Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  He is taking us, basically, downwind. Not that the clinic was downwind of the testing in the years of frequent detonations. The clinic was probably not even here at the time. No, it is the people who were downwind, the villagers who are patients now, and their children and grandchildren, and Viktor takes us inside and we’re not in a museum this time.

  Viktor has been here four times, he says. He says this in a way that’s hard to read. Every time he has gone to the Polygon he has also come here. This is a man who is trying to merchandise nuclear explosions—using safer methods, no doubt—and he comes here to challenge himself perhaps, to prove to himself he is not blind to the consequences. It is the victims who are blind. It is the boy with skin where his eyes ought to be, a bolus of spongy flesh, oddly like a mushroom cap, springing from each brow. It is the bald-headed children standing along a wall in their underwear, waiting to be examined. It is the man with the growth beneath his chin, a thing with a life of its own, embryonic and pulsing. It is the dwarf girl who wears a T-shirt advertising a Gay and Lesbian Festival in Hamburg, Germany, bottom edge dragging on the floor. It is the cheerful cretin who walks the halls with his arms folded. It is the woman with features intact but only half a face somehow, everything fitted into a tilted arc that floats above her shoulders like the crescent moon.

  She is wearing a T-shirt like the dwarf’s and Viktor says this is the result of an importing ploy gone awry. A local businessman bought ten thousand T-shirts without knowing they were leftovers from a gay celebration in Europe. Very crazy thing, Viktor says, bringing these shirts into a place where Islam is stronger every day.

  But this is part of the same surreal, isn’t it, that started on the forty-second floor of that Moscow tower.

  The clinic has disfigurations, leukemias, thyroid cancers, immune systems that do not function. The doctors know Viktor and let us wander here and there. He talks to patients and nurses. He says there are unknown diseases here. And words that are also unknown, or used to be. For many years the word radiation was banned. You could not say this word in the hospitals around the test site. Doctors said this word only at home, to their wives or husbands or friends, and maybe not even there. And the villagers did not say this word because they didn’t know it existed.

  Some of the rooms have rugs on the walls. Old men wear skullcaps, sitting motionless in shabby halls.

  We stand in the cafeteria doorway watching a group of young people eat lunch. Their hair, nails and teeth have fallen out and they are here to be studied. I look around for Brian.

  “Sickness everywhere around. And I tell you something,” Viktor says. “They are blaming us. They are saying this is calculation. The Kazakhs believe this.”

  “Blaming who?”

  “The Russians. They are saying we tried to murder the whole population. Red Army did not always evacuate villages before a test. People see the flash and then a great cloud climbing the sky. They don’t know what this is. Red Army exploded hydrogen bomb, very big yield, you know, and they left behind a hundred villagers to see what effect on people.”

  “Do you believe this?”

  “I believe everything.”

  “Do you believe it was intentional?”

  “Believe everything. Everything is true. Every time they did a test, hundreds of towns and villages exposed to radiation. Ministry of Health says, Okay we raise limit again. When limit is passed, Okay we raise again.”

  Viktor is talking mostly to himself, I gather. But he is also talking to me. These faces and bodies have enormous power. I begin to feel something drain out of me. Some old opposition, a capacity to resist. I look around for Brian. But Brian does not want to see toothless people eating lunch. He is outside somewhere.

  We walk the halls, Viktor and I.

  He says, “Once they imagine the bomb, write down equations, they see it’s possible to build, they build, they test in the American desert, they drop on the Japanese, but once they imagine in the beginning, it makes everything true,” he says. “Nothing you can believe is not coming true.”

  I begin to see him as a very improbable man, lean and dark with the gray dyed out of his hair and a seeming need to look half gangsterish in that long slick coat. At a glance he belongs to these wild privatized times, to the marathon of danced-out plots. The get-rich-quick plot. The plot of members-only and crush-the-weak. Raw capital spewing out. The extortion-and-murder plot. But there are ironies and hesitations in Viktor’s address to the moment. Too many years of slowly growing skepticism. He is in a fix, I think.

