Don DeLillo - Underworld

"Rugs, fabulous, the purest Persian slave labor. Arched windows, okay we're twelve stories underground but the curtain fabric was irresistible so just shut up. Dining table, plantation mahogany, eleven bottles of Lemon Pledge. Centerpiece, designed it himself, the highlight of his career. A huge mound of crabmeat carved in the shape- they're gonna love this, it's so forceful and moving-yes, Kennedy and Khrushchev wrestling in the nude. Lifesize."

And Lenny did a knee dip with his swivel, pausing to let the audience develop the image.

"All right, can't stand around admiring. They'll be down any second. The President, the Secretary of State, the Joint Chiefs, this guy, that guy, the guy with the secret codes for nuclear launch-he's a toilet-trained Jew, incidentally, so there won't be any mix-ups. Let's see now, what else? Flatware he's done, stemware he's done. After-dinner mints, let's see-do I give them the mocha or the cafe noir?"

He did the opening again, checking the line for style and fit.

"Good evening, my fellow citizens."

A stir of renewed anticipation-maybe they wanted him to pursue the presidential thing but he waved it off again and stood there sort of humming at the hips, doing a little wobble that seemed to get the next thought going.

Then he did the shrillest sort of falsetto.

" We're all gonna die !"

This cracked him up. He bent from the waist laughing and seemed to be using the mike as a geiger counter, waving it over the floorboards.

"Dig it, JFK's got this Russian man-bull staring him down, they're pizzle to pizzle, and this is a guy Jack doesn't know how to deal with.

What's he supposed to say? I shtupped more debutantes than you? This is a coal miner, he's a guy who herded farm animals barefoot for a couple of kopeks. He's been known to stick his fist up a sow's ass to fertilize his vegetable garden. What's Jack supposed to say to him-a secretary gave me a handjob on the White House elevator? This is a guy who craps with the door open on state occasions. He has sex with his bowling trophies."

The seating at the Troubadour consisted mainly of folding chairs and when enough people laughed there was a wheezy groan from the slats and hinges. And the audience sat there thinking, How real can the crisis be if we're sitting in a club on Santa Monica Boulevard going ha ha ha.

" We're all gonna die! "

Lenny loves the postexistential bent of this line. In his giddy shriek the audience can hear the obliteration of the idea of uniqueness and free choice. They can hear the replacement of human isolation by massive and unvaried ruin. His closest followers laugh the loudest. Their fan-fed vanity is gratified. They're included in Lenny's own incineration. All the Lennies. The persecuted junkie. The antihyp-ocrite. The satirist and nose picker. Lenny the hipster fink. Lenny the ass mechanic, girl-spotting in hotel lobbies. Lenny the vengeance of the Lord.

"Powerless. Understand, this is how they remind us of our basic state. They roll out a periodic crisis. Is it horizontal? One great power against the other. Or is it vertical, is it up and down?" He seemed to lose his line of argument here. "The U.S. is putting up a naval blockade. Fine, good, groovy. D'ya hear what he said?" And Lenny did his basso head of state. 'Any offensive military equipment being shipped to Cuba gets stopped dead in the water by the U.S. fleet." He jabbed at some imaginary lint on his lapel, signaling a shift, a bit. 'And there's this woman sitting out there in Centralia listening to the speech. She hears, Maximum peril. She hears, Abyss of destruction. She has a job dishing out meat patties in the school cafeteria and she comes home exhausted and turns on the TV and it's the President of the United States and he's saying, Abyss of destruction. And she sits there in her cafeteria whites, with her shoes off, picking her feet. Her name is Bitty. She's thinking they pre-empted Lawrence Welk so this Irish Catholic millionaire can talk about abyss of destruction. Then she thinks, Hey, wait, that's a movie title, right? Sure, it's one of those hard-boiled cynical crime dramas in moody black and white. I saw it with the Muscular Dystrophy Mothers of Central Kansas. The speech goes on and on and Bitty's trying to register the enormous-and the President says something about, Swift and extraordinary buildup. Soviet missiles in Cuba. But she thinks he's talking about the grease in her oven. Yeah that greasy buildup's beginning to bug me, man. She has this oven cleaner she's eager to try. Works fifty-two percent faster than the strongest industrial acid. She tries to concentrate on the President's speech but everything he's saying sounds like a pitch for insect repellent or throat spray. And Bitty's sitting there in Emporia or Centralia and she gets up out of the chair and goes to the phone and calls her friend DeeAnn. DeeAnn is the local movie expert. DeeAnn reviews movies for the cafeteria workers' newsletter, Meat Patty Week. And Bitty says into the phone, Who was in that movie the President's talking about on TV? And DeeAnn says, You're asking me about movies? At a time like this?"

Lenny bent his knees and spread both arms wide, his mouth stretched in a rictus of gaped and grinning terror.

" We're all gonna die !"

He loved this line so much it was a little unnerving, especially in DeeAnn's voice, which could shatter a urinal at fifty feet. An hour later, after all the bits, the scatological asides, the improvised voices, it was this isolated line that stayed in people's mind when they went to their cars and drove home to Westwood or Brentwood or wherever, or roamed the freeways for half the night because they knew they wouldn't be able to sleep and what better place to imagine the flash and burst, where else would they go to rehearse the end of history, or actually see it-this was the meaning of the freeways and always had been and they'd always known it at some unsounded level. And so they drove half the night, at first morose and then angry and then fatalistic and then plain shaking scared, chests tight with the knowledge of how little it would take to make the thing happen-the first night on earth when the Unthinkable crept up over the horizon line and waited in an animal squat, and all the time they drove they heard the keening of that undisguisable Jewish voice repeating the line that had made them bust their guts laughing, astonishingly, only a few hours earlier.

It was a gesture without a history

You hefted the weapon and pointed it and saw an interested smile fall across his face. But after that you were in unknown country The slyest kind of shit-eating grin. But after you forced back the trigger. The trigger pull was heavy and rough. And after you force-squeezed the trigger you were in another place, absorbing the noise and movement, the gesture, the way he jerked and fell, although jerked isn't an adequate word-it was a movement beyond your competence as a witness to understand and describe.

At Staatsburg they had the woman in the office, Dr. Lindblad, and I had regular appointments, knock-knock, and she probed the subject of the shooting while I tried to get a look at her legs.

Forget for a minute that you're the one who shot him.

You can't describe the movement properly because it was a level of reality you hadn't rehearsed, either one of you. The unhinged fling of an arm, the right arm whippy and haywire, like a part that runs amuck in a machine, and the whole body spasm, an arrhythmic thing, a thing outside the limits of experience.

You don't want to forget he was sitting in a chair. The chair moved not unlike the man. The chair could have been a version of the man, so drastic was its tumble into the wall.

And of course your own shock, the trauma of perception-how can you tell what's going on if you're in shock yourself?