Underworld (25 page)

He imagined he was watching the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza—only this was twenty-five times bigger, with tanker trucks spraying perfumed water on the approach roads. He found the sight inspiring. All this ingenuity and labor, this delicate effort to fit maximum waste into diminishing space. The towers of the World Trade Center were visible in the distance and he sensed a poetic balance between that idea and this one. Bridges, tunnels, scows, tugs, graving docks, container ships, all the great works of transport, trade and linkage were directed in the end to this culminating structure. And the thing was organic, ever growing and shifting, its shape computer-plotted by the day and the hour. In a few years this would be the highest mountain on the Atlantic Coast between Boston and Miami. Brian felt a sting of enlightenment. He looked at all that soaring garbage and knew for the first time what his job was all about. Not engineering or transportation or source reduction. He dealt in human behavior, people's habits and impulses, their uncontrollable needs and innocent wishes, maybe their passions, certainly their excesses and indulgences but their kindness too, their generosity, and the question was how to keep this mass metabolism from overwhelming us.

The landfill showed him smack-on how the waste stream ended,
where all the appetites and hankerings, the sodden second thoughts came runneling out, the things you wanted ardently and then did not. He'd seen a hundred landfills but none so vast as this. Yes, impressive and distressing. He knew the stench must ride the wind into every dining room for miles around. When people heard a noise at night, did they think the heap was coming down around them, sliding toward their homes, an omnivorous movie terror filling their doorways and windows?

The wind carried the stink across the kill.

Brian took a deep breath, he filled his lungs. This was the challenge he craved, the assault on his complacency and vague shame. To understand all this. To penetrate this secret. The mountain was here, unconcealed, but no one saw it or thought about it, no one knew it existed except the engineers and teamsters and local residents, a unique cultural deposit, fifty million tons by the time they top it off, carved and modeled, and no one talked about it but the men and women who tried to manage it, and he saw himself for the first time as a member of an esoteric order, they were adepts and seers, crafting the future, the city planners, the waste managers, the compost technicians, the landscapes who would build hanging gardens here, make a park one day out of every kind of used and lost and eroded object of desire.

The biggest secrets are the ones spread open before us. This was Marvin Lundy talking, filling Brian's head with that dry staticky voice that seemed to come out of a surgical slit in his throat.

The wind carried the stink from the mountain of wrack.

Specks and glints, ragtails of color appeared in the stratified mass of covering soil, fabric scraps from the garment center, stirred by the wind, or maybe that teal thing is a bikini brief that belonged to a secretary from Queens, and Brian found he could create a flash infatuation, she is dark-eyed and reads the tabloids and paints her nails and eats lunch out of molded styrofoam, and he gives her gifts and she gives him condoms, and it all ends up here, newsprint, emery boards, sexy underwear, coaxed into high relief by the rumbling dozers—think of his multitudinous spermlings with their history of high family foreheads, stranded in a Ramses body bag and rollered snug in the deep-down waste.

He watched several gulls veering near and saw a hundred other gulls positioned on a slope, all facing the same way, motionless, regardful, joined in consciousness, in beautiful empty birdness, waiting for the signal to fly.

Marvin was out of his basement, wincing in the light. He steered his car tenaciously, choosing a lane and sticking to it. He wore a tan windbreaker with a plaid lining because this is what he always wore when the leaves began to turn. It was the faithful change of apparel, an adjustment to the cosmos that made his life seem regular. He wore the jacket through the decades, giving the old one to the Salvation Army and buying another just like it, the everyman tan that he could spot on a store hanger from fifty yards in one of those vast hushed areas just before closing time where ranks of suits are arrayed like executives in hell.

He also wore a pair of latex gloves, a precaution he took whenever he went to the city.

