Underworld (56 page)

“Of course. It's very hard to believe. That's why I don't believe it,” Eric said. “Not for a tenth of a second.”

The rain line came dragging across the flats and the wind kicked up. The poets of the desert nations told stories about the wind. It bucks and swirls and turns you around and knocks you flat. But it also speaks so softly only your inner spirit can hear it and this is how you correct your path.

Eric said, “They never told the test subjects they were sub, sub, sub, sub.”

“Subjects.”

“I don't believe it,” Eric said. “But you may feel differently.”

Matt didn't know how he felt. But he didn't think the story was completely far-fetched. He'd served in Vietnam, after all, where everything he'd ever disbelieved or failed to imagine turned out, in the end, to be true.

Then one day he stopped to talk to her, the woman alone with the protest sign. He parked the car on the opposite side of the road and walked on over. She held one post cradled in her arms, one eight-foot-long upright piece, and the other was planted in the dirt with rocks piled around the base, and the sign itself, a spray-painted sheet, extended wind-whipped between the posts.

He stood there and started talking. He talked to her in a reassuring, trite and slightly compulsive way, like a first-timer nervous in a singles bar. He realized her wrist was padlocked to the post. He'd never noticed this before and it seemed, well, a little self-dramatizing maybe. Or fanatical and irrational and victim-wishful. She looked at him briefly as he spoke. He'd finished the get-acquainted part and was
talking about the need for readiness and the folly of being naive about the other side's intentions.

He didn't use words such as American and Soviet. They seemed provocative somehow. Or NATO and Europe and the East Bloc and the Berlin Wall. Too soon to be so intimate.

She looked at him only briefly. It was not a hostile look but it was brief. There was something scoured about her, a sense of rubbed surfaces, a willing away of normal accretions and gleanings, and he thought she carried the countermarks of the rural poor.

He talked to her about the need to match our weapons to theirs, even when the numbers become absurd, because this is the only seeming safeguard against attack by either side.

She was fair-skinned, etched and fixed, with lank hair, string hair, and he thought she was true and impressive and unreachable.

They stood on a stretch of flat straight highway, beautiful and lonely, and if you're going to do this kind of work, isn't it necessary, he thought, to be fanatical?
World War III Starts Here.
Isn't this exactly what he wanted from these people, a kind of sunstruck religious witness?

He told her he was completely willing to listen. But she would not talk to him. She stood padlocked to the post and looked off down the road somewhere. He could not despise her arrogance because she wasn't arrogant. She wasn't smarter or more sane or less guilty. They are armed, he said, and so we have to be armed. She clutched the upright and looked down the road, blue-eyed, with an inbuilt wince, and he went back to the car and drove away.

Eric's laundry jumped on the line. It shot straight out and held stiff in the wind.

“I think of my days in the glove box,” he said. “Handling that hot pluto. Mistakes were made even in the small narrow sealed limits of the box. Better believe it. With all the safety procedures and data sheets and supervisors, people still made amazing mistakes. And I'd stick my hands in the gloves and think oddly of my mom, who was a super sensible lady and used to wear rubber gloves to do the dinner dishes back in the placid days when we were bombing our own people.”

“I'm leaving tomorrow,” Matt said.

“Let me have that jacket when you go.”

Matt wore a lightweight calfskin jacket, the kind of soft leather that scuffs and unscuffs at a touch, and Eric often remarked his wish to own it whatever the difference in their sizes.

“I think I'll probably take it with me for the not so rugged parts of the trip.”

“The taste is metallic according to downwinders. You open the door and step outside to get the newspaper that the newsboy on his bike has tossed on the porch and you taste a kind of metallic grit in the air, like salt made of metal shavings. Coming to our party tonight?”

“Wouldn't miss it,” Matt said.

“Your child is born with eyes that are pure white. No discernible pupil or iris. Just a large white eyeball. Two if you're lucky.”

Eric lifted the Playboy off the sofa and held it sideways, letting the centerfold swing open so he could see the monthly subject full-length.

He said, “Where are you going exactly?”

“Someplace remote.”

“Remoter than this?”

“I've been looking at maps.”

“But remoter than this?”

“Where the paved roads end.”

“You're a city kid, Matty.”

