Don DeLillo - Underworld

"It's ridiculous, isn't it? But probably harmless too."

"Nothing is harmless," Marvin said. "You're worried and scared. You see the cold war winding down. This makes it hard for you to breathe."

Brian pushed through a turnstile from an old ballpark. It creaked sort of lovingly.

He said, "Cold war? I don't see the cold war winding down. And if I did, good. I'd be happy about it."

"Let me explain something that maybe you never noticed."

Marvin was sitting in an armchair alongside an old equipment trunk bearing the stenciled inscription Boston Red Stockings . He gestured toward the chair on the other side of the trunk and Brian went over and sat down.

" You need the leaders of both sides to keep the cold war going. It's the one constant thing. It's honest, it's dependable. Because when the tension and rivalry come to an end, that's when your worst nightmares begin. All the power and intimidation of the state will seep out of your personal bloodstream. You will no longer be the main-what do I want to say?"

"I'm not sure."

"Point of reference. Because other forces will come rushing in, demanding and challenging. The cold war is your friend. You need it to stay on top."

"On top of what?"

" You don't know on top of what? You don't know the whole thing is geared to your dominance in the world? You see what they have in England. Forty thousand women circling an air base to protest the bombs and missiles. Some of them are men in dresses. They have Buddhists beating drums."

Brian didn't know how to respond to these remarks. He wanted to talk about old ballplayers, stadium dimensions, about nicknames and minor league towns. That's why he was here, to surrender himself to longing, to listen to his host recite the anecdotal texts, all the passed-down stones of bonehead plays and swirling brawls, the pitching duels that carried into twilight, stories that Marvin had been collecting for half a century-the deep eros of memory that separates baseball from other sports.

Marvin sat staring at the Scoreboard, his cigar slightly shredded at the burnt end.

"I thought we were going to talk baseball."

"We're talking baseball. This is baseball. You see the clock," Marvin said. "Stopped at three fifty-eight. Why? Is it because that's when Thomson hit the homer off Branca?"

He called him Branker.

"Or because that's the day we found out the Russians exploded an atom bomb. You know something about that game?"

"What?" Brian said.

"There were twenty thousand empty seats. You know why?"

"Why?"

"You'll laugh in my face."

"No, I won't."

"It's all right. You're my guest. I want you to feel at home."

"Why so many empty seats for the most important game of the year?"

"Many years," Marvin said.

"Many years."

"Because certain events have a quality of unconscious fear. I believe in my heart that people sensed some catastrophe in the air. Not who would win or lose the game. Some awful force that would obliterate- what's the word?"

"Obliterate."

"Obliterate. That would obliterate the whole thing of the game. You have to understand that all through the nineteen-fifties people stayed indoors. We only went outside to drive our cars. Public parks were not filled with people the way they later became. A museum was empty rooms with knights in armor where you had one sleepy guard for every seven centuries."

"In other words."

"In other words there was a hidden mentality of let's stay home. Because a threat was hanging in the air."

"And you're saying people had an intuition about this particular day."

"It's like they knew. They sensed there was a connection between this game and some staggering event that might take place on the other side of the world."

"This particular game."

"Not the day before or the day after. Because this was an all-or-nothing game between the two hated rivals of the city. People had a premonition that this game was related to something much bigger. They had the mental process of do I want to go out and be in a big crowd, which if something awful happens is the worst place to be, or should I stay home with my family and my brand-new TV , which common sense says yes, in a cabinet with maple veneer."

To his surprise Brian did not reject this theory. He didn't necessarily believe it but he didn't dismiss it either. He believed it provisionally here in this room located below street level in a frame house on a weekday afternoon in Cliffside Park, New Jersey. It was lyrically true as it emerged from Marvin Lundy's mouth and reached Brian's middle ear, unprovably true, remotely and inadmissably true but not completely unhistorical, not without some nuance of authentic inner narrative.

Marvin said, "Which the whole thing is interesting because when they make an atomic bomb, listen to this, they make the radioactive core the exact same size as a baseball."

"I always thought it was a grapefruit."

"A regulation major league baseball no less than nine inches in circumference, going by the rule book."

He crossed his legs, he stuck a finger in his ear and jigged an itch. Marvin had enormous ears. For the first time Brian became aware of music playing somewhere in the house. Maybe he'd been hearing it all along at the assimilated edge, music blended with the room tone, the airplanes drifting into Newark, the faint wail of bullet traffic on the speedways out there-a moderated sorrow, piano work that had the texture of something old and gentled over, a pressed rose faded in a book.

"People sense things that are invisible. But when something's staring you right in the face, that's when you miss it completely."

"What do you mean?" Brian said.

"This Gorbachev that walks around with that thing on his head. It's a birthmark, what he's got?"

"Yes, I think so."

"It's big. You agree with this?"

"Yes, it's quite big."

"Noticeable. You can't help but notice. Am I right?"

"Yes, you are."

"And you agree that millions of people see this thing every day in the newspaper?"

"Yes, they do."

"They open the paper and there's the man's head with that amazing mark high on the dome. Agreed?"

"Yes, of course."

"What does it mean?" Marvin said.

"Why does it have to mean something?"

"You take it at face value."

"It's his face," Brian said. "It's his head. A blemish, a birthmark."

"That's not what I see."

"What do you see?"

"You asked so I'll tell you."

Marvin saw the first sign of the total collapse of the Soviet system. Stamped on the man's head. The map of Latvia.

He said this straight-faced, how Gorbachev was basically conveying the news that the USSR faced turmoil from the republics.

"You think his birthmark? Wait a minute."

"Excuse me but if you rotate the map of Latvia ninety degrees so the eastern border goes on top, this is exactly the shape that's on Gorbachev's head. In other words when he's lying in bed at night and his wife comes over to give him a glass of water and an aspirin, this is Latvia she's looking at."

Brian tried to conjure the shape of the winestain mark on Gorbachev's head. He wanted to match it with a memory of geography tests on mellow afternoons, his limbs faintly aching with biological drives and the sweetness of school's end. The old melodic line came lullabying back, Latvia, Estonia, Lithuania. But the map shapes escaped him now, the precise silhouettes of those nestled anatomies.

Marvin was looking at the Scoreboard again.

"People collect, collect, always collecting. There's people they go after anything out of wartime Germany. Naziana. This is major collectors looking for big history. Does that mean the objects in this room are total trivia? What's the word I'm looking for that sounds like you're getting injected with a vaccine in the fleshy part of your arm?"