Underworld

by Don DeLillo

Civilization did not rise and flourish as men hammered out hunting scenes on bronze gates and whispered philosophy under the stars, with garbage as a noisome offshoot, swept away and forgotten. No, garbage rose first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense. We had to find ways to discard our waste, to use what we couldn’t discard, to reprocess what we couldn’t use. Garbage pushed back. It mounted and spread. And it forced us to develop the logic and rigor that would lead to systematic investigations of reality, to science, art, music, mathematics.

Consume or die. That’s the mandate of the culture. And it all ends up in the dump. We make stupendous amounts of garbage, then we react to it, not only technologically but in our hearts and minds. We let it shape us. We let it control our thinking. Garbage comes first, then we build a system to deal with it.”

“Sex is what you can get. For some people, most people, it’s the most important thing they can get without being born rich or smart or stealing. This is what life can give you that’s equal to others or better, even, that you don’t have to go to college six years to get. And it’s not religion and it’s not science but you can explore it and learn things about yourself.”

The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.

She wanted Japanese but that wasn’t enough. They had to go to a place where the guidebook said tatami seating. Marvin thought if he lived all his life for a hundred years before meeting Eleanor, he would have done the same three or four things in the same order every day and as soon as he met Eleanor, at the age of a hundred and one, he would be sitting on the floor to eat seaweed.

I’ve got a knot in my leg a cannibal would spit it out.”

The ball brought no luck, good or bad. It was an object passing through. But it inspired people to tell him things, to entrust family secrets and unbreathable personal tales, emit heartful sobs onto his shoulder. Because they knew he was their what, their medium of release. Their stories would be exalted, absorbed by something larger, the long arching journey of the baseball itself and his own cockeyed march through the decades.

“True. My situation is even more unreal than yours. At least you move about. I sit here with my crumbling paper. There’s a poetic revenge in all this.” “What revenge?” A hummingbird’s breath of a smile brushed across Tommy’s lips. “The revenge of popular culture on those who take it too seriously.”

How can I not be serious? What’s not to be serious about? What could I take more seriously than this? And what’s the point of waking up in the morning if you don’t try to match the enormousness of the known forces in the world with something powerful in your own life?

Jeff was two years younger, he was six and liked to curl in a corner of the backseat, curl and twist, slide toward the floor in an astral separation from everything around him, using his body to daydream.

When we disliked each other, usually after an evening out, driving home, feeling routinely sick of the other’s face and voice, down to intonation, down to the sparest nuance of gesture because you’ve seen it a thousand times and it tells you far too much for all its thrift, tells you everything, in fact, that’s wrong—when we experienced this, Marian and I, we thought it was because we’d exhausted our meaning, the force that drives the alliance. Evenings out were a provocation. But we hadn’t exhausted anything really—there were things unspent and untold and left hanging and this is where Marian felt denied.

Antoine puts the vehicle in motion. He drives steady and unfazed, pointing the car up Broadway like a poison dart.

But the laps were more effective when she was busy on a project. She didn’t love swimming nearly so much when she was idle. The laps were an attachment to rigorous work, the interval that completes the octave.

“But will we actually be able to sit through it?” Esther said. “Or is it one of those things where we have to be reverent because we’re in the presence of greatness but we’re really all sitting there determined to be the first ones out the door so we can get a taxi.” “You’re thinking of theater,” Miles said. “This is film.”

When Nick dies a team of metaphysicians will examine the black box, the personal flight recorder that’s designed to tell them how his mind worked and why he did what he did and what he thought about it all, but there’s no guarantee they’ll find the slightest clue.

Janet didn’t know how to look at the desert. She seemed to resent it in some obscure personal way. It was too big, too empty, it had the audacity to be real.

There were rumors about a secret war, bombs in unnumbered tons dropped from B-52s. Laos, Chaos, Cambodia. Except the tons were not unnumbered but conscientiously counted because this is how we earn our stripes, by quantifying the product.

