Underworld

by Don DeLillo

The game doesn’t change the way you sleep or wash your face or chew your food. It changes nothing but your life.

The repeated three-beat has the force of some abject faith, a desperate kind of will toward magic and accident.

There is the secret of the bomb and there are the secrets that the bomb inspires, things even the Director cannot guess—a man whose own sequestered heart holds every festering secret in the Western world—because these plots are only now evolving. This is what he knows, that the genius of the bomb is printed not only in its physics of particles and rays but in the occasion it creates for new secrets. For every atmospheric blast, every glimpse we get of the bared force of nature, that weird peeled eyeball exploding over the desert—for every one of these he reckons a hundred plots go underground, to spawn and skein.

It’s not enough to hate your enemy. You have to understand how the two of you bring each other to deep completion.

Al says, “Look at these people.” He is shouting and gesturing, waving a Cuban cigar. “It’s like I-don’t-know-what.” “If you don’t know what, then I don’t know what.” “Save the voice,” says Al. “The voice is dead and buried. It went to heaven on a sunbeam.” “I’ll tell you one thing’s for certain, old pal. We’ll never forget today.” “Glad you’re with me, buddy.”

These men who drop from the high walls like to hang for a while before letting go. They hit the ground and crumple and get up slowly. But it’s the static drama of the dangled body that Edgar finds compelling, the terror of second thoughts.

Al says, the producer, “Great job today, Russ buddy.” “We did something great just by being here.”

“Mark the spot. Like where Lee surrendered to Grant or some such thing.” Russ thinks this is another kind of history. He thinks they will carry something out of here that joins them all in a rare way, that binds them to a memory with protective power.

Russ wants to believe a thing like this keeps us safe in some undetermined way. This is the thing that will pulse in his brain come old age and double vision and dizzy spells—the surge sensation, the leap of people already standing, that bolt of noise and joy when the ball went in. This is the people’s history and it has flesh and breath that quicken to the force of this old safe game of ours.

All the fragments of the afternoon collect around his airborne form. Shouts, bat-cracks, full bladders and stray yawns, the sand-grain manyness of things that can’t be counted. It is all falling indelibly into the past.

They asked where I was from and I replied with a line I sometimes used. I live a quiet life in an unassuming house in a suburb of Phoenix. Pause. Like someone in the Witness Protection Program.

She was looking at me, openly evaluating. I wondered what she was seeing. I felt there was something I ought to explain about the intervening years. I had that half dread you feel when someone studies you after a long separation and makes you think that you’ve done badly to reach this point so altered and drawn.

Those planes on permanent alert, ever present you know, sweeping the Soviet borders, and I remember sitting out there rocking lightly at anchor in some deserted cove and feeling a sense of awe, a child’s sleepy feeling of mystery and danger and beauty. I think that is power. I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people’s sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power.

Sometimes I see something so moving I know I’m not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.

I hit the switch, lowering the windows, and saw mountains reared near Mexico, lyrical in themselves and beautifully named, whatever their names, because you can’t name a mountain badly, and I looked for a sign that would point me home.

Famous people don’t want to be told that you have a quality in common with them. It makes them think there’s something crawling in their clothes.

You maintain a shifting distance between yourself and your job. There’s a self-conscious space, a sense of formal play that is a sort of arrested panic, and maybe you show it in a forced gesture or a ritual clearing of the throat. Something out of childhood whistles through this space, a sense of games and half-made selves, but it’s not that you’re pretending to be someone else. You’re pretending to be exactly who you are. That’s the curious thing.

We felt more closely bound with Gleason in the room. He gave us the line, gave us the sure laugh, the one we needed at the end of the day.

I took her arm and led her out of the church and she was not a small woman but seemed to be dwindling, passing episodically out of flesh—she felt like rice paper under my hand.

“What do I detect?” “What do you mean?” she said. “Between you and Brian.” “What do you mean?” she said. “What do I detect? That’s what I mean.” “He makes me laugh,” she said finally. “He makes his wife laugh too. But I don’t detect anything between them.”

Arthur recited lyrics to me once on the company plane and together we laughed his wacko laugh, those enunciated ha-has, clear and slow and well spaced, like laughing with words.

In the hallways and alleys you heard the footfalls at night and must have wondered if that was Jimmy coming back. From the dead or the dark or maybe just New Jersey.

We were lighter than air, laughing, and the balloon did not seem like a piece of science so much as an improvised prayer.

“What made you think of it? This is something I’ve always wanted to do without knowing it exactly. Or knowing it but not at the level of ever making plans. You must have read my mind.”

He’s supposed to be in his room doing his homework and he’s in his room all right but he doesn’t know what his homework is supposed to be. He reads a few pages ahead in his world history book. They made history by the minute in those days.

Ivie comes in and does not look at him. She has a way of not looking at him that ought to be studied by science. That’s how good she is at doing it, sweeping the room with her look but missing him completely—a thing science ought to investigate for military use.

You look at old cars and recall a purpose, a destination.” “It’s ridiculous, isn’t it? But probably harmless too.” “Nothing is harmless,” Marvin said.

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.

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.

He looked at the scoreboard one last time. He thought finally it was an impressive thing but maybe a little funereal. It had that compact quality of preservation and exact proportion and respectful history that can produce a mood of mausoleum gloom.

“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.”

He told the caller some things about the ball. He said he would make a long story short. Then he made it long.

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.

They shook hands and exchanged the wry smile of adversaries who are enjoined from mauling each other by some inconvenience of context.

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.

“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.

Bronzini lived with his sister now, who’d never married, who sat in her room and spoke in chants, he said, of reduced informational range. Such compression. But once he’d learned to be patient with her repetitions and attenuations he began to find her presence a source of enormous comfort. A rest, he said, from his own internal rant.

two or three men, he sees them now, standing out near the left-field fence, sort of mortally posed like figures in spaghetti westerns, lean, nameless, unshaved—he didn’t think they were acquainted with the language of life expectancy.

“And you want to ask me why I’m still here. I see your mother in the market and we talk about this. We want nothing to do with this business of mourning the old streets. We’ve made our choice. We complain but we don’t mourn, we don’t grieve. There are things here, people who show the highest human qualities, outside all notice, because who comes here to see?

Nick was always the subject, ultimately. Every subject, ground down and sifted through, yielded a little Nicky, or a version of the distant adult, or the adolescent half lout looking to hit someone.

And his sister, drifting in and out of the past but knowing him always in uncanny ways, seeing straight into his unadorned heart, and he loved her for all the stammered reasons you love a sister and because she’d narrowed her life to a few remarks that he found moving.

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.

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.

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.

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.

They spoke an unfinished English, soft and muffled, insufficiently suffixed, and she wanted to drum some hard g’s into the ends of their gerunds.

She didn’t like him when he was serious. It was outside the rules.

He was not a surveillance man or gun lover. His gun was his father’s old .38. It did not have massive knockdown power and it did not shoot through concrete blocks or make fist-size holes in silhouette targets. It just killed people.

This was an untraveled road. Travel thirty miles on this road and you may not see another car. You see power lines extended to the limits of vision, sinking toward the earth as a matter of perspective. When the wind dies there’s a suspense that falls across the land and makes you think about the hush before the Judgment.

it was Matt’s endless premise, his song of songs, that our old man Jimmy was living somewhere in southern California under the usual assumed name. I told him Jimmy was dead under