Don DeLillo - Underworld

Ismael says, "Some people have a personal god, okay. I'm looking to get a personal computer. What's the difference, right?"

Ismael likes to tease the nuns. Edgar watches him carefully. She admires the graffiti wall, the angels arrayed row after row, blue for boys, pink for girls, but she is wary of the man who runs the project and she tries to understand the disappointment she feels, seeing Ismael in good spirits and evidently healthy.

Does Sister want him to be deathly ill? Does she think he ought to be punished for being homosexual?

Everybody's watching TV except for her. She's watching Ismael. No pallor or weight loss or lesions or other visible symptoms. The only thing he shows is a snaggle smile from out of his history of dental neglect.

Why does she want to see him suffer? Isn't he one of the affirmative forces in the Wall, earning money with his salvage business, using it more or less altruistically, teaching his crew of stray kids, abandoned some of them, pregnant one or two, runaways, throwaways-giving them a sense of responsibility and self-worth? And doesn't he help the nuns feed the hungry?

She studies him for marks, for early signs of incapacity. Then she steals a look out the window, hoping to glimpse the elusive girl. Sister has seen her a number of times from this window, almost always running. Run is what she does. It is her beauty and her safety both, her melodious hope, a thing of special merit, a cleansing, the fleet leaf-fall of something godly blowing through the world.

Two of the charismatics come in to watch TV These are people from the top floor, operating the only church in the Wall, a congregation of pentecostals seeking to receive the gift of the Spirit, laying on hands, shouting out words, prophesying-the whole rocking socking package that makes Edgar want to run and hide.

Of course they look at her a little sideways too.

Ismael appoints four members of the crew to go with the nuns and distribute food in the area. But the crew is rooted right now. They urge Juano to pedal faster because this is the only way to change channels and they want to watch cartoons or movies, something with visuals better than a head.

They're saying, "Go, man, fasta, fasta."

The bicycle boy bends and pumps and the picture wavers briefly but then springs back to the round announcer's face and the moving lines of prices. Ismael stands there laughing. He loves the language of buying and selling and the sight of those clustered sets of letters that represent enormous corporate entities with their jets and stretches and tanker fleets. He starts pulling kids off the cushionless sofa and stone-slinging them toward the door while the other kids and the jivey charismatics keep urging Juano on.

They're saying, "Fasta, fasta, you the man."

The boy cranks and strains, bouncing on the seat, but the numbers keep flowing across the screen. Electronics slightly up, transports down, industrials more or less unchanged.

Three weeks later Edgar sits in the van and watches her partner emerge from the red brick convent-rolling gait, short legs and squarish body. Gracie's face is averted as she edges around the front of the vehicle and opens the door on the driver's side.

She gets in and grips the wheel, looking straight ahead.

"I got a call from the precinct near the Wall."

Then she reaches for the door and shuts it. She grips the wheel again.

"Somebody raped Esmeralda and threw her off a roof."

She starts the engine.

"I'm sitting here thinking, Who do I kill?"

She looks at Edgar briefly, then puts the van in gear.

"Because this is the only question I can ask myself without giving in to despair."

They drive south through local streets, the tenement brick smoked mellow in morning light. Did Edgar know this would happen? Lately, yes, a knowing in her bones. She feels the weather of Grade's rage and pain. In recent days she'd approached the girl, Gracie had, and talked to her from a distance, and thrown a bag of food and clothing into the pokeweed where Esmeralda stood. They ride all the way in silence with the older nun mind-reciting questions and answers from the Baltimore Catechism. The strength of these exercises, which are a form of perdurable prayer, rests in the voices that accompany hers, children responding through the decades, syllable-crisp, a panpipe reply that is the lucid music of her life. Question and answer. What deeper dialogue might right minds devise? She reaches her hand across to Grade's on the wheel and keeps it there for a digital tick on the dashboard clock. Who made us? God made us. Those clear-eyed faces so believing. Who is God? God is the Supreme Being who made all things. She feels tired in her arms. Her arms are heavy and dead and she gets all the way to Lesson 12 when the projects appear at the rim of the sky, upper windows white with sunplay against the broad dark face of beaten stone.

When Gracie finally speaks she says, "It's still there."

"What's still there?"

"That knocking in the engine. Hear it? Hear it?"

"I don't hear a thing."

"Ku-ku. Ku-ku."

Then she drives the van down past the projects toward the painted wall.

When they get there the angel is already sprayed in place. A winged figure in a pink sweatshirt and pink and aqua pants and a pair of white Nike Air Jordans with the logo prominent-she was a running girl so they gave her running shoes. And little Juano still dangles from a rope, winched down from the roof by the old hand-powered hoist the crew uses to grapple cars onto the deck of their flatbed truck. Ismael and others bend over the ledge attempting to shout correct spellings down to him as he drifts to and from the wall, leaning in to spray the interlaced letters that mark the great gone era of wildstyle graffiti.

The nuns stand outside the van watching the kid finish the last scanted word and then see him yanked skyward in the cutting wind.

Esmeralda Lopez

12 year Petected in Heven

When they get to the third floor Ismael is smoking a cigar, arms folded on his chest. Gracie paces the room. She doesn't seem to know where to begin, how to address the nameless thing that someone has done to this child they'd so hoped to save. She paces, she clenches her fists. They hear the gassy moan of a city bus some blocks away.

"Ismael. You have to find out who this guy is that did this thing."

"You think I'm running here? El Lay Pee Dee?"

" You have contacts in the neighborhood that no one else has."

"What neighborhood? The neighborhood's over there. This here's the Wall. It's all I can do to get these kids so they spell a word correct when they spray their paint. When I was writing we did subway cars in the dark without a letter misspell."

"Who cares about spelling?" Gracie says.

Edgar used to care but not today and maybe never again. She feels weak and lost. The great Terror gone, the great thrown shadow dismantled-the launched object in the sky named for a Greek goddess on a bell krater in 500 B.C. All terror is local now. Some noise on the pavement very near, the stammer of casual rounds from a passing car, someone who carries off your child. Ancient fears revived, they will steal my child, they will come into my house when I'm asleep and cut out my heart because they have a dialogue with Satan.

She says a desperate prayer.

Pour forth we beseech thee, O Lord, thy grace into our hearts.

Ten years' indulgence, a blockbuster number, if the prayer is recited at dawn, noon and eventide, or as soon thereafter as possible.

One of the girls is pedaling the bike, Willie for short, and she calls out to them, hey, here, look , and they gather at the TV set and stand astonished. There is a news report of the murder, their murder, and it is freaking network coverage, CNN-tragic life and death of homeless child. The crew is stunned to see footage of the Wall, two and a half seconds of film that shows the building they're in, the facade of spray-painted angels, the overgrown lots with their bat caverns and owl roosts. They gawk and buzz, charged with a kind of second sight, the things they know so well seen inside out, made new and nationwide. They stand there smeared in other people's seeing. Then the anchorwoman comes on. They tell Willamette to pedal faster man because the picture is beginning to fade and the anchorwoman's electric red hair is color-running from her head in a luminous ring, which makes her all the more amazing, and she describes their lives to them in a bell-tone virgin voice, a woman so striking of feature she makes the news her own, and Willie pedals for all she's worth and they urge her firmly on.