Don DeLillo - Underworld

"I'm not a fan anymore. I don't follow the teams."

"I'm in the category myself where I'm undergoing tests. This means I have cancer recurring in so many parts of my body the doctor gives me group rates. Don't worry, you're not supposed to laugh. I'm trying to make you feel bad."

"And you're a Dodger fan, yes?"

"From before I was born."

"Raised in Brooklyn?"

"Raised in Brooklyn, get my cheesecake in the Bronx, go to the Lower East Side for this and that."

"A Dodger fan. But you've reproduced the Polo Grounds Scoreboard in your basement."

"To remind me," Marvin said. "Or prepare me. I forget which."

"I'm not retired. And I haven't made millions. And I don't know exactly why I want to buy the ball."

This was good. Marvin liked this. It was good to hear from someone who was not palpitating in his mind for the old Giants or the old New York. They have stools you can buy in surgical supply outlets that you place in your shower so you can sit and do the far-flung parts of your body without falling and breaking a hip, which he saw one day on the hip replacement channel, with molded seats and nonskid legs. They have a channel for every body part.

"Irbu call me out of nowhere," Marvin said. 'And you want to do a deal. But you don't know why."

"That's right," said the voice.

Good. Because this was Marvin's situation for a long time. This was Marvin's exact status. For years he didn't know why he was chasing down exhausted objects. All that frantic passion for a baseball and he finally understood it was Eleanor on his mind, it was some terror working deep beneath the skin that made him gather up things, amass possessions and effects against the dark shape of some unshoulderable loss. Memorabilia. What he remembered, what lived in the old smoked leather of the catcher's mitt in the basement was the touch of his Eleanor, those were his wife's eyes in the oval photographs of men with handlebar mustaches. The state of loss, the fact, the facticity in its lonely length. This was a word he never thought he'd need to use but here it was, crouched for years in his secluded brain, coming out to elongate the loss.

"I have a mushroom-shaped tumor."

"Yes."

"The doctor calls it a fungating mass."

"I don't know that term."

"I don't know it either. It's not in the dictionary because I looked in two dictionaries. When they get their terms outside the dictionary, it means they're telling you goodbye."

They went to Chinatown. They went to the Jersey shore and ate harpooned swordfish, which it's tastier when the fish dies unstrangled by a net, with olive oil and capers, the last great fish thing on the planet.

"I have to tell you first thing. I don't have the what-do-you-call completely established."

"The lineage."

"The lineage. I don't have the lineage all the way."

He told the caller some things about the ball. He said he would make a long story short. Then he made it long. He entertained the man, why not? And he saw it coming even as he did the bits and routines, delivered the reliable lines. Clarice would have to rent a hospital bed for the apartment, high sides so he wouldn't tumble to the floor. Strangers would come to wash his genitals, immigrants from countries on the travel channel, they had lives of their own that he could not imagine a single minute of. He would forget how to eat, how to say simple words. His body would lie there trying to put together the needed elements to take a breath. An oxygen tube in his nose and bananas on the windowsill, he hates them when they're spotted and soft. Clarice speaking slowly, putting a cool cloth to his naked head. All right, I'm fine, all right. Carl in his pressed white shorts and tube socks, a stockbroker disguised as a boy

"Do we want to talk about price?" said the voice.

The word for water is water but he wouldn't be able to say it. The body forgets the basic things. He talked on the phone to Phoenix and looked at his windbreaker hanging on a chair.

They went to the Jersey shore. They made love, they made salads. This was when the terms were in the dictionary.

That night he ate half a cantaloupe with grapes clustered in the scooped-out part. This is how they sold it in the supermarket, packed in clinging wrap.

When people tell rat stories, the rat is always tremendous. It's a drag-belly rat the size of a cat because this is a satisfying rhyme. There was a fair amount of rat lore in these streets when Nick Shay was growing up. Not that rats were frequently seen. They were heard in the walls and down the yards, indelible half fictions, running across rooftops in the moon. Enormous rats with rat-brown fur. There were rats in sewers and demolition sites and coal bins, a rustling in the flung garbage of empty lots.

He got out of a taxi near the building where his mother lived. The building was not here thirty, forty years ago, a large brown structure, tall and broad and defined by a sense of fortification-fences and ramps, cameras angled from the brickwork.

This used to be a row of five-story buildings, tenements, and that's where he saw the rat, wet and dead, lying next to a coal pile on the sidewalk. He was nine or ten at the time and the incident came back to him, taxi easing from the curb, with a detailed directness. Just a dead rat but he could see it clearly, feeling a kind of doubleness, a shaped transparency, die-cut, that fit him to the moment. He remembered how he'd studied the limp body, feeling a grisly thrill to be so close, able to trace a faint pink line down the underside of the tail, and the rat was brown and gray and pink and white all together and separate but he was disappointed by its size-he would have to exaggerate the rat, put some heft and length in his story, some mouth drool and yellow eye.

There was a man in a plexiglas booth. Nick signed a register and was buzzed into the lobby, which was occupied by kids, small and smaller, playing, milling, their voices shrieky in the bare space. He took the elevator to twelve. The other rat was later, when he was in his twenties, also ordinary in size, your common Norway brown, but ordinary is big enough when you talk about rats.

Matt opened the door, his brother Matty, still looking a little boyish, short and blocky, cowlicked, with thick glasses and a fresh haircut and some gray, maybe, on top, that seemed extraneous. Midforties he would be. They hadn't seen each other in a few years and it was only an accident of timing that brought them together today.

They shook hands and exchanged the wry smile of adversaries who are enjoined from mauling each other by some inconvenience of context.

Nick said, "Where is she?"

They talked about their mother, about medications, doctors' appointments, not unusual matters, but there was a rigor in the older brother's questions, a particularity of interest and concern that amounted to a kind of challenge.

Matt said finally, "She's okay, she's good, she eats and sleeps normally. You want to know about her natural functions, you'll have to ask her yourself."

"You're staying over?"

"Two nights. You've totally forgotten what it's like, Nick. A night in the Bronx."

But Matty had long since filled out the small boy's sketchy torso, developed some mass in his upper body, a certain sturdiness of bearing.

Nick said, "I have to go to Jersey in the morning or I'd take her to the doctor myself."

"What's in Jersey? Chemical waste eating people's houses?"

"Personal business."

"How's Marian?"

"Fine, they're all fine."

They drank seltzer and took turns looking out the window. There was a picture window with a broad view west. El Bronx. People sat on lawn chairs on the roof of a motel nearby. Nick could tell these were local men and women who'd gained entry to the roof from an adjacent building, carrying their chairs and newspapers. He knew it was evidence of brisk improvisation, people extracting pleasure from the grudging streets, but it made him nervous, it was a breach, another opening, another local sign of instability and risk.