Don DeLillo - Underworld

"I'm strange or you're strange?"

"You followed me into a ladies' room."

"No, wait wait wait wait. You can feel me watching you while you sleep and you think I'm strange? Who's strange?" I said.

And there were times when you detached yourself from the steepest breathing, even, and felt a kind of white shadow, a sliding away into a parallel person, someone made of mind-light who seemed to speak for you.

Or, "You can't make me do this," she'd say, running her hand up the seam of my fly, and I'm trying to drive the car.

And once when I was alone for a day and a night, not playing the radio or reading the newspaper and driving around aimlessly for hours, I finally stopped and parked and took a walk in a picnic grounds where there were white-barked trees and garbage cans for food scraps and a man who looked disturbed sitting on a bench, outside Fresno somewhere, but maybe he was only deep in thought, or worried about something, and I felt a sadness I could not exactly locate, a feeling that could have been mine or could have been theirs, the little families with food on paper plates, the unhappy man slouched on the bench, the place itself, the bench itself, the trash cans that didn't have lids.

I bought a postcard to send her after she went her way and I went mine, a card that showed a picnic table in the trees, and I slipped it in a book inside my bag until I had time to figure out what kind of message I would write.

The first man stood by the window of his stately suite at the Waldorf. He watched the yellow cabs sink into soulful dusk, that particular spendthrift light that falls dyingly on Park Avenue in the hour before people take leave of the office and become husbands and wives again, or whatever people become in whatever murmurous words when evenings grow swift and whispered.

The second man sat on the sofa, legs crossed, looking at Bureau reports.

Edgar said, "Of course you packed the masks."

The second man nodded yes, a gesture that went unseen.

"Junior, the masks."

"We have them, yes. I'm looking at a security memo that's a little, actually, rankling."

"I don't want to hear it. File it somewhere. I feel too good."

"Protest. Outside the Plaza tonight."

"What is it the bastards are protesting? Pray tell," Edgar said in a tone he'd perfected through the years, a tight amusement etched in eleven kinds of irony.

"The war, it seems."

"The war."

"Yes, that," the second man said.

They were staying at the Waldorf, which was J. Edgar Hoover's hotel of choice during his sojourns in New York, but the party was taking place, the ball, the fete, the social event of the season, the decade, the half century no doubt-the ball was in the ballroom at the Plaza.

Edgar changed the subject, if only in his mind. He gazed far up Park, where the earth curved toward Harlem. Maybe the deep and fleeting light was making him nostalgic, or the noise perhaps, the muted clamor of taxi horns below, a sound at this protected distance that was oddly and humanly happy, little toots and beeps that seemed to carry a pitch of celebration.

He said, "Where were you when Thomson hit the homer?"

"Beg pardon?"

"Where were you?"

"Yes?"

"Never mind. An idle thought, Junior."

Clyde Tolson, known as Junior, was Edgar's staunchest aide in the Bureau, his dearest friend and inseparable companion.

They were getting on, of course. Clyde was five years younger than Edgar but not so sharp as he used to be, his flash-card memory a little less prodigious now. But where Edgar was pug-nosed and compact, with brows like batwings, Clyde was long-jawed and tallish, sort of semidebonaire, a fairly gentle fellow who liked conversation-again, unlike his boss, who thought you gave yourself away, word by word, every time you opened your trap to speak.

Edgar held a tumbler of scotch. He checked the glass for smudges, then sniffed and sipped, feeling the charred fumes prickle his tongue. The complimentary suite, the soothing booze, the presence of Junior in the room, the party that everybody'd been talking about for months, famous long before it happened, the uninvited lapsing into states of acute confusion, insomniac, unable to function-yes, Edgar was feeling pretty good tonight.

Talkative or not, he loved a good party. He loved celebrities in particular and there would be an abundance of mammal glamour at the Plaza tonight. Personage and flair and stylish wit. A frail schoolboy still crouched inside the Director's pudgy corpus and this lonely crypto-child came to robust life in the presence of show people and other living icons-child stars, ballplayers, prizefighters, even Hollywood horses and dogs.

Celebrated people were master spirits, men and women who spiked the temper of the age. Whatever Edgar's own claim to rank and notoriety, he found himself subject to anal flutters when chatting with a genuine celeb.

Clyde said, "And this, of course, as well."

Edgar did not turn to see what the second man was reading. He studied the carpet instead. The carpets at the Waldorf were thick and lush, nesting grounds for bacteria of every sort. If you knew anything about modern war, you knew that weapons utilizing pathogenic bacteria could be every bit as destructive as megaton bombs. Worse, in a way, because the sense of infiltration was itself a form of death.

Clyde said, "I knew it was a mistake to publicize our methods regarding organized crime figures."

"What methods?"

"Ransacking their garbage."

"Makes good copy."

"And creates a copycat mentality. Now we have a situation that's a public relations nightmare. To wit, a so-called garbage guerrilla is targeting guess whose garbage, Boss?"

"Please. I'm enjoying my drink. A man enjoys a drink when the day winds down."

"Yours," Clyde said.

Edgar could not believe he'd heard the fellow correctly.

"This is what our confidential source tells us." And Clyde rattled the page he was reading for maximum nuisance effect. "Team of urban guerrillas planning a garbage raid at 4936 Thirtieth Place, Northwest, Washington, D.C. "

It was the end of the world in triplicate.

"When is this supposed to happen?"

"More or less momentarily."

" You've posted guards?"

"In unmarked cars. But whether we arrest them or not, they will find a way to make public theater of your garbage."

"I won't put the garbage out."

" You have to put it out, eventually."

" Ill put it out and lock it up."

"How will the garbage collectors collect it?"

When FBI agents stole off in the night with some mobster's household trash, they substituted fake garbage, to allay suspicion-aromatic food scraps, anchovy tins, used tampons prepared by the lab division. Then they took the real garbage back for analysis by forensic experts on gambling, handwriting, fragmented paper, crumpled photographs, food stains, bloodstains and every known subclass of scribbled Sicilian.

"Or do this," Edgar said. "Put out simulated garbage. Bland bits and pieces. Unnewsworthy."

"We can't use conventional methods, however clever, on these people. Because what they're doing flies in the face of ordinary confrontation. And no matter how well-guarded the premises, sooner or later they'll snatch a trash can and make off with it."

Edgar walked over to another window He needed a change, as they say, of scene.

"Confidential source says they intend to take your garbage on tour. Rent halls in major cities. Get lefty sociologists to analyze the garbage item by item. Get hippies to rub it on their naked bodies. More or less have sex with it. Get poets to write poems about it. And finally, in the last city on the tour, they plan to eat it."

Edgar could see part of the east facade of the Plaza , about a dozen blocks away.