Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  When he finished the towers Sabato Rodia gave away the land and all the art that was on it. He left Watts and went away, he said, to die. The work he did is a kind of swirling free-souled noise, a jazz cathedral, and the power of the thing, for me, the deep disturbance, was that my own ghost father was living in the walls.

  The waitress brought a chilled fork for my lifestyle salad. Big Sims was eating a cheeseburger with three kinds of cheddar, each described in detail on the menu. There was a crack in the wall from the tremor of the day before and when Sims laughed I saw his mouth cat’s-cradled with filaments of gleaming cheese.

  We heard the test flights shrieking out of Edwards. Sims said they had aircraft that bounced off the edge of space and came back born-again.

  We were at Mojave Springs, a conference center some distance from Los Angeles. I’d recently gone to work for Waste Containment, known in the industry as Whiz Co, and I was here in the spirit of freshmen orientation, to adjust to the language and customs, and my unofficial advisor was Simeon Biggs, a landfill engineer who’d been with the firm for four or five years. There were a number of waste-handling firms represented at the Springs and we were sharing seminar space with a smaller and more committed group, forty married couples who were here to trade sexual partners and talk about their feelings. We were the waste managers, they were the swingers, and they made us feel self-conscious.

  Sims said, “The ship’s been out there, sailing port to port, it’s almost two years now.”

  “And what? They won’t accept the cargo?”

  “Country after country.”

  “How toxic is the cargo?”

  “I hear rumors,” he said. “This isn’t my area of course. Happens in some back room in our New York office. It’s a folk tale about a spectral ship. The Flying Liberian.”

  “I thought terrible substances were dumped routinely in LDCs.”

  An LDC, I’d just found out, was a less developed country in the language of banks and other global entities.

  “Those little dark-skinned countries. Yes, it’s a nasty business that’s getting bigger all the time. A country will take a fee amounting to four times its gross national product to accept a shipment of toxic waste. What happens after that? We don’t want to know.”

  “All right. But what makes this cargo unacceptable? And why don’t we know what the shipment actually consists of?”

  “Maybe we’re trying to spare ourselves a certain amount of embarrassment,” Sims said.

  The tremor had hit at cocktail time when I was standing in the hospitality suite with a number of colleagues, who peered over their drinks in the slow lean of the world. The room whistled and groaned. I worked at controlling the look on my face, waiting for the situation to define itself. It was not a mild shock. It was in the middle fives, we later learned, a five point four, and I felt justified in my sense of potential alarm, seeing the crack in the restaurant wall when we sat down to lunch.

  “You think what, it’s a drug shipment? Disguised as toxic waste? Because I hear rumors too.”

  “Tell me about it,” Sims said.

  He sat across the table, meat face and wide body, the jut underlip, the odd little unlobed ears, round and perfectly worked, the tiny mannered ears of a sprite child.

  “I’m eager to hear your version,” he said, a trace of sweet condescension in his voice.

  “One, it’s a heroin shipment, which makes no sense. Two, it’s incinerator ash from the New York area. Industrial grade mainly. Twenty million pounds. Arsenic, copper, lead, mercury.”

  “Dioxins,” Sims said agreeably, biting into the middle of his mesquite-grilled beef.

  Four couples took the round table nearby and Sims and I observed a pause. We wanted to be amused and slightly derisive. These were swingers, of course, dressed assertively, in the third person, and they leaned back in sequence when the boy poured water.

  “They take time out for lunch. I respect that,” Sims said.

  “I hear things about the ship.”

  “The ship keeps changing names. You hear that?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “The ship left a pier on the Hudson River with one name, I don’t know what it was but it got changed three months later off the West African coast. Then they changed it again. This was somewhere in the Philippines.”

  “Enormous quantities of heroin, I hear. But why would heroin get shipped from the U.S. to the Far East? Makes no sense.”

  “Makes no sense,” Sims said. “Except it ties in with another rumor. You know this rumor?”

  “I don’t think so.”

  “Mob-owned.”

  He liked saying this, he rounded out the words, popped his eyes a little.

  “What’s mob-owned?”

  “The company that owns the ships we lease. The mob has a lot of involvement in waste carting. So why not waste handling, waste shipment, waste everything?”

  “There’s a word in Italian,” I said.

  “Maybe it’s not just the shipping company. Maybe it’s our company. We’re mob-owned. They’re a silent partner. Or they own us outright.”

  He liked saying this even more. Not that he believed it. He didn’t believe it for half a second but he wanted me to believe it, or entertain the thought, so he could ridicule me. He had a hard grin that mocked whatever facile sentiments you might be tempted to shelter in the name of your personal conspiracy credo.

  “There’s a word in Italian. Dietrologia. It means the science of what is behind something. A suspicious event. The science of what is behind an event.”

  “They need this science. I don’t need it.”

  “I don’t need it either. I’m just telling you.”

  “I’m an American. I go to ball games,” he said.

  “The science of dark forces. Evidently they feel this science is legitimate enough to require a name.”

