Don DeLillo - Underworld

He heard the rumors and the mortars and felt the monsoon heat and heard the universal slogan of the war.

Stay stoned, man.

He'd wanted to come to Vietnam. He'd been back and forth in his mind about the war but thought this was a thing he had to do, a form of self-reckoning-stay straight, be brave, answer when your country calls. But there was also something else, the older blood-borne force known as family.

He could not evade the sense of responsibility. It was there to be confronted. He did not want to slip away, sneak through, get off cheap, dodge, desert, resist, chicken out, turn tail, flee to Canada, Sweden or San Francisco, as his old man had done.

When he found a dot on the film he translated it into letters, numbers, coordinates, grids and entire systems of knowledge.

Om mani padme hum.

In fact the dog didn't leap at all but only watched the frisbee sail past, more or less disdainfully.

A dot was a visual mantra, an object that had no properties except location.

The jewel in the heart of the lotus.

He was in his sleeping bag but wasn't asleep. He wanted company and woke up Janet. He stuck his arm out of the bag and reached over and shook her awake.

"I want the same things you want."

"All right, Matthew."

"I want us to be surrounded by familiar things. I'm excited about it. I want to start right away."

"You ought to wait. Stay where you are. Work for another year at this job. See what happens," she said.

"I want to think up nicknames for our children. Do you know what I mean? I want us to be surrounded. I want photographs, silverware, things well pass on some day. I want to talk about what we're having for dinner. You like baked clams? We've barely ever talked about food, you and I."

"Stay where you are," she told him. "Don't do anything in a hurry."

"I'm excited about this. I wish it wasn't going to take so long to get out of here. I'd like to start driving basically right now."

"Go to sleep," she told him.

"There are so many things to talk about."

She was asleep inside a minute. Matt lay there helpless against his racing mind. He understood finally that he wouldn't be able to sleep and he decided to watch the sun come up over the desert.

He put on his pants and a sweater and went out behind the bunker about fifty yards, where he switched off the flashlight.

Then he sat in the dirt and waited.

He remembered how he'd felt sitting in a chair at the bombhead party, locked in a gravitational field, his head buzzing with suspicion.

He thought of the photograph of Nixon and wondered if the state had taken on the paranoia of the individual or was it the other way around.

He remembered how he felt cranking film across the light box and wondering where the dots connected.

Because everything connects in the end, or only seems to, or seems to only because it does.

At the light box he was a parody of the traditional figure in the basement room, the lone inventor stooped over his worktable, piecing together the pins, springs and wires of some eccentric contraption, the lightbulb idea that would change the world.

And the voice with the Hungarian accent, Eric Deming speaking into his face in the crowded room.

The dots on the film might have been trucks going down the supply route or new model cars coming off the line or condoms that look like fingers on a latex glove.

And someone in the quonset hut had to tell him who they were. Nixon flanked by a couple of ballplayers, old-time guys, a winner-loser sort of thing, joined at the hip for life.

He sat in the dust with his eyes closed and smelled the wet resin of a creosote bush and began to sense light about to break somewhere.

People hide in their basement rooms. They take to the bunkers and tunnels as weapons roll identically off the line and begin to light up the sky.

And how can you tell the difference between orange juice and agent orange if the same massive system connects them at levels outside your comprehension?

And how can you tell if this is true when you're already systemed under, prepared to half believe everything because this is the only intelligent response?

People hide in dark dank places, where mushrooms grow, sprouting quickly.

The dots he marked with his grease pencil became computer bits in Da Nang, Sunday brunch in Saigon and mission briefings in Thailand, he guessed, or Guam.

When you alter a single minor component, the system adapts at once.

Somebody had to give him the names. The president flanked by Thomson and Branca, Bobby and Ralph, the binary hero-goat inseparable to the end.

A mushroom with a fleshy cap that might be poisonous or magical. In Siberia somewhere the shamans ate the cap and were born again. What did they see in their trance state? Was it a cloud shaped like a mushroom?

He was in the Pocket even then, cranking film all night long, waiting for the mortar rounds to come raining down. They made a crunch like a kid eating cereal on TV

And how can you tell the difference between syringes and missiles if you've become so pliant, ready to half believe everything and to fix conviction in nothing?

And how can you know if the image existed before the bomb was invented? There may have been an underworld of images known only to tribal priests, mediums between visible reality and the spirit world, and they popped magic mushrooms and saw a fiery cloud that predated the image on the U.S. Army training film.

Watched from a safe distance, says the narrator, this explosion is one of the most beautiful sights ever seen by man.

He was in the Pocket even then, in a way, but did not think along the systems track to the culmination of his tedious little labors. The thousand-pound bombs clustering out of the bays of B-52s like finned pellets of excrement, cratering the jungle trail.

But they were the enemy so what the hell.

And they're the enemy still, or someone is, and he opened his eyes and saw the sky go an odd sort of mad granny gray.

Ideas used to come from below. Now they're everywhere above you, connecting things and grids universally.

The binary black-white yes-no zero-one hero-goat.

And the two men flanking the president in the photo tacked up on the quonset wall. The tallish handsome fellow and the bushy-browed immigrant. Could just as easily be Oppenheimer and Teller, their bodies greased with suntan oil as they quote Hindu scriptures to each other.

Om does not rhyme with bomb. It only looks that way.

Death and magic, that's the mushroom. Or death and immortal life. Psilocybin is a compound obtained from a Mexican mushroom that can turn your soul into fissionable material, according to scholars of the phenomenon.

They are everywhere at the same time, endlessly connected, and you half believe the most implausible things because you'd be stupid not to.

All technology refers to the bomb.

He sat in the dust with his eyes opened and realized the sun was rising behind him and wondered what this meant.

It meant he'd been facing in the wrong direction all along.

Matt drove the jeep, Janet drowsed next to him, drowsed a while and got bounced awake and nodded off again.

He felt good, clear-minded, he drove and thought, he saw everything, he identified plants without the book.

The sun was still very low and the track would take them right into it for a time before veering gradually north.

He saw the rubble turn to sand.

He saw the silty limestone bottoms of dried-out creeks that paralleled the track.

He heard the wing-whir of mourning doves breaking out of the bush.

He saw a dust devil on a level stretch of desert doing slow-motion spirals.

There was an odd charged pause.

Then the roar descended on them, so close it stopped his blood, and Janet grabbed an arm. No, first she fell against him, knocked sideways by the force of the noise, a flat cracking boom, and then she snatched his arm and missed and grabbed again. He sat there with his head hammered into his shoulders. The jeep left the track but he freed his arm from Janet's clutch and steered it back. He realized his other arm was raised just over his head, curled above him in defense.