Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  Marvin puffed on his stogie.

  “I go all the way to the Bronx to buy this cheesecake. A kosher bakery that you couldn’t find it if I gave you a road map, a guidebook and whatever he’s called that speaks five languages.”

  “An interpreter.”

  “An interpreter,” Marvin said.

  The cheesecake was smooth and lush, with the personality of a warm and well-to-do uncle who knows a hundred dirty jokes and will die of sexual exertions in the arms of his mistress.

  “And so finally,” Brian said, “you bought the baseball.”

  “And I traced it all the way back to October fourth, the day after the game, nineteen hundred and fifty-one.”

  “And how did you finance this operation for so many years? The travel, the technical end, all of it.”

  “I had a local chain of stores, dry cleaning, which I sold after my wife passed away because I didn’t need it anymore, the aggravation.”

  “Marvin the Clothes King,” his daughter said with a little affection, a little regret, some irony, a certain pride, a touch of rueful humor and so on.

  She talked to her father about a doctor’s appointment he had in the morning and he listened the way you listen to the TV news, staring indifferently into India. She took the tray and headed up the stairs. Brian imagined following her in his car and pulling alongside and catching her eye and then accelerating loudly and leading her to a wayside inn where they get a room and undress each other with their teeth and tongues and never say a word.

  He listened to the music drifting through the house, the keyboard lament, and he finally identified the lurking presence in the story of Marvin’s search, the strange secondhandedness of all that exacting work, the retouching, the enhancements—it was an eerie replay of the investigations into the political murders of the 1960s. The attempt to reassemble a crucial moment in time out of patches and adumbrations—Marvin in his darkroom borrowing a powerful theme and using it to locate a small white innocent object bouncing around a ballpark.

  Brian said, “So we know the lineage of the thing in the later stages. Rauch to Rauch to Lundy. But how did it all begin?”

  “You asked so I’ll tell you. With a man named Charles, let me think, Wainwright. An advertising executive. I have the complete sequence back to him. The line of ownership.”

  “But not back to the game itself.”

  “I don’t have the last link that I can connect backwards from the Wainwright ball to the ball making contact with Bobby Thomson’s bat.” He looked sourly at the scoreboard clock. “I have a certain number of missing hours I still have to find. And when you’re dealing with something so many years back, you have to face the mortality rate. Wainwright passed away and his son Charles Jr. is forty-two years old now and stuck with the name Chuckie and I’ve been trying to talk to him for a long time. He was last seen working as an engineer on a freighter that plied—you like that word?”

  “Plied.”

  “The Baltic Sea,” Marvin said. “Speaking of which.”

  “Yes?”

  “You should train an eye on the mark on this Gorbachev’s head, to see if it changes shape.”

  “Changes shape? It’s always been there.”

  “You know this?”

  “What, you think it recently appeared?”

  “You know this? It’s always been there?”

  “It’s a birthmark,” Brian said.

  “Excuse me but that’s the official biography. I’ll tell you what I think. I think if I had a sensitive government job I would be photographing Gorbachev from outer space every minute of the day that he’s not wearing a hat to check the shape of the birthmark if it’s changing. Because it’s Latvia right now. But it could be Siberia in the morning, where they’re emptying out their jails.”

  He looked at his cigar.

  “Reality doesn’t happen until you analyze the dots.”

  Then he got to his feet with a certain effort.

  “And when the cold war goes out of business, you won’t be able to look at some woman in the street and have a what-do-you-call-it kind of fantasy the way you do today.”

  “Erotic. But what’s the connection?”

  “You don’t know the connection? You don’t know that every privilege in your life and every thought in your mind depends on the ability of the two great powers to hang a threat over the planet?”

  “That’s an amazing thing to say.”

  “And you don’t know that once this threat begins to fade?”

  “What?”

  “You’re the lost man of history.”

  It seemed the visit was done. But first the host led his guest to a shelved alcove near the stairway. This is where he kept his collection of taped ball games, radio and TV, hundreds of slotted cassettes going back to the earliest broadcasts.

