Don DeLillo - Underworld

Caviar pulsing in chilled bowls. There are geologists and game theorists and energy experts and a journalist with a book contract. I see waste traders and venture capitalists, piroshki and skewered lamb. There are arms dealers looking to make bids, Viktor says, on the idle inventory of weapons-grade plutonium floating at the fringes of the industry.

this explosion," I say. "Not banned by international accord?"

"Banned, not banned. We are exception. Test site was closed by local decree. But we are exception. It is necessary to do a trial demonstration. Plutonium waste is getting to a point that's very crazy. Worldwide, who is counting? Maybe twelve hundred metric tons."

"More."

"More. Okay. Has to disappear somehow."

The food makes me happy for a time. I eat everything I can reach. Meat, fish, eggs, my appetite is enormous. The vodka looks beautiful, with a lucent ruby softness that belies its spice and bite. I fill myself to near capacity, feeling rebuilt, fundamentally sound and content, pro-teinized, and I watch Viktor mingle with the nuclear brass. He looks a little lost among those mainframe bodies. He needs to get adjusted to an environment in which fixing and hustling have come out of the shadows of black-market speculation to create a wholly open economy of plunder and corruption. I'm not sure he can forget all the things he has to forget before he can become a man who flourishes here.

I talk to a woman with a pastry flake fixed to a corner of her mouth. Eating saves us from the fatedness of the landscape, from the dosage meters we wear on our bodies. We talk about this. How nice that the unprinted record of some stray pleasure might rebuke the exclusion out there, the forces that make it chancy for us to take a simple breath of air.

I go looking for Brian Classic. The bunker complex is set on several levels with one large section clearly off-limits to guests-sealed and guarded. I go looking in and out of map rooms, sleeping quarters, a medical setup, down concrete passageways, often ducking my head under low openings. An economist from the U.N. is searching for a toilet. I ease myself down a hatchway that has an iron rail and hobnail steps and there he is in a small room, asleep again.

A chair, a cot and a sink. I'm carrying a plate of food. Not for him- food for me. I sit and watch him sleep and I eat my food. He is wearing his loden coat, one of those hooded Tyrolean things of coarse cloth with wooden toggles for buttons. How right for his old-fashioned face, narrow and boyish, that I could probably crush with five earnest blows. I imagine this with some satisfaction. Dealing a serious blow. But we don't do that anymore, do we? This is a thing we've left behind. Five dealt blows to the pinkish face with the paling hair. But I sit there and watch him, you know, and I'm not sure I want to hit him.

Brian thought I was the soul of self-completion. Maybe so. But I was also living in a state of quiet separation from all the things he might cite as the solid stuff of home and work and responsible reality. When I found out about him and Marian I felt some element of stoic surrender. Their names were nice together and they were the same age and I was hereby relieved of my phony role as husband and father, high corporate officer. Because even the job is an artificial limb. Did I feel free for just a moment, myself again, hearing the story of their affair? I watch him sleep, thinking how satisfying it would be, ten serious smashes to his prep-school face. But it was also satisfying, for just a moment, to think of giving it all up, letting them have it all, the children of both marriages, the grandchild, they could keep the two houses, all the cars, he could have both wives if he wanted them. None of it ever belonged to me except in the sense that I filled out the forms.

I don't have to get out of the chair to kick the side of the cot. I just extend my leg and kick.

Then I watch him come awake.

"So. The fastest lover een Mayheeko ."

"What's that?"

"Old joke, You don't know this joke?"

"Jesus, I was dreaming. What was I dreaming?"

"A guy's worried about his wife because there's a famous lover on the prowl. What, you don't know this joke? The Speedy Gonzalez joke. Goes way back. Took decades, this joke, to get from there to here."

"From where to here?"

"Fuck you. That's from where."

I kick the bed again.

He says, "What?"

"How long, Brian?"

"How long what?"

"You and Marian."

"What do you mean?"

"What do I mean?"

I kick the bed. He sits up and puts his hands over his face and begins to laugh miserably.

"We used to talk more or less. That's all."

"Don't contradict me."

"We used to exchange, all right, a confidence now and then. We were close that way but it didn't last long."

"I'm smoking a cigar and drinking a brandy. Don't contradict me."

He looks at me. I don't have a cigar and I'm drinking vodka.

"I mean now? Is this the time we want to discuss the matter? Here? Can't we think about finding a more suitable?"

"She told me everything."

He looks away.

"I'm prepared to be very open about this but I think we need to reconsider the timing," he says.

I lean over, the plate in my left hand, and I cuff him with the right. I throw a right, openhanded because we're being open about this, hitting him with the heel of the hand on the side of the head-a token blow that improves my mood. It is even better than eating. It is better than the meat, the fish, the eggs, the fish eggs and the vodka. I feel good about it. I think we both feel better.

Once he adjusts to the knowledge that he has just been hit, he looks at me again. I know what he sees when he looks at me. Someone bigger than he is, readier to act, sitting between him and the door. This is the message that hums in the air. Not the words, the personal histories, the moral advantage or disadvantage, whatever maneuvers of bluff and counterbluff might ornament the moment. It's the force of the body. It's which body crushes the other. Not that he has anything, really, to worry about. But maybe he does.

"When you say she told you everything."

"She told me everything. We talked for a long time. The talk we had lasted a couple of days, on and off. She said a lot. She told me everything. Then I got in the company car and went to the airport and there you were."

He grins at me.

"Fucking women. Can't trust them for shit."

I hit him with the flat of my hand across an ear. His head jerks impressively. It is not a hard blow. It is a token blow and the head-jerk is overdone.

"Watch what you say about her, Brian."

He lowers his eyes, looking for a fetch of sympathy. Here he is, hungry, thirsty, jet-lagged, unkempt, being held prisoner, sort of, cuffed around in a basement cell. But I don't think he has serious reason to worry.

"She told you about the heroin?"

"She told me everything."

"Only once, I swear. Scared the shit out of me."

He reaches over and takes some food out of my plate and begins to eat it. I watch him. He keeps his head down, reaching into my plate, eating and reaching, and I let him do it.

"I'm sorry, Nick. Kill me. I want you to. But I have to tell you it didn't last long. And I have to tell you I was not always-how do I want to put this if I don't want to get hit again?"

"She told me."

"I was not always willing."

I watch him eat.

"I'm the one who was reluctant and I'm the one who was scared you'd find out. And when you didn't find out, she told you."

He reaches and eats, head down. I let him go to the sink and splash water on his face. Bomb or no bomb, he says, that's a boring bunch of people out there. We head back to the room with the food. The guests are spread through several areas, drinking coffee or tea or brandy, some of them, or holding dessert plates up to their chins, those who are standing.