Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  But Matty was sneaking looks at outdoor magazines, at camp bags and dome tents, because he needed time to get away and think.

  He had doubts about the rightness of his role.

  Down route 70 a ways, near the sign for the missile range, an area that is white on your map—this is where the protesters stood, seven or eight men and women, sometimes only two or three, and they carried a sign stretched between wooden uprights, World War III Starts Here, and base personnel taunted them, or just smirked, or were flattered by the sign, or felt sorry for the sign carriers because they were windswept and unattractive.

  Matt liked seeing them. He counted on it in a way. It began to be important to him, knowing they were there, four, five, six people, usually women outnumbering men, or maybe two grim figures clinging to the uprights, never saying a word as military vehicles passed, or flatbed trucks with draped objects, or civilian workers and construction crews, the odd finger flipped their way.

  The white places on your map include the air base, the army base, the missile range, the vast stretch to the northwest called the Jornada del Muerto and the interdunal flats as well—the flats were map-white, on the page and in living fact, and a few low buildings were situated here, fenced structures with propane tanks, to service the underground operation in the Pocket, where weapons were conceived and designed.

  • • •

  They worked to strict deadlines. There were always deadlines to meet. The bombheads complained about this. They were the people of superior sensibility, the ones who’d gained a rational mastery over themselves, who were not subject to moral ambivalence, to the sentimental babyshit of consequence and anguish. They were the ones who understood the hard-ass principles of the conflict and they did not like bureaucratic pressures exerted from the surface.

  But the deadlines persisted. There were deadlines all the time. There was the urgency of war without a war.

  Eric said, “Hear the latest secret?”

  They were walking beyond the bungalows at sunset, totally alone on the sand plain, and Eric kept looking around for eavesdroppers, comically of course, and he affected a side-of-mouth murmur that might frustrate even a lip-reader recruited to study surveillance tapes.

  “It’s an old thing just now surfacing,” he said, “in the form of very faint rumors.”

  “What old thing?”

  “Workers at the Nevada Test Site in the days of aboveground shots.”

  “What about them?”

  “And people living downwind. These people have a name, incidentally, that totally defines their existence.”

  “What is it?”

  “Downwinders,” Eric said.

  They ambled out past low growths of saltbush toward the electrified fence.

  “What about them?” Matt said.

  “Nobody’s supposed to know this. It’s something that’s more or less out in the open but at the same time.”

  “What?”

  “Secret. Untalked about. Hushed up.”

  “What’s the secret?” Matt said.

  “Multiple myelomas. Kidney failures. Or you wake up one morning and you’re three inches shorter.”

  “You mean exposure to fallout.”

  “Or you start throwing up one day and you throw up every succeeding day for seven, eight weeks.”

  “But isn’t this something we have to expect? Occasional miscalculations. It’s dangerous work, you know?”

  Eric seemed to enjoy this remark. No, he seemed to expect it, he seemed to find it encouraging. They walked out past a large parabolic dune and it was so draggingly hot out here that the air seemed a form of physical hindrance.

  “Little farm communities downwind of the tests. Nearly all the kids wear wigs,” Eric whispered.

  “Doing chemo?”

  “Yeah. And here and there a kid that’s born with a missing limb or whatnot. And a healthy woman that goes to wash her hair and it all comes out in her hands. She’s a ravishing, you know, brunette one minute and totally bald the next.”

  “Where?”

  “Mainly southern Utah, I hear, because it’s downwind. But other places too. Adenocarcinomas. Old Testament outbreaks of great red boils. Great big splotches and rashes. And coughing up handfuls of blood. You look in your cupped hands and you see a pint of radded blood.”

  They walked along the electrified fence past a warning sign graffiti’d by a protester or some apostate working slyly in the Pocket.

  “You think the stories are true?”

  “No,” Eric said.

  “Then why do you spread them?”

  “For the tone, of course.”

  “For the edge.”

  “For the edge. The bite. The existential burn.”

  Matty was six years old when his father went out for cigarettes.

