Underworld by Don DeLillo
“Junior, that noise. Can you hear it?”
Clyde walked into the room in his shirtsleeves, a shoe brush in hand.
“Yes, barely.”
“Is it possible?”
“Yes, it could be the protesters at the Plaza.”
“The wind.”
“Yes, the wind is carrying the sound this way.”
They heard the hard rhythmic salvo of voices chanting angry slogans, again, louder, fading when the wind shifted, then audible once more.
“You know what they want, don’t you?” Edgar said.
Through the battered century of world wars and massive violence by other means, there had always been an undervoice that spoke through the cannon fire and ack-ack and that sometimes grew strong enough to merge with the battle sounds. It was the struggle between the state and secret groups of insurgents, state-born, wild-eyed—the anarchists, terrorists, assassins and revolutionaries who tried to bring about apocalyptic change. And sometimes of course succeeded. The passionate task of the state was to hold on, stiffening its grip and preserving its claim to the most destructive power available. With nuclear weapons this power became identified totally with the state. The mushroom cloud was the godhead of Annihilation and Ruin. The state controlled the means of apocalypse. But Edgar, by the window, heard the old alarums. He thought the time might be coming, once again, when ideas became insurgent and rebel bands were reborn, longhair men and women, scruffy and free-fucking, who moved toward armed and organized resistance, trying to break the state and bring about the end of the existing order.
“They want the power to shake the world. It’s the old bolshevik dream being dreamed again and it’s the communists who are behind it all. And you know where it begins, don’t you?”
“These are kids, mostly, who lie down in the street and wave flowers at the police,” Clyde said. “Vietnam is the war, the reality. This is the movie, where the scripts are written and the actors perform. American kids don’t want what we’ve got. They want movies, music.”
Let Junior devise his clever perceptions. He didn’t understand that once you patronize the enemy, you begin the process of your own undoing.
“It begins in the inmost person,” Edgar said. “Once you yield to random sexual urges, you want to see everything come loose. You mistake your own looseness for some political concept, whereas in truth.”
He didn’t finish the thought. Some thoughts had to remain unspoken, even unfinished in one’s own mind. This was the point of his relationship with Clyde. To keep the subject unspoken. To keep the feelings unfelt, the momentary urges unacted-upon. How strange and foolish this would seem to the young people running in the streets, or living six to a room, or three to a bed, and to many other people for that matter—how sad and rare.
Clyde went back to his duties, leaving the Boss by the window.
Edgar thought there was something noble in a constant companionship that does not fall to baser claims. He assumed Clyde believed likewise. But then Clyde was the second man, wasn’t he, and perhaps he only followed Edgar’s line of march wherever it led, or didn’t.
He heard the chanting intermittently on the wind. Clyde was in the shower now. Edgar turned to see where he’d left the mask and saw himself unexpectedly in a full-length mirror, across the room, in his white robe and soft slippers, and he was startled by the image.
Of course it was him, but him in the guise of a macrocephalic baby, sexless and so justborn as to be, in essence, unearthly.
Mother Hoover’s cuddled runt.
He crossed the room and picked up the mask. He noted how the stylized handlebars were simple swirls of cut leather designed to flare from the temples.
He heard Clyde come out of the shower.
When they were younger and on vacation together, or away on business, sharing a suite or taking adjoining rooms and keeping the connecting door open so they could talk from their respective beds well into the night, Edgar sometimes managed to angle the mirrors in such a way that he could catch a glimpse—by taking the free-standing antique in an old inn, the cheval glass, for example, and simply moving it to another part of the floor, or opening the medicine cabinet to a certain position when he shaved and letting the mirror absorb the light from the bed in the next room, or leaving a hand mirror propped on a desk—a glimpse, a passing glance, a spyhole peek at Junior as he busied himself dressing or undressing or taking a bath, the arrangement being such that the moment would seem wholly accidental, should the subject realize he was being watched, and an accident not just from his perspective but to Edgar’s own mind as well, Junior’s likeness being a thing that might simply float across his ken in the normal course of events, away on urgent Bureau business, his companion’s body lean and virile, or at a golf resort, or following the ponies west to Del Mar, when they were both a great deal younger.
Junior was going bald now, and bulb-nosed, and he walked with a stoop. But then Junior had always walked with a stoop in an effort to appear no taller than the Boss.
Edgar was in the bedroom with the door closed. He stood at the mirror, a seventy-one-year-old man wearing nothing but his sequined biker’s mask and his wool-lined slippers, listening to the voices in the street.
JANUARY 9, 1967
When her workday was finished Janet Urbaniak put on her running shoes. There was a stretch of four desolate blocks between the hospital complex where she did classroom work and got floor experience and the apartment complex where she lived. Bleak and weedy streets, unshoveled snow going grim with bus exhaust, snow that was drilled and gilded with dog piss, and there were usually a few lurking figures in green fatigues, the last of a straggle battalion of wasted men.