  “People who save these bats and balls and preserve the old stories through the spoken word and know the nicknames of a thousand players, we’re here in our basements with tremendous history on our walls. And I’ll tell you something, you’ll see I’m right. There’s men in the coming years they’ll pay fortunes for these objects. They’ll pay unbelievable. Because this is desperation speaking.”

  Brian wished the man could be lighter and sweeter. He looked at the scoreboard one last time. He thought finally it was an impressive thing but maybe a little funereal. It had that compact quality of preservation and exact proportion and respectful history that can produce a mood of mausoleum gloom.

  They went up the stairs and walked through the shadowed rooms to the front door. Marvin stood there with his dead cigar.

  “Men come here to see my collection.”

  “Yes.”

  “They come and they don’t want to leave. The phone rings, it’s the family—where is he? This is the fraternity of missing men.”

  “I understand.”

  “What’s your name?”

  “Brian Glassic.”

  “Nice to meet you,” Marvin said.

  Brian asked about a way back to Manhattan that did not include the George Washington Bridge. There was a tunnel here and a tunnel there and Marvin gave both sets of directions with a number of choices attached to each. Brian the fool narrowed his eyes and nodded yes although he knew he would retain none of this once he was in the car.

  He drove along turnpikes and skyways, seeing Manhattan come and go in a valium sunset, smoky and golden. The car wobbled in the sound booms of highballing trucks, drivers perched in tall cabs with food, drink, dope and pornography, and the rigs seemed to draw the little car down the pike in their sheering wind. He drove past enormous tank farms, squat white cylinders arrayed across the swampland, and he saw white dome tanks in smaller groupings and long lines of tank cars rolling down the tracks. He went past power pylons with their spindly arms akimbo. He drove into the spewing smoke of acres of burning truck tires and the planes descended and the transit cranes stood in rows at the marine terminal and he saw billboards for Hertz and Avis and Chevy Blazer, for Marlboro, Continental and Goodyear, and he realized that all the things around him, the planes taking off and landing, the streaking cars, the tires on the cars, the cigarettes that the drivers of the cars were dousing in their ashtrays—all these were on the billboards around him, systematically linked in some self-referring relationship that had a kind of neurotic tightness, an inescapability, as if the billboards were generating reality, and of course he thought of Marvin.

  When he went past Newark Airport he realized he’d overshot all the turnoffs and their related options. He looked for a friendly exit, untrucked and rural, and found himself some time later on a two-lane blacktop that wended uncertainly through cattail mires. He felt a bitey edge of brine in the air and the road bent and then ended in gravel and weeds.

  He got out of the car and climbed an earthen bank. The wind was stiff enough to make his eyes go moist and he looked across a narrow body of water to a terraced elevation on the other side. It was reddish brown, flat-topped, monumenta
l, sunset burning in the heights, and Brian thought he was hallucinating an Arizona butte. But it was real and it was man-made, swept by wheeling gulls, and he knew it could be only one thing—the Fresh Kills landfill on Staten Island.

  This was the reason for his trip to New York and he was scheduled to meet there with surveyors and engineers in the morning. Three thousand acres of mountained garbage, contoured and road-graded, with bulldozers pushing waves of refuse onto the active face. Brian felt invigorated, looking at this scene. Barges unloading, sweeper boats poking through the kills to pick up stray waste. He saw a maintenance crew working on drainpipes high on the angled setbacks that were designed to control the runoff of rainwater. Other figures in masks and butylene suits were gathered at the base of the structure to inspect isolated material for toxic content. It was science fiction and prehistory, garbage arriving twenty-four hours a day, hundreds of workers, vehicles with metal rollers compacting the trash, bucket augers digging vents for methane gas, the gulls diving and crying, a line of snouted trucks sucking in loose litter.