When he got to the Lower East Side he drove through the streets a number of times before he found a space that looked okay, where he wouldn't get towed and he wouldn't get broken in, and he locked the car and then stood back and studied the parking job he'd done and the street in general, old furniture sold cheap and a truck lot in which every inch of every truck was covered with graffiti. The humans walked by looking touchy and unbeloved. He saw two men in wheelchairs
who scooted after cars stopped at the light to scrounge a little change.

Marvin walked in his sliding step, his sort of explanatory shuffle, it was a comment on the literature of shuffles. He went down Orchard Street looking at the clothes in the windows and stalls, dry goods by the mile. He stopped to read the writing on a collection of what-do-you-call, T-shirts, a nasty remark on nearly every item, words unprintable through history wearing shirts in a window. A young man stood next to him, thin-limbed and tattooed, a mustache that's half finished, glaring at him. He felt the glare, a tapered look directed straight into the side of his head.

Marvin glanced over.

“What? I'm looking in the window,” he said.

“I look means you gotta look?”

“I can't look? What? It's a window.”

“You seen me looking. Means you gotta look?”

“What? So I can't look?”

“I'm looking.”

“It's a public window,” Marvin said.

“You want window? I give you window.”

“All of a sudden, this?”

“You think you want to look? I show you look.”

Marvin walked away because what else could he do, flexing his fingers inside the latex gloves. It was impossible to live. You couldn't walk down the street one foot follows another. Because what happens? They kill you. They come out of a door and stab you because you look at them. This is the latest word in death and menace. You look at them, they kill you. One look where you catch their eye, it gives them the right to end your life.

Later he crossed Essex Street and found the bakery. What he likes, the backroom business right up front, the ovens and mixing table where they make bialys in front of your eyes, a man in a white shirt and a white apron with sifted meal on his hands and arms, and Marvin was struck by the force of the moment, a simple drama in a window, the whiteness of bread and work. He thought he could stand here all day and watch the baker shape the pasty mass. He bought for later, for his
daughter, flat rolls, onion-flaked, that were a thing you eat and a city and a religion and a war.

He walked down the street with the bakery bag warm against his ribs. He passed a playground, kids crouched and darting on the handball court, and half a block later it was all Chinese.

When he had his stomach he used to come here with Eleanor.

It was the old mystery of Chinese things, food on steam tables, vegetables he could not identify, the secret minds of the people. He stood and watched the living fish toss in homemade tanks. He bought a fried dumpling and took a bite, more for the gesture than the taste because he didn't taste the way he used to. It was like the memory of food, the ghost of ginger and minced chives.

He shuffled back to the car. He saw the wheelchair beggars with their scraggle beards, they raced each other to a stopped car, bodied forth, hands screwing and cranking. It was a competition of gyrating arms, their eyes peering through the dusty glass for some sign of contact within. But the drivers looked away. The drivers shut their windows against, the window washers, the flower sellers, the carjackers, against the medium mad intent on conversation.

You look at them, they kill you.

He drove home, leaning tensely toward the wheel. An English girl from Somerset, you couldn't make it up. He played the piano elegy that was Eleanor's favorite music, once a month or so, hitting the repeat button so it never stopped. It was her voice he heard at this time of year, reminding him to get out the tan windbreaker. Time to don the old McGregor, Marv. In that simple little sentence, word for word through the years, was all the what, the deep dependency of two people who met during the war, wrote letters back and forth, finally got married, had a child after a while, it took some doing, two hearts joined in the habit of the days. Dry cleaning. He dry-cleaned McGregors by the ton.

The phone was ringing when he walked in the door. He went into the kitchen, put the bakery bag on the table, took off his jacket, the phone was ringing, he opened the refrigerator and got out the celery tonic and took a swig from the bottle, he was free to do that now, there are compensations too. He took off the gloves, so tight they resisted
separation, peeling them down to the wide part of his hand and then yanking each clinging finger, a process that made him feel part artificial. Then he went across the room to the phone, which was a white wall model with a photograph next to it showing President Reagan standing in the Oval Office between Bobby Thomson and Ralph Branca, which was the only baseball reference anywhere in the house above the basement, a tasseled flag behind them. Because she could be a pain in the ass, Eleanor, on the subject of drinking from the bottle.

