Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  I walked in the door and Marian said, “What happened to your face?”

  I walk in the door and this is what I hear, children playing, radio playing, the news, the traffic, the phone is ringing, the washer is pumping through a cycle.

  I smiled and kissed her and she picked up the phone. The kids were making noise out back, our kids and the neighbor’s kids, a game made up by Lainie—I knew this from the quality of the shrieks. Lainie made up fiendish games, inventive shrill spectacles of torture and humiliation.

  “What did you do to your hair?”

  “Had it cut. You like?” she said, still on the phone with someone. “What happened to your face?”

  I walk in the door and see light strike the cool walls and bring out the color in the carpets, the apricots and clarets, the amazing topaz golds.

  I told Marian the next night about the thing I’d done, or the night after that, the thing with Donna at Mojave Springs. I thought I had to tell her. I owed it to her. I told her for our sake, for the good of the marriage. She was in bed reading when I told her. I’d anguished about the right time to tell her and then I told her suddenly, without immediate forethought. I didn’t tell her what I’d said to Donna, or why Donna was at the hotel, and she didn’t ask. I stood near the armchair with my shirt in my hand and I thought she took it well. She understood it was an isolated thing with a stranger in a hotel, a brief episode, finished forever. I told her I felt compelled to speak. I told her it was hard to speak about the matter but not as hard as withholding the truth and she nodded when I said this. I thought she took it fairly well. She didn’t ask me to tell her anything more than I’d told her. There was an air of tact in the room, a sensitivity to feelings. I stood by the chair and waited for her to turn the page so I could get undressed and go to bed.

  And the first available Saturday, the first Saturday I didn’t go to the office, we drove south with the kids to see an ancient ruin.

  We had sunscreen and hats and drinking water, which was Marian’s idea, the water was, because this was desert scrub and the heat was intense.

  Lainie stood behind the front seat, sometimes elbowed forward between Marian and me, leaning toward the windshield, quick to point out stupid maneuvers by other drivers. She reacted angrily to this, a habit that drained my own anger, and Marian’s too, and prompted us to make excuses for the stupid and dangerous moves she pointed out.

  Jeff was two years younger, he was six and liked to curl in a corner of the backseat, curl and twist, slide toward the floor in an astral separation from everything around him, using his body to daydream.

  Even if it wasn’t a rifle, what was he doing on the freeway, on the grassy verge, sitting there with a metal crutch in his lap just yards from that madman traffic?

  The ancient ruin was over six hundred years old, a single major structure with smaller scattered remains and a trace of a wall somewhere. We stood in the late morning heat and listened to a park ranger for a few minutes before we drifted off, one by one, although there was nothing else, essentially, to see.

  I read a plaque and then watched Jeff stalk a ground squirrel. He wasn’t wearing his hat but I didn’t say anything, I just thought, Tough shit kid, don’t say we didn’t warn you. Then I relented and called him over and gave him the car keys. The effort to relent, the effort to slacken and yield, to love him in his careless slouch, this was a brutally difficult thing to do, small as it seems, small and fleeting—it was surprisingly hard. But I called him over and gave him the car keys, I knew he would like this idea, and told him to get his hat and lock the car and bring me the keys, and off he went, happy as I’d ever seen him.

  I drifted back to the main structure and stood among a dozen tourists and listened to the ranger talk, a heavyset woman who scratched her elbow. No one knew the purpose of this structure, she told us, which was three stories high with a faint trace of graffiti near the top. I found I was more interested in the protective canopy than I was in the ancient structure. The ranger said the building was abandoned about a hundred years after it was built, the building and the whole settlement abandoned for no discernible reason, one of those mysteries of a whole people who disappear. But I found myself studying the protective canopy with its great canted columns, maybe seventy feet tall, and the latticed framework that supported the roof.

  Lainie came and stood next to me, sort of collapsed against my haunch in a way that meant she was irreversibly bored.

  The ranger listed some reasons why the people might have disappeared, the desert dwellers. She named flooding, she named drought, she named invasion, but these were only guesses, she said—no one had a clue to the real reasons.

  I thought of Jesse Detwiler, the garbage archaeologist, and wondered if he might suggest that the people abandoned the settlement because they were pushed out by waste, because they had no room to live and breathe, surrounded by their own mounting garbage, and it was nice in a way to think it was true, one of those romantic desert mysteries and the answer’s staring us in the face.

  I was becoming Simslike, too soon, seeing garbage everywhere or reading it into a situation.

  I told Lainie to go find her brother and see what he’d done with the car keys. Then we started home like a ragged band of pilgrims who’d failed to see the statue weep.

  We were in the car ten minutes when Marian began to cry. She was at the wheel and her face lit up and she started crying softly. Lainie backed off from her standing station just behind us and took a seat by the window, hands folded in her lap. Jeff got interested in the scenery.

  I said, “Want me to drive?”

  And she shook her head no.

  I said, “Let me drive, I’ll drive.”

  And she gestured no, she preferred to drive, this is what she wanted.

  We were on a back road flanked by saguaros and wildflowers, notched saguaros, pecked by birds that nested there, and then we reached the interstate and edged into the windblast of streaming traffic.

