Don DeLillo - Underworld

"Drive the car."

"And Esmeralda somewhere in those shrubs and junked cars. I bet anything she's living in a car," Gracie said.

"She'll be all right."

"She won't be all right."

"She can take care of herself."

"Sooner or later," Gracie said.

"She's quick. She's blessed. She'll be all right."

Gracie looked at her and drove and looked again, hearing the engine knock, and said nothing. Edgar was never known to take an optimistic position. Maybe this worried her a little.

And that night, under the first tier of scratchy sleep, Edgar saw the subway riders once again, adult males, females of childbearing age, all rescued from the smoky tunnels, groping along catwalks and led up companion ladders to the street-fathers and mothers, the lost parents found and gathered, shirt-plucked and bodied up, guided to the surface by small faceless figures with day-glowings.

Weeks later Edgar picked up a copy of Time on her way out of the refectory and there she saw it, a large color photo of a white-haired woman seated in a director's chair beneath the old weathered wing of an Air Force bomber. And she recognized the name, Klara Sax, because she recognized everything, because people whispered names to her, because she felt stirrings of information in the dusty corridors of the convent or the school's supply room that smelled of pencil wood and composition books, because she sensed some dark knowledge floating in the smoke of the priest's swinging censer, because things were defined for her by the creak of old floorboards and the odor of clothes, a man's damp camel coat, because she drew News and Rumors and Catastrophes into the spotless cotton pores of her habit and veil.

All the connections intact. The woman once married to a local man. The man a tutor in chess to one of Edgar's own former students. The boy with necktie ever askew, Matthew Aloysius Shay, fingernails bitten to the pink, one of her brainier boys, male parent missing.

She knew things, yes, chess, all those layers of Slavic stealth, those ensnarements and ploys. She knew that Bobby Fischer had all the fillings removed from his teeth when he played Boris Spassky in 1972-it made perfect sense to her-so the KGB could not control him through broadcasts made into the amalgam units packed in his molars.

She put the magazine in her closet with the old fan mags she'd stopped reading decades ago when she lost her faith in movie stars.

The faith of suspicion and unreality. The faith that replaces God with radioactivity, the power of alpha particles and the all-knowing systems that shape them, the endless fitted links.

That night she leaned over the washbasin in her room and cleaned a steel wool pad with disinfectant. Then she used the pad to scour a scrub brush, cleaning every bristle. But she hadn't cleaned the original disinfectant in something stronger than disinfectant. She hadn't done this because the regression was infinite. And the regression was infinite because it is called infinite regression. You see how fear spreads beyond the pushy extrusions of matter and into the elevated spaces where words play upon themselves.

She cleaned and she prayed.

She said brief prayers while she worked, simple pious pleas called ejaculations that carried indulgences numbered in the days rather than years.

She prayed and she thought.

She went to bed and lay awake and thought of Esmeralda. They'd spotted her a number of times but hadn't been able to catch her. Not Gracie or the monks or the agile writers in Ismael's crew. And Edgar's sense of her safety was beginning to grow less assured.

She welcomed every breath of knowledge that came her way, all the better for its element of disquiet, but this time the foreboding shook her strongly. She sensed something out there in the Wall, a muddled shuffling danger that waited for the girl on her lithe passage through car bodies and discarded human limbs and acres of uncollected garbage.

Mother of Mercy pray for us. Three hundred days.

Nick was trying to find the magazine he'd been saving to take to Houston. He saved certain kinds of reading for business trips, things he never got around to looking at otherwise, magazines that stacked and nagged and finally went to the sidewalk on the designated day. There was a noise that started, a world hum-you began to hear it when you left your carpeted house and rode out to the airport. He wanted something friendly to read in the single sustained drone that marks every mile in a business traveler's day.

The magazine was Time, missing about a month. He found it finally in the bathroom, stashed in a basket that Marian kept filled with mostly glossy fashion books-every shadow brushed to an anatomical polish, contoured against crumble and waste. Just the thing to browse when your body is squatted and your pants are down. The copy of Time had an article on Klara Sax he wanted to read, not the first such piece he'd spotted through the years but maybe more interesting than most, some desert project she'd started, bristling with ambition.

His suitcase was on the bed, small enough for the overhead bin, and he zippered the magazine into an outer pocket and finished packing. Marian walked in wearing her catwoman shades. They came with the job. She worked for the city's arts commission now and wanted a sleeker look.

"Don't you need to hurry?"

"The car's not here. I trust the car," he said.

"The car is dependable."

"The car knows things we don't know."

"The car is never late."

"The car and the plane are in constant touch."

She always looked great when he was walking out the door. Why is that, he thought. Some soft-bodied mood, some tone that half insisted on being noticed but was also a shy secret, afraid of disturbing the air between them.

He moved her into the wall and put his hands on her thighs, kiss-biting her mouth and neck. She said something he didn't quite catch. He put his hands between her ass and the wall and moved her into him. Her skirt slid against her parted legs, fabric stretched out and up, the tensile whisper of friction he counted on to carry him through life. He stepped back slightly and looked at her.

"Why is that?" he said.

"What are we talking about?"

"And why is it that when I get back, the whole thing's gone and lost and forgotten?"

"What thing?"

He took off her sunglasses and handed them to her. When he walked out the door, seconds later, the company car was waiting.

A few hours later Marian stood in a small room in a two-story pale brick building near Jack in the Box and Brake-O. Cars were parked under a lopsided shed out back and there was a man's abandoned shoe in one of the empty slots. She stood naked in the room by the edge of the window. Then she walked to the long mirror and edged her hip against the surface of the glass, feeling some small coiled chill of body and object. She looked all right. All the exercise, the diet, the diet, the exercise. All the butt repetition, the toilsome boredom she endured in the name of keeping fit. She was not the twisted perfect woman she used to be but she still kept fit. Fuck you, keep fit. She stood squared up to the glass. Nothing she could do about the needle nose but otherwise not bad. She never looked at herself so closely at home. It was easier to see herself out here, inside strange walls. She let her nipples touch the glass and when she backed away she saw they'd left a moist-ness, a pair of pressed kisses like winter breath.

When Brian arrived she was wearing a robe she'd found in the closet.

"I shouldn't be here," he said.

"Neither should I. This is the point, isn't it?"

He sat on the edge of the bed taking off his shoes, a little like the class crybaby undressing for gym.

"Whose place is this?"

"My assistant's."