to him, taxi easing from the curb, with a detailed directness. Just a dead rat but he could see it clearly, feeling a kind of doubleness, a shaped transparency, die-cut, that fit him to the moment. He remembered how he’d studied the limp body, feeling a grisly thrill to be so close, able to trace a faint pink line down the underside of the tail, and the rat was brown and gray and pink and white all together and separate but he was disappointed by its size—he would have to exaggerate the rat, put some heft and length in his story, some mouth drool and yellow eye.
There was a man in a plexiglas booth. Nick signed a register and was buzzed into the lobby, which was occupied by kids, small and smaller, playing, milling, their voices shrieky in the bare space. He took the elevator to twelve. The other rat was later, when he was in his twenties, also ordinary in size, your common Norwa
Matt opened the door, his brother Matty, still looking a little boyish, short and blocky, cowlicked, with thick glasses and a fresh haircut and some gray, maybe, on top, that seemed extraneous. Midforties he would be. They hadn’t seen each other in a few years and it was only an accident of timing that brought them together today.
They shook hands and exchanged the wry smile of adversaries who are enjoined from mauling each other by some inconvenience of context.
Nick said, “Where is she?”
They talked about their mother, about medications, doctors’ appointments, not unusual matters, but there was a rigor in the older brother’s questions, a particularity of interest and concern that amounted to a kind of challenge.
Matt said finally, “She’s okay, she’s good, she eats and sleeps normally. You want to know about her natural functions, you’ll have to ask her yourself.”
“You’re staying over?”
“Two nights. You’ve totally forgotten what it’s like, Nick. A night in the Bronx.”
But Matty had long since filled out the small boy’s sketchy torso, developed some mass in his upper body, a certain sturdiness of bearing.
Nick said, “I have to go to Jersey in the morning or I’d take her to the doctor myself.”
“What’s in Jersey? Chemical waste eating people’s houses?”
“Personal business.”
“How’s Marian?”
“Fine, they’re all fine.”
They drank seltzer and took turns looking out the window. There was a picture window with a broad view west. El Bronx. People sat on lawn chairs on the roof of a motel nearby. Nick could tell these were local men and women who’d gained entry to the roof from an adjacent building, carrying their chairs and newspapers. He knew it was evidence of brisk improvisation, people extracting pleasure from the grudging streets, but it made him nervous, it was a breach, another opening, another local sign of instability and risk.
“I took her to the zoo,” Matt said. “She has the zoo across the street but it’s the first time in twenty years I could get her to go. Practically forced her out the door.”
“You’re on a mission.”
“She says she has more animals on television than she can handle. I can’t make her see the point of living breathing creatures.”
“I’m getting her out of here,” Nick said.
“Is that right?”
“To Phoenix. That’s right. There’s no reason anymore for her to be here.”
“She has friends here. You know this.”
“I know this? How many friends? What friends?”
“To Phoenix,” Matt said.
“How many friends?”
“We haven’t done a head count lately. But if she wanted to go, we’d take her gladly.”
“You don’t have room.”
“We have room,” Matt said.
“Listen to me. You don’t have room. We have room. We also have climate.”
“Climate.”
“This is important at her age.”
“Janet’s a nurse. You want to make a contest out of it? Janet’s a nurse.”
“This is stupid.”
“Of course it’s stupid. This is why we’re doing it,” Matt said.
Nick was at the window again.
“Why would they put a motel in a place like this?”
“I don’t know.”
“It’s a convenience, this motel, for sex and drugs. Because what else is it here for? Or homeless. A shelter for homeless people. They put them in motels now.”
“She likes it here, Nick. It’s her life, it’s what she’s used to. She has her church, her stores, all the familiar things. And the friends that are still alive. Ask her for a list.”
“You don’t know. I know. It’s a convenience, this motel, for what they’re doing.”
Nick went into the kitchen and started opening cabinets. He inspected the area under the sink. Kids were riding tricycles in the hallway. He poured another seltzer and went into the living room. The bike bells sounded down the hall.
“How’s Janet? Janet’s all right?”
“She had a lump removed from under her arm.”
“Did I know this?”
“It’s okay. She’s doing okay. The kids are okay.”
“These lumps are everywhere. Everybody’s looking for lumps.”
“I read something in the paper not long ago. Made me think of you,” Matt said. “Remember those machines they had in shoe stores? Tall consoles sort of like old radios, but with a slot down near the bottom.”
“Jesus, yes. I haven’t thought of that.”
“The clerk puts shoes on the kid’s feet and then the kid goes and stands with his feet inside the slot.”
“I haven’t thought of that since I was, what. They stopped making them.”
