Underworld

by Don DeLillo

I moved into a kiss and she did not lean away this time but returned a certain tepid sip, a hint of distances we’d yet to cross.

  “A long time ago, years ago, I read a book called The Cloud of Unknowing. Written by an anonymous mystic, I’m not sure, fourteenth century maybe, whenever the Black Death was—he was writing in the days of the Black Death. A priest gave me this book. This was the priestly part of my life. He pressed this book upon me. And I’ve forgotten most of this book over the years. But I know that it made me think of God as a force that withholds himself from us because this is the root of his power. I remember one sentence.”

  “Neat title.”

  “I remember the title and I remember one sentence.”

  I stopped here, letting the words take shape and sequence, my hand around Donna’s ankle, and I sensed a certain receptiveness, a thing I needed to beat back the incongruity. What the hell, I thought. Take a chance.

  “The sentence appears near the beginning of the book and it made me feel I was being addressed directly by the writer, whoever he was, a poet maybe, a poet-priest, I like to imagine. ‘Pause for a moment, you wretched weakling, and take stock of yourself.’ See, that was me, sort of incisively singled out, living in a state of pause and stocktaking, twenty years old and stupider than my fellows and desperate to find a place for myself. And I read this book and began to think of God as a secret, a long unlighted tunnel, on and on. This was my wretched attempt to understand our blankness in the face of God’s enormity. This is what I respected about God. He keeps his secret. And I tried to approach God through his secret, his unknowability. Maybe we can know God through love or prayer or through visions or through LSD but we can’t know him through the intellect. The Cloud tells us this. And so I learned to respect the power of secrets. We approach God through his unmadeness. We are made, created. God is unmade. How can we attempt to know such a being? We don’t know him. We don’t affirm him. Instead we cherish his negation. We wretched weaklings, you see. And we try to develop a naked intent that fixes us to the idea of God. The Cloud recommends that we develop this intent around a single word. Even better, a single word of a single syllable. This was very appealing to me. I became preoccupied with this search for the one word, the one syllable. It was romantic. The mystery of God was romantic. With this word I would eliminate distraction and edge closer to God’s unknowable self.”

  “What kind of word?”

  “I searched. I thought about it. I took it seriously. I was young.”

  “Love would be a word. But not for you. Too namby-pamby,” she said.

  “Help would be a word. But even for a weakling, this was a little pitiful. And I thought the problem is the language, I need to change languages, find a word that is pure word, without a lifetime of connotation and shading. And I thought of the Italian word for help because this is what my father used to say when we annoyed him, my brother and I, he’d clasp his hands and wag them and roll his eyes toward heaven and he’d say, Aiuto. The way his own father or grandfather probably did. A word to penetrate the darkness. Aiuto.”

  “Too many syllables.”

  “Too many syllables and too comical. Because he did it basically to make us laugh, distract us with laughter. Maybe my father knew twenty words of Italian, I don’t know, he was born here, or maybe he spoke the language fairly well, I don’t really know. But he did this word. This word was a three-act play the way he did it, drawing it out, croaking like a poisoned duke. Ay-oo-tow. And we laughed because on some level he was making fun of the old country and the old mannerisms. A great and profound word but I couldn’t use it.”

  Oddly now she reached down and took my hand and moved it up along the inside of her thigh and placed it sort of cuppingly snug in her crotch, adjusting her posture to get completely comfy, like a child at story time.

  “Where’s your father now?”

  “Dead.”

  “Where’s your brother?”

  “I don’t know.”

  She waited for me to continue.

  “But I knew I was right to abandon English. And finally I came upon a phrase that seemed alive with naked intent. Alive with something I knew and felt from my own experience. A beautiful spontaneous prayer. Five syllables but so what. Three words and five syllables but I knew I’d found the phrase. It came from another mystic, a Spaniard, John of the Cross, and for that one winter this phrase was my naked edge, my edging into darkness, into the secret of God. And I repeated it, repeated it, repeated it. Todo y nada.”

