Don DeLillo - Underworld

The woman on the porch felt the air burning and went inside and the men went inside with her. Young men went running past, students and marchers, and one of them stopped long enough to fling a bottle the other way.

The gas, called CS, made people dizzy almost: at once and caused a stinging on the body where the skin was moist.

Rosie smelled the gas, she tasted it before she saw it. A trooper had a man bent over the trunk of the cruiser, in an armlock, and another trooper stood nearby holding two shotguns, his own and his partner's who had the armlock on the marcher.

The armored van moved slowly through the streets, searchlights swiveling on the roof.

The church was filling up with people trying to escape the gas, which rolled through the alleys off Lynch Street in Jackson, Mississippi on a muggy summer night with radios playing and children standing at the windows of shotgun shacks, watching men run through the dark.

Rosie started running. She saw the cop beating the man methodically, three, four blows and then a pause, and she started running toward them.

The gas had a radiance, a night glow, and the men in insect masks came walking out of the cloud, alive and bright.

The man who'd rolled up the windows of the car, a sixty-year-old in a white shirt and straw hat, proceeded to walk down the unpaved street toward his house, tasting the gas and putting his hat over his face and accidentally kicking a pop bottle someone had thrown, lying unbroken in the dust.

She watched the cop strike the man on the head and arms, three, four blows with his billy club and then a pause, and she pushed through a couple of sawhorses and ran directly toward them, feeling fast and light and unstoppable.

The gas rolled through the streets in tides and drifts, narrowing down alleys and fitting into confined spaces.

She had no idea what she planned to do when she got there, about four seconds from now.

Charles Wainwright was on the phone to a client in Omaha, soothing, stroking, joking, making promises he could not keep. He felt a measure of detachment from the matters at hand, his eyes slightly aswim in the agreeable yield of a long liquid lunch.

He heard himself saying, "Off the top of my head I would estimate, Dwayne, well be able to present this campaign, timewise, in four and a half weeks. Four weeks minimum. We just switched our best art director to the account. Three weeks with heavenly intervention. God keeps an apartment in New York , incidentally, because this is a swinging town. Seriously, the guy's an award-winning art director and he's in his office right now doing roughs."

Just then Pasqualini, the art director, stuck his head in the door.

"What is death?" he said.

Wainwright smiled and shrugged.

"Nature's way of telling you to slow down."

Charlie tossed his head to indicate laughter and Pasqualini headed down the hall to tell the joke to some of the other senior account men, Charlie's peers, the guys with the snap tab collars and chromium smiles-they drank gibsons straight up and said, Thanks much.

In fact Charlie thought the joke was beautifully suited to these surroundings. In the Times every morning, wasn't it a fact that the obits and the ad column tended to appear on facing pages?

Charles Wainwright was an account supervisor at Parmelee Lock-hart amp; Keown, a medium-sized agency located in the Fred F French Building on Fifth Avenue in New York .

The shop had suffered a few setbacks lately. And every time an account went walking out the door, a hush fell over the carpeted halls. People stood in line at the coffee wagons, holding their poignant mugs. The jokes they told had a bitter edge. Executives made phone calls behind closed doors. The pasteup boys sat in the bullpen with the radio off and the lights down low. Copywriters took three-hour lunches and came back stinko. They sat in their cubicles and stared at memos pinned to the corkboard, wondering why they'd sold out if this was how it felt to be a sellout.

Charlie had to fire people sometimes. Once he fired three people in one day, two before lunch and one after. He fired a tall man and a short man in the same week. These were the Mutt and Jeff firings. He fired a man recovering from a heart attack and a woman who'd just died. He didn't know Maxine was dead and he was forced to fire the secretary who'd caused the mix-up.

Charlie said into the phone, "If you want us to do the presentation here, I'll get you a table at the Four Seasons, Dwayne, and you can play footsie with my English secretary. Or I'll schlep the layouts out to Omaha. What a thrill it is to spend time-no, seriously, what do you do on Sundays, Dwayne? Go to the park and look at the cannon?"

This was a line off a Lenny Bruce LP but Charlie didn't think he had to credit the source. He liked Dwayne Sturmer, a decent guy for an ad manager. And the account was fairly sound, the lawn fertilizer division of a giant chemical company. The creative types here in the shop wanted to do a Bomb Your Lawn campaign. A little twist on the fact that these fertilizer ingredients, plus fuel oil, could produce a rather loud disturbance if ignited.

A young copywriter, Swayze, stuck his head in the door.

"Had a date with a Swedish model last night."

Charlie smiled and waited. The kid paused for effect.

"When I touched her Volvo, she Saabed."

It was Charlie who killed the Bomb Your Lawn campaign while it was still in-house. The creative types wanted to use George Metesky as a spokesman. An approach so suicidal Charlie found it somewhat lovable. George Metesky was the Mad Bomber of the 1940s and 1950s, famous for setting off a series of blasts at New York landmarks. They wanted to track him down at the state pen or the funny farm and build the whole campaign around his ancient and fabled deeds and his endorsement of the product.

Bomb your lawn with Nitrotex .

Mad Ave was getting younger all the time and Charlie was forty-six. Almost ready to be placed on an ice floe with his handcrafted English wingtips and his Patek Philippe timepiece. Still, he had solid accounts and a sunlit corner office with a crushed leather sofa. Prints of steeplechase races and frocked lordlings riding to hounds. A painted sea chest he'd spotted in a London shop. And the thing that gave him away as a regular guy-a sort of baseball shrine, three populist mementoes clustered at the far end of the room.

First, a tenth-anniversary limited-edition lithograph entitled The Shot Heard Round the World. The piece included photos of the Polo Grounds, Ralph Branca delivering the pitch, Bobby Thomson swinging the bat, Thomson's teammates waiting in a conga line to greet him at home plate.

Second, a photo of Thomson and Branca standing on a golf course with Dwight D. Eisenhower, all holding drivers, a couple of Secret Service men shadowing the fringes of the picture-Charlie's wife found the item in a junk shop in Vermont.

And, third, a smudged baseball balanced on the rim of a coffee mug that sat on the credenza-a ball he'd bought from a guy who claimed it was the very object Branca had hurled and Thomson had heroically struck.

His secretary walked in, Sandy, in a Mondrian dress and white shoes.

"Dwayne, my secretary just walked in. She's wearing white shoes. She's got a foot fetish and she's dying to meet you."

He liked to tease Dwayne, who was a bachelor, extremely shy, a large flesh-colored man in a pajama-striped wash-and-wear suit and shoes like Chinese gunboats.

Sandy dropped some status reports in his in-box. He listened to Dwayne talk about ad rates and cost-per-thousand. Sandy walked out of the office and he watched her, buttocks swinging meanly, printed with yellow parallelograms.

They'd wanted to give George Metesky a wig, a mustache and spectacles to make him look like Einstein.