Don DeLillo - Underworld

These creative minds with their sublimated forms of destruction. Every third campaign featured some kind of play on weapons. The agency was still in shock over the Equinox Oil campaign. This was a very expensive effort that culminated in a sixty-second commercial shot in the Jornada del Muerto in remotest New Mexico. Site of the first atomic test shot ever made. A white space on the map. Totally closed to the public. Charlie thought the idea would fly, actually. Fill up two cars with premium gasoline. One with Equinox, the other with a leading competitive brand. Run the cars across the barren desert. Shoot the commercial with helicopters, crane shots, tracking shots, slow motion, stop action, all the latest know-how. White car versus black car. Clear implication. U.S. versus USSR. First car to get to the Trinity site wins-this is the monument that marks the spot where the bomb went off. We get permission from the Department of Energy, Department of Defense, Atomic Energy Commission, National Park Service. We shoot the thing. Takes many weeks. Costs, per second, more than a Hollywood epic. But it'll fly, baby. The stark scrub. The heat undulations and cow skulls. The dust storms. The high-angle shots-one car pulling away, the other catching up. A voice-over done by a pompous announcer with a cold war tone. Which car will run out of gas first? Which one will get to the marker? Miles per gallon. A huge consumer issue. Of course the white car outlasted the black car and reached the site first. We air the commercial. Heavy schedule. We thought the Soviet embassy might lodge a complaint. We looked forward to it. Free publicity. What happens? We get complaints all right. But not from foreign governments. We hear from the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People. We hear from the Urban League. We hear from the Congress of Racial Equality. Because the white car beat the black car. An amazing firestorm of protest. Threatened boycotts of all Equinox products. We pull the commercial. We reshoot the entire thing and absorb the cost ourselves. Two cars. Both white. Car with letter A painted on roof. Car with letter B painted on roof. Lesson. Don't mix your metaphors.

"Cost per thou, Dwayne, is an overrated device intended to blind us to the truth of our situation." He waited for Dwayne to ask what the truth of our situation was. "There is only one truth. Whoever controls your eyeballs runs the world."

There were probably two dozen people walking the streets in the days after the game, shysters, heisters, fools and knaves, all claiming they had the one and only baseball. Which Charlie devoutly wanted to believe was the selfsame object on his credenza.

Yes, the baseball that marked him as a regular fellow with a soft streak despite his milled-steel veneer. He got fascist haircuts done by Spadavecchia of Milan-his school actually, since Gianni was frequently overbooked. He wore striped shirts with white collars, or white shirts with blue collars. He wore suits so compulsively custom-fit a fart would split a seam. He played squash and handball, did Canadian Air Force exercises, applied bronzing agents to his face and body and sat in front of a sunlamp all winter long. A regular guy with a station wagon heart despite the giddy MG he'd just treated himself to, perfect for tooling the foothills of the Berkshires around their weekend place.

A sentimental weepy white guy.

Yes, the baseball he dearly wanted to entrust to his son Chuckie. To Charles Jr. No longer the bubblegum boy of yore but a failed preppy now, slant-bodied and dissonant, with dumdum eyes and a way of hating you from a distance. Flunked out of Exeter, chased out of Choate, walked out of Andover. Chuckie didn't care. But Charlie did and it was painful. How could he give such an emotional object, whatever ambiguity throbbed in the ball's corked heart, to this aimless wayward aging kid, a displaced person in his own life?

Pasqualini stuck his head in the door on his way back to the art department.

"What do you call a six-foot five-inch two-hundred-and-sixty-pound Negro that you run into in a dark alley?"

Charlie smiled thinly, wary of the new wave of civil rights jokes, and raised his head to indicate, What?

"Mister."

He fired a pregnant woman once. He fired a man related to the Dutch royal family. He fired a Catholic, a Protestant and a Jew in fairly close succession. He fired a man for falling in the water on the company boat ride and another for carrying a gun to a client meeting.

"They're doing research, Dwayne, on what they call retinal discharge. They secretly photograph women in supermarkets. They have sensitive cameras hidden on the shelves that record excitations of the inner eye, motions of the eye far more subtle and telling than a simple blink, and it seems that women go completely crazy eyeballwise when they see certain colors, packages and designs. These are orgasms, basically, of the eye, the brain and the nervous system. How do we use this research? Simple. We correlate high discharge events with the particular items that caused them and then we design our products and packaging accordingly. Once we get the consumer by the eyeballs, we have complete mastery of the marketing process."

Sandy came back in and began to mouth some sort of complicated message.

But if Charlie truly believed the baseball was authentic, would he leave it in plain sight, unguarded, where a cleaning woman might decide to take it home to her kid because she doesn't earn enough money to buy him a baseball, or a delivery boy from the coffee shop around the corner-he pictured a swarthy male drifting through the corridors on a slow afternoon, with creamless coffee and a toasted English in a white bag, looking for something to pinch.

"She wants to talk to us, Dwayne. Yes, my secretary. Did I ever tell you how she types? She likes to fold one leg up under her. Before she began sitting on her foot she did about twenty-five words a minute. Now she does two hundred."

Charlie was fascinated by certain quirks and traits that Sandy brought to her job. She had that distinctive English quality of looking terrifically fresh and crisp even while conveying tawdry intimations of the state of her underwear and the fact that she bathes only under pressure from her roommates, Fiona and Georgina.

Charlie talked to Omaha and deciphered his secretary's mouthed message at the same time.

"She's telling us she needs to leave early, Dwayne. She's been leaving early quite often lately. And taking conspicuously long lunches. We know what that means, don't we? An affair with a married man."

Sandy did a stand-up collapse, aghast at the man's cheek. His temerity, his effrontery, his American facking New York nerve. Charlie gave her his Richard Widmark grin. He had no reason to keep her around the rest of the afternoon but asked her to order him an orange juice before she left.

Charlie wanted to pitch the Minute Maid account. He thought about orange juice all the time. He looked at it, drank it, had fantasies about it. He knew how to advertise orange juice. Forget Florida. Forget the piddling vitamins. You have to go for appetite appeal, for the visual hit, because this is a beautiful and enticing beverage and women's eyeballs reach high levels of excitation when they see bright orange cans in the freezer, gleaming with rime ice. You have to show the pulp. You show the juice splashing in the glass. You show the froth on a perky housewife's upper lip, like the hint of a blowjob before breakfast. Of course there is no pulp in concentrate. And there is only a microtrace of pulp in container juice. But you can suggest, you can make inferences, you can promise the consumer the experience of cit-rusy bits of real pulp-a glass of juice, a goblet brimming with partic-ulate matter, like wondrous orange smog. You show it. You photograph it lovingly and microscopically. If the can or package can be orgasmi-cally visual, so can the product inside. There was nothing Charlie liked better than a glass of orange juice on a lazy Sunday morning in the country, nicely spiked with vodka.