Underworld

by Don DeLillo

  We walk along the drainage canal past tree trunks limed white—white against the sun.

  The earth opened up and he stepped inside. I think it felt that way not only to us but to Jimmy as well. I think he went under. I don’t think he wanted a fresh start or a new life or even an escape. I think he wanted to go under. He lived day-to-day and step-to-step and did not wonder what would become of us or how she would manage or how tall we grew or how smart we became. I don’t think he spent a minute thinking about these things. I think he just went under. The failure it brought down on us does not diminish.

  This is how I came across the baseball, rearranging books on the shelves. I look at it and squeeze it hard and put it back on the shelf, wedged between a slanted book and a straight-up book, an expensive and beautiful object that I keep half hidden, maybe because I tend to forget why I bought it. Sometimes I know exactly why I bought it and other times I don’t, a beautiful thing smudged green near the Spalding trademark and bronzed with nearly half a century of earth and sweat and chemical change, and I put it back and forget it until next time.

  They said, L.S./M.F.T—Lucky Strike Means Fine Tobacco. Lucky Strike, in quotes, they said—“It’s toasted.”

  The planes come sparking out of the mountains to the south, glinting in the haze as they approach in a long line to make their landings, and I see the open-steel truss of the waste facility at the end of the road. I park beneath terraced gardens that send bougainvillea spilling over the pastel walls. My granddaughter is with me, Sunny, she is nearly six now, and inside the vast recycling shed we stand on a catwalk and watch the operations in progress. The tin, the paper, the plastics, the styrofoam. It all flies down the conveyor belts, four hundred tons a day, assembly lines of garbage, sorted, compressed and baled, transformed in the end to square-edged units, products again, wire-bound and smartly stacked and ready to be marketed. Sunny loves this place and so do the other kids who come with their parents or teachers to stand on the catwalk and visit the exhibits. Brightness streams from skylights down to the floor of the shed, falling on the tall machines with a numinous glow. Maybe we feel a reverence for waste, for the redemptive qualities of the things we use and discard. Look how they come back to us, alight with a kind of brave aging. The windows yield a strong broad desert and enormous sky. The landfill across the road is closed now, jammed to capacity, but gas keeps rising from the great earthen berm, methane, and it produces a wavering across the land and sky that deepens the aura of sacred work. It is like a fable in the writhing air of some ghost civilization, a shimmer of desert ruin. The kids love the machines, the balers and hoppers and long conveyors, and the parents look out the windows through the methane mist and the planes come out of the mountains and align for their approach and the trucks are arrayed in two columns outside the shed, bringing in the unsorted slop, the gut squalor of our lives, and taking the baled and bound units out into the world again, the chunky product blocks, pristine, newsprint for newsprint, tin for tin, and we all feel better when we leave.

  I drink aged grappa and listen to jazz. I do the books on the new shelves and stand in the living room and look at the carpets and wall hangings and I know the ghosts are walking the halls. But not these halls and not this house. They’re all back there in those railroad rooms at the narrow end of the night and I stand helpless in this desert place looking at the books.

  I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.

  http://blk.www/dd.com/miraculum

  Her name is Esmeralda. She lives wild in the inner ghetto, a slice of the South Bronx called the Wall—a girl who forages in empty lots for discarded clothes, plucks spoiled fruit from garbage bags behind bodegas, who is sometimes seen running through the trees and weeds, a shadow on the rubbled walls of demolished structures, unstumbling, a tactful runner with the sweet and easy stride of some creature of sylvan myth.

  The nuns have been trying to find her.

  Sister Grace, the younger of the two, determined to track and catch the girl and get her to a relief agency or to their convent in the middle Bronx, somewhere safe—examine her, feed her properly, get her enrolled in school.

  Sister Edgar, seeing a radiant grace in the girl, a reprieve from the Wall’s endless distress, even a source of personal hope, a goad to the old rugged faith. All heaven trembles when a soul swings in the wind—save her from danger, bring her to candles and ashes and palms, to belief in the mystical body.

  The nuns deliver food to people living in the Wall and nearby, the asthmatic children and sickle-cell adults, the cases of AIDS and the cocaine babies, and every day, twice a day, three or four times a day, they drive their van past the memorial wall. This is the six-story flank of a squatters’ tenement on which graffiti writers spray-paint an angel every time a local child dies of illness or mistreatment.

  Gracie talks and drives and yells out the window at dogs doing doody in the street. She wears a skirt and a windbreaker, she carries a can of Chemical Mace. Old spindle-shanked Edgar sits next to her and feels the aura of the streets and thinks herself back into another century. She is cinctured and veiled and would not know how to dress otherwise and would not be here at all if the children were healthy and the dogs middle-class.

  Gracie says, “Sometimes I wonder.”

  “What do you wonder?”

  “Never mind, Sister. Forget it.”

  “You wonder if we make a difference. You can’t understand how the last decade of the century looks worse than the first in some respects. Looks like another century in another country.”

  “I’m a positive person,” Gracie says.

  Edgar has a high-frequency laugh that travels through time and space, a sort of cackle frankly, shrill and dank—she thinks the dogs can probably hear it.

