Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  “Powerless. Understand, this is how they remind us of our basic state. They roll out a periodic crisis. Is it horizontal? One great power against the other. Or is it vertical, is it up and down?” He seemed to lose his line of argument here. “The U.S. is putting up a naval blockade. Fine, good, groovy. D’ya hear what he said?” And Lenny did his basso head of state. “Any offensive military equipment being shipped to Cuba gets stopped dead in the water by the U.S. fleet.” He jabbed at some imaginary lint on his lapel, signaling a shift, a bit. “And there’s this woman sitting out there in Centralia listening to the speech. She hears, Maximum peril. She hears, Abyss of destruction. She has a job dishing out meat patties in the school cafeteria and she comes home exhausted and turns on the TV and it’s the President of the United States and he’s saying, Abyss of destruction. And she sits there in her cafeteria whites, with her shoes off, picking her feet. Her name is Bitty. She’s thinking they preempted Lawrence Welk so this Irish Catholic millionaire can talk about abyss of destruction. Then she thinks, Hey, wait, that’s a movie title, right? Sure, it’s one of those hard-boiled cynical crime dramas in moody black and white. I saw it with the Muscular Dystrophy Mothers of Central Kansas. The speech goes on and on and Bitty’s trying to register the enormous—and the President says something about, Swift and extraordinary buildup. Soviet missiles in Cuba. But she thinks he’s talking about the grease in her oven. Yeah that greasy buildup’s beginning to bug me, man. She has this oven cleaner she’s eager to try. Works fifty-two percent faster than the strongest industrial acid. She tries to concentrate on the President’s speech but everything he’s saying sounds like a pitch for insect repellent or throat spray. And Bitty’s sitting there in Emporia or Centralia and she gets up out of the chair and goes to the phone and calls her friend DeeAnn. DeeAnn is the local movie expert. DeeAnn reviews movies for the cafeteria workers’ newsletter, Meat Patty Week. And Bitty says into the phone, Who was in that movie the President’s talking about on TV? And DeeAnn says, You’re asking me about movies? At a time like this?”

  Lenny bent his knees and spread both arms wide, his mouth stretched in a rictus of gaped and grinning terror.

  “We’re all gonna die!”

  He loved this line so much it was a little unnerving, especially in DeeAnn’s voice, which could shatter a urinal at fifty feet. An hour later, after all the bits, the scatological asides, the improvised voices, it was this isolated line that stayed in people’s mind when they went to their cars and drove home to Westwood or Brentwood or wherever, or roamed the freeways for half the night because they knew they wouldn’t be able to sleep and what better place to imagine the flash and burst, where else would they go to rehearse the end of history, or actually see it—this was the meaning of the freeways and always had been and they’d always known it at some unsounded level. And so they drove half the night, at first morose and then angry and then fatalistic and then plain shaking scared, chests tight with the knowledge of how little it would take to make the thing happen—the first night on earth when the Unthinkable crept up over the horizon line and waited in an animal squat, and all the time they drove they heard the keening of that undisguisable Jewish voice repeating the line that had made them bust their guts laughing, astonishingly, only a few hours earlier.

  JULY 12, 1953

  It was a gesture without a history.

  You hefted the weapon and pointed it and saw an interested smile fall across his face. But after that you were in unknown country. The slyest kind of shit-eating grin. But after you forced back the trigger. The trigger pull was heavy and rough. And after you force-squeezed the trigger you were in another place, absorbing the noise and movement, the gesture, the way he jerked and fell, although jerked isn’t an adequate word—it was a movement beyond your competence as a witness to understand and describe.

  At Staatsburg they had the woman in the office, Dr. Lindblad, and I had regular appointments, knock-knock, and she probed the subject of the shooting while I tried to get a look at her legs.

  Forget for a minute that you’re the one who shot him.

  You can’t describe the movement properly because it was a level of reality you hadn’t rehearsed, either one of you. The unhinged fling of an arm, the right arm whippy and haywire, like a part that runs amuck in a machine, and the whole body spasm, an arrhythmic thing, a thing outside the limits of experience.

