Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  Nick did not like cats. Once he got her to say yes, the cats would have to be sent into retirement.

  Either they rob you and kill you or they rob you and let you live or you take them somewhere very efficient, the man said, and either they pay you or they don’t.

  I live a quiet life in an unassuming house in a suburb of Phoenix.

  Once he got her to say yes, they’d be able to spend untrammeled time remembering together.

  He’d tipped the man nicely. What do you tip a man who risks his life when he answers a call? Nick was confident he’d tipped him nicely, handsomely, but not ridiculously, not in a way that would have exposed him as a stranger here.

  He looked at the TV screen, where the tape was nearing the point when the driver waves, the crisp wave from the top of the steering wheel, and he waited for room service to knock on the door.

  6

  * * *

  When Matty was real small and his brother used to sit on the pot and read comics to a peewee audience, neighbor kids ages four and five supposedly being minded by a grown-up somewhere near, with Matty in the doorway ready to shout out chickie, which was the warning word, and there’s Nick on the pot reading to them from Captain Marvel or the Targeteers, his pants hanging limp from his kneecaps, and he did lively dialogue, declaimed and gestured, developed a voice for villains and for women and an airy stabbing screech for gangster cars cornering tightly in the night, scaring the kids at times with his intensity of manner, then pausing to loose a turd that would splattingly drop, that would plop into the water, the funniest sound in nature, sending a happy awe across the faces of his listeners—it was the creepiest delight of all, better than anything he might deliver from the paneled pages.

  Matt walked through the neighborhood to see the old building, number 611, and wondered idly who lived in their third-floor apartment, what language spoken, how many grinding lives, but mainly he thought of nine-year-old Nicky asquat the glory seat. Who else would read the comics to them, acting out those vibrant dramas of crime fiends and bounding heroes?

  He went to see Bronzini, his old chess mentor, a sweet-natured man and not-so-willing drillmaster. Living now in a sad building with an entranceway marked by specimens of urban spoor—spray paint, piss, saliva, dapples of dark stuff that was probably blood. The elevator was not working and Matt made his way up five flights. A child’s sandal on the landing. He knocked and waited. He sensed an eyeball on the other side of the peephole and he thought of his own street and house and the life of the computer suburb, those huddled enclaves off the turnpike, situated to discourage entry, and the corner store that sells eleven kinds of croissants and twenty-seven coffees, which are somehow never enough, and the life he led before this, the weapons he studied and helped perfect, the desert experience, so completely unconnected to root reality, compared to this man, he thought, on the other side of the peephole, who watches the ruin build around him on the actual planet where he was born.

  The man’s smile was in his eyes, a warm fizz that had an eagerness in it, a desire to know. This is what remained, his curiosity. He looked too old, too spare, his face a boxy outline, an underdrawing of the original likeness, the fleshed-out and tinted-in Bronzini. A couple of days of gray stubble surrounded his untrimmed mustache and Matt thought the man had seized upon old age, embraced it with a kind of reckless assent.

  “Please, no misters. It’s Albert now. And you look well. Robust, I’m surprised. I remember a matchstick. A matchstick with a fiery head.”

  Evidently the man had forgotten more recent meetings. They sat at a table near the window and drank brewed tea. Bronzini lived with his sister now, who’d never married, who sat in her room and spoke in chants, he said, of reduced informational range. Such compression. But once he’d learned to be patient with her repetitions and attenuations he began to find her presence a source of enormous comfort. A rest, he said, from his own internal rant.

  He said, “Sometimes I take the train downtown. There’s a chess club that’s also a coffeehouse, in the Village, and I play a game or two. I lose but I don’t get embarrassed. Or I play down there, in the playground, with a neighbor. We share a bench. They leave us alone, the kids.”

  “I don’t play,” Matt said in a voice emptied of any shading.

  “I used to wonder about your father. He taught you the moves but was he a serious player, I used to wonder. I didn’t know him well enough to bring up the subject, any subject. He was not a man who encouraged, shall we say, inquiries.”

  The eyes fizzed like carbonated water.

  “He taught me quite a bit. We practiced openings and played many games. We played speed chess for fun. He called it rapid transit.”

  When his father went out for cigarettes Matty was finishing first grade. He found a book of chess problems Jimmy had kept in a bureau. It was a major discovery and he worked his way through the book and sat in front of the board, squares and pieces, pushing wood. His brother used to walk into the room and knock the pieces off the board and walk out of the room without a word. Matty picked up the pieces and set them on the board exactly as positioned earlier. He’d study black’s defense. His brother would walk into the room, knock the pieces off the board and walk out again.

  “Your mother petitioned me. But you were a problem,” Bronzini said. “I needed help to deal with you.”

  “Hard to handle.”

  “Volatile, yes, and very quick to dismiss my advice. Of course you saw things I did not. You had remarkable skills and insights. It was exhilarating for me but also humbling. I lacked the deep feel of the master player.”

  “As a team we were maybe a little shaky. But we managed to last a few years. We tasted a little glory, Albert. I can tell you I don’t like that little boy. I don’t like thinking about him.”

  “I study theory now and then. I read a little in the history of the game. The personality of the game. This is a game of enormous hostility.”

