Don DeLillo - Underworld

Sister does not watch. She sees nothing for the rest of that day and the day after and the two or three weeks after that. She sees the human heart exposed like a pig's muscle on a slab. That's the only thing she sees. She believes she is falling into crisis, beginning to think it is possible that all creation is a spurt of blank matter that chances to make an emerald planet here, a dead star there, with random waste between. The serenity of immense design is missing from her life, authorship and moral form, and when Gracie and the crew take food into the projects Edgar waits in the van, she is the nun in the van, and when Gracie maces a rat at the curbstone Edgar does not blink.

It is not a question of disbelief. There is another kind of belief, a second force, insecure, untrusting, a faith that is spring-fed by the things we fear in the night, and she thinks she is succumbing.

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She sleeps on the roof when it's not too cold and this is where he sees her, on the roof of a boarded four-story building with fire escape intact. He's up there wandering, thinking his thoughts, a man who drifts in and out of the Wall, a sidler type, doesn't like to be looked at, and when you enter a name-search the screen reads Searching . He comes across the sleeping girl and feels a familiar anger rising and knows he will need to do something to make her pay He's on her like that. She tries to fight but does not cry out. He beats her with the end of his fist, sending ham-merblows to the head. Struggle bitch get hit. He wants to turn her over on her face and put it up inside her. She fights and whisper-cries in a voice that makes him angrier, like who the fuck she think she is, and the screen reads Searching . Either way he's gonna hit her, she struggle or not, and he looks away when he does it, sidle-type. No eye contact, cunt. Last woman he looked at was his mother. After he does it, driving it in and spilling it out, he hits her one last time, hard, whore, and drags her up on the ledge and leans her over and lets her go. You dead, bitch. Then he goes back to thinking his nighttime thoughts. Screen reads Searching .

Then the stories begin, word passing block to block, moving through churches and superettes, maybe garbled slightly, mistranslated here and there, but not deeply distorted-it is clear enough that people are talking about the same uncanny occurrence. And some of them go and look and tell others, stirring the hope that grows when things surpass their limits.

They gather after dusk at a windy place between bridge approaches, seven or eight people drawn by the word of one or two, then thirty people drawn by the seven, then a tight silent crowd that grows bigger but no less respectful, two hundred people wedged onto a traffic island in the bottommost Bronx where the expressway arches down from the terminal market and the train yards stretch toward the narrows, all that old industrial muscle with its fretful desolation-the ramps that shoot tall weeds and the waste burner coughing toxic fumes and the old railroad bridge spanning the Harlem River, an openwork tower at either end, maybe swaying slightly in persistent wind.

They come and park their cars if they have cars, six or seven to a car, parking tilted on a high shoulder or in the factory side streets, and they wedge themselves onto the concrete island between the expressway and the pocked boulevard, feeling the wind come chilling in and gazing above the wash of standard rip-roar traffic to a billboard floating in the gloom-an advertising sign scaffolded high above the river-bank and meant to attract the doped-over glances of commuters on the trains that run incessantly down from the northern suburbs into the thick of Manhattan money and glut.

Edgar sits across from Gracie in the refectory She eats her food without tasting it because she decided years ago that taste is not the point. The point is to clean the plate.

Grade says, "No, please, you can't ."

"Just to see."

"No, no, no, no."

"I want to see for myself."

"This is tabloid. This is the worst kind of tabloid superstition. It's horrible. A complete, what is it? A complete abdication, you know? Be sensible. Don't abdicate your good sense."

"It could be her they're seeing."

" You know what this is? It's the nightly news. It's the local news at eleven with all the grotesque items neatly spaced to keep you watching the whole half hour."

"I think I have to go," Edgar says.

"This is something for poor people to confront and judge and understand and we have to see it in that framework. The poor need visions, okay?"

"I believe you are patronizing the people you love," Edgar says softly.

"That's not fair."

"You say the poor. But who else would saints appear to? Do saints and angels appear to bank presidents? Eat your carrots."

"It's the nightly news. It's gross exploitation of a child's horrible murder."

"But who is exploiting? No one's exploiting," Edgar says. "People go there to weep, to believe."

"It's how the news becomes so powerful it doesn't need TV or newspapers. It exists in people's perceptions. It's something they invent, strong enough to seem real. It's the news without the media."

Edgar eats her bread.

"I'm older than the Pope. I never thought I would live long enough to be older than a pope and I think I need to see this thing."

"Pictures lie," Grade says.

"I think I need to be there."

"Don't pray to pictures, pray to saints."

"I think I need to go."

"But you can't. It's crazy. Don't go, Sister."

But Edgar goes. She puts on her latex gloves and winter cape and heads for the door, planning to take the bus and subway, and Gracie can't let her go alone. She rushes out to the van, wearing her retainer for spacy teeth, a thing she never wears in public, and they drive down past the Wall and into dark and empty streets and the van stalls out, doing a murmurous swoon, and they walk the last eleven blocks with Gracie carrying Mace and a cellular phone.

A madder orange moon hangs over the city.

People in the glare of passing cars, hundreds clustered on the island, their own cars parked cockeyed and biaswise, dangerously near the speeding traffic. The nuns dash across the boulevard and squeeze onto the island and people make room for them, pressed bodies part to let them stand at ease.

They follow the crowd's stoked gaze. They stand and look. The billboard is unevenly lighted, dim in spots, several bulbs blown and unre-placed, but the central elements are clear, a vast cascade of orange juice pouring diagonally from top right into a goblet that is handheld at lower left-the perfectly formed hand of a female Caucasian of the middle suburbs. Distant willows and a vaguish lake view set the social locus. But it is the juice that commands the eye, thick and pulpy with a ruddled flush that matches the madder moon. And the first detailed drops splashing at the bottom of the goblet with a scatter of spindrift, each fleck embellished with the finicky rigor of some precisionist painting. What a lavishment of effort and technique, no refinement spared-the equivalent, Edgar thinks, of medieval church architecture. And the six-ounce cans of Minute Maid arrayed across the bottom of the board, a hundred identical cans so familiar in design and color and typeface that they have personality, the convivial cuteness of little orange-and-black people.

Edgar doesn't know how long they're supposed to wait or exactly what is supposed to happen. Produce trucks pass in the rumbling dusk. She lets her eyes wander to the crowd. Working people, shopkeepers, maybe some drifters and squatters but not many, and then she notices a group near the front, fitted snug to the prowed shape of the island-they're the charismatics from the top floor of the tenement in the Wall, dressed mainly in floppy white, tublike women, reedy men in dreadlocks. The crowd is patient, she is not, finding herself taut with misgiving, absorbing Grade's take on the whole business. Planes drop out of the darkness toward the airport across the water, splitting the air with throttled booms. The nuns see Ismael Murioz standing thirty yards away, surrounded by his crew-Ismael looking a little ghostly in the beams of swinging light-and Edgar presses a knowing look on Gracie. They stand and watch the billboard. They stare stupidly at the juice. After twenty minutes there is a rustle, a sort of perceptual wind, and people look north, children point north, and Edgar strains to catch what they are seeing.