  You don’t want to forget he was sitting in a chair. The chair moved not unlike the man. The chair could have been a version of the man, so drastic was its tumble into the wall.

  And of course your own shock, the trauma of perception—how can you tell what’s going on if you’re in shock yourself?

  Dr. Lindblad said, “Do you think you’d like to have a family someday?”

  “I don’t know. Haven’t thought about it. No,” I said. “I don’t think so. Kids? I don’t want kids. I don’t want to be a father.”

  “And why is that?”

  “Why is that. I don’t know. After what I’ve done? I don’t think I should be a father. Do you?”

  “What have you done, Nick?”

  I smiled at her. I liked Dr. Lindblad. She wasn’t good-looking but she was stacked. The Alley Boys liked her, the gang members, because she listened to their stories without making judgments. She did delicate twirling tricks with their rage and shame and sullen excuses. She did not try to get them to moderate their sense of inevitability. They were at war with society and what’s the point of pretending otherwise. I didn’t tell her anything but I liked going into her office and smelling the furniture wax and checking the titles of the books and scouting out the bulge of her breasts under the fabric of whatever snug blouse she was wearing that day.

  One of the Alley Boys looked out the window of the mess and said, “That’s a Disney picture, man.” He was talking about the miniature golf course. “And we’re the dwarfs that supposed to be in it.”

  I wanted my correction to be consistent and strong. They’d made an attempt to try me as an adult even though I was only seventeen at the time and I agreed with their reasoning, that there was a coldblooded element in this crime whatever the shadings. When a judge ruled that the prosecution couldn’t do this, they decided to try me for manslaughter and again I thought why not, considering the recklessness of the act, but my lawyer Imperato, a man with sallow jowls and a briefcase that was shedding skin, arranged a plea deal and they went for a lesser charge and now I stood looking at the golf course on a soft summer morning a few days before my release and saw that someone had painted names all over the ramparts and windmills, the nicknames of gang members, all hail the Alhambras, and the guys gawked and pointed and bent over laughing and I thought this was the time to start my round of guilty goodbyes.

  Because you were the shooter and the witness both and you can separate these roles. The second was helpless to prevent the first from acting. The second could not stop the act, could not manage it and finally did not know how to perceive it. It was too down deep even as it reached his eyes, your eyes. The terrible spasticky thing, the whole groanlike abandon, the resignation of life and breath to this vehement depth of gesture, man and chair going different ways.

  Dr. Lindblad might have said, “The gesture is extreme because the mind is closing down. It’s the end of consciousness. So the body goes berserk. The body shows you what’s happening to the mind. The way a person’s grief bends the body. This is how consciousness looks. This is how it flails and thrashes when the end is sudden and violent and the mind is unprepared.”

  And I might have said, “You’re talking about his mind, how the end is sudden, or mine?”

  But she didn’t say it and I didn’t say it because I wasn’t talking much. The Alley Boys were talking. They told her they were in a state of total war with society. They told her it would be that way until they were dead. Society wanted them dead. The Alley Boys were too smart not to know this. They told her they’d get released and go back to the street, which was another departm
ent of the penal system and vice versa, and they’d go back and do what they’d always done, they told her. They’d deal, steal, get the edge, carry the piece and pursue the conduct of the war.

  The book fits the hand, it fits the individual. The way you hold a book and turn the pages, hand and eye, the rote motions of raking gravel on a hot country road, the marks on the page, the way one page is like the next but also totally different, the lives in books, the hills going green, old rolling hills that made you feel you were becoming someone else.

  Dr. Lindblad tried to work my soul. She believed in my salvation. She probed all the forces in my history and she gave me books to read, and I read them, and she advanced ideas about what had happened, and I thought about them. But I didn’t know if I accepted the idea that I had a history. She used that word a lot and it was hard for me to imagine that all the scuffle and boredom of those years, the crisscross boredom and good times and flare-ups and sameshit nights—I didn’t understand how the streaky blur in my nighttime mind could have some sort of form and coherence. Maybe there was a history in her files but the thing I felt about myself was that I’d leaned against a wall in a narrow street serving out some years of mostly aimless waiting.

