Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  How and when would it reveal itself?

  She wondered why the film was silent. Maybe it was shot earlier than the experts surmised. But she thought it was more likely that Eisenstein knew he’d have an easier time doing the film in secret if he did not use sound. And maybe silence suited the development of his themes.

  What about the politics? She thought this film might be a protest against socialist realism, against the party-minded mandate to produce art that advanced the Soviet cause. Was he in secret rebellion? He’d been condemned for earlier work, according to Miles, and had seemed to capitulate. But what was this murky film, this strange dark draggy set of images if not a statement of outrage and independence?

  Even better. Doesn’t this movie seem to anticipate the terror that was mounted against Russian artists in the late nineteen-thirties? The secret police. The arrests, the torture, the disappearances, the executions.

  The mad scientist aims the gun.

  A figure stands against a wall, his body going white.

  The scientist shows a tight smile.

  The victim is transfigured, pain-racked, his lower lip dribbling off his face, a growth appearing at the side of his neck, a radiant time-lapse melanoma.

  The scientist approaches and touches the man, tenderly, on the cheek.

  Abruptly the screen went dark. Intermission seemed a timely idea and Klara thought she’d take Esther on a tour of the powder rooms, there were quite a few, she thought, on several levels, and well worth beholding—murals, sculpture, furniture, things she’d seen through her mother’s eyes, suddenly free in space, independent of memory.

  Miles went up to a private viewing room in the third mezzanine to confer with his colleagues. The two women left Jack in a chair in the grand lounge, downstairs, a carpeted area about two hundred feet in length, and they went into the nearest powder room.

  “I’ve got a question,” Esther said.

  Klara lit a cigarette. Esther, who’d stopped smoking, bummed one and lit it and inhaled and then looked away to protect the sensation, to guard it from distraction.

  They heard a rumble. They felt something shaking under their feet and Klara studied the white parchment wall, listening carefully.

  Then she took a drag and said, “S’okay, friend. Only the subway. The IND plowing under Sixth Avenue with its cargo of human souls.”

  They went up to the mezzanine levels and peered in at the walnut and pigskin in the men’s smoking rooms and Klara said, “So what’s your question?”

  “Do we have to stay for the rest of it?”

  “Miles went to a certain amount of trouble. Besides I want to see what happens.”

  “What could happen?”

  “I don’t know. But it’s an interesting movie to look at from time to time.”

  “There’s something about the tone,” Esther said. “The photography. The glances that get exchanged. It’s awfully shrouded of course. And the way the scientist.”

  “Touched the victim.”

  “What do you know about Eisenstein?”

  “He was your friend, not mine,” Klara said.

  They made their rounds of the powder rooms and went back down to find Jack on the lower level, sitting above the rattle of another subway run.

  The train was one of his, Moonman’s, he had a dozen pieces running through the system, top-to-bottom burners, and it just so happens he was aboard tonight, under the water mains and waste pipes, under the gas and steam and electric, between the storm sewers and telephone lines, and he moved from car to car with each stop and checked out the people who stepped inside, wearing their retractable subway faces, and the doors went ding dong before banging shut.

  Ismael Muñoz, dark and somber, watching people come aboard. Sparsely stubbled Ismael reading lips and faces, hoping he might catch a bravo comment. Hey this guy is lighting up the line. This was his newest piece so here he was going uptown on the Washington Heights local, every car tagged with his own neon zoom, with highlights and overlapping letters and 3-D effect, the whole wildstyle thing of making your name and street number a kind of alphabet city where the colors lock and bleed and the letters connect and it’s all live jive, it jumps and shouts—even the drips are intentional, painted supersharp to express how the letters sweat, how they live and breathe and eat and sleep, they dance and play the sax.

  This was not a window-down piece. This was a whole-train burner with windows painted over and each letter and number bigger than a man.

  Moonman 157.

  Ismael was sixteen, not too old and not too young, and he was determined to kill the shit of every subway artist in town.

