Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  They saw a man who’d cut his eyeball out of its socket because it contained a satanic symbol, a five-pointed star, and Edgar talked to this one, he’d popped the eyeball from his head and then severed the connecting tendons with a knife, and she talked to him in English and understood what he said although he spoke a language, a dialect none of them had ever heard—finally flushing the eye down the communal toilet outside his cubbyhole.

  Gracie dropped the crew at their building just as a bus pulled up. What’s this, do you believe it? A tour bus in carnival colors with a sign in the slot above the windshield reading South Bronx Surreal Gracie’s breathing grew intense. About thirty Europeans with slung cameras stepped shyly onto the sidewalk in front of the boarded shops and closed factories and they gazed across the street at the derelict tenement in the middle distance.

  Gracie went half berserk, sticking her head out the van and calling, “It’s not surreal. It’s real, it’s real. Your bus is surreal. You’re surreal.”

  A monk rode by on a rickety bike. The tourists watched him pedal up the street. They listened to Gracie shout at them. They saw a man come along with battery-run pinwheels he was selling, brightly colored vanes pinned to sticks—an elderly black fellow in a yellow skullcap. They saw the ailanthus jungle and the smash heap of mortified cars and they looked at the six-story slab of painted angels with streamers rippled above their cherub heads.

  Gracie shouting, “Brussels is surreal. Milan is surreal. This is real. The Bronx is real.”

  A tourist bought a pinwheel and got back in the bus. Gracie pulled away muttering. In Europe the nuns wear bonnets like cantilevered beach houses. That’s surreal, she said. A traffic jam developed not far from the Wall. The two women sat and waited. They watched children walk home from school, eating coconut ices. Two tables on the sidewalk—free condoms at one, free needles at the other.

  “Granted, he may be gay. But this doesn’t mean he has AIDS.”

  Sister Edgar said nothing.

  “All right, this area is an AIDS disaster. But Ismael’s a smart man, safe, careful.”

  Sister Edgar looked out the window.

  A clamor rising all about them, weary beeping horns and police sirens and the great saurian roar of fire-engine klaxons.

  “Sister, sometimes I wonder why you put up with all this,” Gracie said. “You’ve earned some peace and quiet. You could live upstate and do development work for the order. How I would love to sit in the rose garden with a mystery novel and old Pepper curled by my feet.” Old Pepper was the cat in the motherhouse upstate. “You could take a picnic lunch to the pond.”

  Edgar had a mirthless inner grin that floated somewhere back near her palate. She did not yearn for life upstate. This was the truth of the world, right here, her soul’s own home, herself—she saw herself, the fraidy child who must face the real terror of the streets to cure the linger of destruction inside her. Where else would she do her work but under the brave and crazy wall of Ismael Muñoz?

  Then Gracie was out of the van. She was out of the seat belt, out of the van and running down the street. The door hung open. Edgar understood at once. She turned and saw the girl, Esmeralda, half a block ahead of Gracie, running for the Wall. Gracie moved among the cars in her clunky shoes and frump skirt. She followed the girl around a corner where the tour bus sat dead in traffic. The tourists watched the running figures. Edgar could see their heads turn in unison, pin-wheels spinning at the windows.

  All sounds gathered in the dimming sky.

  She thought she understood the tourists. You travel somewhere not for museums and sunsets but for ruins, bombed-out terrain, for the moss-grown memory of torture and war. Emergency vehicles were massing about a block and a half away. She saw workers pry open subway gratings in billows of pale smoke and she knew she ought to say a fast prayer, an act of hope, three years’ indulgence, but she only watched and waited. Then heads and torsos began to emerge, indistinctly, people coming into the air with jaws skewed open in frantic gasps.

  A short circuit, a subway fire.

