"Underworld" - читать интересную книгу автора (DeLillo Don)

PART 1. LONG TALL SALLY

1

I was driving a Lexus through a rustling wind. This is a car assembled in a work area that's completely free of human presence. Not a spot of mortal sweat except, okay, for the guys who drive the product out of the plant-allow a little moisture where they grip the wheel. The system flows forever onward, automated to priestly nuance, every gliding movement back-referenced for prime performance. Hollow bodies coming in endless sequence. There's nobody on the line with caffeine nerves or a history of clinical depression. Just the eerie weave of chromium alloys carried in interlocking arcs, block iron and asphalt sheeting, soaring ornaments of coachwork fitted and merged. Robots tightening bolts, programmed drudges that do not dream of family dead.

It's a culmination in a way, machines made and shaped outside the little splat of human speech. And this made my rented car a natural match for the landscape I was crossing. Heat shimmer rising on the empty flats. A bled-white sky with ticky breezes raking dust across the windshield. And the species factually absent from the scene-except for me, of course, and I was barely there.

Let's just say the desert is an impulse. I'd decided in a flash to switch planes and get a car and hit the back roads. There is something about old times that's satisfied by spontaneity. The quicker you decide, the more fully you discharge the debt to memory. I wanted to see her again and feel something and say something, a few words, not too many, and then head back into the windy distance. It was all distance. It was hardpan and sky and a wafer trace of mountain, low and crouched out there, mountain or cloud, cat-shaped, catamount-how human it is to see a thing as something else.

The old road bent north, placing the sun approximately abeam, and I wanted to feel the heat on my face and arms. I turned off the air conditioner and lowered the windows. I reached for the tube of sunblock, protection factor fifteen, a thing I keep nearby even though I'm olive-skinned, dark as my father was.

I slowed the car to a no-hands crawl and applied the stuff to half my face and one arm, the exposed person, because I was fifty-seven years old and still learning how to be sensible.

The musky coconut balm and the adolescent savor of heat and beach and an undermemory of seawater rush, salt scour in the eyes and nose. I squeezed the tube until it was sucked dry. It sucked and popped and went dry. I glimpsed something, a mental image, a sort of nerve-firing, a desert flash-the briefest puddled color of an ice-cream vendor weaving through high sand.

Later the wind died and a cloudreef rimmed in pale rose hung low and still. I was on a dirt road now, spectacularly lost, and I stopped the car and got out and scanned the landscape, feeling pretty dumb, and I thought I saw some funk holes out among the yucca-old concrete bunkers from a mining operation or military test site. It would be dark in forty-five minutes. I had a quarter tank of gas, half a can of iced tea, nothing to eat, no warm clothes, a map that scanted the details.

I would drink my tea and die.

Then a scatter of dust, a hazy mass rising from the sundown line. And an approaching object that made me think of a hundred movies in which something comes across the wavy plain, a horseman with scabbarded rifle or a lone cameleer hunched in muslin on his dumb-headed beast, This thing was different, raising twin kicks of sand, coming at a nice clip. But not your everyday average all-terrain vehicle. It had a roof light and a gleam of yellow paint and it was brassy and jouncing, with a cartoon shine. The happiest sort of apparition, coming down the rutted path like a pop-art object. Less than fifty yards away. It seemed to be, it clearly was a New York taxi, impossible but true, yellower than egg yolk and coming fast.

What better gesture might I devise than an outstretched hailing hand?

But the damn thing did not slow down. Windows open, music ripping out-a surge of steroid rock. I stepped back out of the way, my arm still raised, the suntan arm, sleek with chemicals. I saw the cab was jammed with people and I called out as they went by-a person's name, a password in the throbbing air.

"Klara Sax," is what I shouted.

And there were answering shouts. The taxi slowed briefly and I could hear them cheering. Then arms came jutting from two or three windows, waving and beckoning, and a single smiling yellow head, a blond woman sunny and young and looking back at me-the driver serene in all that ruckus, driving blind-and the taxi springing away, hightailing through the studded vegetation and out across the desert.

I got in my silent car and followed.

The volunteers were mainly art students but there were others as well, history majors and teachers on leave and nomads and runaways, coming and going all the time, burnt-out hackers looking for the unwired world, they were people who heard the call, the whisper in the ear that sends you out the door and into some zone of exalted play.

Working with the hands. Scraping and painting. Stirring the indolent mixture. Seeing brushstrokes mark a surface. Pigment. The animal fats and polymers that blend to make this word.