  “Todo y nada.”

  “Yes. And what does it make you think of? What does it refer to, in your own life? What does it describe?”

  “Sex,” she said at once. “The best sex. Todo y nada”

  “Yes, exactly.”

  “So what are you saying?”

  “I’m not saying sex is our divinity. Please. Only that sex is the one secret we have that approximates an exalted state and that we share, two people share wordlessly more or less and equally more or less, and this makes it powerful and mysterious and worth sheltering.”

  “Don’t take it into the open, you’re saying. But this is because you’re still the same romantic person, probably, you were at twenty. Sex is not so secret anymore. The secret is out. You know what sex means to most people?”

  She put her hand down over mine and shifted her pelvis slightly, working into my palm.

  “Sex is what you can get. For some people, most people, it’s the most important thing they can get without being born rich or smart or stealing. This is what life can give you that’s equal to others or better, even, that you don’t have to go to college six years to get. And it’s not religion and it’s not science but you can explore it and learn things about yourself.”

  She paused and it was true, she looked a little toneless in here, away from the Sundance of poolside light, her face deprived of its unquiet shading, the mica animation that gave her bones a line and edge. All the more interesting, I thought. All the graver, the weightier. I was after real time and an honest reading of the woman.

  “And anyway there’s all kinds of public sex,” she said. “Horny writers write sex scenes.”

  “Alone. They write them alone. And you read them alone.”

  “How do we meet people with similar interests?”

  “I don’t know. Silently, clandestinely.”

  “Like criminals. But we’re not criminals. We want our own conference, with hors d’oeuvres and little napkins. There’s too much loneliness in America? Too many secrets? Let them out, open them up. And don’t look at me so closely. You’re looking too closely.”

  “How else do I know you?”

  “You don’t know me. You don’t want to know me. We’re in the desert here.”

  “There’s another sentence from The Cloud. But I only recall a fragment. About the sharp dart of longing love.”

  “Sounds porno.”

  “You’re porno and your friends are porno. You have your own magazine, right? Like any business. Like the rock and gravel business and the mortician business. Only you show pubic hair. And home movies through the mail.”

  Head erect, her mouth pursed in mock self-righteousness.

  “This isn’t about smut, you know. I’m not a smutty person believe it or not”—she began to laugh a little wildly, her voice cracking—“as I sit here with a strange man’s hand on my pussy.” And she hip-twisted and moaned oohingly at the friction—moaned in parody but also in earnest.

  “I’m not a strange man’s hand.”

  “Don’t look at me.”

  “Who will I look at?”

  “I didn’t come to this freaking outback to be analyzed.”

  “You’re my relapse. Not the first but the first in a very long time. And that’s what makes you unsafe.”

  “What makes you unsafe?”

  “I’m your exception to indiscriminate fucking.”

  “You think you’re discriminate? What makes you discriminate? I don’t even remember your name
.”

  I told her my name, first and last, and she said it sounded phony.

  “More. I need more,” she said. “There you were. Weak and wretched.”

  “Yes.”

  “Reading books about God.”

  “Yes.”

  “Talking to priests.”

  “Yes.”

  “So what was your sin? Your secret? The reason for your wretched state?”

  She had that original challenge in her eyes but without the knowingness, the amused and slightly tilted—not disdain but unwillingness to allow the possibility of surprise. This was gone and there was a curiosity that was less sheer and frontal.

  I withdrew my hand from her body and sat back and folded my arms across my chest, head tilted, as a sign of resignation, of being abject before a mystery, a young man unstatus’d and base.

  “I’d been in correction.”

  “In correction.”

  “As we called it. A juvenile correction center. They’d sent me away for a time and when I got out, I went to a small Jesuit outpost in northern Minnesota, where they specialized in hardship kids and others of uncommon qualities.”

  “And you were in correction?”

  “For shooting a man. I shot a man.”

  “Killed him?”

