Don DeLillo - Underworld

When the wind gusted out of the mountains it rebodied the dunes and if you were up out of the Pocket and sitting around at home with a beer and a snack you saw your laundry go horizontal on the backyard line, all of it, sheets, hankies, boxer shorts, pajama bottoms, like people of all sizes and shapes snapping from the pressure, letting their souls fly forth to the gypsum hills.

"But that's not the point," Eric said, "you keep mi, mi, missing the point."

It was raining in the mountains.

Eric had a fake stutter he liked to use to texture the conversation, a thing he'd developed to mock himself or his listener, although neither one of them stuttered, or maybe he was imitating some nightclub comic or simpy character on TV-it wasn't clear to Matt.

He looked out a window of Eric's bungalow. The rain was a wall of smoky shimmer that hung across the limestone bluffs. Eric sat on a sofa that was still wrapped in warehouse plastic amid a mess of scientific journals, UFO monthlies, supermarket tabloids, half a dozen Playboys and some lost food.

"Even though huge amounts of territory were affected and large numbers of people were exposed, it remains a major secret to this day."

"So secret it may not be true," Matt said.

"Do you believe it's true?"

"I believe mistakes were made."

Eric enjoyed this. His shadow smile appeared at the far end of the sprawled body. It came and went, like some inner dialogue he was conducting that ran parallel to the spoken lines, a thing of elusive drift.

"But the point is, pure and simple."

"What's the point, Eric?"

He picked up a magazine and leafed through it aimlessly, speaking in a tone that was slightly impatient but mostly, now that he was finally coming to the point, a little weary and bored.

"It was done deliberately," he said. "They knew the tests weren't safe but they went ahead anyway. They marched troops to zero point after the detonations. They sent manned aircraft through radiation clouds. They injected people with plutonium to track its course through the body, They did this deliberately, without telling people what the risks were. They exposed troops to the atomic flash and some of them were given protective eye filters and some were not. They experimented on children, infants, fetuses and mental patients. They never told the Navahos who worked in uranium mines what the dangers were. The dangers were considerable as it turned out. They zapped the testicles of prison inmates. They basically grabbed you by the balls and zapped you full of x rays. This is the story I hear. Do you believe it?"

"It's awfully, I don't know."

"Of course. It's very hard to believe. That's why I don't believe it," Eric said. "Not for a tenth of a second."

The rain line came dragging across the flats and the wind kicked up. The poets of the desert nations told stories about the wind. It bucks and swirls and turns you around and knocks you flat. But it also speaks so softly only your inner spirit can hear it and this is how you correct your path.

Eric said, "They never told the test subjects they were sub, sub, sub, sub."

"Subjects."

"I don't believe it," Eric said. "But you may feel differently."

Matt didn't know how he felt. But he didn't think the story was completely far-fetched. He'd served in Vietnam, after all, where everything he'd ever disbelieved or failed to imagine turned out, in the end, to be true.

Then one day he stopped to talk to her, the woman alone with the protest sign. He parked the car on the opposite side of the road and walked on over. She held one post cradled in her arms, one eight-foot-long upright piece, and the other was planted in the dirt with rocks piled around the base, and the sign itself, a spray-painted sheet, extended wind-whipped between the posts.

He stood there and started talking. He talked to her in a reassuring, trite and slightly compulsive way, like a first-timer nervous in a singles bar. He realized her wrist was padlocked to the post. He'd never noticed this before and it seemed, well, a little self-dramatizing maybe. Or fanatical and irrational and victim-wishful. She looked at him briefly as he spoke. He'd finished the get-acquainted part and was talking about the need for readiness and the folly of being naive about the other side's intentions.

He didn't use words such as American and Soviet. They seemed provocative somehow. Or NATO and Europe and the East Bloc and the Berlin Wall. Too soon to be so intimate.

She looked at him only briefly. It was not a hostile look but it was brief. There was something scoured about her, a sense of rubbed surfaces, a willing away of normal accretions and gleanings, and he thought she carried the countermarks of the rural poor.

He talked to her about the need to match our weapons to theirs, even when the numbers become absurd, because this is the only seeming safeguard against attack by either side.

She was fair-skinned, etched and fixed, with lank hair, string hair, and he thought she was true and impressive and unreachable.

They stood on a stretch of flat straight highway, beautiful and lonely, and if you're going to do this kind of work, isn't it necessary, he thought, to be fanatical? World War HI Starts Here . Isn't this exactly what he wanted from these people, a kind of sunstruck religious witness?

He told her he was completely willing to listen. But she would not talk to him. She stood padlocked to the post and looked off down the road somewhere. He could not despise her arrogance because she wasn't arrogant. She wasn't smarter or more sane or less guilty. They are armed, he said, and so we have to be armed. She clutched the upright and looked down the road, blue-eyed, with an inbuilt wince, and he went back to the car and drove away.

Eric's laundry jumped on the line. It shot straight out and held stiff in the wind.

"I think of my days in the glove box," he said. "Handling that hot pluto. Mistakes were made even in the small narrow sealed limits of the box. Better believe it. With all the safety procedures and data sheets and supervisors, people still made amazing mistakes. And I'd stick my hands in the gloves and think oddly of my mom, who was a super sensible lady and used to wear rubber gloves to do the dinner dishes back in the placid days when we were bombing our own people."

"I'm leaving tomorrow," Matt said.

"Let me have that jacket when you go."

Matt wore a lightweight calfskin jacket, the kind of soft leather that scuffs and unscuffs at a touch, and Eric often remarked his wish to own it whatever the difference in their sizes.

"I think I'll probably take it with me for the not so rugged parts of the trip."

"The taste is metallic according to downwinders. You open the door and step outside to get the newspaper that the newsboy on his bike has tossed on the porch and you taste a kind of metallic grit in the air, like salt made of metal shavings. Coming to our party tonight?"

"Wouldn't miss it," Matt said.

"Irbur child is born with eyes that are pure white. No discernible pupil or iris. Just a large white eyeball. Two if you're lucky."

Eric lifted the Playboy off the sofa and held it sideways, letting the centerfold swing open so he could see the monthly subject full-length.

He said, "Where are you going exactly?"

"Someplace remote."

"Remoter than this?"

"I've been looking at maps."

"But remoter than this?"

"Where the paved roads end."

"You're a city kid, Matty."

"I've been looking at southwest Arizona maybe."

"I want that jacket if you die."

When the bombheads threw a party you couldn't expect to emerge into the world you'd always known. And last night's affair seemed to overlay the landscape as Matty drove west on Interstate 10 through a town called Deming, which was Eric's last name of course, and how clammy was the hand of coincidence-faces, places and provocative remarks all running through his mind.