Underworld (12 page)

I let her tell me about her hometown.

I asked her about the work she did at the site and she said she applied a metal primer and sometimes she hand-scraped paint and sometimes she sanded with a machine.

She sat high in the seat, reciting details, and wagged her head, mock-girlish but also girlish.

I asked her about school and she said she'd dropped out several years earlier but was thinking of going back to get a degree in retailing and I let her tell me about it.

We talked about her brother, who had a rare blood disease.

I let her tell me about a white-water trip she took one summer when she was seventeen.

She said deteriated for deteriorated. When she said okay it sounded like okai.

She sat on a beaded cushion. Her hair was cut short, bulking out her face. I saw that the taxi's details and fittings, up close, and the paint job itself, had more amateurish charm than accuracy. But then it's not easy to get New York right.

“But here's the joke that's going round,” she said. “Except no one seems sure it's a joke. We're painting these old planes as a celebration in a way but how do we know for sure the crisis is really over? Is the breakup of the USSR really happening? Or is the whole thing a plot to trick the West?”

She sounded out a laugh from her sinuses. It was oral and it was nasal and it came out harsh and moist, a curious noise designed to ridicule the idea while conceding its dark appeal.

“They're making it seem like they're falling apart so we'll lower our guard, okai?”

I let her tell me about it.

She made the noise again. A long wet whinnying letter
k
. And I found the more she talked, the more she owed me. But I didn't say a word. It was in my heart to speak, to make a breach in her self-absorption, in the solid stuff of her hometown and dying brother. I wanted to reduce these things to rubble. It was just a passing mood, a thing that erupts out of the formed core of one's middle-minded resolve.

I let her talk. And the more I listened and the more unappealing she became, the more I wanted to get inside her pants, for reasons no one comprehends under heaven.

But I didn't say word one. It was in my heart to talk her into spending the night in my room, or half the night, or an hour and ten minutes. I didn't know why I wanted her but I knew why I didn't want her. It would have been disloyal to Klara, to our shared memory, our own brief time in that small room back there in the narrow streets that were the borders of the world.

“Well, getting late,” I said.

“Hey, big day tomorrow.”

“Best,” I said, “be on my way.”

She told me again how to get there and then drove off. All the other vehicles had left the area and I went looking for my car in the dark.

It is interesting to think of the great blaze of heaven that we winnow down to animal shapes and kitchen tools.

I watched TV in my motel.

I lived responsibly in the real. I didn't accept this business of life as a fiction, or whatever Klara Sax had meant when she said that things had become unreal. History was not a matter of missing minutes on the tape. I did not stand helpless before it. I hewed to the texture of collected knowledge, took faith from the solid and availing stuff of our experience. Even if we believe that history is a workwheel powered by human blood—read the speeches of Mussolini—at least we've known the thing together. A single narrative sweep, not ten thousand wisps of disinformation.

A man sat in a contour chair in a living-room set with a coffee table in front of him and books or the covers of books arrayed on the wall behind.

I believed we could know what was happening to us. We were not excluded from our own lives. That is not my head on someone else's body in the photograph that's introduced as evidence. I didn't believe that nations play-act on a grand scale. I lived in the real. The only ghosts I let in were local ones, the smoky traces of people I knew and the dinge of my own somber shadow, New York ghosts in every case, the old loud Bronx, hand-to-mouth, spoken through broken teeth—the jeer, the raspberry fart.

The man in the chair said, “Down's syndrome. Your toll-free number is one, eight hundred, five one five, two seven six eight. Korsakoff's psychosis. One, eight hundred, three one three, seven five eight one. Alzheimer's disease. Call toll-free. One, eight hundred, eight one three, three five two seven.” He said, “Kaposi's sarcoma. Twenty-four hours a day. One, eight hundred, six seven two, nine one six one.”