  “I know there’s a laborious procedure you have to follow,” she says, “in order to attain a positive state of mind. It’s a wonder you have strength left over to steer the car.”

  This pisses Gracie off and she rails a bit, respectfully, as the van approaches the salvage operation of Ismael Muñoz.

  A mass of junked cars, a pack jam, cars smash-heaped and jack-knifed, seventy or eighty cars, shamefaced. The nuns look instinctively for a sign of Esmeralda, who probably spends her nights sleeping in one of these cars. Then they park the van and enter the derelict tenement, climbing three flights of crumbling stairs to Ismael’s headquarters.

  Edgar expects him to look wan and drawn, visibly fragile. She thinks he has AIDS. It is a thing she senses. She senses dire things. She stands at a distance, studying him. An affable sort of human shambles in a tropical shirt and slapdash beard—he’s in a lively mood today because he has managed to rig a system in the building that produces enough power to run a TV set.

  “Sisters, look,” he says.

  They see a little kid, Juano, seated on a stationary bike pedaling frantically. The bike is linked to a World War II generator that Ismael got cheap at an armory liquidation. The generator is throbbing in the basement and there are cables running from the unit up to the TV set and there is a wheezing drive belt connecting the TV set to the bicycle. When the kid fast-pedals the bike, the generator ekes out a flow of electricity to the television set—a brave beat-up model that two of the other kids dug out of the garbage pits, where it was layered in the geological age of leisure-time appliances.

  Gracie is delighted and sits with the graffiti crew, eight or nine kids, watching the stock market channel.

  Ismael says, “What do you think? I did okay? This is just a start-up. I got things I’m planning big-time.”

  Edgar disapproves of course. This is her mission, to disapprove. One of the stern mercies of the Wall, a place unlin
ked to the usual services, is that TV has not been available. Now here it is, suddenly. You touch a button and all the things concealed from you for centuries come flying into the remotest room. It’s an epidemic of seeing. No conceivable recess goes unscanned. In the uterus, under the ocean, to the lost halls of the human brain. And if you can see it, you can catch it. There’s a pathogenic element in a passing glance.

  Ismael says, “I’m planning to go on-line real soon, Sisters. Advertise my junk cars. Go, like, global. Scrap metal for these trodden countries looking to build a military.”

  On the screen an image flicks and jumps. It is a man’s discoid head, a fellow in a white shirt with blue collar, or blue shirt with white collar—there is a fairly frequent color shift. He is talking about the big board composite while numbers and letters flow in two bands across the bottom of the screen, a blue band and a white band, and the crew sits watching and the kid on the bike is bent and pedaling, a furious pumping boy, and the names and prices flow in two different directions with active issues blinking.

  Ismael says, “Some people have a personal god, okay. I’m looking to get a personal computer. What’s the difference, right?”

  Ismael likes to tease the nuns. Edgar watches him carefully. She admires the graffiti wall, the angels arrayed row after row, blue for boys, pink for girls, but she is wary of the man who runs the project and she tries to understand the disappointment she feels, seeing Ismael in good spirits and evidently healthy.

  Does Sister want him to be deathly ill? Does she think he ought to be punished for being homosexual?

  Everybody’s watching TV except for her. She’s watching Ismael. No pallor or weight loss or lesions or other visible symptoms. The only thing he shows is a snaggle smile from out of his history of dental neglect.

  Why does she want to see him suffer? Isn’t he one of the affirmative forces in the Wall, earning money with his salvage business, using it more or less altruistically, teaching his crew of stray kids, abandoned some of them, pregnant one or two, runaways, throwaways—giving them a sense of responsibility and self-worth? And doesn’t he help the nuns feed the hungry?

  She studies him for marks, for early signs of incapacity. Then she steals a look out the window, hoping to glimpse the elusive girl. Sister has seen her a number of times from this window, almost always running. Run is what she does. It is her beauty and her safety both, her melodious hope, a thing of special merit, a cleansing, the fleet leaf-fall of something godly blowing through the world.

  Two of the charismatics come in to watch TV. These are people from the top floor, operating the only church in the Wall, a congregation of pentecostals seeking to receive the gift of the Spirit, laying on hands, shouting out words, prophesying—the whole rocking socking package that makes Edgar want to run and hide.

  Of course they look at her a little sideways too.

  Ismael appoints four members of the crew to go with the nuns and distribute food in the area. But the crew is rooted right now. They urge Juano to pedal faster because this is the only way to change channels and they want to watch cartoons or movies, something with visuals better than a head.

  They’re saying, “Go, man, fasta, fasta.”

  The bicycle boy bends and pumps and the picture wavers briefly but then springs back to the round announcer’s face and the moving lines of prices. Ismael stands there laughing. He loves the language of buying and selling and the sight of those clustered sets of letters that represent enormous corporate entities with their jets and stretches and tanker fleets. He starts pulling kids off the cushionless sofa and stone-slinging them toward the door while the other kids and the jivey charismatics keep urging Juano on.

  They’re saying, “Fasta, fasta, you the man.”

