Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  “They’re evacuating Norfolk, Virginia. You know about this? Norfolk. The huge naval base where ships have been setting out, destroyers, cruisers, to form the blockade. They’re evacuating dependents and all nonessential personnel. The question is,” and he turned his head sideways so he could look at the audience obliquely with a sly sense of put-on. “Who moves in when they move out? That’s right—there goes the neighborhood. Because all the spade undesirables from three hundred miles around are gonna snatch up those houses and ruin real estate values and the Navy’s gonna say, Fuck it, man, never mind the Russian subs and cargo ships, let’s aim our guns at Norfolk.”

  Lenny looked a little bloated tonight, his face puff-pastry white and an extracurricular jitter in his body lingo.

  “Everything is real estate. You’re a product of your geography. If you’re a Catholic from New York, you’re a Jew. If you’re a Jew from Butte, Montana, you’re a totally goyish concoction. You’re like instant mashed potatoes. And that’s what this crisis is all about, incidentally. Instant mashed potatoes. The whole technology, man, of instant and quick, because we don’t have the attention span for normal wars anymore, and in the movie version it’s Rod Steiger playing Khrushchev as an Actors Studio chief of state. Dig it, he’s deep, he’s misunderstood, he’s got the accent down pat, the shaved head, he does the screaming fits, he does the motivation—lonely boy from the coal pits ruthlessly fights his way to the top but all he’s really looking for is a wisecracking dame who’ll give him some back talk and make him laugh once in a while. This is no bumpkin—half man, half sausage. Steiger plays him as a moody and sensitive loner burdened by the whole mishegaas of Russian history. We see his tender feminine side when he has an affair in a coat closet with an American double agent played by Kim Novak in a butch haircut.”

  Lenny did the voices, the accents. He was not technically sound but mixed in whole cultures and geographies and cross-references to convey the layers of impersonation involved.

  There was a beatnik element in the audience, several postbeats in old checked lumberjackets vintage 1950, men with a kind of distance in their gazes but still alert to signs of marvels astir in the universe, and a woman in a patchwork shirt with a baby in a pouch, probably the first and last infant at one of Lenny’s shows but this was San Francisco in the week that was.

  “Kennedy makes an appearance in public and you hear people say, I saw his hair! Or, I saw his teeth! The spectacle’s so dazzling they can’t take it all in. I saw his hair! They’re venerating the sacred relics while the guy’s still alive.”

  In the beatnik canon it was America’s sickness that had produced the bomb. If the beats were receptive to Lenny’s take on hypocrisy and related matters and if they regretted his drug busts and obscenity trials, they were probably unmoved by the Russian accents and other ethnic riffs and bits that came shpritzing out of him like seltzer from an old bottling plant in Canarsie. The whole beat landscape was bomb-shadowed. It always had been. The beats didn’t need a missile crisis to make them think about the bomb. The bomb was their handiest reference to the moral squalor of America, the guilty place of smokestacks and robot corporations, Time-magazined and J. Edgar Hoovered, where people sat hunched over cups of coffee in a thousand rainswept truck stops on the jazz prairie, secret Trotskyites and sad nymphomaniacs with Buddhist pussies—things Lenny made fun of. Lenny was showbiz, he was suited and groomed and cool and corrupt, the mortician-comic, and the bomb was part of a scary ad campaign that had gotten out of hand.

  He was wearing a Nehru jacket tonight, a dark tunic with a high collar, it needed cleaning and pressing, and he had a white raincoat draped over his shoulders—either he’d forgotten to take it off or he was planning to get out of here in a hurry.

  He began an impressionistic ramble. Hard to follow. About court cases, lawyers and judges. Like listening to someone who thought he was talking to someone else.

  Then he broke off and said, “Love me. That’s what I’m here for. Tonight and every night. Stop loving me, I die.”

  This was not a bit. The bit followed this. It was a bit he’d thought up sitting in the plastic pygmy toilet on the flight from L.A. with a red light near his right eyeball flashing Return to seat Return to seat.

