Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  It was the rooftop summer, still, and she sat in the dense shade of a grape arbor on a Chelsea roof, redwood posts and rafters and a latticework of cedar that was weathered bony gray.

  A poet walked across the roof, he came from the far end of the roof over the thin slate surface.

  He said, “They’re writing the name Marie.”

  And Klara looked out through the opening at the front of the arbor, fringed with broad puckered leaves, grape leaves of whatever variety of native grape, and she saw the smoke from a skywriting plane, spelling the name Marie.

  And the World Trade Center rising at the southern rim, the towers siamesed when you see them from this angle, joined at the waist by a transit crane.

  What an encouragement it was that someone built this thing, lugging so much wood and soil up five narrow flights, raising the posts and joists, and vines growing out of half barrels, old whiskey barrels great-girthed and stained, and she sat with three others at the table eating nachos and drinking sangria, the others did—Klara liked her wine unmixed.

  It was the summer of blue-black nights, ambiguous thunder to the east, hoarse and false, and the city grid below—a guy beheads his lover, puts the object in a box and takes it on the train to Queens.

  And don’t forget the poet drunk on a cast-iron bench and the small strange woman who photographed him obsessively.

  Klara watched the skywriter’s smoke begin to attenuate and drift. A cat walked along the ledge at the far end, a stray from the alleys and back gardens, and she didn’t know why, you never know why, but her mother was part of this moment, angry about something, and a neighbor with a special shoe, a man with a high shoe, an orthopedic shoe, things, shapes, masses, memories, all the braidwork of unmatching states.

  Even the poisoned air floats a woman’s name.

  Miles took her to the studio of a video artist he knew. Not a studio, okay, but an ordinary set of rooms packed with equipment and TV sets, where the guy lived and worked. People started arriving. There were people already there and others started arriving and there was a pungent trail in the air, the root aroma of marijuana rolled and toked communally, and a sense of some event not unlike the showing of a midnight film, only not so loose a group—a little beady-eyed, these people, wary of their own anticipation.

  They sat on the floor mainly. There were a few folding chairs and a sofa in one room and a number of people stood huddled in corners but most of them sat on the floor, which was covered with soda stains and unspeakable scuz. TV sets were arranged in stacks everywhere in the flat and other sets were parked individually on TV tables with copies of TV Guide and there were sets with rabbit ears and a few old mahogany consoles and every size screen from the smallest imported eyeball to the great proscenium face of the household god.

  And one whole wall in one room—there was a TV wall, maybe a hundred identical sets banked floor to ceiling.

  Klara and Miles stood in a corner and she’d begun detaching herself from the event long before she got here because she’d been told what it was at some point but still had to see it, whatever the level of misgiving.

  The event was rare and strange. It was the screening of a bootleg copy of an eight-millimeter home movie that ran about twenty seconds. A little over twenty seconds probably. The footage was known as the Zapruder film and almost no one outside the government had seen it.

  Of course the event had a cachet, an edge of special intensity. But if those in attendance felt they were lucky to be here, they also knew a kind of floating fear, a mercury reading out of the sixties, with a distinctly trippy edge.

  The footage started rolling in one room but not the others and it was filled with slurs and jostles, it was totally jostled footage, a home movie shot with a Super 8, and the limousine came down the street, muddied by sunglint, and the head dipped out of the frame and reappeared and then the force of the shot that killed him, unexpectedly, the headshot, and people in the room went ohh, and then the next ohh, and five seconds later the room at the back went ohh, the same release of breath every time, like blurts of disbelief, and a woman seated on the floor spun away and covered her face because it was completely new, you see, suppressed all these years, this was the famous headshot and they had to contend with the impact—aside from the fact that this was the President being shot, past the outer limits of this fact they had to contend with the impact that any high-velocity bullet of a certain lethal engineering will make on any human head, and the sheering of tissue and braincase was a terrible revelation.

  And oh shit, oh god it came from the front, didn’t it?

