Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  George was in the room all right, playing solitaire.

  “I thought you might be here.”

  “Cool down here.”

  “That’s what I thought,” Nick said.

  George gathered and stacked the cards and shuffled them. Nick sat across the table and George dealt out three to a man and turned over a club trump and they started playing a game.

  “The trouble with cards, when you play for money,” George said, “and you concentrate on all those numbers and colors for hours and hours, a poker game into the morning, you can’t fucking sleep when you go home.”

  “Your mind’s too active.”

  “You can’t fucking no-way sleep.”

  “Your brain is racing.”

  “But we play a little friendly game of briscola. Maybe I can sleep in an hour or two.”

  “You have trouble, normally, sleeping?”

  “I have trouble sleeping. I also have trouble staying awake.”

  They laughed and played. They played for an hour and talked about nothing much and smoked a couple of cigarettes each and dropped the butts in an old beer bottle.

  “This thing I want to show you. Found it a couple of days ago,” George said, “in a car I was parking at the track. Slid out from under the seat when I made a quick turn.”

  “The turns you make.”

  “I’m cautious. Hey. Compared to most guys.”

  “You respect the automobiles you park.”

  “Not so much the owners. The cars, definitely.”

  They laughed. George reached behind him and came up with an object from the bottom shelf, down behind paint cans and rolled linoleum.

  It was a shotgun, sawed-off, the barrel extending only a couple of inches from the forearm part and the stock cut down to a pistol grip arrangement.

  “What? You found it?”

  “I didn’t want to leave it in the car where somebody who’s not responsible.”

  “Let me see,” Nick said.

  He reached across the table for the weapon. He sort of bounced it in his hands and then stood up to hold it more naturally.

  “I know one thing about shotguns,” George said. “You shoot with both eyes open.”

  “Sawed-off is illegal, right?”

  “That’s the other thing I know. Once you cut the thing down it’s a concealed weapon.”

  “Looks old to me.”

  “It’s old, rusty, wore out,” George said. “Piece of, basically, junk.”

  He posed with it, Nick did, a pirate’s pistol or an old Kentucky flintlock if that’s the word. It was more natural two hands than one, the left hand under the forepart to steady and point.

  He hefted it and pointed it. He saw an interested smile fall across George’s face. He had the weapon pointed at George. He was standing a couple of yards from George and George was in the chair and he held the weapon midbody, slightly above the hip, which meant it was pointed at George’s head.

  A little brightness entered George’s eye. Rare in George. This brightness in the eye. And an interested look moved across his mouth. It was the slyest kind of shit-eating grin.

  “Is it loaded?”

  “No,” George said.

  This made him smile a little wider. They were having a good time. And he had a look on his face that was more alive and bright than George had ever looked. Because he was interested in what they were doing.

  Nick pulled the trigger.

  In the extended interval of the trigger pull, the long quarter second, with the action of the trigger sluggish and rough, Nick saw into the smile on the other man’s face.

  Then the thing went off and the noise busted through the room and even with the chair and body flying he had the thumbmark of George’s face furrowed in his mind.

  The way the man said no when he asked if it was loaded.

  He asked if the gun was loaded and the man said no and the smile was all about the risk, of course, the spirit of the dare of what they were doing.

  He felt the trigger pull and then the gun went off and he was left there thinking weakly he didn’t do it.

  But first he pointed the gun at the man’s head and asked if it was loaded.

  Then he felt the trigger pull and heard the gun go off and the man and chair went different ways.

  And the way the man said no when he asked if it was loaded.

  He asked if the thing was loaded and the man said no and now he has a weapon in his hands that has just apparently been fired.

  He force-squeezed the trigger and looked into the smile on the other man’s face.

  But first he posed with the gun and pointed it at the man and asked if it was loaded.

  Then the noise busted through the room and he stood there thinking weakly he didn’t do it.

  But first he force-squeezed the trigger and saw into the smile and it seemed to have the spirit of a dare.

  Why would the man say no if it was loaded?

  But first why would he point the gun at the man’s head?

  He pointed the gun at the man’s head and asked if it was loaded.

  Then he felt the action of the trigger and saw into the slyness of the smile.

  He stood above the spraddled body in the blood muck of the room, not that he clearly saw the room, and he thought he heard a sucking sound come out of the man’s face, the afterbirth of face, the facial remains of what was once a head.

  But first he went through the sequence and it played out the same.

  When they took him out to the cop car there were people on the stoops, in robes, some of them, and heads in many windows, hanging pale and hushed, and a number of young men stood near the car, some he knew well and some in passing, and they watched him closely and gravely, thinking this was a kind of history taking place, here in their own remote and common streets.

  EPILOGUE

  DAS KAPITAL

  * * *

  Capital burns off the nuance in a culture. Foreign investment, global markets, corporate acquisitions, the flow of information through transnational media, the attenuating influence of money that’s electronic and sex that’s cyberspaced, untouched money and computer-safe sex, the convergence of consumer desire—not that people want the same things, necessarily, but that they want the same range of choices.

  We’re sitting in a pub called the Football Hooligan. There’s a man at the next table and I’ve been waiting for him to turn this way so I can confirm the uncanny resemblance.

