Don DeLillo - Underworld

America, a fact he'd managed to miss-the things, the places, the bright buzz of products on the shelves, the sunblast of fortune's favor. Here they were in a strange bed in California, what twists to life, how uncertain go the turns, an English girl in his arms, pink and innocent even if she's not, and Marvin's polymerized hairpiece secure on his head.

She wanted Japanese but that wasn't enough. They had to go to a place where the guidebook said tatami seating.

Marvin thought if he lived all his life for a hundred years before meeting Eleanor, he would have done the same three or four things in the same order every day and as soon as he met Eleanor, at the age of a hundred and one, he would be sitting on the floor to eat seaweed.

They faced each other over the low table, in their stocking feet.

"What's the word for the thing that's not ultimate but next to ultimate?"

"Penultimate."

"Penultimate. See, that's what I've got in Chuckie Wainwright."

"Sit up straight," she told him.

"Greenland. I always had my suspicions about that place."

"What do you mean?"

"That's where he was stationed in the Air Force if he was actually there."

"Why wouldn't he have been there?"

"Do you personally know anybody who's ever been there?"

"No, I don't," Eleanor said.

"Let me advise you. Neither do I. And neither does anyone I've talked to lately."

"I think there's a main city."

" You think there's a main city. Do you know the name of this place?"

"No, I don't."

"Did you ever look at Greenland on a map?"

"I guess I have, once or twice perhaps."

"Did you ever notice that it's never the same size on any two maps?

The size of Greenland changes map to map. It also changes year to year."

"Actually it does. I used to think you were mad. But I understand now. Yes, you're mad but there's a certain reasoning behind it. There's a little childlike spot of logic. A little bedtime thing. You need to finish the story. Dear Marvin. Without the final link to the baseball there's no way to be sure how the story ends. What good's a story without an ending? Although I suppose in this case it's not the ending we need but the beginning."

He liked her in a towel. They'd first met near the end of the war, said hello-goodbye but corresponded, she was an air-raid warden with a torch, they called it, and he was a quartermaster handing out condoms for D-day that the troops fixed to the muzzles of their rifles to keep out sand and water and he still liked her in a towel or slip, married twenty-seven years to this point.

He sat in his shorts at the edge of the bed, taking off his ribbed socks. They would do like tourists in commercials, have marital sex in a nice hotel. Their room had a view of a view. From their window they could look across the courtyard to office towers and reflected clouds in the picture window of the hotel restaurant.

"Marvin, do you plan to wear it?"

She was talking about his toupee.

"I need it for how I see myself."

He also needed it because it took the edge off his large ears and sorrowful Marvin nose. He wanted to look nice for her even if she didn't think it mattered. Tonight he'd wear his best shirt, with cuffs so French he wanted to hum the what-do-you-call.

"You're my man, with or without."

A thing she said with a half-fake quiver of her mouth that made him feel he owned the earth.

She slipped off the towel and placed a knee on the end of the bed. They were honeymooners still, shy but eager, and Marvin in his Brooklyn-bornness, his religion of skeptical response-he was only now beginning to see how hard it was to persist in the sentimental myth, after all these years, of their dissimilarity, a thing he'd fabricated out of her accent and complexion. He was glimpsing his Eleanor truth by truth, that she matched him in appetite, that her ambitions for the business were bigger than his own, that her main ambition was

The waitress brought saki for her, beer for him. She called the drinks beverages and Marvin thought he was on an airliner. All the traveling he'd done, baseball-related, the unsheveled lives, the words and sentences.

Wait-listed passenger Lundy please present yourself at the podium.

1. The mother of twins in what's that town.

2. The man who lived in a community of chemically sensitive peo ple, they wore white cotton shifts and hung their mail on clotheslines.

3. The woman named Bliss, which he was younger then, Marvin was, and maybe could have, with eyes as nice as hers, done a little something, in Indianola, Miss.

4. The shock of lives unlike your own. Happy, healthy, lonely, lost. The one-eighth Indian. Lives that are blunt and unforeseen even when they're ordinary.

5. Who knew a Susan somebody who spoke about a baseball with a famous past. Marvin forgets the tribe.

6. Stomach acting up again.

7. The chemically sensitive man, his whole body vibrated when somebody snapped a photo a mile and a half away.

8. And Chuckie Wainwright gone to sea, leaving a woman and child behind, a hippie Christian cluster, barefoot with beads, and Marvin tracking him ship by ship.

9. And the bone cancer kid in Utah, which his mother blamed the government.

10. Marvin often lost, setting out one day for Melbourne, Florida and nearly ending up Down Under.

11. And the woman with the chipped tooth-a whole long story, you shouldn't ask.

12. And the chemicals in the core of the ball that made the man run in place after breakfast every day.

"Tell me what we're going to do after dinner." "Me you're asking?"

"You've been to this city before. I haven't," she said. "What's left to do by the time I pick myself off the floor? I've got a knot in my leg a cannibal would spit it out." "Come on. Show me a good time."

"It's large," she said.

"It's very large. It's enormous. But sometimes it's a little less enormous, depending on which map you're looking at."

"I believe it's the largest island in the world."

"The largest island in the world," Marvin said. "But you don't know anyone who's ever been there. And the size keeps changing. What's more, listen to this, the location also changes. Because if you look closely at one map and then another, Greenland seems to move. It's in a slightly different part of the ocean. Which is the whole juxt of my argument."

"What's your argument?"

"You asked so I'll tell you. That the biggest secrets are staring us right in the face and we don't see a thing."

"What's the secret about Greenland?"

"First, does it exist? Second, why does it keep changing its size and its location? Third, why can't we find anyone who's personally been there? Fourth, didn't a B-52 crash about ten years ago that the facts were so hush-hush we still don't know for sure if there were nuclear weapons aboard?"

He pronounced it nucular.

"You think Greenland has a secret function and a secret meaning. But then you think everything has a secret function and a secret meaning," she said.

"The bigger the object the easier it is to hide it. How do you get to Greenland? What boat do you take? Where do you find an airport that has a flight to this main city that nobody knows the name of and nobody has ever been to? And this is the main city. What about the outlying areas? The whole enormous island is one big outlying area. What color is it? Is it green? Iceland is green. Iceland 's on TV You can see the houses and the countryside. If Iceland is green, is Greenland white? I'm only asking because nobody else is asking. I have no personal stake in this place. But I watch the nature channel and I see tribes they wear mud on their body in New Guinea and I see those thingabeests, they're mating in some valley in Africa."

"Wildebeests," Eleanor said.

"But I never hear a peep from Greenland."