They were nice to me. They ate and slept in a set of abandoned barracks at the edge of an enormous air base. Toilets, showers, cots and an improvised commissary. They were a good-humored workforce with an array of skills. They fixed things, sang songs, they told funny stories. When their numbers grew beyond the capacity of the barracks, they slept in pup tents or sleeping bags or in their dusty cars.

I told a student with a welcome badge that I was not here to wield a brush or sandblaster but only to see the piece-the artwork, the project, whatever it was called-and to say hello if that was possible to Klara Sax.

I told him I didn't want to take up space and he gave me directions to a motel where I might spend the night, maybe twenty-five miles away, and then asked me to meet him later at a place he called the paint shop.

I washed the sunblock off my hands and face and got in a food line, sandwiches and kiwis and fruit juice. Then I sat and talked with five or six others. They were all nice. I asked about the taxi and they said it was someone's car that they'd decided to paint and ornament, a gift for Klara on her birthday earlier in the week. Not the car itself, which had been returned to the owner in its taxified form, but the paint, the gesture, the sense of her ancestral New York.

They asked where I was from and I replied with a line I sometimes used.

I live a quiet life in an unassuming house in a suburb of Phoenix. Pause. Like someone in the Witness Protection Program.

I hated the line by this time but it seemed to bend the edge of inquiry, to set a patently shallow tone. All the while we were talking I looked around for the taxi driver with the honey-blond hair.

A number of people wore T-shirts inscribed Long Tall Sally.

I thought I could guess Klara's age within a year or two and when I asked which birthday she was celebrating somebody said seventy-two. This sounded about right.

It was a clear night with swirled stars burning low and close and a sweet breeze skimming the earth. I drove for about a minute and a half-don't walk, they'd said-and followed a line of road reflectors stuck in the dirt. There were strung lights and a cluster of jeeps and vans and a single long concrete structure about ten feet high and divided along its length into a dozen compartments, room-sized, open at the front and rear.

This was the operation center, where the project was coordinated- designs created, daily assignments made, most of the material stored.

One of the spaces was filled with people and I spotted a mike boom suspended over the massed heads. Lights, a camera, a woman with a clipboard-and spectators from the workforce, maybe forty of them, some with protective face masks dangled on their chests, many wearing shirts or jackets with the same inscription I'd seen earlier. I parked nearby and walked to the edge of the group. It took me a moment to find the subject. She was seated in a director's chair with a cane alongside and one leg propped on an overturned bucket. She smoked a black cigarette and talked to people while the crew set up.

Now that I was a word or two away, a name away, the oddness of the trip pressed in on me. Seventeen. That's how old I was last time I saw her. Yes, that long ago, and after all this time it might seem to her that I was some invasive thing, a figure from an anxious dream come walking and talking across a wilderness to find her. I stood and watched, trying to generate the will to make an approach. And maybe it was stranger still, odder than the years between meetings, that I was able to see her retrospectively. I could lift the younger woman right out of the chair, separate her from the person in the dark plaid pants and old suede blazer who sat talking and smoking. I'd seen photographs of Klara but could never quite isolate the woman I'd known, straight-bodied and pale, with a little twist about the mouth, the turned mouth that made her seem detached from what she said. And the evasive eyes, the look that seemed to bend the question of what it was we wanted from each other.

She looked famous and rare, famous even to herself, famous alone making a salad in her kitchen. Her hair was white, a mineral glisten, cropped close about her oblong face with a decorative fringe across the forehead. She wore a floppy orange T-shirt under the blazer and a necklace and several rings and one white running shoe and a sock the color of Kool-Aid grape. The injured foot was wrapped in a tan elastic brace.

Somebody passed with a paper cup and she dropped her cigarette in.

She'd rubbed some dark rouge high on her cheeks and it made her look severe and even deathly in an impressive way. But I could see the younger woman. I could make her rise in some sleight of mind to occupy the space I'd prepared, eyes faintly slanted and papery hands and how she used to smile privately and unbelievingly at the thought of us together and how she seemed to move in time-delay-the mind clocks in and the body follows.

I watched her. These first thirty seconds had a compressed power. I could feel my breathing change.

The crew was from French television and they were ready to start filming. The spectators grew still. The woman with the clipboard crouched just out of camera range, the spot from which she would ask her questions. She was in her willowy middle forties, streaked hair and antique jeans, a denim tote bag splay-handled at her feet.

She said, "It is all right we begin I think. I am allowed to be stupid because we edit my questions out of the film. Those are the rules okay? I choke on my English no problem."

