Don DeLillo - Underworld

She didn't ask whether it was Portland, Maine or Portland, Oregon when I said it was not Boston, it was Portland, and I'd felt the question coming, layered in the sequence of our exchange, waiting to edge out, but one of us fell asleep before she could ask which Portland by the way in those words exactly, I think I fell asleep first but maybe not- the light was out, the last light was out.

Then I came up out of a dream and felt my way to the armchair, breathing funny, and switched on the small reading lamp.

And the crowd noise behind the voice, the incessant smash and tension, the thickness, the sort of bristle and teem that deepened at a turn in play-a noise so dense it might have had a flash point, a heat to blow out the radio.

I heard my mother in the next room getting up to go to the toilet. I listened to her come out of the room. I waited and listened, nearly breathless. I waited for the shuffle of slippers along the hall, for the pace, the familiar rate and pace of the shuffle, and then I listened for the sound of water flushing-fully intent, listening in the fiercest kind of concentrated stillness until she was safely back in bed.

I hefted the weapon and pointed it and saw an interested smile fall across his face, the slyest kind of shit-eating grin.

Maybe that was the dream-I wasn't sure.

Then I got the baseball from the bookshelves and sat in the armchair and looked into the whiskey-cream ceiling.

I didn't listen to the Dodger station that day. I listened to Russ Hodges instead, trying to work a reverse kind of luck. Never occurred to me at the time-I didn't think of it in fact until I sat in the armchair squeezing the baseball-but Russell Hodges, if you count the letters, if you're odd enough to think of doing such a thing, spinning out the full name and counting the characters, you may be amused to see old thirteen.

I felt calmer now. I felt all right. My arm hung over the side of the chair and I squeezed the baseball, listening to Marian sleep-breathe- squeezed it hard, the veins leveling on the back of my hand, going dead flat.

Maybe we fell asleep simultaneously. Then I felt my way to the armchair and switched on the lamp. I stood there, pulling my pajama shirt away from my body where the sweat made it cling. Then I went to the bookshelves and got the baseball.

She was sitting up. She wasn't exactly sitting up, she was propped-I realized she was awake, propped on an elbow looking at me, rubbing her temple with her right hand.

"Nick?"

"I'm here."

"You all right?"

"Yes. I'll be there in a minute."

"Come back to bed."

"I'm all right. Go to sleep."

"It was a lovely birthday, wasn't it?"

"Do you want me to turn out this light?"

"No. Just come to bed."

"I'll be there in a minute."

"I want you next to me," she said.

I stood on the roof with my radio placed on the ledge and sometimes I squatted and took the radio down with me, down behind the ledge, surrounding it sort of, taking hope from it, suffering the game's slides and veers, rooting from the gut-an Emerson, maroon, that I took everywhere. But when I stood I faced southwest, looking beyond the hospital for the incurable and past the elevated tracks on Third Avenue, looking toward the river that cuts the boroughs. That's where the Polo Grounds stood, west by southwest, and I imagined the field and the players, the crisp blues and elysian greens on that great somber-skied day-great and terrible, a day now gone to black and white in the film fade of memory.

Then he remembers his books and goes back down the stairs because you can't come home from school without your schoolbooks, fool. He forces the baseball into his side pocket and leans into the dim triangle behind the stairs, where the bottom of the first flight meets the floor, and he scoops the three books he left there in the morning, slides them out and scoops them up, plus a composition book with a mottled cover, and he blows away the dust and smut and sourness.

The janitor comes in the back door from the yards, the new janitor, he limps so bad you're not even sure you feel sorry for him-maybe you wonder why he's walking around at all.

"What's this?"

"Dropped something," Cotter says.

"I need to talk to your father."

"When I see him."

"Tell him," the man says.

Cotter can't figure out how the janitor knows who he is. The last janitor left in a hurry and the new man just arrived and he has four buildings he takes care of and a limp that's hard to look at and he already knows which son belongs to the matching father and it's probably not a mistake. People always want to talk to his father. His father spends hours every day in flight from these conversations.

He climbs to four and goes inside. His sister is there, Rosie, poring over her homework at the kitchen table. Rosie's sixteen, always blasting away at the books, and he has two older brothers, one in Korea with the infantry and one in the airborne stationed in Georgia. This is the peach state. But if Cotter had to choose between these two forms of employment he thinks he'd rather face a weaponed enemy in snow and mud than walk out a door into the balmy evening air with a snatch of bundled silk hanging on his back.

"What's he carrying in his pocket? Makes a person wonder," Rosie says. "Looks like an apple to me. Maybe he went to an orchard on his day off."

"What day off?"

"Traveled upstate on a bus to pick some apples. Of course we have apples right here. But that's for after school. No school, no apples. Is that why he found his own apple?"

"If I didn't go to school, where did I go?"

"I don't know but when I saw you from the window you had no books and when you walked in the door, lo and behold."

"Then you know that's not an apple in my pocket."

He takes out the ball and does his flip trick, back-spinning the thing over his hand and wrist and catching it with a sort of gearshift motion, elbow in reverse. This gets Rosie smiling and she plants her face in the book again, which tells Cotter he has won a little victory because it is only when this girl goes wordless that you know she is showing respect.

In his room he looks out the window, the room he used to share with his brothers, remarkably his own now, and then he drops the ball on the khaki blanket in the lower bunk, it is the only military touch, the sturdy olive drab, and he grabs a sweater off the chair back. He fits the sweater over his head and looks out the window again, watching people move through the streetlights and into the partial dark. Gets dark too soon. He stands and looks, just watching, being nobody in a window, and then he hears his mother pushing through the door.

He snaps to, thinking what he has to say if he is challenged about missing school. But he knows Rosie will not snitch on him. He thinks he knows this. He is confident more or less. He thinks he feels her loyalty through the walls and he goes into the kitchen where his mother is putting away groceries and he drops a hand on Rosie's shoulder and stands at the table with an eye fixed on the bright boxes and cans his mother is placing on the shelves.

His mother says, "How many times?"

"What?"

"You have to be told. Don't wear that sweater. I need to clean that sweater."

"Plunge it in something strong," Rosie says.

"That's a filthy sweater."

"Take it to the cleaner, they'll give it back," Rosie says. "Rejected."

See, the world is filled with things he's not supposed to do and not supposed to wear. But maybe he likes it when they array against him, it's different from his brothers, who bossed him a little and teased him a little but did not show this picky interest, this endless searching concern. His sister's head poked forward so she can study the particular jut of his dumbness. He likes running his fingers over the edge of the fruit bowl, over the specked glaze, with Rosie's books sprawled on the table and the fruit in the bowl and his mother doing things at the stove or cabinet, the way his mother talks to him and never looks in his direction but knows where he is and measures her voice to his sliding whereabouts, room by room. Maybe he wants them to figure him out so they can let him in on the secret.