Don DeLillo - Underworld

Now there is a search party on the prowl, men on horseback strung out across the plain. They recapture some of the fugitives, they shackle and march them in somber lockstep, in tired mindless versions of the stage routines, and Klara saw it retrospectively, how the Rockettes had prefigured this, only it wasn't funny anymore, and they bare the faces of those who are still hooded, and the shots begin to engage a rhythm, long shot and close-up, landscape and face, waves of hypnotic repetition, and the music describes a kind of destiny, a brutish fate that bass-drums down the decades.

Klara was moved by the beauty and harshness of the scenes. You could feel a sense of character emerge from each rough unhooding, a life inside the eyes, a textured set of experiences, and an understanding seemed to travel through the audience, conveyed row by row in that mysterious telemetry of crowds. Or maybe not so mysterious.

This is a film about Us and Them, isn't it?

They can say who they are, you have to lie. They control the language, you have to improvise and dissemble. They establish the limits of your existence. And the camp elements of the program, the choreography and some of the music, now tended to resemble sneak attacks on the dominant culture.

You try to imagine Eisenstein in the underground of bisexual Berlin, forty-five years ago, with his domed head and somewhat stunted limbs, hair springing from his scalp in clownish tufts, a man with bourgeois scruples and a gift for sublimation, and here he is in the Kit Kat or the Bow Wow, seamy heated cellars unthinkable in Moscow, and he's dishing Hollywood gossip with men in drag.

I'm terribly fond of Judy Garland, he once said.

But you don't want to be too modishly knowing, do you? He was a dynamo of ideas and ambitious projects but it isn't clear that he had the sexual resolve to realize actual contact with either men or women.

Look at the figures in long shot on the low smoky line of the plain.

All Eisenstein wants you to see, in the end, are the contradictions of being. You look at the faces on the screen and you see the mutilated yearning, the inner divisions of people and systems, and how forces will clash and fasten, compelling the swerve from evenness that marks a thing lastingly

You realize the orchestra has been silent for a time. All hoods removed, members of the expedition plodding in endless matching step, trailed by distempered dogs oozing from the eyes. Then you hear the melody again, one more time, the familiar march from Prokofiev, not the mock-heroic organ but full orchestra now, and the pitch is very different, forget the amusing radio reminiscence, it is all vigilance and suppression, the FBI in peace and war and day and night, your own white-collar cohort of the law.

The march lasted only a minute and a half but how dark and strong, what fatedness in the rolling brass, and then there was a long silence and a white screen and finally a face that transfigures itself in a series of multiple-exposure shots, losing its goiters and gnarls, a seamed eye reopening, and it was awfully mawkish, okay, but wonderful also, a sequence that occurred outside the action proper, a distinct and visible wish connecting you directly to the mind of the film, and the man sheds his marks and scars and seems to grow younger and paler until the face finally dissolves into landscape.

The orchestra began to rise into the pit and the music now was Shostakovich, you are sure of this, how spacious and skysome, lyrically wheeling, bird-wheeling over the wide plain.

Then it ended. It didn't end, it just stopped dead. A landscape of foreground dogs and distant figures leaning to their march. Klara remained in her seat, you all did, and she felt a curious loss, that thing you used to feel as a child when you walked out of a movie house in the middle of the day and the streets were all agitation and nasty glare, every surface intense and jarring, people in loud clothing that did not fit.

Miles showed up and they went to a bar that Jack knew. Jack knew all the midtown bars, he knew the steak houses and the best cheesecake and where you got onion soup that makes you think you're in Les Halles and he told funny stories about his early days in the theater district, flacking shows up and down the street, but Klara wasn't listening.

The film was printed on her mind in jits and weaves. She felt she was wearing the film instead of a skirt and blouse. She heard Esther laugh and it sounded like someone in a room three rooms away. Miles told a story that required her to join in but she couldn't get the details straight. She smiled and drank her wine. The conversation was over there somewhere. She kept seeing snatched fragments. She saw the marked faces in the great landscape. She had the movie all around her, sitting in a bar under walls of white neon beating in the Broadway heat.

In cities you build a language of circumspection and tact, a thousand little intimations, the nuance that has a shimmer of rubbed bronze. Then you go to the wilderness and become undone, lapsing into babble, eating mushroom caps that implode your brain, that make you preternaturally aware and afraid, turn you into an Aztec bird.

Matt Shay sat in the terminal at the airport in Tucson and listened to announcements bouncing off the walls.

He was thinking about his paranoid episode at the bombhead party the night before. He felt he'd glimpsed some horrific system of connections in which you can't tell the difference between one thing and another, between a soup can and a car bomb, because they are made by the same people in the same way and ultimately refer to the same thing.

There was a garbage strike in New York.

There was a man being paged known only as Jack.

A woman with an accent said to someone seated next to her, "I so-call fell in love with him the day he paint my walls."

There was a man in a wheelchair eating a burrito.

He sat waiting for Janet's plane to be announced. He wondered if this might be a good time to call his brother. Nick was living in Phoenix now, doing some vague consulting work and teaching Latin once a week at a junior college.

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.

Reciting Latin epigrams to business majors in a place called Paradise Valley.

Matt took off his glasses and blew on the lenses, his mouth worked into a whispery ellipse, and then he ran his handkerchief over the steamy surface and held the glasses to the light.

Whenever the ambient voice asked someone to pick up the white courtesy phone, a small girl made a fist and spoke into it.

He put his glasses on. Janet came out of the gate and he laughed when he saw her. Laughed in sheer and healthy delight, in relief that she was finally here and in physical anticipation as well, and he laughed at the shambles they were going to make of the camping trip they were taking and he laughed in the end because he couldn't help it. He was woozy from the long day's drive and didn't have the strength to keep from laughing.

Janet walked briskly toward him wearing a slightly twisted grin, the one that meant she wasn't completely sure what she was doing here.

"The captain said it's a hundred and four."

"Should I call Nick?"

"What for? It was seventy-two in Boston."

"He's right up the road. It seems dumb not to call."

"There's a garbage strike in New York," she said.

He was woozy from driving and she was numbed by confinement and engine noise. They went to the parking area and crammed her bags into the jeep. The jeep was brimful, a consumer cartoon bulging with equipment, clothing, luggage and books,