Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  “What’s your approach to bomb waste?”

  “Bomb waste. That’s why we hired Nick.”

  I saw the gleam in Simeon’s eye and I said deadpan, “I have a background in public relations.”

  Detwiler tilted his chin, marking the small measure of amusement he might attach to this remark. He had the canny self-assurance of an industry maverick, the outsider who tries to roil the works, japing every complacent rule of belief. And he looked remade, retooled, shaved head and bushy mustache, a guy in firm control, with a workout coach and a nice line of credit, in a black turtleneck jersey and designer jeans. It occurred to me that except for the plucked hair he could have been a swinger.

  “I’ll tell you what I see here, Sims. The scenery of the future. Eventually the only scenery left. The more toxic the waste, the greater the effort and expense a tourist will be willing to tolerate in order to visit the site. Only I don’t think you ought to be isolating these sites. Isolate the most toxic waste, okay. This makes it grander, more ominous and magical. But basic household waste ought to be placed in the cities that produce it. Bring garbage into the open. Let people see it and respect it. Don’t hide your waste facilities. Make an architecture of waste. Design gorgeous buildings to recycle waste and invite people to collect their own garbage and bring it with them to the press rams and conveyors. Get to know your garbage. And the hot stuff, the chemical waste, the nuclear waste, this becomes a remote landscape of nostalgia. Bus tours and postcards, I guarantee it.”

  Sims wasn’t sure he liked this.

  “What kind of nostalgia?”

  “Don’t underestimate our capacity for complex longings. Nostalgia for the banned materials of civilization, for the brute force of old industries and old conflicts.”

  Detwiler had been a fringe figure in the sixties, a garbage guerrilla who stole and analyzed the household trash of a number of famous people. He issued mock-comintern manifestos about the contents, with personal asides, and the underground press was quick to print this stuff. His activities had a crisp climax when he was arrested for snatching the garbage of J. Edgar Hoover from the rear of the Director’s house in northwest Washington and this is what people remembered, what I remembered when I first reheard the name Jesse Detwiler. He’d earned a brief feverish fame in the chronicles of the time, part of the strolling band of tambourine girls and bomb makers, levitators and acid droppers and lost children.

  A bird flew across the width of the crater, a finch or wren, moving with the nervous fleetness, the urgency of sundown.

  Detwiler said that cities rose on garbage, inch by inch, gaining elevation through the decades as buried debris increased. Garbage always got layered over or pushed to the edges, in a room or in a landscape. But it had its own momentum. It pushed back. It pushed into every space available, dictating construction patterns and altering systems of ritual. And it produced rats and paranoia. People were compelled to develop an organized response. This meant they had to come up with a resourceful means of disposal and build a social structure to carry it out—workers, managers, haulers, scavengers. Civilization is built, history is driven—

  He talked in his talk-show way, focused, practiced, generically intimate. He was a waste hustler, looking for book deals and documentary films, and I don’t think he cared whether we were two people listening or half a million.

  “See, we have everything backwards,” he said.

  Civilization did not rise and flourish as men hammered out hunting scenes on bronze gates and whispered philosophy under the stars, with garbage as a noisome offshoot, swept away and forgotten. No, garbage rose first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense. We had to find ways to discard our waste, to use what we couldn’t discard, to reprocess what we couldn’t use. Garbage pushed back. It mounted and spread. And it forced us to develop the logic and rigor that would lead to systematic investigations of reality, to science, art, music, mathematics.

  The sun went down.

  “Do you really believe that?” I said.

  “Bet your ass I believe it. I teach it at UCLA. I take my students into garbage dumps and make them understand the civilization they live in. Consume or die. That’s the mandate of the culture. And it all ends up in the dump. We make stupendous amounts of garbage, then we react to it, not only technologically but in our hearts and minds. We let it shape us. We let it control our thinking. Garbage comes first, then we build a system to deal with it.”

  The rim clouds took on a chromium edge and the high sky was still an easy noonish blue. But the pit went dark in a hurry, the vast plastic liner wind-lapped and making the eeriest sort of music, just outside the wave-fold of nature, and the surface was indigo now, still faintly sky-streaked, washed by gradations of shade and motion. We stood a moment watching and then went back to the car. Detwiler sat in the middle of the rear seat, needling us about dumping our garbage on sacred Indian land. And about Whiz Co’s vanguard status. He thought the firm had the hard-core appetites of any traditional company.

  We drove an empty road.

  “You tracking the rumors, Sims? This ship you’ve got.”

  “It’s not my area.”

  “Cruising the oceans of the world trying to dump some hellish substance.”

  “I’m looking the other way,” Sims said.

  “Look this way. I hear it’s headed back to the U.S.”

  “You know more than we do.” Sims hated saying this. “What do we know, Nick?”

  “We’re not sixties people. We’re forties and fifties people.”

  “We’re limited,” Sims said.

  “We don’t know much of anything.”

  “We listened to the radio,” Sims said. “We know the Lone Ranger and Tonto.”

  “From out of the past,” I said.

  “The thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver.”

  “A fiery horse with the speed of light.”

  “This is what we know, Jesse.”

  “A cloud of dust.”