  He says, “An interesting thing. There is a woman in Ukraine who says she is second Christ. She is going to be crucified by followers and then rise from the dead. Very serious person. Fifteen thousand followers. You can believe this? Educated people, look very normal. I don’t know. After communism, this?”

  “After Chernobyl maybe.”

  “I don’t know,” he says.

  He didn’t know and neither did I. We walked out into a patchy courtyard that opened at the far end onto the great wide plain running treeless to the mountains. Children played a game in the dirt, six boys and girls with missing arms, left arms in every case, knotted below the elbow. The eyeless boy was also here, squatted on his haunches, facing the players as if in careful observation of their efforts. Copper-skinned, wearing clothes that were probably Chinese-made, a hole above the welt in each shoe, his big toes poking, a fourteen-year-old, according to Viktor, who looked to be nine or ten, but unretarded, his head slightly oversized, face and forehead marked by tumors, and the spongy caps over the place where his eyes should have been.

  The kids are playing follow the leader. A boy falls down, gets up. They all fall down, get up.

  Something about the juxtaposition deepened the moment, faces against the landscape, the enormous openness, the breadth of sheepland and divided sky that contains everything outside us, unbearably. I watched the boy in his bundled squat, arms folded above his knees. All the banned words, the secrets kept in whitewashed vaults, the half-forgotten plots—they’re all out here now, seeping invisibly into the land and air, into the marrowed folds of the bone.

  He crouched under the great split sky, ears set low and his head sloped. The sky was divided, split diagonally, a flat blue, a soft slatey blue, like the head of a crested jay, and a yellow that wasn’t even yellow, an enormous heartbreak yellow sweeping to the east, a smoky goldshot stain, and the kids with the knotted arms fell down in a row.

  Most of our longings go unfulfilled. This is the word’s wistful implication—a desire for something lost or fled or otherwise out of reach.

  In Phoenix now, with the years blowing by, I take a drive sometimes out past the regimented typeface on the map and down through the streets named for Indian tribes and past the roofing supply and sandblasting and the condom outlet, painted now in ice-cream flavors, and finally I see the impressive open-steel truss of the waste facility down off Lower Buckeye Road, with grackles sparking across the landfill and the planes in a long line coming out of the hazy mountains to drop into approach patterns.

  Marian and I are closer now, more intimate than we’ve ever been. The serrate edges have dulled away. We go to Tucson to see our daughter and granddaughter. We redecorate our house, building new bookshelves all the time, buying new carpets to set on top of the old ones, and we walk along the drainage canal in the twilight and tell each other stories of the past.

  In the bronze tower I stand by the window and look at the hills and ridges and it’s a hundred and ten degrees out on the street and I always wear a suit even if I’m only here to check the mail and I listen to the microtonal hum of the systems and feel a quiet kind of power because I’ve done it and come out okay, done it and won, gone in weak and come out strong, and I do my imitation gangster for the elevator guy.

  We separate our household waste according to the guidelines. We rinse out the used cans and empty bottles and put them in their respective bins. We do tin versus aluminum. We use a paper bag for the paper
bags, pressing the smaller bags flat and fitting them into the large bag that we’ve set aside for the purpose. We bundle the newspapers but do not tie them in twine.

  The long ghosts are walking the halls. When my mother died I felt expanded, slowly, durably, over time. I felt suffused with her truth, spread through, as with water, color or light. I thought she’d entered the deepest place I could provide, the animating entity, the thing, if anything, that will survive my own last breath, and she makes me larger, she amplifies my sense of what it is to be human. She is part of me now, total and consoling. And it is not a sadness to acknowledge that she had to die before I could know her fully. It is only a statement of the power of what comes after.

  They are trading garbage in the commodity pits in Chicago. They are making synthetic feces in Dallas. You can sell your testicles to a firm in Russia that will give you four thousand dollars and then remove the items surgically and mash them up and extract the vital substances and market the resulting syrupy stuff as rejuvenating beauty cream, for a profit that is awesome.