  Through the rearview mirror she spotted tourists getting off the bus and edging along the street, poised to take pictures. And the schoolkids going by, barely interested—they heard shootings all the time out their windows at night, death interchangeable on the street and TV. But what did she know, an old woman who ate fish, still, on Friday, beginning to feel useless here, far less worthy than Sister Grace. Gracie was a soldier, a fighter for human worth. Edgar was basically a junior G-man, protecting a set of laws and prohibitions.

  She had a raven’s heart, small and obdurate.

  She heard the yammer of police cars pulsing in stalled traffic and saw a hundred subway riders come up out of the tunnels accompanied by workers in incandescent vests and she watched the tourists snapping pictures and thought of the trip she’d made to Rome many years ago, for study and spiritual renewal, and she’d swayed beneath the great domes and prowled the catacombs and church basements and this is what she thought as the riders came up to the street, how she’d stood in a subterranean chapel in a Capuchin church and could not take her eyes off the skeletons stacked there, wondering about the monks whose flesh had once decorated these metatarsals and femurs and skulls, many skulls heaped in alcoves and hidey-holes, and she remembered thinking vindictively that these are the dead who will come out of the earth to lash and cudgel the living, to punish the sins of the living—death, yes, triumphant.

  But does she really want to believe that, still?

  After a while Gracie edged into the driver’s seat, unhappy and flushed.

  “Nearly caught her. We ran into the thickest part of the lots and then I was distracted, damn scared actually, because bats, I couldn’t believe it, actual bats—like the only flying mammals on earth?” She made ironic wing motions with her fingers. “They came swirling out of a crater filled with red-bag waste. Hospital waste, laboratory waste.”

  “I don’t want to hear it.”

  “Dead white mice by the hundreds with stiff flat bodies. You could flip them like baseball cards.”

  “Cars starting to move,” Edgar said.

  “Ever wonder what happens to amputated limbs after the doctor saws them off? They end up in the Wall. Dumped in a vacant lot or burned in the waste incinerator.”

  “Drive the car.”

  “And Esmeralda somewhere in those shrubs and junked cars. I bet anything she’s living in a car,” Gracie said.

  “She’ll be all right.”

  “She won’t be all right.”

  “She can take care of herself.”

  “Sooner or later,” Gracie said.

  “She’s quick. She’s blessed. She’ll be all right.”

  Gracie looked at her and drove and looked again, hearing the engine knock, and said nothing. Edgar was never known to take an optimistic position. Maybe this worried her a little.

  And that night, under the first tier of scratchy sleep, Edgar saw the subway riders once again, adult males, females of childbearing age, all rescued from the smoky tunnels, groping along catwalks and led up companion ladders to the street—fathers and mothers, the lost parents found and gathered, shirt-plucked and bodied up, guided to the surface by small faceless figures with day-glo wings.

  Weeks later Edgar picked up a copy of Time on her way out of the refectory and there she saw it, a large color photo of a white-haired woman seated in a director’s chair beneath the old weathered wing of an Air Force bomber. And she recognized the name, Klara Sax, because she recognized everything, because people whispered names to her, because she felt stirrings of information in the dusty corridors of the convent or the school’s supply room that smelled of pencil wood and composition books, because she sensed some dark knowledge floating in the smoke of the priest’s swinging censer, because things were defined for her by the creak of old floorboards and the odor of clothes, a man’s damp camel coat, because she drew News and Rumors and Catastrophes into the spotless cotton pores of her habit and veil.


  All the connections intact. The woman once married to a local man. The man a tutor in chess to one of Edgar’s own former students. The boy with necktie ever askew, Matthew Aloysius Shay, fingernails bitten to the pink, one of her brainier boys, male parent missing.

  She knew things, yes, chess, all those layers of Slavic stealth, those ensnarements and ploys. She knew that Bobby Fischer had all the fillings removed from his teeth when he played Boris Spassky in 1972—it made perfect sense to her—so the KGB could not control him through broadcasts made into the amalgam units packed in his molars.

  She put the magazine in her closet with the old fan mags she’d stopped reading decades ago when she lost her faith in movie stars.