  “I came to hate the language,” Matt said. “You crush your opponent. It’s not a question of win or lose. You crush him. You annihilate him. You strip him of dignity, manhood, womanhood, you destroy him, you expose him publicly as an inferior being. And then you gloat in his face. All the things that gave me such naked pleasure, I began to hate.”

  “Because you began to lose,” Albert said.

  It was true of course and Matt laughed. All that concentrated power, the implosive life of the board, black and white, the autocratic beauty of winning, what a chestful of undisguisable pride—he defeated men, boys, the old and wise, the vigorous and quick, the bohemian café poets, friendly and smelly. But then at ten or eleven he saw his edge begin to muddy and he took some losses, suffered consistent reversals that made him sick and limp.

  “The competition changed. We found better opponents for you to play.”

  “And I slowed down.”

  “Your development hit a wall. Not a wall. But it no longer grew exponentially.”

  Matt looked out at the playground, surprised at the desolation, the basketball court potholed and empty, only one backboard still standing. Directly below him the old boccie court grown over with weeds. Everything empty. Up on the second level the softball field empty and tar-hot, a heavy sweltry indolence, the dark surface flashing with broken glass, two or three men, he sees them now, standing out near the left-field fence, sort of mortally posed like figures in spaghetti westerns, lean, nameless, unshaved—he didn’t think they were acquainted with the language of life expectancy.

  He said, “I’ve been walking around. It’s a complicated thing. I find myself trying to resist the standard response.”

  “You don’t want to be shocked. You’re reluctant to blame anyone. But you went to the old streets.”

  “Yes.”

  “You saw your building. The squalor around it. The empty lot with the razor wire.”

  “Yes.”

  “The men. Who are they, standing around doing nothing? Poor people. They’re very shocking.”


  “Yes, they are,” Matt said.

  “And these were your streets. It’s a curious rite of passage, isn’t it? Visit the old places. First you wonder how you lived so uncomplainingly in such cramped circumstances. The streets are narrower, the buildings smaller than you ever remembered. It’s like coming back to Lilliput. And think of the rooms. Think of the tiny bathroom, shared by the family, by the grandparents, by the uncle who’s slightly u’pazz’. But what else do you see? These people that you barely glance at. How can you see them clearly? You can’t.”

  “No, I can’t.”

  “And you want to ask me why I’m still here. I see your mother in the market and we talk about this. We want nothing to do with this business of mourning the old streets. We’ve made our choice. We complain but we don’t mourn, we don’t grieve. There are things here, people who show the highest human qualities, outside all notice, because who comes here to see? And I’m too rooted to leave. Speaking only for myself, I’m too rooted, too narrow. My mind is open to absolutely anything but my life is not. I don’t want to adjust. I’m an old Roman stoic. But then I was always too old, too narrow. Klara used to attack me on this subject. Not attack me. Chide me, urge me to see things differently.”

  “Do you talk to her at all?”

  “No. Go to Arthur Avenue, Matty. Look at the shops and the people shopping and the people weighing the fish and cutting the meat. This will restore your spirits. I took your mother into the pork store the other day to show her the ceiling. Hundreds of hanging salamis, such bounty and fullness, the place teeming with smells and textures, the ceiling covered completely. I said, Rosemary, look. A gothic cathedral of pork.”

  They shook hands at the door.

  “You used to wear glasses, Albert.”

  “I didn’t absolutely need them. I needed them a little. They were part of my schoolteacher’s paraphernalia. My accoutrements. Take the elevator.”

  “It’s not working.”

  “It’s not working. Then I guess you’ll have to walk. But don’t tarry,” Bronzini said, eyes bright. “There are dangers in the woods.”

  Matt went shopping for dinner and then headed back to his mother’s building, walking directly toward the western end of the zoo. Out over the trees he saw the residue of a jet contrail, the vapor losing its shape, beginning to spread and rib out, and he thought of the desert of course, the weapons range and flypaths and the way the condensation in the sky was the only sign of human endeavor as far as he could see, a city boy out camping, taking his soul struggle to the back-country, and the mach-2 booms came skyclapping down and the vapor formed an ice trail in the heavens.

  They were showing the tape again. The TV set was on in the empty room and they had the tape going, they had the victim at the wheel, the random man in the medium Dodge, alive again in sunlight—they were running it one more time.

  Matt came in, surprised to find the TV on, and he sat on the footstool near the screen. When it was running he could not turn away from it. When it wasn’t running he never thought about it. Then he’d get on line at the supermarket back home and there it was again on the monitors they’d installed to keep shoppers occupied at the checkout—nine monitors, ten monitors, all showing the tape.

  But this time something was different. There was a voice-over, barely audible, and he looked around for the remote control device. He hit the button a couple of times and the voice came up and it had something in it that matched the tape. The voice was naked the way the tape was naked. A man’s voice, flat and stripped, saying something about the weather.

  A set of words appeared, superimposed across the bottom of the tape.

  LIVE CALL-IN VOICE OF TEXAS HIGHWAY KILLER.