  “People who need this science, I would make an effort to tell them we have real sciences, hard sciences, we don’t need imaginary ones.”

  “I’m just telling you the word. I agree with you, Sims. But the word exists.”

  “There’s always a word. There’s probably a museum too. The Museum of Dark Forces. They have ten thousand blurry photographs. Or did the Mafia blow it up?”

  This is where Sims laughed, showing a mouth crisscrossed with cheddar.

  I checked the round table. Two of the women smoked. Two of the women wore studded western vests. One was nearsighted, sticking her head in the menu, and one had an accent I couldn’t place. All the women were ornamented, decked in chains, bracelets and breastpins, in hoop earrings with bead pendants, jewelry with a hammered look, a pounded look, and one chewed a carrot stick and talked about her kids.

  “You know Italian?” he said.

  “I studied Latin for a while. In school, then on my own, pretty intensively. And dabbled in German and Italian.”

  “My wife is German,” he said. “Met her when I was stationed there.”

  “A GI with a swagger.”

  “That pretty much says it. Except I was Air Force.”

  “She speaks German around the house?”

  “A little bit. Yeah. Quite a lot.”

  “You understand?”

  “I better understand,” he said.

  The men wore broad-collared print shirts unbuttoned to the thorax. The men were all hair. Not the protest hair of the sixties of course. Chest hair, mustaches, brushy sideburns, great heads of Hollywood hair—real hair that resembled toupees in bad taste, wish-fulfilling rugtops, sort of spit-curled and heavily surfed.

  Big Sims called for the check.

  “But we like our jobs, don’t we, Nick? Whoever owns the ships we use.”

  “I like my job.”

  “I like my job.”

  His sport coat was draped over the back of his chair, too broad to fit snugly over the palmettes that adorned the top rail. He wore a white short-sleeved shirt with a dark tie and a tie clip shaped like a scimitar.
/>   He gave me a tight-eyed look.

  “Want to go to a Dodger game?”

  “No,” I said.

  It did not seem surprising, all these ghost-ship stories, even if they were only elusive hearsay, because we’d been told the night before that waste is the best-kept secret in the world. This is what Jesse Detwiler said, the garbage archaeologist who’d addressed the massed members about an hour after the tremor—an address that did not go down well with the grilled squab and baby Zen vegetables.

  Our faces showed a pristine alertness, back there at cocktail time, when the room shook around us. It was a look that trailed a self-awareness in its wake, a sheepish sense of our own glimpsed fear, of being caught unaware, just before we gained control, and this is the face that traveled through the suite, above the vodka tonics, creating an ironic bond among the managers, in the indoor wind.

  We saw Detwiler in the lobby after we paid the bill. Sims went over and collared him, literally, got him in a headlock and mock-pummeled his shaved dome. They were acquaintances, it seemed, and the three of us made a date to drive out to a landfill that Sims had designed, a massive project still in development.

  A man and woman walked across the lobby and I watched her carefully. Maybe it was the hip-sprung way she moved, high-assed and shiny, alert to surfaces, like a character in a B movie soaked in alimony and gin. I went over and checked the schedule of events on the easeled board near the revolving doors, registration and coffee, licensing laws, spent fuel storage, all the topics and speakers in movable white type, ten to twelve and two to five and on into the night, and I thought about the swingers and their arrangements.

  Whiz Co was a firm with an inside track to the future. The Future of Waste. This was the name we gave our conference in the desert. The meeting was industry-wide but we were the firm that provided the motive force, we were the front-runners, the go-getters, the guys who were ready to understand the true dimensions of the subject.

  I was in my early forties, hired away from a thin-blooded job as a corporate speechwriter and public relations aide, and I was ready for something new, for a faith to embrace.

  Corporations are great and appalling things. They take you and shape you in nearly nothing flat, twist and swivel you. And they do it without overt persuasion, they do it with smiles and nods, a collective inflection of the voice. You stand at the head of a corridor and by the time you walk to the far end you have adopted the comprehensive philosophy of the firm, the Weltanschauung. I use this grave and layered word because somewhere in its depths there is a whisper of mystical contemplation that seems totally appropriate to the subject of waste.

  I went running with Big Sims and we ran along trails that hikers used, backpackers with rugged boots, and we ran on bridle paths that went into the hills. We wore sunglasses and peaked caps and ran on stony rubble and red sand and Sims didn’t stop talking, he talked and ran across the desert scrub and I labored to keep up.

  “You know, it’s funny, I took this job four years ago and it’s a good job and pays well and has the benefits and provides for my widow when I die from overwork but I find—you find this, Nick? From the first day I find that everything I see is garbage. I studied engineering. I didn’t study garbage. I thought I might go to Tunisia and build roads. I had a romantic idea, you know, wear a safari jacket and pave the world. Turns out I’m doing fine. I’m doing real work, important work. Landfills are important. Trouble is, the job follows me. The subject follows me. I went to a new restaurant last week, nice new place, you know, and I find myself looking at scraps of food on people’s plates. Leftovers. I see butts in ashtrays. And when we get outside.”

