Don DeLillo - Underworld

ing about old jazz 45s. These were phone taps you could buy, or bugs in the wall, recordings of organized crime figures discussing their girlfriends or their lawyers, he's a hard-on with a briefcase-you're talking about men on the eleven o'clock news in cashmere overcoats with enough material you could clothe a Little League team from Taiwan. And phone taps of ordinary anonymous men and women, even more repellent-addictive, your next-door neighbor maybe, and Marvin understood how such a purchase could lead to stupefied hours of listening, could take over a person's life, all the more so for the utter sucked-dry boredom of the recordings and how they provided the lure of every addiction, which is losing yourself to time.

The Float had an edge, it had a midnight finish.

They stepped briefly into shops that sold autopsy photos, that sold movie stars' garbage, the actual stuff deep-frozen in a warehouse- you looked in a catalog and placed an order.

Eleanor was delighted by the ambiance, a word she pronounced a little French. Bare-board floors and stained walls. She took Marvin's arm and they went down the street, spotting a sign in a first-floor window, Foot Fetish Cruise of Spanish Ports.

Floating zones of desire. It was the what, the dismantling of desire into a thousand subspecialties, into spin-offs and narrowings, edgewise whispers of self. There was a dive with a back room where they showed sex movies involving people with missing limbs. They had gay nights and straight nights. If you were open to suggestion you could float through the zone, finding out who you were by your attachments, slice by slice, tasting the deli specials of the street. You were defined by your fixation.

A boy walked by in clothes so raggedy he could have been a ticker-tape parade.

There was a place called the Conspiracy Theory Cafe. Shelves filled with books, film reels, sound tapes, official government reports in blue binders. Eleanor wanted to have a coffee and browse but Marvin waved the place off-a series of sterile exercises. He believed the well-springs were deeper and less detectable, deeper and shallower both, look at billboards and matchbooks, trademarks on products, birthmarks on bodies, look at the behavior of your pets.

"She wants to go gallivanting."

"Let's make this our city, Marv."

Strange how he was compiling a record of the object's recent forward motion while simultaneously tracking it backwards to the distant past. Sometimes he thought he was seeing the ball sort of fly by. He wanted to find Chuckie and establish the last link, the first link, the connection to the Polo Grounds itself, but if he couldn't find the guy he would probably buy the ball anyway, the reputed ball, once he located it, and keep looking for Chuckie till he died.

"I want you to show me the seamy underside," Eleanor said.

The ball brought no luck, good or bad. It was an object passing through. But it inspired people to tell him things, to entrust family secrets and unbreathable personal tales, emit heartful sobs onto his shoulder. Because they knew he was their what, their medium of release. Their stories would be exalted, absorbed by something larger, the long arching journey of the baseball itself and his own cockeyed march through the decades.

All right. Marvin was not a night person but he knew one place he might take her, one street really, that's all it was, called the Float, out near the old hippie district, shops that came and went overnight, buildings without house numbers, an area catering to very select desires that changed with the phases of the moon.

He lifted himself off the floor mat in stages, joint by joint, and they called a cab and went outside.

Twenty minutes later they walked along the street, umbrellas up, it was raining lightly, a few panhandlers about, a woman in a mohawk and white makeup punching a doomsday leaflet into the belt buckle of Marvin's raincoat. PEACE IS COMING-BE PREPARED. Most of the shops were open despite the hour or because of the hour and they were almost all below street level so you peered over a guardrail to see what they were selling, Role-Reversal Rubber Goods, or Endangered Fashions-jackets made from the skin of disappearing species.

They went into a hole-in-the-wall place, a lot of cracked plaster and roachy baseboards and a stock of rare recordings. But you're not talk-for good or ill, he didn't know where in the world-a shaking in the earth that could alter everything.

"All right, Marv. I'm ready to go to bed now."

One more place. The one place on the street he'd been to before, run by an acquaintance, you could call him a colleague, Tommy Chan, maybe the country's first baseball memorabilist if that's an actual word.

They went down a grimy set of steps into a dark cubby stacked with scorecards and old songbooks and a thousand other baseball oddities, whole slews of records and documents in tottering columns.

Eleanor sighed in her chest like a shot partridge.

And there was Tommy in his high chair, the chair and cash register platformed, islanded higher than the surging mass of old paper that was going chemically brown, and it made Marvin think of all the game footage he'd seen during his search, fans in the Polo Grounds throwing scorecards and newspapers onto the field as the day waned and the Dodgers approached their doom. All that twilight litter. Maybe some of it was sitting here today, preserved by the stadium sweepers and eventually entering the underground of memory and collection, some kid's airplaned scorecard, a few leaves of toilet tissue unfurled in jubilation from the upper deck, maybe autographed delicately by a player, the scatter of a ball game come to rest all these years later, a continent away.

"This is my wife."

"We don't see many women," Tommy said like a Buddhist monk in a backcountry compound, polite and wise.

"It's a wonder you see anybody. Because frankly who would come here?" Marvin said. "You have to make the place halfway presentable."

"Presentable." Nice word. "Marvin, think. What am I selling here? I'm not selling housewares in a regional mall."

He was a smart guy and would-be likable but ageless in the face, which disconcerted Marvin because you like to know how old a man you're talking to.

"What did you sell today?"

"You're the first people in the shop."

"Don't look so smug."

Something's staring you straight in the face.

The largest shop was at street level, a dozen men standing around, furtive, in raincoats, looking at old copies of National Geographic. These were used magazines, used and handled, lived-with, and the address labels were attached, machine-stamped and ink-smudged and skin-greasy, and printed on the labels were the names and addresses of real people out there in magazine America, and the men in raincoats stood by tables and bins and read the labels and leafed through the magazines, heads never lifting.

A man bought a magazine and left quickly, slipping it under his coat.

Marvin did not think these men were interested in photos of wolf packs on the tundra at sunset. It was something else they sought, a forgotten human murmur, maybe, a sense of families in little heartland houses with a spaniel flop-eared on the rug, a sense of snug innocence and the undiscovered world outside, the vast geographic. A pornography of nostalgia, maybe, or was it something else completely?

And was there a back room, because isn't there always a back room, another splintering of desire, a little more refined and personalized, and in the back room weren't the magazines cased in acetate folders, maybe these were rare issues or rare labels, or maybe the folders themselves were the fetish items here, dust-veneered, handled, nearly opaque some of them, a dullish sort of plastic with a faint odor and prophylactic feel, like condoms for reading matter, and maybe there's another room where you need to whisper a password and this is the room with folders only, empty folders, handled a thousand times, and Eleanor was completely creeped out by this place, it was more than she'd bargained for, raincoated men with National Geographies, furtively thumbing the labels.