Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  Coming home, landing at Sky Harbor, I used to wonder how people disperse so quickly from airports, any airport—how you are crowded into seats three across or five across and crowded in the aisle after touchdown when the captain turns off the seat belt sign and you get your belongings from the overhead and stand in the aisle waiting for the hatch to open and the crowd to shuffle forward, and there are more crowds when you exit the gate, people disembarking and others waiting for them and greater crowds in the baggage areas and the concourse, the crossover roars of echoing voices and flight announcements and revving engines and crowds moving through it all, people with their separate and unique belongings, the microhistory of toilet articles and intimate garments, the medicines and aspirins and lotions and powders and gels, so incredibly many people intersecting on some hot dry day at the edge of the desert, used underwear fist-balled in their bags, and I wondered where they were going, and why, and who are they, and how do they all disperse so quickly and mysteriously, how does a vast crowd scatter and vanish in minutes, bags dragging on the shiny floors.

  I used to say to the kids. I used to hold up an object and say, The little ridged section at the bottom of the toothpaste tube. This is called the crimp.

  Gleason dead but also in the room with us, Irish like her and camped in a stale sweatbox, dressed in a busman’s suit, arm-waving, flailingly fat, the only person who could make her laugh. He stalked across the floor pumping his fist. You’re goin’ to the moon, Alice. My mother liked the familiar things best. The more often he used a line, the more she laughed. She waited for certain lines. We both waited and he never let us down. We felt more closely bound with Gleason in the room. He gave us the line, gave us the sure laugh, the one we needed at the end of the day. Gleason aggrieved. Pounding the table-top and bending his knees and tilting the great head skyward. He was the joke that carried a missing history—the fat joke, the dumb joke, the joke about the rabbi and the priest, the honeymoon joke, the dialect joke, the punch line that survives long after the joke is forgotten. We felt better with Jackie in the room, transparent in his pain, alive and dead in Arizona.

  I dropped her off and picked her up and made sure she had money for the basket.

  We built pyramids of waste above and below the earth. The more hazardous the waste, the deeper we tried to sink it. The word plutonium comes from Pluto, god of the dead and ruler of the underworld. They took him out to the marshes and wasted him as we say today, or used to say until it got changed to something else.

  I liked to hurry home from the airport and get into my trunks and T-shirt. I ran along the drainage canal with Sufi voices tracking through my head and sometimes I saw a plane taking off, all light and climb and calculus, and I thought of my son Jeffrey when he was younger—the gift he thought he possessed to take an aircraft out of the sky, the mastery of space and matter, a power and control that rose damnably from the curse of unbelonging.

  And sometimes I sat with her through the mass, the mass in English, what a stark thing it was, without murmur or reverberation, but still the best part of my week, and I took her arm and led her out of the church and she was not a small woman but seemed to be dwindling, passing episodically out of flesh—she felt like rice paper under my hand.

  He used to shave with a towel draped over his shoulder, wearing his undershirt, his singlet, and the blade made a noise I liked to listen to, a sandpaper scrape on his heavy beard, and the brush in the shaving cup, the Gem blade and the draped towel and the hot water from the tap—heat and skill and cutting edge.

  Dominus vobiscum, the priest used to say, and we’d push our way out of the vestibule, several kids chanting, Dominick go frisk ’em. What was Latin for if you couldn’t reduce the formal codes to the jostled argot of the street?

  It was science-fiction stuff or horror-movie stuff except that Jeff was too shy and frightened to test it in the world, even with his sister whistling in his ear to make the thing explode.

  5

  * * *

  Brian Glassic called late sometimes. He called in streaks, late at night, four calls in one weekend maybe, and what did he talk about when he called? The office, of course, bringing up matters he could not easily discuss in the tower itself, or the latest national scandal maybe, with anatomical details, or he’d carry on about a movie he wanted me to rent, guns and drugs—he thought it made us better buddies.

