Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  He said, “Light up a Lucky. It’s light-up time.”

  Neither one of us had a cigarette in hand or showed any sign of reaching for one. Maybe he was just recalling the old slogan, idly, reciting the thing simply because he’d thought of it, because it had shot to mind out of some nowhere in the memory, but it was odd and unsettling. You come to a city and hear a thing like that and you don’t know what to think. I looked at him. I leaned to the side and looked at his profile and I tried to figure out what he meant.

  2

  * * *

  He was waiting for Chuckie Wainwright. The broad-backed work of the waterfront went on around him, a sense of enormous tonnage and skyhook machinery, tractor-trailers crooking into marked slots and containered goods stacked on the decks of tremendous ships, you almost can’t believe how big, and the what-do-you-call, the booms of dockside cranes swinging cargo through the mist. And farther out in the bay an aircraft carrier easing toward the Golden Gate, sent on its way by a mongrel fleet of small craft and three fireboats spritzing great arcs of water like a champagne farewell.

  Marvin checked his watch for the tenth time in the last hour. He stood near a transit shed where he was safe from the action. He resembled a gentile lost in a fog, wearing a suede touring cap and a double-breasted raincoat with epaulets, gun flaps, raglan sleeves, he knows these terms from years in dry cleaning, broad-welt pockets, belt loops, sleeve straps and so many buttons he felt dressed for life.

  He carried a telescopic umbrella enclosed in a sheath that belonged to a different umbrella, he has kelly green inside sky blue, not that it mattered to anyone but his wife.

  Eleanor was here, the first time she’d ever accompanied him on a trip in search of the baseball. This was San Francisco, don’t forget, which she didn’t want to live a life and miss it.

  And that was the Bay Bridge over his right shoulder, flashing a million cars a minute that never heard of Marvin Lundy and his baseball mania.

  He checked his watch again and peered across the bay.

  Chuckie Wainwright was a crewman on a tramp steamer coming down the coast from Alaska. Marvin had communicated with shipping companies, harbormasters and actual captains on matters pertaining to the whereabouts of the ship and the roster of the crew, making phone calls and sending radiograms. And it was confirmed more than once, it was determined and duly documented that Charles Wainwright Jr., known as Chuckie, was aboard the Lucky Argus steaming out of Anchorage with a load of sand and pulverized rock.

  Chuckie was his key to the chain of possession. Marvin had gathered a thousand tidbits of information that connected the baseball to previous owners and finally, what is the word for the thing that is not ultimate but next to ultimate—finally the Wainwright name came into play.

  He waited half an hour and then went to the Ferry Building to ask about the Lucky Argus, should he be worried or not, and they told him it would put in at pier 7 in about an hour and a half.

  Outside he caught a whiff in the air, a faint sort of stinkhole odor, barely detectable but odd in its emotional force. Then it passed, gone on the breeze, and he heard the watery shush of traffic on the bridge and saw his Eleanor approach, alight with her strawberry smile, under a sky blue umbrella.

  “Thought I’d find you here. I came to see this lovely old building.”

  Marvin looked behind him to fathom what was lovely that he’d missed.

  “Did you know this building survived the great earthquake but the clock stopped dead and stayed that way for a whole year?”

  “There’s always a clock somewhere that’s stopping,” Marvin said morosely.

  “As if to remind everyone in visual range.”

  “Remind them of what?”

  She waved her guidebook at him.

  “Sometimes bad luck is writ large and plain.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “The clock stopped at seventeen minutes past five in the morning. Five one seven, dear. Add the digits and you get thirteen.”

  Maybe there was a shift in the breeze. He noted the smell again and found it moved him in strange ways, one of those smells that traces back through memory, musty and earthy in this particular case, and he felt an unaccountable urge to follow it to its source.

  “Where is your Mr. Wainwright?”

  “Boat’s late,” he said.

  “Don’t be so pessimistic.”

