Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  “But Wainwright,” she said.

  “Not on board.”

  “Stand up straight.”

  “Jumped ship in Vancouver.”

  “Do they know where he went?”

  “Signed on some other ship. Going north somewhere. He’s a cold-weather person, this Chuckie.”

  “You’ll find him.”

  “It doesn’t matter.”

  “Actually it does. I used to think you were mad. But I understand now. Yes, you’re mad but there’s a certain reasoning behind it. There’s a little childlike spot of logic. A little bedtime thing. You need to finish the story. Dear Marvin. Without the final link to the baseball there’s no way to be sure how the story ends. What good’s a story without an ending? Although I suppose in this case it’s not the ending we need but the beginning.”

  He liked her in a towel. They’d first met near the end of the war, said hello-goodbye but corresponded, she was an air-raid warden with a torch, they called it, and he was a quartermaster handing out condoms for D-day that the troops fixed to the muzzles of their rifles to keep out sand and water and he still liked her in a towel or slip, married twenty-seven years to this point.

  He sat in his shorts at the edge of the bed, taking off his ribbed socks. They would do like tourists in commercials, have marital sex in a nice hotel. Their room had a view of a view. From their window they could look across the courtyard to office towers and reflected clouds in the picture window of the hotel restaurant.

  “Marvin, do you plan to wear it?”

  She was talking about his toupee.

  “I need it for how I see myself.”

  He also needed it because it took the edge off his large ears and sorrowful Marvin nose. He wanted to look nice for her even if she didn’t think it mattered. Tonight he’d wear his best shirt, with cuffs so French he wanted to hum the what-do-you-call.

  “You’re my man, with or without.”

  A thing she said with a half-fake quiver of her mouth that made him feel he owned the earth.

  She slipped off the towel and placed a knee on the end of the bed. They were honeymooners still, shy but eager, and Marvin in his Brooklyn-bomness, his religion of skeptical response—he was only now beginning to see how hard it was to persist in the sentimental myth, after all these years, of their dissimilarity, a thing he’d fabricated out of her accent and complexion. He was glimpsing his Eleanor truth by truth, that she matched him in appetite, that her ambitions for the business were bigger than his own, that her main ambition was America, a fact he’d managed to miss—the things, the places, the bright buzz of products on the shelves, the sunblast of fortune’s favor.

  Here they were in a strange bed in California, what twists to life, how uncertain go the turns, an English girl in his arms, pink and innocent even if she’s not, and Marvin’s polymerized hairpiece secure on his head.

  She wanted Japanese but that wasn’t enough. They had to go to a place where the guidebook said tatami seating.

  Marvin thought if he lived all his life for a hundred years before meeting Eleanor, he would have done the same three or four things in the same order every day and as soon as he met Eleanor, at the age of a hundred and one, he would be sitting on the floor to eat seaweed.

  They faced each other over the low table, in their stocking feet.

  “What’s the word for the thing that’s not ultimate but next to ultimate?”

  “Penultimate.”

  “Penultimate. See, that’s what I’ve got in Chuckie Wainwright.”

  “Sit up straight,” she told him.

  “Greenland. I always had my suspicions about that place.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “That’s where he was stationed in the Air Force if he was actually there.”

  “Why wouldn’t he have been there?”

  “Do you personally know anybody who’s ever been there?”

  “No, I don’t,” Eleanor said.

  “Let me advise you. Neither do I. And neither does anyone I’ve talked to lately.”

  “I think there’s a main city.”

  “You think there’s a main city. Do you know the name of this place?”

  “No, I don’t.”

  “Did you ever look at Greenland on a map?”

  “I guess I have, once or twice perhaps.”

  “Did you ever notice that it’s never the same size on any two maps? The size of Greenland changes map to map. It also changes year to year.”

  “It’s large,” she said.

  “It’s very large. It’s enormous. But sometimes it’s a little less enormous, depending on which map you’re looking at.”

