Underworld by Don DeLillo
The needle slurred some notes but he was used to that. He sat at the edge of the room, where he could feel the kitchen sun and look at Laura’s face. The music joined them edgewise. He believed he could enter her reverie. He could know her, almost know her, feel her innocence through the music, know the girl again, the spinsterly twelve-year-old who walked behind her parents in the street, he could see her in the face of the somber older sister, she was almost there, the girl, in the pouches and moles and smoky hair. There was a brief moment in one of the pieces, after passagework of mellow recollection, when something dark seemed to enter, the soloist’s left hand urging the tempo, and it made her raise an arm, slowly, a gesture of half shock, thoughtful and fraught—she’d heard a boding in the bass notes that startled her. And this was the other thing they shared, the sadness and clarity of time, time mourned in the music—how the sound, the shaped vibrations made by hammers striking wire strings made them feel an odd sorrow not for particular things but for time itself, the material feel of a year or an age, the textures of unmeasured time that were lost to them now, and she turned away, looking past her lifted hand into some transparent thing he thought he could call her life.
“You have to tell me, Albert, when you’re going out. So I know.”
“I did tell you.”
“You never tell me.”
“I do tell you.”
“I don’t know if you forget or what’s the reason.”
“I will tell you.”
“If you tell me, then I know.”
“I will tell you. I will be sure to tell you.”
“But I forget, don’t I?”
“Sometimes, yes.”
“You tell me and I forget.”
“Sometimes. It’s not important.”
“But you have to tell me.”
“I will. I will tell you.”
“So this way I know,” she said.
• • •
He took his coffee black with a stab of rye in the morning, a nip, a pin drop, and with anisette in the afternoon or early evening, a shot, a jolt of the licorice sap, and maybe a beady tongue-taste of rye again before retiring, without coffee this time, medically forbidden of course but just a driblet, a measured snort, the briefest swig in the history of guilty drinking.
“You have to tell me. So I know.”
“I will tell you. I promise.”
“This way I know.”
“This way you know.”
“If you tell me, then I know.”
“That’s right.”
“That’s right, isn’t it?”
“Yes, that’s right.”
“But you have to tell me. That’s the only way I know.”
He cleaned the kitchen windowsill, dust, hair, fly heads, flakes of plaster—stony little spalls.
When they made dinner together she hit Albert’s hand every time he got in the way, a jurisdictional tap on the back of the hand.
He set his three pills next to his plate on the table, lined up for consumption. His heart pill, his fart pill and his liver pill.
He spent more time indoors when there were people in the halls. He’d seen a hypodermic syringe on the second-story landing and now there were people in the halls, busy and inert at the same time, busy inside their eyes but also body-dead, barely able to drag a hand through the air. When it stops raining, he thought, they’ll go to the playground or empty lots. And the elevator was stuck between floors so he was better off not leaving the apartment anyway because it was not a good idea for him to be climbing stairs.
He slipped her glasses off her face and cleaned them with a tissue and put them back.
And when he went out they were on the front stoop muttering something that sounded like Wall Street and Albert finally surmised this was a brand of heroin for sale, Wall Street, Wall Street, and he could hear them in the halls, strangers in the building, breathing in and out.
He told her he was calling his daughter Teresa long-distance. He announced every phone call to keep Laura involved, including weather and time, and because he liked to make announcements.
His daughter ran a child-care center in a small city and had expenses and two children of her own and a lapsed husband trying to start a new career and Albert sent her a little money now and then, out of his teacher’s pension.
A long-distance call was an act of predeliberation that filled a span in his mind much more extended than the length of the call. He planned an evening around it, waiting for the hour of the rate change and then placing a chair by the telephone and working the numbers carefully, his face down in the rotary dial.
He heard them breathing in the halls and knew he had food for two days easy and when the milk went sour he could open a can of peaches and dump the fruit and syrupy juice on the breakfast cereal. Clingstone, flesh that clings to the pit, to the stone, as with a peach. He heard them late at night and knew he could stretch the chopped meat, bulk up the tomato soup with macaroni, and they didn’t live in the building and would find another place.
When his daughter answered the phone he looked across the room to Laura and nodded—contact made, the century of progress marches on.
Apples and cheese, they had apples and cheese, that was a meal in itself.
He was taking a book back to the library, another spring or early summer, a mild-hearted day, and he saw a familiar figure crossing the street and going toward the convent that was part of the Catholic grammar school. Anciently familiar, a figure from the land of the past. He hadn’t realized she was still alive, Sister Edgar, how remarkable, the same blade face and bony hands, hurrying, a spare frame shaped by rustling garments. She wore the traditional habit with long black veil and white wimple and the starched clothpiece over the neck and shoulders, an iron crucifix swinging from her waist—she might have been a detail lifted from a painting by some sixteenth-century master.