  Nobody could take him down.

  And he sat there in his khaki jacket with his eyes ever moving, waiting for someone to say something that would make his day.

  He knew he was getting fame. He had imitators now, a couple of fairy-ass kids who tried to outking him in his own country. One of them got busted by the vandal squad, sentenced to clean graffiti from the station walls with an orange juice mixture because there’s an acid in the juice that eats into paint.

  Serves the chulo right for biting my style.

  And he sat there with his longish face and misaligned teeth, an old man’s worried head, and he studied the platform people at every stop. They reacted to the train, their heads went wow. Some shocked looks too, they’re seeing hell on wheels, but mostly the eyes go yes and the faces open up. And he studied the riders as they shuffled in, carrying umbrellas, some of them, and concealed weapons, others, and gum wrappers and phone numbers and crushed Kleenex and hankies wrapped around house keys all wadded together on their mulatto bodies because the subway’s where the races mix.

  It made him think he was an unknown hero of the line, riding a train he’d maximum tagged. Revealing himself in a cartoon glow. Hey it’s Moonman in our midst.

  Once a man stood on the platform and took a picture of one of Moonman’s top-to-bottoms, a foreigner by the look of him, and Ismael sidled to the open door so he could be in the picture too, unknown to the man. The man was photographing the piece and the writer both, completely unknown to himself, from someplace like Sweden he looked.

  The whole point of Moonman’s tag was how the letters and numbers told a story of backstreet life.

  At Columbus Circle he changed to the Broadway train because he had business at the end of the line. He got on a train that was bombed inside and out by Skaty 8, a thirteen-year-old writer who frantically tagged police cars, hearses, garbage trucks, who took his Krylon satin colors into the tunnels and tagged up the walls and catwalks, he hit platforms, steps, turnstiles and benches, he’d tag your little sister if she was walking by. Not a style king, no way, but a legend among writers for the energy he put forth, getting his tag seen by major millions and then two weeks ago, and a genuine regret went through Ismael as he recalled being told, he slumped and sagged all over again and felt the deepest kind of soldierly sadness—Skaty 8 hit by a train while he’s walking on the tracks under downtown Brooklyn.

  People moved along the car, they skated to a seat, they looked at display ads above the heads across the aisle, all without eye motion that you could detect with the most delicate device.

  Ismael used to walk the tracks when he felt sorry for himself. Those were foregone times. He’d pop an emergency hatch in the sidewalk and climb down into a tunnel and just, like, go for a walk, be alone down there, keeping the third rail in sight and listening for the train and getting to know the people who lived in the cable rooms and up on the catwalks, and that’s where he saw a spray-paint scrawl, maybe five years ago, down under Eighth Avenue. Bird Lives. It made him wonder about graffiti, about who took the trouble and risk to walk down this tunnel and throw a piece across the wall, and how many years have gone by since then, and who is Bird, and why does he live?

  And the guy who reached around saying excuse me please.

  He rode up the edge of Manhattan headed for the Bronx. There was no art in bombing platforms and
walls. You have to tag the trains. The trains come roaring down the rat alleys all alike and then you hit a train and it is yours, seen everywhere in the system, and you get inside people’s heads and vandalize their eyeballs.

  The doors went ding dong before banging shut.

  He saw a thin black male standing at the end of the car, disregardful, he’s acting out the birth of the cool, and Ismael thought he was an undercover cop. It made him go low profile in his mental makeup, willing himself to be unnoticed in his seat, because he believed they were closing in on him. There was a big push out of City Hall to wipe out graffiti once and for all, to cork these ghetto crews and the middle-class white boys that came biting in behind them, and writers were being careful and playing safe.

  He did not fear arrest, only the complications that would follow. Arrest would be good for his notoriety. It might even mean a story in the Post. But then the matter of the family begins to be important. It’s not that he didn’t want to be a father. He liked the idea of father and family. But there were so many things in between.