“I've been looking at southwest Arizona maybe.”

“I want that jacket if you die.”

When the bombheads threw a party you couldn't expect to emerge into the world you'd always known. And last night's affair seemed to overlay the landscape as Matty drove west on Interstate 10 through a town called Deming, which was Eric's last name of course, and how clammy was the hand of coincidence—faces, places and provocative remarks all running through his mind.

He'd smoked something that had made him immobile. But not just immobile. Matt was not a user except at parties, where he'd go through the sociable motions, taking a pull on a long-stemmed pipe
with a clay bowl that was tamped with grassy substance. But the thing he'd toked last night was either a rogue strain of hashish or standard stuff laced with some psychotomimetic agent. And he was not just immobilized. And somebody sat in front of him and spoke thickly into his face in a ridiculous movie accent evidently meant to be Prussian.

“You can never underestimate the willingness of the state to act out its own massive fantasies.”

It was Eric of course. But even if Matt understood this, he could not place it in the jocular context of broad bombhead sport. Because he was not just immobile—he couldn't think straight either. He was surrounded by enemies. Not enemies but connections, a network of things and people. Not people exactly but figures—things and figures and levels of knowledge that he was completely helpless to enter.

The villingness of the shtate.

You can never unterestimate the villingness of the shtate.

Eric went on in his stupid voice, talking about problem boxes and minimax solutions, all the kriegspielish stuff they'd studied in grad school, theory of games and patterns of conflict, heads I win, tails you lose, and Matty sat there stoned totally motionless.

He was locked to his chair, mind-locked and gravity-trapped, aware of the nature of the state he was in but unable to think himself out. He was bent to the weight of the room, distrustful of everyone and everything here. Paranoid. Now he knew what it meant, this word that was bandied and bruited so easily, and he sensed the connections being made around him, all the objects and shaped silhouettes and levels of knowledge—not knowledge exactly but insidious intent. But not that either—some deeper meaning that existed solely to keep him from knowing what it was.

To ahkt out its own massif phantasies.

Eric was still talking, stirring a drink with his finger, and it occurred to Matt in the morning, driving his car through Deming, that maybe the accent was not supposed to be Prussian at all but Hungarian. Eric was paying tribute to the original bombheads, all those emigrés from Middle Europe, thick-browed men with sad eyes and roomy pleated pants. They came to do science in New Mexico during the war, an overnight sprawl of trailers and hutments, and they ate the local grub
and played poker once a week and went to the Saturday square dance and worked on the thing with no name, the bomb that would redefine the limits of human perception and dread.

He sat in the chair studying someone's shoe.

He knew he wasn't part of some superficial state that people like to borrow from when they say they're feeling paranoid. This was not secondhand. This was real and deep and true. It was all the one-syllable words that mean we aren't kidding. It was also familiar in some strange paleolithic root-eating way, a thing retained in the snake brain of early experience.

He studied the shoe on the foot of someone seated near him. It was an Earth shoe, one of those functional, sensible, unsexy, shallow-heeled and vaguely Scandinavian items of fad footwear, the shy, androgynous and countercultural shoe, unthreatening to the environment or the species, and he wondered why it looked so sinister.

Eric was stuttering now.

He didn't know who was wearing the shoe. The idea of connecting the shoe to the person who was wearing it required such an immensity of effort, there was such encumbrance and complication that he could only bend his head to the weight of the room. Maybe the shoe looked sinister because all its meanings and connections and silhouettes were outside Matty's faculties of knowing.

And maybe it looked sinister because it was the left shoe, on the left foot, and this is what sinister means of course—unlucky, unfavorable, leftward—and the word was asserting its baleful roots, its edible tubers and stems, through the medium of someone's shoe.

Eric was still there, talking in a normal voice interrupted by stutters. He seemed to be in another time frame, Eric did, cut and edited, his words in stop-start format and his position frequently altered in relation to the background, and here he was again on the sign for Deming, his name floating out of the soft dawn as Matt drove west, deeper into the white parts of the map, where he would try to find a clue to his future.

The statue in the marbled niche had the thighs and calves of a man, a man's bundled muscles in the forearms, but the figure in fact was biblical Eve, tight-breasted, with an apple in her hands and the sloping shoulders of a fullback.

