Don DeLillo - Underworld

Dr. Lindblad said, "Do you think you'd like to have a family someday?"

"I don't know. Haven't thought about it. No," I said. "I don't think so. Kids? I don't want kids. I don't want to be a father."

"And why is that?"

"Why is that. I don't know. After what I've done? I don't think I should be a father. Do you?"

"What have you done, Nick?"

I smiled at her. I liked Dr. Lindblad. She wasn't good-looking but she was stacked. The Alley Boys liked her, the gang members, because she listened to their stones without making judgments. She did delicate twirling tricks with their rage and shame and sullen excuses. She did not try to get them to moderate their sense of inevitability. They were at war with society and what's the point of pretending otherwise. I didn't tell her anything but I liked going into her office and smelling the furniture wax and checking the titles of the books and scouting out the bulge of her breasts under the fabric of whatever snug blouse she was wearing that day.

One of the Alley Boys looked out the window of the mess and said, "That's a Disney picture, man." He was talking about the miniature golf course. 'And we're the dwarfs that supposed to be in it."

I wanted my correction to be consistent and strong. They'd made an attempt to try me as an adult even though I was only seventeen at the time and I agreed with their reasoning, that there was a coldblooded element in this crime whatever the shadings. When a judge ruled that the prosecution couldn't do this, they decided to try me for manslaughter and again I thought why not, considering the recklessness of the act, but my lawyer Imperato, a man with sallow jowls and a briefcase that was shedding skin, arranged a plea deal and they went for a lesser charge and now I stood looking at the golf course on a soft summer morning a few days before my release and saw that someone had painted names all over the ramparts and windmills, the nicknames of gang members, all hail the Alhambras, and the guys gawked and pointed and bent over laughing and I thought this was the time to start my round of guilty goodbyes.

Because you were the shooter and the witness both and you can separate these roles. The second was helpless to prevent the first from acting. The second could not stop the act, could not manage it and finally did not know how to perceive it. It was too down deep even as it reached his eyes, your eyes. The terrible spasticky thing, the whole groanlike abandon, the resignation of life and breath to this vehement depth of gesture, man and chair going different ways.

Dr. Lindblad might have said, "The gesture is extreme because the mind is closing down. It's the end of consciousness. So the body goes berserk. The body shows you what's happening to the mind. The way a person's grief bends the body. This is how consciousness looks. This is how it flails and thrashes when the end is sudden and violent and the mind is unprepared."

And I might have said, " You're talking about his mind, how the end is sudden, or mine?"

But she didn't say it and I didn't say it because I wasn't talking much. The Alley Boys were talking. They told her they were in a state of total war with society. They told her it would be that way until they were dead. Society wanted them dead. The Alley Boys were too smart not to know this. They told her they'd get released and go back to the street, which was another department of the penal system and vice versa, and they'd go back and do what they'd always done, they told her. They'd deal, steal, get the edge, carry the piece and pursue the conduct of the war.

The book fits the hand, it fits the individual. The way you hold a book and turn the pages, hand and eye, the rote motions of raking gravel on a hot country road, the marks on the page, the way one page is like the next but also totally different, the lives in books, the hills going green, old rolling hills that made you feel you were becoming someone else.

Dr. Lindblad tried to work my soul. She believed in my salvation. She probed all the forces in my history and she gave me books to read, and I read them, and she advanced ideas about what had happened, and I thought about them. But I didn't know if I accepted the idea that I had a history. She used that word a lot and it was hard for me to imagine that all the scuffle and boredom of those years, the crisscross boredom and good times and flare-ups and sameshit nights-I didn't understand how the streaky blur in my nighttime mind could have some sort of form and coherence. Maybe there was a history in her files but the thing I felt about myself was that I'd leaned against a wall in a narrow street serving out some years of mostly aimless waiting.

But you felt some things, didn't you? You felt the strange fascination of his dying fall, so crazy-armed and unmade-up that you didn't know how to look at it.

She told me that my father was the third person in the room the day I shot George Manza. This was frankly news to me and I sort of half laughed-you know the way you snicker a nervous draft of air down your nostrils. She told me that one way or another the two events were connected, meaning that six years after Jimmy disappeared I shot a guy who didn't know my father, or barely knew him, or saw him on the street a few times, and this was a link she wanted to probe.

"You have a history," she said, "that you are responsible to."

"What do you mean by responsible to?"

"You're responsible to it. You're answerable. You're required to try to make sense of it. You owe it your complete attention."

She kept talking about history in her tight blouse. But all I saw was the crazy-armed man, his body spinning one way, the chair going another. And all I saw was the rough slur of those narrow streets, the streets going narrower all the time, collapsing in on themselves, and the dumb sad sameness of the days.

Then they came and told me I'd be getting an early release, unexpectedly, one summer day. I wasn't sure how I felt about this. They told me they were sending me to the Jesuits, at the wintry end of the world, somewhere near a lake in Minnesota.

The Demings were home this afternoon, busy at various tasks in their split-level suburban house, a long low two-tone colonial with a picture window, a breezeway and bright siding.

Erica was in the kitchen making Jell-O chicken mousse for dinner. Three cups chicken broth or three chicken bouillon cubes dissolved in three cups boiling water. Two packages Jell-O lemon gelatin. One teaspoon salt. One-eighth teaspoon cayenne. Three tablespoons vinegar. One and a third cups whipped topping mix. Two-thirds cup mayonnaise. Two cups finely diced cooked chicken. Two cups finely chopped celery. Two tablespoons chopped pimiento.

Then boil and pour and stir and blend. Fold spiced and chilled gelatin into chicken thing. Spoon into 9x5-inch loaf pan. Chill until firm. Unmold. Garnish with crisp lettuce and stuffed olives (if desired). Makes six entree salads.

Do not reuse this bottle for storing liquids.

Erica did things with Jell-O that took people's breath away. Even now, as she prepared the chicken mousse for final chilling, there were nine parfait glasses in the two-tone Kelvinator. This was dessert for the next three evenings. Each glass was tilted at a forty-five-degree angle either against the wall of the refrigerator or against another object. This tilting method, handed down from her grandmother and her mother, allowed Erica to do Jell-O desserts in a number of colorful diagonal stripes, working the combinations among half a dozen flavors. She might put black raspberry Jell-O, slightly thickened, into a parfait glass. She puts the glass in the fridge, tilting it at forty-five degrees. After the gelatin chills and fully thickens she folds in a swathe of lime Jell-O, and then maybe orange, and then strawberry or strawberry-banana. At the end of the process she has nine multistriped desserts, all different, all so vividly attractive.