Don DeLillo - Underworld

Ismael had his headquarters on the third floor and the nuns hustled up the stairs. Grace had a tendency to look back unnecessarily at the senior nun, who ached in her movable parts but kept pace well enough, her habit whispering through the stairwell.

"Needles on the landing," Gracie warned.

Watch the needles, sidestep the needles, such deft instruments of self-disregard. Gracie couldn't understand why an addict would not be sure to use a clean needle. This failure made her pop her cheeks in anger. But Edgar thought about the lure of critical risk, the little love bite of that dragonfly dagger. If you know you're worth nothing, only a gamble with death can gratify your vanity.

Gracie knocked on the door.

"Don't get too close to him," Edgar said.

"Who?"

"Ismael."

"Why?"

"He's not well."

"I saw him three days ago. I was here. You weren't, Sister. How do you know he's not well?"

"I can sense it."

"He's well. He's fine," Gracie said.

"I've sensed it for some time."

"What do you sense?"

"AIDS," Edgar said,

Gracie studied old Edgar. She looked at the latex gloves. She looked at the nun's face, emphatic of feature, eyes bird-bright. She looked and thought and said nothing.

One of the kids unlocked the door-latch bolts, dead bolts, steel shafts.

Ismael stood barefoot on dusty floorboards in a pair of old chinos rolled to his calves and a parrot-print shirt worn outside his pants, smoking a whopping cigar and resembling some carefree islander wading in happy surf.

"Sisters, what do you have for me?"

Edgar thought he was quite young despite the seasoned air, maybe midthirties-sparse beard, a sweet smile complicated by rotting teeth. Members of his crew sat around on scavenged sofas, improvised chairs, smoking and looking at comic books. Too young for one, too old for the other. She knew in her heart he had AIDS.

Gracie handed over a list of cars they'd spotted in the last two days. Details of time and place, type of vehicle, condition of same.

He said, "You do nice work. My other people do like this, we run the world by now."

Edgar kept a distance of course. She looked at the crew, seven boys, four girls. Graffiti, illiteracy, petty theft. They spoke an unfinished English, soft and muffled, insufficiently suffixed, and she wanted to drum some hard g's into the ends of their gerunds.

"I don't pay you today, okay? I got some things I'm doing that I need the capital."

"What things?" Gracie said.

Retroviruses in the bloodstream, acronyms in the air. Edgar knew what all the letters stood for. AZidoThymidine. Human Immunodeficiency Virus. Acquired Immune Deficiency Syndrome. Komitet Gosudarstvennoi Bezopasnosti. Yes, the KGB was part of the multiplying swarm, the cell-blast of reality that has to be distilled and initialed in order to be seen.

"I'm making plans I get some heat and electric in here. Plus pirate cable for the Knicks."

Here in the Wall many people believed the government was spreading the virus, our government. Edgar knew better. The KGB was behind this particular piece of disinformation. And the KGB was responsible for the disease itself, a product of germ warfare-making it, spreading it through networks of paid agents.

She'd stopped talking about these things to Gracie, who rolled her eyes so far up into her head she looked like science fiction.

Edgar looked out a window and saw someone moving among the poplars and ailanthus trees in the most overgrown part of the rubbled lots. A girl in a too-big jersey and striped pants grubbing in the underbrush, maybe for something to eat or wear. Edgar watched her, a lanky kid who had a sort of feral intelligence, a sureness of gesture and step-she looked sleepless but alert, she looked unwashed but completely clean somehow, earth-clean and hungry and quick. There was something about her that mesmerized the nun, a charmed quality, a sense of something favored and sustaining.

She gestured to Gracie. Just then the girl slipped through a maze of wrecked cars and by the time Gracie reached the window she was barely a flick of the eye, lost in the low ruins of an old firehouse.

"Who is this girl," Gracie said, "who's out there in the lots hiding from people?"

Ismael looked at his crew and one of them piped up, an undersized boy in spray-painted jeans, dark-skinned and shirtless.

"Esmeralda. Nobody knows where her mother's at."

Gracie said, "Can you find the girl and then tell Brother Mike?"

"This girl she be real quick."

A murmur of assent.

"She be a running fool this girl."

Heads bobbing above the comic books.

"Why did her mother go away?"

"She be a addict. They un, you know, predictable."

All street, these kids. No home or school. Edgar wanted to get them in a room with a blackboard and then buzz their heads with Spelling and Punctuation. She wanted to drill them in the lessons of the Baltimore Catechism. True or false, yes or no, fill in the blanks.

Ismael said, "Maybe the mother returns. She feels the worm of remorse. But the truth of the matter there's kids that are better off without their mothers or fathers, Because their mothers or fathers are dangering their safety."

"Catch her and hold her," Gracie told the crew "She's too young to be on her own. Brother Mike says she's twelve."

"Twelve is not so young," Ismael said. "One of my best writers, he does wildstyle, age eleven or twelve. Juano. I send him down in a rope to do the complicated letters."

Edgar knew about Ismael's early career as a graffiti master, a legend of spray paint. He was the infamous Moonman 157, nearly twenty years ago, and he told the nuns how he'd marked subway cars all over the city, his signature running on every line, and Edgar believed this was where he'd started having sex with men, in his teens, in the tunnels. She heard it in the spaces in his voice.

"When do we get our money?" Gracie said.

Ismael stood there coughing and Edgar moved back against the far wall. She knew she ought to be more sympathetic to the man. But she was not sentimental about fatal diseases. Dying was just an extended version of Ash Wednesday. She intended to meet her own end with senses intact, grasp it, know it finally, open herself to the mystery that others mistake for something freakish and unspeakable.

People in the Wall liked to say, When hell fills up, the dead will walk the streets.

It was happening a little sooner than they thought.

"I'll have some money next time," Ismael said. "I make practically nothing on these cars. My margin it's very minimum. I'm looking I might expand out of the country. Don't be surprise my scrap ends up in North, you know, Korea."

Gracie joked about this. But it was not a thing Edgar could take lightly. She was a cold war nun who'd once lined the walls of her room with Reynolds Wrap as a safeguard against nuclear fallout. The furtive infiltration, deep and sleek. Not that she didn't think a war might be thrilling. She often conjured the flash even now, with the USSR crumbled alphabetically, the massive letters toppled like Cyrillic statuary

They went down to the van, the nuns and five kids, and they set out to distribute the food, starting with the hardest cases in the projects, just outside the Wall.

They rode the elevators and went down the long passageways. Unknown lives in every wallboard room. Sister Grace believed the proof of God's creativity eddied from the fact that you could not surmise the life, even remotely, of his humblest shut-in.

They spoke to two blind women who lived together and shared a seeing-eye dog.

They saw a man with epilepsy.

They saw children with oxygen tanks next to their beds.

They saw a woman in a wheelchair who wore a Fuck New York T-shirt. Gracie said she would trade the groceries they gave her for heroin, the dirtiest street scag available. The crew looked on, angry. Gracie set her jaw, she narrowed her pale eyes and handed over the food. They argued about this and it was Sister Grace against everybody. Even the wheelchair woman didn't think she should get the food.