  “The archangel Gabriel appears in the sky over Havana. Bodyguards wake up Castro and he tells them, Lemme alone, and they tell him it’s the messenger of God, and he gets in a helicopter and goes up there. The angel’s wearing a white robe and he’s holding a flaming trumpet and Castro’s intrigued when he sees that Gabriel’s a black man. He thinks, Great, an articulate Negro, we can have a real no-bullshit dialogue. He says to the angel, I don’t believe in God but lemme ask you. Whose side are you on in this crisis? And the angel says, I’m only gonna say this once. The side that has baseball and jazz. Castro says, We have baseball and jazz. We call it Afro-Cuban music and you’d dig it, man. Swings like crazy. And Gabriel says, Don’t patronize me, motherfucker. I blew with Bird, you know. Yeah, we jammed together at Minton’s in the old days. Okay, you wanna know which side I’m on. The side that has mom and apple pie. Castro says, No problema. The Russians have mom and apple pie. They call it yablochy pirog. The angel says, Okay, you so smart, the side that has Donald Duck, Mickey Mouse and the Mafia. And Castro says, Damn we threw the Mafia out of Cuba. But how come you’re siding with them? The angel says, Lawd Jesus has a soft spot for the mob. Castro says, How come? The angel says, What you think, man? He’s Italian. Castro says, Wait a minute. Jesus is Italian? The angel says, Well—ain’t he? And he looks a little uncertain. He starts shaking the spittle off the mouthpiece of his trumpet, a thing Gabe does whenever he’s insecure. He’s very touchy about his education. He says a little defensively, All the popes are wops. Everybody knows this, man. This because Jesus a wop. Jesus a guinea from the word go. Check his complexion, Jim. Castro says, Jesus lived in the Middle East. Gabriel says, You must be crazy, telling me shit like that. The cat’s Neapolitan. Talks with his hands. Castro says, He was a Jew if you wanna know the truth. The angel says, I know he was a Jew—an Italian Jew. They have them, don’t they? And Castro says, Why am I standing here listening to this? You’re totally loco, man. And the angel says, Are you telling me I believed all my life that Jesus changed water into wine at an Italian wedding—and he didn’t.”

  Lenny did this bit a little distractedly, slurring lines here and there, but isn’t that what he always did, wasn’t that part of the whole hipster format—a kind of otherworldly dope-driven fugue.

  “I saw his hair! I saw his teeth!”

  Then he remembered the line he’d come to love. He went into a semicrouch and put the raincoat over his head and practically stuck the mike down his throat.

  “We’re all gonna die!”

  Yes, he loved saying this, crying it out, it was wondrously refreshing, it purified his fear and made it public at the same time—it was weak and sick and cowardly and powerless and pathetic and also noble somehow, a long, loud and feelingly high-pitched cry of grief and pain that had an element of sweet defiance.

  And his voice sent a weird thrill shooting through the audience. They felt the cry physically. It leaped in their blood and bonded them. This was the revolt of the psyche, an idlike wail from their own souls, the desperate buried place where you demand recognition of primitive rights and needs.

  Then he gets an idea and flicks it straight out, like a boxer jabbing so well it brings a grin to his face.

  “But maybe some of us are more powerless than others. It’s a white bomb, dig.” And his voice changes here, goes redneck and drawly. “It’s our bomb. Moscow and Washington. Think about it, man. White people control this bomb.”

  The idea delights him.

  “You look down at Watts. You look up at Harlem. And you say, Fuck with our chicks, man, we drop the bomb. Better end the world than mix the races.”

  He goes into a bopster’s finger-snapping slouch.

  “Because we’d rather kill everybody than share our wo
men.”

  Then the lights went out. Just like that. The spotlight, the bar lights, the exit signs—all out, A vague shape, Lenny’s, could be seen moving sort of experimentally toward the large metal door that opened directly onto the street and the customers up front might have heard him muttering, “Return to seat, return to seat.”