"But I must be smart, funny, profound and charming," Klara said.

"It would actually be very nice. We start with the injury of your left leg. You can tell us what happened okay?"

"I fell off a ladder. Very minor. Missed a rung somewhere along the way. We use whatever devices we can find. We don't have a roof over our heads, a hangar or factory. We don't have the scaffolding, the platforms they have in assembly halls where they do construction and repair work."

I moved closer and found myself standing a few feet behind the student with the welcome badge, the young man who'd offered to arrange a room for me.

The interviewer said, "So you are climbing, you are working."

"It's a sprained ankle. Take an aspirin. Yes, I get up there sometimes if it's not too fierce, if the heat's bearable, you know. I've got to see it and feel it. We have many able-bodied volunteers. But I need to pitch in now and again."

"I was at the site tonight the first time and saw many ladders and people crawling on the wings. They're wearing masks. They have strapped to their backs these enormous tanks."

"We have automotive spray guns we use to prime the metal. We have industrial guns that spray oil paints, enamel, epoxy and so on. We use air compressors that are portable. We even use brushes. We use brushes when we want a brush effect."

People in the audience shifted a bit, trying to get a better look at Klara as she spoke or edging nearer to hear the conversation more clearly. Klara's voice had a slight rasp and a kind of wobble, the loose liquid texture of something sliding side to side.

"We scrape and sandblast," she said. "We have many blasting machines with guns and nine-gallon hoppers, I think they are. We have some pressure blasters, big things on wheels. Most of the planes have only one coat of paint to remove because they were painted originally with weight considerations foremost in mind. They were built to carry bombs in other words, not beautiful coats of paint. Of course this is impossible work. Working outside in heat, dust and wind. Completely impossible. Too much dust we don't paint. A little dust we paint. We're not looking for precision. We spray it on, grit and all. Spray it, shoot it, throw it."

She said, "Of course the planes have been stripped of most components that might still be useful or salable to civilian contractors. But the wheels are still there, the undercarriages, because I don't want planes that sit flat on their bellies. So we need a great deal of elevation to work on the fuselage and the massive fin. We have people standing on ladders with twelve-foot pole guns, we have people on the stabilizers spraying away at the damn tail."

"But you have cooperation."

"We have cooperation from the military up to a point. We can paint their deactivated aircraft. They let us paint and they promise to keep the site intact, to isolate it from other uses and to maintain the integrity of the project. No other objects, not a single permanent object can be located within a mile of the finished piece. We also have foundation grants, we have congressional approval, all sorts of permits. What else? Materials donated by manufacturers, tens of thousands of dollars' worth. But we still have to scratch and steal to get many of the things we need."

"And the dry air of the desert this keeps the metal safe."

"It is dry and it is hot."

"It is very hot okay?"

"Abandoned aircraft. Like the end of World War II," Klara said. "The one difference is-two differences. The one difference is we haven't actually fought a war this time. We have a number of postwar conditions without a war having been fought. And second we are not going to let these great machines expire in a field or get sold as scrap."

"You are going to paint them."

"We are in the process of painting them. We are saving them from the cutter's torch. And it's very strange let me tell you because thirty years ago when I gave up easel painting and started doing my castoffs they attacked me for it. And I don't recall when the term first came into use but they eventually started calling me the Bag Lady which I said funny ha-ha, figuring it would last a month. But the name trailed me for quite a long time and I was not amused anymore."

"Now you are here in the desert."

"Back to castoffs. This time it is not aerosol cans and sardine tins and shampoo caps and mattresses. I painted a mattress and some sheets. It was the end of marriage number two and I painted my bed in effect. Anyway yes, I am now dealing with B-52 long-range bombers. I am painting airplanes that are a hundred and sixty feet long with wingspans even longer and total weight operating on full tanks maybe half a million pounds, I don't know about empty-planes that used to carry nuclear bombs, ta-da, ta-da, out across the world."

"This is not a mattress."

"I'll tell you what this is. This is an art project, not a peace project. This is a landscape painting in which we use the landscape itself. The desert is central to this piece. It's the surround. It's the framing device. It's the four-part horizon. This is why we insisted to the Air Force-a cleared area around the finished work."

"Yes it is true the landscape."

"Wait. I'm not finished. I want to say in this passage from small objects to very large ones, in the years it took me to find these abandoned machines, after all this I am rediscovering paint. And I am drunk on color. I am sex-crazed. I see it in my sleep. I eat it and drink it. I'm a woman going mad with color."

