Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  He came in from the breezeway.

  “The carrots are in the crisper, Rick.”

  He liked to nibble on a raw carrot after he’d waxed and buffed the car.

  He stood looking at the strontium white loaf that sat on a bed of lettuce inside a cake pan in the middle of the table.

  “Wuff what is it?”

  “It’s my Jell-O chicken mousse.”

  “Hey great,” he said.

  Sometimes she called it her Jell-O chicken mousse and sometimes she called it her chicken mousse Jell-O. This was one of a thousand convenient things about Jell-O. The word went anywhere, front or back or in the middle. It was a push-button word, the way so many things were push-button now, the way the whole world opened behind a button that you pushed.

  May cause discoloration of urine or feces.

  Eric sidled along the wall and slipped into the bathroom, palming the sloppy condom. He washed it out in the sink and then fitted it over his middle finger and aimed the finger at his mouth so he could blow the condom dry. And in the movie version of his life he imagined how everything is projected on a CinemaScope screen, all the secret things he did alone over the years, and now that he is dead it’s all available for public viewing and all his dead relatives and friends and teachers and ministers can watch him with his finger in his mouth, more or less, and a condom on his finger, and he is panting rhythmically to dry it off.

  He heard his mother call his name.

  He had to wash it and reuse it because this was the only one he had, borrowed from another boy, Danny Anderson, who’d taken it from his father’s hiding place, under the balled socks, and who swore he’d never used it himself—a thing that wouldn’t be fully established until both boys were dead and Eric had a chance to see the footage.

  To avoid suffocation keep out of reach of small children.

  Eric hid the rubber in his room, pressed into a box of playing cards. He took a long look at Jayne Mansfield’s picture before he slipped it into the world atlas on his desk. He realized that Jayne’s breasts were not as real-looking as he’d thought in his emotionally vulnerable state, dick in hand. They reminded him of something but what? And then he saw it. The bumper bullets on a Cadillac.

  He went into the kitchen and opened the fridge, just to see what was going on in there. The bright colors, the product names and logos, the array of familiar shapes, the tinsel glitter of things in foil wrap, the general sense of benevolent gleam, of eyeball surprise, the sense of a tiny holiday taking place on the shelves and in the slots, a world unspoiled and over renewable. But there was something else as well, faintly unnerving. The throb perhaps. Maybe it was the informational flow contained in that endless motorized throb. Open the great white vaultlike door and feel the cool breezelet of systems at work, converting current into power, talking to each other day and night across superhuman spaces, a thing he felt outside of, not yet attuned to, and it confused him just a bit.

  Except their Kelvinator wasn’t white of course. Not on the outside anyway. It was cameo rose and pearly dawn.

  He looked inside. He saw the nine tilted parfait glasses and felt a little dizzy. He got disoriented sometimes by the tilted Jell-O desserts. It was as if a science-fiction force had entered the house and made some things askew while sparing others.

  They sat down to dinner and Rick carved the mousse and doled out portions. They drank iced tea with a slice of lemon wedged to the rim of each glass, one of Erica’s effortless extra touches.

  Rick said to Eric, “Wha’cha been up to all afternoon? Big homework day?”

  “Hey dad. Saw you simonizing the car.”

  “Got an idea. After dinner we’ll take the binoculars and drive out on the Old Farm Road and see if we can spot it.”

  “Spot what?” Erica said.

  “The baby moon. What else? The satellite they put up there. Supposed to be visible on clear nights.”

  It wasn’t until this moment that Erica understood why her day had felt shadowed and ominous from the time she opened her eyes and stared at the mikado yellow walls with patina green fleecing. Yes, that satellite they put into orbit a few days ago. Rick took a scientific interest and wanted Eric to do the same. Sure, Rick was surprised and upset, just as she was, but he was willing to stand in a meadow somewhere and try to spot the object as it floated over. Erica felt a twisted sort of disappointment. It was theirs, not ours. It flew at an amazing rate of speed over the North Pole, beep beep beep, passing just above us, evidently, at certain times. She could not understand how this could happen. Were there other surprises coming, things we haven’t been told about them? Did they have crispers and breezeways? It was not a simple matter, adjusting to the news.

  Rick said, “What about it, Eric? Want to drive on out?”

  “Hey dad. Ga, ga, ga, great.”

  A pall fell over the table, displacing Erica’s Sputnik funk. She thought Eric’s occasional stuttering had something to do with the time he spent alone in his room. Hitting the books too hard, Rick thought. He was hitting something too hard but Erica tried not to form detailed images.

  Do not puncture or incinerate.

  The boy could sit in the family room and watch their super console TV, which was compatible with the knotty pine paneling, and he could anticipate the dialogue on every show. Newscasts, ball games, comedy hours. He did whatever voice the announcer or actor used, matching the words nearly seamlessly, and he never stuttered.

  All the other kids ate Oreo cookies. Eric ate Hydrox cookies because the name sounded like rocket fuel.

  One of her kitchen gloves was missing—she had many pairs—and she wanted to believe Eric had borrowed it for one of his chemistry assignments. But she was afraid to ask. And she didn’t think she looked forward to getting it back.

