Don DeLillo - Underworld

"It came up in conversation."

"I don't know what art history says about this painting. But I say it's not that different from the other famous Bruegel, armies of death marching across the landscape. The children are fat, backward, a little sinister to me. It's some kind of menace, some folly. Kinderspielen . They look like dwarves doing something awful."

He held the girl kicking, raising her just above the surface, then dropping her a notch so she could splash lightly, laughing when the spray hit him in the face.

"Fat and backward. Did you hear that, little girl? As a matter of fact she's getting pretty heavy, isn't she? Whoa. Aren't you, sweetheart?"

Sooner or later the daily litany of delicate questions and curt replies.

"And my mother?"

"Resting."

"And the doctor came?"

"No."

"The doctor did not come?"

"No."

"When is he coming?"

"Tomorrow."

"Tomorrow. And Mrs. Ketchel looked in?"

"Looked in, exactly."

The child stepped along the surface and he lifted her high so Klara could take her. She swung her past the end of the tub and managed to have her wet socks off about a second after she touched down. One of those thousand-a-day death struggles of mother and child. Wails and bent limbs and a certain physical insistence on the woman's part. All done in a compact blur that dazzled Albert and made him lean over the edge to espy the two dinky socks lying soggy on the tile, as confirmation.

His mother suffered from a neuromuscular condition, myasthenia gravis, and she lay helpless much of the time, eyelids sagged, arms too weak to move except in ever slower syllables of gesture, reduced to units now, and her vision evidently doubled.

He recited the word for the child one last time as she was hustled out.

He'd brought his mother here, prevailing over her own fatalism and his wife's practical misgivings. You are the son, you take care of the parents. And the illness, the drama of a failing body, the way impending death made her seem saintly, with an icon's fixedness, a stern and staring and enameled beauty. Albert, who shunned any form of organized worship and thought God was a mass delusion, sat and watched her for hours, combed her hair, soaked up her diarrhea with bunched Kleenex, talked to her in his boyhood Italian, and he felt that the house, the flat, was suffused with a reverence, old, sad, heavy and impressive-an otherworldliness, now that she was here.

The salts had stopped fizzing and he lay in silence a while. He felt the contentment begin to slip away. There was something about evening perhaps that caused a transient sadness. He heard Klara in the kitchen preparing the meal. Things there he must keep at a distance. Her moods, her doubts. He thought about his own situation. Things he must confront. His complacency, his distractedness, his position at school, his sneaky-pete drinking.

It came to him suddenly when it finally came. Tangerine. How he'd stood in the market this afternoon peeling the loose-skinned fruit and eating the sweet sections, slightly stinging as the juice washed through his mouth, and how the scent seemed to breathe some essence, but why, of Morocco. And now he knew, incontrovertibly. Tangerine, Tanger, Tangier. The port from which the fruit was first shipped to Europe.

He felt better now, thank you.

How language is webbed in the senses. Out of sand-blaze brilliance into quirky minds such as his, into touch, taste and fragrance. He thought he'd linger just a bit longer, let the bath take total hold, ease and alleviate, before he put on clothes and entered the complex boxes where people do their living.

Nothing fits the body so well as water.

Later they would go get the car but first they hung around a while, letting the night close in, sitting on the stoop in front of 611.

Juju did not sit down until he spread his hanky on the steps. He was talking about the new model cars, just out, this one's got the horsepower, that one's got the handling, and he was earnest and fervent.

" You talk like you're ready to whip out your wallet," Nick said. "When you know and I know."

Scarfo stood on the corner about ten yards away eating a jelly apple, a grown man, holding it away from his body and leaning in to bite.

"There's nothing in there but a rubber."

They watched people come home from work. Nick sat haunched on the iron rail just above Juju. It was cold and they came plugging home, clerks, bus drivers, garment workers, elevator operators.

Nick watched them and smoked.

"That's you," he said.

"What are you talking?"

"Two years tops. That's you," he said. "Could happen sooner."

"It's a job. They have jobs. What do you want them to do?"

"I'll tell you what I think."

"Save me a drag on that cigarette."

They watched Scarfo talking to the shoemaker, holding the jelly apple at arm's length now.

"Anything's better than what they're doing. That's what I think."

"They're working. Let them work."

Nick watched and smoked, secretaries, maintenance men, bank tellers, messengers, typists in the typing pool, stenographers in the steno pool.

"It's not the work. It's the regular hours," Nick said. "Going in the same time every day. Clocking in, taking the train. It's the train. Going in together. Coming home together."

"You're better than that."

"I'm better, I'm worse, what's the difference."

When Nick took the last drag on the cigarette he held the butt with his thumb and middle finger, the middle finger poised to flick so that he took the drag and flicked in one prolonged motion, sending the butt toward the curbstone.

"Thanks," Juju said.

"For what?"

" You rather collect twenty weeks a year than have a steady job that pays decent?"

"I tell you what I rather do. I rather get my dick sucked by the one in the green coat."

"Where?"

"The one in the green coat."

"Where?"

"Across the street," Nick said.

"You like that?"

"Hey. I didn't say I want to marry her."

"You couldn't save me a drag?"

"What? Did you ask?"

"She's awful short," Juju said.

"Good. She can blow me standing up."

"Save wear and tear on her knees."

"God makes short people for a reason."

Scarfo wore neat creased pants and good shoes and he ate with his body contorted to keep the jelly from dripping on his clothes. He was talking to the shoemaker about something and the shoemaker stood there squat-bodied and blank.

" You got gas money?" Juju said.

"We don't need gas. For where we're going?"

"Where are we going?"

"To the poolroom," Nick said.

They watched the shoemaker think. Like watching a bulldog take a crap.

The people came home from work, thinning out over time, the merest scatter now. It was the night before Thanksgiving and there was a thing you were supposed to feel about a holiday and a day off and getting ready for the big feast with the relatives coming over but Nicky's days off had started a couple of weeks earlier when he stopped going to school and there weren't any relatives nearby which was something, in fact, to be thankful for.

He tapped Juju on the shoulder. They walked over to Quarry Road, a stretch of weedy landscape traveled mainly by dog walkers. This was where the '46 Chevy waited at the base of the high stone wall that surrounded the hospital for the incurable.

They were too young to have drivers' licenses but it didn't matter because the car was stolen anyway.

They'd seen it parked near the zoo about three weeks ago, key in the ignition, near nightfall, and Nick had gotten in, an impulse, a thing you don't even have time to dare yourself to do, and he started up the engine. Juju watched for a second and got in. Vito was with them, Bats, and he got in. They drove around for much of the night and it was still a joke, an escapade, and they chipped in for gas and drove around some more and then left the car parked next to an empty lot, with Nick taking the keys, and it was still there the next day They got a set of plates from Vito's uncle's car that was in traction, more or less, for the winter, and they exchanged these for the original plates and drove mainly at night because the brashness had given way to a responsible sense of ownership and they went only limited distances because it seemed safer and they didn't have money to spend on gas and there was nowhere to go anyway.