  And that was the other thing, all these things in the sequence that begins with frame 313, and wouldn’t you know, Miles would say later, there had to be a thirteen somewhere in the case.

  She was getting backaches again and sleeping episodically and it hurt to sit in a chair sometimes. They told her to go to a yoga class. They told her about herbal teas and holistic massages.

  She went to the hospital to see Jack Marshall, who was recovering from heart surgery, and she went with Esther, who thought that a hospital visit was a thing out of pharaonic antiquity, where you fixed your face and arrayed yourself sedately and you carried books, puzzles and flowers and brought along a priest to utter certain phrases.

  Esther didn’t seem to know what went on in hospitals and she moved at a cringing gait, leaning away from doors to patients’ rooms, afraid she’d glimpse something or catch something, taking it all personally—a challenge to her remoteness from such matters.

  Jack said that catheter was the ugliest word in the language.

  They told her to eat whole grains, take warm baths, to see a man in Finland who did the lower back.

  She went to Acey’s opening, of course, in a hot new gallery uptown, in the early fall, and Acey looked sensational in a white linen suit with a sequined bandeau and the work was all breasts and heart-shaped asses, a raunchy assault in which a woman’s body parts, her skintight gowns and full mouth and bazoomy tits become a kind of politics.

  There was no comfort here, Klara thought. If women have a condition called incompleteness, and some recover nicely and some don’t, then these paintings were flaunting it, loving it, shoving it in your face. And Acey located her arguments in composition and perspective, in the odd bodiness, the massive off-center ass, the misalignments, the relationship of breasts to body, the way Jayne came angling out of her Jaguar, all avid excess, her knees and dimpled crotch bursting out of their package.

  It was a question of lines of force. Here was a woman who lived outside the bureaucratic needs of male desire, outside the detailed ceremonies and horny hands.

  Acey used off-tones, flesh tones, completely nonpop, a lot of sand and amber and a beautiful burnt rose, a sunburnt strip that ran across the top of every canvas, a little sad and frayed, and all of it slightly blurry and doubled, color-xeroxed, that was the telling touch—you have copycat Jayne, the reproduced goddess, and she is all the more strong for being unoriginal.

  They went to a disco somewhere and she watched Miles and Acey dance and they looked totally great together and she felt a little jealous, of course, and she still felt jealous half a minute later—not jealous but begrudging—when Acey danced with a woman.

  She watched them weave and shimmer in the flashing lights and she was admiring and begrudging both, taken by the sight of them, the other woman in jeans and braided sandals, some diplomat’s daughter, Klara thought, hair hung down in spiral curls, and how completely easy they were in their physical mien, a grace of a certain passing abandon, searching each other’s eyes in the fever strobes, and she was stung by her reaction.

  Acey’s ascent, Acey’s name in the air, her brash talent and sense of freedom and her self-asserting manner and how she wants it all and’ll probably get it and dancing sort of striped in the lights with her jacket flying open and the music shaking the walls.

  The funny thing is, Esther wasn’t kidding. A priest showed up, from some actor’s chapel, ar
ranged by Esther, although Jack hadn’t been to church in forty years except for midnight mass at Christmas, which he attended, as they say, religiously.

  They sat around and talked about Broadway show tunes. Jack was too weak to sing or tell jokes. He was a great splayed length of pounded veal. Esther held his hand until she had to go out for a smoke. She’d stopped and started again and the priest went with her and Klara adjusted the pillow for Jack.

  • • •

  And when she embraced Acey at the end of the evening—it was the end of Klara’s evening because the music in that place was a form of brain seizure and she had to get out fast and when she embraced Acey and told her the show was great and wished every blessing on her head, it was an experience of shadings and half meanings and an awful sort of feeling, to extend love to a friend with reluctance.

