Don DeLillo - Underworld

And one whole wall in one room-there was a TV wall, maybe a hundred identical sets banked floor to ceiling.

Klara and Miles stood in a corner and she'd begun detaching herself from the event long before she got here because she'd been told what it was at some point but still had to see it, whatever the level of misgiving.

The event was rare and strange. It was the screening of a bootleg copy of an eight-millimeter home movie that ran about twenty seconds. A little over twenty seconds probably. The footage was known as the Zapruder film and almost no one outside the government had seen it.

Of course the event had a cachet, an edge of special intensity But if those in attendance felt they were lucky to be here, they also knew a kind of floating fear, a mercury reading out of the sixties, with a distinctly trippy edge.

The footage started rolling in one room but not the others and it was filled with slurs and jostles, it was totally jostled footage, a home movie shot with a Super 8, and the limousine came down the street, muddied by sunglint, and the head dipped out of the frame and reappeared and then the force of the shot that killed him, unexpectedly, the headshot, and people in the room went ohh, and then the next ohh, and five seconds later the room at the back went ohh, the same release of breath every time, like blurts of disbelief, and a woman seated on the floor spun away and covered her face because it was completely new, you see, suppressed all these years, this was the famous headshot and they had to contend with the impact-aside from the fact that this was the President being shot, past the outer limits of this fact they had to contend with the impact that any high-velocity bullet of a certain lethal engineering will make on any human head, and the sheering of tissue and braincase was a terrible revelation.

And oh shit, oh god it came from the front, didn't it?

And that was the other thing, all these things in the sequence that begins with frame 313, and wouldn't you know, Miles would say later, there had to be a thirteen somewhere in the case.

She was getting backaches again and sleeping episodically and it hurt to sit in a chair sometimes. They told her to go to a yoga class. They told her about herbal teas and holistic massages.

She went to the hospital to see Jack Marshall, who was recovering from heart surgery, and she went with Esther, who thought that a hospital visit was a thing out of pharaonic antiquity, where you fixed your face and arrayed yourself sedately and you carried books, puzzles and flowers and brought along a priest to utter certain phrases.

Esther didn't seem to know what went on in hospitals and she moved at a cringing gait, leaning away from doors to patients' rooms, afraid she'd glimpse something or catch something, taking it all personally-a challenge to her remoteness from such matters.

Jack said that catheter was the ugliest word in the language.

They told her to eat whole grains, take warm baths, to see a man in Finland who did the lower back.

She went to Acey's opening, of course, in a hot new gallery uptown, in the early fall, and Acey looked sensational in a white linen suit with a sequined bandeau and the work was all breasts and heart-shaped asses, a raunchy assault in which a woman's body parts, her skintight gowns and full mouth and bazoomy tits become a kind of politics.

There was no comfort here, Klara thought. If women have a condition called incompleteness, and some recover nicely and some don't, then these paintings were flaunting it, loving it, shoving it in your face. And Acey located her arguments in composition and perspective, in the odd bodiness, the massive off-center ass, the misalignments, the relationship of breasts to body, the way Jayne came angling out of her Jaguar, all avid excess, her knees and dimpled crotch bursting out of their package.

It was a question of lines of force. Here was a woman who lived outside the bureaucratic needs of male desire, outside the detailed ceremonies and horny hands.

Acey used off-tones, flesh tones, completely nonpop, a lot of sand and amber and a beautiful burnt rose, a sunburnt strip that ran across the top of every canvas, a little sad and frayed, and all of it slightly blurry and doubled, color-xeroxed, that was the telling touch-you have copycat Jayne, the reproduced goddess, and she is all the more strong for being unoriginal.

They went to a disco somewhere and she watched Miles and Acey dance and they looked totally great together and she felt a little jealous, of course, and she still felt jealous half a minute later-not jealous but begrudging-when Acey danced with a woman.

She watched them weave and shimmer in the flashing lights and she was admiring and begrudging both, taken by the sight of them, the other woman in jeans and braided sandals, some diplomat's daughter, Klara thought, hair hung down in spiral curls, and how completely easy they were in their physical mien, a grace of a certain passing abandon, searching each other's eyes in the fever strobes, and she was stung by her reaction.

Acey's ascent, Acey's name in the air, her brash talent and sense of freedom and her self-asserting manner and how she wants it all and'll probably get it and dancing sort of striped in the lights with her jacket flying open and the music shaking the walls.

The funny thing is, Esther wasn't kidding. A priest showed up, from some actor's chapel, arranged by Esther, although Jack hadn't been to church in forty years except for midnight mass at Christmas, which he attended, as they say, religiously.

They sat around and talked about Broadway show tunes. Jack was too weak to sing or tell jokes. He was a great splayed length of pounded veal. Esther held his hand until she had to go out for a smoke. She'd stopped and started again and the priest went with her and Klara adjusted the pillow for Jack.

And when she embraced Acey at the end of the evening-it was the end of Klara's evening because the music in that place was a form of brain seizure and she had to get out fast and when she embraced Acey and told her the show was great and wished every blessing on her head, it was an experience of shadings and half meanings and an awful sort of feeling, to extend love to a friend with reluctance.

She decided to go to Los Angeles with Miles. He'd run out of money for Normal, Illinois and was trying to get financing from an Israeli gangster who lived in L.A. Or there were two men maybe, she wasn't sure, one Israeli and one gangster, and she decided she'd go. She didn't like the idea of going but she thought she'd go out of a sense of loose ends or whatever the exact state of mind-she wasn't sure of that either.

And the poet drunk on a cast-iron bench, the visiting Romanian on the roof, and how a woman no one knew shot seven rolls of film and left without a word.

In the three days she was there. She was there to small and passing purpose so it wasn't supposed to matter what she saw and heard but at some point in the three days someone mentioned the Watts Towers and Klara thought she probably ought to see this place because she'd known about the towers for years and thought maybe if there's time and then forgot about it.

At another point she got a call from New York and who was it, someone eager to read reviews of Acey's show, the first to appear, and they were bad, they were stinging and grim, and Klara called a few people who said word around town was even worse.

They spoke with controlled excitement, that tone of breathy documentary where you code your pleasure to the formal pauses.

They waited for her to respond in kind. This made her feel sleazy as hell. They waited for her to rejoice in kind, on cue, with due observance of the protocols.

That was the next-to-last day. On the last day she went to see the Watts Towers. Miles dropped her off and said he'd come by an hour later. She had no idea. She didn't know a thing so rucked in the vernacular could have such an epic quality. All she knew about the towers was that the man worked alone, an immigrant, for many years, a sort of unimaginable number of years, and used whatever objects he could forage and scrounge.