•    •    •

I drove out to the site at sunrise. I parked near an equipment shed and began to climb a small rise that would place me at a natural vantage in relation to the aircraft. I heard them before I saw them, an uneasy creaking, wind gusts spinning the movable parts. Then I reached the top of the sandstone ledge and there they were in broad formation across the bleached bottom of the world.

I didn't know there would be so many planes. I was astonished at the number of planes. They were arranged in eight staggered ranks with a few stray planes askew at the fringes. I counted every last plane as the sun came up. There were two hundred and thirty planes, swept-winged, finned like bottom creatures, some painted in part, some nearly completed, many not yet touched by the paint machines, and these last were gunship gray or wearing faded camouflage or sanded down to bare metal.

The painted aircraft took on sunlight and pulse. Sweeps of color, bands and spatters, airy washes, the force of saturated light—the whole thing oddly personal, a sense of one painter's hand moved by impulse and afterthought as much as by epic design. I hadn't expected to register such pleasure and sensation. The air was color-scrubbed, coppers and ochers burning off the metal skin of the aircraft to exchange with the framing desert. But these colors did not simply draw down power from the sky or lift it from the landforms around us. They pushed and pulled. They were in conflict with each other, to be read emotionally, skin pigments and industrial grays and a rampant red appearing repeatedly through the piece—the red of something released, a burst sac, all blood-pus thickness and runny underyellow. And the other planes, decolored, still wearing spooky fabric over the windscreen panels and engines, dead-souled, waiting to be primed.

Sometimes I see something so moving I know I'm not supposed to linger. See it and leave. If you stay too long, you wear out the wordless shock. Love it and trust it and leave.

She wanted us to see a single mass, not a collection of objects. She wanted our interest to be evenly spaced. She insisted that our eyes go
slowly over the piece. She invited us to see the land dimension, horizonwide, in which the work was set.

I listened to the turboblades rattle in the wind and felt the sirocco heat come blowing in and my eyes did in fact go slowly over the ranks and I felt a kind of wildness all around me, the grim vigor of weather and desert and those old weapons so forcefully rethought, the fittingness of what she'd done, but when I'd seen it all I knew I wouldn't stay an extra second.

Three vehicles moved toward the site, the day's first sturdy workers. I went down to my car and uncapped the tube of sunblock I'd spotted on a rack near the front desk in the mom-and-pop motel, next to the postcards and Indian dolls—the kachina dolls and snack packs of tortilla chips that are part of some curious neuron web of lonely-chrome America. I stood by the car and rubbed the lotion over my arms and face, pausing to read the label again. I'd been reading the label all morning. The label said the protection factor was thirty, not fifteen. I knew this subject well. I'd read up on this subject, seen the research studies, I'd compared the products and the claims. And I knew with total certainty that a protection factor of fifteen was the highest level of sunblock scientifically possible. Now they were selling me a thirty.

And it made me think of something strange. I got in the car and headed out toward the interstate. It made me think of the Teller story. The Teller story was about Dr. Edward Teller and the world's first atomic explosion, which occurred about two hundred miles northeast of my present position. And the story said how Dr. Teller feared the immediate effects of the blast at his viewing site twenty miles from zero point and how he decided it might be helpful to apply suntan lotion to his face and hands.

These thoughts, these flashes of light, that innocent winsome gesture, this Japanese car—all more or less appropriate to the landscape.

I hit the switch, lowering the windows, and saw mountains reared near Mexico, lyrical in themselves and beautifully named, whatever their names, because you can't name a mountain badly, and I looked for a sign that would point me home.

My mother was living with us at the time. We finally got my mother to come out from the East and we set her up in a cool room at the back of the house.

My wife was good with her. They knew how to talk to each other. They found things to talk about. They talked about the things I did not talk about with Marian, the things I shrugged off when Marian asked, early girlfriends maybe or how I got along with my brother. The small shrewd things Marian used to ask me. I broke my arm when I was eight, falling out of a tree. This is what they talked about.

