Don DeLillo - Underworld

"You're talkative all of a sudden."

"He's always being photographed on the courthouse steps. He's the king of the steps."

"See, it's not a boatload of heroin. It's a boatload of shit."

We were momentarily alert and uncircling. It was one of those episodes of heightened clarity in a night of talking and drinking.

"At one point, am I right, the rumor suggested it wasn't an ordinary cargo ship."

" A sludge tanker. Turns out the rumor was correct."

"Carrying treated human waste."

"Port to port, it's nearly two years," he said.

We listened to the music, a cash register ringing at the end of the bar and a trace of a radio voice, radio or TV , coming from a back room somewhere.

"Tell her you're sorry. Go home, Sims."

"Maybe she ought to tell me."

"Tell her first."

"Maybe I'm not the guilty party. Ever think of that? The instigator."

"Doesn't matter, you jerk."

"That's the second time," he said, showing me two fingers.

We got out of there and went somewhere else, zebra walls and small tables, a fairly crowded room with a body hum, people in aviator glasses and silver shirts.

"He's wearing a white suit."

"Right."

"He's playing his alto."

"Right."

"And he's facing out of the picture, out of the frame."

"And he's wearing white and brown shoes. Two-tone shoes. But they're not saddle shoes."

"I didn't ask what kind of shoes. I don't care about his shoes."

"I'm just saying."

"I'm not interested in his shoes."

"They have a name I'm trying to think of."

"Do it somewhere else."

"In a club in New York," I said.

"You know this? And I don't? And it's my photograph? In my house we're talking about?"

The waiter brought drinks.

not who he resembled at all. He resembled the cabdriver I'd hailed earlier in the day, or the day before, the guy who'd said, "Light up a Lucky. It's light-up time."

When they put me in the squad car, or maybe they called it a radio car then, it was a green and white vehicle in any case and the cop who drove was smoking, which he wasn't supposed to do, a uniformed cop on duty was not supposed to smoke, and it surprised me to see this, I remember, an officer cupping a smoke between his knees, because I'd shot a man dead and thought I was being taken into a system where the rules were consistent and strict, and the other thing I remember is that no one put a hand on my head and folded me into the car because evidently this was not something they did at the time, this was something they developed later, preventing the felon from bumping his head when they took him in.

This happened back east of course. I've heard that term a lot since coming to this part of the country. But I never think of the term as a marker of geography. It's a reference to time, a statement about time, about all the densities of being and experience, it's time disguised, it's light-up time, shifting smoky time tricked out as some locus of stable arrangement. When people use that term they're talking about the way things used to be before they moved out here, the way the world used to be, not just New Jersey or South Philly, or before their parents moved, or grandparents, and about the way things still exist in some private relativity theory, some smoky shifting mind dimension, or before the other men and women came this way, the ones in Con-estoga wagons, a term we learned in grade school, a back-east term, stemming from the place where the wagons were made.

The room was very nearly empty and they were playing blues.

"Be nice to her," I said. "Go home, talk to her, make nice. You know this phrase? Make nice. They use this phrase when you were a Negro child in St. Louis, Sims?"

"They came to take the census."

"You're right. Let's leave," I said.

"Your father knew him. This means-what?"

"It means he knew him."

"In other words I have to show respect. I have to be reverent when I mention his name. This guy who runs a criminal enterprise in narcotics, extortion, what else. Murder, attempted murder, what else."

"Waste carting," I said.

"Could be. Why not? And I have to respect him. Because he was nice to your father."

"You're right. Let's leave," I said.

"I didn't say I wanted to leave. I don't want to leave."

"Tell her you're sorry and take a bath," I told him.

Half an hour later we were in the last club of the night, a blues room with an air of desperation, and the waiter resembled the old guy from two or three places ago, facially resembled-he wore a standard waiter's getup but looked a lot, I thought, like the other guy, in the football T-shirt, three or four places ago, or whenever it was, the T-shirt and cotton nose plug.

"This place reminds me. You know how they're always saying, Where were you when such and such? Where were you when Kennedy? Well, remember the time the lights went out. This place reminds me. The great Northeast blackout."

"Am I supposed to ask where you were?" he said.

"Thirty million people affected."

"I was in Germany. I never knew what caused it. What caused it?"

"Nobody remembers. Thirty million people. Not one of us remembers."

"But you remember where you were."

"Ask me where I was. I was in a bar that was a little like this place," I said. "Dead souls, sad jazz. Palm trees painted on the wall."

"This place doesn't have palm trees on the wall."

"Even better, even more similar. And the lights went out."

"They made a movie. I was in Germany," he said.

"Maybe they didn't have jazz at this other place. Maybe they used to have jazz but stopped. They had a jazz policy that became a policy of no jazz, which is much the same thing if you examine it closely."

He didn't resemble the old guy from three or four places ago. That's

"Wait wait wait wait wait wait."

"Think about it," he said.

He plucked his shirt, he did a thing big men do, he used both hands to pluck his shirt away from his chest and then he shook it, half dainty, letting his upper body breathe.

"Sims, you and I."

"Just think about it."

"We're not, remember, we don't have a word, you and I, for the science of dark forces. For what is behind an event. We don't accept the validity of this word or this science. Remember that conversation?"

"This is another conversation. And in this conversation I'm saying, Think about it."

"But you and I. We go against the tide, Sims. The tide is easy, it's irresponsible. We're responsible men. We've established this. We don't believe there are secret forces undermining our lives."

"Thirty million people affected by your local blackout. But only twenty-five million, they're saying, black people in the whole huge country."

"If that's the number, that's the number."

"And this is all you can say. We have an issue that's crying out for, really, scrutiny, to use one of your words."

"Go ahead, scrutinize it."

"Ibu're willing to accept this number."

"Twenty-five million. Yes, why not?"

" You don't think this number is way too low."

"Twenty-five million's not so low. It's twenty-five million," I said.

"You don't think this number is totally underreported."

"Why do you say scrutiny is my word?"

"Because you used it."

"This makes it my word?"

"I didn't use it. You used it."

"I believe the number. It's a believable number to me."

"You don't think somebody's afraid that if the real number is reported, white people gonna go weak in the knees and black people gonna get all pumped up with, Hey we oughta be gettin' more of this and more of that and more of the other."

"Yes, and what?"

"And my mother told me to hide."

"What for?"

"What for. That's the point. I didn't know what for. She thought, I don't know what she thought. I went and hid, you know. Two people at the door with clipboards. She said, Get inside, stay down."