Don DeLillo - Underworld

Sims spoke to both of us but mainly to Jesse Detwiler because this was the visionary in our midst, the waste theorist whose provocations had spooked the industry. And Sims was eloquent, he loved his subject and gestured sweepingly, hand-shaping the layers of plastic and earth, the shredding of tires, the mixing of chemicals with kiln dust. I hadn't seen these things yet, myself, but it was easy to perceive what they meant to Sims, a labor of earth, utterly satisfying in its mingled tempers of technology and old hard useful work, dust in the mouth and a wall of drenching smells.

Detwiler stood at the rim of the crater, looking in.

"What about the hot stuff?"

"Well drum it and segregate it. But we won't forget it. It'll be logged on three-D computer records. We can find it if we have to."

"What's your approach to bomb waste?"

"Bomb waste. That's why we hired Nick."

I saw the gleam in Simeon's eye and I said deadpan, "I have a background in public relations."

Detwiler tilted his chin, marking the small measure of amusement he might attach to this remark. He had the canny self-assurance of an industry maverick, the outsider who tries to roil the works, japing every complacent rule of belief. And he looked remade, retooled, shaved head and bushy mustache, a guy in firm control, with a workout coach and a nice line of credit, in a black turtleneck jersey and designer jeans. It occurred to me that except for the plucked hair he could have been a swinger.

"I'll tell you what I see here, Sims. The scenery of the future. Eventually the only scenery left. The more toxic the waste, the greater the effort and expense a tourist will be willing to tolerate in order to visit the site. Only I don't think you ought to be isolating these sites. Isolate the most toxic waste, okay. This makes it grander, more ominous and magical. But basic household waste ought to be placed in the cities that produce it. Bring garbage into the open. Let people see it and respect it. Don't hide your waste facilities. Make an architecture of waste. Design gorgeous buildings to recycle waste and invite people to collect their own garbage and bring it with them to the press rams and conveyors. Get to know your garbage. And the hot stuff, the chemical waste, the nuclear waste, this becomes a remote landscape of nostalgia. Bus tours and postcards, I guarantee it."

Sims wasn't sure he liked this.

"What kind of nostalgia?"

"Don't underestimate our capacity for complex longings. Nostalgia for the banned materials of civilization, for the brute force of old industries and old conflicts."

Detwiler had been a fringe figure in the sixties, a garbage guerrilla who stole and analyzed the household trash of a number of famous people. He issued mock-comintern manifestos about the contents, with personal asides, and the underground press was quick to print this stuff. His activities had a crisp climax when he was arrested for snatching the garbage of J. Edgar Hoover from the rear of the Director's house in northwest Washington and this is what people remembered, what I remembered when I first reheard the name Jesse Detwiler. He'd earned a brief feverish fame in the chronicles of the time, part of the strolling band of tambourine girls and bomb makers, levitators and acid droppers and lost children.

A bird flew across the width of the crater, a finch or wren, moving with the nervous fleetness, the urgency of sundown.

Detwiler said that cities rose on garbage, inch by inch, gaining elevation through the decades as buried debris increased. Garbage always got layered over or pushed to the edges, in a room or in a landscape. But it had its own momentum. It pushed back. It pushed into every space available, dictating construction patterns and altering systems of ritual. And it produced rats and paranoia. People were compelled to develop an organized response. This meant they had to come up with a resourceful means of disposal and build a social structure to carry it out-workers, managers, haulers, scavengers. Civilization is built, history is driven-

He talked in his talk-show way, focused, practiced, generically intimate. He was a waste hustler, looking for book deals and documentary films, and I don't think he cared whether we were two people listening or half a million.

"See, we have everything backwards," he said.

Civilization did not rise and flourish as men hammered out hunting scenes on bronze gates and whispered philosophy under the stars, with garbage as a noisome offshoot, swept away and forgotten. No, garbage rose first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense. We had to find ways to discard our waste, to use what we couldn't discard, to reprocess what we couldn't use. Garbage pushed back. It mounted and spread. And it forced us to develop the logic and rigor that would lead to systematic investigations of reality, to science, art, music, mathematics.

The sun went down.

"Do you really believe that?" I said.

"Bet your ass I believe it. I teach it at UCLA. I take my students into garbage dumps and make them understand the civilization they live in. Consume or die. That's the mandate of the culture. And it all ends up in the dump. We make stupendous amounts of garbage, then we react to it, not only technologically but in our hearts and minds. We let it shape us. We let it control our thinking. Garbage comes first, then we build a system to deal with it."

The rim clouds took on a chromium edge and the high sky was still an easy noonish blue. But the pit went dark in a hurry, the vast plastic liner wind-lapped and making the eeriest sort of music, just outside the wave-fold of nature, and the surface was indigo now, still faintly sky-streaked, washed by gradations of shade and motion. We stood a moment watching and then went back to the car. Detwiler sat in the middle of the rear seat, needling us about dumping our garbage on sacred Indian land. And about Whiz Go's vanguard status. He thought the firm had the hard-core appetites of any traditional company

We drove an empty road.

" You tracking the rumors, Sims? This ship you've got."

"It's not my area."

"Cruising the oceans of the world trying to dump some hellish substance."

"I'm looking the other way," Sims said.

"Look this way. I hear it's headed back to the U.S."

"ibu know more than we do." Sims hated saying this. "What do we know, Nick?"

"We're not sixties people. We're forties and fifties people."

"We're limited," Sims said.

"We don't know much of anything."

"We listened to the radio," Sims said. "We know the Lone Ranger and Ton to."

"From out of the past," I said.

"The thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver."

" A fiery horse with the speed of light."

"This is what we know, Jesse."

"A cloud of dust."

"And a hearty hi-yo Silver."

Deep-pitching our voices to the baritone drama of the old radio show.

"Guys think you're funny," Detwiler said. "Bet you don't know the name of Tonto's horse. Come on, Sims. You know the white man's horse. Why don't you know the Indian's horse?"

I didn't think I liked Detwiler but I liked to listen to him. Sims did not. Sims wanted to get him in another headlock, not so fraternal this time. No, he didn't know the Indian's horse and maybe it bothered him a little.

Jesse kept talking.

"The more dangerous the waste, the more heroic it will become. Irradiated ground. The way the Indians venerate this terrain now, we'll come to see it as sacred in the next century. Plutonium National Park. The last haunt of the white gods. Tourists wearing respirator masks and protective suits."

I said, "What was the name of the Indian's horse?"

"Scout, okay? And I'm amazed and shocked. This is a deep cultural failure, you guys. Tonto's horse. You have to know this."