The phone was ringing. He looked at it and lifted the receiver, they call it a handset now. He was finally selling the house to go live in Clarice's apartment building, the daughter and son-in-law up on four, the father down on three in an easy-to-manage flat with bananas going brown on the windowsill. He would take showers sitting down while Clarice and Carl went running on their running machine upstairs, they were training to live forever.

“I'm calling from Phoenix,” said the voice.

“The city or the bird?”

“Some months ago a man I know. Ten or eleven months ago. Paid you a visit.”

“I wouldn't recall.”

“Named Brian Glassic.”

“If you tortured me, I wouldn't remember. I have people they come here half a dozen times. I see them on the street they could be garment bags on their way to the airport. I function inside my mind.”

“In any case he recently mentioned the visit. I wonder what you can tell me about the baseball in the trunk.”

They would knock on his door to see if he was all right. He'd poke his head past the shower curtain. All right, I'm fine, all right.

“You're a loyal fan retired in Arizona with a heart valve they implanted with dacron cuffs and you developed a sweetness for the old days. You spent your career in mergers and what, acquisitions. Made millions but you're still dissatisfied. You want one last acquisition that's personal from the heart.”

“Brian said it might go like this.”

“You want to talk about the ball, you get approximated first. The fact is I'm ready to sell. People know this. I get calls from men with
grainy voices. They have polymer packed in their gums. They have openings that were drilled in their sides for human waste to detour. They come home from the hospital echo-dopplered. I hear from men with quadruple bypass, with nitroglycerin in their bloodstream that you manufacture dynamite.”

“I'm not a fan anymore. I don't follow the teams.”

“I'm in the category myself where I'm undergoing tests. This means I have cancer recurring in so many parts of my body the doctor gives me group rates. Don't worry, you're not supposed to laugh. I'm trying to make you feel bad.”

“And you're a Dodger fan, yes?”

“From before I was born.”

“Raised in Brooklyn?”

“Raised in Brooklyn, get my cheesecake in the Bronx, go to the Lower East Side for this and that.”

“A Dodger fan. But you've reproduced the Polo Grounds scoreboard in your basement.”

“To remind me,” Marvin said. “Or prepare me. I forget which.”

“I'm not retired. And I haven't made millions. And I don't know exactly why I want to buy the ball.”

This was good. Marvin liked this. It was good to hear from someone who was not palpitating in his mind for the old Giants or the old New York. They have stools you can buy in surgical supply outlets that you place in your shower so you can sit and do the far-flung parts of your body without falling and breaking a hip, which he saw one day on the hip replacement channel, with molded seats and nonskid legs. They have a channel for every body part.

“You call me out of nowhere,” Marvin said. “And you want to do a deal. But you don't know why.”

“That's right,” said the voice.

Good. Because this was Marvin's situation for a long time. This was Marvin's exact status. For years he didn't know why he was chasing down exhausted objects. All that frantic passion for a baseball and he finally understood it was Eleanor on his mind, it was some terror working deep beneath the skin that made him gather up things, amass possessions and effects against the dark shape of some unshoulderable
loss. Memorabilia. What he remembered, what lived in the old smoked leather of the catcher's mitt in the basement was the touch of his Eleanor, those were his wife's eyes in the oval photographs of men with handlebar mustaches. The state of loss, the fact, the facticity in its lonely length. This was a word he never thought he'd need to use but here it was, crouched for years in his secluded brain, coming out to elongate the loss.

“I have a mushroom-shaped tumor.”

“Yes.”

“The doctor calls it a fungating mass.”

“I don't know that term.”

“I don't know it either. It's not in the dictionary because I looked in two dictionaries. When they get their terms outside the dictionary, it means they're telling you goodbye.”