Don DeLillo - Underworld

People walked along listening to transistor radios because there were stations with auxiliary power and there were men wrapped in headscarves who sold flashlights and candles and there were candles in thousands of apartment windows and people on line for candles outside the five-and-ten and long lines at phone booths on every second corner.

The power grid gone. What did it mean? The whole linked system down. Or not linked sufficiently perhaps. Sylvia Sidney in the dark.

From certain vantages the city was all haunted silhouette, secret and recessed, its neon ego shut down. There was a sky tonight. The towers across the park were planed down to a kind of night velvet that was etched and deathly and lacking the static that makes the high nights throb.

I heard the sound of drums, drumbeats, not staccato shots but hand drums maybe, dull and soft-skinned, coming out of the park.

I was a stranger here. I knew Manhattan only at street level, fitfully, and felt a little isolated, and the place scared me with its knowingness, its offhand vaunt, a style of mind and guise that can be harder to learn than some dialect of the Transvaal. Everybody knew the same seven things. But it could take you years to work through the list and by that time the number would be different, or the whole list.

They came out of the park at 90th Street, a band of hippies on a candlelight march, with flutes, drums and tambourines, about fifty chanting people, and a man with a needle stuck in his protruding tongue, and a woman with a snake around her neck, and a haze of pungent smoke that had the whiff of some congenial misdemeanor, and there were kids walking along and babies in backpacks and slings, and the marchers chanted a sort of hummed syllable, a thing with a twang, it sounded to me like Bomb , a vibe with the gravid tone of prayer, repeated, repeated, but they wouldn't be chanting an ominous word, would they, with infants strapped to their chests and backs.

And maybe Jerry had been correct. I didn't have the right to refuse him. This tremendous thing of his, this trip to the Bronx-I felt guilty about slipping away and betraying a sweet idea.

I watched the marchers go south along the park edge. The streets began to darken, drained of traffic and headlights, and an odd calm set in, edged with apprehension. How many thousands, hundreds of thousands trapped in subways or aloft in packed elevators waiting. The always seeping suspicion, paralysis, the thing implicit in the push-button city, that it will stop cold, leaving us helpless in the rat-eye dark, and then we begin to wonder, as I did, how the whole thing works anyway.

I walked east on 96th Street. Going empty and dead, stores closed, bus stops deserted, phone booths unoccupied. Ego gone and vertigo too, a city without its merengue spin, and a car pulled up at the center stripe, anonymous sedan going the other way, and the driver stuck his head into the gusty wind and called across to me.

I said, "What?"

"Where you go? I take you. Cheap."

I looked at him. I was glad I'd walked away from Jerry. It would have been deadly. It would have been crap. I wouldn't have been able to listen to that crap. I got in the car and told the guy where my hotel was. I wanted to call Marian from my room, if the phones were working, Marian Bowman, and tell her what was happening here and ask what they knew about it there.

There was a hole in the dashboard where the radio should have been located. But I asked the guy if he'd heard any news.

"All out. State of Maine out. Boston, Massachusetts. Pennsylvania, my sister lives. Ontario, Canada. Very big, this thing."

I sat back and watched the streets roll by and saw what I could see in the moonlight.

We'd be married three years later. Our daughter would be born in 1970, the year a small group of radicals bombed the Army Math Research Center at the University of Wisconsin in Marian's Big Ten town by igniting a carload of agricultural fertilizer and fuel oil. Killed one man, injured five others.

We'd have a son two years later. Children. This was remote to me sitting in the Romanian's car, or the Greek's. Marriage remote. Fatherhood a vague regret somewhere in the kitchen smell of another country. The decades not exactly unpromising but remote, and maybe unpromising too, in this phantom Manhattan, with only a few stragglers astir and the darkness so dense it had physical mass.

I looked out the Greek's dusty window and could see the past and never stop seeing it but could not summon the future, even in cartoon strokes, the strong bright Sunday of the world.

We rode without talking the rest of the way.

And the enormity of the night. You could feel the night expanding, standing on the sidewalk near Times Square, a siren sounding half a mile away.

I looked at the candles lined up on the desk in the lobby. The lobby was empty and the candles threw light high on the walls. The clerk came out of a room somewhere.

"I could take you up but frankly."

"Not necessary."

"I took up people I lost count."

"I'll just take a candle."

The clerk held a flashlight. He gestured when he spoke and the beam swung across the small lobby

"I did something to my back with the climbing," he said. "But I lit these candles you can take, in case some people come in they don't have a match."

I took a candle and climbed the stairs to the fifth floor. When I entered the room I went right to the window to see how the night looked from up here.

I didn't call Marian. I felt a loneliness, for lack of a better word, but that's the word in fact, a thing I tried never to admit to and knew how to step outside of, but sometimes even this was not means enough, and I didn't call her because I would not give in, watching the night come down.

He walks along the curving base of the stadium wall, under the blue and white bunting, and he is trying to spot an easy mark.

He is in the crowd, a large and moving swarm, elbows and shoulders, faces suddenly jutting, eye to eye, and they're still coming down from the elevated train station, men and boys, talking and whooping, and the line is forming for bleacher seats even though the gates won't open until nine in the morning, hours from now, and they're coming up from the subway and streaming out of the local streets and he walks some more, caught up in the rush of sensation, flags flying and emblems bejeweling the high wall and a second long line, this one for standing room tickets, men eating and drinking, some sitting in beach chairs covered with blankets, and Manx goes walking through clouds of cigar smoke and sees whiskey flasks showing here and there, with caps on chains.

Now what does he do? Does he look for some highjiver from Harlem, a Giant fan all flush with victory and ready to drop some dollars on a genuine all-time souvenir?

Won't work, Manx thinks. Black man's not gonna believe anything he says. Think I'm some fool running a penny hustle. Black man's gonna look him down with that saucy eye he's got for outrageous plots against his person.

No. Got to go white. Only way to go. Besides, the numbers mostly white, so it's the percentage play.

A happy rumble. The street is one big buzz and rumble, a steady roar of talk and song and people calling to each other, filled with good feeling.

Manx walks over to two men. He does this on an impulse, in the spirit of why not, and because he doesn't want to stand around all night studying faces and calculating odds, even though that's exactly what he ought to be doing, and he knows it, and he'd planned to do it, but the best-laid plans, like the man says, have a habit of collapse.

His hand grips the baseball. He keeps his hand outside the jacket pocket and he grips the ball through the cloth.

And in the spirit of good feeling. In the swelling presence of two groups of fans, Giants and Yankees, both winners this year-a happy steady join-in roar that brings him up and gives him heart.