Don DeLillo - Underworld

"What am I talking about, Janet?"

"You tell me," she said.

He kept his eyes on the rutted track and didn't say a word. Acacia slapped and twanged on the windshield and doors. They both watched the track.

There was a structure about two hundred yards ahead, concrete and bunkerlike, sand-streaked, with slit windows and brambly growth edging up the walls.

It was nearly sundown and they decided to camp nearby. There was something irresistible about the building, of course, even an unyielding ruin such as this, slabbed private and tight. It stood alone here, with mountains behind it, and carried the tilted lyric of a misplaced object, like some prairie drive-in shut down for years with the audio hookups all askew and the huge screen facing blankly toward a cornfield. It's the kind of human junk that deepens the landscape, makes it sadder and lonelier and places a vague sad subjective regret at the edge of your response-not regret so much as a sense of time's own esthetic, how strange and still and beautiful a chunk of concrete can be, lived in fleetingly and abandoned, the soul of wilderness signed by men and women passing through.

"I'd rather sleep in there," Janet said, "than do the tent again."

There were two slab doors sealed tight and the windows were narrow and high but they went around the back and found an opening at waist height and climbed inside. After all the choppy hours they'd put in, jeep-weaving over rubblestone and sand, the place seemed homey enough. A table, a few chairs, some nude calendars on the wall and a couple of shelves filled with canned food, utensils, safety matches and old magazines.

Matt thought the bunker might have been constructed to accommodate spotters during exercises, a couple of ordnance guys helicoptered in to check firing accuracy, retrieve tow targets and possibly mark the location of unexploded rockets and bombs.

Back outside he started a charcoal fire and they ate quickly and unconversationally and scraped the makings and remains into a plastic bag and stowed it in the jeep because they didn't know what else to do with it.

They carried their camp bags into the bunker and undressed in the moonlight. Janet sat on the nylon shell, one leg flat, one flexed, and she leaned back like a sunbather at lunch break on the library steps. He approached and lowered himself and felt the sun on her body, the residue of deep heat transferred to his hands and mouth and the way their bodies exchanged a sense of the day and the land, all the heat and blowing dust heavy on their breath, tasted again, fingertipped and felt and smelled.

But the act was melancholy and slightly odd, it was calm and sweet and loving but also odd and slightly resigned and they lay together without speaking for a long time afterward.

"I think we ought to turn back in the morning."

"Why?" she said. "We came this far."

"I think we've seen everything there is to see, pretty much."

"You haven't seen the bighorns."

"I don't need to see the bighorns. I don't need to see the prong-horns either, There are pronghorns out there, antelope."

"You barely saw the eagle."

"I saw the eagle."

"From a distance, barely, in its nest," she said.

"The eagle was great. The eagle met every expectation."

She slept, he did not.

He finally told himself the truth, that he'd wanted her to talk him out of his job. This was the question he'd been asking all along. Aren't you going to tell me that you don't want me to do this kind of work, for your sake, and the baby we'll have, and the home we'll own someday?

But Janet did not cooperate.

He understood this finally, that he'd wanted her to think he was making a sacrifice, leaving the Pocket for wife and child. He'd wanted her to say, Come to Boston and marry me.

But Janet did not say it.

He wasn't made for this kind of work. He wanted to leave the job but he didn't want to do it himself. He wanted her to do it for him.

But Janet did not do it. And she knew all along what was in his heart. And she had no patience with his arias of the unreal. Whatever we're doing in secret, she'd say, they're doing something worse.

The wind drove out of the east from time to time and he heard an animal near the jeep, going for the garbage.

No, he was not a weaponeer. But that wasn't the point. He'd wanted her to feel responsible, and guilty, for making him change his life. What an edge that would give him in the years to come.

At Army Intelligence School he did double shifts of classwork, surrounded every edgy minute by combat analysts, language experts, counterintelligence guys snooping out drug use, by agent trainees on simulated missions, a spook for every body function.

They sent him to Vietnam, to Phu Bai, and the first thing he saw when he entered the compound was a flourish of spray-paint graffiti on the wall of a supply shed. Om manipadme hum . Matt knew this was some kind of mantra, a thing hippies chanted in Central Park, but could it also be the motto of the 131st Aviation Company?

From this point on he had trouble with the input.

He worked in a quonset hut, cranking rolls of film across a light box. This was the take from aerial recon, an endless series of images sucked up by the belly cameras of surveillance planes. It was all about lost information, how to recover the minutest unit of data and identify it as a truck driven by a man smoking a French cigarette, going down the Ho Chi Minh trail.

He tossed a frisbee to a gook dog and watched the animal leap and twist.

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.

Matt was a spec 5, the same pay grade as a sergeant but less command authority. That was okay with him.

The rocket attacks were not okay, or the mortar rounds that came arcing down out of the rain.

The rains came and the sirens sounded and he went to the nearest entrenchment, a shelter put together with sandbags and construction debris, with an open sewer running through.

The heat and heroin came and there was the odd body found facedown in the muddy company street, a casualty of smack.

Someone hung a photo of Nixon in the quonset hut, two men flanking him, familiar somehow but unrecallable, and there were rumors about a substance stored in black drums near the perimeter of the compound.

In the movie version you'd freeze the frame with the dog in midleap about to snare the frisbee. A park on a summer's day somewhere in America -that would be the irony of the shot, with a solo guitar producing the bitter screech of feedback.

This is what happens when part of a system's output is returned to the input.

Yes, someone tacked up a magazine page and Matt could not quite identify the two men who flanked the President but they weren't politicians or corporation heads. A curly-haired man, handsome and smiling. And a sad-eyed guy with a honker nose and the leaden aspect of an immigrant in a borrowed suit.

He cranked the film across the light box. When he found a dot on the film he tried to make a determination. It was a truck or a truck stop or a tunnel entrance or a gun emplacement or a family grilling burgers at a picnic.

It was hot and monotonous and planes came and went all the time, gunships, transports, medium bombers, stratotankers, fighter jets, executive jets, a little pink Piper carrying an instructor and a student and finally converted cargo planes spraying the jungles with a herbicide stored in black drums that had identifying orange stripes.

There were rumors about whole other wars, just to the east, or was it west?

The drums resembled cans of frozen Minute Maid enlarged by a crazed strain of DNA. And the substance in the drums contained, so the rumor went, a cancer-causing agent.