Don DeLillo - Underworld

The detectives did not laugh.

A sea breeze blew through the room and the band was playing cha-chas now. A woman sitting down missed her chair. Dancers appeared at the far end of the bar, they were spilling out of the lounge, one-two cha-cha-cha, and Lenny rolled his shoulders and dipped his hips. The travel agents took a vote and decided to order another round. The music drilled the wall like tamale farts and a couple of college girls got up and danced in place among the crowded tables. The original dancers moved in a boxer's crouch, advancing down the bar in pastel skirts and white guayaberas while test missiles in California were reprogrammed with Soviet targets.

Lenny seized the mike and cried, " We're all gonna die !"

They laughed and half wept. He led them in a chorus of the chant. The cha-cha music poured into the room and the dancers followed in beautifully balanced twos and the men and women at the tables got up and danced in place, making pugilistic motions with their hands. One-two cha-cha-cha. They kicked off their shoes and spilled their drinks.

Lenny did a monologue in Spanglish and they loved it and laughed and half wept and a young man majoring in Wardrobe Management chugalugged a glass of straight scotch, a stone's throw from Cuba. It's fabulous, it's marvelous, it's Miami.

Marian Bowman was talking to her mother. They were in the living room of her mother's house, her mother and father's house, where she'd grown up, and there were sprays of baby's breath in most of the rooms and in bud vases on hall tables, small white flowers in branched clusters, a plant her mother liked to display in its starkness, free of the customary larger arrangement, for whatever reason a mother might have, with the elms going yellow and the red oaks blazing on a fine fall day in Madison, Wisconsin, and students running wild in the streets.

"So you've been keeping secrets."

"He's not a secret," Marian said.

"Ifbu've known him all this time and I'm only now hearing. That's a secret."

"I've known him technically all this time."

"And now you know him how?"

The mother smiled first, then the daughter.

"Untechnically," Marian said. 'And he's not a secret. There hasn't been much to say, that's all."

"There's always something to say. What do I sense about this relationship? I think you're very uncertain. You have a tendency. You always did. To act against your misgivings. Because-well, I don't know why you do it exactly."

They heard the voices more clearly now, ripping from stereo speakers set in the windows of A-frames along Mifflin Street.

"I wasn't aware. Have I expressed misgivings."

"Yes. And it's clear I'm meant to notice. And it's clear you want me to argue against the man."

"This is totally. No no no no," Marian said mildly.

"You can't bring yourself to argue against him. You want me to doit."

"And you sense all this, sort of."

"Not sort of. Hard and clear."

"And what happens when you argue against him? Do I say thank-you mother you've saved me from a fate worse."

"Of course not. You defend him. You stand up for him."

"She stands up for her man. And you what, you infer all this from a little bitty talk in which I said practically nothing about him."

"Tell me I'm wrong," her mother said, "and I'll make every effort to believe you."

Her mother turned toward the window showing a faint annoyance. They were running in the streets. They were probably throwing bricks and starting fires. There was a bullhorn voice mixed in with the music that ripped from the speakers.

"They have what they call the riot season."

"Did it ever occur to me," Marian said, "that Chicago would seem peaceful and decent?"

"I don't know if this is the riot season or not. Maybe it's just a block party that the police are trying to contain. Although, no, that can't be right. They have block parties in the spring."

"I'll come back for Thanksgiving if you'll make them stop that noise."

Her mother said, "Is he married?"

And instantly regretted it. Marian saw the self-reproach in the tilt of her mother's mouth. Yes, a rare lapse. It diminished the authority of her earlier remarks and was totally unthought-out, a lapse, a tactical mistake, and the color in her mother's face went flat. Because if he were married, one, why would Marian talk about him without saying so; and, two, why would she talk about him at all?

"No, of course not."

"Of course not. I know that," her mother said.

Marian went upstairs feeling better. She loved her old room. She loved coming back because the quiet streets were here, in theory, and the houses with screened sunporches, and the elmed esplanades and university buildings, and because her room was here, kept safe for her, spare, unspecial, unfussed over, but a place no one could see as she did, containing a sizable measure of what is meant by home.

She started packing for the trip back, taking some winter things out of the closet, and then stopped just long enough to turn on the radio. She found WIBA, Up Against the Wall FM, because she wanted to know what was going on out there, just as a point of exasperated interest, and because the noise was getting louder.

It was too soon to pack but she did it anyway. Home is the place where they have to take you in, said the poet, or said Marian's father paraphrasing the poet, and home is also the place you can't wait to get the hell out of.

She had a job in Chicago she hated. Only she didn't really hate it- she'd acquired gestures of discontent because this seemed to be a thing you were supposed to do. She was twenty-five and saw no future doing backroom work in a brokerage house. But the job was okay in a way because it forced her to be disciplined and involved and unsloppy, and anyway there was nothing else she wanted to try just now.

The radio said, DowDay DowDay DowDay DowDay.

She rummaged through the dresser, finding a couple of old sweaters that might be passable, still, and a number of bright stocking caps that were funny and dumb.

The dresser was the one object in the room worth a second look, outside the text of personal reference-an oak piece fitted with a tall scuffed mirror that was hinged to swivels in a graceful trefoil frame.

The radio said, PigPigPigPigPigPigPig.

She began to understand that some of the noise in the streets, the music and voices ripping from speakers that students had placed in their windows, was coming from the station she was tuned to.

She packed and listened.

The radio said, Faculty Document 122 authorizes force against students. Faculty Document 122 authorizes force against students.

She began to understand that this was Vietnam Week on campuses across the country. And this was Dow Day here in Madison, a protest against Dow Chemical, whose recruiters were active on campus and whose products included a new and improved form of napalm with a polystyrene additive that made jellied matter cling more firmly to human flesh.

Faculty Document 122 authorizes force against students.

She thought, Small wonder. Because it sounded as if the students were tearing up the campus and it looked as if, earlier in the day, with Vietcong flags on Linden Street and mimes in whiteface tussling with police on Bascom Hill-it looked as if what?

The station was reporting Dow Day and seemingly taking part.

The radio said, PigPigPigPigPigPigPig.

It looked as if something had happened in the night to change the rules of what is thinkable.

She began to understand that the riot out there, if that's what it was, was being augmented and improved by a simulated riot on the radio, an audio montage of gunfire, screams, sirens, klaxons and intermittent bulletins real and possibly not.