Don DeLillo - Underworld

There was an interval of static and a brief silence. Then the radio returned to its normal broadcast mode.

What was this?

Three voices chanting liturgically, a priest reciting the same line over and over and two altar boys delivering fixed responses.

Better things for better living.

Through chemistry .

Better things for better living.

Through chemistry .

Better things for better living.

Through chemistry .

She turned off the radio.

Then her father came home and was filled in by her mother and they all sat down to dinner with the poached bass and the baby's breath and her father said, "What is he?"

Marian thought this was funny and maybe her father did too, a little. What could she say? She could say what he wasn't. This would take a fair amount of time. But concerning what he was, well, she could say he was an English teacher in a secondary school in Arizona. But she couldn't say a whole lot more because there wasn't much he'd told her.

Her mother talked about the broken bones of the demonstrators, the students with head wounds, clubbed, gassed, bleeding.

Her father said, "Do you know what this means to me, the injuries of the students? What can I compare it with? Because I want to be fair to them. It's like the life and death of a fly, on a wall, in a village, somewhere in China. That's how much I care."

He had a drained smile that no one liked to see.

"I guess that means you can't be a Buddhist. Because the Buddhists if I understand them correctly," her mother said, and then let the thought drift toward the ceiling.

Marian sat in her room that night and dialed Nick's number. She told him about her day. There wasn't much to tell him because she left out the demonstration. She was feeling needy, moody and lunar and she didn't want distractions.

Then she told him she wanted to get married. She wanted to marry him and live with him, anywhere, wherever he wanted, and not have kids and not have friends and never go to dinner with her parents.

There was a silence at the other end that she could not read. A telephone silence can be hard to read, grim and deep and sometimes unsettling. You don't have the softening aspect of the eyes or even the lookaway glance while he ponders. There's nothing in the silence but the deep distance between you.

They finished the conversation in a halting and awkward manner and she was damn mad, angry at him and at herself, mostly herself, she decided, and she was determined to get back to the grind, to the work of hygiened perfection, shaping herself, willing herself into tighter being.

She opened the window and lit a cigarette and sat there blowing streams of smoke into the cool night air.

His mother didn't want him playing cards on the corner, even with Catholic school boys, and she waited until he came upstairs and told him.

He played a game called sett' e mezz' for pennies, sitting on the one-step terrace outside the grocery store, freezing on the stone, and he memorized the cards coming out of the dealer's hand and won very regular, expecting a picture card and it would come, worth half a point, but she told him not to play anymore.

But before she told him this he sat there in the cold memorizing the cards and making his bets. When he got seven and a half, which was the best score you could get, he turned over his hole card and said, " Sett' e mezz'"

But when the dark seeped down around the players he had to quit the game and go to the butcher to pick up the meat his mother had bought earlier in the day.

The butcher was nicer to him now, with Nick upstate. The butcher asked him if he was old enough to get it up and Matty said thirteen, almost, and the butcher said salut' .

The butcher said he needed someone to tell him what it was like to get it up because he couldn't remember anymore and this was the same thing the butcher used to say to Nick, more or less, when Nick was the one who went for the meat, and Matty felt good about this, smelling sawdust and blood.

When he was walking home with the meat a woman came out of the bread store and gave Matty a tweak with her fingers, a twist of the flesh on his cheek, affectionate, like turning a key, and she told him to give regards to his mother.

He reached his street and the kids were still playing cards in front of the grocery, in the dark, some of the same kids who used to taunt him for his chess when he played chess, or because he had no father, and he sat in for a couple of hands, figuring the meat could not go bad in the freezing cold, and he memorized the cards as they fell.

Then he went upstairs and she told him she didn't want him gambling. She told him even if it was only pennies. She said it didn't look good and led to other things and other kinds of company and she told him she didn't want to say anything in front of the other boys, whether they were Catholic school boys or not, and he stood there with the meat in his arms.

They were the two of them alone and he wanted to obey He felt the solemn weight of the situation, the size of Nicky's going, but there were always kids playing cards on the stoops and corners and he wasn't sure, when they dealt him in, that he'd say no. And not because he could memorize the cards. It wasn't so sneaky as that. It was another kind of thing completely. He was a little bit of a hero with his brother upstate, doing what he'd done, and boys from blocks around wanted to know him.

This is why he thought it might be hard to obey her, with the lamb chops knobby in his arms.

You can't fight a war without acronyms. This is a fact of modern combat, according to Louis T. Bakey.

And where do these compressed words come from?

They come from remote levels of development, from technicians and bombheads in their computer universe-storky bespectacled men who deal with systems so layered and many-connected that the ensuing arrays of words must be atomized and redesigned, made spare and letter-sleek.

But acronyms also come from the ranks, don't they, at least occasionally? Look at old Louis strapped and cramped in his aft-facing ejection seat in the lower deck of the forward fuselage, going through the checklist. And the crews in alert barracks worldwide waiting for the klaxons to sound. And the guys on the line who load the ordnance and juice the engines. These are men who feel an armpit intimacy with the weapons systems they maintain and fly. This gives their acronyms a certain funky something.

And this is why the high-altitude bomber sitting on the ramp out there, crew of six including Louis, a great, massive, swept-winged and soon-to-soar B-52-this aircraft is known as a BUFF to tens of thousands of men throughout the command, for Big Ugly Fat Fuck.

In the cockpit the pilot and copilot hacked their watches for the second time. The crewmen at their separate stations went through the standard hundred-headed procedure, the gunner floating alone in the tail turret at the end of a crawlway, the EW officer shoehorned into a cubicle at the rear of the upper deck, and down in the squat black hole Louis Bakey let a yawn come rolling out and looked at the panels, switches and monitors that encased him in a more or less total monopoly of avionic jargon and he half nudged the navigator pressed in next to him.

"Chuckman, I find myself in a very pussy-minded mood today."

"Hell of a time to be thinking such thoughts."

"I don't think no thoughts. They just come."

"Being we're strapped in this tube for the next."

"That's the fucked-up beauty of the thing. How thoughts just come. Of and by themselves."

"Not counting debrief. Twelve hours, Louisman."

"In other words you're saying."