Don DeLillo - Underworld

To Albert. Why do you want to talk about your father when all I see when I hear his name is lost opportunity?

To Albert. Be careful. That's all I'm saying.

To Klara. Go live your life. I'm not worth your time or attention.

This last is a gesture of hand and eye that both women know to be insincere.

Klara did not tell Albert that she found it an odd comfort, at times, to sit with his mother. They had one parent left between them, dying. She played Perry Como records for the woman. She brought the child in so the grandmother could touch her hands and face. The woman did not see well, or saw two things where one occurred, and her hand on the child's face seemed to work a marvel of retrospection.

Her skin was getting browner, her hair whiter, hands spotted and blotched, but there was still something strong about her, something Albert seemed to fear, a judgment, a withering conviction of some kind.

She had a gesture that seemed to mark a state of hopelessness too deep to be approached with words.

Klara sat there and talked to her a little. She kept the window open slightly to let the mustiness escape, the slow waste. She heard fire engines some distance off and watched the light fade.

Albert's sister came to visit sometimes, Laura, unable to accept the impending death, scared, dependent, betrayed, and Klara could imagine she'd try to climb into the gravehole when the time came.

How strange it was to find herself here, listening to Perry Como with a woman she didn't know, who was dying, and with everything else as well, this chair, that lamp, this house and street, and to wonder how it happened.

When Albert came home she was in the kitchen.

"How is she?" "Sleeping."

"Did she eat anything?"

"I made a little soup."

"Did she eat it?"

"Ate some, spilled some. Your daughter caught a cold from the baby-sitter."

"I'll make it go away," he said.

She heard him telling stories to Teresa, nonsense tales he'd been told as a boy, characters with funny rhyming names, and he overpro-nounced certain words for effect, his voice rounded and melodic, but she shut the kitchen door because she didn't want to hear it anymore.

The story voice, the play voice was all too Albertlike, rippling with incidental music and fanciful plot. She put the dinner on the table and spoke his name.

They talked through dinner, inconsequentially. She smoked her last cigarette of the day in the spare room, looking at the wall. She put out the cigarette by grinding it into the bathroom mirror and then she flushed it down the toilet and went to bed.

The first one ran into the playground, the one with the dark cap. Nick was punching the other one, both of them skidding on the icy surface.

He'd never seen the guy before and this is why he was punching him. He punched the guy to his knees, or the guy skidded to his knees, and then Nick looked into the playground. Juju was chasing the first one but skidded and fell, a leg flying up. Juju sat there a moment watching the guy run toward the steps that went down to the lower level. The playground was white and still, swings hanging empty, an inch of snow on the seats.

The other one was on his knees, looking embarrassed to be there. Nick crouched and set himself and threw a punch. He knew it was not necessary to throw this punch but he'd hit the guy only glancing blows to the face and he wanted to hit him solid. It was a chance to hit someone solid that he didn't want to miss. He punched him under the eye, a short-stroke blow, and the guy rocked back on his haunches, hands to his face, and Nick felt better now.

Juju came out of the playground and took some frozen dog shit out of the snow. He wasn't wearing gloves. He picked it up and mashed it into the guy's head, into his hair and ears.

He said, "Here, stroonz, this is for you."

Then he washed his hands in the snow and they walked over to Mike's to shoot a game.

Matty knotted the blue tie. The Catholic school boys wore white shirts and blue ties. For a long time his mother had to knot his tie for him. And he couldn't figure out how to put his jacket on, how to hold it so that a certain arm goes in a certain sleeve hole, and sometimes he had to place the jacket flat on the ground, sit down in front of it and then match an arm to a hole, sort of lying down backwards into the jacket.

Imagine what Nicky said, watching this spectacle.

But he was over that now. He was over the tantrums, pretty much, and the silent treatment he used to give his mother when he was mad at her, and the times he locked the bathroom door and tried to suffocate himself with the shower curtain.

He was over the tantrums because he wasn't playing chess. Mr. Bronzini called it a sabbatical. One of those words of his, to be spelled, explained and acted out. Matty had his own word. Sick.

He could not take the losing. It was too awful. It made him physically weak and massively angry. It sent him reeling through the flat, arms windmilling. His brother bopped him on the head and that made him madder. He did not have enough height and weight to contain all his rage. He was past the point of crying. Losing made his limbs shake. He gasped for air. He did not understand why someone so small, young and unprepared should have to squat in the path of this juggernaut called losing.

He put on his tie and went to school. First he slipped the new dog tag over his neck, for atomic attack, with his name and school inscribed on the disk, and then he put on his blue tie and walked the five blocks to school.

Matty sat in the row next to the cloakroom and was one of three pupils who opened and closed the sliding doors of the cloakroom at designated times. They worked in unison, with a whoosh and bang. This was their assignment.

It was Catherine Conway's assignment to clap the erasers every Friday, out the back door above the schoolyard, her eyes smarting in the chalk dust.

Richard Stasiak was assigned to open and close the windows. He took the window pole with the hook at one end and he fitted the hook into the loop at the top of the window and then pushed or pulled. Richard Stasiak was big and tall and this was the logical job for him.

They sat at their desks, forty boys and girls, sixth-graders, this drab gray day backs erect, feet together, watching Sister Edgar.

Sister prowled the space between her desk and the blackboard, moving in a rustle of monochrome cotton, scrubbed hands flashing. She recited questions from the Baltimore Catechism and her students responded in a single crystal voice.

Matty believed in the Baltimore Catechism. It had all the questions and all the answers and it had love, hate, damnation and washing other people's feet, it had whips, thorns and resurrections, it had angels, shepherds, thieves and Jews, it had hosanna in the highest.

He didn't know what that meant, hosanna in the highest, and was afraid to ask. They were all afraid. They'd been afraid for a week, ever since Sister had banged Michael Kalenka's head against the blackboard when he gave a snippy answer to an easy question. They were studying the Creation and the Fall of Man, lesson five in the Baltimore Catechism, and Sister pointed to a picture in the book of a man and woman standing more or less undressed beneath an apple tree with a serpent coiled on a limb and she called on Michael Kalenka and asked him to identify the man and woman, the easiest question she'd ever asked, and Michael Kalenka stood up and looked at the picture, and he thought and looked and thought, and Sister said, "The original parents of us all," and Michael Kalenka thought and grinned and said, "Tarzan and Jane."

Sister flew at Michael Kalenka and collected the boy in the wing-folds of her habit. He was practically out of sight until she suddenly propelled him toward the blackboard headfirst. The impact was strong and true. There was a sound so real, a thud and a subsequent hum, the whole panel vibrating, that the boys and girls went slack in their seats, wide-eyed and semiliquid. Blown out of their rigid posture. And Michael Kalenka stood stunned and rag-dollish, sheepish, guilty, grinning but mostly just stunned and rag-armed and sagging.