  We take the TV set out of the cool room at the back of the house, Lainie’s old room, our daughter, which is my mother’s old room now, the room with the humidifier and the resilvered mirror and the good hard healthy bed, and we build bookshelves there.

  At Waste Containment I’ve become a sort of executive emeritus. I go to the office now and then but mostly travel and speak. I visit colleges and research facilities, where I’m introduced as a waste analyst. I talk to them about the vacated military bases being converted to landfill use, about the bunker system under a mountain in Nevada that will or will not accommodate thousands of steel canisters of radioactive waste for ten thousand years. Then we eat lunch. The waste may or may not explode, seventy thousand tons of spent fuel, and I fly to London and Zurich to attend conferences in the rain and sleet.

  I rearrange books on the old shelves and match and mix for the new shelves and then I stand there looking. I stand in the living room and look. Or I walk through the house and look at the things we own and feel the odd mortality that clings to every object. The finer and rarer the object, the more lonely it makes me feel, and I don’t know how to account for this.

  Marian midfifties is lean and tanned and not so edgy now, it’s clear, and a little more measured in her approach to the moment. The moment, suddenly, no longer matters. We take drives in the desert and sometimes I tell her things she didn’t know, or knew at an unlearned level, the way you know you’re sleepy or sad.

  When I come across his name on a document it always makes me pause, it gives me pause, the name in jumpy type on some stamped document, James Nicholas Costanza, the raised stamp that marks a thing official, the document in the dusty bottom drawer, the sense of slight confusion until I realize who he is.

  I drive out there sometimes and see grackles sparking across the landfill, down past the Indian tribe streets, and sometimes I take our granddaughter along when she is here on a visit and we see the sage gray truss of the waste facility and the planes in their landing patterns and the showy desert plants spilling over the pastel walls above the parking area.

  I fly to Zurich and Lisbon to exchange ideas and make proposals and it is the kind of desperate crisis, the intractability of waste, that doesn’t really seem to be taking place except in the conference reports and the newspapers. It is not otherwise touchable somehow, for all the menacing heft and breadth of the material, the actual pulsing thing.

  Everybody is everywhere at once. Jeff likes to say this, our son, who still lives at home and still says things with the smirky sort of shyness he has brought with him out of adolescence, a quality that turns nearly everything he says into a lubricious hint about some secret he is keeping.

  They are making synthetic feces in Dallas. They have perfected a form of simulated human waste in order to test diapers and other protective garments. The compound comes in a dry mix made of starches, fibers, resins, gelatins and polyvinyls. You add water for desired consistency. The color is usually brown.

  Nostra aetate, as the popes like to say. In our time.

  He went out to get a pack of cigarettes and never came back. He smoked Lucky Strikes. He smoked the brand where they said, Light up a Lucky—it’s light-up time. Be happy—go Lucky. That was another thing they said.

  Jeff has jobs on and off, waits on tables in a food court somewhere, and spends tremendous amounts of time with his computer. He visits a website devoted to miracles. There are many reports, he tells us, of people flocking to uranium mines in order to cure themselves. They come from Europe, Canada and Australia, on crutches and in wheelchairs, and they sit in tunnels under rangeland in Montana, where the radon emissions are many hundreds of times higher than the federal safety level. They are trying to cure themselves of arthritis, diabetes, blindness and cancer. There are reports that crippled dogs have risen and walked. Jeff tells us this and smirks shyly, either because he thinks it’s funny or because he thinks it’s funny and believes it.

  We have bookshelves built in the cool room at the back of the house, my mother’s old room, and you know how time slips by when you are doing books, arranging and rearranging, the way time goes by untouched, matching and mixing inventively, and then you stand in the room and look.

  I’ll tell you what I long for, the days of disarray, when I didn’t give a damn or a fuck or a farthing.

  Matt came out for the funeral, he flew out the night before with two of his kids and then broke down at the gravesite and they saw this and were astonished. They were shocked to see this because they thought of him as a father, not a son, and they looked away and then sneaked a glance and then looked away again when he fell against me and wept, and they saw me put an arm around him and had to adjust to this, the shock of seeing him as a brother and a son.