  She decided to go to Los Angeles with Miles. He’d run out of money for Normal, Illinois and was trying to get financing from an Israeli gangster who lived in L.A. Or there were two men maybe, she wasn’t sure, one Israeli and one gangster, and she decided she’d go. She didn’t like the idea of going but she thought she’d go out of a sense of loose ends or whatever the exact state of mind—she wasn’t sure of that either.

  And the poet drunk on a cast-iron bench, the visiting Romanian on the roof, and how a woman no one knew shot seven rolls of film and left without a word.

  In the three days she was there. She was there to small and passing purpose so it wasn’t supposed to matter what she saw and heard but at some point in the three days someone mentioned the Watts Towers and Klara thought she probably ought to see this place because she’d known about the towers for years and thought maybe if there’s time and then forgot about it.

  At another point she got a call from New York and who was it, someone eager to read reviews of Acey’s show, the first to appear, and they were bad, they were stinging and grim, and Klara called a few people who said word around town was even worse.

  They spoke with controlled excitement, that tone of breathy documentary where you code your pleasure to the formal pauses.

  They waited for her to respond in kind. This made her feel sleazy as hell. They waited for her to rejoice in kind, on cue, with due observance of the protocols.

  That was the next-to-last day. On the last day she went to see the Watts Towers. Miles dropped her off and said he’d come by an hour later. She had no idea. She didn’t know a thing so rucked in the vernacular could have such an epic quality. All she knew about the towers was that the man worked alone, an immigrant, for many years, a sort of unimaginable number of years, and used whatever objects he could forage and scrounge.

  She went around touching things, rubbing her palms over the bright surfaces. She loved the patterns made by jute doormats pressed in cement. She loved the crushed green glass and the bottle bottoms that knobbed an archway. And one of the taller towers with its tracery of whirling atoms. And the south wall candied with pebbles and mussel shells.

  She didn’t know what this was exactly. It was an amusement park, a temple complex and she didn’t know what else. A Delhi bazaar and Italian street feast maybe. A place riddled with epiphanies, that’s what it was.

  Cats passed through, they were everywhere, asleep in the sun or trying to mooch a knuckle rub, strays from the hot streets, ghetto cats, and she felt a kind of static in her body, seeing columns inlaid with broken glass, shards of discarded mirrors, and the crazy-quilt tiles, and the arc he’d shaped over the front gate with cans of Canada Dry.

  She felt a static, a depth of spirit, she felt delectation that took the form of near helplessness. Like laughing helplessly as a girl, collapsing against the shoulder of your best friend. She was weak with sensation, weak with seeing and feeling. She touched and pressed. She looked up through the struts of the tallest tower. Such a splendid independence this man was gifted with, or likely fought for, and now she wanted to leave. She didn’t need to stay any longer. An hour was too long and she stood by the entrance, buzzing, and waited for Miles to arrive.

  That night she got on the phone and tried to find Acey, she called around for an hour, waking people up, and Miles came in, dragging, and pulled off his boots where he stood, a seamless swipe of the hand, repeated.

  She said, “Look, your socks are the color of the rug. That must mean it’s time to leave.”

  He told her about his afternoon, which was spent around a pool drained of water, speaking of which—there was a guy there who described how he’d faked his own suicide by drowning and managed to effect a clean disappearance.

  “You’re talking a mile a minute,” she said.

  And there’s Yankel saying, the Israeli with the bankroll, Some people fake their death, I’m faking my life.

  She called New York again and found out Acey had gone somewhere or just didn’t want to talk.

  Miles wanted to talk. Miles was beat, he was dragging but also amped-up, jangled by caffeine and freeway traffic and whatever else he was inhaling in the way of controlled substances. Three days of whatever else on the fringes of the business. They were in a borrowed apartment and he had to get up early to go to Normal and there was a space between his weariness and his sparky nerve ends and they filled it persuasively with sex. They did it and did it and talked and did it. They had a thumping time, or she did—she wasn’t sure what he was having. He was intense and a little feverish and had his indigenous common cold and when he talked it was on a polyphonic plane, steep and desperate, and when he fucked it was strong and aloof—not aloof but rootless, a kind of any-fuck in the sense that there was nothing outside the act, they lived for the strokes, for the nasal drone, and finally he slept, and then she did, and they barely made their flights in the morning.