And she looked toward her audience, her workers, briefly, and they stirred and laughed.

"But the beauty of the desert."

"It's so old and strong. I think it makes us feel, makes us as a culture, any technological culture, we feel we mustn't be overwhelmed by it. Awe and terror, you know. Unconducive"-and she waved a hand and laughed-"to industry and progress and so forth. So we use this place to test our weapons. It's only logical of course. And it enables us to show our mastery. The desert bears the visible signs of all the detonations we set off. All the craters and warning signs and no-go areas and burial markers, the sites where debris is buried."

The interviewer asked a series of questions about young conceptu-alists working with biological and nuclear waste and then called for a short break. The spectators applauded lightly and folded into chatty clusters or went outside to watch the night sky build and thicken.

I reached for the guy with the welcome on his chest.

"Can you approach her now? Tell her it's Nick Shay. From New York, tell her. Tell her if she can spare a minute," I said. "We lived near each other in New York."

He was blinking at me.

I told him my name again and watched him head for the director's chair. He had to wait until she was unoccupied and then he spoke to her, gesturing in my direction.

I watched her face, waiting for the name to register, for light to strike her eyes. She paused, then began to look around for me. Her face showed-what? A certain concern, a solicitude on my behalf, grave and memoried. Are you really here? Are you all right? Are you alive?

I walked over there and grabbed a folding chair and set it down alongside her and waited for the kid to go away.

"So this is Nick."

"Yes."

"Talk about surprises."

"You remember."

"Oh yes," she said, and there was the fadeaway smile, the look that says how did this happen.

"I was in Houston."

"You're leading a regular life."

"Shave every day."

"Pay taxes-good."

"I had business in Houston. There was a magazine I took with me that had a story about your project. So I thought why not."

"Nick exercises, I think."

"Well, let's see. I drink soy milk and run the metric mile."

I waited for her to smile. Then I said, "But the story didn't say exactly where the site was located. So I flew to El Paso and rented a car and thought I would drive home to Phoenix and pay a visit along the way."

"And you found us."

"Wasn't easy."

She was looking at me, openly evaluating. I wondered what she was seeing. I felt there was something I ought to explain about the intervening years. I had that half dread you feel when someone studies you after a long separation and makes you think that you've done badly to reach this point so altered and drawn. Unknown to yourself, you see. To reach this point so helpless against your own connivings that the truth has been obscured from you.

"And you're well? You look well," she said.

She was saying I looked well but she was staring in a certain way and there was something in her voice, you see, that made me wary. People kept interrupting to tell her things, to relay messages. Someone came by with a message about some administrative matter and she introduced us.

"An old friend from the cherished past," she said. "Well, cherished in memory maybe. Rough going at the time."

Then she turned to me again.

"Married?"

"Yes. Two children. College-age. Although they're not in college."

"I've married out of impulse, out of a cozy evening with a nice wine. Not lately, though. Lately I've been crazy with work. It took me a long time to realize I was careful and logical about affairs, really sort of scrupulous about who and where and when, and completely reckless when it came to marriage."

I wanted to say, You weren't always careful about affairs. But then it wasn't an affair, was it? Just an occurrence, a thing in two episodes, a few hours only, measured in hours and minutes and then ended. Of course I said nothing. I didn't know how to handle the subject. We could not be wry, considering the difference in our ages, about growing old and deaf and hobbled, and I despaired a little, I began to think we'd already stretched the visit past bearable limits and what a mistake I'd made, coming here, because the subject was not speakable- too secret, still, even between the secret-keepers, after forty years.

"I thought I owed us this visit. Whatever that means," I said.

"I know what it means. You feel a loyalty. The past brings out our patriotism, you know? We want to feel an allegiance. It's the one undivided allegiance, to all those people and things."

"And it gets stronger."

"Sometimes I think everything I've done since those years, everything around me in fact, I don't know if you feel this way but everything is vaguely-what-fictitious."

It was an offhand remark that didn't begin to interest her until she got to the last word.

"This is a long way, Nick. We're a long way from home."

"The Bronx."

We laughed.

"Yes. That place, that word. Rude, blunt-what else do we call it?"

"Crunching," I said.

"Yes. It's like three words they've crunched together."

"It's like talking through broken teeth."

We laughed again and I felt better. It was wonderful to laugh with her. I wanted her to see me. I wanted her to know I was out of there, whatever crazy mistakes I'd made-I'd come out okay.

"So strong and real," she said. "And everything since then-but maybe that's just a function of getting older. I don't read philosophy."