  “Killed him. I was seventeen when it happened and to this day I’m not sure whether the intent was express or implied or howsoever the law reads. Or was it all a desperate accident?”

  “And you’ve thought about this a great deal?”

  “I’ve tried, on and off. I retain the moment. I’ve tried to break it down, see it clearly in its component parts. But there are so many whirling motives and underlying possibilities and so whats and why nots.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Well at some point, with my finger already moving the trigger, at some micropoint in the action of the mind and the action of the finger and the trigger-action itself, I may have basically said, So what. I’m not really sure. Or, Why not do it and see what happens.”

  “Who was the man?”

  “Who was the man. He wasn’t an enemy or a rival. A sort of friend if anything. A guy who helped me out occasionally, an older guy, not an influence in any way, I don’t think, except in the sense that he owned a shotgun.”

  I had a rash inspiration then, unthinking, and did my mobster voice.

  “In udder words I took him off da calendar.”

  A voice my wife had never heard and a story I’d never told her and how strange this was and how guilty it made me feel. But not right away. Guilt later in Phoenix—save the guilt for the bookwalled rooms and the Turkish prayer rugs and the fashion magazines in the bathroom basket.

  Donna had the sniffles. She’d taken a midnight swim and caught a chill and that was all we talked about for a while. We talked about the night and the chill air and the food in the restaurant.

  Then she took off her panties and handed them to me. I tossed them on the bed and got undressed.

  I felt a breath of estrangement in the room and thought she might be a voyeur of her own experience, living at an angle to the moment and recording in some state of future-mind. But then she pulled me down, snatched a fistful of hair and pulled me into a kiss, and there was a heat in her, a hungry pulse that resembled a gust of being. We were patched together grappling and straining, not enough hands to grab each other, not nearly sufficient body to press upon the other, we wanted more hold and grip, a sort of mapped contact, bodies matching point for point, and I raised up and saw how small she looked, naked and abed, how completely different from the woman of the movietone aura in the hotel lobby. She was near to real earth now, the sex-grubbed dug-up self, and I felt close to her and thought I knew her finally even as she shut her eyes to hide herself.

  I said her name.

  We were hollowed out like scooped guava when it was over. Our limbs ached and I had a desert thirst and we’d killed the morning off. I went and peed and watched the fluid splash amber in the sun-washed bowl. What well-being in a barefoot piss after a strenuous and proper screw. In the room she sniffled a little and sounded hoarse and brassy and I rolled a blanket over her. She fell into pretend sleep, leave-me-alone sleep, but I eased onto the blanket and pressed myself upon her, breathing the soft heat of her brow and tasting at the end of my tongue the smallest beadlets of fever. I heard room maids talking in the hall and knew we were gone from each other’s life, already and forever. But some afterthing remained and kept us still, made us lie this way a while, Donna and I, in the all-and-nothing of our love.

  You withhold the deepest things from those who are closest and then talk to a stranger in a numbered room. What’s the point of asking why? Guilt later in Phoenix, where I could evade vexing questions in the daily wheel of work.

  I was the juniormost fellow with the fixed smile. There was a spirit of generous welcome, the spirit of one-of-us and how-many-kids and let’s-have-lunch. I wanted to be bound to the company. I felt complicit with some unspoken function of the corporation. I stayed late and worked weekends. I corrected my foot-drag step. I heard my own voice and saw my smile and earned an office at the end of the hall, where I wore a crisp gray suit and grew stronger by the day.

  It was a long run through a narrow draw on the last day of the conference and we jostled for space, Sims and I, just beginning to forget the tremor in the fives and the way the room spoke to us, and I thought this is when we get the aftershock, after we forget the shock.

  The first part of the run was a monologue that Sims delivered with a veteran’s artful zest and he stopped talking only to take deep breaths or blow sweat off the edge of his upper lip.

  “The thing about raw sewage,” he said. “You treat it with loving care. You route it through bar screens way underground. And pump it up to settling tanks and aeration tanks. And you separate it and skim it and nurse it with bacteria.”