  “I believe it’s the largest island in the world.”

  “The largest island in the world,” Marvin said. “But you don’t know anyone who’s ever been there. And the size keeps changing. What’s more, listen to this, the location also changes. Because if you look closely at one map and then another, Greenland seems to move. It’s in a slightly different part of the ocean. Which is the whole juxt of my argument.”

  “What’s your argument?”

  “You asked so I’ll tell you. That the biggest secrets are staring us right in the face and we don’t see a thing.”

  “What’s the secret about Greenland?”

  “First, does it exist? Second, why does it keep changing its size and its location? Third, why can’t we find anyone who’s personally been there? Fourth, didn’t a B-52 crash about ten years ago that the facts were so hush-hush we still don’t know for sure if there were nuclear weapons aboard?”

  He pronounced it nucular.

  “You think Greenland has a secret function and a secret meaning. But then you think everything has a secret function and a secret meaning,” she said.

  “The bigger the object, the easier it is to hide it. How do you get to Greenland? What boat do you take? Where do you find an airport that has a flight to this main city that nobody knows the name of and nobody has ever been to? And this is the main city. What about the outlying areas? The whole enormous island is one big outlying area. What color is it? Is it green? Iceland is green. Iceland’s on TV. You can see the houses and the countryside. If Iceland is green, is Greenland white? I’m only asking because nobody else is asking. I have no personal stake in this place. But I watch the nature channel and I see tribes they wear mud on their body in New Guinea and I see those thingabeests, they’re mating in some valley in Africa.”

  “Wildebeests,” Eleanor said.

  “But I never hear a peep from Greenland.”

  The waitress brought saki for her, beer for him. She called the drinks beverages and Marvin thought he was on an airliner. All the traveling he’d done, baseball-related, the unsheveled lives, the words and sentences.

  Wait-listed passenger Lundy please present yourself at the podium.

  1. The mother of twins in what’s that town.

  2. The man who lived in a community of chemically sensitive people, they wore white cotton shifts and hung their mail on clotheslines.

  3. The woman named Bliss, which he was younger then, Marvin was, and maybe could have, with eyes as nice as hers, done a little something, in Indianola, Miss.

  4. The shock of lives unlike your own. Happy, healthy, lonely, lost. The one-eighth Indian. Lives that are blunt and unforeseen even when they’re ordinary.

  5. Who knew a Susan somebody who spoke about a baseball with a famous past. Marvin forgets the tribe.

  6. Stomach acting up again.

  7. The chemically sensitive man, his whole body vibrated when somebody snapped a photo a mile and a half away.

  8. And Chuckie Wainwright gone to sea, leaving a woman and child behind, a hippie Christian cluster, barefoot with beads, and Marvin tracking him ship by ship.

  9. And the bone cancer kid in Utah, which his mother blamed the government.

  10. Marvin often lost, setting out one day for Melbourne, Florida and nearly ending up Down Under.

  11. And
the woman with the chipped tooth—a whole long story, you shouldn’t ask.

  12. And the chemicals in the core of the ball that made the man run in place after breakfast every day.

  “Tell me what we’re going to do after dinner.”

  “Me you’re asking?”

  “You’ve been to this city before. I haven’t,” she said.

  “What’s left to do by the time I pick myself off the floor? I’ve got a knot in my leg a cannibal would spit it out.”

  “Come on. Show me a good time.”

  “She wants to go gallivanting.”

  “Let’s make this our city, Marv.”

  Strange how he was compiling a record of the object’s recent forward motion while simultaneously tracking it backwards to the distant past. Sometimes he thought he was seeing the ball sort of fly by. He wanted to find Chuckie and establish the last link, the first link, the connection to the Polo Grounds itself, but if he couldn’t find the guy he would probably buy the ball anyway, the reputed ball, once he located it, and keep looking for Chuckie till he died.

  “I want you to show me the seamy underside,” Eleanor said.

