Don DeLillo - Underworld

The planes come sparking out of the mountains to the south, glinting in the haze as they approach in a long line to make their landings, and I see the open-steel truss of the waste facility at the end of the road. I park beneath terraced gardens that send bougainvillea spilling over the pastel walls. My granddaughter is with me, Sunny, she is nearly six now, and inside the vast recycling shed we stand on a catwalk and watch the operations in progress. The tin, the paper, the plastics, the styrofoam. It all flies down the conveyor belts, four hundred tons a day, assembly lines of garbage, sorted, compressed and baled, transformed in the end to square-edged units, products again, wire-bound and smartly stacked and ready to be marketed. Sunny loves this place and so do the other kids who come with their parents or teachers to stand on the catwalk and visit the exhibits. Brightness streams from skylights down to the floor of the shed, falling on the tall machines with a numinous glow. Maybe we feel a reverence for waste, for the redemptive qualities of the things we use and discard. Look how they come back to us, alight with a kind of brave aging. The windows yield a strong broad desert and enormous sky. The landfill across the road is closed now, jammed to capacity, but gas keeps rising from the great earthen berm, methane, and it produces a wavering across the land and sky that deepens the aura of sacred work. It is like a fable in the writhing air of some ghost civilization, a shimmer of desert ruin. The kids love the machines, the balers and hoppers and long conveyors, and the parents look out the windows through the methane mist and the planes come out of the mountains and align for their approach and the trucks are arrayed in two columns outside the shed, bringing in the unsorted slop, the gut squalor of our lives, and taking the baled and bound units out into the world again, the chunky product blocks, pristine, newsprint for newsprint, tin for tin, and we all feel better when we leave.

I drink aged grappa and listen to jazz. I do the books on the new shelves and stand in the living room and look at the carpets and wall hangings and I know the ghosts are walking the halls. But not these halls and not this house. They're all back there in those railroad rooms at the narrow end of the night and I stand helpless in this desert place looking at the books.

I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.

Her name is Esmeralda. She lives wild in the inner ghetto, a slice of the South Bronx called the Wall-a girl who forages in empty lots for discarded clothes, plucks spoiled fruit from garbage bags behind bodegas, who is sometimes seen running through the trees and weeds, a shadow on the rubbled walls of demolished structures, unstumbling, a tactful runner with the sweet and easy stride of some creature of sylvan myth.

The nuns have been trying to find her.

Sister Grace, the younger of the two, determined to track and catch the girl and get her to a relief agency or to their convent in the middle Bronx, somewhere safe-examine her, feed her properly, get her enrolled in school.

Sister Edgar, seeing a radiant grace in the girl, a reprieve from the Wall's endless distress, even a source of personal hope, a goad to the old rugged faith. All heaven trembles when a soul swings in the wind- save her from danger, bring her to candles and ashes and palms, to belief in the mystical body.

The nuns deliver food to people living in the Wall and nearby, the asthmatic children and sickle-cell adults, the cases of AIDS and the cocaine babies, and every day, twice a day, three or four times a day, they drive their van past the memorial wall. This is the six-story flank of a squatters' tenement on which graffiti writers spray-paint an angel every time a local child dies of illness or mistreatment.

Grade talks and drives and yells out the window at dogs doing doody in the street. She wears a skirt and a windbreaker, she carries a can of Chemical Mace. Old spindle-shanked Edgar sits next to her and feels the aura of the streets and thinks herself back into another century. She is cinctured and veiled and would not know how to dress otherwise and would not be here at all if the children were healthy and the dogs middle-class.

Grade says, "Sometimes I wonder."

"What do you wonder?"

"Never mind, Sister. Forget it."

" You wonder if we make a difference. You can't understand how the last decade of the century looks worse than the first in some respects. Looks like another century in another country."

"I'm a positive person," Grade says.

Edgar has a high-frequency laugh that travels through time and space, a sort of cackle frankly, shrill and dank-she thinks the dogs can probably hear it.

"I know there's a laborious procedure you have to follow," she says, "in order to attain a positive state of mind. It's a wonder you have strength left over to steer the car."

This pisses Gracie off and she rails a bit, respectfully, as the van approaches the salvage operation of Ismael Murioz.

A mass of junked cars, a pack jam, cars smash-heaped and jack-knifed, seventy or eighty cars, shamefaced. The nuns look instinctively for a sign of Esmeralda, who probably spends her nights sleeping in one of these cars. Then they park the van and enter the derelict tenement, climbing three flights of crumbling stairs to Ismael's headquarters.

Edgar expects him to look wan and drawn, visibly fragile. She thinks he has AIDS. It is a thing she senses. She senses dire things. She stands at a distance, studying him. An affable sort of human shambles in a tropical shirt and slapdash beard-he's in a lively mood today because he has managed to rig a system in the building that produces enough power to run a TV set.

"Sisters, look," he says.

They see a little kid, Juano, seated on a stationary bike pedaling frantically. The bike is linked to a World War II generator that Ismael got cheap at an armory liquidation. The generator is throbbing in the basement and there are cables running from the unit up to the TV set and there is a wheezing drive belt connecting the TV set to the bicycle. When the kid fast-pedals the bike, the generator ekes out a flow of electricity to the television set-a brave beat-up model that two of the other kids dug out of the garbage pits, where it was layered in the geological age of leisure-time appliances.

Gracie is delighted and sits with the graffiti crew, eight or nine kids, watching the stock market channel.

Ismael says, "What do you think? I did okay? This is just a start-up. I got things I'm planning big-time."

Edgar disapproves of course. This is her mission, to disapprove. One of the stern mercies of the Wall, a place unlinked to the usual services, is that TV has not been available. Now here it is, suddenly. You touch a button and all the things concealed from you for centuries come flying into the remotest room. It's an epidemic of seeing. No conceivable recess goes unscanned. In the uterus, under the ocean, to the lost halls of the human brain. And if you can see it, you can catch it. There's a pathogenic element in a passing glance.

Ismael says, "I'm planning to go on-line real soon, Sisters. Advertise my junk cars. Go, like, global. Scrap metal for these trodden countries looking to build a military."

On the screen an image flicks and jumps. It is a man's discoid head, a fellow in a white shirt with blue collar, or blue shirt with white collar-there is a fairly frequent color shift. He is talking about the big board composite while numbers and letters flow in two bands across the bottom of the screen, a blue band and a white band, and the crew sits watching and the kid on the bike is bent and pedaling, a furious pumping boy, and the names and prices flow in two different directions with active issues blinking.