Underworld (38 page)

I went running with Big Sims and we ran along trails that hikers used, backpackers with rugged boots, and we ran on bridle paths that went
into the hills. We wore sunglasses and peaked caps and ran on stony rubble and red sand and Sims didn't stop talking, he talked and ran across the desert scrub and I labored to keep up.

“You know, it's funny, I took this job four years ago and it's a good job and pays well and has the benefits and provides for my widow when I die from overwork but I find—you find this, Nick? From the first day I find that everything I see is garbage. I studied engineering. I didn't study garbage. I thought I might go to Tunisia and build roads. I had a romantic idea, you know, wear a safari jacket and pave the world. Turns out I'm doing fine. I'm doing real work, important work. Landfills are important. Trouble is, the job follows me. The subject follows me. I went to a new restaurant last week, nice new place, you know, and I find myself looking at scraps of food on people's plates. Leftovers. I see butts in ashtrays. And when we get outside.”

“You see it everywhere because it is everywhere.”

“But I didn't see it before.”

“You're enlightened now. Be grateful,” I said.

Our sneakers were flimsy things against the slabstone and tuff. We ran on trails littered with straw shit from the rented horses and we ran gasping and panting, panting as we talked, and the sweat came down Sims' face in intersecting streams. I kept up with him. It was necessary to keep up, keep running, show you can talk while you run, show you can run, you can keep up. The sweat came down our bodies and plastered our shirts to our backs.

“We get outside and we're waiting. The guy's bringing our car around. I peer into the alley meanwhile. And I see something curious. An enclosure, a barred enclosure set along the wall. A cage basically. Three sides and a top. Wrought iron bars and a big padlock.” He's talking and pausing, the words are pumping out of his chest. “And I have to step a little ways into the alley. Before I can see exactly what this is. And I smell it before I see it. The cage is filled with bags of garbage. Food waste in plastic bags. A day and a night of restaurant garbage.”

He was looking at me as we ran.

“Why do they cage it?” I said.

He looked at me.

“Derelicts come out of the park and eat it.”

We turned back toward the compound of rose stucco buildings burning in the light. It was not easy keeping pace with Sims. He had the plodding force of a fleshy ex-boxer who still has reserves of deep endurance, oil reserves, fossil fuel—he had calories to burn, sweat to yield in abundance.

“Why won't the restaurant let them eat the garbage?”

“Because it's property,” he said.

Five fighter jets went over in tight formation, flying low, a haunted roar spilling through the valley, and Sims jerked his thumb at the sky as if to signal something that had slipped my mind.

I kept seeing my own face of the evening before, when the fiver shook the room, all the work it took to reconcile the forces that pressed against each other.

We pounded down past the golf course and guest cottages, a cropped world of people in soft pastels, alive by the handful, by the orderly foursome, and I felt relieved the run was nearly over.

“Ask me about the ship,” he said.

“Is the ship Liberian register?”

“It was when it started out. I hear it's registered in Panama now.”

“Is that possible? Change registry in midcourse?”

“I don't know It's not my area,” Sims said. “But the rumors about the ship don't only concern what the ship is carrying in its hold. Or who owns the ship. Or where the ship is headed.”

“Okay, what else is there?”

“Is this an ordinary cargo ship? Or is there some degree of confusion about this?”

“What kind of ship would it be if it carries cargo but isn't a cargo ship?”

“Remind me to give you a lesson in sludge sometime.”

He laughed and ran, capering a little, bop-running, elbows out and fingers snapping, and he surged ahead of me. I felt a flare of competition, a duress of the spirit that warns against the shame of losing, and I hurried to catch up.

And interesting that later this business of picking through garbage, old winos and runaway kids slipping into an alley to get at broken bread chunks and slivers of veiny beef—later, with Detwiler, the subject
would reoccur, but differently, with a touch of the renegade theater of the sixties.

The three of us went out to the landfill in the early evening, half an hour's drive to the east, some of this on roads restricted to military use. Sims had a permit that allowed entry at select times, an arrangement worked out between Whiz Co and some agency buried in the Pentagon, and this saved us the trouble of taking the long way around.