  He imagined he was watching the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza—only this was twenty-five times bigger, with tanker trucks spraying perfumed water on the approach roads. He found the sight inspiring. All this ingenuity and labor, this delicate effort to fit maximum waste into diminishing space. The towers of the World Trade Center were visible in the distance and he sensed a poetic balance between that idea and this one. Bridges, tunnels, scows, tugs, graving docks, container ships, all the great works of transport, trade and linkage were directed in the end to this culminating structure. And the thing was organic, ever growing and shifting, its shape computer-plotted by the day and the hour. In a few years this would be the highest mountain on the Atlantic Coast between Boston and Miami. Brian felt a sting of enlightenment. He looked at all that soaring garbage and knew for the first time what his job was all about. Not engineering or transportation or source reduction. He dealt in human behavior, people’s habits and impulses, their uncontrollable needs and innocent wishes, maybe their passions, certainly their excesses and indulgences but their kindness too, their generosity, and the question was how to keep this mass metabolism from overwhelming us.

  The landfill showed him smack-on how the waste stream ended, where all the appetites and hankerings, the sodden second thoughts came runneling out, the things you wanted ardently and then did not. He’d seen a hundred landfills but none so vast as this. Yes, impressive and distressing. He knew the stench must ride the wind into every dining room for miles around. When people heard a noise at night, did they think the heap was coming down around them, sliding toward their homes, an omnivorous movie terror filling their doorways and windows?

  The wind carried the stink across the kill.

  Brian took a deep breath, he filled his lungs. This was the challenge he craved, the assault on his complacency and vague shame. To understand all this. To penetrate this secret. The mountain was here, unconcealed, but no one saw it or thought about it, no one knew it existed except the engineers and teamsters and local residents, a unique cultural deposit, fifty million tons by the time they top it off, carved and modeled, and no one talked about it but the men and women who tried to manage it, and he saw himself for the first time as a member of an esoteric order, they were adepts and seers, crafting the future, the city planners, the waste managers, the compost technicians, the landscapes who would build hanging gardens here, make a park one day out of every kind of used and lost and eroded object of desire.

  The biggest secrets are the ones spread open before us. This was Marvin Lundy talking, filling Brian’s head with that dry staticky voice that seemed to come out of a surgical slit in his throat.

  The wind carried the stink from the mountain of wrack.

  Specks and glints, ragtails of color appeared in the stratified mass of covering soil, fabric scraps from the garment center, stirred by the wind, or maybe that teal thing is a bikini brief that belonged to a secretary from Queens, and Brian found he could create a flash infatuation, she is dark-eyed and reads the tabloids and paints her nails and eats lunch out of molded styrofoam, and he gives her gifts and she gives him condoms, and it all ends up here, newsprint, emery boards, sexy underwear, coaxed into high relief by the rumbling dozers—think of his multitudinous spermlings with their history of high family foreheads, stranded in a Ramses body bag and rollered snug in the deep-down waste.

  He watched several gulls veering near and saw a hundred other gulls positioned on a slope, all facing the same way, motionless, regardful, joined in consciousness, in beautiful empty birdness, waiting for the signal to fly.

  4

  * * *

  Marvin was out of his basement, wincing in the light. He steered his car tenaciously, choosing a lane and sticking to it. He wore a tan windbreaker with a plaid lining because this is what he always wore when the leaves began to turn. It was the faithful change of apparel, an adjustment to the cosmos that made his life seem regular. He wore the jacket through the decades, giving the old one to the Salvation Army and buying another just like it, the everyman tan that he could spot on a store hanger from fifty yards in one of those vast hushed areas just before closing time where ranks of suits are arrayed like executives in hell.

  He also wore a pair of latex gloves, a precaution he took whenever he went to the city.

  When he got to the Lower East Side he drove through the streets a number of times before he found a space that looked okay, where he wouldn’t get towed and he wouldn’t get broken in, and he locked the car and then stood back and studied the parking job he’d done and the street in general, old furniture sold cheap and a truck lot in which every inch of every truck was covered with graffiti. The humans walked by looking touchy and unbeloved. He saw two men in wheelchairs who scooted after cars stopped at the light to scrounge a little change.

