Don DeLillo - Underworld

Working with the hands. Scraping and painting. Stirring the indolent mixture. Seeing brushstrokes mark a surface. Pigment . The animal fats and polymers that blend to make this word.

They were nice to me. They ate and slept in a set of abandoned barracks at the edge of an enormous air base. Toilets, showers, cots and an improvised commissary. They were a good-humored workforce with an array of skills. They fixed things, sang songs, they told funny stories. When their numbers grew beyond the capacity of the barracks, they slept in pup tents or sleeping bags or in their dusty cars.

I told a student with a welcome badge that I was not here to wield a brush or sandblaster but only to see the piece-the artwork, the project, whatever it was called-and to say hello if that was possible to Klara Sax.

I told him I didn't want to take up space and he gave me directions to a motel where I might spend the night, maybe twenty-five miles away, and then asked me to meet him later at a place he called the paint shop.

I washed the sunblock off my hands and face and got in a food line, sandwiches and kiwis and fruit juice. Then I sat and talked with five or six others. They were all nice. I asked about the taxi and they said it was someone's car that they'd decided to paint and ornament, a gift for Klara on her birthday earlier in the week. Not the car itself, which had been returned to the owner in its taxified form, but the paint, the gesture, the sense of her ancestral New York.

They asked where I was from and I replied with a line I sometimes used.

I live a quiet life in an unassuming house in a suburb of Phoenix. Pause. Like someone in the Witness Protection Program.

I hated the line by this time but it seemed to bend the edge of inquiry, to set a patently shallow tone. All the while we were talking I looked around for the taxi driver with the honey-blond hair.

A number of people wore T-shirts inscribed Long Tall Sally .

I thought I could guess Klara's age within a year or two and when I asked which birthday she was celebrating somebody said seventy-two. This sounded about right.

It was a clear night with swirled stars burning low and close and a sweet breeze skimming the earth. I drove for about a minute and a half-don't walk, they'd said-and followed a line of road reflectors stuck in the dirt. There were strung lights and a cluster of jeeps and vans and a single long concrete structure about ten feet high and divided along its length into a dozen compartments, room-sized, open at the front and rear.

This was the operation center, where the project was coordinated- designs created, daily assignments made, most of the material stored.

One of the spaces was filled with people and I spotted a mike boom suspended over the massed heads. Lights, a camera, a woman with a clipboard-and spectators from the workforce, maybe forty of them, some with protective face masks dangled on their chests, many wearing shirts or jackets with the same inscription I'd seen earlier. I parked nearby and walked to the edge of the group. It took me a moment to find the subject. She was seated in a director's chair with a cane alongside and one leg propped on an overturned bucket. She smoked a black cigarette and talked to people while the crew set up.

Now that I was a word or two away, a name away, the oddness of the trip pressed in on me. Seventeen. That's how old I was last time I saw her. Yes, that long ago, and after all this time it might seem to her that I was some invasive thing, a figure from an anxious dream come walking and talking across a wilderness to find her. I stood and watched, trying to generate the will to make an approach. And maybe it was stranger still, odder than the years between meetings, that I was able to see her retrospectively. I could lift the younger woman right out of the chair, separate her from the person in the dark plaid pants and old suede blazer who sat talking and smoking. I'd seen photographs of Klara but could never quite isolate the woman I'd known, straight-bodied and pale, with a little twist about the mouth, the turned mouth that made her seem detached from what she said. And the evasive eyes, the look that seemed to bend the question of what it was we wanted from each other.

She looked famous and rare, famous even to herself, famous alone making a salad in her kitchen. Her hair was white, a mineral glisten, cropped close about her oblong face with a decorative fringe across the forehead. She wore a floppy orange T-shirt under the blazer and a necklace and several rings and one white running shoe and a sock the color of Kool-Aid grape. The injured foot was wrapped in a tan elastic brace.

Somebody passed with a paper cup and she dropped her cigarette in.

She'd rubbed some dark rouge high on her cheeks and it made her look severe and even deathly in an impressive way. But I could see the younger woman. I could make her rise in some sleight of mind to occupy the space I'd prepared, eyes faintly slanted and papery hands and how she used to smile privately and unbelievingly at the thought of us together and how she seemed to move in time-delay-the mind clocks in and the body follows.

I watched her. These first thirty seconds had a compressed power. I could feel my breathing change.

The crew was from French television and they were ready to start filming. The spectators grew still. The woman with the clipboard crouched just out of camera range, the spot from which she would ask her questions. She was in her willowy middle forties, streaked hair and antique jeans, a denim tote bag splay-handled at her feet.

She said, "It is all right we begin I think. I am allowed to be stupid because we edit my questions out of the film. Those are the rules okay? I choke on my English no problem."

"But I must be smart, funny, profound and charming," Klara said.

"It would actually be very nice. We start with the injury of your left leg. You can tell us what happened okay?"

"I fell off a ladder. Very minor. Missed a rung somewhere along the way. We use whatever devices we can find. We don't have a roof over our heads, a hangar or factory. We don't have the scaffolding, the platforms they have in assembly halls where they do construction and repair work."

I moved closer and found myself standing a few feet behind the student with the welcome badge, the young man who'd offered to arrange a room for me.

The interviewer said, "So you are climbing, you are working."

"It's a sprained ankle. Take an aspirin. Yes, I get up there sometimes if it's not too fierce, if the heat's bearable, you know. I've got to see it and feel it. We have many able-bodied volunteers. But I need to pitch in now and again."

"I was at the site tonight the first time and saw many ladders and people crawling on the wings. They're wearing masks. They have strapped to their backs these enormous tanks."

"We have automotive spray guns we use to prime the metal. We have industrial guns that spray oil paints, enamel, epoxy and so on. We use air compressors that are portable. We even use brushes. We use brushes when we want a brush effect."

People in the audience shifted a bit, trying to get a better look at Klara as she spoke or edging nearer to hear the conversation more clearly. Klara's voice had a slight rasp and a kind of wobble, the loose liquid texture of something sliding side to side.

"We scrape and sandblast," she said. "We have many blasting machines with guns and nine-gallon hoppers, I think they are. We have some pressure blasters, big things on wheels. Most of the planes have only one coat of paint to remove because they were painted originally with weight considerations foremost in mind. They were built to carry bombs in other words, not beautiful coats of paint. Of course this is impossible work. Working outside in heat, dust and wind. Completely impossible. Too much dust we don't paint. A little dust we paint. We're not looking for precision. We spray it on, grit and all. Spray it, shoot it, throw it."