So when her workday was finished Janet took off her lightweight casual slip-ons and got the running shoes out of her locker, a pair of firm padded sneakers with shock-absorbent midsoles and a supple and confident feel. Then she went and stood at the hospital entrance with another student nurse and they waited for the traffic lights to turn green along the semideserted length of the four extended blocks, the kind of heartless boulevard you find in parts of town where the architecture is guarded and tense and it always feels like curfew.
Janet stood and waited in the deep and eerie dusk. Then the lights went green and her buddy said, “Go, go, go, go,” and Janet started to run, nonstop she hoped, with the lights in her favor, hitting top speed in a matter of seconds and trying to avoid icy patches, and her buddy watched her all the way.
Some evenings, most evenings it’s the men you want to look out for. This is why you’re running after all. They see you coming in your bouncy blue-and-white shoes and have things to say and gestures to make or just looks to look, or nothing at all sometimes, you’re a ghost, a shadow—a number of men clustered near a chain-link fence or empty lot, and you’re never sure whether it’s better to veer away in a defensive arc or keep running in a straight line because the first tactic might offend them and the second might tempt them to get familiar or maybe even affront them in its unaffectedness, and some evenings it’s the snow.
It’s the snow or rain or garbage or the stray dogs you have to look out for.
But you’re not running because of the dogs. The dogs make you slow down, ease into a walk. It’s the men loitering who make you run and the men who are out of sight in doorways or junked cars—you want them to think you’re running for the love of running, you and all the others, the evening stream of students making the four-block sprint.
We’re just runners, you want them to think, getting our minutes in.
Janet was dashing now, deep-breathing, concentrating on the snow and on the lights staying green, and she watched for men who might be leaning on a wall or getting out of a car—there were usually a couple of junked cars in the course of a run, used as social clubs in winter.
Four long blocks under a streaky northern sky. When she reached the entrance to her building the keys were already in her hand and she went inside and took the elevator up, still ru
The call was routine procedure, another student back at the hospital checking to see if she’d made it safely. They gave her eleven minutes door-to-door including the elevator up and the keys in the locks. A number of student nurses lived in the same complex and the routine was designed to allow people to switch roles systematically. Janet ran the dash, made the phone call and monitored the progress of the running woman according to a schedule.
They figured it all out and posted it on a board. Then they changed into running shoes and waited for green.
NOVEMBER 29, 1966
The second man made the decision to show up late. It was the kind of firm determination in the type of difficult circumstance that Clyde Tolson liked to make.
It proved his mettle. And when you’re a man who is variously described as dutiful, deferential, obsequious, slavish and brown-nosingly corrupt, in descending order of distinction, you need to make a show of character now and then.
But first Clyde had to convince the Boss that missing an hour or two of party time was not going to haunt the twilight years of his directorate.
An FBI security detail at the Plaza had reported that the protest was growing loud and that the party guests, as they entered, were being cursed in rhyming couplets, exposed to obscene signs and geshires, spat upon at close range and forced to duck an occasional flying object.
It did not make sense to Clyde to allow the Director to enter a situation, and Edgar finally agreed, in which the dignity of the Bureau might be compromised.
So it was midnight when the two men rolled through the deserted midtown streets in their bulletproof black Cadillac. They’d had a leisurely dinner, bantering with the wine steward and then enjoying a brandy at the bar with old acquaintances because there were old acquaintances wherever J. Edgar Hoover went, some who were loyal supporters, others residing in the files, a few who were enemies-for-life but didn’t know it yet, and Edgar and Clyde were in a mellow enough mood, despite reports from the site, seated in the plush rear seat in black tie of course and wearing their masks, like a suave and jaunty crime fighter out of the Sunday comics, a master bureaucrat by day who becomes dashing Maskman at night, cruising the streets in formal dress with his trusted right-hand man.
The driver activated the intercom to report that a car was tailing them.
Clyde turned to look while the Director slumped in his seat, getting his head below the window line.
“Little Volkswagen bug,” Clyde said. “Painted top to bottom in very bright colors. Psychedelic. Big bright swirls and streaks. Can’t make out the driver’s face.”
The Cadillac coasted slowly past the Plaza. The klieg lights were gone, the media pack was gone, there was no trace of the crush of curious onlookers drawn by news of the event. There were still a few demonstrators, listless now, young people in their grimy tie-dyes, and city cops as well, idler still, showing the eternal laden strain of a big meal hustled down the gullet, where it sits for hours earning overtime.
The great dark car circled the block, equipped with an Arpège atomizer that contained room freshener, and Clyde checked the other entrances.
The north steps were empty and he tapped on the glass and the driver pulled up and the two men exited and suddenly there was the VW, cutting in front, and people came scrambling out, three, four, what, six people, it’s a circus car debouching clowns, about seven people tumbling onto the sidewalk and hurrying up the steps to flank the doorway.
All wore masks, the faces of Asian kids, some blood-spattered, others with eyes seamed shut, and they commenced their shouting as Hoover and Tolson moved up the stairs.
The first man was clumsy and slow and the second took his arm to assist and they made their plodding way toward the entrance.