  “And a hearty hi-yo Silver.”

  Deep-pitching our voices to the baritone drama of the old radio show.

  “Guys think you’re funny,” Detwiler said. “Bet you don’t know the name of Tonto’s horse. Come on, Sims. You know the white man’s horse. Why don’t you know the Indian’s horse?”

  I didn’t think I liked Detwiler but I liked to listen to him. Sims did not. Sims wanted to get him in another headlock, not so fraternal this time. No, he didn’t know the Indian’s horse and maybe it bothered him a little.

  Jesse kept talking.

  “The more dangerous the waste, the more heroic it will become. Irradiated ground. The way the Indians venerate this terrain now, we’ll come to see it as sacred in the next century. Plutonium National Park. The last haunt of the white gods. Tourists wearing respirator masks and protective suits.”

  I said, “What was the name of the Indian’s horse?”

  “Scout, okay? And I’m amazed and shocked. This is a deep cultural failure, you guys. Tonto’s horse. You have to know this.”

  He leaned toward us, needling.

  “A ship carrying thousands of barrels of industrial waste. Or is it CIA heroin? I can believe this myself. You know why? Because it’s easy to believe. We’d be stupid not to believe it. Knowing what we know.”

  “What do we know?” Sims said.

  Choppers in formation, ten or twelve, coming at us right over the road, large assault transports lighted like manic angels, and they passed above us with a rackety blast that sucked the air out of the car and left us limp and ducking.

  “That everything’s connected,” Jesse said.

  Not that I completely disliked my previous job. I wrote speeches mainly for corporate chairmen, ruddy white-haired guys with big ravaged noses, patriarchs of this or that industry. They tended to be sportsmen who flew in company planes to remote lakes in Canada, where they fished the last unspoiled waters of the continent. I went along on one such trip with a c
hairman named McHenry, a sweet and decent man in fact who owned a number of software companies that had contracts with the government. And his grandsons were at the lake, a pair of whitebrowed boys in down vests, primed for blood sport. And I stood and looked at the old lakeside house with its cedar shakes and tall chimneys and all the shabby and splintery porch furniture of a backwoods retreat. I looked at the house and missed it on some curious level. It might have been some object of my own past, some augury in reverse, stately rustic and high-ceilinged and mothballed in the unused rooms, with thick scratchy blankets on the guest beds, bearing college emblems—the promise of things I’d never had but somehow seemed to know, collectively, at the edge of memory. And the way the boys handled their shotguns, born to it, you see—they were kids and I was a man but I think I took a measure of instruction from them, Johno and Todd, not that I joined them in their game stalking. Mostly I sat on the porch and worked on speeches for McHenry but I gleaned from the boys what it must be like to grow into this kind of world, how commensurate to one’s expectation of what is due—the world that money makes and erect bearing and clear speech and college emblems on the beds and a sense of birthright and usable history. At dinner we talked about things, about their schools and sports, and I took pleasure in all this effortless youth, rude youth in the best sense, robust and vigorous and unfinished. I took secondary pleasure, felt myself walking in their angled strides, felt what it was like to cast a line in the sun with nothing obtaining in the world but the rub of the boat’s burred wood and the early heat on my arms, and even when I felt something drawn up out of me, some cornered shape, I was able to pull it down in the table talk and lose it in the throbbing fires that burned inside the great fieldstone hearth.

  I took notes and introduced myself around, walking the floor, a crowded couple of acres—cranes and grapples, hydraulic units for heavy balers and then the hauling equipment, the refuse trucks that seemed toylike for all their bulk, innocent in shiny paint, unprepared for the nasty work ahead.

  I was standing by a model of a confidential shredder called the Watergate, talking to a sales rep about some technical matter, educating myself, jotting notes as we talked, and that’s when I saw the woman in a row of new computer products, dressed in tense denims and carrying a shoulder bag with a satin appliqué—not one of us.

  When she raised her head and looked my way, I knew who she was. I’d watched her walk across the lobby with her husband, a day earlier or two days or whenever it was, walking high on the balls of her feet, camera-selected in the liquid mingle of loiterers and bellmen, and now she stood looking at me dead-on, secretly amused by something.

  We had coffee by the pool. It was ten in the morning and the pool man and the gardeners drifted along the edge of the conversation.

  “Among the waste machines. Strange way to spend a morning, Donna.”

  We’d exhanged first names only.

  “Change of pace,” she said.

  “From what?”

  “From what. From being here to do what we’re doing.”

  She sat on the shady side of the table, hands flashing when she reached for her coffee, and when the umbrella edge lifted in the breeze her face caught contour and warmth.

  “You’re beginning to feel restricted?”

  A slight twisty smile.

  “You think the program’s too confining?”

  She was dark-haired and had a way of pursing her lips demurely to plant a curse on a remark she didn’t like.

  “Where’s your husband?”

  “Sitting around somewhere with a bloody mary.”

  “How do you know he’s not fucking one of the wives?”

  “Or he’s fucking one of the wives.”

  “This is what you’re here for after all.”

  “Exactly,” she said.

  She watched a maintenance man test a sliding door on a balcony.