  The ball brought no luck, good or bad. It was an object passing through. But it inspired people to tell him things, to entrust family secrets and unbreathable personal tales, emit heartful sobs onto his shoulder. Because they knew he was their what, their medium of release. Their stories would be exalted, absorbed by something larger, the long arching journey of the baseball itself and his own cockeyed march through the decades.

  All right. Marvin was not a night person but he knew one place he might take her, one street really, that’s all it was, called the Float, out near the old hippie district, shops that came and went overnight, buildings without house numbers, an area catering to very select desires that changed with the phases of the moon.

  He lifted himself off the floor mat in stages, joint by joint, and they called a cab and went outside.

  Twenty minutes later they walked along the street, umbrellas up, it was raining lightly, a few panhandlers about, a woman in a mohawk and white makeup punching a doomsday leaflet into the belt buckle of Marvin’s raincoat. PEACE IS COMING—BE PREPARED. Most of the shops were open despite the hour or because of the hour and they were almost all below street level so you peered over a guardrail to see what they were selling, Role-Reversal Rubber Goods, or Endangered Fashions—jackets made from the skin of disappearing species.

  They went into a hole-in-the-wall place, a lot of cracked plaster and roachy baseboards and a stock of rare recordings. But you’re not talking about old jazz 45s. These were phone taps you could buy, or bugs in the wall, recordings of organized crime figures discussing their girlfriends or their lawyers, he’s a hard-on with a briefcase—you’re talking about men on the eleven o’clock news in cashmere overcoats with enough material you could clothe a Little League team from Taiwan. And phone taps of ordinary anonymous men and women, even more repellent-addictive, your next-door neighbor maybe, and Marvin understood how such a purchase could lead to stupefied hours of listening, could take over a person’s life, all the more so for the utter sucked-dry boredom of the recordings and how they provided the lure of every addiction, which is losing yourself to time.

  The Float had an edge, it had a midnight finish.

  They stepped briefly into shops that sold autopsy photos, that sold movie stars’ garbage, the actual stuff deep-frozen in a warehouse—you looked in a catalog and placed an order.

  Eleanor was delighted by the ambiance, a word she pronounced a little French. Bare-board floors and stained walls. She took Marvin’s arm and they went down the street, spotting a sign in a first-floor window, Foot Fetish Cruise of Spanish Ports.

  Floating zones of desire. It was the what, the dismantling of desire into a thousand subspecialties, into spin-offs and narrowings, edgewise whispers of self. There was a dive with a back room where they showed sex movies involving people with missing limbs. They had gay nights and straight nights. If you were open to suggestion you could float through the zone, finding out who you were by your attachments, slice by slice, tasting the deli specials of the street. You were defined by your fixation.

  A boy walked by in clothes so raggedy he could have been a ticker-tape parade.

  There was a place called the Conspiracy Theory Café. Shelves filled with books, film reels, sound tapes, official government reports in blue binders. Eleanor wanted to have a coffee and browse but Marvin waved the place off—a series of sterile exercises. He believed the well-springs were deeper and less detectable, deeper and shallower both, look at billboards and matchbooks, trademarks on products, birthmarks on bodies, look at the behavior of your pets.

  Something’s staring you straight in the face.

  The largest shop was at street level, a dozen men standing around, furtive, in raincoats, looking at old copies of National Geographic. These were used magazines, used and handled, lived-with, and the address labels were attached, machine-stamped and ink-smudged and skin-greasy, and printed on the labels were the names and addresses of real people out there in magazine America, and the men in raincoats stood by tables and bins and read the labels and leafed through the magazines, heads never lifting.

  A man bought a magazine and left quickly, slipping it under his coat.

  Marvin did not think these men were interested in photos of wolf packs on the tundra at sunset. It was something else they sought, a forgotten human murmur, maybe, a sense of families in little heartland houses with a spaniel flop-eared on the rug, a sense of snug innocence and the undiscovered world outside, the vast geographic. A pornography of nostalgia, maybe, or was it something else completely?

