Don DeLillo - Underworld

A voice piped up at the back of the class.

"Call him Alan."

A rush of amusement moved through the room like wind over dune grass. Bronzini did not have major problems of discipline. The students sensed his unwillingness to engage in confrontation and they read his museful mild delivery, sometimes far-wandering, as a kind of private escape, not unlike their own, from the assignment of the day.

A second voice near the window, a girl's, sissy-mimicking.

"Don't call me Alfonse. Call me Alan. I want to be an actor in the movies."

A deeper ripple of mirth this time and Bronzini was sad for the boy, skinny Alfonse, but did not rebuke them, kept talking, talked over the momentary rollick-skinny sorry Alfonse, grape-stained with tragic acne.

"We need numbers, letters, maps, graphs. We need scientific formulas to understand the structure of matter. E equals MC squared."

He wrote the equation on the blackboard.

"How is it that a few marks chalked on a blackboard, a few little squiggly signs can change the shape of human history? Energy, mass, speed of light. Protons, neutrons, electrons. How small is the atom? I will tell you. If people were the size of atoms-think about it, Gagliardi-the population of the earth would fit on the head of a pin. Never mind the vast amounts of energy stored in matter. Matter. Something that has mass-a solid, a liquid, a gas. Never mind what happens when we split the atom and release this energy. Energy. The capacity of a physical system to do work. I want to know how it is that a few marks on a slate or a piece of paper, a little black on white, or white on black, can carry so much information and contain such shattering implications. Never mind the energy packed in the atom. What about the energy contained in this equation? This is the real power. How the mind operates. How the mind identifies, analyzes and represents. What beauty and power. What marvels of imagination does it require to reduce the complex forces of nature, all those unseeable magical actions inside the atom-to express all this with a bing and a bang on a blackboard. The atom. The unit of matter regarded as the source of nuclear energy. The Greeks of the fifth century B.C. proposed the idea of the atom. B.C., Miss Innocenti. Before Chewing Gum. Small, small, small. Something inside something else inside something else. Down, down, down. Under, under, under. Next time, chapter seven. Be prepared for an oral quiz."

Barely an audible groan.

"Maximum public embarrassment," Bronzini said.

They bundled out of the room and into the long halls, where four thousand others were beginning to mass in the vast hormonal clamor that marked the condition of release.

It was still winter but there was something soft in the air today, that rhythmic fiction of early spring, so sweet to be deceived by, and Albert took his usual route into the shopping streets, poking into stores and social clubs.

Here he ate a pignoli cookie and asked after the woman's son, an artilleryman in Korea. There he thumbed his mustache and stood amused in the company of an eager complainant, a man loud with the measliest grievance, pink-eyed and spitting.

In the pork store he talked to a couple of newcomers, Calabrian, a woman and her trail-along daughter, and it made him think of his mother and sister, down that memory tunnel, and how the girl fairly clung to her mother.

Now the mother lay in a plot in Queens, in a great wide meadow of stones and crosses, thousands of souls outside the ordinary sprawl, a sovereign people uncomplaining.

He bought meat here, fish there, and headed home. He thought about the saint's day every summer when members of the church band walked through the streets playing heart-heavy pieces that brought women's faces to the open windows of the tenements. It was the custom of the musicians to slow-step along a certain residential street and stop at a particular private house, a frame structure with a front porch and rose trellis, the home of the olive oil importer. When they stopped playing the family invited them in and they entered in their band uniforms of black pants and white shirt, carrying their instruments. Such an old and dignified custom, the elderly men, the obese trombonist, the young man hollowed out by the bass drum strapped to his torso, each shuffling into the shady house for a glass of red wine.

Juju didn't want to follow him in but he had to. Once Nick went in, Juju had to go in too.

He'd wanted to see a person dead and Nick was going to show him. They stood in the anteroom of the funeral home near Third Avenue, where twenty or thirty men were smoking and talking.

"Maybe this is not a good idea," Juju said.

"Just be sure you don't laugh."

"What am I gonna laugh?"

"Show some respect," Nick said. "We want them to think we're family."

Nick shoved him and they went into the viewing room. Women sat in folding chairs saying their beads and there were sofas against the walls, younger women looking strange in black, sealed away from knowing, with several small girls placed among them, grave and pale.

They went up to the casket and looked in. It was an old man with nostrils gaped wide and the hands of a carpenter or mason, copper fingers rough and notched.

"Here's your body. Soak it up."

They knelt at the casket.

"He doesn't look that bad," Juju said.

"I think they plucked his eyebrows."

"I thought it would be different," Juju said.

"Different how?"

"I don't know. White," Juju said. "The whole face chalk white."

"They put makeup and grooming."

"White and stiff, I thought."

"He's not stiff, this man?"

"He could almost be asleep. If he slept in a suit."

"So you're disappointed then."

"I'm a little, yeah, disappointed."

"Why don't you say it louder," Nick said, "so they can drag us out to the street and beat us to death."

"This was a bad idea of yours."

"We're supposed to have an envelope," Nick said.

"This was a bad idea. What kind of envelope?"

"If we're family," Nick said. " A mass card or money."

"I thought an envelope is when you get married. Not when you die."

"An envelope is when you do anything. They're always doing envelopes."

"This was a bad idea. I'm ready to leave."

"Too soon. Say a prayer. Show them you're praying. Show them respect," Nick said. "Women in black dresses. We don't show respect, they tear us apart."

In a corner of the poolroom a guy named Stevie hawked up a wad of pearly phlegm, called an oyster, and spat it down the neck of his Coke bottle.

Juju said, "I ask you for a slug of soda, you do this?"

"Hey I didn't say no."

"But you do this? You spit in it?"

" You asked for a slug. I'm saying. Take two slugs."

Stevie cleared another oyster out of his throat and spat it into the bottle and handed the bottle to Juju.

"But you do this? You hack up this big thing, which you think nobody in his right mind's gonna drink from a bottle that has this big thing floating in there."

" You want a slug. Hey. Take a slug. Take whatever."

"So you're giving me your whole soda, you're saying. Take whatever. If I'm crazy enough to drink it."

"What's mines is yours," Stevie said.

Juju smiled falsely, a look with a mocking quality. Then he drank the whole thing down in one long slug. He followed with a small gassy belch and tossed the bottle back to Stevie.

Nick watched in admiration.

Later that night he took Mike the Dog out for a walk. He walked along the hospital wall and then went east through the empty streets. He stood across the street from the building where the woman lived. There was a bed in the front room, stripped of sheets, an empty bed cranked up, easy enough to see just to the right of the stoop, the curtains half drawn, a lamp lit nearby, and he stood there a while smoking.