  Eight days later, when his father hadn’t come back and hadn’t called or sent a message through a friend, the boy took all the change he could find in the apartment and started walking.

  He’d never gone alone past the Third Avenue el in this particular direction but that’s where he walked. Then he crossed the avenue where the trains ran through the long corridor below street level from the suburbs all the way down to Grand Central Station. That Nicky would one day throw rocks at. That Nicky would stand at the railing in plain sight throwing rocks at the trains running right below him.

  Then he climbed the long set of steps up to the streets near the Concourse. He’d climbed these steps with his mother to go to the movies and get a sundae at the ice-cream parlor nearby and now he climbed the steps alone, going to the Grand Concourse, where the movie theater stood, the Loew’s Paradise, and there were sixty or seventy steps and buildings on iron stilts, like another country altogether.

  He sees himself from this distance in the white sands standing across the street looking at the great Italianate facade of the Paradise.

  He sees himself staring up at the clock and the roof balustrade and the ornate stone cupola.

  He sees himself buying a ticket, barely able to reach the window hole, and he pushed the coins through the hole and watched the ticket woman hit a thing that sent the ticket out of a slit.

  He walked into the lobby. He felt an enveloping sort of warmth rise from the thick carpet like the happy repose of a stroked dog. There were goldfish swimming in marble basins. He looked at the etched glass chandeliers. There were a number of jutting balconies where paintings hung in gilded frames. He thought this was a thousand times more holy than church.

  He is sitting in his half bungalow near the missile range and he sees himself climb the carpeted staircase because he wanted to sit high up, close to the theater ceiling.

  He saw the usher standing with a flashlight held across his belt. The usher wore braiding on his shoulders and a row of brass buttons set aslant his chest and he flashed the light repeatedly on and off just to hear it click. Matty thought the usher would tell him he could not sit in the balcony because it was grown-ups only here, for smoking, or boys and girls who want to neck. But the usher clicked the thing and stood there and Matty walked right by.

  He climbed to seats near the ceiling, where stars twinkled and moved. The whole sky moved across the ceiling, stars and constellations and misty blue clouds. His mother wanted him to be an altar boy when he was old enough but this was more tremendous than church.

  He sees all this as a grown-up who has never smoked a cigarette, who barely drives a car and no longer plays chess and loves a woman who’s a nurse in Boston.

  He sees himself sitting in the balcony at the Paradise. The light from the movie glowed or faded depending on the nature of the scene. He looked at the wall nearest him and then at the other wall and when the light flared and leaped there it all was, the whole tremendous thing, arches, porticos, statues, the urns and marble busts, the vines trained through balusters, the pedestaled heroes with long swords, the columns in the shape of draped figures, both walls crowded with stacked anatomies and structures, too much to take in, and
angels that stood halo’d atop the pediments, and he sat there and waited for his father, for the ghost or soul of his father to make a visitation.

  He took off his glasses, he put on his glasses. Then he took them off and wiped them with a pale cloth and sat in front of his screen blinking at a display of data that pertained to an arming system, to that element of the weapon designed to send signals that will arm or safe or resafe the firing system. He heard a faint boom somewhere over the desert, the blast wave of mach speeds, and it thrilled him, moved him. It always did, no matter how often he heard it or how far he was situated from the source. The sound woke him some mornings when the planes flew right over and sometimes he stood outside his quarters before nightfall and watched the matched contrails of half a dozen aircraft in tight formation, the planes themselves long gone, but it was the drag and sonic shock, this is what awed and moved him, and then the afterclap rolling off the mountains, like they were blowing out a seam in the world.

  There were people here who didn’t know where their work ended up, how it might be applied. They didn’t know how their arrays of numbers and symbols might enter nature. It could conceivably happen in a flash.

  Everything connected at some undisclosed point down the systems line. This caused a certain select disquiet.

  But it was a splendid mystery in a way, a source of wonder, how a brief equation that you tentatively enter on your screen might alter the course of many lives, might cause the blood to rush through the body of a woman on a tram many thousands of miles away, and how do you define this kind of relationship?