  He also did it as a provocation. Brian believed I was safely encased, solid, with a house and family folded around me, surer than he was, older but also physically superior, physically fit, a man of hardier stuff, this was his own stated theme—a man who keeps his counsel. And it greatly fazed him, it made him want to chip away, make boyish forays, place claims on my attention.

  When the phone rang at a certain hour, Marian and I exchanged the Brian look—had to be him.

  “You will not believe where I am. Get over here right away. This place is astonishing. You’re the only person I can bear to share it with. Come alone,” he said.

  It took me a while to find the place. I kept crossing I-10, out where the map begins to go white, low stucco buildings with satellite dishes—tractor parts and diesel tune-ups, sand and rock and self-defense. Then I spotted a cluster of shops that matched Brian’s description, a neat clean minimall, painted sort of rancho pink and green, three of the outlets not yet open for business, and I parked near the last shop on the left, the only going concern, called Condomology.

  College kids, gently unkempt. They stood between the shelves talking and browsing, going through the catalogs and reading the small print on the product boxes, and others mixed in, slightly older men and women, they had professions and soft slacks with knife pleats and a certain ease of bearing and belonging, the package of attitudes and values known as lifestyle.

  Brian pushed me into a corner so I could scan the area. Wide aisles, the carpeting was soft and pale and the aisles were wide and there were wall paintings, five panels on each of the two long walls showing scenes of an ice-cream parlor of the nineteen-forties and -fifties. A soda jerk behind a marble counter making a strawberry float for a couple of girls in school jerseys and bobby socks—that was one mural, flat-painted, painted in a style not current to the scene, and the effect was interesting, completely undreamy. Brian was studying my lower jaw for some reaction. I heard music in the deep distance, a crooner doing lost songs, the kind of ballad that sometimes included a verse or two in slurred Italian, and it was all nicely subdued, I thought, unaffected, without patronizing humor.

  Brian whispered at me sharply, as if I hadn’t noticed.

  “Condoms.”

  That’s what it was all right, condoms, the whole place was condoms, shelves filled with a hundred kinds of protection, male and female, spermicides, body butter, latex gloves, silicone lubricants, with books, manuals, videos, special displays, with novelty items of the big-dick little-dick type, and T-shirts of course, and baseball caps with condom logos.

  “And the place is strategically located, out at the new frontier,” he said. “I can see a satellite city growing out from this one shop, a thousand buildings, this is my vision, sort of spoked around the condom outlet. Like some medieval town with the castle smack at the center.”

  “They built their castles on the periphery.”

  “Fuck you. Show some amazement. They have peach-flavored rubbers. And kids come here to socialize, to hang around and see what’s doing. I’m waiting to hear Al Hibbler sing ‘Unchained Melody.’ ”

  “Al Hibbler was good.”

  “Good? Fuck you good. He was amazing. You think Ray Charles is blind? Al Hibbler, that was blind. Show some response.”

  He led me down an aisle. My response was, Look at all these condoms. Studded, snug, ribbed, bareback. We used to say, Don’t go in bareback. Meaning wear a rubber or you’ll knock her up. Now there were rubbers called barebacks, electronically tested for sheerness and sensitivity.

  “These will replace running shoes,” Brian said. “Kids will shoot each
other for expensive lambskin condoms.”

  There were loose condoms sold in bowls, in candy jars—grab a handful. A woman looked at a display model of a polyurethane sheath with flexible rings at either end. Brian knew her from the automated teller machine at his bank—hello, how are you, hi, hello. There were finger condoms and full-body condoms, oral condoms with a minty savor. There were condom cases, pocket-sized, and a condom you could wear as a hat.

  Brian said, “My brother carried a rubber in his wallet all through adolescence. He showed it to me once, I think I was twelve. Flipped open his wallet and showed me this little wizened thing like a deflated penis and I don’t think I ever recovered. This was a world I wasn’t ready to enter. I could understand sex on the animal level. This was something else entirely. Something about the material, the plasticky sort of rubber, the look and touch, he made me touch it, and the whole nature and function of the thing, I don’t know, it was alien and unsettling. Sex alone was tough enough to encounter. This was technology they wanted to wrap around my dick. This was mass-produced latex they used to paint battleships.”