  “Where’s pessimistic? I’m standing here having a conversation.”

  “You’re hunched and slumped.”

  “I’m always hunched and slumped. This is how it came from the factory.”

  “You’re more hunched than usual when the subject is the baseball.”

  Eleanor was not wrong. Was Eleanor ever wrong? He grouched at her sometimes but they both knew she was almost always right. She had her English accent, her popovers she baked that he felt the anticipation a day in advance, her excruciating neatness of dress that he thought might be a disease, he caught her talking to her closet a couple of times—but always seemly is a word he likes, tastefully matching this to that. She had a stern determination that she soft-pedaled but made sure he got the point. And now that their daughter was on her own, with a nice job and an apartment on a safe street, Eleanor stood guard over Marvin’s obsessiveness and joke-spattered gloom.

  They were walking now, taking an amble along the Embarcadero, and Marvin realized the pier numbers were getting higher as they walked—high numbers and even numbers, which meant they were moving away from pier 7. But this is where the odor seemed to be leading him, a stinky wisp intermittent on the wind.

  “And you need this fellow Wainwright to tell you what?”

  “How his father acquired the ball, who’s dead and buried.”

  “And in this way you will complete the what?”

  “The what-do-you-call.”

  “The lineage.”

  “The lineage,” Marvin said.

  1. The ex-wife of Chuckie Wainwright, Susan somebody—never mind the details.

  2. The one-eighth Indian, Marvin forgets the tribe, who led him to the former wife.

  3. The shock of other people’s lives. The truth of another life, the blow, the impact.

  4. Chuckie in the Air Force, in Greenland, in Vietnam, and going AWOL, which is a what, an acronym, and drifting afar and growing a beard and fathering a child and naming it Dakota.

  5. Which is where Marvin found the ex-wife, coincidentally, in Rapid City, walking sick people across a swimming pool in four feet of water.

  6. The shock, the power of an ordinary life. It is a thing you could not invent with banks of computers in a dust-free room.

  “Marvin, you know what I’m going to say.”

  “There’s a three-hour time difference. I don’t think I can wait.”

  “Pick up your feet when you walk. You’re a healthy man who tries to look sick.”

  “This is chitchat on the people channel.”

  She did not quibble or carp, she spoke gently to him, she was better than he deserved, writing postcards when she went back home to visit—imagine getting a postcard from your wife.

  Then she stopped dead, going rigid in her brilliant slicker.

  “What’s that I smell?” she said.

  Marvin began to understand why the odor was so compelling. It came, in a way, from him. He recalled the trip they’d made through Europe six years after the war, he and Eleanor, newly wed, a girl of modest background, taking a long honeymoon by the cheapest means possible, slow trains and old hotels squeezed of every convenience, but they were also embarked on a mission important to Marvin’s family. He was trying to find his half brother, Avram Lubarsky, who’d served in the Red Army, who was wounded at Leningrad, who was wounded at Stalingrad, who shot himself in the toe at Grodno, who rowed a boat across the Volga under a strafing attack by Stukas, who was captured by the Germans and escaped, who fled south wearing newspapers for shoes and married a gypsy in the Carpathians and ate whitefish from the Black Sea and disappear
ed somewhere in the Urals.

  Such Russian stuff, and here was Marvin today looking for a baseball. But he wasn’t inclined to make light of his preoccupation. It had its own epic character, its history of comebacks and sweet memories and family picnics and buggy evenings on the back porch and hopes that rise and fall and the song of loss that goes unwritten in the records.

  “Let’s turn back, shall we? I don’t think I want to get any closer to that smell.”

  She said the word with a grimace of suspicion, the response reserved for certain smells, clutching up the mouth and nose, beading the eyes against the sight of criminal matter at the source.

  “Just some sewer work probably. Comes and goes. Let’s walk a little more.”

  “I’m on holiday,” she said.

  “This makes you squeamish? People eat camel meat barehanded, they’re back at work in the morning.”