"I read everything," I told her.

She looked at me with something like renewed surprise.

"Maybe I should save this for the French," she said. "But didn't life take an unreal turn at some point?"

"Well, you're famous, Klara."

"No. It's not unreal because I'm famous." Annoyed at me. "It's just unreal."

She pulled a box of fslat Shermans out of her blazer and lit one up. "I'm not pregnant so I can do this."

Another person came and went, a young woman with a schedule change, and Klara's face went distant and tight but not at this news at all. Something else upset her, something stirred and entered and she tilted her head as if to listen.

"Strange you should turn up now. God, how strange and awful in a way. And I didn't make the connection until this minute. What in God's name is wrong with me? Did I forget he died? Albert died two weeks ago. Three weeks ago. Teresa called me, our daughter."

"I'm sorry."

"We were not in touch, he and I. Three weeks ago. Congestive heart failure. It's one of those illnesses, you sort of know what it means even if you don't."

"Where was he living? Back there?"

"Yes, back there," she said. "Where else would Albert die?"

Albert was Klara's husband when I knew them both. He was a science teacher in my high school. Mr. Bronzini. Years after I'd seen him for the last time I found myself thinking of him unexpectedly and often. You know how certain places grow powerful in the mind with passing time. In those early morning dreams when I come back to bed after a sleepy pee and fall quickly into the narrow end of the night, there is one set of streets I keep returning to, one dim mist of railroad rooms, and certain figures reappear, borderline ghosts. Albert and Klara among them. He was the husband, she was the wife, a detail I barely thought about at the time.

Two people leaned over Klara muttering something simultaneously and then one of the crew asked if she was ready to resume.

She said to me, "Your brother."

"Living in Boston."

"Do you see him?"

"No. Rarely."

"What about his chess?"

"I don't see anyone. He gave it up a long time ago."

"But what a pity."

"We couldn't have two geniuses coming out of the same little neighborhood."

"Oh bullshit," she said.

I put a hand on her arm and felt a softening. She looked at me again, eyes protuberant, bloodshot with seeing. I found it deeply agreeable to sit there with my hand on Klara's arm and to recall the younger woman's turned mouth, the kind of erotic flaw that makes you want to lose yourself in the imbalance-mouth and jaw not quite aligned. But this was the limit of reflective pleasure. These were all the things I could put through the squeezer. We'd said what we were going to say and exchanged all the looks and remembered the dead and missing and now it was time for me to become a functioning adult again.

Another person said something and I got up and moved away, feeling Klara's hand trail along my forearm and across my palm. I found a place farther back this time, nearer the opening. It took the audience a moment to assemble and settle down.

The interviewer crouched and spoke.

"Maybe you can tell us why you want to do this thing."

"It's a work in progress, don't forget, changing by the day and minute. Let me try, I'll try to circle around to an answer and maybe I'll get there and maybe I won't."

She held her right hand near her face, the cigarette tilted up, eye-high.

"I used to spend a lot of time on the Maine coast. I was married to a yachtsman, my second husband this was, a dealer in risky securities who was about to go bust any day but didn't know it at the time and he had a lovely ketch and we used to go up there and cruise the coastline. We sat on deck at night and the sky was beautifully clear and sometimes we saw a kind of halo moving across the star fields and we used to speculate what is this. Airliners making the North Atlantic run or UFOs you know, that was a popular subject even then. A luminous disc slowly crossing. Hazy and very high. And I thought it was too high for an airliner. And I knew that strategic bombers flew at something like fifty-five thousand feet. And I decided this is the refracted light from an object way up there, this is the circular form it takes. Because I wanted to believe that's what we were seeing. B-52s. War scared me all right but those lights, I have to tell you those lights were a complex sensation. Those planes on permanent alert, ever present you know, sweeping the Soviet borders, and I remember sitting out there rocking lightly at anchor in some deserted cove and feeling a sense of awe, a child's sleepy feeling of mystery and danger and beauty. I think that is power. I think if you maintain a force in the world that comes into people's sleep, you are exercising a meaningful power. Because I respect power. Now that power is in shatters or tatters and now that those Soviet borders don't even exist in the same way, I think we understand, we look back, we see ourselves more clearly, and them as well. Power meant something thirty, forty years ago. It was stable, it was focused, it was a tangible thing. It was greatness, danger, terror, all those things. And it held us together, the Soviets and us. Maybe it held the world together. You could measure things. You could measure hope and you could measure destruction. Not that I want to bring it back. It's gone, good riddance. But the fact is."