  A rustle in the audience, a few heads turning, several people standing uncertainly. Were they thinking maybe this is it, a bomb, an airburst? Didn’t the electromagnetic pulse from a test shot in the Pacific send massive currents surging through power lines in Honolulu, only recently, blowing out lights and setting off burglar alarms all over the island?

  The lights came on. The spotlight shone on an empty stage. The field-stone wall had never looked more naked and fake. And there was Lenny, standing about a yard and a half from the exit. He came walking slowly stageward, mimicking a person sneaking back into a room, relieved and abashed, and they waited for him to say something that would pay off the long tense moment and shake them with laughter and he reached the stage and lifted the dangling mike and put it to his face and it began to screech and crackle and then the lights went out again and the afterimage of Lenny’s tallowy face stuck to every retina in the house, half a scared smirk across his mouth, and the baby started crying.

  When the lights came back on, a twenty-second lifetime later, the stage was empty, the metal door was ajar, the show was evidently over.

  JUNE 14, 1957

  There were weeks went by when we barely slept. We were together every hour of the day and night for three or four weeks, much of it, most of it in her car, eating and sleeping there, having sex in her car, sleeping and waking up and looking around and it was still dark, or still light, depending, and finally we’d stop driving for one reason or another, logical or not, and life’d slow down enough so things could happen normally in rooms but only until it was time to go again and she’d rumble up in the 1950 Merc, chassis lowered and driveline slightly souped, and we were headed west again.

  “Don’t tell me your dreams,” I said.

  “But you have to hear.”

  “I don’t want to hear.”

  “Oh you bastard, you have to hear,” Amy said, “because everything that happens has to happen to both of us.”

  “Don’t you know people don’t want to hear other people’s dreams?”

  “Oh you bastard, what other people? Who are these other people?”

  “Watch the road.”

  “Every smallest thought we said we’d share.”

  “Watch the road. Drive the car,” I told her.

  And once I dropped her off in Santa Fe, where she had family friends, and kept the car myself and didn’t play the radio or read the newspaper and she caught up with me a week later in a miners’ bar in Bisbee, Arizona and we played a flirty game of liar’s poker and climbed the high tight streets and felt a thing so powerful, and knew the other felt it, that we thought our faces might ignite.

  “It was a mountain dream. A high clear place near a lake.”

  “Don’t you know dreams are only interesting to the dreamer?”

  “Think you’re so worldly-wise. You’re awful smart for a foreigner.”

  “Drive the car.”

  “Who only learned English when he left New York.”

  Amy was tall and competent and looked good in jeans. She knew how to do things and make things and even her good looks were competent, a straightforward sort of ableness, open and clear-eyed, with a smatter of fading freckles and a dirty-minded smile.

  And once we were in Yankton, South Dakota, early on that summer, and the movie theater was just letting out, the Dakota it was called, with a bright tile facade and Audie Murphy on the marquee, and the young people of Yankton got in their cars and drove up and down the main drag and we drove with them, nearly falling asleep, and we went to drive-in movies and talked about life and we rode across prairies and talked about movies and we drove through car washes and read poetry aloud, one of us to the other, and soapy water slid down the windows.

  Her car was black and hooded-looking and we thought we were phantoms of the road, djinns who could pee unseen in the country dust. She didn’t want me to know her father had given her the car. A graduation gift. But this was a thing I knew because one of her brothers had told me and the other thing I knew was that she’d drop me cold when the trip was done.

  “You know what’s interesting about you? You say you want to share the smallest thought. But what’s interesting about you,” I said, “is that you’re going to forget everything we said and everything we did and every thought we shared the minute.”

  “No.”

  “The minute.”

  “No.”

  “The minute we say goodbye. Because you know what you are? A practical hardheaded more or less calculating individual who is planning ten years ahead and knows every passing minute for what it is.”

  “What is it?”

  “A thing you drain every drop of juice from so you can forget it in the morning.”

  And once we stopped at some stables and she tried to teach me to ride but I got up there and got down again and would not get back up and she rode off with the Indian who led the expeditions, into the cool hills.

  She said, “What’s wrong with that?”

  “I’m just talking.”

  She said, “Draining every minute. What’s wrong with that?”