  Matt did not like to drive. He’d been driving only six months and knew he’d never feel natural at the wheel. The best he could do was mimic a driver. He borrowed a four-wheel-drive vehicle from one of the bombheads and drove it with the instruction booklet in his lap. The roads, the road signs, the other cars made him self-conscious, exposing his crime of driving.

  But he wanted to practice for his camping trip with Janet and he went for drives on his days off and there were signs for runaway truck ramps and dangerous crosswinds and there was the Jesus is Lord sign and the lines of whitish haze in the deep distance that he now knew to be sea-bottom sand and the Do not enter sign When road is flooded and the slat-back shadows on the flats formed by the crossbars of power lines that stretched hellbent to Texas.

  Returning one day from a drive he saw the protesters, as always, positioned in the wrong place. They should have been standing by the third gate to the air base, the unmarked gate, because that’s where scientists from the Pocket entered and left, and they were the most susceptible presence, and he half wanted to tell the protesters to move their operation up the road.

  Matt looked slightly Jewish, a little Hispanic maybe. He’d lifted weights in his late teens, remaking the soft flimsy body that used to function as an adjunct to the Univac head. Back in the Bronx, people said he looked a little everything. Mexican, Italian, Japanese even—his friendliest smile could look like a ceremonial grimace. A police sketch made from seven different descriptions—that was Matt. He never stopped resembling the student he was at City College in the late fifties, hardworking, nearsighted, smart and poor, riding the subway to class.

  • • •

  He sat with Eric Deming in the mess. Eric took a strand of spaghetti in his fingers and slow-lowered it down his throat with a certain amount of snakely constriction.

  Matt said, “All right. These are things we have to expect. We’re not naive. Mistakes are part of the process. There’s a sudden wind shift and the fallout blows the wrong way. Or the blast and shock are larger than anyone anticipated.”

  “The placid nineteen-fifties. Everybody dressed and spoke the same way. It was all kitchens and cars and TV sets. Where’s the Pepsodent, mom? We were there, so we know, don’t we?”

  “You know. I don’t know,” Matt said.

  “You were there. We were both there.”

  “You were there. I was somewhere else.”

  “Dad’s in the breezeway washing the car. Meanwhile way out here they were putting troops in trenches for nuclear war games. Fireballs roaring right above them.”

  “Positioned too close, you mean.”

  “That’s the story I hear. You look at your arm and see right through it. Basically your arm becomes an x ray of your arm. You can see right through the uniform cloth and the skin. The light’s so white. You can see blood, bones and whatnot. But that’s not all. You can see all this with your eyes shut. You don’t have to open your eyes. You see right through the lids. Ha!”

  “Well was it officially acknowledged?”

  “You wake up one day a few years later, all your inner organs are fused. It’s one big jellied lump.”

  “But did the men get compensated?”

  “I don’t know,” Eric said.

  “That’s not part of your rumormongering.”

  Eric stuck a finger in Matty’s creamed spinach and hooked a shreddy morsel toward his mouth.

  “What good’s a rumor that deals with bureaucratic details? The point is this,” he said. “It happened right out in the open but it’s still a huge secret to this day. That’s the story anyway. Which I don’t happen to believe. They did major shots off towers or dropped devices from planes and they put troops too close to the blast and they let the fallout drift to Utah, where kids are getting born with their bladders backwards.”

  Matt wanted to like Eric. The guy was smart, friendly, sort of semi-charismatic in a physically awkward and too-tall way. But his motives were sometimes lost to observers in the inward drifts of his smile. You saw the shadow action around the mouth and wondered if you were being set up for something.

  “You know about the school not far from here. This is not rumor now but fact. I’ve been there and seen it. The Abo Elementary School and Fallout Shelter. A real place down in the ground.”

  “Just like us.”

  “We’re not real,” Eric said. “They’re only kids. It’s a grade school. They still have a chance to be real. I was sent there to speak to them.”