  When he walked the tunnels as a kid he used to ask about Bird and he found out this was Charlie Parker. A jazz giant. He used to talk to the men who lived on the catwalks and in the unused freight tunnel under the West Side, they had beds and chairs and shopping carts, they had slippers they put on in the evening, they were mostly ordinary men, they washed the dishes and took out the garbage, and they told him about bop, bebop, and how Bird was dead at thirty-four. And one day Ismael, maybe he’s thirteen, he’s taking a leak against a wall and a guy comes along and stands behind him and reaches around, believe it or not, saying excuse me, and holds Ismael’s dick while he pisses.

  Dead at thirty-four, that was Bird, which was a ripe old age in the tunnels.

  He knew he was getting fame because he had imitators, first, and because other writers did not disrespect him by spraying over his work, except some of them did, and because two women came looking for him in the Bronx.

  But, see, this was the way his mind was reasoning at this particular time. Stay totally low and out of sight. Do not get your name or face in the papers. Do not get in trouble with the transit police. Because he had a woman he used to live with who was pregnant head to toe. They used to live with her mother and her mother’s part-time man and it isn’t that Ismael Muñoz doesn’t want to be a father. It’s just that this is not the time to get personally involved.

  He heard they went into the superettes, two women from the galleries. They went into the bodegas, the church, the firehouse, he pictured them going into the firehouse to ask about graffiti, twenty men in rubber boots eating combination pizzas.

  He sat on the Broadway train listening to the way his mind was reasoning.

  People from the galleries were all over the Bronx looking for Moon-man, for Momzo Tops, for Snak-Bar and Rimester and the whole Voodoo crew.

  Forget it, man. He could easily envision a case where the whole gallery scene is a scam by the police to get writers out of the tunnels and train yards and into the open, identified by name and face.

  The man held his dick and eventually sucked it, whenever it was, a couple of days later, or weeks, that was the act he performed. And Ismael went down there, feeling sorry for himself, fairly often after that, going through a fence near the West Side Highway and into an opening in a grated emergency exit and down the narrow steps into the freight tunnel, where they had bookshelves, some of them, and Christmas decorations, and used half names and code names, tags like the writers would develop, and the truth of the matter is that he still goes down there for sex with men because some habits you drop and others you come to rely on.

  The train went past City College, then veered east.

  They did it herky-jerky in the dark. Or they went to a cable room and did it with sheets and towels. They kept pets down there and ran clotheslines across the tunnel and stole electricity from the government.

  Bop, bebop. And how Bird was dead at thirty-four.

  And he sat there in his khaki slouch, looking down between his feet, glancing at the feet across the aisle, all the notched and dimpled shoes that did not seem to be things that people bought and wore so much as permanent parts, body parts, inseparable from the men and women sitting there, because the subway seals you durably in the stone of the moment.

  The train entered the Bronx and he got off four stops later, at the end of the line, where his crew was waiting faithfully.

  There were three of them, ages twelve, eleven and twelve, and they’d spent the day racking paint from hardware stores, which is a pastime, petty theft, that Ismael has long since risen above.

  They walked up the steep hill at 242nd Street.

  “Where’s the rain?” Ismael said.

  “Nothing happen,” they said.

  “I hear rain on the radio all day. I figure we don’t work tonight. Ten to one against.”

  “Nothing happen,” they said. “Two, three drops.”

  They had the spray-paint cans in three gym bags. They had Ismael’s sketches in a manila portfolio. They had peaches and grapes in a paper bag inside a plastic bag. They had the French mineral water he liked to drink while he worked, also acquired in the day’s little wave of thievery, Perrier, in pretty green bottles. He believed in going elite whenever possible. They had nozzles for the spray cans. They had master keys to open up the cars in case he wanted to work inside, which he did not.

  His crew consisted of hopefuls, of course. Up writers of the future. They racked for the master. They kept lookout while he painted. They crossbraced their arms to support his weight when he needed to reach the upper part of a car.