And she seemed to lose her line of argument here. She paused, she realized the cigarette had burned down and the interviewer reached for it and Klara handed it over, delicately, butt-end first.

"Many things that were anchored to the balance of power and the balance of terror seem to be undone, unstuck. Things have no limits now. Money has no limits. I don't understand money anymore. Money is undone. Violence is undone, violence is easier now, it's uprooted, out of control, it has no measure anymore, it has no level of values."

And she paused again and thought.

"I don't want to disarm the world," she said. "Or I do want to disarm the world but I want it to be done warily and realistically and in the full knowledge of what we're giving up. We gave up the yacht. That's the first thing we gave up. Now I've got these airplanes down out of the sky and I've walked and stooped and crawled from the cockpit to the tail gun armament and I've seen them in every kind of light and I've thought hard about the weapons they carried and the men who accompanied the weapons and it is awful to think about. But the bombs were not released. You see. The missiles remained in the underwing carriages, unfired. The men came back and the targets were not destroyed. You see. We all tried to think about war but I'm not sure we knew how to do this. The poets wrote long poems with dirty words and that's about as close as we came, actually, to a thoughtful response. Because they had brought something into the world that out-imagined the mind. They didn't even know what to call the early bomb. The thing or the gadget or something. And Oppenheimer said, It is merde. I will use the French. J. Robert Oppenheimer. It is merde. He meant something that eludes naming is automatically relegated, he is saying, to the status of shit. You can't name it. It's too big or evil or outside your experience. It's also shit because it's garbage, it's waste material. But I'm making a whole big megillah out of this. What I really want to get at is the ordinary thing, the ordinary life behind the thing. Because that's the heart and soul of what we're doing here."

The wobble in her voice. And the way the sound came cornering out of the side of her mouth. It was scary-seductive, it made us think she might trail into some unsteady meander. And the pauses. We waited out the pauses, watching the match tremble when she lit another cigarette.

She said, "See, we're painting, hand-painting in some cases, putting our puny hands to great weapons systems, to systems that came out of the factories and assembly halls as near alike as possible, millions of components stamped out, repeated endlessly, and we're trying to unrepeat, to find an element of felt life, and maybe there's a sort of survival instinct here, a graffiti instinct-to trespass and declare ourselves, show who we are. The way the nose artists did, the guys who painted pinups on the fuselage."

She said, "Some of the planes had markings painted on the nose. Emblems, unit insignia, some with figures, an animal mascot snarling and dripping juices from the mouth and jowls. Wonderful, actually, cartoons. Nose art, they call it. And some with women. Because it's all about luck, isn't it? The sexy woman painted on the nose is a charm against death. We may want to place this whole business in some bottom pit of nostalgia but in fact the men who flew these planes, and we are talking about high alert and distant early warning, we are talking about the edge of everything-well, I think they lived in a closed world with its particular omens and symbols and they were young and horny to boot. And one day I came across one of the oldest planes in the ranks, very weathered, with a nice piece of nose art that was faded and patchy and showed a young woman in a flouncy skirt and narrow halter and she was very tall, very blond, she had amazing legs and her hands were on her hips very sort of aspiring-pinup-you knew she didn't have quite the skill to bring it off-and her name was lettered under the painting and it was Long Tall Sally. And I thought, I like this girl because she is not amazonian or angelic or terrifically idealized. And I thought about her some more and this is what I thought. I thought even if she has to be painted over, and maybe she will be and maybe she won't, I thought we will definitely have to salvage her name. I thought we will title our work after this young woman, after the men who fixed her image to the aircraft, after the song that inspired them to do it. Which I recall only vaguely, the song. But there was a song and I thought there is probably a real and original Sally somewhere in the mix. She inspired the songwriter or the nose painter or the crew that flew the plane. Maybe she was a waitress in an airman's bar. Or somebody's hometown girl. Or somebody's first love. But this is an individual life. And I want this life to be part of our project. This luck, this sign against death. Whoever she is or was, a waitress bedraggled you know, hustling a ketchup bottle across the room, and never mind the bomb, I want to keep our intentions small and human despite the enormous work we've done and the huge work we have ahead of us and I'm sitting here with a propped foot and talking endlessly about my work when I'm completely aware of Matisse and what he said, that painters must begin by cutting out their tongues."

I could see her on television in France, dotted down to reconverted waves. I could hear her voice distanced behind a monotone translation. People watching in every part of the country, their heads clustered in the dark. I could see her flat-screen face buzzing at the edges, her eyes like lived-out moons, half a million Klaras floating in the night.