  “You were a sensitive boy.”

  “I was scrawny and mute, barely human. You were a strapping kid who beat the crap out of kids like me.”

  “We didn’t have any kids like you,” I told him.

  “You carried a rubber?”

  “In the little slit pocket in my dungarees.”

  “By the time I was sixteen they weren’t doing that anymore.”

  “They’re doing it now,” I said.

  “I don’t think my brother ever used the condom in his wallet. When he got a car he put it in the car. He put it in the glove compartment. That’s when I think he finally got to use it.”

  A man was singing softly along, crooning the lyrics on the sound system. He moved haltingly toward us, pushing a cylinder of oxygen on wheels, a gray-haired guy, with tubes from the tank running all the way up into his nose. The tank was the size of a dachshund in a custom case. And he sang, he crooned in a rasping voice—he had the phrasing, the timing just right, the lazy line endings, some insipid lyric about a farewell letter, only altered in his gnawed voice to a life’s own shape, felt in the deepest skin.

  We moved out of the way to let him pass.

  Behind the products and their uses we glimpsed the industry of vivid description. Dermasilk and astroglide and reservoir-tipped. There were condoms packaged as Roman coins and condoms in matchbook folders. Brian read aloud from the copy on the boxes. We had natural animal membranes and bubblegum scenting. We had condoms that glowed in the dark and foreplay condoms and condoms marked with graffiti that stretched to your erection, a letter becoming a word, a word that expands to a phrase. He did a little Churchill—We shall wear them on the beaches. We had lollipop condoms, we had boxer shorts printed with cartoon characters shaped like condoms standing on end, sort of floaty and nipple-headed, who spoke a language called Spermian.

  A young woman stood near the door, a Ramses logo tattooed on her earlobe.

  “My kid’s got one of those,” Brian said. “Only it says Pepsi. Should I be grateful?”

  “Which kid?”

  “Which kid. What’s the difference?”

  Brian was wary of his family. He adopted the put-upon pose of the father complaining routinely about kids who are careless with money and forgetful of every caution, we all have this act we perform, it amounts to a second language, the dad’s easy-to-master lament, and Brian did scornful solos of high animation, but he also harbored something deeper and sadder, a sense that these were his enemies, forces loose in his own house prepared to drain him of self-worth, a stepdaughter, a daughter and a son, all in high school, and a wife, he said, who was a couple of bubbles off center.

  “That’s not the only thing she’s got planted on her body.”

  “Which kid?” I said.

  “Brittany.”

  “I like Brittany. Be nice to her.”

  “Be nice to her. Listen to this, she wears an armband, you won’t believe this—they had Apartheid Simulation Day at her school.”

  “What’s that?”

  “What it says. They attempt to simulate the culture of apartheid. A lesson for the kids. They all wore armbands. You wore gold if you were the oppressed class and I think red if you were the military and green if you were the elite. Brittany volunteered for the oppressed class and now she won’t take her armband off. The official simulation lasted one day but she’s been doing this for weeks now. Nobody else is doing this but her. She restricts her access to the lunchroom, ten minutes a day. She only rides certain buses at certain times. She sits in a specified area of the classroom.”

  “How do the other kids react?”

  “She gets spat upon and shunned.”

  He made a TV screen with his hands, thumbs horizontal, index fingers upright, and he looked out at me from inside the frame, eyes crossed, tongue lolling in his head.

  We took a final turn around the room. A boy and girl in one of the murals sat in a booth with ice-cream sundaes and frosty glasses of water and long-handled spoons for the sundaes and the scene was not contrived to be charming but was close to documentary in tone and the whole place was a little museumlike, I thought, with time compressed and objects arrayed of evolutionary interest. And a woman sang a ballad about a chapel in the moonlight, vaguely familiar to me, and I turned to see if the man with the oxygen tank was still singing along.