  Yesterday he’d dunked a Hydrox cookie in milk, held it dripping over the glass and said thickly, “Is verry gud we poot Roosian moon in U.S. sky.”

  Then he took a bite and swallowed.

  The men went out to find the orbiting satellite. Erica cleared the table, put on her rubberoid gloves and began to do the dishes. Rick had kidded her about the gloves a number of times. The kitchen was equipped with an automatic dishwasher of course. But she felt compelled as a homemaker to do a preliminary round of handwashing and scouring because if you don’t get every smidge of organic murk off the fork tines and out of the pans before you run the dishwasher, it could come back to haunt you in the morning.

  Flush eyes with water and call physician at once.

  And the gloves protected her from scalding water and the touch of food scraps. Erica loved her gloves. The gloves were indestructible, basically, made of the same kind of materials used in countertops and TV tubes, in the electrical insulation in the basement and the vulcanized tires on the car. The gloves were important to her despite the way they felt, clammy but also dry, a feeling that defied innate contradiction.

  All the things around her were important. Things and words. Words to believe in and live by.

  Breezeway

  Car pools

  Crisper

  Bridge parties

  Sectional

  Broadloom

  When she finished up in the kitchen she decided to vacuum the living room rug but then realized this would make her bad mood worse. She’d recently bought a new satellite-shaped vacuum cleaner that she loved to push across the room because it hummed softly and seemed futuristic and hopeful but she was forced to regard it ruefully now, after Sputnik, a clunky object filled with self-remorse.

  Stacking chairs

  Room divider

  Scatter cushions

  Fruit juicer

  Storage walls

  Cookie sheet

  She thought she’d lift her spirits by doing something for the church social on Saturday to pep up the event a little.

  Do not use in enclosed space.

  She would prepare half a dozen serving bowls of her Jell-O antipasto salad. Six packages Jell-O lemon gelatin. Six teas
poons salt. Six cups boiling water. Six tablespoons vinegar. Twelve cups ice cubes. Three cups finely cut salami. Two cups finely cut Swiss cheese. One and a half cups chopped celery. One and a half cups chopped onion. Twelve tablespoons sliced ripe olives.

  She remembered coming home one day about six months ago and finding Eric with his head in a bowl of her antipasto salad. He said he was trying to eat it from the inside out to test a scientific theory of his. The explanation was so crazy and unconvincing that it was weirdly believable. But she didn’t believe it. She didn’t know what to believe. Was this a form of sexual curiosity? Was he pretending the Jell-O was a sort of lickable female body part? And was he engaged in an act of unnatural oral stimulation? He had jellified gunk all over his mouth and tongue. She looked at him. She had people skills. Erica was a person who related to people. But she had to put on gloves just to talk to him.

  She set to work in the kitchen now, listening all the while for the reassuring sound of her men coming home, car doors closing in the breezeway, the solid clunk of well-made parts swinging firmly shut.

  AUGUST 14, 1964

  The charismatic black stood outside the church talking to the crowd.

  Downtown the young whites leaned on brick walls and parked cars, crew-cut young men in chinos or jeans, or squatted on the curbstone, some older men among them, most showing a small hard salty grin, eyes tight, watching the marchers move out of the bus terminal.

  Past the brick dorms and athletic fields of the campus, a group of black men lounged against a car parked in front of a rickety frame house in an alley off Lynch Street. A man with a cane. A man with blue suspenders. A man in a necktie and white shirt and straw fedora. A couple of younger men sitting on the fenders and talking to a woman eating a peach on the porch steps.

  The charismatic speaker said, “They made us run, so we got good at it.”

  The marchers came into town carrying knapsacks and signs. Some of them walked toward the campus as the sun began to set. A number of white-shirted police stood along the route, smoking, some of them, and seeming to disregard the marchers, who walked in two loose columns toward the sound of the speaker’s voice.

  The young speaker said, “They made us run until we got so good at it we didn’t need their inspiration anymore.”

  In the Greyhound terminal a number of marchers separated from the others and began to sit on the floor of the whites-only waiting room.

  But the porch didn’t really have steps. It had a couple of loose cinder blocks set against the brick underpinning and that’s where the woman sat.

  Students joined the crowd in front of the church, listening to the speaker, and some of the cornerboys came out of Cooper’s, where they’d been shooting pool, and stood around to watch the crowd.

  Men and women kept marching through the downtown streets and the whites sat on the curbstone and watched them, seemingly unable to stop grinning.

  Four highway patrolmen stood outside the bus terminal leaning on a cruiser and talking casually, the butt ends of their shotguns leveraged on their hips, muzzles pointing up.

  The young speaker said, “But just about the time we became Olympic-class runners, some of us decided we were gonna sit down.”

  The woman finished eating the peach and held the pit in her hand and when one of the men leaning on a car fender said something racy or tricky or sly, she threw the pit at his feet with a kind of dismissive motion.

  Somebody adjusted the speaker’s microphone and his voice began to carry now, reaching the guardsmen who were coming down out of trucks at the end of a blocked-off street.