  “You see it everywhere because it is everywhere.”

  “But I didn’t see it before.”

  “You’re enlightened now. Be grateful,” I said.

  Our sneakers were flimsy things against the slabstone and tuff. We ran on trails littered with straw shit from the rented horses and we ran gasping and panting, panting as we talked, and the sweat came down Sims’ face in intersecting streams. I kept up with him. It was necessary to keep up, keep running, show you can talk while you run, show you can run, you can keep up. The sweat came down our bodies and plastered our shirts to our backs.

  “We get outside and we’re waiting. The guy’s bringing our car around. I peer into the alley meanwhile. And I see something curious. An enclosure, a barred enclosure set along the wall. A cage basically. Three sides and a top. Wrought iron bars and a big padlock.” He’s talking and pausing, the words are pumping out of his chest. “And I have to step a little ways into the alley. Before I can see exactly what this is. And I smell it before I see it. The cage is filled with bags of garbage. Food waste in plastic bags. A day and a night of restaurant garbage.”

  He was looking at me as we ran.

  “Why do they cage it?” I said.

  He looked at me.

  “Derelicts come out of the park and eat it.”

  We turned back toward the compound of rose stucco buildings burning in the light. It was not easy keeping pace with Sims. He had the plodding force of a fleshy ex-boxer who still has reserves of deep endurance, oil reserves, fossil fuel—he had calories to burn, sweat to yield in abundance.

  “Why won’t the restaurant let them eat the garbage?”

  “Because it’s property,” he said.

  Five fighter jets went over in tight formation, flying low, a haunted roar spilling through the valley, and Sims jerked his thumb at the sky as if to signal something that had slipped my mind.

  I kept seeing my own face of the evening before, when the fiver shook the room, all the work it took to reconcile the forces that pressed against each other.

  We pounded down past the golf course and guest cottages, a cropped world of people in soft pastels, alive by the handful, by the orderly foursome, and I felt relieved the run was nearly over.

  “Ask me about the ship,” he said.

  “Is the ship Liberian register?”

  “It was when it started out. I hear it’s registered in Panama now.”

  “Is that possible? Change registry in midcourse?”

  “I don’t know It’s not my area,” Sims said. “But the rumors about the ship don’t only concern what the ship is carrying in its hold. Or who owns the ship. Or where the ship is headed.”

  “Okay, what else is there?”

  “Is this an ordinary cargo ship? Or is there some degree of confusion about this?”

  “What kind of ship would it be if it carries cargo but isn’t a cargo ship?”

  “Remind me to give you a lesson in sludge sometime.”

  He laughed and ran, capering a little, bop-running, elbows out and fingers snapping, and he surged ahead of me. I felt a flare of competition, a duress of the spirit that warns against the shame of losing, and I hurried to catch up.

  And interesting that later this business of picking through garbage, old winos and runaway kids slipping into an alley to get at broken bread chunks and slivers of veiny beef—later, with Detwiler, the subject would reoccur, but differently, with a touch of the renegade theater of the sixties.

  The three of us went out to the landfill in the early evening, half an hour’s drive to the east, some of this on roads restricted to military use. Sims had a permit that allowed entry at select times, an arrangement worked out between Whiz Co and some agency buried in the Pentagon, and this saved us the trouble of taking the long way around.

  The construction crew had gone for the day. We stood above a hole in the earth, an engineered crater five hundred feet deep, maybe a mile across, strewn with snub-nosed machines along the terraced stretches and covered across much of the sloped bottom by an immense shimmering sheet, a polyethylene skin, silvery blue, that caught cloudmotion and rolled in the wind. I was taken by surprise. The sight of this thing, the enormous gouged bowl lined with artful plastic, was the first material sign I’d had that this was a business of a certain drastic grandeur, even a kind of greatness, maybe�
��the red-tailed hawks transparent in the setting sun and the spring stalks of yucca tall as wishing wands and this high-density membrane that was oddly and equally beautiful in a way, a prophylactic device, a gas-control system, and the crater it layered that would accept thousands of tons of garbage a day, your trash and mine, for desert burial. I listened to Sims recite the numbers, how much methane we would recover to light how many homes, and I felt a weird elation, a loyalty to the company and the cause.

  Sims spoke to both of us but mainly to Jesse Detwiler because this was the visionary in our midst, the waste theorist whose provocations had spooked the industry. And Sims was eloquent, he loved his subject and gestured sweepingly, hand-shaping the layers of plastic and earth, the shredding of tires, the mixing of chemicals with kiln dust. I hadn’t seen these things yet, myself, but it was easy to perceive what they meant to Sims, a labor of earth, utterly satisfying in its mingled tempers of technology and old hard useful work, dust in the mouth and a wall of drenching smells.

  Detwiler stood at the rim of the crater, looking in.

  “What about the hot stuff?”

  “We’ll drum it and segregate it. But we won’t forget it. It’ll be logged on three-D computer records. We can find it if we have to.”