“You worry too much,” Acey said. “You worry about the work you’re not doing because you feel deeply obliged to justify. I think you’re always justifying in your mind. And you also worry about the work you’ve done because considering what you gave up and took away, considering the damage you caused, if we tell it like it is, child, you need to convince yourself your work is good enough to justify this.”

And there’s Yankel saying, the Israeli with the bankroll, Some people fake their death, I’m faking my life.

I believed in the stern logic of correction. I did my study assignments every night and pounded the floor and pounded the boards in the old gym, good riddance to bad beginnings, blood beginnings, and I was ready for this, hammering hard surfaces on some country road in the julepy haze of a midsummer day, feeling the dead soul slowly drain out of me, the sedimentary stuff of who I was, gone in the dancing air of insects and pollen.

In the gym that day we played half-court with our customary combat skills, hacking the shooter, wheeling off the boards with elbows jutting, but the intensity wasn’t there and the game stopped cold a couple of times so the players could talk about the escape. They cracked jokes and bent over laughing but I thought the joke was on us. We weren’t worth much if the system designed to contain us kept breaking down.

The man looked into the audience, stroking his chin, body set in a hipster slouch, and he wore a charcoal suit, continental cut, with natural shoulders and half lapels, and a dark slim knit tie, and that New York Levantine look—yes, this was the infamous sick comic, Lenny Bruce, and they waited for him to tell them how they felt.

The seating at the Troubadour consisted mainly of folding chairs and when enough people laughed there was a wheezy groan from the slats and hinges. And the audience sat there thinking, How real can the crisis be if we’re sitting in a club on Santa Monica Boulevard going ha ha ha.

Maybe there was a history in her files but the thing I felt about myself was that I’d leaned against a wall in a narrow street serving out some years of mostly aimless waiting. But you felt some things, didn’t you? You felt the strange fascination of his dying fall, so crazy-armed and unmade-up that you didn’t know how to look at it.

One of Erica’s favorite words in the language was breezeway. It spoke of ease and breeze and being contemporary and having something others did not. Another word she loved was crisper. The Kelvinator had a nice roomy crisper and she liked to tell the men that such-and-such was in the crisper. Not the refrigerator, the crisper. The carrots are in the crisper, Rick. There were people out there on the Old Farm Road, where the front porches sag badly and the grass goes unmowed and the Duck River Baptists worship in a squat building that sits in the weeds on the way to the dump, who didn’t know what a crisper was, who had iceboxes instead of refrigerators, or who had refrigerators that lacked crispers, or who had crispers in their refrigerators but didn’t know what they were for or what they were called, who put tubs of butter in the crisper instead of lettuce, or eggs instead of carrots. He came in from the breezeway. “The carrots are in the crisper, Rick.”

“What are you reading?” I recited a list. “You understand what’s in those books?” “No,” I said. Again he smiled. I think he was tired of gifted kids. He’d done work with boys of advanced standing and now he wanted to talk to misfits of the other kind, the ones who’d made trouble for themselves and others.

It was the end of the world in triplicate.

The dossier was a deeper form of truth, transcending facts and actuality. The second you placed an item in the file, a fuzzy photograph, an unfounded rumor, it became promiscuously true. It was a truth without authority and therefore incontestable.

It looked as if something had happened in the night to change the rules of what is thinkable.

knowing what she knew, that she needed outside forces to counteract her tendencies.

There was a silence at the other end that she could not read. A telephone silence can be hard to read, grim and deep and sometimes unsettling. You don’t have the softening aspect of the eyes or even the lookaway glance while he ponders. There’s nothing in the silence but the deep distance between you.

What are you drinking?” “What are you drinking?” “Don’t ask,” he said. “That’s what I’ll have.”

Lenny was their diamond cutter, their cool doomed master of uncommon truth.

The old material was making him feel bad. And the laughs were worse than the jokes.

But he was delighted. He was getting George to talk. How children adapt to available surfaces, using curbstones, stoops and manhole covers. How they take the pockmarked world and turn a delicate inversion, making something brainy and rule-bound and smooth, and then spend the rest of their lives trying to repeat the process.