  The faith of suspicion and unreality. The faith that replaces God with radioactivity, the power of alpha particles and the all-knowing systems that shape them, the endless fitted links.

  That night she leaned over the washbasin in her room and cleaned a steel wool pad with disinfectant. Then she used the pad to scour a scrub brush, cleaning every bristle. But she hadn’t cleaned the original disinfectant in something stronger than disinfectant. She hadn’t done this because the regression was infinite. And the regression was infinite because it is called infinite regression. You see how fear spreads beyond the pushy extrusions of matter and into the elevated spaces where words play upon themselves.

  She cleaned and she prayed.

  She said brief prayers while she worked, simple pious pleas called ejaculations that carried indulgences numbered in the days rather than years.

  She prayed and she thought.

  She went to bed and lay awake and thought of Esmeralda. They’d spotted her a number of times but hadn’t been able to catch her. Not Gracie or the monks or the agile writers in Ismael’s crew. And Edgar’s sense of her safety was beginning to grow less assured.

  She welcomed every breath of knowledge that came her way, all the better for its element of disquiet, but this time the foreboding shook her strongly. She sensed something out there in the Wall, a muddled shuffling danger that waited for the girl on her lithe passage through car bodies and discarded human limbs and acres of uncollected garbage.

  Mother of Mercy pray for us. Three hundred days.

  9

  * * *

  Nick was trying to find the magazine he’d been saving to take to Houston. He saved certain kinds of reading for business trips, things he never got around to looking at otherwise, magazines that stacked and nagged and finally went to the sidewalk on the designated day. There was a noise that started, a world hum—you began to hear it when you left your carpeted house and rode out to the airport. He wanted something friendly to read in the single sustained drone that marks every mile in a business traveler’s day.

  The magazine was Time, missing about a month. He found it finally in the bathroom, stashed in a basket that Marian kept filled with mostly glossy fashion books—every shadow brushed to an anatomical polish, contoured against crumble and waste. Just the thing to browse when your body is squatted and your pants are down. The copy of Time had an article on Klara Sax he wanted to read, not the first such piece he’d spotted through the years but maybe more interesting than most, some desert project she’d started, bristling with ambition.

  His suitcase was on the bed, small enough for the overhead bin, and he zippered the magazine into an outer pocket and finished packing. Marian walked in wearing her catwoman shades. They came with the job. She worked for the city’s arts commission now and wanted a sleeker look.

  “Don’t you need to hurry?”

  “The car’s not here. I trust the car,” he said.

  “The car is dependable.”

  “The car knows things we don’t know.”

  “The car is never late.”

  “The car and the plane are in constant touch.”

  She always looked great when he was walking out the door. Why is that, he thought. Some soft-bodied mood, some tone that half insisted on being noticed but was also a shy secret, afraid of disturbing the air between them.

  He moved her into the wall and put his hands on her thighs, kissbiting her mouth and neck. She said something he didn’t quite catch. He put his hands between her ass and the wall and moved her into him. Her skirt slid against her parted legs, fabric stretched out and up, the tensile whisper of friction he counted on to carry him through life. He stepped back slightly and looked at her.

  “Why is that?” he said.

  “What are we talking about?”

  “And why is it that when I get back, the whole thing’s gone and lost and forgotten?”

  “What thing?”

  He took off her sunglasses and handed them to her. When he walked out the door, seconds later, the company car was waiting.

  A few hours later Marian stood in a small room in a two-story pale brick building near Jack in the Box and Brake-O. Cars were parked under a lopsided shed out back and there was a man’s abandoned shoe in one of the empty slots. She stood naked in the room by the edge of the window. Then she walked to the long mirror and edged her hip against the surface of the glass, feeling some small coiled chill of body and object. She looked all right. All the exercise, the diet, the diet, the exercise. All the butt repetition, the toilsome boredom she endured in the name of keeping fit. She was not the twisted perfect woman she used to be but she still kept fit. Fuck you, keep fit. She stood squared up to the glass. Nothing she could do about the needle nose but otherwise not bad. She never looked at herself so closely at home. It was easier to see herself out here, inside strange walls. She let her nipples touch the glass and when she backed away she saw they’d left a moistness, a pair of pressed kisses like winter breath.

