Don DeLillo - Underworld

There was a noise near the door. He didn't move for a moment. He lay there listening. The rain hit hard now, splashy, rattling the window. He heard the noise again and got up. He put on his glasses and looked through the peephole. He edged the door slowly open. He looked into the hallway, long and prison-lit, left and right, rows of closed doors, all blank and still, and he was a grown man in his mother's house, afraid of noises in the hall.

How deep is time? How far down into the life of matter do we have to go before we understand what time is?

The old science teacher, Bronzini, moved through the snow, slogging, dragging happily, head down, his cigar box tucked under his arm-the scissors, the combs, the electric clipper to do the nape of Eddie's neck.

We head out into space, we brave space, line up the launch window and blast off, we swing around the planet in a song. But time binds us to aging flesh. Not that he minded growing old. But as a point of argument, in theory only, he wondered what we'd learn by going deeper into structures beneath the standard model, down under the quantum, a million billion times smaller than the old Greek atom.

The snow came down, enormous star-tipped flakes, feathery wet on his lashes, stuck and gone, and he raised his head to see parked cars humped and stunned, nothing moving in the streets, snow on the back of his hand-touches flesh and disappears.

He climbed the stairs to Eddie's apartment and rang the bell, No ding or buzz, no sawtooth whine. He knocked on the metal sheath that covered the door and heard Mercedes approach in her slappy shoes.

She opened up, calling back to Eddie, "You'll never guess who is it."

Bronzini handed her the cigar box, Garcia y Vega, fine cigars since 1882. He took off his checked cap and gave it to her. He got out of the old belted greatcoat he'd bought cheap at Freight Liquidation, where you go for factory discounts, for irregular suits and dresses, cardigans hijacked by mistake-they thought they were getting cigarettes. He gave her the coat. He wiggled his hands to show no gloves. Then he bent to unbuckle his galoshes, stepping out of them half dizzy from the bending.

"Eddie, look, he wears slippers under his boots. The man is unde-scribable."

He embraced the woman and the coat and then moved into the living room rubbing his hands like a man treading across a Persian rug toward a birch fire and a snifter of rare brandy. Eddie sat there smiling, the real Eddie Robles who lived inside the imposter, inside the haunted likeness, arthritic, emphysemic, with ulcerated veins in his legs, retired more or less from everything.

"I woke up this morning and I knew it," Bronzini said.

"You knew it."

"Time for Eddie's haircut."

"In a blizzard. You woke up but you didn't look out the window."

"It's a gentle snowfall. Old-fashioned. You should go walking."

"Walking," Eddie said. "You have any idea what you're saying? Sit down, you're making me nervous."

"I can't give you a haircut sitting down. Where are my tools of the trade?"

"I should give you . You're the one who needs his hair cut. You should carry a violin, Albert."

"You don't want to play chess with me anymore. There's no one left in the world I can defeat in chess, trounce-I can trounce the way I trounce you. So you have to submit to the barber's moves. It's a beautiful snowfall from out of the past. Incidentally, Mercedes. Where is she? Your doorbell's not working."

They sat drinking hot chocolate. What Albert wanted was a shot of hootch from an imported bottle. He imagined the warm wincing sting of a trickle of scotch. Durable, that was the beauty of the thing. It hit you so it lasted. The chairman scotched rumors of a takeover. A wedge you stick behind a wheel to keep a vehicle from rolling. That's a scotch. So is a line drawn on the ground, as in hopscotch, he thought.

"Doorbell. Only the doorbell?" Mercedes said.

"The elevator of course. But we know about the elevator."

" You know about the plaster?" she said. "I put newspapers in the cracks. Someday they find this place and they know exactly when the trouble started, from the newspapers."

"Let the man live," Eddie said. "Talk about something else."

"My own elevator, this is a problem," Bronzini said. "Periodic breakdowns."

"Four flights?"

"Five flights."

"Let the man live," Eddie said.

"Five flights with his heart?"

"Talk about something else."

Mercedes was heavy, disposed to gesture, swaying in the chair, hand-sweeping, but ably taking care of feeble Eddie, the imposter, the aching and stiff-jointed and gasping man. The old Eddie of the subways was a robust guy, selling tokens from a booth in that cinema dimness of bad air and sprocketing trains, immune to the hell rattle of the express, and she tended him now with expert love, with knowledge and command, and when she got mad at something it made Albert want to hide because he was a coward of blunt emotion, things met head-on and direct.

"They put up the bobwire to save us from drug dealers. But what about the water when it rains? Comes right in. I don't want to see winter end. I rather be cold. I rather jam newspapers in the cracks. Because when the snow melts."

"The man is happy. Let him live," Eddie said.

She got a kitchen chair for Eddie to sit on. She got the cigar box and put it on the table and opened it. She went away and came back with a bath towel, which she placed over her husband's upper body and then spread down around his knees. She fastened the two upper corners at the back of his neck, loosely, and then she looked across at Albert, who shared her satisfaction with all the collateral matters, the stir of preparations, crucial to the business of the haircut.

Albert took the implements out of the cigar box. He set them on the table a couple of inches apart. The short black rubberized comb, tapered for sideburns. The tortoiseshell comb with a handle and three missing teeth, called a rake comb. The beautiful pair of scissors, made in Italy, a family possession for generations, one of those things that turns up among the effects of the deceased, suddenly seen anew, an everyday treasure, filigreed shanks and a spur attached to one loop, a curved projection to support the middle finger. You put your index finger in the loop and rest the middle finger against the suitably shaped appendage. What else? The shaving brush, not needed. The nose scissors, let him do his own nose. The electric clipper, heavy and black, Elk Grove, Illinois, blade still a little wispy with Eddie's shorn hair of six weeks ago. What else? Tube of lubricating oil for clipper. Five-and-dime whiskbroom, soft-bristled.

He had no idea how to cut hair. He'd done Eddie's hair a number of times but hadn't worked out a method. He paused often to study the effect, snipping, stepping back. Mercedes did not stay around to watch. Working slowly, snipping. The idea was to get the hair off the guy's head and onto the floor. Mercedes did not seem to think this was a thing she had to see.

"They have a new thing, maybe you heard," Eddie said. "Called space burials."

"I like it already."

"They send your ashes into space."

"Sign me up," Bronzini said.

"They have orbits you can select. There's an orbit around the equator. This is one orbit. The earth turns and you turn. Not you, your ashes."

"Is there a waiting list?"

"There's a waiting list. I saw it on the news. Plus the premium shot. This is way out there."

"Deep space."

"Way out. You and the stars."

"But you don't go up alone."

" You go up with about seven hundred other ashes in the same shot. Humans and their pets, "ibu call the company, they'll put you on the list."

"What if you're already dead?"