  No last names, no echoing second thoughts. This is the pact of casual sex. But I told her my last name and it wasn’t casual, was it? That’s the odd dominant of the piece, that I wanted to reach her, still her breathing, to make her breathless, yes. There was something about Donna that untongue-tied me. Guilt later, feeling Marian next to me, asleep in the dark.

  When we disliked each other, usually after an evening out, driving home, feeling routinely sick of the other’s face and voice, down to intonation, down to the sparest nuance of gesture because you’ve seen it a thousand times and it tells you far too much for all its thrift, tells you everything, in fact, that’s wrong—when we experienced this, Marian and I, we thought it was because we’d exhausted our meaning, the force that drives the alliance. Evenings out were a provocation. But we hadn’t exhausted anything really—there were things unspent and untold and left hanging and this is where Marian felt denied.

  Marian in her Big Ten town, raised safely, protected from the swarm of street life and feeling deprived because of it—privileged and deprived, an American sort of thing. All the scenes she recoiled from when she watched TV, the narrative of local crime, we see the body in the street, the lament of the relatives, the suspect doubled over to conceal himself—Marian could not even watch the detective’s hand on the suspect’s head, bending him into the unmarked car. It was all a violence, a damage to the spirit. But she wanted my stories, my things, the fiercer the better.

  I was selfish about the past, selfish and protective. I didn’t know how to bring Marian into those years. And I think silence is the condition you accept as the judgment on your crimes.

  She said it was her mother, she said it was two years ago today that her mother died and I repeated it for the kids and the kids relaxed a little. I reached back and got a stick of gum from Lainie. Two years ago today and of course Marian knew this and we didn’t, I didn’t, I hadn’t kept track, and I felt relieved and the kids did too because at least there was a reason, at least it wasn’t a thing where the parent
s act funny and the children learn to make their faces blank.

  She shone brilliantly, she glowed in her weeping, she smiled, I think—a smile that was a wince but also a real smile, with her mother in it somewhere.

  After a while the kids started to sing.

  And I was relieved, I was goddamn glad because I’d sat there thinking I was to blame or thinking maybe she does it all the time because how the hell do I know what goes on when I’m not home.

  And the kids were singing, “Ninety-nine bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-nine bottles of beer, if one of the bottles should happen to fall, ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall. Ninety-eight bottles of beer on the wall, ninety-eight bottles of beer.”

  She looked at me and looked at the road and the kids kept singing, counting backwards all the way to one as Marian drove—cried and drove.

  MANX MARTIN 2

  * * *

  The super comes gimping toward him. Before he takes five steps along the street the super comes gimping toward him from a building down the block, moving with that hip-lurch of his that takes up half a sidewalk.

  “Been looking for you,” the man says.

  Manx Martin stands with folded arms, not bothering to cock his head just yet—a little early for gestures of the superior type.

  “You seen those shovels?”

  “What shovels?” Manx says.

  “Because they’re missing out of the basement.”

  “Things always missing. Bought a new pair of socks missing in the wash.”

  “Two snow shovels from the utility room standing against the wall this morning.”

  “We expecting snow?” Manx says.

  And he looks heavenward. Look like snow to you? Don’t look like snow to me. Weatherman say snow?

  “Gone by noon, right out the door. And I’m asking up and down the street.”

  “You ought to be more careful who you ask. Because some people touchy on the subject.”

  “I’m asking you because I hear things.”

  The super is wearing a light shirt in this chill. Manx smells the change of season, the bite of wet and the cutting wind, and the man’s standing here with his sleeves rolled up, getting on in years, the super, with stubble specked a little white.

  “Somebody tells me straight out,” he says to Manx. “Talk to the klepto.”

  “You’re saying to my face.”

  “I’m saying what I hear.”

  “Who you hear it from?”

  “And I’m saying those shovels worth good money. Those are tools I need to do my job. Those blades, understand. Try pushing snow with a coal shovel.”

  Manx is surprised by the super’s attitude, knocked a little off-balance. The super seems determined. Should be the landlord’s problem. Why run around doing detective work? Let the landlord go into his pocket for replacements. Those pockets so deep the man’s knees get skinned by rattling change.

  Someone stands on the corner preaching to the wind.

  Manx is also surprised by the super’s forearms. Got some strength in those arms, wrestling garbage cans, you know, rolling the cans diagonal across the pavement.

  “I think you got your business backwards,” Manx says. “Because what we see in this block of buildings is buildings getting robbed, not shovels getting robbed. They breaking in left and right.”

  “I’m telling you what I hear.”

  “And I’m saying this is the thing you ought to be occupying your time. Jimmy guards on the doors.”

  “I find out you took those shovels I go to the landlord and you’re out on the street, brother.”

  Awful biggity for a cripple.

  “Because he will listen when I talk.”

  Most janitors around here are floaters who work in one neighborhood and then another, come and go, staying one step ahead of something. This man’s dug in like infantry.

  “You and me, we’re through passing the time,” he says. “You show up at my door with a shovel in your right hand and a shovel in your left, then I listen to what you say.”