  From the air, what was it like? The vast swept West, basin and range, you could almost detect the mineral content, the badland shale—it was the kind of immense and unsparing beauty that left you slightly subdued because you didn’t know the natural language, the names of formations and mountain folds.

  And her father with his Hopi scout, Hopi or Navaho—his View-Master slides of a headbanded scout at the edge of a canyon. Sitting in the kitchen clicking his slides through the handheld device. He specialized in slides of the great West. He called it the great West and it was, it is, look at it, his 3-D slides of the trail ride down the canyon on muleback, or the Canyon Dons the Velvety Cloak of Twilight, and that’s exactly what it did, his completely unreachable West, and he sat in the kitchen because the light was better there.

  She didn’t know the West and she’d never flown above it in weather so clear. It looked young and untouched, it had the strangeness of worlds we’d never seen, it was not ours from up here, it was too flowingly new and strange—we hadn’t settled it yet.

  Klara remembered who she was. She pulled away from the window and she was a sculptor, although she didn’t always believe it, an artist—she believed them sometimes when they said she wasn’t.

  She thought of her work, the skewed meter of putty and junk, the crambo clink, she thought of rust rot and wadded cotton batting. She wanted to feel the urge to work again. She wanted to be rushing out of the airport to take a taxi home. She needed to feel that thing begin to happen, suddenly, that faithworthy feeling, that newness, a freshet of life behind the eyes.

  She called around looking for Acey and reached her a few days later, she was bitter and tight and didn’t want to talk. But Klara talked to her. She was good at this. She’d talked like this to Teresa a thousand times, the daughter determined to be unhappy.

  They had dinner that night and talked some more. Klara was in control. She cajoled and encouraged. She was good at this. She was eager to help and she was helping.

  The waiter stood there reciting the specials. There was a fire down the street, or a false alarm, and an amplified voice erupted from one of the trucks, absorbing everything around it, and the days got darker earlier, and the streets began to acquire a medieval texture with strange draped women, scar
fed like Tuaregs, living in junked cars, watchful and silent, and the ones who danced in subways for loose coins, and the ones with their own radio programs that you didn’t need a radio to listen to because they followed you down the street in the endless inspired catastrophe of New York.

  After a while some people got up and walked around. They didn’t leave, almost nobody left. The footage kept repeating and they walked around, they stirred from their corners and visited the other rooms or stood in front of the TV wall. They were like tourists walking through the rooms of some small private collection, the Zapruder Museum, one item on permanent display, the twenty-some-odd seconds of a home movie, and it runs continuously.

  It ran continuously, men who carried the power of the state, the film muddied by sunglint, riding in a car with their confident wives, all the jostled quality of birthday footage.

  Or they stayed on the floor and passed a joint and just kept looking in an acquired sort of awe, here comes the car, here comes the shot, and it was amazing that there were forces in the culture that could out-imagine them, make their druggiest terrors seem futile and cheap.

  The footage ran at normal speed on some sets, slow motion on others, and the car moved down Elm Street and past the freeway sign and the head dipped out of the frame and reappeared and the shot was unexpected.

  Different phases of the sequence showed on different screens and the spectator’s eye could jump from Zapruder 239 back to 185, and down to the headshot, and over to the opening frames, and on the TV wall the sets and frames were geared to patterns. The TV wall was a kind of game board of diagonals and verticals and so on, interlocking tarots of elemental fate, or synchronous footage running in an X pattern, and whatever the mathematics of the wall there were a hundred images running at once, here comes the car, here comes the shot, and even though it wasn’t part of the footage Klara was sure there was a Hertz sign on top of the Book Depository—she’d seen it in photographs, forgotten about it until now and thought it was another passing strangeness, however minor, a rent-a-car sign brooding over the motorcade.