  He went through the process in lushest detail, stroking certain words, drawing them out, oozy, swampy, semisolid, thick, slick, sludge.

  “Because this is your medium now. A tarlike substance with a funky savor to it.”

  What gusto he managed to salvage from our punishing run, eyes wide and voice strong—he made it sound like a personal attack.

  “And you wait for a sludge tanker to come and get it. Honey buckets, they’re called in the Northeast. The tanker dumps the sludge in the ocean. Like you take a dump in your own home. One hundred and six miles from the Jersey shore, legally. Or less, illegally.”

  “Interesting.”

  “Interesting,” he said. “Isn’t it?”

  “Yes it is.”

  “Never thought about it, did you?”

  “I thought about it a little.”

  “Never thought about it. Say it.”

  “I thought about it vaguely maybe.”

  “Vaguely maybe. I see. That’s well put. Perfect really.”

  A delta-wing plane nudged the sun and vanished in the dizzy ozone, climbing dreamily.

  “But how is it my medium?” I said.

  We ran through the gulley, over the stony surface.

  “This is what you and I. And all of us here. Fundamentally deal with. Over and above. Or under and below. Our stated duties.”

  “You’re saying all waste.”

  “That’s what I’m saying.”

  All waste defers to shit. All waste aspires to the condition of shit.

  We poked and elbowed, jockeying for advantage, and Sims blew mist off his upper lip.

  “How are things at home? Things all right at home?”

  “Things are good. Things are fine at home. Thanks for asking.”

  “Love your wife?” he said.

  “Love my wife.”

  “Better love her. She loves you.”

  We went a little faster and he took off his cap and hit me with it and put it back on.

  “But this ship thing,” I said.

  “This ship thing is a dumb rumor that builds on itself.”


  “The ship is a running joke.”

  “The crew keeps changing. You know that?” he said. “They change the crew more often than they change the name of the ship.”

  He laughed and hit me with his hat.

  “One crew leaves, they have to press-gang another.”

  He pulled ahead of me and I caught up and we went hard past the golf course in the bright clean heat.

  Later we drove back together and went directly to the campus, our Los Angeles headquarters, a series of bridge-linked buildings with mirrored facades, high above a freeway, and I could see it all shatter in slow motion in my mind.

  A cobbled road took us past ponds and blond sculpture and cinnamon trails for jogging.

  “You see these buildings breaking apart and coming down?”

  He looked at me.

  “You don’t think this is what we’re supposed to see when we look at these buildings?”

  He wanted nothing to do with this idea.

  “You don’t think it’s a new way of seeing?”

  We walked along hallway mazes fitted with electronic gates that Sims opened by inserting a keycard in a lockset. This was the smart new world of microprocessors that read coded keys. I liked the buzz and click of the card in the lock. It signified connection. I liked the feeling of some power source accessible to those of us with coded keys. In the elevator he spoke his name into a voiceprint device, Simeon Branson Biggs, suitably sonorous, and the machine lifted instantly to three.

  We sat in his office.

  “Nobody dies here. I get blood pressure readings right down the hall. We have exercise rooms. They measure my body fat and tell me what to eat in grams and ounces.”

  He lit a cigar and looked at me through the skeptical smoke.

  “People come to work in tennis shoes and blond beards. Play tennis and volleyball. I go to sleep black every night and come back white in the morning.”

  He wore shoes we used to call clodhoppers, great heavy things with squared-off toe caps.

  “You believe in God?” he said.

  “Yes, I think so.”

  “We’ll go to a ball game sometime.”

  Sims had calls to make and mail to read. I spent some time with other people and then took a taxi to my hotel—I’d be here for a couple of days. And the taxi driver said something odd. We were driving along. I didn’t know where we were. You come to a city and you go where the driver takes you—you go on faith. And he said something either to me or to himself. He was an old guy with nervous hands and a catch in his voice, a half gasp like a splice that wasn’t working.