Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  In other words to muralize a whole train you need a full night and part of the next night and no shuffling bullshit talk.

  And a mood of who you are in your head day by day, which he did not share with anyone at street level, and going to sleep in a cousin’s bed at night or in the supply cellar of some bodega where they knew Ismael Muñoz and gave him a place that was adequate and hearing the doors go ding dong and seeing the man from Stockholm, Sweden, who took pictures of his piece.

  He liked to watch the eyes of platform people to see how they reacted to his work.

  His letters and numbers told a story of tenement life, good and bad but mostly good. The verticals in the letter N could be drug dealers guarding a long diagonal stash of glassine product or they could be schoolgirls on a playground slide or a couple of sandlot ballplayers with a bat angled between them.

  Nobody could take him down. He kinged every artist in town.

  They had dozens of cans out and ready, all by prearrangement, and he called a color and they shook the can and the ball went click.

  “Where’s my Perrier?” he said.

  But you have to stand on a platform and see it coming or you can’t know the feeling a writer gets, how the number 5 train comes roaring down the rat alleys and slams out of the tunnel, going whop-pop onto the high tracks, and suddenly there it is, Moonman riding the sky in the heart of the Bronx, over the whole burnt and rusted country, and this is the art of the backstreets talking, all the way from Bird, and you can’t not see us anymore, you can’t not know who we are, we got total notoriety now, Momzo Tops and Rimester and me, we’re getting fame, we ain’t ashame, and the train go rattling over the garbagy streets and past the dead-eye windows of all those empty tenements that have people living there even if you don’t see them, but you have to see our tags and cartoon figures and bright and rhyming poems, this is the art that can’t stand still, it climbs across your eyeballs night and day, the flickery jumping art of the slums and dumpsters, flashing those colors in your face—like I’m your movie, motherfucker.

  They came funneling out of the lobby and moved down the aisles and found their seats, the anticipation of early evening largely depleted by now, and they settled in quickly, all business, and the second half of the film began.

  Klara looked around for Miles. But Miles didn’t show. He’d evidently sensed the impatience of his guests and decided to stay with the cineastes in the private booth upstairs.

  “Does this mean we’re unworthy?” Esther said.

  It seems you are witnessing an escape. Figures moving upward through gouged tunnels into a dark rainy night. A long scene of silhouettes and occasional tight shots, eyes peering in the dark.

  Then a spotlight swung across the orchestra pit and came to rest on a side curtain on the north wall, set slightly higher than the stage and some yards distant. And you knew what you were going to see half a second before you saw it and what a mood-booster, absolutely. The curtains parted and the horseshoe console of New York’s last great theater organ, the mighty Wurlitzer, stood framed and gleaming in the dark hall.

  The organist was a slightish man, white-haired, who seemed to hover in the alcove, his back to the audience, wizardly in his very smallness, and he hit the thunder pedal just as a figure on the screen drew back cowering from some danger above, and laughter swept the auditorium.

  The prisoners continued their climb, moving in grim proximity to each other.

  The organist hit a series of notes that had an uncanny familiarity. The sort of thing that takes you hauntingly back to your bedside radio and the smells in your kitchen and the way the linoleum used to ripple near the icebox. It was a march, sprightly is the word, and it worked in ironic counterpoint to the foreground silhouettes on the screen, figures climbing in rote compliance, and Klara felt the music in her skin and could practically taste it on her tongue but wasn’t able to name the piece or identify the composer.

  She gave old Jack a poke in the arm.

  “What’s he playing?”

  “Prokofiev.”

  “Prokofiev. Of course. Prokofiev did scores for Eisenstein. I knew that. But what’s this march?”

  “It’s that Three Oranges thing, whatever it’s called. You’ve heard it a thousand times.”

  “Of course, yes. But why have I heard it a thousand times?”

  “Because it was the theme music on an old radio show. Brought to you by Lava soap. Remember Lava soap?”

  “Yes, yes, of course.”

