Don DeLillo - Underworld

But it was a splendid mystery in a way, a source of wonder, how a brief equation that you tentatively enter on your screen might alter the course of many lives, might cause the blood to rush through the body of a woman on a tram many thousands of miles away, and how do you define this kind of relationship?

Matt did not like to drive. He'd been driving only six months and knew he'd never feel natural at the wheel. The best he could do was mimic a driver. He borrowed a four-wheel-drive vehicle from one of the bombheads and drove it with the instruction booklet in his lap. The roads, the road signs, the other cars made him self-conscious, exposing his crime of driving.

But he wanted to practice for his camping trip with Janet and he went for drives on his days off and there were signs for runaway truck ramps and dangerous crosswinds and there was the Jesus is Lord sign and the lines of whitish haze in the deep distance that he now knew to be sea-bottom sand and the Do not enter sign When road is flooded and the slat-back shadows on the flats formed by the crossbars of power lines that stretched hellbent to Texas.

Returning one day from a drive he saw the protesters, as always, positioned in the wrong place. They should have been standing by the third gate to the air base, the unmarked gate, because that's where scientists from the Pocket entered and left, and they were the most susceptible presence, and he half wanted to tell the protesters to move their operation up the road.

Matt looked slightly Jewish, a little Hispanic maybe. He'd lifted weights in his late teens, remaking the soft flimsy body that used to function as an adjunct to the Univac head. Back in the Bronx, people said he looked a little everything. Mexican, Italian, Japanese even-his friendliest smile could look like a ceremonial grimace. A police sketch made from seven different descriptions-that was Matt. He never stopped resembling the student he was at City College in the late fifties, hardworking, nearsighted, smart and poor, riding the subway to class.

He sat with Eric Deming in the mess. Eric took a strand of spaghetti in his fingers and slow-lowered it down his throat with a certain amount of snakely constriction.

Matt said, 'All right. These are things we have to expect. We're not naive. Mistakes are part of the process. There's a sudden wind shift and the fallout blows the wrong way. Or the blast and shock are larger than anyone anticipated."

"The placid nineteen-fifties. Everybody dressed and spoke the same way. It was all kitchens and cars and TV sets. Where's the Pepso-dent, mom? We were there, so we know, don't we?"

" You know. I don't know," Matt said.

" You were there. We were both there."

" You were there. I was somewhere else."

"Dad's in the breezeway washing the car. Meanwhile way out here they were putting troops in trenches for nuclear war games. Fireballs roaring right above them."

"Positioned too close, you mean."

"That's the story I hear. You look at your arm and see right through it. Basically your arm becomes an x ray of your arm. You can see right through the uniform cloth and the skin. The light's so white. You can see blood, bones and whatnot. But that's not all. You can see all this with your eyes shut. You don't have to open your eyes. You see right through the lids. Ha!"

"Well was it officially acknowledged?"

"You wake up one day a few years later, all your inner organs are fused. It's one big jellied lump."

"But did the men get compensated?"

"I don't know," Eric said.

"That's not part of your rumormongering."

Eric stuck a finger in Matty's creamed spinach and hooked a shreddy morsel toward his mouth.

"What good's a rumor that deals with bureaucratic details? The point is this," he said. "It happened right out in the open but it's still a huge secret to this day. That's the story anyway. Which I don't happen to believe. They did major shots off towers or dropped devices from planes and they put troops too close to the blast and they let the fallout drift to Utah, where kids are getting born with their bladders backwards."

Matt wanted to like Eric. The guy was smart, friendly, sort of semi-charismatic in a physically awkward and too-tall way. But his motives were sometimes lost to observers in the inward drifts of his smile. You saw the shadow action around the mouth and wondered if you were being set up for something.

"You know about the school not far from here. This is not rumor now but fact. I've been there and seen it. The Abo Elementary School and Fallout Shelter. A real place down in the ground."

"Just like us."

"We're not real," Eric said. "They're only kids. It's a grade school. They still have a chance to be real. I was sent there to speak to them."

"As a bombhead."

"As a clean-cut younger member of the military industrial complex. A diversion at recess type thing."

"What did you say to them?"

"There's a water tank at the edge of town. State Champs in bright new paint. And rows of neat homes. Then you come upon the school but just barely. Some trailerlike structures and a couple of basketball courts and finally you spot an entrance and you open the steel door and go down the stairs and there's a lot of concrete and steel and the lighting's slightly eerie. The classrooms, the bedding, the canned food, the morgue. No window breakage. That's one of the features. Because there aren't any windows of course. But the point is. What's the point, Matty?"

"I don't know. Tell me."

"Did they do all this to protect the kids from Soviet bombs or from our bombs and our fallout?"

"I don't know. Both. What did you say to the kids?"

"I spoke in tongues," Eric said. "I mean think about it. I'm standing in an underground room at the northern edge of a great desert with filtering systems for fallout and a fully equipped morgue and there are crayon drawings pinned above the blackboard of piglets and cows. Incidentally."

"What?"

"I have a chess set in my room. What about a game?"

The Pocket was one of those nice tight societies that replaces the world. It was the world made personal and consistently interesting because it was what you did, and others like you, and it was self-enclosed and self-referring and you did it all together in a place and a language that were inaccessible to others.

Janet Urbaniak was Matt's girlfriend, a registered nurse. They were off-and-on serious, mostly on, often impatient with each other but always strongly joined, the kind of star-matched couple born to meet and disagree.

He called Janet on her days off and she told him where she'd gone and what she'd seen or bought, and who with, and for how long, and he listened and commented and asked for details.

She worked in a trauma unit now. She told him about her nights there but he said almost nothing about his own work and of course she understood and did not probe.

Janet called his mother twice a week to find out how she was doing and then she called Matt to give him a report and then Matt called his mother to confirm everything, to clarify the particulars of an ache or pain, and he liked all these calls, the ones he made and the ones he heard about-they gave him a life outside the Pocket.

He drove his borrowed jeep past a protester alone, a woman struggling to keep the sign upright in a dry stiff wind that beat across the flats. He wanted to stop and talk to her. Give her a hand, have a chat. He wanted to show his tolerance of her viewpoint, allow himself to be convinced by some of her arguments, make certain trenchant points of his own and then drive her to the nondescript room where she lived at the edge of this or that town, with a partial view of the mountains, and have soft, moaning and mutually tolerant sex in her rumpled bed, but he slowed only slightly as he drove past.