Don DeLillo: End Zone

I had accomplished nothing all those months and so I decided to enroll at the University of Miami. It wasn't a bad place. Repetition gave way to the beginnings of simplicity. (A preparation thus for Texas) I wanted badly to stay. I liked playing football and I knew that by this time I'd have trouble finding another school that would take me. But I had to leave. It started with a book, an immense volume about the possibilities of nuclear war- assigned reading for a course I was taking in modes of disaster technology. The problem was simple and terrible: I enjoyed the book. I liked reading about the deaths of tens of millions of people. I liked dwelling on the destruction of great cities. Five to twenty million dead. Fifty to a hundred million dead. Ninety percent population loss. Seattle wiped out by mistake. Moscow demolished. Airbursts over every SAC base in Europe. I liked to think of huge buildings toppling, of firestorms, of bridges collapsing, survivors roaming the charred countryside. Carbon 14 and strontium 90. Escalation ladder and subcrisis situation. Titan, Spartan, Poseidon. People burned and unable to breathe. People being evacuated from doomed cities. People diseased and starving. Two hundred thousand bodies decomposing on the roads outside Chicago. I read several chapters twice. Pleasure in the contemplation of millions dying and dead. I became fascinated by words and phrases like thermal hurricane, overkill, circular error probability, postattack environment, stark deterrence, doserate contours, killratio, spasm war. Pleasure in these words. They were extremely effective, I thought, whispering shyly of cycles of destruction so great that the language of past world wars became laughable, the wars themselves somewhat naive. A thrill almost sensual accompanied the reading of this book. What was wrong with me? Had I gone mad? Did others feel as I did? I became seriously depressed. Yet I went to the library and got more books on the subject. Some of these had been published well after the original volume and things were much more uptodate. Old weapons vanished. Megatonnage soared. New concepts appeared-the rationality of irrationality, hostage cities, orbital attacks. I became more fascinated, more depressed, and finally I left Coral Gables and went back home to my room and to the official team photo of the Detroit Lions. It seemed the only thing to do. My mother brought lunch upstairs. I took the dog for walks.

In time the draft board began to get interested. I allowed my father to get in touch with a former classmate of his, an influential alumnus of Michigan State. Negotiations were held and I was granted an interview with two subalterns of the athletic department, types familiar to football and other paramilitary complexes, the squarejawed bedrock of the corporation. They knew what I could do on the football field, having followed my high school career, but they wouldn't accept me unless I could convince them that I was ready to take orders, to pursue a mature course, to submit my will to the common good. I managed to convince them. I went to East Lansing the following autumn, an aging recruit, and was leading the freshman squad in touchdowns, yards gained rushing, and platitudes. Then, in a game against the Indiana freshmen, I was one of three players converging on a safetyman who had just intercepted a pass. We seemed to hit him simultaneously. He died the next day and I went home that evening.

I stayed in my room for seven weeks this time, shuffling a deck of cards. I got to the point where I could cut to the six of spades about three out of five times, as long as I didn't try it too often, abuse the gift, as long as I tried only when I truly felt an emanation from the six, when I knew in my fingers that I could cut to that particular card.

Then I got a phone call from Emmett Creed. Two days later he flew up to see me. I liked the idea of losing myself in an obscure part of the world. And I had discovered a very simple truth. My life meant nothing without football.

Raymond Toon stood six feet seven. He was a mild young man, totally unintimidating, a former bible student. He was a reserve tackle on defense and he had come here because it was the only school he knew of that offered a course in sportscasting.

"Timeadjusted rate of return," he said. "Redundant asset method. Capital budgeting, Probable stream of earnings. Independently negotiated credit balances. Consolidation. Tax anticipation notes."

We were in the cafeteria. John Jessup was also at our table, reading a textbook. Jessup and Toon were roommates. Jessup didn't like the arrangement because Raymond practiced his sportscasting in the room all weekend. When he wasn't studying theories of economic valuation, he was camped in front of his portable TV set. He'd switch it on, turn the sound down to nothing, and describe the action. At this time of year it was mainly baseball, golf, bowling and stock car racing. Jessup had complained to Rolf Hauptfuhrer that he was being driven out of his mind. But so far nothing had been done. Moody Kimbrough brought his tray over to our table.

"This milk is putrid," Jessup told him.

"What do you want from me?"

"You're one of the captains. Go tell Coach. They shouldn't give us milk like this. They should be more careful with the athletes' milk."

"Back home it's the blanketyblank water you have to watch," Kimbrough said.

"Back where I come from it's the water and the milk," Raymond said.

"This is shitpiss," Jessup said. "This is the worstass milk I ever tasted."

Kimbrough drank from his little carton.

"I'll tell you something," he said. "This milk is putrid."

"Damnright," Jessup said.

"This milk is contaminated. It's putrid. It's the worst I ever tasted. Back up home it's the water. Here I guess it's the milk. I'll be sure and tell Coach."

"Toony, what was the point you were trying to make?" I said.

"The level of deemed merit," Raymond said. "Assessed value. Imputed market prices. Munitions. Maximized comparative risk."

Onan Moley joined us. He was wearing a sweat shirt with a screaming eagle, the team symbol, pictured across the front. The word sacrifice was inscribed beneath the eagle. Onan hunched his shoulders and lowered his head almost to table level before speaking.

"There's a lot of talk about a lot of things."

"What talk?" Kimbrough said.

"Never mind."

"I'm cocaptain, Onan. I've got a pipeline. But I don't know about any talk. Now what talk do you mean?"

"There might be a queer on the squad."

"Offense or defense," Kimbrough said.

Terry Madden seated himself at the end of the table. He broke a roll and began to butter it.

"What's the good word?" he said.

Jessup read aloud from his textbook on monolithic integrated circuitry.

"The pattern match begins with a search for a substring of a given string that has a specified structure in the stringmanipulation language."

Taft Robinson was sitting three tables away. I took my dessert over. He looked up, nodded, then looked down again and sliced a quivering ribbon of fat off the last piece of sirloin on his plate.

"That weakside sweep looked good today," I said. "I finally got in a good block for you."

"I saw it," he said.

"I wiped out that bastard Smee. He likes to hurt people, that son of a bitch."

"Which one is he?"

"Middle linebacker. He's the defensive captain. He 1 captains the defense." "I saw the block," Taft said. "I really wiped him out, that bastard. Hey, look, what are you doing here anyway?"

"Where-here?"

"Right," I said. "Here in this particular locale. This dude ranch."

"I'm here to play football. Same as you."

"You could be at almost any school in the country. Why would you want to leave a place like Columbia to come here? Granted, Columbia's not exactly a football colossus. But to come here. How the hell did you let Creed talk you into this place? It's not as though you're integrating the place. Technically you're integrating the place but that's only because nobody else ever wanted to come here. Who the hell would want to come to a place like this?"