Don DeLillo - Underworld

"Coming home from work."

"The stress builds up real personal."

"Driving that drive," Richard said.

"And she has to go. And then she remembers. There's no working toilet in the house. And she looks at me outright murderous."

They said unbelievable things, obese women in the express line, with him having two sick parents at home, or one sick and one bad-tempered, like that's sixteen cents off on the tomato paste or that's not a red pear that's a an-jew They forced him to ask across the aisle. Can't you see it's not red? He charged me for red, this here's a an-jew. He had to speak across the aisle to the other checkout, where any person on either line could hear what he said.

"For myself I don't mind," Bud said. "Because it makes a certain amount of sense to take your business outside. When you think about what's involved."

They talk about head trauma. They talk about is he adopted or was he abused? The problem is all in the spacing. If you fire out the window on the driver's side, which you have to do if you don't want to shoot across the width of your own car and the space between your car and the other car, you still face the problem of having to fire across the space between cars and the width of the other car because the other driver's side is the far side in relation to your position at the wheel. You are not going to shoot a passenger. If you shoot a passenger, then the driver is liable to take evasive action and note your license number and make of car and color of hair and so on. So you are going to shoot lone drivers and you are going to fire out the window on your side using the left hand to hold the weapon. But the fact is, as he eventually figured out, that if you shoot with the right hand, the natural hand, your projectile travels the same distance across the same spaces, pretty much, as the self-taught method of the left hand. He figured this out after victim five or six, he forgets which, but decided to stick with the left hand as the shooting hand even though it made more sense to steer with the left hand and shoot with the right. Because the right hand was the born hand.

"I just noticed what it was I couldn't figure out," Bud said.

They heard the dog barking and Richard looked through the dusty sheeting and saw the animal thrust up on hind legs at the end of its chain, dog balls taut, and he hoped it might be Aetna come home early. Aetna made a pie for them once that had a latticed crust. This was something he remembered. Seeing it wasn't her coming home but likely some critter in the woods that roused the dog, he felt a sadness out of all proportion. But then everything was out of all proportion. The wind beat at the sheeting, making it shiver and pop. Crack cocaine is supposedly the cravingest form of substance abuse, according to studies made over time.

" You're wearing a tie," Bud said.

Richard paused, wary about how to take this, peering inwardly ahead for a setup, a possible remark.

"Well that's from work," he said. "I went home from work and didn't change."

"But you wear ties? To check out groceries?"

"It's a company regulation, statewide, pretty much."

Be calm, he thought.

"And there's the thing Aetna said, which she's right for a change. That you look like a guy that wears glasses. Except you don't. Except when she said it, we weren't sure. We said, Does he or doesn't he?"

"Never did," Richard said.

When he first walked in the house and Bud barely noticed him, it was like the normalcy of dying. It was the empty hollow thing of not being here. A forty-mile drive into being transparent, awful but not unaccustomed. But now this scrutiny as to what he wears and what he looks like. A panic set in. He tried to think of what to say. There might be something he could say about the dog. He searched for a glimpse of the dog through the sheeting. How nothing gets dirtier than plastic sheeting, retaining, absorbing the dirt.

! "Well maybe you should. Glasses give appearance to a person. Get yourself some thick dark frames that match your tie."

He didn't know why Bud would want to talk to him this way. Bud sat cross-legged over the narrow rent in the floor. He held the hammer at rest on his shoulder and looked directly into Richard's face. Richard tried to smile, make the whole thing humorous. He felt the stupidity of the look on his face, as if a turn of the mouth can alter the outside world.

"I can think about it."

"You do that."

"I should probably be getting back."

"She'll be sorry she missed you."

"Tell her I said."

"I'll be sure and do that."

The only person he ever talked to from the heart was Sue Ann. She made him feel real, talking on the phone. She gave him the feeling he was taking shape as himself, coming into the shape he'd always been intended to take, the thing of who he really was. It was like filling out-did you ever feel things pouring out from the center of who you are and taking the shape of the intended person? Well that's what Sue Ann did and you can disbelieve it or disrespect it but he was never really who he was until he talked to her.

He heard Bud ripping up wood as he walked out the door to his car.

With mental killers roaming the earth, the checkout boys wear neckties.

That's what he thought Bud might say.

He made the call to Sue Ann from a house he broke and entered. Switched on the TV and called the superstation in Atlanta and touched things with a hanky and placed the voice device on the phone that he'd ordered from the back pages of a mercenary magazine. This was not a publication Richard normally perused. He was not a surveillance man or gun lover. His gun was his father's old.38. It did not have massive knockdown power and it did not shoot through concrete blocks or make fist-size holes in silhouette targets. It just killed people.

He drove out of the wooded area and into the open sky, where the road dropped down to the floodplain and he felt the true force of the wind.

He made the call and turned on the TV , or vice versa, without the sound, his hand wound in a doubled hanky, and he never felt so easy talking to someone on the phone or face-to-face or man to woman as he felt that day talking to Sue Ann. He watched her over there and talked to her over here. He saw her lips move silent in one part of the room while her words fell soft and warm on the coils of his secret ear. He talked to her on the phone and made eye contact with the TV This was the waking of the knowledge that he was real. This alien-eyed woman with raving hair sending emanations that astonished his heart. He spoke more confidently as time went on. He was coming into himself, shy but also unashamed, a little vain, even, and honest and clever, evasive when he needed to be, standing there in a stranger's house near a lamp without a shade and she listened and asked questions, watching him from the screen ten feet away. She had so much radiance she could make him real.

This was an untraveled road. Travel thirty miles on this road and you may not see another car. You see power lines extended to the limits of vision, sinking toward the earth as a matter of perspective. When the wind dies there's a suspense that falls across the land and makes you think about the hush before the Judgment.

Then they cut away to the tape. He was suspicious of the tape because it had a vista different from his experience and he kept thinking the girl was going to move the camera and get him in the picture. He'd watched the tape a dozen times sitting with his pain-racked dad and every time he watched the tape he thought he was going to turn up in his own living room, detached from who he was, peering squint-eyed over the wheel of his compact car.

He called Sue Ann twice after that but the switchboard would not put him through because many others were trying to reach her now and the switchboard was leery and abrupt and unbelieving. He needed her to keep him whole. He probably would have told her his name. She would have broken him down completely over a number of calls over a number of days, watching him from the screen. He would have surrendered to her in a blaze of lights, Richard Henry Gilkey, hustled down a hallway with Stetsoned men all around him and Sue Ann Corcoran by his side.