  “Make a deal. We’ll walk as far as that construction site up ahead. Then we’ll come back.”

  “What’s a little smell?” he said.

  But it wasn’t a little smell anymore. It grew stronger and drew him nearer and he recalled those old hotels and their toilets, the toilets down the hall, fortunately, and he thought of the public toilets in railroad stations, a stranger in the next stall with his own autobiography of foreign foods and personal smells, through England, France and Italy, but it wasn’t other people’s smells that began to overwhelm him—only his own.

  Marvin’s bowel movements seemed to change, gradually, in grim stages, as he and Eleanor moved east through Europe. The smell grew worse, deeper, it acquired a kind of density, it ripened and aged, and he began to dread the moment after breakfast every day when it came time for him to haul himself to the toilet.

  What is the word, ignoble?

  Marvin thought of his bowel movements as BMs, a phrase he’d heard an army doctor mutter once. His BMs were turning against him, turning violent in a way. He and Eleanor went through the Dolomites and across Austria and nipped into the northwest corner of Hungary and the stuff came crashing out of him, noisy and remarkably dark. But mainly it was the smell that disturbed him. He was afraid Eleanor would notice. He realized this was probably a normal part of every early marriage, smelling the other’s smell, getting it over and done with so you can move ahead with your lives, have children, buy a little house, remember everybody’s birthday, take a drive on the Blue Ridge Parkway, get sick and die. But in this case the husband had to take extreme precautions because the odor was shameful, it was intense and deeply personal and seemed to say something awful about the bearer.

  His smell was a secret he had to keep from his wife.

  They entered Czechoslovakia, where the toilets flushed so weakly that he had to flush and wait and then flush some more and he opened windows and waved towels, feeling guilty and trapped. There was something cold and hard in the streets, a breathable tension, many arrests, people on trial. The newlyweds argued with an ironworker in a café, he was proud of the smoke and filth that hung over the landscape, this was progress, this was industrial might and drive—the darker the skies and the more property owners in prison, the greater the future of the socialist state.

  Who are they, Marvin thought, that it drives me crazy not to convince them that they’re wrong?

  His BMs grew steamier as they traveled up through eastern Poland. They argued with workers in a stand-up bar, men drinking morning mugs of beer. They argued with a woman who did ticket prices on an abacus. Marvin returned to a toilet for a newspaper he’d left behind, he was looking vainly for baseball scores in a Warsaw daily, and he was surprised by the heat in the little room, the steamy aura he’d established there, it was heavy and humid, an air mass of sweltry stench—all that radiant energy from a single BM.

  Lucky for him that Eleanor went first every day. Because she shouldn’t have to confront this, an English girl with hair that’s nearly blond. He made sure she never passed a toilet he’d just used.

  “This is as far as I’m going,” she said now.

  “We’re not at the construction site.”

  “I will die gasping if I take another step.”

  Ahead a hundred yards was an area of halted roadwork, there were unmanned bulldozers and dump trucks, the pavement heaved-up and rubbled and not a living soul in sight except for a lone figure asleep in a mail sack, one of those draggled men Marvin sees everywhere these days—where have they been hiding all this time?

  “I’ll just go ten, twenty yards,” he told her. “Just to see what’s causing this, some ruptured pipe probably, out of curiosity.”

  He had to conceal the memory from her just as he’d once concealed the smell. And the strain of evacuation grew worse, they had their passports, they had their visas, they went to Pinsk, they went to Minsk, he grunted on the seat until all the elements issued—earth, air, fire and water.

  The deeper into communist country, the more foul his BMs.

  They were accompanied everywhere they went by an Intourist guide. A guide dropped them off, another guide met them, someone sneaked a look in their luggage, a guide made sure they did not cast a passing glance at certain sensitive buildings, at rivers with dams a hundred miles upstream, at roads that led to military sites a thousand miles away. It was like sharing every breath with your personal policeman. Even the weather was a secret, unpublished in newspapers and never mentioned in tones above a whisper.