  Manx cocks his head, makes his eyes go tight in phonied concentration. He’s looking to stare the man down, put the man in his place.

  But the super pushes on past. Manx is leaning into the man but the man pushes on past, clumsily, every step a contortion and a labor, and Manx is fazed once more—he was just getting set to make a major statement.

  He walks over toward Amsterdam Avenue. Three kids run by, going like hellfire, and he sees Franzo Cooper in a suit and tie, standing by the shoe repair.

  “Who died? You’re all dressed up, Franzo.”

  Turning as he speaks, wanting one last look at the super, he’s not sure why, to shoot a beam of evil, maybe.

  “You seen my brother?” Franzo says.

  He’s wearing a hat with a little feather in the band and his shoes have a military shine. The neon shoe is out of juice.

  “I’m going to Tally’s.”

  “You see him, tell him I need his car.”

  “Who died, Franzo?”

  “I need to go to Jersey to see a lady. Else I die. What you doing?”

  “Nothing much.”

  “I die of lovesick, man. Tell him to get over here with that junkheap. Be worth his while.”

  There’s the beauty school, the shoe repair, the furnished rooms and over the door of the shoe repair there’s a neon highshoe and the neon, he sees, is dark and cold, which brings him down a ways, a little sag in his mood.

  The traffic stops and rolls at the corner, rolls on into the night, and a man stands by the rib joint preaching. Three or four people stop a minute and get the drift and stand another minute and go where they’re going and two or three others come and listen and leave and the cars roll past and the light changes and the cars roll on.

  The preacher says, “They say that only insects survive.”

  He’s an old man with a hungry head, veined at the temples, and his hands are coming out of his sleeves. The sleeves of his jacket are so shrunk down that you can see way up his wrists. Long flat fingers marking his words and bicycle clips on his pants.

  Three kids race by, like fleeing the scene.

  “This is what they say and I believe them because they study the matter. All the creatures God put on earth, only insects survive the radiation. They have scientists studying the cockroach every second of his life. They watch him when he sleeps. He comes through a crack in the wall, there’s a man with a magnifying glass been waiting since dawn. And I believe them when they say the insects still be here after the atom bombs will fell the buildings and destroy the people and kill the birds and the animals and masculate the dogs and cats so they can’t begat their young. I believe them in and out and up and down. But I also got news for them. I know this before they do. We all know this, standing here right now, because we veterans of a particular place. Do we need somebody telling us how insects survive the blast? Don’t we know this from the morning we born? I’m talking to you. Nobody here need scientific proof that insects be the last living things. They already pretty close. We dying all the time, these roaches still climbing the walls and coming out the cracks.”

  Manx glances back the other way. He’d like to get one last look at the super to nourish his grudge.

  People stop to get the street preacher’s drift, six or seven folks standing in the wind. Manx looks at the old man in his cuffed pants like some uniform a boy invents, playing army. There’s something thin-skulled about him, his head is naked and veined and papery. A man listens, interested, in a French hat, a black beret, and two women in those sister outfits, sister so-and-so from the storefront church, glad to meetcha, with napkins on their heads and frown faces.

  “Nobody knows the day or the hour.”

  Two men in suits and their well-dressed wives, the men want to listen, the ladies say no thanks—cockroach talk is not their deedly-dee.

  “Russians explode an atom bomb on the other side of the world. You got your radio tuned to the news? I’m t
elling you the news. Clear across the world. And you’re standing there saying don’t mean nothing to me. Old business, you’re saying. The business of the generals and the diplomats. But right now, this here minute, while I’m talking and you’re listening, officials making plans to build bomb shelters all over this city. Building bomb shelters that hold twenty-five thousand people under the streets of this city. And guess what you don’t hear on today’s news. You have to stand in the wind and hear it from me. Every one of those people standing in those shelters while the bombs raining down is a white person. I’m talking to you. Because not one single shelter’s being built in Harlem. All right. They’re putting shelters on the Upper East Side. They’re putting shelters down lower Sixth Avenue. They’re sheltering Forty-second Street all right. They’re putting shelters out in Queens all right. They’re sheltering Wall Street deep and dry. A-bombs raining from the sky, what are you supposed to do? Take a bus downtown?”

  Manx has a faint grin.

  A girl’s standing there with her boyfriend and she says, “He’s a agitator, let’s go.”

  Manx can appreciate the man’s argument but it’s a little removed. The argument is satisfying because it’s the multiplying into millions of the little do’s and don’ts he carries around every day.

  She says, “He’s a agitator, let’s go.”

  But it’s the do’s and don’ts he has to live with, not the news of the world with that rooster that goes scraw scraw in the movie house down the street.

  The man’s still talking, standing tall and with a whippy kind of bend in his body, a head like a hatched egg that’s all veined out, and three kids race by, and a face so naked you think you’ve known him all your life, pants cuffed tight, and some kids race by.

  “Where’s your bicycle, man?”

  And the boyfriend’s got his cap slung low, not moving from the spot, and the girlfriend’s saying, “He’s a agitator, let’s go.”