Don DeLillo - Underworld

She knew she'd hear from Miles at dinner about the secret manipulation of history, or attempts at such, or how the experts could not seem to produce a clear print of the movie, or whatever. But the movie in fact was powerfully open, it was glary and artless and completely steeped in being what it was, in being film. It carried a kind of inner life, something unconnected to the things we call phenomena. The footage seemed to advance some argument about the nature of film itself. The progress of the car down Elm Street, the movement of the film through the camera body, some sharable darkness-this was a death that seemed to rise from the streamy debris of the deep mind, it came from some night of the mind, there was some trick of film emulsion that showed the ghost of consciousness. Or so she thought to wonder. She thought to wonder if this home movie was some crude living likeness of the mind's own technology, the sort of death plot that runs in the mind, because it seemed so familiar, the footage did-it seemed a thing we might see, not see but know, a model of the nights when we are intimate with our own dying.

Someone passed her a joint, she passed it back.

On a large console the screen was split four ways and the headshot ran in every sector and, "It's outside language," Miles said, which was his way of saying far-out, or too much, or the other things they used to say, and here was an event that took place at the beginning of the sixties, seen belatedly, that now marked the conceptual end, carrying all the delirium that floated through the age, and people stood around and talked, a man and woman made out in a closet with the door open, remotely, and the pot fumes grew stronger, and people said, "Let's go eat," or whatever people say when a thing begins to be over.

It ran continuously, a man in his forties in a suit and tie, and all the sets were showing slow motion now, riding in a car with his confident wife, and the footage took on a sense of elegy, running ever slower, running down, a sense of greatness really, the car's regal gleam and the murder of some figure out of dimmest lore-a greatness, a kingliness, the terrible mist of tissue and skull, so massively slow, on Elm Street, and they got something to eat and went to the loft, where they played cards for a couple of hours and did not talk about Zapruder.

She married Carlo Strasser in his Park Avenue apartment before a justice of the peace and twenty-five friends of the couple. Carlo's daughter was there, the youngest of his three children, a beautiful spindly girl, fifteen, who lived with her mother in Brussels. It was one of those autumn days in New York. And Klara's daughter also appeared, about half an hour late but lively and bright, completely unmorose-she embraced people left and right and danced after the ceremony with Jack Marshall.

It was one of those taut autumn days. The bride wore an old brocade vest that had once been her mother's, and someone's before that, a second cousin or great-aunt, and maybe someone's before that, before America. People ate wherever they found a space, standing up or sitting primly in hall chairs, and the dancing did not last long-it wasn't meant to be a drawn-out affair.

When the guests were gone they decided to take a walk, the bride and groom and their daughters, and after a night of stiff winds the air was rinsed clean and the light was so precise that distances in the park seemed diminished. Clouds began to build, fair-weather cumulus, high-prowed and drifting. It was one of those days in Central Park when there's a distilled sense of perception, a spareness, every line firm and unredundant, and the leaves were beginning to turn, the dogwoods and sumacs, and nothing was wasted or went unseen.

How nice to be a family again, even if fleeting and incomplete, with parceled-out children and children on tight schedules and who knows when they'll all see each other next. Carlo's daughter spoke a clipped efficient English. She stuck to her father's side and followed his wagging hand to particular vistas. They could look over the treetops to the buildings on Fifth Avenue, the unbroken taupe facade, and then to the mansards and temple-tops at the western edge of the park, and Klara imagined the whistling doormen, the taxis hotfooting past-she loved the showy yellow coats of New York cabs.

It was one of those days of light and scale when everything you see has the full breadth of intention. She held Teresa's hand and talked about visits here and there, and they made promises and resolutions, they made mental notes. And how nice, how strange to be doubly paired like this, husband and wife, mother and daughter, and she saw that Carlo walked with a slight limp and was amused to think she'd never noticed- felt free to be amused, felt what the hell it's only marriage.

They walked behind a man with a wolfhound, a dog as grand as any in a vodka ad.

Klara laughed for no reason. Maybe she laughed for no reason and maybe because she'd noticed her husband had a limp. The others thought she was laughing in relief, laughing in the spirit of a swirling day, and it made them all smile benignly. They thought she was laughing in the aftermath of checking on planes that were late and hearing complaints from the caterer and finding the right receptacles for all the goddamn flowers. And finally just unwinding on a walk, they thought. Laughing in ragged relief. They thought they knew the mystery of living in her skin.

You looked at the hills and they were rolling hills that made you wonder who you were and how you got here. The hills had no more connection to your life than a calendar with a picture of hills, old rolling hills set above a river, fixed to some kitchen wall.

I sensed the river was out there somewhere, a briskness in the wind, and I took deep breaths because I was upstate and it was supposed to be healthy here.

Staatsburg was seventy-five miles from home, farther than I'd ever been, and I got settled in the dorm and took classes for a high school certificate and never missed an afternoon in the old barn where the makeshift gym was located, a boxing ring at one end and a backboard at the other.

You commit your crimes in the city and they send you upstate to take deep breaths and get a perspective on your life.

I played basketball with members of a street gang named the Alhambras after a movie theater in Harlem. They were doing nigger time, they said. They'd come up through Youth House and a number of reformat ries, raised on the felony alphabet, and we pounded up and down the floor in that dusty gym, working off the effects of our transgressions.

We were all juvies, under eighteen. I was an E-felony, criminally negligent homicide, reduced from a charge of manslaughter in the second degree, and we played game after game of half-court, going all-out and taking deep and healthy breaths and having a tussle or two.

You could fight a guy here and then forget it, leave it on the court or in the ring, because you'd already mind-whipped yourself repeatedly for what you'd done out there in the streets, whatever misfit thing of rage or bleakness or stupendous aberration, and maybe you'd reached an early maturity on the subject of running a grudge-how important it is to be selective.

When I entered correction I wanted things to make sense. I kept my bed neat, corners squared, and stacked my clothes sensibly in my cubicle.

The minute I entered correction I was a convert to the system. I went out on work crews that did road repair and I was the eagerest hand, giving myself up to the rote motions of breaking asphalt, leaky-eyed and sneezing in the ragweed brush.