“I have respect for people that can play that game. When I think to myself this kid is how old.” “I try not to lose sight of that very thing, George.” “I hear he beats experienced players. This could be good or bad. Not that I’m the expert here. But I’m thinking maybe he should be in the street with these other kids.” “The street is not ready for Matty.”

He watched a boy playing handball against himself, hitting Chinese killers. The hi-bounce rubber ball, the pink spaldeen, rapping back from the brick facade. And the fullness of a moment in the play street. Unable to imagine you will ever advance past the pencil line on the kitchen wall your mother has drawn to mark your height.

He was wondering about being it. This was one of those questions that he tortured himself deliciously with. Another player tags you and you’re it. What exactly does this mean? Beyond being neutered. You are nameless and bedeviled. It. The evil one whose name is too potent to be spoken. Or is the term just a cockney pronunciation of hit? When you tag someone, you hit her. You’re ’it, missy. Cockney or Scots or something.

A fearsome power in the term because it makes you separate from the others. You flee the tag, the telling touch. But once you’re it, name-shorn, neither boy nor girl, you’re the one who must be feared. You’re the dark power in the street. And you feel a kind of demonry, chasing the players, trying to put your skelly-bone hand on them, to spread your taint, your curse. Speak the syllable slowly if you can. A whisper of death perhaps.

“It’s not the work. It’s the regular hours,” Nick said. “Going in the same time every day. Clocking in, taking the train. It’s the train. Going in together. Coming home together.” “You’re better than that.” “I’m better, I’m worse, what’s the difference.”

They watched the shoemaker think. Like watching a bulldog take a crap.

She heard the women talk about making gravy, speaking to a husband or child, and Rosemary understood the significance of this. It meant, Don’t you dare come home late. It meant, This is serious so pay attention. It was a special summons, a call to family duty. The pleasure, yes, of familiar food, the whole history of food, the history of eating, the garlicky smack and tang. But there was also a duty, a requirement. The family requires the presence of every member tonight. Because the family was an art to these people and the dinner table was the place it found expression.

There was less of her now and more of other people. She was becoming other people. Maybe that’s why they called her Rose.

“You wouldn’t think of saving me a drag, would you, on that cigarette?” She looked at him, taking in the question. “Hate to ask,” he said. She looked at him, taking in the damp shirt and scuffed dungarees, the way he held the crate at belly level, forearms veined beneath the rolled sleeves. “One drag could mean the difference,” he said, “between life and death.” She said, “In which direction?” He smiled and looked away. Then he looked at her and said, “When you need a smoke, does it matter?”

Like childhood, he thought. Those bedridden days when he was islanded in sheets and pillows, surrounded by books, by chess pieces, deliciously sick at times, a fever that sent him inward, sea-sweats and dreams with runny colors, lonely but not unhappy, the room a world, the safe place of imagination.

“I’m prepared to be very open about this but I think we need to reconsider the timing,” he says. I lean over, the plate in my left hand, and I cuff him with the right. I throw a right, openhanded because we’re being open about this,

I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.

And what do you remember, finally, when everyone has gone home and the streets are empty of devotion and hope, swept by river wind? Is the memory thin and bitter and does it shame you with its fundamental untruth—all nuance and wishful silhouette? Or does the power of transcendence linger, the sense of an event that violates natural forces, something holy that throbs on the hot horizon, the vision you crave because you need a sign to stand against your doubt?

And Sister begins to sense the byshadows that stretch from the awe of a central event. How the intersecting systems help pull us apart, leaving us vague, drained, docile, soft in our inner discourse, willing to be shaped, to be overwhelmed—easy retreats, half beliefs.

It may be that the call for a new structure, for a vault forward in time, simply came to me out of a subchamber in the mind, the novelist’s mind, forever asprawl with scraps, schemes, needs, greeds and the hope of living long enough to finish writing the book that’s killing him.