Don DeLillo - Underworld

Lenny paused here, pointing out that the end, the punch line, would have to involve some reversion to type, something the girl does that demonstrates the power of a single old and shocking habit over any number of civilizing influences.

Then he said, "No, yes, wait. We've got it backwards. It's not the girl who reverts. It's the man. Dig it. He's the kind of cat who questions everything he does. Begins to ask himself. Was she a twisted child or an artist? Was she jailbait or saint? In other words did he make a terrible mistake bringing her here and educating her and banning cigarettes from her life? He begins to recall those delirious nights in San Juan." Lenny gave the name of the city an authentic guttural rumble. "Yes, those nights in the basement of the stinking bordello where she performed. Admit it, fool. You've destroyed a strange, crude, beautiful and eerie perversion and replaced it with a boring oboe. Which she plays incessantly by the way. And which is anyway just a displaced version of the king-size Kent, normalized and concertized."

Lenny stood sideways, mike in hand, stroking his jaw.

"He longs to see smoke rings come out of her puss, her nook. First the cigarette between her spindly legs. Then the rising rings. When he bought her from the madam, she was on the verge of intertwining the rings, which is either a symbol of the Blessed Trinity, Father, Son and Holy Ghost, or it's the Ballantine beer logo-Purity, Body and Flavor. Either way, imagine the rush he would have gotten."

He looked into the wings, thinking.

"They marry in a smoke-free ceremony on the rolling lawn. On their wedding night, still a virgin, she stands in a negligee by the window facing west. He enters, in pafamas and smoking jacket, holding a cigarette in a cigarette holder, an unlit king-size Kent."

But he wasn't sure how to end it.

"He takes the cigarette out of the holder and extends it in her direction, glancing at the shadowy mound under her negligee. She steps back, horrified. She says, You must be mad. She says it in four languages. She says almost everything in four languages, a habit that's beginning to piss him off."

Then Lenny got a better idea, deeper, more challenging.

"Wait, listen, no. The millionaire is a myth, isn't he? We stuck him in the story because we needed a rich weak do-gooder, what, a respectable self-deluding jerk who shows his corruption in the end. We made him up. Let's tell the truth this time."

He sensed a disappointment out there. They wanted the wedding night, the negligee, the boudoir, the casually cruel ending like the bit he used to do about the boy raised by wolves, found in the wild, fed, developed, educated, who graduates with honors from MIT and is killed a week later chasing a car down the street.

"Let's tell the truth," he said. "Nobody saved the girl from a life of perversion. She fled the whorehouse on her own initiative. She saved all the meager cash handouts the customers had been giving her and she took a plane to New York, the roach coach, in order to find her mother, who wasn't dead at all-another easy myth."

Shit, he was ruining their fun. He could feel the cooling all the way up to the cheap seats, where his teenage fans craved a final grossness, draped over the rails-some epic sicko finish.

"She never worked in a whorehouse at all," Lenny said. "She never dropped her drawers or blew smoke rings from her pussy. Fact of the matter, she never lived in San Juan, baby."

He loved to say San Juan. And yes, he was disassembling the whole structure. He felt their puzzlement and couldn't blame them.

"Let's make her human. She's real like us. You take the subway to the South Bronx, where she lives with her junkie mother who can't kick. She's just barely old enough so that men are beginning to notice. Her mother comes and goes. Disappears, comes back. Phone company shuts off the phone. Landlord's been coming around. Or putting dispossesses under the door because you never actually see him. He's a corporation called XYZ Realty with a post office box in Greenland.

The girl's hiding in the empty lots, down the maze of back alleys, because her mother's gone again and she thinks the landlord will have her arrested. Let's make her human. Let's give her a name."

But he didn't give her a name. He couldn't think of a name. Not a real name. He went back to old jokes instead. He told a mother-in-law joke and they laughed because in fact it was funny. He told a Jewish mother joke, even better, and they loved it, they laughed, and he worked his way back to form, doing race, sex, religion, and it was funny and offensive Lenny and the night ended finally in booming waves of laughter and applause, in spirited shouts from the kids in the top tiers, and he stood on the great stage in his stupid white suit, small and remorseful, and then he turned and walked toward the wings.

Hours later I was still walking. I walked right past my hotel and kept on going, a nondescript building near Times Square, where they'd give me a candle and show me the door that led to the stairwell, but I wanted to keep on walking, and where I'd only have to climb five flights, but I wanted to walk into the night and see this thing.

I saw taxis with off-duty signs lit up but people took them anyway, just opened the doors and got in because the cabs were captive to the traffic and could not shy off and speed away and I raised the collar of my jacket and walked east a while and went past a huge crowd near the main library and finally realized it was a bus stop, six or seven hundred people at a bus stop, easily that many, massed and more or less orderly, packed along the sidewalk and up on the library steps, and the wind whipping down Fifth, and they were waiting for a bus.

I didn't have a coat. My coat was in Evanston, Illinois. I hunched in my jacket and saw people walking across the Queensboro Bridge and they were taking over the bridge, they were walking eight or nine abreast, maybe fifty deep, followed by a sequence of crawling cars, then another band of pedestrians, and they were walking home to Queens.

That's when I got the idea and felt the twinge of regret.

I stopped for dinner in a candlelit restaurant in the 70s, where they seated me with three others because it was shared tables tonight. There was only one subject, of course, at least for a while, and we wondered how widespread the blackout might be, and whether it was sabotage, and someone said, a book editor with a bow tie, that this was the title of an early Hitchcock film, with Sylvia Sidney, and he named the rest of the cast compulsively-a film that starts with the lights going out. We skipped dessert and coffee for the sake of those waiting on line and I had a drink in a bar nearby and thought Jerry was right, Jerry Sullivan, this was the twinge, the pinch of guilt-we ought to be going to the Bronx tonight, Jerry and I, not trying to commandeer a taxi but walking all the way, something crazy and emotional, a trek through a city gone dark and cold.

But then I thought stupid, no, forget it-we'd lose interest on the way or get in a fight with looters and muggers or just get tired, or Jerry would, and what happens after that?

A man directed traffic with a rolled-up magazine, a man of some girth but quick on his feet, dipping and gliding, addressing the major mess at 86th Street, a man who shrugged off beeping horns and did a hundred semaphores, extravagant of gesture, in a topcoat with a velvet collar, his glossy baton flashing and people pausing to watch, and there was a great and fervent feeling that attended his performance, which was conscientious and deft however befrilled by theater, and it spread among the people in the street.

But it would have been tremendous somehow too, a beautiful thing, I thought, walking up Manhattan and into the Bronx, as a gesture, a remembrance, and all the way to the old neighborhood, tonight of all nights, with the world coming down, but what would we do when we got there, at two in the morning?