  The boy cranks and strains, bouncing on the seat, but the numbers keep flowing across the screen. Electronics slightly up, transports down, industrials more or less unchanged.

  Three weeks later Edgar sits in the van and watches her partner emerge from the red brick convent—rolling gait, short legs and squarish body. Gracie’s face is averted as she edges around the front of the vehicle and opens the door on the driver’s side.

  She gets in and grips the wheel, looking straight ahead.

  “I got a call from the precinct near the Wall.”

  Then she reaches for the door and shuts it. She grips the wheel again.

  “Somebody raped Esmeralda and threw her off a roof.”

  She starts the engine.

  “I’m sitting here thinking, Who do I kill?”

  She looks at Edgar briefly, then puts the van in gear.

  “Because this is the only question I can ask myself without giving in to despair.”

  They drive south through local streets, the tenement brick smoked mellow in morning light. Did Edgar know this would happen? Lately, yes, a knowing in her bones. She feels the weather of Gracie’s rage and pain. In recent days she’d approached the girl, Gracie had, and talked to her from a distance, and thrown a bag of food and clothing into the pokeweed where Esmeralda stood. They ride all the way in silence with the older nun mind-reciting questions and answers from the Baltimore Catechism. The strength of these exercises, which are a form of perdurable prayer, rests in the voices that accompany hers, children responding through the decades, syllable-crisp, a panpipe reply that is the lucid music of her life. Question and answer. What deeper dialogue might right minds devise? She reaches her hand across to Gracie’s on the wheel and keeps it there for a digital tick on the dashboard clock. Who made us? God made us. Those clear-eyed faces so believing. Who is God? God is the Supreme Being who made all things. She feels tired in her arms. Her arms are heavy and dead and she gets all the way to Lesson 12 when the projects appear at the rim of the sky, upper windows white with sunplay against the broad dark face of beaten stone.

  When Gracie finally speaks she says, “It’s still there.”

  “What’s still there?”

  “That knocking in the engine. Hear it? Hear it?”

  “I don’t hear a thing.”

  “Ku-ku. Ku-ku.”

  Then she drives the van down past the projects toward the painted wall.

  When they get there the angel is already sprayed in place. A winged figure in a pink sweatshirt and pink and aqua pants and a pair of white Nike Air Jordans with the logo prominent—she was a running girl so they gave her running shoes. And little Juano still dangles from a rope, winched down from the roof by the old hand-powered hoist the crew uses to grapple cars onto the deck of their flatbed truck. Ismael and others bend over the ledge attempting to shout correct spellings down to him as he drifts to and from the wall, leaning in to spray the interlaced letters that mark the great gone era of wildstyle graffiti.

  The nuns stand outside the van watching the kid finish the last scanted word and then see him yanked skyward in the cutting wind.

  Esmeralda Lopez

  12 year

  Petected in Heven

  When they get to the third floor Ismael is smoking a cigar, arms folded on his chest. Gracie paces the room. She doesn’t seem to know where to begin, how to address the nameless thing that someone has done to this child they’d so hoped to save. She paces, she clenches her fists. They hear the gassy moan of a city bus some blocks away.

  “Ismael. You have to find out who this guy is that did this thing.”

  “You think I’m running here? El Lay Pee Dee?”

  “You have contacts in the neighborhood that no one else has.”

  “What neighborhood? The neighborhood’s over there. This here’s the Wall. It’s all I can do to get these kids so they spell a word correct when they spray their paint. When I was writing we did subway cars in the dark without a letter misspell.”

  “Who cares about spelling?” Gracie says.

  Edgar used to care but not today and maybe never again. She feels weak and lost. The great Terror gone, the great thrown shadow dismantled—the launched object in the sky named for a Greek goddess on a be
ll krater in 500 B.C. All terror is local now. Some noise on the pavement very near, the stammer of casual rounds from a passing car, someone who carries off your child. Ancient fears revived, they will steal my child, they will come into my house when I’m asleep and cut out my heart because they have a dialogue with Satan.

  She says a desperate prayer.

  Pour forth we beseech thee, O Lord, thy grace into our hearts.

  Ten years’ indulgence, a blockbuster number, if the prayer is recited at dawn, noon and eventide, or as soon thereafter as possible.

  One of the girls is pedaling the bike, Willie for short, and she calls out to them, hey, here, look, and they gather at the TV set and stand astonished. There is a news report of the murder, their murder, and it is freaking network coverage, CNN—tragic life and death of homeless child. The crew is stunned to see footage of the Wall, two and a half seconds of film that shows the building they’re in, the facade of spray-painted angels, the overgrown lots with their bat caverns and owl roosts. They gawk and buzz, charged with a kind of second sight, the things they know so well seen inside out, made new and nationwide. They stand there smeared in other people’s seeing. Then the anchorwoman comes on. They tell Willamette to pedal faster man because the picture is beginning to fade and the anchorwoman’s electric red hair is color-running from her head in a luminous ring, which makes her all the more amazing, and she describes their lives to them in a bell-tone virgin voice, a woman so striking of feature she makes the news her own, and Willie pedals for all she’s worth and they urge her firmly on.