  And Jack chanted in sacramental sync with the organ.

  “El-lay-vee-ay. El-lay-vee-ay.”

  “Of course, yes. It’s completely clear to me now. But I don’t remember the program,” she said.

  And Jack kept chanting because he was having such a good time with this, and so was the audience, eyes shifting from the screen to the console and minds locked in radio recall, those of you who were old enough, and somewhere backstage, in a dozen lofts, the enormous organ pipes sounded the tones—pipes, wind chests, shutters and blowers bringing this vintage theme, borrowed from a Russian opera, back home to the past.

  And Jack left off his chanting to adopt the bardic voice of a veteran announcer doing the show’s opening.

  “ ‘The FBI in Peace and War,’ ” he spoke ringingly.

  It was nice to have friends. Klara remembered now. Neighbor kids used to listen to the show, faithfully, toward the end of the war, and she could almost hear the voice of the actor who played the FBI field agent.

  The curtain closed on the organist just as the sun came out and Esther said, “Finally.”

  Yes, the film has climbed to the surface, to a landscape shocked by light, pervasive and overexposed. The escaped prisoners move across flat terrain, some of them hooded, the most disfigured ones, and there are fires in the distance, the horizon line throbbing in smoke and ash.

  You wonder if he shot these scenes in Mexico, or could it be Kazakhstan, where he went to shoot Ivan the Terrible, later, during the war?

  Many long shots, sky and plain, intercut with foreground figures, their heads and torsos crowding out the landscape, precisely the kind of formalist excess that got the director in trouble with the apparat.

  The orchestra was in its covert mode, somewhere under the pit, playing faintly at first, a soft accent edged against the strong visuals.

  You study the faces of the victims as they take off their hoods. A cyclops. A man with skewed jaw. A lizard man. A woman with a flap of skin for a nose and mouth.

  A series of eloquent largo passages begins to fill the hall.

  The audience was stilled. You saw things differently now. If there was a politics of montage, it was more intimate here—not the themes of atomic radiation or irresponsible science and not state terror either, the independent artist who is disciplined and sovietized.

  These deformed faces, these were people who existed outside nationality and strict historical context. Eisenstein’s method of immediate characterization, called typage, seemed self-parodied and shattered here, intentionally. Because the external features of the men and women did not tell you anything about class or social mission. They were people persecuted and altered, this was their typology—they were an inconvenient secret of the society around them.

  Now there is a search party on the prowl, men on horseback strung out across the plain. They recapture some of the fugitives, they shackle and march them in somber lockstep, in tired mindless versions of the stage routines, and Klara saw it retrospectively, how the Rockettes had prefigured this, only it wasn’t funny anymore, and they bare the faces of those who are still hooded, and the shots begin to engage a rhythm, long shot and close-up, landscape and face, waves of hypnotic repetition, and the music describes a kind of destiny, a brutish fate that bass-drums down the decades.

  Klara was moved by the beauty and harshness of the scenes. You could feel a sense of character emerge from each rough unhooding, a life inside the eyes, a textured set of experiences, and an understanding seemed
to travel through the audience, conveyed row by row in that mysterious telemetry of crowds. Or maybe not so mysterious.

  This is a film about Us and Them, isn’t it?

  They can say who they are, you have to lie. They control the language, you have to improvise and dissemble. They establish the limits of your existence. And the camp elements of the program, the choreography and some of the music, now tended to resemble sneak attacks on the dominant culture.

  You try to imagine Eisenstein in the underground of bisexual Berlin, forty-five years ago, with his domed head and somewhat stunted limbs, hair springing from his scalp in clownish tufts, a man with bourgeois scruples and a gift for sublimation, and here he is in the Kit Kat or the Bow Wow, seamy heated cellars unthinkable in Moscow, and he’s dishing Hollywood gossip with men in drag.

  I’m terribly fond of Judy Garland, he once said.