He watched her open the convent door and disappear. This was a nun who’d been notorious for the terror she spread among the children, fifth-graders or sixth-graders, beatings, vituperations, keep them after school, send them out to clap erasers in a rainstorm. He’d never exchanged a word with Sister Edgar but felt half an urge to knock on the convent door and speak to her now, find out who she was after all these years. He’d been proud to teach in a public school, never mind the lax discipline. He worked among humane colleagues and heard stories about this nun and her routine cruelties.
He walked with a cane now and it gave him a feeling of professor emeritus. At the local library, named after Enrico Fermi, there was a photograph on the wall showing the scientist with an early model of the first atomic bomb. Years ago Albert used to entertain the idea of certain affinities between himself and the great Fermi. Illness in early childhood, marriage to a Jewish woman, science itself of course, cultural heritage—the allowable flush of Italian pride, only not so rousing in this case, attached to such destruction. The library was a movie house then, known to neighborhood kids as the Dumps for its sour odors and unswept debris. Let’s not forget how some things get better, he thought. Books now, the hush of decimaled stacks.
He walked to the social club where he played cards sometimes, less than he used to, and took an occasional glass of wine. Some pictures on the wall, old days, fishmongers in aprons and caps, waiters outside a restaurant with sharply parted hair, dignified by time. He heard the church bell at Mount Carmel, half a block away, and poured himself a glass of red. He sat alone at a formica table and studied the legs of the wine, the trickles of swirled liquid that run down the inside of the glass and tell you how much body the wine has. This wine had legs. It was all legs. It had the legs of a sumo wrestler.
The videotape was running on the TV set in the corner. He’d seen the tape only once before, right here, and knew that they would keep running it until everyone on the planet had seen it. And when they started running it again after an interval of not running it, he knew it meant the shooter had shot someone else, someone new, and because there was no
Steve came over, Silvera, one of the Silvera brothers, he wore a suit and drove a hearse. Albert always asked, Who died?
“You drink that wine?”
“I tried talking to it but that didn’t work,” Albert said. “Sit down and join me.”
“I got a funeral.”
“Who died?”
“What’s-his-name, from the fish market.”
“Bury or cremate?”
“They put them in a wall nowdays. It’s a popular thing.”
“Encrypted,” Albert said with satisfaction.
When the church bell rang again Steve hurried out. Albert could lean a bit and see the other drivers and pallbearers put out their cigarettes and start up the steps. It was nearly time for them to carry out the coffin. Another fishmonger, one more photograph that will seem decades hence to be an emblem of a certain stately innocence, some old lost sweet-tasting time. How memory conspires with objects of human craft, pressing time flat, inciting a tender reminiscence.
Later he went into the empty church and sat in the last row to spend a moment alone with Eddie Robles. A pigeon flew across the transept and landed on the edge of a swivel window near a bank of candles. He admired this old church. Corinthian columns and niched saints. Lighted candles in rosy glass containers. The neighborhood changes, the church remains the same. In the days that followed Eddie’s mass he began to see again how the loss of a friend, how any loss was an aspect of Klara’s departure, repeating the impact, the devastation.
The pigeon was aloft again, fluttering up near the dome. He thought he recalled that the Holy Ghost took form as a dove, was it? Every ghost is holy, he supposed, but you’ll have to point one out to me before I genuflect. Still, he liked to sit here alone, brood and mourn amid the architectural details, the faith of stone and wood, pigments mixed in glass.
When Klara left him it turned something loose, a rant, an unworded voice that incited feelings so varied and confused and bled-together, so resistant to separation and scrutiny that he felt helpless in its surge. It was a hindrance to living. It made him distrust the man he was supposed to be, soft-spoken, well-spoken, gently reflective. Oh that bitch and how unworthy of him to think of her that way. It was his sister, eventually, who kept him from despair, another kind of voice, a woman marooned in introversion, only oddly loving.
He needed to walk, shake his muscles loose, and he went out into the street. Yes, people talking, eating, the loyal shoppers, they came from other boroughs, other counties, the double-parked cars, the coronary throb of the immediate streets still palpable. He walked west across Arthur Avenue and then edged warily north, an old route lately forsworn, toward the high school where he’d taught for thirty years.
Eddie dead, Mercedes in Puerto Rico now. Stop walking and you die.
When he entered a street behind the high school he was surprised to see it was closed to traffic. A play street, the pavement marked with painted game grids, with the numbered spaces of hopscotch and skelly, bases for slapball, and Albert was delighted. He’d thought this old custom of closing off streets for children’s games was long dead, decades dead, a mind relic of life not yet dominated by cars and trucks. He stopped and watched the kids play, holding his cane across his waist as if gripping a stadium rail. Small children, slim and quick, Jamaican cadence in some of the voices and a girl with mottled skin maybe Malaysian or South Indian, he was only guessing, who jumped the hopscotch boxes with a measured deftness, doing a midair whirl so economical her hair was barely ruffled—bronze skin that went darker and lighter, olive-drab beneath the eyes. He wanted to stop her in midjump, stop everything for half a second, atomic clocks, body clocks, the microworld in which physicists search for time—and then run it backwards, unjump the girl, rewind the life, give us all a chance to do it over. He recalled the word for do-it-over, a word that kids used to shout during a game interrupted by a rare passing car or a lady crossing the street with a baby carriage. In-do, someone cried. In-do or hin-du, he wasn’t completely sure. The Indian girl in sneakers and jeans.
