Don DeLillo - Underworld

At home we separated our waste into glass and cans and paper products. Then we did clear glass versus colored glass. Then we did tin versus aluminum. We did plastic containers, without caps or lids, on Tuesdays only. Then we did yard waste. Then we did newspapers including glossy inserts but were careful not to tie the bundles in twine, which is always the temptation.

The corporation is supposed to take us outside ourselves. We design these organized bodies to respond to the market, face foursquare into the world. But things tend to drift dimly inward. Gossip, rumor, promotions, personalities, it's only natural, isn't it-all the human lapses that take up space in the company soul. But the world persists, the world heals in a way. You feel the contact points around you, the caress of linked grids that give you a sense of order and command. It's there in the warbling banks of phones, in the fax machines and photocopiers and all the oceanic logic stored in your computer. Bemoan technology all you want. It expands your self-esteem and connects you in your well-pressed suit to the things that slip through the world otherwise unperceived.

Marian drove the car with a pencil in her hand. I don't think I ever asked her why. I don't think we talked the way we used to talk when the kids were growing up. What a richness of subject, two living things changing before our eyes, going from dumb clamor, from milk slop to formed words, or starting school, or just sitting at the table eating, little crayoned faces pumped with being. But they were grown people now with a computer after all, with rotating media shelves and a baby on the way and a bumper sticker (this was my son) that read Going Nowhere Fast . The days of the marriage were no longer filled with dialogues about Lainie and Jeff. We hung on the birth of the grandchild.

I ran along the drainage canal wearing a wireless headphone. I listened to Sufi chanting while I ran. I ran along the palm alleys and through the winding streets of orange trees and handsome stucco homes-streets of westward dreams, the kind of place my father could have taken us half a century earlier, lightward and westward, where people came to escape the hard-luck past with its gray streets and crowded flats and cabbage smells in the hallway.

Lainie was an entrepreneur, a hard driver, a bargainer, our huckster daughter, we called her, and she was living in Tucson with husband Dex. They made ethnic jewelry and sold it over a shopping channel, bracelets, chains, the works, and they did interviews and traveled to festivals and other cultural events. Her pregnancy gave us a lift and she sent photos of her changing shape and we drove down there often to see the booming body.

I rearranged the books on the shelves. I stood in the room looking at the books. Then I strapped my ankle wallet to my ankle and ran.

The larger she got, the happier we became. We never knew how happy we were supposed to be until we turned off Interstate 10 and followed the sweeping traffic on one of those mall arteries that resemble a marathon of headlong metal and found her little street and saw her posing in the doorway in stately profile.

I call the Lucky Strike logotype a target because I believe they were waiting for my father when he went out to buy a pack of cigarettes and they took him and put him in a car and drove him somewhere near the bay, where the river goes into the bay or where the lagoon lies silent in the dark and there are marshes and inlets, remote spits of land, and then they gave it to him good, the projectile entering the back of the head and making a pathway to the brain. And, besides, if it's not a target, why did they name the brand Lucky Strike? True, there's a gold-rush connotation. But a strike is not only the discovery of some precious metal in the ground. It is also a penetrating hit from a weapon. And isn't there a connection between the name of the brand and the design of concentric circles on the package? This implies they were thinking target all along.

We sat in the Stadium Club with our sour-mash whiskey and bloody meat, pretending to watch the game. I'd been to Los Angeles many times on business but had never made the jaunt to Dodger Stadium. Big Sims had to wrestle me into his car to get me here.

We were set apart from the field, glassed in at press level, and even with a table by the window we heard only muffled sounds from the crowd. The radio announcer's voice shot in clearly, transmitted from the booth, but the crowd remained at an eerie distance, soul-moaning like some lost battalion.

Brian Classic said, "I hear they finally stopped ocean dumping off the East Coast."

"Not while I'm eating," I said.

"Tell him," Sims said. "Describe it in detail. Make him smell the smell."

"I also hear the more they dumped in a particular area, the richer the sea life."

Sims looked at the Englishwoman, who alone ate fish.

"Hear that?" he said. "The sea life thrived."

And Classic said, "Let's eat fast and get out of here and go sit in the stands like real people."

And Sims said, "What for?"

"I need to hear the crowd."

"No, you don't."

"What's a ball game without crowd noise?"

"We're here to eat a meal and see a game," Sims said. "I took the trouble to book us a table by the window. You don't go to a ballpark to hear a game. You go to see a game. Can you see all right?"

Simeon Biggs, Big Sims, was famous in the firm for his midbody girth. He was fat, bald and fifty-five but also strong, with a neck and arms resembling rock maple. If he liked you enough he might trade chest thumps or invite you to race him around the block. Sims ran the operational end of our Los Angeles campus, as we called it, and designed landfills that were prettier than pastel malls.

Classic looked at me and said, "We need video helmets and power gloves. Because this isn't reality. This is virtual reality. And we don't have the proper equipment."

Sims said, "We can't take our drinks with us if we go to our seats."

"That's a forceful point," I said.

The only time I ate the wrong food, just about, or drank too much, if ever, was when I was out with Sims, who was a living rebuke to the tactics of moderation.

The Englishwoman said, "Now as I understand it the pitcher gets a signal from the catcher. This pitch or that pitch. Fast or slow, up or down. But what happens if he ardently opposes the catcher's selection?"

"He shakes off the sign," Classic said.

"Oh I see."

"He waggles his glove or shakes his head," Sims said. "Or he stares down the catcher."

The Englishwoman, Jane Farish, was a BBC producer who wanted to do a program about the salt domes we were testing for the storage of nuclear waste, under the direction of the Department of Energy. She'd been busy for some years devouring American culture, leaving the earth scorched with interviews, she said-porno kings, contemplative monks, blues singers in prison. She'd just finished a sweep of California and was headed to a poker tournament in Reno and then into the desert to interview Klara Sax.

The Dodgers were playing the Giants.

Sims looked at Parish and said, " You know these two teams go way back. They were New York teams until the late fifties."

"They moved west, did they?"

"Moved west, taking Nick's heart and soul with them."

Farish looked at me.

"There was nothing left to take. I was already a nonfan by that time. Burnt out. This is my first ball game in decades."

"And it turns out to be silent," Classic said.

Big Sims ordered another round and told Farish about the old Brooklyn Dodgers. Sims grew up in Missouri and he got some of it right, some of it wrong. No one could explain the Dodgers who wasn't there. The Englishwoman didn't mind. She was absorbing things chemically, sometimes shutting her eyes to concentrate the process.