The construction crew had gone for the day. We stood above a hole in the earth, an engineered crater five hundred feet deep, maybe a mile across, strewn with snub-nosed machines along the terraced stretches and covered across much of the sloped bottom by an immense shimmering sheet, a polyethylene skin, silvery blue, that caught cloudmotion and rolled in the wind. I was taken by surprise. The sight of this thing, the enormous gouged bowl lined with artful plastic, was the first material sign I'd had that this was a business of a certain drastic grandeur, even a kind of greatness, maybe—the red-tailed hawks transparent in the setting sun and the spring stalks of yucca tall as wishing wands and this high-density membrane that was oddly and equally beautiful in a way, a prophylactic device, a gas-control system, and the crater it layered that would accept thousands of tons of garbage a day, your trash and mine, for desert burial. I listened to Sims recite the numbers, how much methane we would recover to light how many homes, and I felt a weird elation, a loyalty to the company and the cause.

Sims spoke to both of us but mainly to Jesse Detwiler because this was the visionary in our midst, the waste theorist whose provocations had spooked the industry. And Sims was eloquent, he loved his subject and gestured sweepingly, hand-shaping the layers of plastic and earth, the shredding of tires, the mixing of chemicals with kiln dust. I hadn't seen these things yet, myself, but it was easy to perceive what they meant to Sims, a labor of earth, utterly satisfying in its mingled tempers of technology and old hard useful work, dust in the mouth and a wall of drenching smells.

Detwiler stood at the rim of the crater, looking in.

“What about the hot stuff?”

“We'll drum it and segregate it. But we won't forget it. It'll be logged on three-D computer records. We can find it if we have to.”

“What's your approach to bomb waste?”

“Bomb waste. That's why we hired Nick.”

I saw the gleam in Simeon's eye and I said deadpan, “I have a background in public relations.”

Detwiler tilted his chin, marking the small measure of amusement he might attach to this remark. He had the canny self-assurance of an industry maverick, the outsider who tries to roil the works, japing every complacent rule of belief. And he looked remade, retooled, shaved head and bushy mustache, a guy in firm control, with a workout coach and a nice line of credit, in a black turtleneck jersey and designer jeans. It occurred to me that except for the plucked hair he could have been a swinger.

“I'll tell you what I see here, Sims. The scenery of the future. Eventually the only scenery left. The more toxic the waste, the greater the effort and expense a tourist will be willing to tolerate in order to visit the site. Only I don't think you ought to be isolating these sites. Isolate the most toxic waste, okay. This makes it grander, more ominous and magical. But basic household waste ought to be placed in the cities that produce it. Bring garbage into the open. Let people see it and respect it. Don't hide your waste facilities. Make an architecture of waste. Design gorgeous buildings to recycle waste and invite people to collect their own garbage and bring it with them to the press rams and conveyors. Get to know your garbage. And the hot stuff, the chemical waste, the nuclear waste, this becomes a remote landscape of nostalgia. Bus tours and postcards, I guarantee it.”

Sims wasn't sure he liked this.

“What kind of nostalgia?”

“Don't underestimate our capacity for complex longings. Nostalgia for the banned materials of civilization, for the brute force of old industries and old conflicts.”

Detwiler had been a fringe figure in the sixties, a garbage guerrilla who stole and analyzed the household trash of a number of famous people. He issued mock-comintern manifestos about the contents, with personal asides, and the underground press was quick to print this stuff. His activities had a crisp climax when he was arrested for snatching the garbage of J. Edgar Hoover from the rear of the Director's
house in northwest Washington and this is what people remembered, what I remembered when I first reheard the name Jesse Detwiler. He'd earned a brief feverish fame in the chronicles of the time, part of the strolling band of tambourine girls and bomb makers, levitators and acid droppers and lost children.

A bird flew across the width of the crater, a finch or wren, moving with the nervous fleetness, the urgency of sundown.

