Don DeLillo - Underworld

"Innocuous."

"Innocuous. What am I, innocuous? This is history, back-page. From back to front. Happy, tragic, desperate." Marvin shifted his gaze. "In this trunk right here I have the one thing that my whole life for the past twenty-two years I was trying to collect."

Brian had an inkling.

"I tracked, I searched and finally I found it and bought it, eighteen months ago, and I don't even put it on display. I keep it in the trunk, out of sight."

Now it was Brian who looked at the Scoreboard.

Marvin said morosely, "It's the Bobby Thomson home-run ball, which I traced it back starting with rumors in the business. It wasn't even a business back then, just a few interested parties with someone's telephone number or first name, the skimpiest kind of lead that I pursued with a fury."

He paused to light his cigar. It was old and stale and looked like a soybean sausage from the school cafeteria. But Brian understood that a cigar was tribally required, even if the smoke stung his eyes.

For the next three hours Marvin talked about his search for the baseball. He forgot some names and mangled others. He lost whole cities, placing them in the wrong time zones. He described how he followed false leads into remote places. He climbed the stairs to raftered upper rooms and looked in old trunks among the grandmother's linen and the photographs of the dead.

"I said to myself a thousand times. Why do I want this thing? What does it mean? Who has it?"

Through the narration, the whole wandering epic, skimmed here, protracted there, Brian was confident that the man was slipshod only in the telling. The search itself had clearly been hard, fierce, thorough and consuming.

At one point Marvin hired a man who worked in a photo lab and had access to special equipment. They studied news photographs of the left-field stands at the Polo Grounds taken just after the ball went in. They looked at enlargements and enhancements. They went to photo agencies and burrowed in the archives. Marvin had people sneak him into newspaper morgues, into the wire services and the major magazines.

"I looked at a million photographs because this is the dot theory of reality, that all knowledge is available if you analyze the dots."

There was a slight crackle in his voice that sounded like random radio noise produced by some disturbance of the signal.

He acquired original film. He brought in darkroom equipment. He ate his meals with a magnifier around his neck. The house was filled with contact sheets, glossy prints, there were blowups pinned to clotheslines rigged through several rooms. His wife and child fled to England to visit relatives because Marvin somehow married English.

He hired a private detective with an intermittent nosebleed. They placed ads in the personal columns of sporting magazines, trying to locate people who'd sat in section 35, where the ball went in.

There was the photographic detailwork, the fineness of image, the what-do-you-call-it into littler units.

"Resolution," Brian said.

And then there was the long journey, the suitcase crawl through empty train stations, the bitter winter flights with ice on the wings, there was the weary traipse, a word he doesn't hear anymore, the march into people's houses and lives-the actual physical thing, unphotographed, of liver-spotted hands and dimpled chins and the whole strewn sense of what they remember and forget.

1. The widow on Long Island turning a spoon in her cup.

2. The gospel singer named Prestigious Booker who kept a baseball in an urn that held her lover's ashes.

3. The ship on the dock in San Francisco-don't even bring it up.

4. The man in his car in Deaf Smith County, Texas, the original middle of nowhere.

5. A whole generation of Jesus faces. Young men everywhere bearded and sandaled, bearded and barefoot-little peeky spectacles with wire frames.

6. Marvin's sense of being lost in America, wandering through cities with no downtowns.

7. The woman on Long Island, what's-her-name, whose husband was at the game-she served instant coffee in cups from a doll museum.

8. The Coptic family in Detroit-never mind, it's too complicated, riots and fires in the distance, tanks in the streets.

9. The detailed confusion of Marvin's narrative, people's memories mixed with his own, shaped to bending time.

10. A tornado touching down, skipping along the treetops in an evil weave, the whole sky filthy with flung debris.

11. Whose husband was in the footage Marvin analyzed, scrambling for the baseball, and all she had in the house was instant.

12. Riding up the side of a building in an elevator that's transparent.

13. The ship on the dock-please not now.

14. What a mystery all around him, every street deep in some radiant amaze.

Brian listened to all this and he heard the music end and begin again, the same piano piece, and this was not the second time he was hearing it but maybe the eighth or ninth, and he listened to Marvin's dot theory of reality and felt an underlying force in this theme of the relentless photographic search, some prototype he could not bring into tight definition.

"A thousand times I said. How long do I look? Why do I want it? Where is it?"

He advertised for amateur film footage of the game and acquired a few minutes of crude action that showed a massive pulsing blur above the left-field wall shot by a man in the bleachers. He brought in an optical printer. He rephotographed the footage. He enlarged, reposi-tioned, analyzed. He step-framed the action to slow it down, to combine several seconds of film into one image. He examined the sprocket areas of the film searching for a speck of data, a minim of missing imagery. It was work of Talmudic refinement, zooming in and fading out, trying to bring a man's face into definition, read a woman's ankle bracelet engraved with a name.

Brian was shamed by other men's obsessions. They exposed his own middling drift, the voice he heard, soft, faint and faraway, that told him not to bother.

Marvin's wife and child came home and went away again. The house had become a booby hatch of looming images. The isolated grimace, the hair that juts from the mole on the old man's chin. Every image teeming with crystalized dots. A photograph is a universe of dots. The grain, the halide, the little silver things clumped in the emulsion. Once you get inside a dot, you gain access to hidden information, you slide inside the smallest event.

This is what technology does. It peels back the shadows and redeems the dazed and rambling past. It makes reality come true.

Marvin Lundy opened the trunk.

The baseball was wrapped in tissue paper inside an old red-and-white Spalding box. There were deep stacks of photographs and correspondence and other material related to the search. Birth certificates, passports, affidavits, handwritten wills, detailed lists of people's possessions, there were bloodstained garments in Ziploc bags.

He took some still frames out of a manila envelope and showed them to Brian.

This was a sequence that involved the scramble for the ball, people in bevies, Marvin said, scratching and grabbing, and a man in the last photo standing starkly alone, white-shirted, looking down at the exit ramp, looking hard, glaring at someone, probably at the person who'd come away with the ball, but Marvin could not find a way, for all his mastery of the dots, to rotate the heads of the people on the ramp so he could see the face of the individual in question.

"But you identified the man in the white shirt."

"From running the picture in the back of magazines where they did waterbeds and dirty personals."

"And you went to see the wife."

"This is many years after the game. What happened he died. The widow sits in a cold house turning a spoon in her tiny cup. I try to find out what he might have said to her about the game, the ball, anything. What game, she says. I try to explain the extenuations of the thing. But it's more than twenty years later. What game, what ball?"