  But you don’t want to be too modishly knowing, do you? He was a dynamo of ideas and ambitious projects but it isn’t clear that he had the sexual resolve to realize actual contact with either men or women.

  Look at the figures in long shot on the low smoky line of the plain.

  All Eisenstein wants you to see, in the end, are the contradictions of being. You look at the faces on the screen and you see the mutilated yearning, the inner divisions of people and systems, and how forces will clash and fasten, compelling the swerve from evenness that marks a thing lastingly.

  You realize the orchestra has been silent for a time. All hoods removed, members of the expedition plodding in endless matching step, trailed by distempered dogs oozing from the eyes. Then you hear the melody again, one more time, the familiar march from Prokofiev, not the mock-heroic organ but full orchestra now, and the pitch is very different, forget the amusing radio reminiscence, it is all vigilance and suppression, the FBI in peace and war and day and night, your own white-collar cohort of the law.

  The march lasted only a minute and a half but how dark and strong, what fatedness in the rolling brass, and then there was a long silence and a white screen and finally a face that transfigures itself in a series of multiple-exposure shots, losing its goiters and gnarls, a seamed eye reopening, and it was awfully mawkish, okay, but wonderful also, a sequence that occurred outside the action proper, a distinct and visible wish connecting you directly to the mind of the film, and the man sheds his marks and scars and seems to grow younger and paler until the face finally dissolves into landscape.

  The orchestra began to rise into the pit and the music now was Shostakovich, you are sure of this, how spacious and skysome, lyrically wheeling, bird-wheeling over the wide plain.

  Then it ended. It didn’t end, it just stopped dead. A landscape of foreground dogs and distant figures leaning to their march. Klara remained in her seat, you all did, and she felt a curious loss, that thing you used to feel as a child when you walked out of a movie house in the middle of the day and the streets were all agitation and nasty glare, every surface intense and jarring, people in loud clothing that did not fit.

  Miles showed up and they went to a bar that Jack knew. Jack knew all the midtown bars, he knew the steak houses and the best cheesecake and where you got onion soup that makes you think you’re in Les Halles and he told funny stories about his early days in the theater district, flacking shows up and down the street, but Klara wasn’t listening.

  The film was printed on her mind in jits and weaves. She felt she was wearing the film instead of a skirt and blouse. She heard Esther laugh and it sounded like someone in a room three rooms away. Miles told a story that required her to join in but she couldn’t get the details straight. She smiled and drank her wine. The conversation was over there somewhere. She kept seeing snatched fragments. She saw the marked faces in the great landscape. She had the movie all around her, sitting in a bar under walls of white neon beating in the Broadway heat.

  4

  * * *

  In cities you build a language of circumspection and tact, a thousand little intimations, the nuance that has a shimmer of rubbed bronze. Then you go to the wilderness and become undone, lapsing into babble, eating mushroom caps that implode your brain, that make you preternaturally aware and afraid, turn you into an Aztec bird.

  Matt Shay sat in the terminal at the airport in Tucson and listened to announcements bouncing off the walls.

  He was thinking about his paranoid episode at the bombhead party the night before. He felt he’d glimpsed some horrific system of connections in which you can’t tell the difference between one thing and another, between a soup can and a car bomb, because they are made by the same people in the same way and ultimately refer to the same thing.

  There was a garbage strike in New York.

  There was a man being paged known only as Jack.

  A woman with an accent said to someone seated next to her, “I so-call fell in love with him the day he paint my walls.”

  There was a man in a wheelchair eating a burrito.

  • • •

  He sat waiting for Janet’s plane to be announced. He wondered if this might be a good time to call his brother. Nick was living in Phoenix now, doing some vague consulting work and teaching Latin once a week at a junior college.

  When Nick dies a team of metaphysicians will examine the black box, the personal flight recorder that’s designed to tell them how his mind worked and why he did what he did and what he thought about it all, but there’s no guarantee they’ll find the slightest clue.

  Reciting Latin epigrams to business majors in a place called Paradise Valley.