Detwiler said that cities rose on garbage, inch by inch, gaining elevation through the decades as buried debris increased. Garbage always got layered over or pushed to the edges, in a room or in a landscape. But it had its own momentum. It pushed back. It pushed into every space available, dictating construction patterns and altering systems of ritual. And it produced rats and paranoia. People were compelled to develop an organized response. This meant they had to come up with a resourceful means of disposal and build a social structure to carry it out—workers, managers, haulers, scavengers. Civilization is built, history is driven—

He talked in his talk-show way, focused, practiced, generically intimate. He was a waste hustler, looking for book deals and documentary films, and I don't think he cared whether we were two people listening or half a million.

“See, we have everything backwards,” he said.

Civilization did not rise and flourish as men hammered out hunting scenes on bronze gates and whispered philosophy under the stars, with garbage as a noisome offshoot, swept away and forgotten. No, garbage rose first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense. We had to find ways to discard our waste, to use what we couldn't discard, to reprocess what we couldn't use. Garbage pushed back. It mounted and spread. And it forced us to develop the logic and rigor that would lead to systematic investigations of reality, to science, art, music, mathematics.

The sun went down.

“Do you really believe that?” I said.

“Bet your ass I believe it. I teach it at UCLA. I take my students into garbage dumps and make them understand the civilization they live in. Consume or die. That's the mandate of the culture. And it all
ends up in the dump. We make stupendous amounts of garbage, then we react to it, not only technologically but in our hearts and minds. We let it shape us. We let it control our thinking. Garbage comes first, then we build a system to deal with it.”

The rim clouds took on a chromium edge and the high sky was still an easy noonish blue. But the pit went dark in a hurry, the vast plastic liner wind-lapped and making the eeriest sort of music, just outside the wave-fold of nature, and the surface was indigo now, still faintly sky-streaked, washed by gradations of shade and motion. We stood a moment watching and then went back to the car. Detwiler sat in the middle of the rear seat, needling us about dumping our garbage on sacred Indian land. And about Whiz Co's vanguard status. He thought the firm had the hard-core appetites of any traditional company.

We drove an empty road.

“You tracking the rumors, Sims? This ship you've got.”

“It's not my area.”

“Cruising the oceans of the world trying to dump some hellish substance.”

“I'm looking the other way,” Sims said.

“Look this way. I hear it's headed back to the U.S.”

“You know more than we do.” Sims hated saying this. “What do we know, Nick?”

“We're not sixties people. We're forties and fifties people.”

“We're limited,” Sims said.

“We don't know much of anything.”

“We listened to the radio,” Sims said. “We know the Lone Ranger and Tonto.”

“From out of the past,” I said.

“The thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver.”

“A fiery horse with the speed of light.”

“This is what we know, Jesse.”

“A cloud of dust.”

“And a hearty hi-yo Silver.”

Deep-pitching our voices to the baritone drama of the old radio show.

“Guys think you're funny,” Detwiler said. “Bet you don't know the
name of Tonto's horse. Come on, Sims. You know the white man's horse. Why don't you know the Indian's horse?”

I didn't think I liked Detwiler but I liked to listen to him. Sims did not. Sims wanted to get him in another headlock, not so fraternal this time. No, he didn't know the Indian's horse and maybe it bothered him a little.

Jesse kept talking.

“The more dangerous the waste, the more heroic it will become. Irradiated ground. The way the Indians venerate this terrain now, we'll come to see it as sacred in the next century. Plutonium National Park. The last haunt of the white gods. Tourists wearing respirator masks and protective suits.”

I said, “What was the name of the Indian's horse?”

“Scout, okay? And I'm amazed and shocked. This is a deep cultural failure, you guys. Tonto's horse. You have to know this.”

He leaned toward us, needling.

“A ship carrying thousands of barrels of industrial waste. Or is it CIA heroin? I can believe this myself. You know why? Because it's easy to believe. We'd be stupid not to believe it. Knowing what we know.”