Underworld (111 page)

Fasten, fit closely, bind together.

And you can glance out the window for a moment, distracted by the sound of small kids playing a made-up game in a neighbor's yard, some kind of kickball maybe, and they speak in your voice, or piggyback races on the weedy lawn, and it's your voice you hear, essentially, under the glimmerglass sky, and you look at the things in the room, offscreen, unwebbed, the tissued grain of the deskwood alive in light, the thick lived tenor of things, the argument of things to be seen and eaten, the apple core going sepia in the lunch tray, and the dense measures of experience in a random glance, the monk's candle reflected in the slope of the phone, hours marked in Roman numerals, and the glaze of the wax, and the curl of the braided wick, and the chipped rim of the mug that holds your yellow pencils, skewed all crazy, and the plied lives of the simplest surface, the slabbed butter melting on the crumbled bun, and the yellow of the yellow of the pencils, and you try to imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world, taking all its meanings, its sense of serenities and contentments out into the streets somehow, its whisper of reconciliation, a word extending itself ever outward, the tone of agreement or treaty, the tone of repose, the sense of mollifying silence, the tone of hail and farewell, a word that carries the sunlit ardor of an object deep in drenching noon, the argument of binding touch, but it's only a sequence of pulses on a dullish screen and all it can do is make you pensive—a word that spreads a longing through the raw sprawl of the city and out across the dreaming bourns and orchards to the solitary hills.

Peace.

A
LSO BY
D
ON
D
E
L
ILLO

Novels

AMERICANA

END ZONE

GREAT JONES STREET

RATNER'S STAR

PLAYERS

RUNNING DOG

THE NAMES

WHITE NOISE

LIBRA

MAO II

THE BODY ARTIST

COSMOPOLIS

FALLING MAN

Plays

THE DAY ROOM

VALPARAISO

LOVE-LIES-BLEEDING

SCRIBNER

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New York, NY 10020

www.SimonandSchuster.com

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are products of the author's imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

Copyright © 1997 by Don DeLillo

All rights reserved, including the right of reproduction in whole or in part in any form.

First Scribner trade paperback edition 2003
SCRIBNER
and design are trademarks of Macmillan Library Reference USA, Inc., used under license by Simon & Schuster, the publisher of this work.

DESIGNED BY ERICH HOBBING

Set in Electra

The Library of Congress has cataloged the Scribner edition as follows:

DeLillo, Don.

Underworld / Don DeLillo.

p. cm.

I. Title.

PS3554.E4425U53 1997

813'.54—dc21     97-13825

CIP

ISBN 0-684-84269-6

0-684-84815-5 (Pbk)
ISBN-13: 978-1-41659-585-4 (ebook)

Portions of the work were previously published, in different form, in
Harper's, Esquire, Antaeus
and
The New Yorker
.