And why not. The evening had the slightly scattered air of some cross-referenced event. Klara wandered through the grand foyer, among the early arrivals, and what a happy buzz they generated, mostly men in fact, and this was interesting. Look at the lean sleek geometry and gunmetal surfaces, the draped mirrors and long chandeliers, it was an art deco palace, burnished steel and chrome, a sense of machine-age completion, and fairly refined in tone except for the mural.

The lobby crowd loved the mural. An enormous mystical vision, sixty feet by forty, with a sort of Lost Horizon motif, situated above the staircase and contoured in a gentle curve so that the craggy peaks of the painting were captured in the towering mirrors, extending the enchanted effect over much of the lobby. Amber mists, a cloaked old man with a staff, a cluster of flamingos standing in the alpenglow—a vision so steeped in kitsch you could die just by buying the postcard.

Yes, this was Radio City Music Hall, a place Klara had last visited when she was thirteen probably, about a year after the doors opened—showplace of the nation. She remembered the soaring walls and carpeted stairs. She remembered the powder room, that's what she remembered, downstairs, in the grand lounge.

She watched Miles Lightman weave through the crowd, doing a couple of pirouettes as he approached, taking in the full 360, eyes slightly popping.

“Where are we, in a model room at Bloomingdale's?”

“We're in 1932, that's where we are.”

“It's sort of I-don't-know-what, isn't it?”

“Jazz moderne,” Klara said.

“Can you believe I've never been here?”

She was surprised to see that Miles had dressed for the occasion. Many people had and so had Miles, to the extent that he dresses. He wore his scuffed boots and jeans but also had a leopard shirt and mustard tie and a black corduroy jacket with an Edwardian flare.

They watched a man come down the grand staircase, feigning injury as he went past the mural. Miles had a package of cigarettes for Klara. While they waited he gave her further background on the event.

The event was a showing of the legendary lost film of Sergei Eisenstein, called
Unterwelt,
recently found in East Germany, meticulously restored and brought to New York under the aegis of the film society Miles belonged to, a remarkable coup for the group. After a period of maneuvering, infighting and hard bargaining they managed to reach an agreement with several rock impresarios and arranged to cosponsor this one-time screening, with orchestral accompaniment, in a house seating nearly six thousand people.

“How do you explain the turnout?” Klara said. “A lot of gay men in this lobby.”

“I think you ought to see the film and figure it out for yourself. I'll only tell you that word got around, early on, that Eisenstein made a film with a powerful theme and the footage has been hidden away all these decades because the theme deals on some level with people living in the shadows, and the government, or the governments, the GDR and the Soviets, have suppressed the film until now.”

Probably shot in the midthirties, sporadically and in secret, during a period of acute depression for Eisenstein. Ostensibly idle at the time, goaded by fellow Soviet directors to discard his theories and conceits. Called eccentric, called myth-ridden and politically unsound, accused of being out of touch with the people. Stories began to circulate that he'd been executed.

Esther Winship showed up waving her handbag and saying, “I don't need to see the movie. I already love it. This hall is so wonderful. I'd forgotten it was here. Miles, you look like a mod-and-rocker reunion.”

“Where's Jack?” Klara said.

“Where could he be? Is it your shirt or tie that gives me vertigo?”

“Thank you, Esther.”

“He's having a drink around the corner,” she said.

There was an ambivalence that vitalized the crowd. Whatever your sexual persuasion, you were here to enjoy the contradictions. Think of the relationship between the film and the theater in which it was showing—the work of a renowned master of world cinema screened in the camp environment of the Rockettes and the mighty Wurlitzer. But a theater of a certain impressive shapeliness, a breathtaking place, even, for all its exaggerations and vanities, with roundels of enameled brass on the outer walls and handsome display cases in the ticket lobby and nickel bronze stair rails here in the foyer, a space that resembled the hushed and sunken saloon of an ocean liner. And possibly a film, you're not likely to forget this, that will be riddled with mannerisms whatever the level of seriousness. At least you hope so. Didn't
Ivan the Terrible
contain scenes so comically overwrought, amid the undeniable power of the montage, that you laughed and caught your breath more or less simultaneously?