She said, "Not long ago I saw an old photograph, a picture taken in the midsixties, and there is a woman at the edge of the picture. The picture is crowded with people and they are in the doorway, it looks like the entranceway to a grand ballroom, and they are all wearing black and white, men and women both, and they are wearing masks as well, and I looked at the picture and I realized this was the famous party, the famous event of the era, Truman Capote's Black amp; White Ball at the Plaza Hotel in New York in the dark days of Vietnam, and I was completely sort of out-of-body looking at this scene because it took me maybe half a minute to understand that the woman at the edge of the frame was me. Absolutely. And I'm standing next to a man who is either Truman Capote or J, Edgar Hoover, one or the other because they had heads that were shaped alike, and the mask and the angle and the shadows make it hard to tell which one it is, and I am wearing a long black sheathy dress that I simply can't believe I ever wore although there I am, it's me, and a little white feline mask. And I thought, What is it about this picture that makes it so hard for me to remember myself? I thought, I don't know who that person is. Why is she there exactly. What is she thinking about? What sort of underwear is she wearing under the stupid dress and I can swear to you that I don't know. Surrounded by famous people and powerful people, men in the administration who were running the war, and I want to paint it over, paint the photograph orange and blue and burgundy and paint the tuxedos and long dresses and paint the grand ballroom of the Plaza Hotel and maybe this is what I'm doing, I don't know, it's a work in perpetual progress. And let's not forget pleasure. The senses, the pleasures, the body juices. But strata blue yes. But yellow and green and geranium red. Maine geraniums that thrive on cool damp air. But magenta yes. But orange and cobalt and chartreuse."

And someone in the small crowd called out, "Better red than dead."

And we all laughed. The remark had a resonance that seemed to travel on our voices, caroming off the facing walls of the space we shared. We stood and listened to our own laughter. And we all agreed together that the evening was done.

I was walking to my car when I saw the New York taxi. Someone was getting in and when the light came on I saw it was the same young woman who'd been driving.

"Hey thanks," I said. "Back there."

"You're the Lexus."

"Lost and wandering. Good thing you came along."

"We were saying I bet he thinks this is the Texas Highway Killer getting ready to claim another victim."

"I knew you weren't the Texas Highway Killer because this isn't Texas."

"Plus I doubt if he drives a yellow cab."

"That's the other reason."

"Here to help out?" she said.

"Wish I could. But I'm due back at the office tower in the great capital city."

"Could be your last chance to make art history."

"Or whatever it is you're doing here."

"Or whatever it is we're doing here."

She sat in the driver's seat with the door open, broad-bodied, not quite the levitated sylph she'd appeared to be in the bucking dust of that earlier moment.

"This your car?"

"I volunteered it more or less," she said, "so I guess I'm stuck with a taxi, which is slightly inconvenient. But to see the look on Klara's face I'd have to say yeah it was worth it."

Broad and open like a summer waitress who says There you go when she deposits the food in front of you.

"Been here long?"

"Going on seven weeks and I'm sticking it out if it takes forever, which it actually could."

"Not homesick?"

"Now and then. But this is a one-chance thing. You been out there yet?"

"In the morning," I said.

"Go early. The heat is mean."

"I know about heat. I like heat."

"Where you from?"

I didn't tell her I lived a quiet life in an unassuming house and so forth. Instead I told her where I was spending the night and I let her tell me how to get there although I already knew.

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. Kor-sakoff'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, hori-zonwide, 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 fitting-ness 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.

Marian believed this is the crucial thing you have to consider when making a person feel at home. If you don't provide enough hangers, she will think she is not wanted.

My firm was involved in waste. We were waste handlers, waste traders, cosmologists of waste. I traveled to the coastal lowlands of Texas and watched men in moon suits bury drums of dangerous waste in subterranean salt beds many millions of years old, dried-out remnants of a Mesozoic ocean. It was a religious conviction in our business that these deposits of rock salt would not leak radiation. Waste is a religious thing. We entomb contaminated waste with a sense of reverence and dread. It is necessary to respect what we discard.

I saw a man on the via della Spiga standing in front of a mirrored column smoothing his hair, running both hands over his hair, and the way he did it, the cast of his eyes, the slightly pitted skin, both hands guiding the flow of his hair-this was half a second in Milan one day-reminded me of a thousand things at once, long ago.