  I still respond to that thing you feel in an office, wearing a crisp suit and sensing the linked grids lap around you. It is all about the enfolding drone of the computers and fax machines. It is about the cell phones slotted in the desk chargers, the voice mail and e-mail—a sense of order and command reinforced by the office itself and the bronze tower that encases the office and by all the contact points that shimmer in the air somewhere.

  We remove the wax paper from cereal boxes before we put the boxes out for collection. The streets are dark and empty. We do clear glass versus colored glass and it is remarkable really how quiet it is, a stillness that feels old and settled, with landmark status, the yard waste, the paper bags pressed flat, the hour after sunset when a pause obtains in the world and you forget for a second where you are.

  They sit on wooden benches in the mines and breathe radon air and soak their feet in deadly radon water and they pray and chant and sing soaring hymns or maybe just ordinary songs, dinky sing-alongs, the kind of songs that people have always sung, doing things in groups.

  When we go for long drives—we go for long drives out past the retirement compounds and onto the long straight interstate where kestrels sit spaced on the power lines and sometimes I apply suntan lotion to my arms and face and there’s a smell of beach, a sense of heat and beach, the haze of slick stuff across the hair on my forearm and the way the tube pops and sucks when it goes empty—I get reminded of something way back when.

  No one talks about the Texas Highway Killer anymore. You never hear the name. The name used to be in the air, always on the verge of being spoken, of reentering the broadcast band and causing a brief excitation along the lined highways, but the shootings have evidently ended and the name is gone now. But sometimes I think of him and wonder if he is still out there, driving and looking, not done with this thing at all but only waiting.

  When I tell her things she listens with a high clear alertness, so vigilant and still, and she seems to know what I’m going to say before I say it. I tell her about the time I spent in correction and why they put me there and she seems to know it, at some level, already. She looks at me as if I were seventeen. She sees me at seventeen. We take long walks
along the drainage canal. All the hints and intimations, all the things she spied in me at the beginning of our time together—come to some completion now. If not for me, then for her. Because I don’t know what happened, do I?

  We bundle the newspapers but do not tie them in twine, which is always the temptation.

  He enters seventeen characters and then dot com miraculum. And the miracles come scrolling down. At dinner one night he tells us about a miracle in the Bronx. Jeff is shy about the Bronx, shy and guilty. He thinks it is part of the American gulag, a place so distant from his experience that those who’ve emerged can’t possibly be willing to spend a moment in a room with someone like him. But here we are at the table, sharing a meal, and he tells us about a miracle that took place earlier in the decade and is still a matter of some debate, at least on the web, the net. A young girl was the victim of a terrible crime. Body found in a vacant lot amid dense debris. Identified and buried. The girl memorialized on a graffiti wall nearby. And then the miracle of the images and the subsequent crush of people and the belief and disbelief. Mostly belief, it seems. We ask him questions but he is tentative with this kind of material. He is shy. He feels he doesn’t have the credentials to relate a tale of such intensity, all that suffering and faith and openness of emotion, transpiring in the Bronx. I tell him what better place for the study of wonders.

  It is a hundred and eight degrees out on the street, a hundred and ten, a hundred and twelve, and I go to the airport and fly to Lisbon and Madrid, or I stand in the living room and look at the books.

  Jeff is a lurker. He visits sites but does not post. He gathers the waves and rays. He adds components and functions and sits before a spreading mass of compatible hardware. The real miracle is the web, the net, where everybody is everywhere at once, and he is there among them, unseen.

  The intimacies we’ve come to share, the belated exchange of childhoods and other ferocious times, and something else, a firm grip of another kind, a different direction, not back but forward—the grasp of objects that bind us to some betokening. I think I sense Marian missing in the objects on the walls and shelves. There is something somber about the things we’ve collected and own, the household effects, there is something about the word itself, effects, the lacquered chest in the alcove, that breathes a kind of sadness—the wall hangings and artifacts and valuables—and I feel a loneliness, a loss, all the greater and stranger when the object is relatively rare and it’s the hour after sunset in a stillness that feels unceasing.