  The voice was asking about the weather in Atlanta. They cut from the videotape to a live shot of a face above a desk, a woman with red hair and amazing green eyes. The anchorwoman. The anchorwoman was telling the caller that the weather desk said rain.

  Then she said, “And clearly this is not a true voice we are hearing over the phone lines. This is a manipulated voice, an altered voice.”

  And the voice said, “Well, it is a device that disguises the sound. It is a device that’s a little more than three inches by two inches and you fit it to the talk part of the telephone and it makes the sound hard to identify as an individual.”

  Then she said, “Just to recap. We are taking a call from an individual who identifies himself as the Texas Highway Killer. He has given us information known only to the real killer and to the authorities and we have checked this information with the authorities in order to verify the caller’s credentials.”

  Then she said something to the caller about his reason for calling.

  Matt looked at her, half mesmerized. Those eyes were an amazement, like offshore green you see from an airplane.

  The voice said, “Why I’m calling is to set the record straight. People write things and say things on air that I don’t know from day one where they’re coming from. I feel like my situation has been twisted in with the profiles of a hundred other individuals in the crime computer. I keep hearing about low self-esteem. They keep harping about this. Use your own judgment, Sue Ann. How does an individual with this kind of proven accuracy where he hits targets in moving vehicles where he’s driving with one hand and firing a handweapon with the other and he’s not supposed to be aware of his personal skills?”

  The anchorwoman looked into the camera. She had no choice of course. The camera was on her, not on the caller. She was a live body and he was just a voice, or not a voice. The odd sound, the devoicing, with contour and modulation strained out. Electronically toned but not without a human quality, Matt thought, a trace of jerkwater swerve. The struggle to speak, the bare insides of the simplest utterance.

  The anchorwoman listened.

  “I keep hearing about history of head trauma whereby an individual, you know, can’t control their behavior.”

  They cut to the tape again. It showed the man at the wheel of the medium Dodge.

  “Let’s set the record straight. I did not grow up with head trauma. I had a healthy, basically, type childhood.”

  The car approaches briefly, then falls back.

  “Why are you doing it?”

  “Say what?”

  “Why are you committing these murders?”

  “Let’s just say it’s a nice seasonal day where I’m located here, with scattered clouds, and if that’s a hint to my location, then take it as a hint, and if this is all a game, then take it as a game.”

  On the screen the man at the wheel does his little wave, the friendly understated wave to the camera and the future and all the watching world, his hand wagging stiffly from the top of the wheel.

  “You are aware, are you not, that one of these crimes is said to have been the work of a copycat killer. Can you comment on that for us?”

  Now here is where he gets it. Matt could not look at the tape without wanting to call out to Janet. Hurry up, Janet, here it comes. Getting her mad. Mad at the tape and mad at him. And the more often they showed it, the more singsong he put in his voice. Hur-ree u-up, here it co-omes. An anxious joke, a joke in somebody else’s voice, not meant to be funny. Janet swore at him and said enough. But it wasn’t enough. It was never enough.

  “Let’s just say, okay, the police have their job and I have mine.”

  The eeriness of the car that keeps on coming after the driver is shot. It approaches briefly, then falls back.

  “Which the correct term for this is not sniper by the way. This is not an individual with a rifle working more or less long-range. You’re mobile here, you’re moving, you want to get as close to the situation as humanly possible without bringing the two vehicles into contact, whereby a paint mark might result.”

  The car is drifting toward the guardrail now. The odd sound of the caller’s voice, leveled-out, with faint tremors at the edges, odd little electronic storms, like someone trying to make a human utterance out of itemized data. />
  They cut to the face above the desk. The anchorwoman live. Her elbows rested on the desk now, hands tucked together beneath her chin. Matt wondered what this meant. Every shift of position meant a change in the state of the news. The green eyes peered from the screen. And the altered voice went on, talking in that flat-graphed way, he was actually chatting now, confident, getting the feel of the medium, the format, and the anchorwoman listened because she had no choice and everybody watched her as she listened. They were watching her in Murmansk in the fog.

  The voice said, “I hope this talk has been conducive to understand the situation better. For me to request that I would only talk to Sue Ann Corcoran, one-on-one, that was intentional on my part. I saw the interview you did where you stated you’d like to keep your career, you know, ongoing while you hopefully raise a family and I feel like this is a thing whereby the superstation has the responsibility to keep the position open, okay, because an individual should not be penalized for lifestyle type choices.”

  They began to run the tape again. It showed the man at the wheel of the medium Dodge.

  When his mother came in he was scouring a frying pan with a short-handled brush. She stood there and looked at him.

  “You’ll wear it out,” she said.

  “I did this in the army. I liked doing it. It was the best thing about the army.”

  “That was a long time ago. Besides, the pan is already clean. Whatever you think you’re doing, you’re not getting the pan any cleaner.”

  “The TV was on. When I walked in,” he said. “You normally leave the TV on?”

  “Not normally. But if you say it was on, I guess it was on. Abnormally.”

  “I always thought you were careful.”

  “I’m pretty careful. I’m not a fanatic,” she said. “You’re wearing out the steel. You’ll clean right through it.”

  He made dinner for them and they kept a fan going because the air conditioner seemed to be running at half strength.