The Jesuits taught me to examine things for second meanings and deeper connections. Were they thinking about waste? We were waste managers, waste giants, we processed universal waste. Waste has a solemn aura now, an aspect of untouchability. White containers of plutonium waste with yellow caution tags. Handle carefully. Even the lowest household trash is closely observed. People look at their garbage differently now, seeing every bottle and crushed carton in a planetary context.

My son used to believe that he could look at a plane in flight and make it explode in midair by simply thinking it. He believed, at thirteen, that the border between himself and the world was thin and porous enough to allow him to affect the course of events. An aircraft in flight was a provocation too strong to ignore. He'd watch a plane gaining altitude after taking off from Sky Harbor and he'd sense an element of catastrophe tacit in the very fact of a flying object filled with people. He was sensitive to the most incidental stimulus and he thought he could feel the object itself yearning to burst. All he had to do was wish the fiery image into his mind and the plane would ignite and shatter. His sister used to tell him, Go ahead, blow it up, let me see you take that plane out of the sky with all two hundred people aboard, and it scared him to hear someone talk this way and it scared her too because she wasn't completely convinced he could not do it. It's the special skill of an adolescent to imagine the end of the world as an adjunct to his own discontent. But Jeff got older and lost interest and conviction. He lost the paradoxical gift for being separate and alone and yet intimately connected, mind-wired to distant things.

At home we separated our waste into glass and cans and paper products. Then we did clear glass versus colored glass. Then we did tin versus aluminum. We did plastic containers, without caps or lids, on Tuesdays only. Then we did yard waste. Then we did newspapers including glossy inserts but were careful not to tie the bundles in twine, which is always the temptation.

The corporation is supposed to take us outside ourselves. We design these organized bodies to respond to the market, face foursquare into the world. But things tend to drift dimly inward. Gossip, rumor, promotions, personalities, it's only natural, isn't it-all the human lapses that take up space in the company soul. But the world persists, the world heals in a way. You feel the contact points around you, the caress of linked grids that give you a sense of order and command. It's there in the warbling banks of phones, in the fax machines and photocopiers and all the oceanic logic stored in your computer. Bemoan technology all you want. It expands your self-esteem and connects you in your well-pressed suit to the things that slip through the world otherwise unperceived.

Marian drove the car with a pencil in her hand. I don't think I ever asked her why. I don't think we talked the way we used to talk when the kids were growing up. What a richness of subject, two living things changing before our eyes, going from dumb clamor, from milk slop to formed words, or starting school, or just sitting at the table eating, little crayoned faces pumped with being. But they were grown people now with a computer after all, with rotating media shelves and a baby on the way and a bumper sticker (this was my son) that read Going Nowhere Fast. The days of the marriage were no longer filled with dialogues about Lainie and Jeff. We hung on the birth of the grandchild.

I ran along the drainage canal wearing a wireless headphone. I listened to Sufi chanting while I ran. I ran along the palm alleys and through the winding streets of orange trees and handsome stucco homes-streets of westward dreams, the kind of place my father could have taken us half a century earlier, lightward and westward, where people came to escape the hard-luck past with its gray streets and crowded flats and cabbage smells in the hallway.

Lainie was an entrepreneur, a hard driver, a bargainer, our huckster daughter, we called her, and she was living in Tucson with husband Dex. They made ethnic jewelry and sold it over a shopping channel, bracelets, chains, the works, and they did interviews and traveled to festivals and other cultural events. Her pregnancy gave us a lift and she sent photos of her changing shape and we drove down there often to see the booming body.

I rearranged the books on the shelves. I stood in the room looking at the books. Then I strapped my ankle wallet to my ankle and ran.

The larger she got, the happier we became. We never knew how happy we were supposed to be until we turned off Interstate 10 and followed the sweeping traffic on one of those mall arteries that resemble a marathon of headlong metal and found her little street and saw her posing in the doorway in stately profile.

I call the Lucky Strike logotype a target because I believe they were waiting for my father when he went out to buy a pack of cigarettes and they took him and put him in a car and drove him somewhere near the bay, where the river goes into the bay or where the lagoon lies silent in the dark and there are marshes and inlets, remote spits of land, and then they gave it to him good, the projectile entering the back of the head and making a pathway to the brain. And, besides, if it's not a target, why did they name the brand Lucky Strike? True, there's a gold-rush connotation. But a strike is not only the discovery of some precious metal in the ground. It is also a penetrating hit from a weapon. And isn't there a connection between the name of the brand and the design of concentric circles on the package? This implies they were thinking target all along.