  He had names and addresses and talked to a dozen people and followed a trail that led to Gorki, where a cousin many times removed told him to go to a street of unfinished buildings and that’s where they found Avram, the first time he and Marvin had ever set eyes on each other, he’s living in a tiny flat with his second wife and his second, third and fourth children. They embraced and wept, maybe it was real, maybe partly for effect, speaking smidgens of Russian, English and Yiddish, and soon they were arguing strenuously. Avram was a dedicated communist with a beetled brow and he spat little word-flecks of contempt at the U.S., the system is corrupt, we will eat you for lunch, you are a what-do-you-call-it kind of culture, a mickey mouse culture, and that night Marvin had to make an emergency visit to the hotel toilet, where he unleashed a firewall of chemical waste. The smell that surrounded him was infused with what, with geopolitics, and he waved a towel for five minutes and propped open the window, it kept closing, with a rolled-up copy of Pravda, he was still looking for baseball scores, and then he went and stood in their room and watched Eleanor sleep—she came from a gentle rural place and could easily perish from his reek.

  He walked to the edge of the construction debris and realized this was not the source of the smell. The smell was still distinct, completely reminiscent of his Soviet experience, only less farshtinkener than his personal output, a bit toned down, and it was not coming from a sewer main break or a communal toilet of the homeless.

  Then he saw the ship. It was docked at a remote pier up ahead, between a number of empty slips and a wide basin, and it appeared to be abandoned, with bridge and deck deserted and rust stains running down the sides and graffiti spray-painted on the smokestacks in languages he did not recognize and in alphabets unknown.

  He turned and looked at Eleanor. She had a thing she did to show impatience, where she dipped her body and tilted her head and went half limp, her mouth showing a yawny oh.

  The name of the ship was unreadable, covered with rust and graffiti. Such a woebegone thing, an oceangoing vessel that carries a public funk of portable toilets in a field.

  Marvin and Avram argued for three days. They ate meals in the little unheated flat where you had to unscrew the tap from the kitchen sink and take it down the hall to the bathroom when you wanted to take a bath because construction of this block of flats ended on a certain date, finished or not. The two men traded many family stories but always with an undercurrent of contention and with intervals of open insult, Us and Them, and it grated on Marvin to hear these things from a man so self-assured who’s a total nobody, a little guy who pushed
upward when he talked, with two false teeth made of stainless steel, he’s the shiniest appliance in sight. The flat came without windows. Avram had to install the windows himself, they came from the plate-glass factory where he worked, glass so thin you had to come away from the window to talk. A word with too many consonants might shatter the glass.

  He said to Marvin, We’re making bigger bombs than the West can even dream. That’s why the windows break so easy.

  Yes, it galled Marvin to think of a man living under these circumstances, carrying a kitchen tap back and forth, the spout and two valves but only the cold gives water, the family crowded up the walls and he’s so cocky and flushed, this was the thing that drove Marvin nuts, how the guy gets along without the basic whatevers, Eleanor knows the word, the things that contribute to material comfort—she says it so refined.

  She called out to him now, “Come away.”

  And on the way back to Western Europe his system slowly returned to normal, branny BMs, healthful and mild.

  And they were on a train in Switzerland, a normal neutral place, going through tunnels and past moonlit lakes, and Marvin heard a familiar voice up ahead, a radio crackle and yak, and he followed the sound to the front of the car, where two GIs were huddled over a little portable radio with a stunted antenna, listening to Russ Hodges on the Armed Forces Network, his account of the game interrupted whenever the train entered a tunnel, and that’s where Marvin was when Thomson hit the homer, racing through a mountain in the Alps.

  Eleanor was just out of the shower when Marvin walked in, collapsing the room with his mood. She stood in a towel, pink-toed, and looked at him.

  “The ship came in. Lucky Argus. Pier seven. Exactly when they said to the minute.”