  But you felt some things, didn’t you? You felt the strange fascination of his dying fall, so crazy-armed and unmade-up that you didn’t know how to look at it.

  She told me that my father was the third person in the room the day I shot George Manza. This was frankly news to me and I sort of half laughed—you know the way you snicker a nervous draft of air down your nostrils. She told me that one way or another the two events were connected, meaning that six years after Jimmy disappeared I shot a guy who didn’t know my father, or barely knew him, or saw him on the street a few times, and this was a link she wanted to probe.

  “You have a history,” she said, “that you are responsible to.”

  “What do you mean by responsible to?”

  “You’re responsible to it. You’re answerable. You’re required to try to make sense of it. You owe it your complete attention.”

  She kept talking about history in her tight blouse. But all I saw was the crazy-armed man, his body spinning one way, the chair going another. And all I saw was the rough slur of those narrow streets, the streets going narrower all the time, collapsing in on themselves, and the dumb sad sameness of the days.

  Then they came and told me I’d be getting an early release, unexpectedly, one summer day. I wasn’t sure how I felt about this. They told me they were sending me to the Jesuits, at the wintry end of the world, somewhere near a lake in Minnesota.

  2

  * * *

  OCTOBER 8, 1957

  The Demings were home this afternoon, busy at various tasks in their split-level suburban house, a long low two-tone colonial with a picture window, a breezeway and bright siding.

  Erica was in the kitchen making Jell-O chicken mousse for dinner. Three cups chicken broth or three chicken bouillon cubes dissolved in three cups boiling water. Two packages Jell-O lemon gelatin. One teaspoon salt. One-eighth teaspoon cayenne. Three tablespoons vinegar. One and a third cups whipped topping mix. Two-thirds cup mayonnaise. Two cups finely diced cooked chicken. Two cups finely chopped celery. Two tablespoons chopped pimiento.

  Then boil and pour and stir and blend. Fold spiced and chilled gelatin into chicken thing. Spoon into 9×5-inch loaf pan. Chill until firm. Unmold. Garnish with crisp lettuce and stuffed olives (if desired). Makes six entree salads.

  Do not reuse this bottle for storing liquids.

  Erica did things with Jell-O that took people’s breath away. Even now, as she prepared the chicken mousse for final chilling, there were nine parfait glasses in the two-tone Kelvinator. This was dessert for the next three evenings. Each glass was tilted at a forty-five-degree angle either against the wall of the refrigerator or against another object. This tilting method, handed down from her grandmother and her mother, allowed Erica to do Jell-O desserts in a number of colorful diagonal stripes, working the combinations among half a dozen flavors. She might put black raspberry Jell-O, slightly thickened, into a parfait glass. She puts the glass in the fridge, tilting it at forty-five degrees. After the gelatin chills and fully thickens she folds in a swathe of lime Jell-O, and then maybe orange, and then strawberry or strawberry-banana. At the end of the process she has nine multistriped desserts, all different, all so vividly attractive.

  Doing things with Jell-O was just about the best way to improve her mood, which was oddly gloomy today—she couldn’t figure out why.

  From the kitchen window she could see the lawn, neat and trimmed, low-hedged, open and approachable. The trees at the edge of the lawn were new, like everything else in the area. All up and down the curving streets there were young trees and small new box shrubs and a sense of openness, a sense of seeing everything there is to see at a single glance, with nothing shrouded or walled or protected from the glare.

  Nothing shrouded or secret except for young Eric, who sat in his room, behind drawn fiberglass curtains, jerking off into a condom. He liked using a condom because it had a sleek metallic shimmer, like his favorite weapons system, the Honest John, a surface-to-surface missile with a warhead that carried yields of up to forty kilotons.

