Don DeLillo - Underworld

"I've got a question," Esther said.

Klara lit a cigarette. Esther, who'd stopped smoking, bummed one and lit it and inhaled and then looked away to protect the sensation, to guard it from distraction.

They heard a rumble. They felt something shaking under their feet and Klara studied the white parchment wall, listening carefully.

Then she took a drag and said, "S'okay, friend. Only the subway. The IND plowing under Sixth Avenue with its cargo of human souls."

They went up to the mezzanine levels and peered in at the walnut and pigskin in the men's smoking rooms and Klara said, "So what's your question?"

"Do we have to stay for the rest of it?"

"Miles went to a certain amount of trouble. Besides I want to see what happens."

"What could happen?"

"I don't know. But it's an interesting movie to look at from time to time."

"There's something about the tone," Esther said. "The photography. The glances that get exchanged. It's awfully shrouded of course. And the way the scientist."

"Touched the victim."

"What do you know about Eisenstein?"

"He was your friend, not mine," Klara said.

They made their rounds of the powder rooms and went back down to find Jack on the lower level, sitting above the rattle of another subway run.

The train was one of his, Moonman's, he had a dozen pieces running through the system, top-to-bottom burners, and it just so happens he was aboard tonight, under the water mains and waste pipes, under the gas and steam and electric, between the storm sewers and telephone lines, and he moved from car to car with each stop and checked out the people who stepped inside, wearing their retractable subway faces, and the doors went ding dong before banging shut.

Ismael Munoz, dark and somber, watching people come aboard. Sparsely stubbled Ismael reading lips and faces, hoping he might catch a bravo comment. Hey this guy is lighting up the line. This was his newest piece so here he was going uptown on the Washington Heights local, every car tagged with his own neon zoom, with highlights and overlapping letters and 3-D effect, the whole wildstyle thing of making your name and street number a kind of alphabet city where the colors lock and bleed and the letters connect and it's all live jive, it jumps and shouts-even the drips are intentional, painted supersharp to express how the letters sweat, how they live and breathe and eat and sleep, they dance and play the sax.

This was not a window-down piece. This was a whole-train burner with windows painted over and each letter and number bigger than a man.

Moonman 157 .

Ismael was sixteen, not too old and not too young, and he was determined to kill the shit of every subway artist in town.

Nobody could take him down.

And he sat there in his khaki jacket with his eyes ever moving, waiting for someone to say something that would make his day

He knew he was getting fame. He had imitators now, a couple of fairy-ass kids who tried to outking him in his own country. One of them got busted by the vandal squad, sentenced to clean graffiti from the station walls with an orange juice mixture because there's an acid in the juice that eats into paint.

Serves the chulo right for biting my style.

And he sat there with his longish face and misaligned teeth, an old man's worried head, and he studied the platform people at every stop. They reacted to the train, their heads went wow. Some shocked looks too, they're seeing hell on wheels, but mostly the eyes go yes and the faces open up. And he studied the riders as they shuffled in, carrying umbrellas, some of them, and concealed weapons, others, and gum wrappers and phone numbers and crushed Kleenex and hankies wrapped around house keys all wadded together on their mulatto bodies because the subway's where the races mix.

It made him think he was an unknown hero of the line, riding a train he'd maximum tagged. Revealing himself in a cartoon glow. Hey it's Moonman in our midst.

Once a man stood on the platform and took a picture of one of Moonman's top-to-bottoms, a foreigner by the look of him, and Ismael sidled to the open door so he could be in the picture too, unknown to the man. The man was photographing the piece and the writer both, completely unknown to himself, from someplace like Sweden he looked.

The whole point of Moonman's tag was how the letters and numbers told a story of backstreet life.

At Columbus Circle he changed to the Broadway train because he had business at the end of the line. He got on a train that was bombed inside and out by Skaty 8, a thirteen-year-old writer who frantically tagged police cars, hearses, garbage trucks, who took his Krylon satin colors into the tunnels and tagged up the walls and catwalks, he hit platforms, steps, turnstiles and benches, he'd tag your little sister if she was walking by Not a style king, no way, but a legend among writers for the energy he put forth, getting his tag seen by major millions and then two weeks ago, and a genuine regret went through Ismael as he recalled being told, he slumped and sagged all over again and felt the deepest kind of soldierly sadness-Skaty 8 hit by a train while he's walking on the tracks under downtown Brooklyn.

People moved along the car, they skated to a seat, they looked at display ads above the heads across the aisle, all without eye motion that you could detect with the most delicate device.

Ismael used to walk the tracks when he felt sorry for himself. Those were foregone times. He'd pop an emergency hatch in the sidewalk and climb down into a tunnel and just, like, go for a walk, be alone down there, keeping the third rail in sight and listening for the train and getting to know the people who lived in the cable rooms and up on the catwalks, and that's where he saw a spray-paint scrawl, maybe five years ago, down under Eighth Avenue. Bird Lives . It made him wonder about graffiti, about who took the trouble and risk to walk down this tunnel and throw a piece across the wall, and how many years have gone by since then, and who is Bird, and why does he live?

And the guy who reached around saying excuse me please.

He rode up the edge of Manhattan headed for the Bronx. There was no art in bombing platforms and walls. You have to tag the trains. The trains come roaring down the rat alleys all alike and then you hit a train and it is yours, seen everywhere in the system, and you get inside people's heads and vandalize their eyeballs.

The doors went ding dong before banging shut.

He saw a thin black male standing at the end of the car, disregard-ful, he's acting out the birth of the cool, and Ismael thought he was an undercover cop. It made him go low profile in his mental makeup, willing himself to be unnoticed in his seat, because he believed they were closing in on him. There was a big push out of City Hall to wipe out graffiti once and for all, to cork these ghetto crews and the middle-class white boys that came biting in behind them, and writers were being careful and playing safe.

He did not fear arrest, only the complications that would follow. Arrest would be good for his notoriety. It might even mean a story in the Post. But then the matter of the family begins to be important. It's not that he didn't want to be a father. He liked the idea of father and family. But there were so many things in between.

When he walked the tunnels as a kid he used to ask about Bird and he found out this was Charlie Parker. A jazz giant. He used to talk to the men who lived on the catwalks and in the unused freight tunnel under the West Side, they had beds and chairs and shopping carts, they had slippers they put on in the evening, they were mostly ordinary men, they washed the dishes and took out the garbage, and they told him about bop, bebop, and how Bird was dead at thirty-four. And one day Ismael, maybe he's thirteen, he's taking a leak against a wall and a guy comes along and stands behind him and reaches around, believe it or not, saying excuse me, and holds Ismael's dick while he pisses.