Don DeLillo - Underworld

He was wearing a Nehru jacket tonight, a dark tunic with a high collar, it needed cleaning and pressing, and he had a white raincoat draped over his shoulders-either he'd forgotten to take it off or he was planning to get out of here in a hurry.

He began an impressionistic ramble. Hard to follow. About court cases, lawyers and judges. Like listening to someone who thought he was talking to someone else.

Then he broke off and said, "Love me. That's what I'm here for. Tonight and every night. Stop loving me, I die."

This was not a bit. The bit followed this. It was a bit he'd thought up sitting in the plastic pygmy toilet on the flight from L.A. with a red light near his right eyeball flashing Return to seat Return to seat .

"The archangel Gabriel appears in the sky over Havana. Bodyguards wake up Castro and he tells them, Lemme alone, and they tell him it's the messenger of God, and he gets in a helicopter and goes up there. The angel's wearing a white robe and he's holding a flaming trumpet and Castro's intrigued when he sees that Gabriel's a black man. He thinks, Great, an articulate Negro, we can have a real no-bullshit dialogue. He says to the angel, I don't believe in God but lemme ask you. Whose side are you on in this crisis? And the angel says, I'm only gonna say this once. The side that has baseball and jazz. Castro says, We have baseball and jazz. We call it Afro-Cuban music and you'd dig it, man. Swings like crazy. And Gabriel says, Don't patronize me, motherfucker. I blew with Bird, you know. Yeah, we jammed together at Minton's in the old days. Okay, you wanna know which side I'm on. The side that has mom and apple pie. Castro says, No problema. The Russians have mom and apple pie. They call it yablochy pirog . The angel says, Okay, you so smart, the side that has Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and the Mafia. And Castro says, Damn we threw the Mafia out of Cuba. But how come you're siding with them? The angel says, Lawd Jesus has a soft spot for the mob. Castro says, How come? The angel says, What you think, man? He's Italian.

Castro says, Wait a minute. Jesus is Italian? The angel says, Well- ain't he? And he looks a little uncertain. He starts shaking the spittle off the mouthpiece of his trumpet, a thing Gabe does whenever he's insecure. He's very touchy about his education. He says a little defensively, All the popes are wops. Everybody knows this, man. This because Jesus a wop. Jesus a guinea from the word go. Check his complexion, Jim. Castro says, Jesus lived in the Middle East. Gabriel says, You must be crazy, telling me shit like that. The cat's Neapolitan. Talks with his hands. Castro says, He was a Jew if you wanna know the truth. The angel says, I know he was a Jew-an Italian Jew. They have them, don't they? And Castro says, Why am I standing here listening to this? You're totally loco, man. And the angel says, Are you telling me I believed all my life that Jesus changed water into wine at an Italian wedding-and he didn't/'

Lenny did this bit a little distractedly, slurring lines here and there, but isn't that what he always did, wasn't that part of the whole hipster format-a kind of otherworldly dope-driven fugue.

"I saw his hair! I saw his teeth!"

Then he remembered the line he'd come to love. He went into a semicrouch and put the raincoat over his head and practically stuck the mike down his throat.

" We're all gonna die !"

Yes, he loved saying this, crying it out, it was wondrously refreshing, it purified his fear and made it public at the same time-it was weak and sick and cowardly and powerless and pathetic and also noble somehow, a long, loud and feelingly high-pitched cry of grief and pain that had an element of sweet defiance.

And his voice sent a weird thrill shooting through the audience. They felt the cry physically. It leaped in their blood and bonded them. This was the revolt of the psyche, an idlike wail from their own souls, the desperate buried place where you demand recognition of primitive rights and needs.

Then he gets an idea and flicks it straight out, like a boxer jabbing so well it brings a grin to his face.

"But maybe some of us are more powerless than others. It's a white bomb, dig." And his voice changes here, goes redneck and drawly "It's our bomb. Moscow and Washington. Think about it, man. White people control this bomb."

The idea delights him.

"You look down at Watts. You look up at Harlem. And you say, Fuck with our chicks, man, we drop the bomb. Better end the world than mix the races."

He goes into a bopster's finger-snapping slouch.

"Because we'd rather kill everybody than share our women."

Then the lights went out. Just like that. The spotlight, the bar lights, the exit signs-all out. A vague shape, Lenny's, could be seen moving sort of experimentally toward the large metal door that opened directly onto the street and the customers up front might have heard him muttering, "Return to seat, return to seat."

A rustle in the audience, a few heads turning, several people standing uncertainly. Were they thinking maybe this is it, a bomb, an airburst? Didn't the electromagnetic pulse from a test shot in the Pacific send massive currents surging through power lines in Honolulu, only recently, blowing out lights and setting off burglar alarms all over the island?

The lights came on. The spotlight shone on an empty stage. The field-stone wall had never looked more naked and fake. And there was Lenny, standing about a yard and a half from the exit. He came walking slowly stageward, mimicking a person sneaking back into a room, relieved and abashed, and they waited for him to say something that would pay off the long tense moment and shake them with laughter and he reached the stage and lifted the dangling mike and put it to his face and it began to screech and crackle and then the lights went out again and the afterimage of Lenny's tallowy face stuck to every retina in the house, half a scared smirk across his mouth, and the baby started crying.

When the lights came back on, a twenty-second lifetime later, the stage was empty, the metal door was ajar, the show was evidently over.

There were weeks went by when we barely slept. We were together every hour of the day and night for three or four weeks, much of it, most of it in her car, eating and sleeping there, having sex in her car, sleeping and waking up and looking around and it was still dark, or still light, depending, and finally we'd stop driving for one reason or another, logical or not, and life'd slow down enough so things could happen normally in rooms but only until it was time to go again and she'd rumble up in the 1950 Merc, chassis lowered and driveline slightly souped, and we were headed west again.

"Don't tell me your dreams," I said.

"But you have to hear."

"I don't want to hear."

"Oh you bastard, you have to hear," Amy said, "because everything that happens has to happen to both of us."

"Don't you know people don't want to hear other people's dreams?"

"Oh you bastard, what other people? Who are these other people?"

"Watch the road."

"Every smallest thought we said we'd share."

"Watch the road. Drive the car," I told her.

And once I dropped her off in Santa Fe, where she had family friends, and kept the car myself and didn't play the radio or read the newspaper and she caught up with me a week later in a miners' bar in Bisbee, Arizona and we played a flirty game of liar's poker and climbed the high tight streets and felt a thing so powerful, and knew the other felt it, that we thought our faces might ignite.

"It was a mountain dream. A high clear place near a lake."

"Don't you know dreams are only interesting to the dreamer?"

"Think you're so worldly-wise. You're awful smart for a foreigner."