  Matt took off his glasses and blew on the lenses, his mouth worked into a whispery ellipse, and then he ran his handkerchief over the steamy surface and held the glasses to the light.

  Whenever the ambient voice asked someone to pick up the white courtesy phone, a small girl made a fist and spoke into it.

  He put his glasses on. Janet came out of the gate and he laughed when he saw her. Laughed in sheer and healthy delight, in relief that she was finally here and in physical anticipation as well, and he laughed at the shambles they were going to make of the camping trip they were taking and he laughed in the end because he couldn’t help it. He was woozy from the long day’s drive and didn’t have the strength to keep from laughing.

  Janet walked briskly toward him wearing a slightly twisted grin, the one that meant she wasn’t completely sure what she was doing here.

  “The captain said it’s a hundred and four.”

  “Should I call Nick?”

  “What for? It was seventy-two in Boston.”

  “He’s right up the road. It seems dumb not to call.”

  “There’s a garbage strike in New York,” she said.

  He was woozy from driving and she was numbed by confinement and engine noise. They went to the parking area and crammed her bags into the jeep. The jeep was brimful, a consumer cartoon bulging with equipment, clothing, luggage and books.

  “Tell me again where we’re going,” she said.

  • • •

  They spent the night at the edge of an Indian reservation, in an old adobe lodge with a teenage girl eating popcorn at the desk and the white dome of an observatory visible from their bed.

  It was a fine beamed room with creepy suburban furniture and they were shy because they hadn’t seen or touched each other in a long time and Janet had to get used to this. They’d only slept together several times, planned always in advance. They didn’t have a set of understandings, a pace and glance, the whole hushed protocol of wishes and hints, bodies lightly brushing in the elevator. There was no elevator here. And Janet was a little unsure of herself in a strange room. It wasn’t really her, was it?

  Another woman might feel the lure of anonymity. Meeting a man in a room of a thousand previous men and women. Shedding the personal past in a faceless sort of motel abandon. But this wasn’t a motel and at least there was that to be thankful for.

  She was nervous, standing by the window in her jeans and bra. They’d gotten
only as far as the bra. That’s when she paused to talk, to let him know how she felt. She was not sexually anxious. She was sexually anxious, yes, but mainly unsure in a general way, she said, because it did not seem completely comfortable, meeting a man in a setting that had predetermined expectations—a strange bed in the middle of nowhere. She had a way of seeing herself, a wariness about things that didn’t feel right. The place wasn’t particularly clean for one thing. The girl downstairs for another, cross-eyed or walleyed, whatever. She talked to him honestly, in her small voice, slightly piping, and he lay in bed and listened, waiting for her to get used to the idea, a flight across country that ends in a random sort of room, making her feel isolated from everything that’s familiar.

  He listened and waited and finally understood that some of the things she was saying about herself were also true of him. He understood this the way you sneak up on things you’ve always sort of known.

  She stood by the window. Over her shoulder he could see the observatory dome washed in last light at the top of the mountain.

  • • •

  There were men who walked these deserts a hundred years ago, the penitentes, chanting and fasting, scourging themselves with hemp whips, or whips made from the braided fiber of the yucca plant, or cord whips, la cuerda, a small whip of tightly knotted wool.

  Janet didn’t know how to look at the desert. She seemed to resent it in some obscure personal way. It was too big, too empty, it had the audacity to be real.

  They drove and talked.

  “Tell me again why we’re going there.”

  “It’s a wildlife preserve and gunnery range.”

  “So if one doesn’t kill us, the other will.”

  He reached over and put his hand on her leg.

  “We want to be alone,” he said.

  “We could be alone in Boston.”

  “They don’t have bighorn sheep there. We want to see bighorns in the wild.”

  “What will we do when we see them?”

  “We’ll be happy. It’s rare that anyone sees them. And it’s very remote, where we’re going. We’ll rejoice and be glad. They’re beautiful animals that no one ever sees.”