Don DeLillo - Underworld

"You think I keep rubbers in this drawer here?"

"I don't know."

"You want to see what I keep in here?"

"I don't know, George. Sure, why not?"

"No. I don't think you want to see what I keep in here."

"Sure, why not?"

"No. Big mistake. You'll talk."

"I won't talk. Who'm I gonna tell?"

All right. George was having a little fun with him, not that he changed expression. Raw, drawn, tired, with receding hair and long fingers stained with cigarette tar.

"Because I trust you, Nicky."

He reached into the drawer and came out with a box of kitchen matches and a spoon.

"We used to call these lucifers, these wood matches."

The utensil was an ordinary spoon clouded on the bottom of the bowl, stained like George's fingers, only darker and marbled.

"I'm watching," Nick said.

"You interested?"

"I'm interested," he said.

George reached into the drawer and came out with a length of elastic, medical-looking, a strapping device of some kind. He tossed it next to the matches and looked at Nick.

"I'm still watching."

"You watching?"

"I'm watching."

George reached in and came out with a hypodermic needle, a needle and dusty syringe, and he held it in front of Nicky's face.

" You watching? Watch."

It took Nick a minute to understand all this. This was new to him. Drugs. Who used drugs around here? He felt dumb and confused and very young suddenly

" You use this stuff?"

George lifted a fold-over pouch out of his breast pocket. He wagged it several times and dropped it back in.

" Eroina ," he said.

Nick felt dumb all right. He felt like someone had just sandbagged him in an alley. Wham. He almost put a hand to the back of his neck.

"Let me see it," he said.

George took out the pouch and handed it to him. Nick lifted the flap and tried to sniff the powder.

"What are you smelling? It don't smell."

He handed it back.

"How come?"

"How come what?"

"You use this stuff."

George rolled up the sleeve on his left arm. There were stippled marks and scars and in the crook of the elbow a dark mass, a fester of busted blood vessels and general wreckage.

Then he brandished the needle, enjoying himself.

" You asked me do I fix up my friends? What kind of fix?"

"Hey. Get away."

"We'll start you slow. Skin-pop. You don't hit a vein."

"I skeeve needles, George. Get that thing away from me."

" You hit the plunger, see."

"This I don't need."

"Come on. We'll tie you off."

George brandished the elastic belt and Nick felt he had to get up and stand across the room. The older man enjoyed that.

"How come?" he said.

"How come how come. You want to get laid. How come," George said.

For years kids played hango seek down the yards and there were nickel-and-dirne dice games and older guys who might tap a keg on a hot day and drink a few brews standing up in the shade and women who hung out the windows to get some air and complain about the cursing.

"You could put that needle in your arm? Man, I skeeve that like death."

George smiled. He was happy. He swept his works back in the drawer and lit up a cigarette and sat there with his face in the smoke.

They talked about the robbery and after a while the tone went back to normal.

"Gotta go," Nick said.

"Be good."

"See you at Mike's."

"Be good," George said.

Nick made a turn in the dim passage and went out into a small courtyard where trash cans stood against the wall and he walked up the back stairs and through the heavy metal door into his building.

George had cut him down to size all right. George had taught him a lesson in serious things.

It happened near the end of the day when no one expected it. This was her intention of course. It happened fast and hard and unexpected.

Sister turned from the blackboard where she'd been diagramming a compound sentence, the chalked structure so complex and self-appending it began to resemble the fire-escaped facade of the kind of building most of the boys and girls lived in.

She paused just long enough to let them know that something was coming but not so long that they might guess what it was.

Then she said, "Duck and cover! Duck and cover! Duck and cover!"

For a long moment they were too shocked to think straight. Slow, shocked, klutzy and dumb. They began to tumble out of their seats, knocking over books and bumping each other, all scuttling to the three designated walls as they'd been trained to do, squat-hopping like people in potato sacks.

The fourth wall was the window wall, which they'd been told to avoid.

Matty saw Francis X. Cavanaugh blunder nuts-first into a desk edge. He felt a sympathetic quiver in his loins.

And Sister's voice keening across the room, drop and duck, duck and cover, and the kids jostling for position and then going into deep genuflections, heads to the floor, eyes shut, hands guarding the face from bomb-flash.

It was a long time before they were positioned and settled and still.

Matty had his head at the base of the cloakroom door nearest his desk. He liked to duck and cover. There was a sense of acting in unison that he found satisfying. It was not so different really from opening and shutting the cloakroom doors with two of his classmates or reciting mass answers to Sister's questions from the catechism. He felt the comfort of numbers. He felt snug and safe here on the floor, positioned more or less identically with the others. After the first moments of surprise and confusion, they were all calm now. This was the first rule of atomic attack. Keep calm. Do not get excited or excite others. Another rule, Do not touch things.

He felt an odd belonging in the duck-and-cover. It was a community of look-alikes and do-alikes, heads down, elbows tucked, fannies in the air. The overbrained boy of the thirty-two pieces and the million trillion combinations liked to nestle in his designated slot, listening to Sister's voice repeat all the cautions and commands like a siren lifting and dipping in the dopplered haze of another nondescript day.

Keep calm.

Do not touch things.

Do not answer a ringing phone.

Unplug your toaster.

Do not drive a motor vehicle.

Carry a handkerchief to place over your mouth.

In their prayer posture they could have been anyone from anywhere. The faithful of old Samarkand bending to their hojatollah. The only thing that mattered was the abject entreaty, the adoration of the cloud of all-power-forty softly throbbing bodies arrayed along the walls.

She ordered them back to their normal places. They got up, retrieved their fallen books and slid a little hangdog into their seats, watching Sister Edgar so they might ascertain how totally foolish they ought to feel.

Never end a sentence with a preposition and never begin a sentence with an And.

Sister was not pleased with their performance. She leaned over her desk, hands so tensed on the wood surface they could see the blood drain from her knuckles.

They waited for her to tell them to do it again.

"Hey Bobby."

"I'm busy over here."

"Hey Bobby."

"I'm busy over here."

"Hey Bobby. There's something we want to tell you.

"I told you, okay, I'm busy."

"Juju wants to tell you. Hey Bobby. Listen."

"Go way, all right?"

"Hey Bobby."

"Fuck out of here."

"Hey Bobby."

"Irbu see I'm working over here?"

"Hey Bobby. Juju wants to tell you this one thing."

"What."

"Hey Bobby."

"All right. What."

"This one thing."

"All right. What."

"Shit in your fist and squeeze it," Nick said.

She didn't know what to call it, a lightness, a waft, something with change in it, treebloom or fragrant rain, and she stood on the stoop and watched a man across the street chip rust from his fire escape, up on the fourth floor.