  I’m talking to Brian Glassic, old buddy Brian, and he seems to listen intently below the music. This is a thing called cult rock, loud, yes, but mostly piercing and repetitive, on an icy kind of wavelength, and Brian sits with his head low, nodding now and then, in agreement or fatigue—it’s hard to tell.

  Some things fade and wane, states disintegrate, assembly lines shorten their runs and interact with lines in other countries. This is what desire seems to demand. A method of production that will custom-cater to cultural and personal needs, not to cold war ideologies of massive uniformity. And the system pretends to go along, to become more supple and resourceful, less dependent on rigid categories. But even as desire tends to specialize, going silky and intimate, the force of converging markets produces an instantaneous capital that shoots across horizons at the speed of light, making for a certain furtive sameness, a planing away of particulars that affects everything from architecture to leisure time to the way people eat and sleep and dream.

  Here the people are eating ethnic fast food and drinking five-star cognac and they are crowding the dance floor and falling down, some of them, and being dragged half senseless to the sidelines.

  I have to lower my head to speak to Brian, who seems to be sinking into his drink, but I resist the urge to nod along with him. True, I am mostly quoting remarks made to me earlier in the day by Viktor Maltsev, a trading company executive, but they are remarks worth repeating because Viktor has thought about these matters in the very ruck of every kind of changeover a society can bear.
r />   Brian mutters that he finds this place frightening. I look at the kids on the bandstand, five or six gawks with fuzz heads and fatigue pants and bomb packs strapped to their bare chests—college boys probably who’ve appropriated a surface of suicide terror.

  But it’s not the music, he says, or the band and its trappings. And I think I know what he means. It’s the sense of displacement and redefinition. Because what kind of random arrangement puts a club such as this up on the forty-second floor of a new office tower filled with brokerage houses, software firms, import companies and foreign banks, where private guards hired by various firms to patrol the corridors sometimes shoot at each other and where the man at the next table, with a bald dome, slit eyes and a jut beard, turning this way at last, is clearly a professional Lenin look-alike.

  We take the elevator down and go out to the street, carrying our luggage. We can’t find a taxi but after a while an ambulance comes along and the driver sticks his head out the window.

  “You go airport?” he says.

  We get in the back and Brian goes to sleep on a collapsible gurney. About twenty minutes later, out the glass panel on the rear door, I see a huge billboard advertising a strip club.

  INTERACTIVE SONYA

  Nude Dancing on the Information Highway

  We get to Sheremetyevo and the driver wants dollars of course. I wake up Brian and we go into the terminal and manage to find the man from the trading company. He tells us there’s no particular hurry because we’re at the wrong airport anyway.

  “Where should we be, Viktor?”

  “No problem. I have arranged. You went to club?”

  “The club was very interesting,” I tell him. “Lenin was there.”

  “There is Marx and Trotsky too,” he says. “Very crazy thing.”

  This is what I thought after we arrived at the military airfield and boarded a converted cargo plane that went bucking down the runway and lifted swayingly into the mist. And after the plane reached cruising altitude and I got up and found a window slit in an emergency exit behind the port wing and pressed my face to the glass to gather a sense of the great eastern reaches, endless belts of longitude, the map-projection arcs beyond the Urals and across the Siberian Lowland—a sense mainly of my own imagining, of course, a glimpse through falling dusk of whatever landmass was visible in the limited window space.

  And this is what I thought after I sat down again.

  I thought leaders of nations used to dream of vast land empires—expansion, annexation, troop movements, armored units driving in dusty juggernauts over the plains, the forced march of language and appetite, the digging of mass graves. They wanted to extend their shadows across the territories.

  Now they want—

  I explain my thinking to Brian Glassic, who sits on the opposite side of the aircraft facing me. We’re on parallel benches like paratroops waiting to reach the drop zone.

  Brian says, “Now they want computer chips.”

  “Exactly. Thank you.”

  And Viktor Maltsev says, “Yes, it’s true that geography has moved inward and smallward. But we still have mass graves, I think.”

  Viktor sits near Brian, a slim figure in a leather coat. We have to shout at each other to converse above the noise that drones and rattles through the hollowed-out interior of the massive transport. He tells us the plane was originally designed for mixed loads of cargo and troops. There are dangling wires, fixtures jutting from the bulkhead. The aircraft is all cylinder, all ribs and slats and shaking parts.

  “It’s a company plane, Viktor?”

  “I buy it this morning,” he says.

  “And you will use it to ship material.”

  “We fix it up good.”

  His trading company is called Tchaika and they want to invite our participation in a business scheme. We are flying to a remote site in Kazakhstan to witness an underground nuclear explosion. This is the commodity that Tchaika trades in. They sell nuclear explosions for ready cash. They want us to supply the most dangerous waste we can find and they will destroy it for us. Depending on degree of danger, they will charge their customers—the corporation or government or municipality—between three hundred dollars and twelve hundred dollars per kilo. Tchaika is connected to the commonwealth arms complex, to bomb-design laboratories and the shipping industry. They will pick up waste anywhere in the world, ship it to Kazakhstan, put it in the ground and vaporize it. We will get a broker’s fee.

