Don DeLillo - Underworld

"It used to be so crowded. Or is that just in my mind? The summer nights. Fantastic. It's great to see you, Nick. I'm having one more. Have one more."

I wanted to finish the first one and leave, or not finish it and leave. A chance meeting like this, if you run it five minutes longer than it's worth, you ruin the night and the following day.

He kept adjusting his glasses.

A man alone at a table was moaning a bummed-out monologue that involved being followed wherever he went, and they were recording his private thoughts, and they were sending the seeing-eye blind to spy on him with their dogs and their pencils and their cups, and they were doing this on buses and subways both.

"Jerry, you ought to go home and play with your kids. When you're fifty or sixty, you can come here and think about the past."

But he didn't want to go home. He wanted to recite the destinies of a hundred linked souls, the street swarm that roared in his head. The dead, the married, the moved-to-Jersey, the kid with five sisters who became a safecracker, the handball ace who's a chiropractor, the stuck-up blond in the fifth grade who married a Puerto Rican prizefighter.

"We ought to go up there, Nick. Serious. Take the subway, we'll be there in forty-five minutes. We can get dinner at Mario's. I'll make some calls. Get some of the guys. They'll love it. They'll meet us. Serious, man. Come on, drink, we'll go."

His voice carried an urgent logic. He was defensive and a little angry and about halfway drunk, gripped by the plan and a little angry in advance, wary of the thought that I might not see the beauty and inevitability of a trip to the Bronx, that I might be unswayed by the power of old-times'-sake, and he was already sensing the edges of a bitter affront.

"Come on, serious, we'll take the subway. We'll go see Lofaro. Some of the old faces. They'd love to see you, Nick."

I didn't want to put him off, to seem outside this or above it. Jerry knew I'd been in correction and then more or less lost to news and rumor and now here I was turned out in a tweed jacket and doing a job I liked and looking okay, stopped smoking, didn't overdo the drinking, knew a woman with a sexy cello voice and was probably, regularly banging her, and then look at him, nice Catholic boy gone baggy and stale, hates going home, a wife in Jackson Heights and two small kids, and he's lighting one cigarette with the butt of another, and drinks so much he blacks out, and sells commercial time for a radio station at the end of the dial, and all because he's never killed a man.

"This is a thing we have to do," Jerry said. "We'll grab a cab-on me."

A man named Jorge started a conversation with the bartender. Jorge wore a headband and looked sexually deranged. I didn't think of these people as regulars exactly. They were denizens. That was the word somehow, from the Late Latin, deep within, and that's what they were like, trapped souls trying to emerge, and I began to understand that Jerry came here so he could put aside self-pity and the gnaws of practical worry and be with people who would talk to him in a kind of delusional plainsong, a run-on voice without ordinary sense or strict meter but coming from deeper inside than he could bear to hear in his own locution.

The lights dimmed and flickered.

Jerry was talking to me and there was a woman with Jorge who was saying something to the bartender about the optimum temperature of beer and that's when the lights dimmed and flickered and then went out.

Jerry was saying, "Spur of the moment. I'll make some calls. I'll get some guys. I'll get what's-his-name, Allie. This is a thing, my friend, where you don't have the right to refuse."

Then the lights went out.

The man at the far end of the bar stopped trying to bounce quarters into his shot glass.

Someone said, "Is that the lights?"

We sipped our stingers, Jerry and I.

The bartender said, " You know what?"

Someone started talking in the men's room, loud enough for us to hear.

The bartender said, "Looks like from here the whole block's out."

The first voice said, "Is that the lights?"

"They must be working on something that caused a short," the bartender said. 'And me without candles."

The voice from the toilet grew louder and agitated. One of the old women said something to the other, the first words out of either of them.

Jerry and I sipped our stingers.

"But you know what?" the bartender said.

Jorge was speaking Spanish now.

The bartender came up with a flashlight from the bottom of the bar and he wedged it between two bottles on the shelf beneath the mural.

The woman with Jorge was also speaking Spanish, but badly, talking to the man in the toilet.

The bartender went over to the doorway.

"I thought Allie was killed in Korea."

"That was Viggiano. Korea."

"Stepped on a mine, I thought."

"That was Mike. Stepped on a mine. Viggiano."

The two old women were silent again, adjusted to the dark, sitting there drinking.

"So all these years, you're telling me."

" You've been carrying around the wrong war casualty."

"Or the right war but the wrong guy."

"Let's go outside," he said. "I want to see what's happening."

"I don't have to feel sorry for Allie anymore."

"I think the whole block's out. Allie's selling fish at his father's stall in the market. We'll find him. I'll call him."

We took our drinks out to the sidewalk. The block was out and the area was out. It was after five, dark now, and the traffic lights were also out and we could hear the pulse of car horns at the entrance to the bridge above us and to the west.

People were coming out of shops and apartments, the locksmith and grocery and check-cashing place, and they stood around and talked. We could look down a tenement street to the east and see the river, a narrow strip of shimmer that formed a kind of softness, a visual whisper behind the dark bulk contours in the foreground.

"Is Brooklyn out? I think Brooklyn's out."

"Brooklyn's definitely out."

People talked to each other and looked up periodically. They looked toward the midtown sky or tried to look toward the tip of the island, blocked off of course by clustered buildings, but always up, skywatching, and they pointed and talked.

I went back inside and put my drink on the bar. I left some money near the glass. Someone was still in the toilet, agitated in Spanish, saying something about his mother, or someone's mother, and I figured he couldn't find the toilet paper or he couldn't find the bolt on the door and it was a matter the denizens would have to deal with.

Then I stood in the doorway and watched Jerry talking to the bartender and three or four others, twenty yards up the street, and they were lighted intermittently by passing cars and they were animated, they were roused by the vastness of the circumstance, by the forces involved, and they were talking and pointing.

I went down the street in the other direction. After half a block I crossed to the opposite side and walked through an archway under the bridge and into an area filled with household garbage and smashed cars and mounds of rubble dumped by construction crews and at the north end of the passage I could see the silhouetted towers of mid-town, exact and flat against the streaked sky, and I heard the sound of car horns building, the dinosaur death of stalled traffic at rush hour, calling and answering everywhere, and I made my way out the other end, where the headlights of barely moving cars, cars stopped dead, where rivers of barium light marked my progress through the streets.

He was back in New York, the womb of consciousness, a midnight show at Carnegie Hall, nearly three thousand people, and he stood on the enormous stage looking out across the orchestra and up past two tiers of boxes to the gallery levels, where they stood in the aisles and crowded the exits.