Don DeLillo - Underworld

He wanted to pitch the Smirnoff account. There was an element of Russian chic in the culture these days. Yevtushenko in his black-market jeans. Those Russian hats that sprouted earlier this winter, still going strong in New York and Chicago. Astrakhans. You wake up one morning and every third man earning a salary in a certain range is wearing a lambskin Russian hat.

"Dwayne, she's gone, good buddy. We've lost her to some lech in the copy department. I'd bet anything on that. Sandy thinks writers are moody and glamorous because they're always in danger of getting canned."

The moans of spewing buses rose into the settling dusk. The office lights were on now and all up and down the halls the girls tapped on the squarish keys of their IBM Selectrics. The graved ball kissed the ribbon, the ribbon kissed the paper, a superior grade of bond that was rag-weaved like the oxford shirts worn by the bosses of the typing girls. Every sixteen seconds one of them hit the wrong key and muttered a middling curse.

The married copywriters met their secretaries, or the secretaries of other writers, or the tall and lissome secretaries of account executives, white-shod and well-spoken, and went about the tender regimen of their lunchtime love-the nooner, it was called, or the matinee-meeting in the secretaries' snug apartments, striking in their dimensional similarity to the cubicles the writers worked in, only decorated more touchingly and vulnerably, with posters of Madrid on the off-white walls, or prints of Marino Marini horses or Bernard Buffet lobsters, or in the larger apartments of secretaries with roommates, which complicated the schedule and made the writers yearn for an intimate glimpse of one of the roommates, barefoot in a partially open robe, perhaps, coming from the shower after a late night with a failed date, the apartments situated nearly always in the sunless hindquarters of white-brick buildings in the East 80s, undoormanned, the small elevators inspected every two years by an individual called A. Bear, according to recent entries on the record of inspection that was fixed to the elevator walls.

And yes, it's true, Charlie has practiced this kind of erotic disport himself, off and on, with one or another single young woman working in the production department or somesuch level of the mothership, belowdecks and lonesome and not always, actually, very young. But did he enjoy these interludes or were they sad entertainments he inflicted on himself in the stark space of a convertible sofa turned open to span the room so that he had to walk upon the bedding to go and pee? He had lovely sex with his wife in an antique bed with carved oak posts, so what are you doing here, Charlie, balling this morose media clerk. It was an odd form of mortification for some pattern of behavior, or grain of being, too transparent for this adman to fathom.

"This is the challenge, Dwayne. You have to read the mysterious current that passes in the night and connects millions of people across a continental landmass, compelling them to buy a certain product first thing in the morning. They gotta have it and you gotta be ready for them when they show up."

He said, "Package goods and painkillers. These are the things that keep the country running."

A swarthy male stood in the doorway.

"Jou order oranjuice?"

Charlie fished some money out of his pocket and paid the guy. He took an extra-strength antacid tablet out of the bottle in his desk and washed it down with the watery pulpless half-rancid juice, for whatever calmative effect it might have on his acidic backwash.

He told a dirty joke to Dwayne and sensed the fellow going pink out there on the prairie. There was nothing left to do but leave. Charlie walked through the semiswank lobby, done in Babylonian art deco, and nipped around the corner to his Swedish masseuse, who karate'd his aching lumbar for ten minutes. Then he wheeled into Brooks Brothers and picked up a couple of tennis shirts because what's more fun than an impulse buy? He double-timed it across Madison to the Men's Bar at the Biltmore, where he massively inhaled a Cutty on the rocks and was out the door in half a shake and skating across the vast main level of Grand Central, the Bobby Thomson baseball jammed into the pocket of his topcoat-a Burberry all-weather that he loved like a brother and that went especially well with the suit he was wearing, a slate gray whipcord made for Charlie by a guy who did lapels for organized crime-because he'd decided the ball was no longer safe in his office and he wanted his son to have it, for better or worse, love or money, real or fake, but please Chuckie do not abuse my trust, I could fall down dead passing the stuffed mushrooms at dinner and this is the one thing I want you to take and keep and care for, and he went striding through the gate just in time to make his train, which was the evolutionary climax of the whole human endeavor, and he bucketed up to the bar car, filled with people who more or less resembled Charlie, give or take a few years and a few gray hairs and the details of their evilest dreams.

The last express to Westport.

There were stories about the Pope. There were reports, a certain kind of underground rumor that can make its way across a country, parish to parish. Pope Pius was having mystical visions. That was the rumor going round. He was witness to a series of supernatural events, seeing things in the dead of night. That was the story people told, I don't know, nuns, old ladies on novena nights, maybe well-heeled parishioners too, pink and fit, officers of the Knights of Columbus. People hear such a story and feel something turn in their souls, a leap out of dear old singsong life into some other reading altogether.

In class a student mentioned the rumors to Father Paulus in the course of a discussion that touched on the subject of thaumatology, or the study of wonders.

The old priest looked out the window.

"If you'd been drinking dago red until three in the morning, you'd have visions too."

I went to see Father in his office later in the day. It was a three-hundred-yard walk through a billowing white storm. I had the edges of my watch cap unfurled over my ears and kept my forearm raised against the cutting sleet, against the whole hard physical thing, the snowstorms and open spaces, the reality of a mass of land called North America, new to my experience.

Father started talking before I had my jacket off.

"It's when the hair in my nostrils begins going stiff. That's when I want to retire to the south of France."

"The snow on the parade."

"Yes, I know."

"The benches are buried."

"Yes," he said.

"I realized, just out the window there, I was walking over a bench."

"Yes. Sit down, Shay, and tell me how you're doing. A young man's progress. That's the title of this session."

"I borrowed a pair of boots."

He liked that response.

"Do they fit?"

"No."

Even better. When he asked about the state of my mind and soul, which he did only rarely, and when I answered on a practical plane, as I always did, he seemed to think I was devising a down-to-earth reply out of some manly instinct when in fact I was only confused, forever trying to put together a suitable set of words.

"What are you reading?"

I recited a list.

"Itbu understand what's in those books?"

"No," I said.

Again he smiled. I think he was tired of gifted kids. He'd done work with boys of advanced standing and now he wanted to talk to misfits of the other kind, the ones who'd made trouble for themselves and others.

"Some of it maybe. What I don't understand, I memorize."

His arm was propped on the desk and he leaned his head into the canted hand. No smile this time,