Don DeLillo - Underworld

They laughed and played. They played for an hour and talked about nothing much and smoked a couple of cigarettes each and dropped the butts in an old beer bottle.

"This thing I want to show you. Found it a couple of days ago," George said, "in a car I was parking at the track. Slid out from under the seat when I made a quick turn."

"The turns you make."

"I'm cautious. Hey. Compared to most guys."

"You respect the automobiles you park."

"Not so much the owners. The cars, definitely."

They laughed. George reached behind him and came up with an object from the bottom shelf, down behind paint cans and rolled linoleum.

It was a shotgun, sawed-off, the barrel extending only a couple of inches from the forearm part and the stock cut down to a pistol grip arrangement.

"What? You found it?"

"I didn't want to leave it in the car where somebody who's not responsible."

"Let me see," Nick said.

He reached across the table for the weapon. He sort of bounced it in his hands and then stood up to hold it more naturally.

"I know one thing about shotguns," George said. "You shoot with both eyes open."

"Sawed-off is illegal, right?"

"That's the other thing I know. Once you cut the thing down it's a concealed weapon."

"Looks old tome."

"It's old, rusty wore out," George said. "Piece of, basically, junk."

He posed with it, Nick did, a pirate's pistol or an old Kentucky flintlock if that's the word. It was more natural two hands than one, the left hand under the forepart to steady and point.

He hefted it and pointed it. He saw an interested smile fall across George's face. He had the weapon pointed at George. He was standing a couple of yards from George and George was in the chair and he held the weapon midbody, slightly above the hip, which meant it was pointed at George's head.

A little brightness entered George's eye. Rare in George. This brightness in the eye. And an interested look moved across his mouth. It was the slyest kind of shit-eating grin.

"Is it loaded?"

"No," George said.

This made him smile a little wider. They were having a good time. And he had a look on his face that was more alive and bright than George had ever looked. Because he was interested in what they were doing.

Nick pulled the trigger,

In the extended interval of the trigger pull, the long quarter second, with the action of the trigger sluggish and rough, Nick saw into the smile on the other man's face.

Then the thing went off and the noise busted through the room and even with the chair and body flying he had the thumbmark of George's face furrowed in his mind.

The way the man said no when he asked if it was loaded.

He asked if the gun was loaded and the man said no and the smile was all about the risk, of course, the spirit of the dare of what they were doing.

He felt the trigger pull and then the gun went off and he was left there thinking weakly he didn't do it.

But first he pointed the gun at the man's head and asked if it was loaded.

Then he felt the trigger pull and heard the gun go off and the man and chair went different ways.

And the way the man said no when he asked if it was loaded.

He asked if the thing was loaded and the man said no and now he has a weapon in his hands that has just apparently been fired.

He force-squeezed the trigger and looked into the smile on the other man's face.

But first he posed with the gun and pointed it at the man and asked if it was loaded.

Then the noise busted through the room and he stood there thinking weakly he didn't do it.

But first he force-squeezed the trigger and saw into the smile and it seemed to have the spirit of a dare.

Why would the man say no if it was loaded?

But first why would he point the gun at the man's head?

He pointed the gun at the man's head and asked if it was loaded.

Then he felt the action of the trigger and saw into the slyness of the smile.

He stood above the spraddled body in the blood muck of the room, not that he clearly saw the room, and he thought he heard a sucking sound come out of the man's face, the afterbirth of face, the facial remains of what was once a head.

But first he went through the sequence and it played out the same.

When they took him out to the cop car there were people on the stoops, in robes, some of them, and heads in many windows, hanging pale and hushed, and a number of young men stood near the car, some he knew well and some in passing, and they watched him closely and gravely, thinking this was a kind of history taking place, here in their own remote and common streets.

Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that's electronic and sex that's cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire-not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.

We're sitting in a pub called the Football Hooligan. There's a man at the next table and I've been waiting for him to turn this way so I can confirm the uncanny resemblance.

I'm talking to Brian Classic, old buddy Brian, and he seems to listen intently below the music. This is a thing called cult rock, loud, yes, but mostly piercing and repetitive, on an icy kind of wavelength, and Brian sits with his head low, nodding now and then, in agreement or fatigue-it's hard to tell.

Some things fade and wane, states disintegrate, assembly lines shorten their runs and interact with lines in other countries. This is what desire seems to demand. A method of production that will custom-cater to cultural and personal needs, not to cold war ideologies of massive uniformity. And the system pretends to go along, to become more supple and resourceful, less dependent on rigid categories. But even as desire tends to specialize, going silky and intimate, the force of converging markets produces an instantaneous capital that shoots across horizons at the speed of light, making for a certain furtive sameness, a planing away of particulars that affects everything from architecture to leisure time to the way people eat and sleep and dream.

Here the people are eating ethnic fast food and drinking five-star cognac and they are crowding the dance floor and falling down, some of them, and being dragged half senseless to the sidelines.

I have to lower my head to speak to Brian, who seems to be sinking into his drink, but I resist the urge to nod along with him. True, I am mostly quoting remarks made to me earlier in the day by Viktor Malt-sev, a trading company executive, but they are remarks worth repeating because Viktor has thought about these matters in the very ruck of every kind of changeover a society can bear.

Brian mutters that he finds this place frightening. I look at the kids on the bandstand, five or six gawks with fuzz heads and fatigue pants and bomb packs strapped to their bare chests-college boys probably who've appropriated a surface of suicide terror.

But it's not the music, he says, or the band and its trappings. And I think I know what he means. It's the sense of displacement and redefinition. Because what kind of random arrangement puts a club such as this up on the forty-second floor of a new office tower filled with brokerage houses, software firms, import companies and foreign banks, where private guards hired by various firms to patrol the corridors sometimes shoot at each other and where the man at the next table, with a bald dome, slit eyes and a jut beard, turning this way at last, is clearly a professional Lenin look-alike.

We take the elevator down and go out to the street, carrying our luggage. We can't find a taxi but after a while an ambulance comes along and the driver sticks his head out the window.