  A chain-link fence ran along the street, topped by razor ribbon. The crew paused near the west end of the fence, where there was a section of snipped links, concealed by poison ivy. They held back the fence and Ismael edged through, jump-stepping to the roof that was adjacent. There was a series of equipment sheds with sawtooth roofs. They went to the last roof and shinnied down drainpipes to the wooden planking at track level, which they could do in their sleep by now, and began to look around for a suitable train to tag.

  They knew pretty much in advance that they wouldn’t be hassled. There were too many trains, too many writers. The city could not afford all the guards that would be needed to patrol the yards and sidings through the night.

  They saw Rimester near a light tower, one of the older writers, a black guy wearing a kufi, a skullcap, who did amazing wildstyle window-downs, Ismael had to admit—the letters decorated with love poems and sentiments of heartbreak.

  They gave each other ceremonial respect, with precise and detailed flourishes of handshake and phraseology, and they rapped about this and that, and then Rimester described how he’d seen six of his cars going under the acid bath in the large yard about a mile and a half south of here. They run the cars under sprinklers built above the track. All his two-in-the-morning spray-crazy unpaid labor getting buffed away in minutes. Forget orange juice, man. This was the new graffiti killer, some weirdshit chemical from the CIA.

  It’s like you knock a picture off a shelf and someone dies. Only this time it’s you that’s in the photo.

  That’s how some writers felt about their tags.

  There were a dozen tracks at the siding here. Ismael and his crew went to the far end, to the last track, overlooking the field where the Irish played Irish football. They picked out a flat—this was an old train with a paintable surface, much better than the ridgies that were coming on the market.

  The crew lined up his colors and he went to work. He had a Rustoleum yellow he’d started using, like mad canary, and the crew fitted different nozzles on the can so he could vary the breadth and mass of the strokes.

  “We seen Lourdes,” they said to him.

  Lourdes was the woman he used to live with, two years older than Ismael, more or less, and maybe twenty pounds heavier right now.

  “Who asked you who you seen?”

  “She say she want to t
alk to you.”

  “Maricón, who asked? I ask?”

  Ismael rarely got angry. He was not an angry guy. He had the reflective head of an elder of the barrio, playing dominoes under a canopy while the fire engines idle up the street, but if the crew expected to do the fill-in once he set the style and faded the colors, they’d better learn the manners of the yard.

  “Where’s my Perrier, okay? You want to work with Ismael Muñoz, you give him his Perrier and forget about messages from whoever.”

  They worked through the night without unnecessary talk. They handed him the spray cans. They shook the cans before handing them over and the clicking sound of the aerosol ball was basically the only noise in the yard except for the spray itself, the hissy wash of paint folding over the old iron flanks of the train.

  The man who reached around and said excuse me.

  Moonman 157. Add the digits and you get thirteen. But that’s the street where he lives, or used to live, he lives a lot of places now, so it’s properly part of his tag, it’s what they know him as, and bad luck is an ego trip you can count on, and think of a train coming out of the tunnels and going elevated—think of your tag in maximum daylight rolling over the scorched lots where you were born and raised.

  The crew shook the cans and the ball went click.

  He stood on the door edge of one train and leaned across to the train parked adjacent and tagged it from the windows up.

  And he went down the slate stairway that crumbled to the pressure of his weight, his hand on the rusty pipe that was the banister, and he felt the mood of the tunnel on a given day. It might be a coke mood one day, Ismael did not do drugs, or a mood of speed that’s traveling through the tunnel, someone made a buy and shared it, or a mood of mental illness, which was often the case. And always a brown rat mood because they were there in pack rat numbers, an endless source of stories, the size of the rats, the attitude of unfearing, how they ate the bodies of those who died in the tunnels, how they were eaten in turn by the rat man who lived in level six under Grand Central, he killed and cooked and ate a rat a week—track rabbits, they were called.