  Brian bought a package of condoms to give to his son David, a buddy-buddy thing, a token of communication and accord. We went outside and stood in the empty plaza and he opened the box and removed a single sheath in its foil wrap. He looked at it. He had a sputter-laugh he saved for certain occasions, like a semidrowned man bitter about being rescued, and he looked at the thing and laughed.

  “Everybody talked about VD then. The clap was a term with a very decisive ring to it. The clap.”

  “The siff.”

  “All those terms, one worse than the other. But I couldn’t detect a saving element in a condom. Maybe because it brought to mind another term.”

  “Scumbag.”

  “And in my little retard sort of twelve-year-old brain, maybe I sensed a secret life in this object in my brother’s wallet, this scumbag—how could a thing called a scumbag be safe to use?”

  “We’re waste managers,” I told him. “Scumbags are things we deal with.”

  “But think of the contempt we invest in this word. It’s an ugly word. Full of self-loathing.”

  “Never mind the words. You bought a rubber for your kid because it’s important for him to use it. I hate to be sensible. I know it’s thankless to be sensible in the face of someone’s primitive distrust.”

  “You’re right.”

  “People have to use these things.”

  “You’re right,” he said. “It’s thankless.”

  He unwrapped the condom and shook it out until the nipple end swung lightly in the breeze. Then he crumpled the thing in his fist and held it to his nose.

  He said, “What does it smell like? Is it shower curtains? Is it car upholstery or lampshade liner? Is it those big blocky garment bags where you store the clothes you never wear?”

  He was inhaling deeply, trying to absorb the odor, retain it fully so he might mark its nature. His lean head flared, red-roostered. He thought it might be the smell of the bubble wrap around your new computer when you take it out of the shipping container. Or the shipping container itself. Or the computer itself. Or the plastic baggies that have been in your freezer too long, collecting Freon fumes. He thought it might be a hospital smell, a laboratory smell, a discharge from a chemical plant. He couldn’t place it exactly. The insulation in your walls. The filter in your air conditioner.

  “I thought they were odor-free. Modern condoms,” I said. “Except when flavor is added.”

  “That’s the new type that’s odor-free. I bought him the old cheap latex that binds the sex member and reduces the sensation and smells b
ad. Because I want him to pay a price for being sensible.”

  Marian sat in Jeff’s room watching a movie on TV. I had to adjust to the sight of someone else in his room. His room was his animal den, his pelt and smell, and I thought she was committing some breach of species, sitting in there.

  She wore beat-up jeans and an old tank top that drooped in front, the kind of woman who grows into her beauty, I think, who becomes beautiful over time and then one day you see it, sort of suddenly and all together—it becomes a local scandal of surprise and comment.

  “When did you start smoking again?”

  “Shut up,” she said.

  I told her about Condomology. I stood in the doorway and talked above the noise from the movie. She was fine-skinned, assertive in a way that was all featural—slightly angular of face, straight-nosed, dark-haired, no-nonsense-looking, very near classical in an American way, a certain sort of old-fashioned way that doesn’t stray drastically from plainness, like the face cut in raised relief on the old soap bar, maybe it was Camay, I’m not sure, the woman’s head in profile, with marcelled hair, although Marian’s was straight.

  “Where’s Jeff?”

  “Went out. I’m watching this.”

  I told her about Apartheid Simulation Day, standing in the doorway.

  She said, “I’m watching this.”

  “Want something? I want something.”

  “Mineral water be nice,” she said.

  I went to the kitchen and got all the things out of all the compartments. I poured the mineral water over ice in a tall glass and dropped a wedge of lemon in. Got the potato vodka from the freezer, smoky cold, and remembered what it was I wanted to say to her. I cut a lune of lemon skin and dropped it in a port glass.

  I wanted to say something about Brian.

  I’d tried drinking port for a while just to see how it would feel, how it would sound, a port glass, a fortified wine, and now I used the port glass for my vodka, pouring it syrupy cold and opal.