  And was there a back room, because isn’t there always a back room, another splintering of desire, a little more refined and personalized, and in the back room weren’t the magazines cased in acetate folders, maybe these were rare issues or rare labels, or maybe the folders themselves were the fetish items here, dust-veneered, handled, nearly opaque some of them, a dullish sort of plastic with a faint odor and prophylactic feel, like condoms for reading matter, and maybe there’s another room where you need to whisper a password and this is the room with folders only, empty folders, handled a thousand times, and Eleanor was completely creeped out by this place, it was more than she’d bargained for, raincoated men with National Geographics, furtively thumbing the labels.

  Across the street they saw a tall woman’s shop, called Long Tall Sally, but not for dresses and coats. Fantasy Enhancements, the sign read. Books, movies, appliances—tall women only.

  You see a few funny things in some off-street on a rainy night and you wonder why they seem significant. Marvin thought there was something here that might be an early sign of some great force beginning to tremble awake, he didn’t know what exactly, he didn’t know for good or ill, he didn’t know where in the world—a shaking in the earth that could alter everything.

  “All right, Marv. I’m ready to go to bed now.”

  One more place. The one place on the street he’d been to before, run by an acquaintance, you could call him a colleague, Tommy Chan, maybe the country’s first baseball memorabilist if that’s an actual word.

  They went down a grimy set of steps into a dark cubby stacked with scorecards and old songbooks and a thousand other baseball oddities, whole slews of records and documents in tottering columns.

  Eleanor sighed in her chest like a shot partridge.

  And there was Tommy in his high chair, the chair and cash register platformed, islanded higher than the surging mass of old paper that was going chemically brown, and it made Marvin think of all the game footage he’d seen during his search, fans in the Polo Grounds throwing scorecards and newspapers onto the field as the day waned and the Dodgers approached their doom. All that twilight litter. Maybe some of it was sitting here today, preserved by the stadium sweepers and eventually entering the underground of memory and collection, some kid’s airplaned scorecard, a few leaves o
f toilet tissue unfurled in jubilation from the upper deck, maybe autographed delicately by a player, the scatter of a ball game come to rest all these years later, a continent away.

  “This is my wife.”

  “We don’t see many women,” Tommy said like a Buddhist monk in a backcountry compound, polite and wise.

  “It’s a wonder you see anybody. Because frankly who would come here?” Marvin said. “You have to make the place halfway presentable.”

  “Presentable.” Nice word. “Marvin, think. What am I selling here? I’m not selling housewares in a regional mall.”

  He was a smart guy and would-be likable but ageless in the face, which disconcerted Marvin because you like to know how old a man you’re talking to.

  “What did you sell today?”

  “You’re the first people in the shop.”

  “Don’t look so smug.”

  “I’ve been here since noon. These other merchants don’t open till very late.”

  “Since noon. And no one.”

  “How interesting to see a woman,” Tommy said.

  Eleanor stood motionless, maybe part paralyzed by her exotic status.

  She said, “Don’t you have to give people an incentive to buy? Not that it’s any of my.”

  “An incentive.” What a novel idea. “The incentive is within, I think. These materials have no esthetic interest. They’re discolored and crumbling. Old paper, that’s all it is. My customers come here largely for the clutter and mess. It’s a history they feel they’re part of.”

  Marvin said to Eleanor, “I always thought the people who preserved these old things, baseball things, I always thought they lived in the East. I thought this is where all the remembering is done. Tommy is the first collector I found anywhere west of Pittsburgh.”

  Tommy had a smile so slight and fleeting it could only be photographed on film stock developed by NASA. His little knickknack face floated in the gloom and Marvin had a childlike urge to reach up and touch it, just to see if it felt like his, the rough dull surface he washed and shaved every day.

  “Did you find your man?” Tommy said.

  “I found my ship. The man, forget about.”