Don DeLillo - Underworld

The place is deadly still. And Manx has a stale acid feeling, that fidgety indigestion where you drink too much on an empty stomach, even though he knows he ate a meal he recalls the dish Ivie left him, he tastes the meat loaf and greens, but there's a wrenching pull like he's all sucked dry.

He's down on Eighth Avenue now wandering the perimeter of the ballpark, looking for a sign that someone's still alive. The place is stone cold quiet.

What's a pyramid doing on a U.S. bill? That's a question you do well to ask.

The only thing he sees is a dog of the slinking type, been kicked so often it decides it's being petted. He can't understand how Phil could be wrong about this. Phil's a straight-up guy. If Phil says the fans will be lining up all night to buy tickets and then you go there and look around and the place is deadly still, you have to wonder who's messing with your head.

It is frankly a fly-by-night moving and storage. They call him and he works, they don't and he don't.

Now he sees a car stopped for a light and he walks on over, sliding his feet the way he does when things get culminated on him. A man sits at the wheel. He sees Manx coming and rolls up the window, a white man with a look on his face like I ain't ready to die. Manx makes a motion with his hands. He shakes his hands in the air, no no no no- I only want to ask a question. And the man hits the pedal and he's gone, never mind the light's still red, burning rubber real impressive.

The sound dies into the night stillness and a deep quiet comes on again. The old ballpark stands over the avenue and makes its own enormous silence, different from the street and the river. Kids still swim in the Harlem River in the summer, way uptown where it turns out of the Hudson, and his own boys used to leap off a dock, arms all flung-he sees them momentarily in midair.

It grieves the bejesus out of him.

He feels a little empty. He feels low and put off and frankly humanly disgusted and he wants to lie down and sleep. He feels a little messed with. He wants to somehow, from someone, make some money.

One chance in ten million the ball club even lets him in the door. He has to find the paying fans. And he only walked toward the car to ask where they are. And the face at the wheel, like don't cut me up in little pieces please.

He looks across 155th Street, south to the tenements, and he sees a woman standing under the Power of Prayer sign, soliciting her trade.

He hears a sound across the river.

What's the point of all the secret codes on a U.S. dollar except to disconnect you from the people who know the facts?

He hears something. He's ready to head home, there's nowhere to go but home unless he finds another bar, and he knows he has to go down the subway and wait for a train in an empty station, another bringdown, stand there on the long platform waiting, half an hour maybe, and he hears a sound from across the river, far away but clear, the way voices travel exact on the water at night.

He stands near the bridge approach and listens. Men singing, the sound of a great many voices, some following behind the others, rambunctious and uneven, and he knows the tune.

They're singing, Riding on a pony.

They're singing, Stuck a feather in his cap.

They're singing, Called it macaroni.

And he hears laughter drift across the river and begins to understand finally. It wasn't the bartender who made the mistake. Phil never said the people would be lining up at the Polo Grounds. He never named the ballpark. It was Manx who made the mistake. Because they're lining up at Yankee Stadium just across the river. It's the Giants versus the Yankees at Yankee Stadium and the voices travel so exact it's like someone's whispering just to him.

He hears a group of fans chanting Say Hey Willie and of course those are Giant fans and that's Willie Mays they're singing his praises.

And he hears the answering chant from the Yankee fans with that old Joltin' Joe DiMaggio song from before the war, he thinks, that they were playing on every radio in the country, we want you on our side , and it's all rough-and-tumble and good-natured and his mood picks up and he gives the ball a smack with the palm of his hand where it's tucked in his jacket pocket, the perfect roundness and hardness of an object that's substantial.

He walks across the swing bridge and hears them in the streets and then he begins to see them. They're walking across the public park to the stadium, across the fields and pathways, and they're coming down from the elevated train, men and boys in long streams turning the bends in the high stairways, and they're laughing and singing.

He sees flags waving on the stadium roof and World Series bunting hung high on the outer wall. He sees fires on the pavement, they're building fires in fifty-five-gallon drums, and he is struck a little dumb by the masses of people out to buy tickets at this time of night. His mouth hangs a little open and he is wide-eyed dumb. He paces himself to the crowd, feeling pulled along, feeling frankly happy to be among them, and they're carrying food and chairs, webbed chairs for the beach that fold up light, and they have sleeping bags strapped to their backs, a dozen college boys with their hair clipped short, and they're passing thermos bottles that smoke up when you screw off the lid, strong coffee to keep them awake and warm.

He sees fathers and sons standing around the fires to warm themselves, masses of people if you could count them, and mounted police with horses breathing steam, and he feels a rare elation, a wanting-to-be-among-them, and he is pulled along a little slack-jawed because it's a great thing to see, and they're singing roaring warring songs, they're back-and-forthing on the street with rough-and-tumble humor, all these ball fans striding toward the ticket lines at two or three in the morning or whatever the actual hour.

Manx is wearing a watch that stopped running six weeks ago. This is a situation he will direct his attention to when his life gets back to being regular.

It was the rooftop summer, drinks or dinner, a wedged garden with a wrought iron table that's spored along its curved legs with oxide blight, and maybe those are old French roses climbing the chimney pot, a color called maiden's blush, or a long terrace with a slate surface and birch trees in copper tubs and the laughter of a dozen people sounding small and precious in the night, floating over the cold soup toward skylights and domes and water tanks, or a hurry-up lunch, an old friend, beach chairs and takeout Chinese and how the snapdragons smell buttery in the sun.

This was Klara Sax's summer at the roofline. She found a hidden city above the grid of fever streets. Walk and Dont Walk. Ten million bobbing heads that ride above the tideline of taxi stripes, all brain-waved differently, and yes the street abounds in idiosyncrasy, in the human veer, but you have to go to roof level to see the thing distinct, preserved in masonry and brass. She looked across the crowded sky of ventilators and antennas and suddenly there's a quirk, some unaccountable gesture that isolates itself. Angels with butterfly wings tucked under a,cornice on Bleecker Street. Or the mystery of a white clapboard cottage on the roof of an office building. Or the odd deco heads, sort of Easter Islandish, attached to the corners of a midtown tower. She found these things encouraging, dozens such that hung unauthored, with bridge cables in the distance and occasional booming skies, the false storms of summer.

She was fifty-four now, let that number rumble in your head-fifty-four and between projects and humanly invisible and waiting to go back to work, to make and shape and modify and build.