  Marvin walked in his sliding step, his sort of explanatory shuffle, it was a comment on the literature of shuffles. He went down Orchard Street looking at the clothes in the windows and stalls, dry goods by the mile. He stopped to read the writing on a collection of what-do-you-call, T-shirts, a nasty remark on nearly every item, words unprintable through history wearing shirts in a window. A young man stood next to him, thin-limbed and tattooed, a mustache that’s half finished, glaring at him. He felt the glare, a tapered look directed straight into the side of his head.

  Marvin glanced over.

  “What? I’m looking in the window,” he said.

  “I look means you gotta look?”

  “I can’t look? What? It’s a window.”

  “You seen me looking. Means you gotta look?”

  “What? So I can’t look?”

  “I’m looking.”

  “It’s a public window,” Marvin said.

  “You want window? I give you window.”

  “All of a sudden, this?”

  “You think you want to look? I show you look.”

  Marvin walked away because what else could he do, flexing his fingers inside the latex gloves. It was impossible to live. You couldn’t walk down the street one foot follows another. Because what happens? They kill you. They come out of a door and stab you because you look at them. This is the latest word in death and menace. You look at them, they kill you. One look where you catch their eye, it gives them the right to end your life.

  Later he crossed Essex Street and found the bakery. What he likes, the backroom business right up front, the ovens and mixing table where they make bialys in front of your eyes, a man in a white shirt and a white apron with sifted meal on his hands and arms, and Marvin was struck by the force of the moment, a simple drama in a window, the whiteness of bread and work. He thought he could stand here all day and watch the baker shape the pasty mass. He bought for later, for his daughter, flat rolls, onion-flaked, that were a thing you eat and a city and a religion and a war.

  He walked down the street with the bakery bag warm against his ribs. He passed a playground, kids cr
ouched and darting on the handball court, and half a block later it was all Chinese.

  When he had his stomach he used to come here with Eleanor.

  It was the old mystery of Chinese things, food on steam tables, vegetables he could not identify, the secret minds of the people. He stood and watched the living fish toss in homemade tanks. He bought a fried dumpling and took a bite, more for the gesture than the taste because he didn’t taste the way he used to. It was like the memory of food, the ghost of ginger and minced chives.

  He shuffled back to the car. He saw the wheelchair beggars with their scraggle beards, they raced each other to a stopped car, bodied forth, hands screwing and cranking. It was a competition of gyrating arms, their eyes peering through the dusty glass for some sign of contact within. But the drivers looked away. The drivers shut their windows against, the window washers, the flower sellers, the carjackers, against the medium mad intent on conversation.

  You look at them, they kill you.

  He drove home, leaning tensely toward the wheel. An English girl from Somerset, you couldn’t make it up. He played the piano elegy that was Eleanor’s favorite music, once a month or so, hitting the repeat button so it never stopped. It was her voice he heard at this time of year, reminding him to get out the tan windbreaker. Time to don the old McGregor, Marv. In that simple little sentence, word for word through the years, was all the what, the deep dependency of two people who met during the war, wrote letters back and forth, finally got married, had a child after a while, it took some doing, two hearts joined in the habit of the days. Dry cleaning. He dry-cleaned McGregors by the ton.

  The phone was ringing when he walked in the door. He went into the kitchen, put the bakery bag on the table, took off his jacket, the phone was ringing, he opened the refrigerator and got out the celery tonic and took a swig from the bottle, he was free to do that now, there are compensations too. He took off the gloves, so tight they resisted separation, peeling them down to the wide part of his hand and then yanking each clinging finger, a process that made him feel part artificial. Then he went across the room to the phone, which was a white wall model with a photograph next to it showing President Reagan standing in the Oval Office between Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca, which was the only baseball reference anywhere in the house above the basement, a tasseled flag behind them. Because she could be a pain in the ass, Eleanor, on the subject of drinking from the bottle.