From the shimmering bronze tower where I worked I used to gaze at the umber hills and ridges that defined the northeast view. Maybe it was a hundred and eight degrees out on the street. Maybe it was a hundred and ten, a hundred and twelve, and I looked out past the miscellaneous miles of squat box structures where you took your hearing aid to be fixed or shopped for pool supplies, the self-replicating stretch I traveled every day, and I told myself how much I liked this place with its downtown hush and its office towers separated by open space and its parks with jogging trails and its fairy ring of hills and its residential
streets of oleanders and palms and tree trunks limed white—white against the sun.

We brought her out from the East. We took her out of the daily drama of violence and lament and tabloid atrocity and matching redemption and how the city is hard and how the city is mean and how the city is nice to a tourist from Missouri who leaves her handbag in a cab and we fixed her up in a cool room where she watched TV.

Marian wanted me to tell her about the old streets, the street games, the street fights, the alley sex, the petty theft. I told her about the car, not so petty, but she wanted to hear more. She wanted to hear about the execution now and then of some wayward member of whatever organized group she imagined might be operating thereabouts, the projectile entering the back of the head and making a pathway to the brain. She thought my mother's arrival might yield the basic savor she could not get from laconic Nick. But my mother only talked about the lazy grades I got in school and how I fell out of a tree when I was eight.

And I liked the way history did not run loose here. They segregated visible history. They caged it, funded and bronzed it, they enshrined it carefully in museums and plazas and memorial parks. The rest was geography, all space and light and shadow and unspeakable hanging heat.

I drank soy milk and ran the metric mile. I had a thing I clipped to the waistband of my running trunks, a device that weighed only three and a half ounces and had a readout showing distance traveled and calories burned and length of stride. I carried my house keys in an ankle wallet that fastened with a velcro closure. I didn't like to run with house keys jiggling in my pocket. The ankle wallet answered a need. It spoke directly to a personal concern. It made me feel there were people out there in the world of product development and merchandising and gift cataloguing who understood the nature of my little nagging needs.

They also talked about my father. That's the other thing they talked about in the deep lull after dinner. It's the kind of subject Marian seized on, trying to fill in gaps, work out details. I used to sit in the living room and listen fitfully through the urgent sexual throb of the dishwasher. I used to half listen, listen with my face in a magazine, hearing scumbled voices coming from the back room, a cluster of
words audible now and then above the dishwasher and the TV set. The TV set was always on when my mother was in her room.

Travel was an important part of my job. Leaving the reflecting surfaces of the bronze tower, the way people modeled themselves on someone else, a few people, it's only natural, mostly mimicking up, repeating a superior's gestures or expressions. Think of a young man or woman, think of a young woman speaking a few words in a movie gangster's growl. This is something I used to do for pointed comic effect to get things done on time. I made breathy gutter threats from the side of my mouth and then I'd walk past an office a day or two later and hear one of my assistants speaking in this voice.

We fixed her up with a television set and a humidifier and the dresser that used to be Marian's when she was growing up. We emptied and cleaned the dresser and resilvered the mirror and put a plentiful supply of hangers in the closet.

Or I picked up the phone in the middle of a meeting and pretended to arrange the maiming of a colleague, a maneuver that drew snide laughter from the others in the room. I tried not to laugh a certain way myself, the way Arthur Blessing laughed, our chief executive, with articulated ha-has, a slow nod of the head marking the laugh beat. Going away, flying away freed me from the signals that bounced off every waxed and spanking surface.

He went out to get a pack of cigarettes and never came back. This is a thing you used to hear about disappearing men. It's the final family mystery. All the mysteries of the family reach their culmination in the final passion of abandonment. My father smoked Lucky Strikes. The pack has a design that could easily be called a target but then maybe not—there's no small central circle or bull's-eye. The circle is large. There's a large red circle with a white border and then a narrower tan border and finally a thin black border, so unless you expand the definition of a bull's-eye or the definition of a target, you probably can't call the Lucky Strike logotype a target. But I call it a target anyway and fuck the definitions.