Don DeLillo - Underworld

He drove past the flagpole with the banging halyard. The wind was banging the halyard against the pole and it made him weak somehow, the repeated meaning of this noise.

He went in the house and saw his dad twisted whole in front of the TV set. Mother was in the kitchen running a beater inside a white bowl.

"Look what got dragged in by the scruff."

"I went out to Bud's."

"Do we have time for you to go out to Bud's?"

"We need to give daddy his Nitrospan."

"Well go ahead and do it."

"Well aren't we supposed to call about the new dosage?"

"I didn't call. Did you call?" she said.

The glass booth had a talk hole where you talked. But they sent him out to the checkout and forced him to talk across the aisle.

"I'll call," she said, "but he's not there."

"Irbu'll get the answering service."

"I'll get the answering service and they'll tell me he's not there."

"I meant to call," he said.

"I'll call," she said, "and you do the ointment."

After dinner he did the ointment on his father's chest. His father lay back on the bed with the stubbled look of an old man turning into a castaway, a reject of the islands, except for his eyes-they were moist and deep, pleading for time. Richard spread the ointment and buttoned his father's pajama tops and he thought about the time, any day now, when he would have to wipe his behind.

Pending notification of next of kin.

He came alive in them. He lived in their histories, in the photographs in the newspaper, he survived in the memories of the family, lived with the victims, lived on, merged, twinned, quadrupled, continued into double figures.

He stood at the kitchen door watching her stir some solution for his father's first intake of the next day.

"Well you have a good night now."

"You sleep well," she said.

He went to his room and sat in a chair to take off his shoes. All the meaning of a given life was located in the act of leaning over to untie your shoes and set them in a designated place for the start of the following day.

He thought about the other person.

When he was stationed in the booth he had the talk hole to talk through. But when they put him back at the checkout he had to talk in the open space where anyone could hear.

He kept the gun hidden in the car and he thought about this as he drifted near sleep and he thought about the other person who'd shot a driver on one of the highways where he had shot a driver, just one day later. The so-called copycat shooting. He did not like to think about this but found it was lately more and more, a taunting presence in his mind.

He was an early riser. He heard the rain on the roof and he dressed and ate a muffin standing up, a hand cupped under his chin to catch the crumbs. He had three and a half hours before it was time to report to work. He heard the rain dripping off the eaves and hitting the pie tin where he left food for a stray cat when he remembered.

I know who I am. Who is he?

He zipped up his jacket. Then he put the glove on his left hand, a woman's white glove, and he went out to the empty street, where his car sat waiting under the sheet-metal sky.

I’ve always been a country of one. There's a certain distance in my makeup, a measured separation like my old man's, I guess, that I've worked at times to reduce, or thought of working, or said the hell with it.

I like to tell my wife. I say to my wife. I tell her not to give up on me. I tell her there's an Italian word, or a Latin word, that explains everything. Then I tell her the word.

She says, What does this explain? And she answers, Nothing.

The word that explains nothing in this case is lontananza . Distance or remoteness, sure. But as I use the word, as I interpret it, hard-edged and fine-grained, it's the perfected distance of the gangster, the syndicate mobster-the made man. Once you're a made man, you don't need the constant living influence of sources outside yourself. You're all there, "fou're made, You're handmade. You're a sturdy Roman wall.

I was in Los Angeles thinking about these things. People say L.A. is only half there and maybe that's why I was thinking about my father. And also because my brother Matt-it was Matt's endless premise, his song of songs, that our old man Jimmy was living somewhere in southern California under the usual assumed name.

I told him Jimmy was dead under his own name. We were the ones with assumed names.

But the curious thing, the contradiction, is that I was standing in the middle of a fenced enclosure in a bungalow slum looking up at the spires of the great strange architectural cluster known as the Watts Towers, an idiosyncrasy out of someone's innocent anarchist visions, and the more I looked, the more I thought of Jimmy. The towers and birdbaths and fountains and decorated posts and bright oddments and household colors, the green of 7-Up bottles and blue of Milk of Magnesia, all the vivid tile embedded in cement, the whole complex of structures and gates and panels that were built, hand-built, by one man, alone, an immigrant from somewhere near Naples, probably illiterate, who left his wife and family, or maybe they left him, I wasn't sure, a man whose narrative is mostly blank spaces, date of birth uncertain, until he ends up spending thirty-three years building this thing out of steel rods and broken crockery and pebbles and seashells and soda bottles and wire mesh, all hand-mortared, three thousand sacks of sand and cement, and who spends these years with glass specks crusting his hands and arms and glass dust in his eyes as he hangs from a window-washer's belt high on the towers, in torn overalls and a dusty fedora, face burnt brown, with lights strung on the radial spokes so he could work at night, maybe ninety feet up, and Caruso on the gramophone below.

Jimmy was an edge-seeker, a palmist, inferring the future out of his own lined flesh, but he looked at his hand one day, according to my little brother, and it was blank. And did he become, could I imagine him as a runaway eccentric? In a way, yes, a man who doesn't wash or change his clothes, bummy looking, talks to himself on the street, and in another way, maybe, I could imagine him rising this high, soaring out of himself to produce a rambling art that has no category, with cement and chicken wire.

This was the contradiction. Jimmy's future closed down the night he went out for cigarettes. Why would I even try to imagine him in an alternative reality, coming out here, half here, escaping to the Ange-leno light, the Mediterranean weather?

I walked among the openwork towers, three tall, four smaller ones, and saw the delftware he'd plastered under a canopy and the molten glass and mother-of-pearl he'd pressed into adobe surfaces. Whatever the cast-off nature of the materials, the seeming offhandedness, and whatever the dominance of pure intuition, the man was surely a master builder. There was a structural unity to the place, a sense of repeated themes and deft engineering. And his initials here and there, SR, Sabato Rodia, if this was in fact his correct name-SR carved in archways like the gang graffiti in the streets outside.

I tried to understand the force of Jimmy's presence here. I saw him shabby and muttering but also unconstrained, with nothing and no one to answer to, in a shoe-box room somewhere, slicing a pear with a penknife. Jimmy alive. And then I thought of a thing that happened when I was about eight years old and it was a memory that clarified the connections. I saw my father standing across the street watching two young men, greenhorns, trying to lay brick for a couple of gateposts in front of someone's modest house. First he watched, then he advised, gesturing, speaking a studied broken English that the young men might grasp, and then he moved decisively in, handing his jacket to someone and redirecting the length of string and taking the trowel and setting the bricks in courses and leveling the grout, working quickly, and I didn't know he could do this kind of work and I don't think my mother knew it either. I went across the street and felt a shy kind of pride, surrounded by middle-aged men and older, the fresh-air inspectors, they were called, and you've never seen happier people, watching a man in a white shirt and tie do a skillful brickwork bond.