  “As a bombhead.”

  “As a clean-cut younger member of the military industrial complex. A diversion at recess type thing.”

  “What did you say to them?”

  “There’s a water tank at the edge of town. State Champs in bright new paint. And rows of neat homes. Then you come upon the school but just barely. Some trailerlike structures and a couple of basketball courts and finally you spot an entrance and you open the steel door and go down the stairs and there’s a lot of concrete and steel and the lighting’s slightly eerie. The classrooms, the bedding, the canned food, the morgue. No window breakage. That’s one of the features. Because there aren’t any windows of course. But the point is. What’s the point, Matty?”

  “I don’t know. Tell me.”

  “Did they do all this to protect the kids from Soviet bombs or from our bombs and our fallout?”

  “I don’t know. Both. What did you say to the kids?”

  “I spoke in tongues,” Eric said. “I mean think about it. I’m standing in an underground room at the northern edge of a great desert with filtering systems for fallout and a fully equipped morgue and there are crayon drawings pinned above the blackboard of piglets and cows. Incidentally.”

  “What?”

  “I have a chess set in my room. What about a game?”

  • • •

  The Pocket was one of those nice tight societies that replaces the world. It was the world made personal and consistently interesting because it was what you did, and others like you, and it was self-enclosed and self-referring and you did it all together in a place and a language that were inaccessible to others.

  Janet Urbaniak was Matt’s girlfriend, a registered nurse. They were off-and-on serious, mostly on, often impatient with each other but always strongly joined, the kind of star-matched couple born to meet and disagree.

  He called Janet on her days off and she told him where she’d gone and wha
t she’d seen or bought, and who with, and for how long, and he listened and commented and asked for details.

  She worked in a trauma unit now. She told him about her nights there but he said almost nothing about his own work and of course she understood and did not probe.

  Janet called his mother twice a week to find out how she was doing and then she called Matt to give him a report and then Matt called his mother to confirm everything, to clarify the particulars of an ache or pain, and he liked all these calls, the ones he made and the ones he heard about—they gave him a life outside the Pocket.

  He drove his borrowed jeep past a protester alone, a woman struggling to keep the sign upright in a dry stiff wind that beat across the flats. He wanted to stop and talk to her. Give her a hand, have a chat. He wanted to show his tolerance of her viewpoint, allow himself to be convinced by some of her arguments, make certain trenchant points of his own and then drive her to the nondescript room where she lived at the edge of this or that town, with a partial view of the mountains, and have soft, moaning and mutually tolerant sex in her rumpled bed, but he slowed only slightly as he drove past.

  Later someone told him the protesters lived in a ruined school bus in the Sacramento Mountains. Matt kind of liked that. He liked the idea of people leaving everything behind to pursue an idea. He thought of Sister Edgar in sixth grade talking about desert saints, pillar saints, stylites, and she hoisted herself up on her desk and crossed her legs under the habit, a saint lotused on a column in the Sinai, and spoke to the class in snatches of Latin and Hebrew and he remembered liking that—he liked to think of a godstruck band of wanderers haunting the test ranges and silos of the West.

  It was part of the reason he’d come here in the first place. For the questions and challenges. For the self-knowledge he might find in a sterner life, in the fixing of willful limits.

  Did you do grad work on solar energy? Did you do a paper on the trigger principle of nuclear fission? Do you go to the dentist every six months for a prophy and a polish? Are you a physicist with a grudge against your mother? Are you a systems engineer who masturbates in secret while your wife is watching reruns of “The Honeymooners”? Do you wish to hell you could see a tower shot with all the special effects, with the sun coming up ass-backwards and the trees casting shadows in the wrong direction, the spectacle of the unmattered atom, the condensation cloud arranged split-secondly on the shock disc, sort of primly place-centered, and the visible shock approaching, and the biblical wind that carries sagebrush, sand, hats, cats, car parts, condoms and poisonous snakes, all blowing by in the desert dawn?