  “Why aren’t you there while they’re doing it? He’s in bed with another woman and you’re not allowed to watch? There must be a review board you can talk to.”

  “It’s a nice day. Be quiet.”

  “They’re all nice days.”

  “What’s your name again?” she said flatly, teasing out a casually complex irony—mocking herself and me and the swimming pool and the date palms.

  “Donna, I like your mouth.”

  “It’s my overbite.”

  “Sexy.”

  “So I’m told.”

  “What if you and I decided? Or do you have to stick to your own kind?”

  “Barry saw you watching me yesterday. I didn’t see you but he did. And last night at dinner he pointed you out.”

  “Does he think that you and I?”

  “We decided we know who you are.You’re the ice-blue Aqua Velva man.”

  “And who are you?”

  “We’re two swing clubs getting together.”

  “No, you. The mouth and eyes.”

  She watched the maintenance man slide the door back and forth.

  “I’m a person if you ask me questions. You want to know who I am? I’m a person if you’re too inquisitive I tune you out completely.”

  She kept looking into the middle distance.

  “Private person who fucks strangers.”

  “Where’s the contradiction?” she said, smiling warmly over the spume of her cappuccino, not looking at me. “Actually you sort of hate us, don’t you?”

  “Not true.”

  “And I know why. Because we make it public.”

  “It’s business. Why shouldn’t it be public?” I said. “We’re all businesspeople here to make contacts, expand the range of possibility.”

  “Yes, it’s true, you hate us.”

  These were movie scenes, slightly elliptical in tone, with the shots maybe a little offhand, slurred by incidental action. First the wordless moment in the exhibit space, where the characters trade looks amid the truck bodies. Then the poolside exchange with close-ups and pauses, the people a bit detached from their own dialogue, and a sense throughout of morning languor in the standard birdsong, in the rhythmic motion of men with hedge clippers and the shimmer of perfect turquoise in the background.

  The long lens insinuates a certain compression, a half-lurking anxiety that serves not only the moment but the day and week and age.

  And now the scene in the room, my room, where she took off her jeans, mainly because they were too tight, and sat on the bed in her shirt and briefs, legs stretched toward the footboard. I pulled up a chair and sat alongside, in a posture of consultation, my hand around her ankle.

  She was not so pretty in direct light, with a sad wash under the eyes and a spatter bruise on her upper thigh, like an eggplant dropped from a roof. But I liked the way she looked at me, curious, with a tinge of challenge. It made me ambitious, this look, eager to decondition the episode, make it intimate and real.

  “You hate the fact that it’s public. You can’t stand us coming out here and saying it and doing it and acting it out. We talked about this at dinner.”

  “You and Barry.”

  “We play a game.”

  “The two of you. You and Barr’.”

  “Where we study people in a restaurant. And he is really good at this? And we do their habits and secrets and favorite whatever, right down to underwear.”

  “Want to tell me what I’m wearing?”

  “Actually with you.”

  “You didn’t get that far.”

  “No. Because we found there were more important things. Like why you hate us.”

  I watched and listened, trying to locate the voice and manner, place her in some small industrial city, maybe, a Catholic girl growing up by the dreary riverfront, in a house that looked falling-down drunk.

  “You know what I like about you? You make me aggressive, a little reckless,” I said. “I’m having a relapse just sitting here. I’m backsliding a mile a minute.”

  “What’s that supposed to mean?”

  “It means all
the interesting things in my life happened young.”

  “If you fuck me, it’ll be a hate fuck. This what you want? This what you mean by aggressive?”

  “No. But what do you want? You’re in my room half undressed.”

  “Maybe this is what Barry wants.”

  “To put you in bed with a man who hates you?”

  “We’re here to stretch ourselves.”

  “This is for him then.”

  “Maybe.”

  “Carry out a command.”

  “No, share a fantasy, carry out a fantasy.”

  “What does Barry do for you?”

  “None of yer business, bud,” and she says this in a rural barroom twang.

  I didn’t want to understand her too quickly. It was possible she wasn’t here for sex at all but only back matter, the kind of supplementary material that fills out an experience. We would talk a fuck but not do it and she would go back happy to her swapmeet. I looked at the bruise on her thigh. It was depressing to think she might be an agent of her husband’s will, here to do the thing and run it back for him, and old Barry a sometime screenwriter, probably, who makes his money over the phone, selling real estate to retirees. When I leaned forward to kiss her, she turned away with an expert shrug, minimal, impersonal, that managed to place me on the outer brow of the perceivable.

  “Maybe you’re not completely wrong about me, Donna. Maybe I have a theory about the damage people do when they bring certain things into the open.”

  “Go on. We’re always interested in constructive criticism.”

  “But I don’t think you want to hear this. Too personal.”

  “Oh but I do.”

  “I’ll probably make a fool of myself.”

  “Oh make a fool. I want you to.”

  She took off her watch and dropped it on the bed beside her. I felt an urge to fuck her now and risk the malaise of bleak bargain sex that might drift into the room from the boat show of the swingers. Because I didn’t know how dumb I’d sound, how schoolboy earnest, or what exactly I’d be giving up with this digression into personal history.

  “Go on. We want to be enlightened,” she said.