Don DeLillo - Underworld

I see us hurtling through the dark.

I tell Viktor there is a curious connection between weapons and waste. I don't know exactly what. He smiles and puts his feet up on the bench, something of a gargoyle squat. He says maybe one is the mystical twin of the other. He likes this idea. He says waste is the devil twin. Because waste is the secret history the underhistory, the way archaeologists dig out the history of early cultures, every sort of bone heap and broken tool, literally from under the ground.

All those decades, he says, when we thought about weapons all the time and never thought about the dark multiplying byproduct.

"And in this case," I say. "In our case, in our age. What we excrete comes back to consume us."

We don't dig it up, he says. We try to bury it. But maybe this is not enough. That's why we have this idea. Kill the devil. And he smiles from his steeple perch. The fusion of two streams of history, weapons and waste. We destroy contaminated nuclear waste by means of nuclear explosions.

I cross the body of the aircraft to get my cap refilled.

"It is only obvious," he says.

I see that Brian's eyes are opened.

I return to my seat, an arm out for balance, and I sit carefully and pause and then knock back the scotch and blink a bit.

I look at Brian.

I say, "The early bomb, Brian, they had to do the core material in a certain way as I understand it. They had to mate this part to that part. So they could get the chain reaction that's crucial to the whole operation. One design had a male element fitted into a female element. The cylinder goes into an opening in the sphere. They shoot it right in. Very suggestive. There's really sort of no escape. Cocks and cunts everywhere."

I see our plane racing through the wind and rain.

Because I knew unmistakably now, I was completely certain that Brian and Marian, whose names sound SO nice together, a good friend now and again, that he and my wife were partners in a deep betrayal.

In my jet-crazed way I could almost enjoy the situation we'd found ourselves in. I was so time-zoned, dazed by fatigue and revelation, so deep in the stink of a friend's falseheartedness that I started talking nonstop, manic and jaggy, babble-mouthing into the plane noise, hinting-I hinted insidiously, made clever references. Because I knew it all now, and here we both were, and there was no place he could go to escape our homey chat.

At the gate we are given badges to wear, gauzy strips that register the amount of radiation absorbed by the body in a given period. Maybe this is what makes the landscape seem so strange. These little metered tags put an element of threat into the dull scrub that rolls to the overwhelming sky

Brian says the gate resembles the entrance to a national park.

Viktor says don't be surprised there will be tourists here someday.

The car is driven by a Russian, not a Kazakh. He wears pressed fatigues and carries a radiation meter to go with the two badges clipped to his shirt. Far from the road we see men in white masks and floppy boots bulldozing the earth and when we come to a rise we are able to see the vast cratered plain of recent underground tests, depressions of various diameter but all seemingly well-figured-pale-rimmed holes formed when dirt displaced by the blasts slid back into the gouged earth.

The driver tells us that the test site is known as the Polygon. He tells us a few more things, some translated by Viktor, some not.

Farther on we see signs of the old tests, aboveground, and there is a strangeness here, an uneasiness I try to locate. We see the remnant span of a railroad trestle, a sculptured length of charred brown metal resting on concrete piers. A graveness, a spirit of old secrets gone bad, turned unworthy. We see the squat gray base of a shot tower, most of it blown away decades earlier, leaving this block of seamed concrete that rises only seven feet above the stubble surface, still looking oddly stunned, with metal beams ajut. Guilt in every dosed object, the weathered posts and I-beams left to the wind, things made and shaped by men, old schemes gone wrong.

We ride in silence.

There are mounds of bulldozed earth around a camera bunker daubed with yellow paint-yellow for contaminated. The place is strange, frozen away, a specimen of our forgetfulness even as we note the details. We see signs of houses in the distance, test dwellings blown off their foundations with people still inside, mannequins, and products on the shelves where they'd been placed maybe forty years ago-American brands, the driver says.

And Viktor says this was a point of pride with the KGB, to assemble a faithful domestic setting.

And how strange it is, strange again, more strangeness, to feel a kind of homesickness for the things on the shelves in the houses that still stand, Old Dutch Cleanser and Rinso White, all those half-lost icons of the old life, Ipana and Oxydol and Chase amp; Sanborn, still intact out here in this nowhere near Mongolia, and does anyone remember why we were doing all this?

I say, "Viktor, does anyone remember why we were doing all this?"

"Yes, for contest. You won, we lost. You have to tell me how it feels. Big winner."

Brian sits next to me, sleeping now

We see a rusted tank with yellow brushwork marking the turret. There are roads that end abruptly, weeds pushing through the asphalt.

The car reaches the site of the test, our test. It is a slightly elevated tract of land cleared of brush and graded nearly flat. I wasn't going to be the first one out of the car and for a moment nobody moved. Drill towers stand in the middle distance. There are a dozen trailers arrayed on the flat, all packed with equipment that will analyze the blast.

The driver opens his door and we all get out.

The wind comes with a labored drone. Several technicians and military men stand talking nearby. Viktor lights a cigarette and approaches them. He looks misplaced in his long leather coat. Out beyond the road we see bluffs scarred white by earlier detonations. I keep glancing at the driver for signs and portents.

Viktor comes back and points to a corner of the cleared area where thick cables snake away from several pieces of equipment set in a pale square of earth. He says this is ground zero. We stand there nodding in the wind.

He says the shot will be fired in granite about one kilometer down. Reactor waste and cores from retired warheads are packed around a low-yield nuclear device. He says the hole drilled from the surface to the firing point has been tamped and plugged to keep radiation from venting.

The driver puts a finger to his tongue and rubs some dirt off his sleeve. I check my sleeve for dirt. Then the driver heads back to the car and we all go with him.

He drives us to a bunker complex some distance away. About four dozen people are assembled here. Generals with braided caps, uranium speculators, a man and woman from the Bundesbank. We are introduced around. Many chesty bureaucrats with interchangeable heads. There are industrialists, bomb designers, official observers here to monitor the test. And every one of us wears a badge that measures off the rads. I follow Viktor into a briefing room where tureens and serving plates are spread across a table, heaped with smoking food. I meet executives from Tchaika and high officials of several commonwealth ministries. There is a palpable wave of expectation. Dark young men in round caps serve glasses of peppered vodka cradled in porringers of crushed ice. I talk to a veteran of the Polygon, a weapons scientist looking for work. A Russian tells a joke to a huddle of burly men and I stand on the edge, startled to hear the name Speedy Gonzalez mixed into the rolling narration. I look around for Brian. I want Brian to be in on this. The joke teller is in uniform, his middle finger extended skyward, his face going ruddy as the plot winds down. He does the punch line very well, speaking the words to his lifted finger, and the line comes back to me as he does it in Russian-back in English, of course, after so many years. The huddled men nod and rock, sending plosive noises from their moon jowls.