  “I’m talking.”

  “And I haven’t told you everything. So don’t accuse,” she said.

  “You’ve told me everything twice.”

  “You are such a bastard.”

  “Tell me things you haven’t told me. Go ahead. Shock me,” I said. “You’re not shocking me.”

  She could make and fix things and she liked to talk about the Brookhiser family, the grandparents and pioneer women and gold-panners and all the far-flung offspring of the old rugged stock.

  And once we stayed with her oldest brother, an architect, sleeping in separate rooms—she seemed to have brothers everywhere. This one lived near Yuma in a lopsided house he’d built himself, skewed for effect, out of railroad ties and stucco and stamped tin, and Amy was in an elevated state, looking sideways at the place.

  We were partly out of our minds from driving and we talked at each other across half a major state, pretty much nonstop, and we had the chemistry of a whole long brutal marriage compressed into weeks, the twang in the air of a thing that stays unadjusted, and we also had the feeling it was wrong to sleep because we could be saying something awful and important.

  And once we drove along a dirt road somewhere near Ruby, Arizona and saw four men on horseback driving a bull, a humped bull of amazing size, nearly unreal, and we stopped not only to watch and not only because we thought the animal might charge a moving car but out of a strange and pagan respect, an animal so awesome, a Brahma bull, and the cowboys waved and drove the bull down the red dirt road.

  “I have these tantrums in my mind,” she said, “where you’d hate me if I told you these raging throwing things of sex and jealousy and spite and wishing the worst kind of pain and slow death on someone who is close.”

  “Tell me.”

  “I won’t tell you. Not even you. Least of all you.”

  “I want you to tell me.”

  “I won’t unless you make me,” she said

  Amy had a danceaway manner at times. She had a ritual thing she did, a reflex, not coy but wary and foxy, pulling away from me the more she showed a need, dancing away, eyes bright, her shoulder rounding against my approach. She could be skittish even in the midst of the act, close to pretending we weren’t doing this but something else entirely, I don’t know, holding hands in a school corridor maybe, and sometimes she turned me down flat, saying, No you can’t, or, No I won’t, even as we sprawled on the seat screwing.

  I thought our faces might flare up and disappear the night in mid-June when we climbed the narrow stepped streets of Bisbee, Arizona, shocked by love, so
rt of self-erased, after a beer and a sandwich in a dark bar filled with copper miners and their heartworm dogs. I didn’t know it was possible to feel a thing like this, and then to feel it together, our heads half blown away and our minds emptied out, lost to everything but love.

  She said, “I know what you do. You stay awake and watch me when I sleep.”

  “When do you sleep?”

  “You want too much. You want to crawl inside me basically. You want to follow your cock right in. Did it ever occur to me?”

  “Drive the car.”

  “No but did it ever occur to me?”

  “Don’t look at me when you drive.”

  “No but did it ever occur to me that I would know a man someday who tries to follow me into the bathroom?”

  “Drive the car.”

  She said, “You wanted to crowd into the gas station toilet with me. I just remembered. I almost forgot. Because you thought you might miss something.”

  And once we were passing through Bakersfield, California and the car overheated and we stopped for water at a trailer camp and this was something I absolutely did not know about. All these rows of trailer homes with people cooking hot dogs in a hundred and seven heat. A woman in a bathing suit ironing clothes on an ironing board outside her trailer with small kids riding tricycles in their underwear. And this was a thing I did not know existed, absolutely, or could ever conceive, a thing I had completely missed, people living permanently in trailers, and Amy called me a foreigner from New York.

  I was going to Palo Alto, a textbook editor, fledgling, with an outfit determined to change the nature of the classroom, make it open, fluid, casual and Californian, and she was heading up to Seattle or Portland, she wasn’t sure which, or back across to Denver with a master’s in earth science and a number of professional connections she wasn’t letting on to.

  “I don’t know what I’m doing here with you. I don’t know anything about you. All this time and all this talk and I don’t know anything about you, basically,” she said, “except for the fact that you know how to make me mad.”