Don DeLillo - Underworld

In the bronze tower a fellow executive cleared his throat and I heard something go by in the small hoarse noise, a secret linger of childhood, the game he played inside his life. Maybe it was a hundred and eight degrees out on the street. He was spying on himself. The third person watches the first person. The "he" spies on the "I." The "he" knows things the "I" can't bear to think about. Maybe it was a hundred and ten, a hundred and twelve, telephones warbling in modulated phrases. The third person sends his nobody to kill the first person's somebody.

I used to say when they were small. I told them more than once. This is the washer, this is the packing, this is the spout.

In the bronze tower we used the rhetoric of aggrieved minorities to prevent legislation that would hurt our business. Arthur Blessing believed, our CEO, that true feeling flows upward from the streets, fully accessible to corporate adaptation. We learned how to complain, how to appropriate the language of victimization. Arthur listened to gangsta rap on the car radio every morning. Songs about getting mad and getting laid and getting even, taking what's rightfully ours by violent means if necessary. He believed this was the only form of address that made an impact on Washington. Arthur recited lyrics to me once on the company plane and together we laughed his wacko laugh, those enunciated ha-has, clear and slow and well spaced, like laughing with words.

Coming home I liked to put suntan lotion on my arms, face and legs and go running down the quiet streets of oleanders and palms and along the drainage canal banked with red dirt. I ran in dense heat and strong light and I thought about the protection factor bumping up to sixty now, I wondered about this even though I'm olive-skinned, dark as my old man-from fifteen to thirty to sixty, where once upon a time a factor fifteen was the absolute maximum sunblock scientifically possible. Running past tree trunks limed white against the unrelenting sun.

You have to cut it thick. That's what he said about the bread, the round crusty loaf he called Campobasso bread, after the name of the store, which itself was named for a mountain town on the spine of Italy. The best bread, you cut it too thin, he said, it's worthless. I watched him shave and I watched him cut bread, holding the loaf on its side with one hand, thumb of the other hand, the knife hand, edged over the haft onto the back of the blade to guide the slicing, down through the crust and into the springy middle of the bread.

When Lainie had her baby, her girl, I felt a soft joy settle in my chest. Or a solace, maybe, an easing of some perennial clutch or grab, some taunt of malehood. All these women now, from my mother in her pale green room to this raw arrival kicking in mortal fret, all gathered near the chimneypiece. It was a kindness that the child should be a girl. I felt an expansive ease, an unthrobbing of some knot in my body. I watched her naked in her mother's arms, swimming in a ribbon of light.

Tuesdays only we did plastic, minus caps and lids. Waste is an interesting word that you can trace through Old English and Old Norse back to the Latin, finding such derivatives as empty, void, vanish and devastate.

Residents of Phoenix are called Phoenicians.

They talked about the things I did not talk about, although I told her about the stolen car, and we said to each other, Marian and I, we said if people ever saw our son in the commission of a crime they wouldn't know how to describe him except for his skin color and the jokey sticker fastened to the rear bumper of his Honda, if in fact his Honda was an element in the crime, the bumper sticker someone gave him- Going Nowhere Fast .

Marian and I saw products as garbage even when they sat gleaming on store shelves, yet unbought. We didn't say, What kind of casserole will that make? We said, What kind of garbage will that make? Safe, clean, neat, easily disposed of? Can the package be recycled and come back as a tawny envelope that is difficult to lick closed? First we saw the garbage, then we saw the product as food or lightbulbs or dandruff shampoo. How does it measure up as waste, we asked. We asked whether it is responsible to eat a certain item if the package the item comes in will live a million years.

According to street legend he never wrote a number on a piece of paper.

Night after night we sat in the stale glow, my mother and I, and watched reruns of "The Honeymooners." Ralph Kramden wailing his unstoppable pain. Maybe my mother identified with wife Alice. The apron and cloth coat and underfurnished flat and food smells in the hallway. But Alice had a bus-driver husband who kept walking in the door instead of going out. He drove a vehicle licensed by society. And Ralph and Alice had no kids to worry and torment them. You had the kids without the husband. Not even a body risen from the rock-weed and found floating by two guys early one Sunday in a rented row-boat with a cage for trapping crabs-the nibbled body of Jimmy Costanza, age whatever.

I went back to the coastal lowlands of Texas and did an interview with the BBC wearing a hard hat and miner's lamp and standing in a salt passage two thousand feet under the earth. The producer stood off camera and asked questions and I tasted salt dust stirred up by the forklifts and tried to frame responses that would please her.

You had the man who did the job unlicensed by society. In the hallways and alleys you heard the footfalls at night and must have wondered if that was Jimmy coming back. From the dead or the dark or maybe just New Jersey. And that was you dressing quickly at first light before the heat came whistling up the pipes-early mass among the Italians in their graveclothes. You had the kids with their taut nerves, the little woodpushing wonder who was harder to love than a handful of coffee dregs. Alone those cold mornings going to mass. And the older son with his distance and dimmed moods and undimmed rage, up on the roof in the evening sleet to smoke a cigarette.

I look at the Lucky Strike logotype and I think target.

I watched men in moon suits bury drums of nuclear waste and I thought of the living rocks down there, the subterrane process, the half-life, the atoms that decay to half the original number. The most common isotope of uranium is bombarded with neutrons to produce plutonium that fissions, if we can generate a verb from the energy of splitting atoms. This isotope has the mass number two three eight. Add the digits and you get thirteen.

But the bombs were not released. I remember Klara Sax talking about the men who flew the strategic bombers as we all stood listening in the long low structure of sectioned concrete. The missiles remained in the rotary launchers. The men came back and the cities were not destroyed.

Marian leaned into me and laughed, watching the land surface expand around us. It was first light, a foil shimmer at desert's edge. At three hundred feet we caught a mild westerly and drifted toward the eyelid slice of sun. But we didn't think we were moving. We thought the land was gliding by beneath us, showing a cluster of mobile homes, a truck on a blacktop to the south. And dogs barking up at us-they barked and leaped and ran yapping into each other as we strayed across the trailer park, passed from dog to dog, new dogs appearing at the fringes, twisting in midleap, dogs from nowhere, multiplying yaps and howls, a contagion to wake the known world.

Then we were out over open earth, bone brown and deep in shadow, and we hung in the soft air, balanced in some unbodied lull, with a measure of creation spilling past.

The pilot yanked the blast valve and we heard the burners pulse and roar and this made Marian laugh again. She talked and laughed incessantly, happy and scared. The basket was not large, barely taking the three of us plus tanks, valves, wires, instruments and coiled rope.