Don DeLillo - Underworld

"Because you began to lose," Albert said.

It was true of course and Matt laughed. All that concentrated power, the implosive life of the board, black and white, the autocratic beauty of winning, what a chestful of undisguisable pride-he defeated men, boys, the old and wise, the vigorous and quick, the bohemian cafe poets, friendly and smelly. But then at ten or eleven he saw his edge begin to muddy and he took some losses, suffered consistent reversals that made him sick and limp.

"The competition changed. We found better opponents for you to play."

"And I slowed down."

"Your development hit a wall. Not a wall. But it no longer grew exponentially."

Matt looked out at the playground, surprised at the desolation, the basketball court potholed and empty, only one backboard still standing. Directly below him the old boccie court grown over with weeds. Everything empty. Up on the second level the softball field empty and tar-hot, a heavy sweltry indolence, the dark surface flashing with broken glass, two or three men, he sees them now, standing out near the left-field fence, sort of mortally posed like figures in spaghetti westerns, lean, nameless, unshaved-he didn't think they were acquainted with the language of life expectancy.

He said, "IVe been walking around. It's a complicated thing. I find myself trying to resist the standard response."

"You don't want to be shocked. You're reluctant to blame anyone. But you went to the old streets."

"Yes."

"Irbu saw your building. The squalor around it. The empty lot with the razor wire."

"Yes."

"The men. Who are they, standing around doing nothing? Poor people. They're very shocking."

"Yes, they are," Matt said.

"And these were your streets. It's a curious rite of passage, isn't it? Visit the old places. First you wonder how you lived so uncomplainingly in such cramped circumstances. The streets are narrower, the buildings smaller than you ever remembered. It's like coming back to Lilliput. And think of the rooms. Think of the tiny bathroom, shared by the family, by the grandparents, by the uncle who's slightly upazz . But what else do you see? These people that you barely glance at. How can you see them clearly? You can't."

"No, I can't."

"And you want to ask me why I'm still here. I see your mother in the market and we talk about this. We want nothing to do with this business of mourning the old streets. We've made our choice. We complain but we don't mourn, we don't grieve. There are things here, people who show the highest human qualities, outside all notice, because who comes here to see? And I'm too rooted to leave. Speaking only for myself, I'm too rooted, too narrow. My mind is open to absolutely anything but my life is not. I don't want to adjust. I'm an old Roman stoic. But then I was always too old, too narrow. Klara used to attack me on this subject. Not attack me. Chide me, urge me to see things differently."

"Do you talk to her at all?"

"No. Go to Arthur Avenue, Matty. Look at the shops and the people shopping and the people weighing the fish and cutting the meat. This will restore your spirits. I took your mother into the pork store the other day to show her the ceiling. Hundreds of hanging salamis, such bounty and fullness, the place teeming with smells and textures, the ceiling covered completely. I said, Rosemary, look. A gothic cathedral of pork."

They shook hands at the door

" You used to wear glasses, Albert."

"I didn't absolutely need them. I needed them a little. They were part of my schoolteacher's paraphernalia. My accoutrements. Take the elevator."

"It's not working."

"It's not working. Then I guess you'll have to walk. But don't tarry," Bronzini said, eyes bright. "There are dangers in the woods."

Matt went shopping for dinner and then headed back to his mother's building, walking directly toward the western end of the zoo. Out over the trees he saw the residue of a jet contrail, the vapor losing its shape, beginning to spread and rib out, and he thought of the desert of course, the weapons range and flypaths and the way the condensation in the sky was the only sign of human endeavor as far as he could see, a city boy out camping, taking his soul struggle to the back-country, and the mach-2 booms came skyclapping down and the vapor formed an ice trail in the heavens.

They were showing the tape again. The TV set was on in the empty room and they had the tape going, they had the victim at the wheel, the random man in the medium Dodge, alive again in sunlight-they were running it one more time.

Matt came in, surprised to find the TV on, and he sat on the footstool near the screen. When it was running he could not turn away from it. When it wasn't running he never thought about it. Then he'd get on line at the supermarket back home and there it was again on the monitors they'd installed to keep shoppers occupied at the checkout-nine monitors, ten monitors, all showing the tape.

But this time something was different. There was a voice-over, barely audible, and he looked around for the remote control device. He hit the button a couple of times and the voice came up and it had something in it that matched the tape. The voice was naked the way the tape was naked. A man's voice, flat and stripped, saying something about the weather.

A set of words appeared, superimposed across the bottom of the tape.

LIVE CALL-IN VOICE OF TEXAS HIGHWAY KILLER.

The voice was asking about the weather in Atlanta. They cut from the videotape to a live shot of a face above a desk, a woman with red hair and amazing green eyes. The anchorwoman. The anchorwoman was telling the caller that the weather desk said rain.

Then she said, 'And clearly this is not a true voice we are hearing over the phone lines. This is a manipulated voice, an altered voice."

And the voice said, "Well, it is a device that disguises the sound. It is a device that's a little more than three inches by two inches and you fit it to the talk part of the telephone and it makes the sound hard to identify as an individual."

Then she said, "Just to recap. We are taking a call from an individual who identifies himself as the Texas Highway Killer. He has given us information known only to the real killer and to the authorities and we have checked this information with the authorities in order to verify the caller's credentials."

Then she said something to the caller about his reason for calling.

Matt looked at her, half mesmerized. Those eyes were an amazement, like offshore green you see from an airplane.

The voice said, "Why I'm calling is to set the record straight. People write things and say things on air that I don't know from day one where they're coming from. I feel like my situation has been twisted in with the profiles of a hundred other individuals in the crime computer. I keep hearing about low self-esteem. They keep harping about this. Use your own judgment, Sue Ann. How does an individual with this kind of proven accuracy where he hits targets in moving vehicles where he's driving with one hand and firing a handweapon with the other and he's not supposed to be aware of his personal skills?"

The anchorwoman looked into the camera. She had no choice of course. The camera was on her, not on the caller. She was a live body and he was just a voice, or not a voice. The odd sound, the devoicing, with contour and modulation strained out. Electronically toned but not without a human quality, Matt thought, a trace of jerkwater swerve. The struggle to speak, the bare insides of the simplest utterance.

The anchorwoman listened.

"I keep hearing about history of head trauma whereby an individual, you know, can't control their behavior."

They cut to the tape again. It showed the man at the wheel of the medium Dodge.