They heard, “Society scum!”
They heard, “A dead Asian baby for every Gucci loafer!”
Clyde wasn’t sure whether the protesters knew who they were. Was Edgar’s mask sufficient cover for his gnarled old media mug?
They heard mottoes, slurs and technical terms.
And they labored upward, step by step, eyes front, outer arms stroking, and the protesters jangled and hissed.
“Vietnam! Love it or leave it!”
“White killers in black tie!”
A young woman stood at the entrance wearing the mask of a child’s shattered face and she said somewhat softly to Edgar, blocking his way and speaking evenly, whispering in fact, “We’ll never disappear, old man, until you’re in a landfill with your trash.”
Clyde said, “Coming through,” like a waiter with a heavy tray, and a couple of minutes later, after a stop in the men’s room to collect themselves, the Director and his aide were ready to party.
But first Edgar said, “Who were those jaspers?”
“I have an idea or two. I’ll put someone on it.”
“Did you hear what she said? I think they’re connected to the garbage guerrillas.”
“Straighten your mask,” Clyde said.
“I’d like to see them maimed in the slowest possible manner. Over weeks and months, with voice tapes made.”
They walked down the hall to the grand ballroom. They’d walked down five hundred halls on their way to some ceremonial event, some testimonial dinner, one or another ritual salute to Edgar’s decades in the Bureau, but they’d never heard a sound such as this.
A subdued roar, a sort of rumble-buzz, with a chandelier jingle in the mix and the dreamy sway of dance music and a vocal note of self-delight—the lure, the enticement of a life defined by its remoteness from the daily drudge of world complaint.
“Tapes of cries and moans,” Edgar said, “which I would play to help me sleep.”
They moved through the ballroom, they circulated, seeing prominent people everywhere. The room was high and white and primrose gold, flanked by Greek columns that caught the lickety amber light of a thousand candles.
Swan-necked women in textured satin gowns. Masks by Halston, Adolfo and Saint Laurent. The mother and sister of one American president and the daughter of another. Crisp little men aswagger with assets. Titled jet-setters, a maharajah and maharani, a baroness somebody in a beaded mask. Famous and raging alcoholic poets. Tough smart stylish women who ran fashion books and designed clothes. Hair by Kenneth—teased, swirled, backcombed and ringleted.
“Did you see?”
“The old dowager,” Edgar said.
“In the dime-store mask.”
“Decorated with pearls.”
They shook hands here and there, daintily, and dropped a flattering remark to this or that person, and Clyde knew how the Director felt, mixing with people of the rarest social levels, the anointed and predestined, aura’d like Inca kings, but also the talented and original and self-made and born beautiful and ego-driven and hard-bargaining, all bearing signs of astral radiance, and the ruthless and brutish as well.
Yes, Edgar was damp with excitement.
He stopped to chat with Frank Sinatra and his young actress wife, a nymph in a boy’s haircut and a butterfly mask.
“Jedgar, you old warhorse. Haven’t seen you since.”
“Yes, I know.”
“Tempus fugits, don’t it, pal?”
“Yes, it does,” Edgar said. “Introduce me to your lovely.”
Sinatra was in the files now. Many people in the room were in the files as well. Not a single one of them, Clyde imagined, more accomplished in his occupational strokes than Edgar himself. But Edgar did not carry the glow. Edgar worked in the semidark, manipulating and bringing ruin. He carried the small wan grudging glory of the civil servant. Not the open and confident show, the wide-striding boom of some of these cosmic bravos.
On the stage, under the furled curtain, two bands took turns. A white society band and a black soul group. All musicians masked.
&nbs
They found their table and settled in for a spell, sipping champagne and nibbling on buffet tidbits. Clyde uttered the names of people dancing past and Edgar commented on their lives and careers and personal predilections. Whatever anecdotal lore he failed to recall, Clyde was quick to provide.
Andy Warhol walked by wearing a mask that was a photograph of his own face.
A woman asked Edgar to dance and he flushed and lit a cigarette.
Lord and Lady somebody held their masks on sticks.
A woman wore a sexy nun’s wimple.
A man wore an executioner’s hood.
Edgar spoke rapidly in his old staccato voice, like a radio reporter doing a series of punchy news items. It made Clyde feel good to see the Boss show such animation. They spotted a number of people they knew professionally, administration faces, past and present, men who held sensitive and critical positions, and Clyde noted how the ballroom seemed to throb with crosscurrent interests and appetites. Political power mingling lubriciously with art and literature. Domed historians clubbing with the beautiful people of society and fashion. There were diplomats dancing with movie stars, and Nobel laureates telling chummy stories to shipping tycoons, and the demimonde of Broadway and the gossip industry hobnobbing with foreign correspondents.
There was a self-conscious sense of some profound moment in the making. A dreadful prospect, Clyde thought, because it suggested a continuation of the Kennedy years. In which well-founded categories began to seem irrelevant. In which a certain fluid movement became possible. In which sex, drugs and dirty words began to unstratify the culture.