  The plane comes into heavy weather.

  “There’s some concern in Phoenix,” I tell him, “about the extent of your operating capital. The kind of safety equipment we’re talking about to move highly sensitive material can result, Viktor, in expenditures that are quite dizzying.”

  “Yes yes yes yes. We have the expertise.” He unzippers this word with a certain defensive zest as if it sums up all the insufficiencies that have mocked him until this point. “And we have the stacks of rubles that are also quite, I may say, dizzying. You didn’t read Financial Times? I will send you.”

  Brian is lying on his side wearing his coat and gloves.

  “I forget,” he says. “Where are we going exactly?”

  I call across the heaving body of the plane. “The Kazakh Test Site.”

  “Yeah but where’s that?”

  I shout. “Where are we going, Viktor?”

  “Very important place that’s not on the map. Near Semipalatinsk. White space on map. No problem. They will meet us.”

  “No problem,” I call across to Brian.

  “Thank you both. Wake me when we land,” he says.

  I look at him carefully. It’s cold and we’re dead tired and I look at Brian. The knowledge of what he’s been doing, the calculated breach of trust—I want to stay awake while he sleeps so I can watch him and fine-edge my feelings and wait for my moment.

  Viktor takes a bottle of Chivas Regal out of his overnight bag. I do a mime of polite applause. He goes to the flight deck to get some glasses but they don’t have any or won’t share them. I go through my bag and come up with a bottle of mouthwash and take off the cap and lurch across the aircraft shaking out the grooved plastic piece as I go. Viktor pours some scotch into the cap and I return to my seat.

  We have no seat belts and the passage is growing rougher. I have the bottle of mouthwash wedged upright in my bag so the stuff won’t spill. We are the three of us alone except for the person or persons flying the aircraft and I think we feel a little forlorn in the huge tubed space, more like people in a shabby terminal late at night than lucky travelers aboard their plane. I sip my Chivas from the cap, listening to the shaking structure around us, the minimum ribbing, a sort of endoskeletal arch that makes every groaning noise in the hymnal of manned flight. The scotch tastes faintly of gargled mint.

  “What did you do before you joined Tchaika?”

  “I teach history twenty years. Then no more. I look for a new life.”

  “There are men like you in many American cities now. Russians, Ukrainians. Do you know what they do?”

  “Drive taxi,” he says.

  I notice the way his eyes leap to catch mine, slyly, a brief merged moment that allows him to mark my awareness of his superior status.

  He is drinking from the bottle.

  I see the plane as if from some protected position in the sky. It is a swift shape hurtling through the dark—I felt sure it was dark by now. It is a mass of dark metal racing through the rain and wind as if in a swift scene from an old black-and-white movie, scored with urgent music.

  Viktor asks me if I’ve ever witnessed a nuclear explosion. No. It is interesting, he says, how weapons reflect the soul of the maker. The Soviets always wanted bigger yield, bigger stockpiles. They had to convince themselves they were a superpower. Throw-weight. What is throw-weight? We don’t know exactly but we agree it sounds like hurled bulk, the hurled will of the collective. Soviet long-range missiles had greater throw-weight. They had to convince themselves with numbers and bulk and m
ass.

  “And the U.S.?” I say.

  Eyes flicking my way, happy as carnival lights. It was the U.S., Viktor says, that designed the neutron bomb. Many buzzing neutrons, very little blast. The perfect capitalist tool. Kill people, spare property.

  I watch Brian sleep.

  “You have your own capitalist tools now. Don’t you, Viktor?”

  “You mean my company?”

  “A small private army, I hear.”

  “Also intelligence unit. To protect our assets.”

  “And scare the hell out of the competition.”

  He tells me that the name of the company was his idea. Tchaika means seagull and refers poetically to the fact that the company’s basic business is waste. He likes the way seagulls swoop down on garbage mounds and trail after ships waiting for the glint of jettison at the bow. It is a nicer name, besides, than Rat or Pig.

  I look at Brian. It’s better than sleeping. I don’t want to sleep until I’m finished looking. Traveling with the man from Arizona to Russia, side by side through all those time zones, sharing magazines and trading food items from the little peel-off receptacles, my dessert for his radishes because I’m fit and he’s not, Sky Harbor to Sheremetyevo, all those hours and oceans and pales of plotted land, the houses and lives below—maybe it was just the seating arrangement that made me want to wait before I confronted him. It’s much too clumsy to accuse a man who’s sitting next to you. I wanted a quiet face-to-face in a cozy room somewhere.

  I see us hurtling through the dark.

  I tell Viktor there is a curious connection between weapons and waste. I don’t know exactly what. He smiles and puts his feet up on the bench, something of a gargoyle squat. He says maybe one is the mystical twin of the other. He likes this idea. He says waste is the devil twin. Because waste is the secret history, the underhistory, the way archaeologists dig out the history of early cultures, every sort of bone heap and broken tool, literally from under the ground.

  All those decades, he says, when we thought about weapons all the time and never thought about the dark multiplying byproduct.