Don DeLillo - Underworld

They were dancing cheek, to cheek.

He saw another woman in modified medieval dress, a bit more shrouded and hooded, and it brought to mind-no, not the sixteenth-century painting Edgar was so morbidly fond of, the Bruegel, with its panoramic deathscape. (Edgar had postcards, magazine pages, framed reproductions and enlarged details stored and hung in his basement rumpus room. And he'd ordered Clyde to talk to officials in Madrid about the priceless original and how he might acquire it as a gift to the American people from a Spanish nation grateful for the protective shield of U.S. armed might. But when a B-52 and a tanker collided during routine refueling, earlier this year, and four hydrogen bombs came crashing to earth on the Spanish coast, releasing radioactive materials, Clyde had to deinitiate all discussions.) No, not Bruegel. The nunnish woman brought to mind, of all things and all people, the hip sick dopester comic-Lenny Bruce. No, Lenny Bruce was not a guest at the Black amp; White Ball. Lenny Bruce was dead. Died several months ago, at his home in Los Angeles, of acute morphine poisoning, naked on his toilet floor, limbs gone stiff, mucus trailing out of his nose, his glassy eyes wide open, the syringe still stuck in his arm.

An 8x10 police photo of the bloated body-the picture could have been titled The Triumph of Death -was in the Director's personal files. Why? The horror, the shiver, the hellish sense of religious retribution out of the Middle Ages. And only hours after the body was found a buzz began to circulate in the usual places. Dig it. Lenny's been killed by shadowy forces in the government.

Lynda Bird Johnson danced past with a Secret Service agent.

The rumors had not surprised Clyde. He could smell the decade's paranoid breath. And he wondered suddenly about the woman in his arms. Had he in fact approached her on the dance floor or had she subtly stepped into his path?

A man with a skeleton mask and a woman with a monk's cowl. There, standing at the edge of the bandstand.

"You know my name," Clyde said, "but I'm at a loss, I'm afraid."

"Which doesn't happen very often, does it? But I thought our rules tended to favor nondisclosure."

They were dancing to show tunes from the forties. She pressed slightly closer and seemed to breathe rhythmically in his ear.

"Have you ever seen so many people," she whispered, "gathered in one place in order to be rich, powerful and disgusting together? We can look around us," she whispered, "and see the business executives, the fashion photographers, the government officials, the industrialists, the writers, the bankers, the academics, the pig-faced aristocrats in exile, and we can know the soul of one by the bitter wrinkled body of the other and then know all by the soul of the one. Because they're all part of the same motherfucking thing," she whispered. "Don't you think?"

Well, she just about took his breath away, whoever she was.

"The same thing. What thing?" he said.

"The state, the nation, the corporation, the power structure, the system, the establishment."

So young and lithe and trite. He felt the electric tension of her thighs and breasts passing through his suit.

"If you kiss me," she said, "I'll stick my tongue so far down your throat."

"Yes."

"It will pierce your heart."

Then everything happened at once. Figures in raven faces and skull masks. Figures in white winding-sheets. Monks, nuns, executioners. And he understood of course that the woman in his arms was one of them.

They formed a death rank on the dance floor, halting the music and sending the guests to the fringes. They commanded the room, a masque of silent figures, a plague, a spray of pathogens, and Clyde looked around for Edgar.

The woman slipped away Then the figures trooped across the floor, draped, masked, sheeted and cowled. How had they assembled so deftly? How had they entered the ballroom in the first place?

He looked for old Edgar.

An executioner and a nun did a pas de deux, a round of simple circling steps, and then the others gradually joined, the skeleton men and raven women, and in the end it was a graceful pavane they did, courtly and deadly and slow, with gestures so deliberate they seemed acted as well as danced, and Clyde saw his young partner move silkenly in their midst.

I will stick my tongue so far down your throat .

The guests watched in a trance, five hundred and forty men and women by actual count, and musicians and waiters and other personnel, and men assigned to guard the jewelry of the women, all part of the audience for an entertainment other than themselves-respectful, hushed and half stunned.

It will pierce your heart .

When they were finished the troupe stood in a line and removed their headpieces and masks. Then they opened their mouths, saying nothing, and directed hollow stares at the guests. An extended moment, a long gaping silence in the columned hall.

They departed single file.

A couple of minutes later Clyde found the Boss and they went to the men's room to collect themselves.

"Enjoy your dance, Junior?"

"I think I know who they are."

"Didn't you say that last time we were in here?"

"A group little seen and less known. Campus demonstrations mostly. No one, and this is odd."

"What?" the Boss barked.

"No one in Internal Security has come up with a name for the group. They've been known to act out protests, playing all the roles, even the police. Turn around."

"Find the links. It's all linked. The war protesters, the garbage thieves, the rock bands, the promiscuity, the drugs, the hair."

"There's some dandruff on your jacket," Clyde said.

Men entered and left, carrying a single sullen murmur in and out of the tiled room. They unzipped and peed. They urinated into mounds of crushed ice garnished with lemon wedges. They unzipped and zipped. They peed, they waggled and they zipped.

Edgar stood before the mirrors, still masked, and the sight of him prompted Clyde to think of the secret garden behind the Director's house, a sector fenced away from neighbors and never shown to guests, where statues of nude young men rose from fountains or stood draped in fall-flaming vines. Less titillating than inspirational, Clyde believed. This was the male form as Edgar's idealized double. A role livingly filled by Clyde. At least it used to be that way in the days when Edgar would stealthily tilt a mirror so he could lie in bed and watch Junior doing push-ups in the adjoining room.

That was 1939 in Miami Beach. This was 1966 in New York and we are living in muddle and shock.

He'd let that girl charm and tempt him, and he'd liked it, and he'd been disappointed when she slipped away before the kiss, and he'd been played for a fool in the oldest way-that radical enravishing self-possessed heartless come-hither bitch.

Back in the ballroom half the guests were gone. The rest measured out the time so their departure would not seem influenced by the spectacle, the protest, whatever it was-the mockery of their sleek and precious evening.

The society band played some danceable numbers but nobody wanted to dance anymore. Edgar and Clyde sat drinking with a putty-colored man in smoked glasses and his overmasked wife-satin wings, coq feathers and embedded diamonds.

Possibly Mafia, Clyde surmised.

Edgar would not speak to anyone. He sat, drank and hated. He had the sheen of Last Things in his eye. Clyde knew this look. It meant the Director was meditating on his coffin. It gave him dark solace, planning the details of his interment. A lead-lined coffin of one thousand pounds plus. To protect his body from worms, germs, moles, voles and vandals. They were planning to steal his garbage, so why not his corpse? Lead-lined, yes, to keep him safe from nuclear war, from the Ravage and Decay of radiation fallout.