  Avoid contact with eyes, open cuts or running sores.

  He sat sprawled in a butterfly chair and thought nobody could ever guess what he was doing, specially the condom part. Nobody could ever guess it, know it, imagine it or associate him with it. But what happens, he thought, if you die some day and it turns out that everything you’ve ever done in private becomes general knowledge in the hereafter. Everybody automatically knows everything you ever did when you thought you were totally and sneakingly and safely unseen.

  Prolonged exposure to sun may cause bursting.

  They put thermal pads on the Honest John to heat the solid fuel in preparation for firing. Then they remove the pads and launch the missile from a girderlike launch rail in a grassy field somewhere in the Free World. And the missile’s infallible flight, the way it sweeps out precise volumes of mathematical space, it’s so saintly and sun-tipped, swinging out of its apex to dive to earth, and the way the fireball haloes out above its column of smoke and roar, like some nameless faceless whatever. It made him want to be a Catholic.

  Plus she’d have three chicken mousse salads for leftovers later in the week.

  Out in the breezeway husband Rick was simonizing their two-tone Ford Fairlane convertible, brand-new, like the houses and the trees, with whitewall tires and stripes of jetstreak chrome that fairly crackled when the car was in motion.

  Erica kept her Jell-O molds in the seashell beige cabinet over the range. She had fluted molds, ring molds, crown molds in a number of sizes, she had notes and diagrams, mold techniques, offer forms for special decorative molds that she intended to fill out and mail at her earliest convenience.

  If swallowed, induce vomiting at once.

  Eric stroked his dick in a conscientious manner, somber and methodical. The condom was feely in a way he’d had to get used to, rubbery dumb and disaffecting. On the floor between his feet was a photo of Jayne Mansfield with her knockers coming out of a sequined gown. He wanted to sandwich his dick between her breasts until it went wheee. But he wouldn’t just walk out the door when it was over. He would talk to her breasts. Be tender and lovey. Tell them what his longings were, his hopes and dreams.

  There was one mold Erica had never used, sort of guided missilelike, because it made her feel uneasy somehow.

  The face in the picture was all painted mouth and smudgy lashes and at a certain point in the furtherance of his business Eric deflected his attention from the swooping breasts and focused on the facial Jayne, on her eyebrows and lashes and puckered lips. The breasts were real, the face was put together out of a thousand thermoplastic things. And in the evolving scan of his eros, it was the masking waxes, liners, glosses and creams that became the soft moist mechanisms of release.

&
nbsp; Intentional misuse by deliberately inhaling contents can be harmful or fatal.

  Erica wore a swirly blue skirt and buttercup blouse that happened to match the colors of their Fairlane.

  Rick was still in the breezeway, running a shammy over the chrome-work. This was something, basically, he could do forever. He could look at himself in a strip of chrome, warp-eyed and hydrocephalic, and feel some of the power of the automobile, the horsepower, the decibel rumble of dual exhausts, the pedal tension of Ford-O-Matic drive. The sneaky thing about this car was that, yes, you drove it sensibly to the dentist and occasionally carpooled with the Andersons and took Eric to the science fair but beneath the routine family applications was the crouched power of the machine, top down, eating up the landscape.

  Danger. Contents under pressure.

  One of Erica’s favorite words in the language was breezeway. It spoke of ease and breeze and being contemporary and having something others did not. Another word she loved was crisper. The Kelvinator had a nice roomy crisper and she liked to tell the men that such-and-such was in the crisper. Not the refrigerator, the crisper. The carrots are in the crisper, Rick. There were people out there on the Old Farm Road, where the front porches sag badly and the grass goes unmowed and the Duck River Baptists worship in a squat building that sits in the weeds on the way to the dump, who didn’t know what a crisper was, who had iceboxes instead of refrigerators, or who had refrigerators that lacked crispers, or who had crispers in their refrigerators but didn’t know what they were for or what they were called, who put tubs of butter in the crisper instead of lettuce, or eggs instead of carrots.