  When Brian arrived she was wearing a robe she’d found in the closet.

  “I shouldn’t be here,” he said.

  “Neither should I. This is the point, isn’t it?”

  He sat on the edge of the bed taking off his shoes, a little like the class crybaby undressing for gym.

  “Whose place is this?”

  “My assistant’s.”

  “Are you serious?”

  “Why not? We need a safe place,” she said.

  “But your secretary?”

  “My assistant. And it’s better than a hotel.”

  “I shouldn’t be here.”

  He walked around the room barefoot, unbuttoning his shirt. He had clown feet, long and bunioned, and he didn’t loosen his tie until he’d pulled his shirt out of his trousers.

  “Is she young?”

  “How do you know it’s a woman?”

  “Seriously. Young?”

  “Yes,” she said.

  He walked around touching things, looking at photographs and matchbooks.

  “Good-looking?”

  “You want to check out her underwear? Look, I’m wearing her robe. Fuck me fuck me fuck me,” she said drily.

  “She can’t afford better?”

  “We’re underbudgeted.”

  “It’s a roomette.”

  “Small but intense,” Marian said.

  She was standing against the wall, arms folded, and he stepped into her. She freed her hands and worked at his pants. She liked having sex with Brian because she could handle him, turn him, get him to match her mood, rouse him easily or make him talk, talk—acid candid shameful stuff, bitter-funny.

  “I think he knows,” she said.

  “What?”

  “I think he knows.”

  “He doesn’t know.”

  “I think he knows.”

  She had her hands in his pants and a smile on her face. He moved the robe off half her body, smeared it—rubbed it against her shoulder and breast before he got it off her, almost off her, pulling her arm through the hole and letting the garment drag.

  They eased onto the bed. She tried to get clear of the rest of the robe but he wouldn’t let her. He wanted a woman in half a robe. The phone rang and they stopped to listen. Every time a phone rang in a borr
owed apartment they stopped and thought about the thing they were doing and maybe at some level about the life of the person whose apartment they were using. It made them feel the wrong kind of guilty trespass, she thought. The bed. The mystery of the other person’s life and medicine cabinet and bed. It was the one thing she didn’t like about this, one among others, and she couldn’t have sex to a ringing phone.

  She felt around for her handbag, which was on a chair at the side of the bed. The ringing stopped. Brian got off the bed and finished undressing.

  “You trust her to keep quiet?”

  “She keeps quiet about everything else.”

  “This isn’t everything else.”

  Marian found her cigarettes and lit one up and he handed her an ashtray.

  “I thought you stopped.”

  “I’m down to five a day.”

  “I thought you were wearing the patch.”

  “I’m not,” she said.

  He stretched out next to her, on his side. The ringing phone had brought them prematurely to a lazy state of small caresses and mellow bends of conversation and streams of smoke.

  He said, “This job of yours. Real or fake?”

  “I work with structural engineers, urban designers. I fight with citizens’ groups all the time. But I get things done, pretty much.”

  “I had lunch in a mechanical mist the other day. In some mall somewhere.”

  “We don’t do malls. We do parkways.”

  “What do you do to a parkway?”

  “Make it livable, bearable. Tell little stories. Sculpture on the road dividers. Piers that are shaped like animals.”

  “What’s your secretary’s name?” he said.

  She tipped a length of ash onto his pubic hair.

  “Long hours, single-minded devotion. Stuck in that Japanese thing,” he said. “Death from overwork.”

  “Disappear in the company and die. Only I don’t do it to disappear. I do it to be visible and audible. And I’m not sure what you mean by real or fake.”

  He picked the ashes out of his crotch and blew them off the tips of his fingers.