Don DeLillo - Underworld

"You are a butch biker to me, you know, riding into town to take over leadership of the sadists and necrophiles."

Clyde watched in civilized alarm as a cockroach crawled out of Tanya's pocket and moved slowly down her flank. It was Spanish-Harlem-sized, with antennae that could pick up the BBC.

"It's a lovely fit, darling. You have savage cheekbones for a full-figure man. I would love to do the total face, you know? Highlights and shadows."

Clyde took her gently by the arm, concealing her roach side from Edgar's view, "In fact, shall I tell you something? The ball tonight is a perfect setting for you. Because you are very black and white to me. So you'll be totally in character, yes?"

When she was gone the men busied themselves with practical preparations. Clyde made dinner reservations and set out their evening clothes. Edgar set the mask on a tabletop and took a bath.

When he was finished he put on his fluffy white robe and stood by a window sipping the rest of his drink. He heard a sound above the beeping traffic, something strident rising in the night. New York was less genial than it used to be when the saloons and supper clubs were hangouts for lively and charming women and for gentlemen-bums with a comic flair.

"Junior, that noise. Can you hear it?"

Clyde walked into the room in his shirtsleeves, a shoe brush in hand.

"Yes, barely."

"Is it possible?"

"Yes, it could be the protesters at the Plaza."

"The wind."

"Yes, the wind is carrying the sound this way."

They heard the hard rhythmic salvo of voices chanting angry slogans, again, louder, fading when the wind shifted, then audible once more.

"You know what they want, don't you?" Edgar said.

Through the battered century of world wars and massive violence by other means, there had always been an undervoice that spoke through the cannon fire and ack-ack and that sometimes grew strong enough to merge with the battle sounds. It was the struggle between the state and secret groups of insurgents, state-born, wild-eyed-the anarchists, terrorists, assassins and revolutionaries who tried to bring about apocalyptic change. And sometimes of course succeeded. The passionate task of the state was to hold on, stiffening its grip and preserving its claim to the most destructive power available. With nuclear weapons this power became identified totally with the state. The mushroom cloud was the godhead of Annihilation and Ruin. The state controlled the means of apocalypse. But Edgar, by the window, heard the old alarums. He thought the time might be coming, once again, when ideas became insurgent and rebel bands were reborn, longhair men and women, scruffy and free-fucking, who moved toward armed and organized resistance, trying to break the state and bring about the end of the existing order.

"They want the power to shake the world. It's the old bolshevik dream being dreamed again and it's the communists who are behind it all. And you know where it begins, don't you?"

"These are kids, mostly, who lie down in the street and wave flowers at the police," Clyde said. " Vietnam is the war, the reality. This is the movie, where the scripts are written and the actors perform. American kids don't want what we've got. They want movies, music."

Let Junior devise his clever perceptions. He didn't understand that once you patronize the enemy, you begin the process of your own undoing.

"It begins in the inmost person," Edgar said. "Once you yield to random sexual urges, you want to see everything come loose. You mistake your own looseness for some political concept, whereas in truth."

He didn't finish the thought. Some thoughts had to remain unspoken, even unfinished in one's own mind. This was the point of his relationship with Clyde. To keep the subject unspoken. To keep the feelings unfelt, the momentary urges unacted-upon. How strange and foolish this would seem to the young people running in the streets, or living six to a room, or three to a bed, and to many other people for that matter-how sad and rare.

Clyde went back to his duties, leaving the Boss by the window.

Edgar thought there was something noble in a constant companionship that does not fall to baser claims. He assumed Clyde believed likewise. But then Clyde was the second man, wasn't he, and perhaps he only followed Edgar's line of march wherever it led, or didn't.

He heard the chanting intermittently on the wind. Clyde was in the shower now. Edgar turned to see where he'd left the mask and saw himself unexpectedly in a full-length mirror, across the room, in his white robe and soft slippers, and he was startled by the image.

Of course it was him, but him in the guise of a macrocephalic baby, sexless and so justborn as to be, in essence, unearthly.

Mother Hoover's cuddled runt.

He crossed the room and picked up the mask. He noted how the stylized handlebars were simple swirls of cut leather designed to flare from the temples.

He heard Clyde come out of the shower.

When they were younger and on vacation together, or away on business, sharing a suite or taking adjoining rooms and keeping the connecting door open so they could talk from their respective beds well into the night, Edgar sometimes managed to angle the mirrors in such a way that he could catch a glimpse-by taking the free-standing antique in an old inn, the cheval glass, for example, and simply moving it to another part of the floor, or opening the medicine cabinet to a certain position when he shaved and letting the mirror absorb the light from the bed in the next room, or leaving a hand mirror propped on a desk-a glimpse, a passing glance, a spyhole peek at Junior as he busied himself dressing or undressing or taking a bath, the arrangement being such that the moment would seem wholly accidental, should the subject realize he was being watched, and an accident not just from his perspective but to Edgar's own mind as well, Junior's likeness being a thing that might simply float across his ken in the normal course of events, away on urgent Bureau business, his companion's body lean and virile, or at a golf resort, or following the ponies west to Del Mar, when they were both a great deal younger.

Junior was going bald now, and bulb-nosed, and he walked with a stoop. But then Junior had always walked with a stoop in an effort to appear no taller than the Boss.

Edgar was in the bedroom with the door closed. He stood at the mirror, a seventy-one-year-old man wearing nothing but his sequined biker's mask and his wool-lined slippers, listening to the voices in the street.

When her workday was finished Janet Urbaniak put on her running shoes. There was a stretch of four desolate blocks between the hospital complex where she did classroom work and got floor experience and the apartment complex where she lived. Bleak and weedy streets, unshoveled snow going grim with bus exhaust, snow that was drilled and gilded with dog piss, and there were usually a few lurking figures in green fatigues, the last of a straggle battalion of wasted men.

So when her workday was finished Janet took off her lightweight casual slip-ons and got the running shoes out of her locker, a pair of firm padded sneakers with shock-absorbent midsoles and a supple and confident feel. Then she went and stood at the hospital entrance with another student nurse and they waited for the traffic lights to turn green along the semideserted length of the four extended blocks, the kind of heartless boulevard you find in parts of town where the architecture is guarded and tense and it always feels like curfew.

Janet stood and waited in the deep and eerie dusk. Then the lights went green and her buddy said, "Go, go, go, go ," and Janet started to run, nonstop she hoped, with the lights in her favor, hitting top speed in a matter of seconds and trying to avoid icy patches, and her buddy watched her all the way.