Cheeky chose always goes. That’s what the kid said when he got a second chance and did the same thing he’d done before the interruption. Hit a homer, kicked the can, shot a marble on target through the gutter dust. Cheeky chose always goes.
He saw a vendor selling sugarcane from an open-sided van, mangoes in wooden crates and tall cane sheaved with twine. Some things get better, Albert thought. A library, a play street, prods to his optimism block by block.
But what does do-it-over mean? He didn’t want to lose his soul over compromises, second chances that turned him inside out. And anyway we don’t depend on time finally. There is a balance, a kind of standoff between the time continuum and the human entity, our frail bundle of soma and psyche. We eventually succumb to time, it’s true, but time depends on us. We carry it in our muscles and genes, pass it on to the next set of time-factoring creatures, our brown-eyed daughters and jug-eared sons, or how would the world keep going. Never mind the time theorists, the cesium devices that measure the life and death of the smallest silvery trillionth of a second. He thought that we were the only crucial clocks, our minds and bodies, way stations for the distribution of time. Think about it, Einstein, my fellow Albert.
He walked around to the front of the high school, tempted to go up on the portico and talk to the boys and girls standing there—but, no, they didn’t know him and didn’t care. Then why come here? The old squat pile of limestone and brick held his teacherly corpus, a million words spun into tepid air, and there was no reason to think he’d need to pass this way again. One documentary look to freeze the scene. He made a circuit of the block and headed home.
In one of the bare streets he came across a large stray dog that looked diseased, all ribs and flecked slaver, and he sidled away from it. In a culture of guard dogs there are always a few that fall from grace and end up haunting the streets. The trick is to skirt the animal without publishing your fear. Festina lente. Make haste slowly.
He cleaned the windowsills with a damp rag, fly wings, fly parts, the crumbled husks of glassy green beetles.
He had his teacher’s pension and a small tax-deferred annuity and an old passbook with interest posted in cozy broken type.
Seasons ran together, the years were a stunned blur. Like time in books. Time passes in books in the span of a sentence, many months and years. Write a word, leap a decade. Not so different out here, at his age, in the unmargined world.
He put a record on the turntable and Laura sat in the chair seeming not to hear the music so much as see it.
Bread was dependable, bread with nearly every meal, bread fresh from the brick ovens. He kept library books stacked by the breadbox so he would be sure to return them by the due date.
“Are we moving, Albert?”
“No. We’re not going anywhere.”
“Someone told me, I don’t remember, we’re moving.”
“Maybe we’ll go see Teresa again. We’ll take the bus. It’s a beautiful ride. That’s the only move we’re making.”
“Did you tell me you were going out?”
“You like the ride. Vermont. We’ll go when the leaves turn. You like it then.”
“Albert.”
“What?”
“If you tell me, then I know.”
Seasons and years. Laura read a soap opera digest to keep track of TV characters even though the TV had gone on the blink so long ago it was another life.
Oatmeal bubbled on the stove.
He came along and took her glasses off and cleaned them with a tissue, then placed them on her face again.
8
* * *
The old nun rose at dawn, feeling pain in every joint. She’d been rising at dawn since her days as a postulant, kneeling on hardwood floors to pray. First she raised the shade. That’s creation out there, little green apples and infe
She made the sign of the cross, murmuring the congruous words. Amen, an olden word, back to Greek and Hebrew, verily—the most familiar of everyday prayers yet carrying three years’ indulgence, seven if you dip your hand in holy water before you mark the body.
Prayer is a practical strategy, the gaining of temporal advantage in the capital markets of Sin and Remission.
She said a morning offering and got to her feet. At the sink she scrubbed her hands repeatedly with coarse brown soap. How can the hands be clean if the soap is not? This question was insistent in her life. But if you clean the soap with bleach, what do you clean the bleach bottle with? If you use scouring powder on the bleach bottle, how do you clean the box of Ajax? Germs have personalities. Different objects harbor threats of various insidious types. And the questions turn inward forever.
An hour later she was in her veil and habit, sitting in the passenger seat of a black van that was headed south out of the school district and down past the monster concrete expressway into the lost streets, a squander of burnt-out buildings and unclaimed souls. Grace Fahey was at the wheel, a young nun in secular dress. All the nuns at the convent wore plain blouses and skirts except for Sister Edgar, who had permission from the motherhouse to fit herself out in the old things with the arcane names, the wimple, cincture and guimpe. She knew there were stories about her past, how she used to twirl the big-beaded rosary and crack students across the mouth with the iron crucifix. Things were simpler then. Clothing was layered, life was not. But Edgar stopped hitting kids years ago, even before she grew too old to teach, when the neighborhood changed and the faces of her students became darker. All the righteous fury went out of her soul. How could she strike a child who was not like her?