Don DeLillo - Underworld

She said, "Of course the planes have been stripped of most components that might still be useful or salable to civilian contractors. But the wheels are still there, the undercarriages, because I don't want planes that sit flat on their bellies. So we need a great deal of elevation to work on the fuselage and the massive fin. We have people standing on ladders with twelve-foot pole guns, we have people on the stabilizers spraying away at the damn tail."

"But you have cooperation."

"We have cooperation from the military up to a point. We can paint their deactivated aircraft. They let us paint and they promise to keep the site intact, to isolate it from other uses and to maintain the integrity of the project. No other objects, not a single permanent object can be located within a mile of the finished piece. We also have foundation grants, we have congressional approval, all sorts of permits. What else? Materials donated by manufacturers, tens of thousands of dollars' worth. But we still have to scratch and steal to get many of the things we need."

"And the dry air of the desert this keeps the metal safe."

"It is dry and it is hot."

"It is very hot okay?"

"Abandoned aircraft. Like the end of World War II," Klara said. "The one difference is-two differences. The one difference is we haven't actually fought a war this time. We have a number of postwar conditions without a war having been fought. And second we are not going to let these great machines expire in a field or get sold as scrap."

" You are going to paint them."

"We are in the process of painting them. We are saving them from the cutter's torch. And it's very strange let me tell you because thirty years ago when I gave up easel painting and started doing my castoffs they attacked me for it. And I don't recall when the term first came into use but they eventually started calling me the Bag Lady which I said funny ha-ha, figuring it would last a month. But the name trailed me for quite a long time and I was not amused anymore."

"Now you are here in the desert."

"Back to castoffs. This time it is not aerosol cans and sardine tins and shampoo caps and mattresses. I painted a mattress and some sheets. It was the end of marriage number two and I painted my bed in effect. Anyway yes, I am now dealing with B-52 long-range bombers. I am painting airplanes that are a hundred and sixty feet long with wingspans even longer and total weight operating on full tanks maybe half a million pounds, I don't know about empty-planes that used to carry nuclear bombs, ta-da, ta-da, out across the world."

"This is not a mattress."

"I'll tell you what this is. This is an art project, not a peace project. This is a landscape painting in which we use the landscape itself. The desert is central to this piece. It's the surround. It's the framing device. It's the four-part horizon. This is why we insisted to the Air Force-a cleared area around the finished work."

"Yes it is true the landscape."

"Wait. I'm not finished. I want to say in this passage from small objects to very large ones, in the years it took me to find these abandoned machines, after all this I am rediscovering paint. And I am drunk on color. I am sex-crazed. I see it in my sleep. I eat it and drink it. I'm a woman going mad with color."

And she looked toward her audience, her workers, briefly, and they stirred and laughed.

"But the beauty of the desert."

"It's so old and strong. I think it makes us feel, makes us as a culture, any technological culture, we feel we mustn't be overwhelmed by it. Awe and terror, you know. Unconducive"-and she waved a hand and laughed-"to industry and progress and so forth. So we use this place to test our weapons. It's only logical of course. And it enables us to show our mastery. The desert bears the visible signs of all the detonations we set off. All the craters and warning signs and no-go areas and burial markers, the sites where debris is buried."

The interviewer asked a series of questions about young conceptu-alists working with biological and nuclear waste and then called for a short break. The spectators applauded lightly and folded into chatty clusters or went outside to watch the night sky build and thicken.

I reached for the guy with the welcome on his chest.

"Can you approach her now? Tell her it's Nick Shay. From New York, tell her. Tell her if she can spare a minute," I said. "We lived near each other in New York."

He was blinking at me.

I told him my name again and watched him head for the director's chair. He had to wait until she was unoccupied and then he spoke to her, gesturing in my direction.

I watched her face, waiting for the name to register, for light to strike her eyes. She paused, then began to look around for me. Her face showed-what? A certain concern, a solicitude on my behalf, grave and memoried. Are you really here? Are you all right? Are you alive?

I walked over there and grabbed a folding chair and set it down alongside her and waited for the kid to go away.

"So this is Nick."

"Yes."

"Talk about surprises."

"You remember."

"Oh yes," she said, and there was the fadeaway smile, the look that says how did this happen.

"I was in Houston."

"You're leading a regular life."

"Shave every day."

"Pay taxes-good."

"I had business in Houston. There was a magazine I took with me that had a story about your project. So I thought why not."

"Nick exercises, I think."

"Well, let's see. I drink soy milk and run the metric mile."

I waited for her to smile. Then I said, "But the story didn't say exactly where the site was located. So I flew to El Paso and rented a car and thought I would drive home to Phoenix and pay a visit along the way."

"And you found us."

"Wasn't easy."

She was looking at me, openly evaluating. I wondered what she was seeing. I felt there was something I ought to explain about the intervening years. I had that half dread you feel when someone studies you after a long separation and makes you think that you've done badly to reach this point so altered and drawn. Unknown to yourself, you see. To reach this point so helpless against your own connivings that the truth has been obscured from you.

"And you're well? You look well," she said.

She was saying I looked well but she was staring in a certain way and there was something in her voice, you see, that made me wary. People kept interrupting to tell her things, to relay messages. Someone came by with a message about some administrative matter and she introduced us.

"An old friend from the cherished past," she said. "Well, cherished in memory maybe. Rough going at the time."

Then she turned to me again.

"Married?"

"Yes. Two children. College-age. Although they're not in college."

"I've married out of impulse, out of a cozy evening with a nice wine. Not lately, though. Lately I've been crazy with work. It took me a long time to realize I was careful and logical about affairs, really sort of scrupulous about who and where and when, and completely reckless when it came to marriage."

I wanted to say, You weren't always careful about affairs. But then it wasn't an affair, was it? Just an occurrence, a thing in two episodes, a few hours only, measured in hours and minutes and then ended. Of course I said nothing. I didn't know how to handle the subject. We could not be wry, considering the difference in our ages, about growing old and deaf and hobbled, and I despaired a little, I began to think we'd already stretched the visit past bearable limits and what a mistake I'd made, coming here, because the subject was not speakable- too secret, still, even between the secret-keepers, after forty years.

"I thought I owed us this visit. Whatever that means," I said.