  A black woman stood watching in the bus terminal. She’d come from up north, riding buses all the way, and now she was in the terminal, fittingly, about to sit on the floor. She watched local police move among the demonstrators and lift a young man by an arm and leg, taking him in two directions, briefly, at once, until they got straightened out, a pair of short-sleeved cops, not looking at the youngster, who sat unstruggling in their grip as they carried him out to the street.

  The charismatic black said, “There’s a certain feeling circulating in the culture that black people ought to develop a willingness to die.”

  The guardsmen formed up and began to fix bayonets and their commander stood nearby in summer tans and a campaign hat, looking around for the armored van.

  The miked voice floated over the heads of the assembled marchers and students and townspeople.

  On the floor of the bus terminal the woman waited for the police to reach her and carry her out to the truck and take her to the jail, one Rose Meriweather Martin, known as Rosie, an insurance adjustor from New York City.

  “The interesting thing is that this here’s not what the white man is saying. It’s what the Negro is saying. If they want to kill us, in other words, let’s develop a willingness to die. Or was saying. Because we damn well ain’t saying it anymore.”

  There was an armored van moving through the streets, with bulletproof windows and gunports, and the men inside had submachine guns and tear-gas launchers.

  The young whites began moving away from the walls and the parked cars. They got up from the curbstone and dusted off their pants and they went to stand at the far end of the street, uninterested in the marchers now or interested in a different way.

  The woman on the porch saw some young men running in the dark, cornerboys or students, looking back as they ran, and the men lounging against the parked car also saw them but did not stiffen or speak or move away. It was their car, their street, and they needed to measure the situation.

  The young black man said, “I ain’t saying don’t resist. I ain’t saying assume the fetal position and let them put their cocked revolvers upside your head. Tell you what I’m saying.”

  The whites didn’t look at the marchers as people coming into town to agitate and make trouble. Not anymore. They stopped reading the signs about voter rights and freedom rides. They stopped grinning at white nuns marching with black ministers. It was the armored van they were interested in now, twenty-three feet long, searchlights blazing.

  “And I ain’t saying you’re obliged to love those truncheons they’re beating you with.”

  They watched it go by and began to follow it, some of them, vaguely.

  The guardsmen wore standard issue helmets and were putting on gas masks now and the troopers outside the bus terminal wore white ridged helmets that resembled construction hard hats.

  Rosie Martin watched them get closer, local police in pairs scooping up the demonstrators and taking them out to flatbed trucks.

  Blacks with shirttails flying, looking back as they ran, and maybe the woman on the porch could smell a burning in the air.

  The gas masks were bulky devices with goggle eyes and swollen nosepieces. The guardsmen looked insect-eyed, stepping into a floodlit area near the black college campus. The masks had flap mouths and filtration chambers that bulged out of the left side like pineapple tins.

  A man lay spread-eagle outside the terminal, being patted down by troopers.

  A man was being tug-of-warred, a young black in a striped shirt, two guardsmen gripping an arm and a leg and a marcher holding the other leg and trying to pull him back into the crowd outside Mount Calvary church.

  Somebody threw a bottle and the woman on the porch heard it break in the street. She stood up and tried to see what was happening in the dark out there. Voices, people running, people coming this way and then turning back.

  “Tell you what I’m saying. I’m saying there’s nothing in the world to worry about despite the evidence all around you. Because anytime you see black and white together you know they are joined in some effort of betterment. Says so in the Constitution.”

  Another bottle broke.

  And in the terminal Rosie Martin saw them drag a woman out the door facedown and headfirst.

  The guardsmen moved into the crowd outside the church, holding their bayoneted rifles at port arms, and the gas came blowing in behind them.


  In the terminal a cop started clubbing people on the arms and legs. Rosie watched him calmly, counting the number of sit-in marchers before he got to her.

  The charismatic speaker said, “They’re spraying, I’m talking. I’m gonna keep on talking as long as I got a larynx that can function. Black people love to rap,” he said.

  The marchers sat down, they scattered, some entered the church, some ran the other way, and the guardsmen dragged others along the ground toward the barricaded street.

  At the terminal the cops had their billy clubs out and were moving in a stoop among the demonstrators, who sat hunched forward with their arms over their heads.

  The gas rolled through the streets scorching people’s eyeballs, making their eyeballs feel sucked out by the heat. The streets were filled with running men and women. The gas rolled in and they strayed down alleys, feeling their way, chests tight, coughing in spasms, or chose to walk, some of them, shambling half blind toward the church.

  Rosie knew she’d be taken off to jail on a flatbed garbage truck and then put in a crowded cell and given a piss-smelling mattress because this had been the scuttlebutt for days.

  Blacks came running down the dark street and the men who’d been lounging against the car began to stir finally. The man with blue suspenders went into a frame house and the man with the straw hat got into the car and rolled up the windows and then got out again and the other men slid off the fenders and went to stand on the porch where the woman stood looking down the street.

  Women wanted the same prison conditions the men got. This was a definite issue.

  Guardsmen massed around the armored van, insect-headed, and looked down the dark alleys for students throwing rocks or men out of the bars, the juke joints, still holding cans of Colt 45, and they heard the speaker say, “It’s all a question of mind over matter. They don’t mind and we don’t matter.”