“And the clerk looks into a viewer at the top of the device and can see the feet inside the shoes.”
“To check the fit,” Nick said.
“To check the fit. Well, the machine was a fluoroscope and what it did was transmit x rays through the shoe and into the foot, it’s called differential transmission and it makes a shadowy greenish image. I just barely remember this. Jimmy’s buying you a pair of shoes and then he’s lifting me up so I can look into the machine and see your feet inside your shoes and your bones inside your feet.”
“The question is, Where are those shoes now?”
“No, the question is, Did you do this enough times to suffer bone damage because the machine was basically spraying your feet with radiation.”
They heard the key in the lock.
“I have healthy feet,” Nick said.
“I’m relieved.”
“But thanks for the scare. I’ll do the same for you someday.”
Rosemary Shay came through the door with a shopping bag in each hand, her body slanted toward the heavier bag. She saw that Nick was here. She stood and looked at him, eyes alive and searching. She was always searching him for something, some sign, some change. He moved toward her to help with the bags. Her face had furrows nearly everywhere, gathers and tucks, little parchment pleats above the mouth. Her hands were old, they were long and worked, milky blue veins lapping the scored knuckles.
They took the bags away from her, complaining that she did not allow them to help her sufficiently. They warned of back strain and heat exhaustion. She told them to shut up even as she tried to take the groceries away, items passing hand to hand. Nick embraced her, laughing, and she felt unpersuadable in his arms.
They ate and talked, took second helpings, corn on the cob, enormous tomatoes the grocer kept in the back room for special customers, grown in his yard on City Island—the old deep tomato taste, summery and blood-buttery and voluptuous.
“Tell him about the job,” Rosemary said.
“He doesn’t want to know.”
“He’s your brother. Tell him.”
“Another job change?” Nick said.
“Yes. A research institute.”
“Then this is not a change.”
“A different one. Nonprofit. We draw up studies to help third world countries develop health services and banking facilities.”
“Goody-goody stuff.”
“Yes,” Matt said happily. “We produce paper. We smoke pipes, those of us who smoke.”
“A think tank,” Rosemary said.
They let this term hover above the salad. Year by year, job by job, Matt was separating himself from the science he did in the 1970s, work whose precise nature eluded Nick, government work that involved classified projects and remote locations. Not that Nick was eager to reach him. It was strange, that’s all, for younger brother to be the tight-lipped guy for a change, not inclined to answer questions readily.
“My kid’s learning the game. Jeffrey.”
“What game?” Matt said.
“What game. What game would I be talking about? Your g
“My game.”
“He plays against his computer. His computer has a chess program with a take-back option so he can undo his dumber moves.”
Matt said nothing.
The cats came out of hiding. They curled around the chair legs, hooked their backs, rubbing against the legs of the people, undulant in the mazy space down there, and they went swaybacked and yawned, asses up.
“We have room for you,” Nick said to his mother.
“Where did this come from?”
“It was always here. You know that. We’ve been waiting for you to say you’re ready.”
“Well I’m not. We have dessert. Who wants coffee?” she said. “I have the decaf. I know Matty takes it.”
Then she told them a story about Jimmy downtown. She told it over coffee and they listened with a shared intensity that no other subject could remotely provoke. It was the thing that made them a family, still, after all the silences and distances—the father in his lost glory, making book.
“It was a funny thing, funny-strange I mean, but the first bets he ever took were from cops. He was a plumber’s helper at the New Yorker Hotel. Then he was moved into the security office, which I visited several times, we were keeping company then, a big noisy office in the freight delivery area, and the security chief had made a space for the local bookmaker to come and do his tally every morning. He charged him rent, very reasonable, I’m sure. Soon the bookie makes Jimmy his runner. Jimmy loved this. He made payoffs to winners, he collected money from losers. He did the rounds every day, all through the garment district this was. He was light on his feet, dodging the boys who pushed the racks. He started picking up extra action, action for himself, sitting on bets it was called—he selected carefully, a bet here and there. And it was often the police he was getting his business from. So you have the security people and the police and what else is new? Then once a month a detective, this is the bagman, he went to the Solomon Brothers car dealer and he picked up the protection money to distribute in the precinct house. So the money’s flowing back and forth and everybody’s happy. The Solomon brothers ran the bookie operation for the whole area, Arthur and I forget the other Solomon, Arthur and Bernie, and Arthur and Bernie wore beautiful suits and had a box at the Polo Grounds and knew ballplayers and show people, and eventually Jimmy got his own small piece of action, on the up-and-up, and the Solomons paid him eighty dollars a week, this is after you’re born,” she said to Nick, “and after he already left me once, plus a bonus for a good business month.”