Underworld

'We'll do it. We'll work it out,' she said.

The air went taut and the light took a chlorine edge and then it was raining hard. They couldn't see a thing and sat parked on a rise. The storm seemed to originate ten feet above them. They sat there waiting and they talked.

Matt could tell her anything. It was completely easy with her. She knew him before he was born. She could finish a thought he'd only barely started. She had no shaded spaces in her, none of the silences and disguises that can be fascinating, yes, but not for a guy like him, he thought.

They heard name-saying birds such as whippoorwills and phoebes. After the rain the heat came blowing back and he scanned with the glasses for birds of prey. They hung in the burning air, fantailed and soaring and great, and he went scrambling for the book when he spotted a large dark bird nested in the arm-crotch of a tall saguaro.

It was a golden eagle, immature, and he gave Janet the binoculars and took them back and couldn't stop talking. He talked and laughed and looked at the books. He talked less to Janet than to the bird. He checked the book a number of times to confirm for the bird's benefit that it was an eagle, an eaglet, with a bit of flashing on the wings and a wash of honey-gold at the hindneck.

Janet was not caught up in this. He glanced at her and found a complex plea in her eyes. She was asking him something but he wasn't sure what it was. He put the glasses back on the bird. The bird was a flick of the dial to her. You turned on the TV in the nurses' lounge and saw giraffe heads bobbing on the veldt. This was her nature preserve, a cramped room with a couple of sofas and chairs, where she sat and yakked with the night staff about coffee prices and unsafe streets and the burn victim with the smell you can't describe- this was the handgrip, the safehold she needed to live.

But the look she'd given him was not about what she needed or where she preferred to be. She wanted him to understand something about himself.

Every defeat was a death inside the chest, his little bird-boned thorax. Basically dead at eleven, that was him. Good riddance to little wooden rooks. How many years did it take him to get over the game?

It was Fischer-Spassky that brought him back, and only briefly at that, two years ago, in Iceland, halfway between Washington and Moscow, where they played twenty-one games, Bobby and Boris, a summer's rousing theater of black and white.

Matt checked the newspapers and watched TV. He rooted for Bobby, the gangly boorish boy now pushing thirty. He identified with the public tantrums, all the rude demands, the strokes of unwhole-someness that Bobby consistently delivered, the open show of bitterness when he lost.

If the American's eventual victory didn't begin to redeem Matt's own sulky youth, at least it edged the game out of the private migraine of abnormal introversion and into the mingled thing out there, the everyday melee of competing states and material forces.

You need a makeshift word to describe the process. De-ego'd. This is what the game did to Matt. So let our Bobby rant. He was only showing what is always there beneath the spatial esthetics and the mind-modeling rigor of the game, beneath the forevisional bursts of insight-an autoworld of pain and loss.

He told her about mountains hollowed out in New Mexico. These were storage sites for nuclear weapons. He told her about the gouged mountain in Colorado where huge wall screens could display the flight track of a missile launched from a base in Siberia. He knew a few things about Obyekt, the Installation, built by slave labor in a remote part of the USSR, and he told her about it-a center for bomb design.

People went willingly to these places, scientists eager to meet some elemental need. Or was it just a patriotic duty or the standard chal-lenge of doing serious work in physics or mathematics? He thought they went in search, on impulse, almost recklessly, to locate some higher condition.

'You make it sound like God,' she said.

He told her what he could about the Pocket. The Pocket was just a cozy donut-dunk in a vast hidden system. A system predicated on death from the sky. He told her about the emergency networks, under-ground shelters carved out of mountains in Virginia and Maryland where leaders could keep the government running during a major war. He told her about accidents in the Soviet Union, rumored explosions and fires at nuclear plants, and the sense of excitement he felt, the thrill of devastation in the enemy barrens, and his subsequent shame.

You make it sound like God. Or some starker variation thereof. Go to the desert or tundra and wait for the visionary flash of light, the critical mass that will call down the Hindu heavens, Kali and Shiva and all the grimacing lesser gods.

'Maybe I stayed a Catholic too long. Should have got out when I was ten.'

He thought about the sensitives, preparing for psychic war, and he thought about the penitentes, men in black hoods dragging heavy wooden crosses through the desert, a hundred years ago, or fifty years, and lashing themselves with sisal and hemp, all that Sister Edgarish stuff, and speaking fabricated words-the maunder of roaming holy men.

'I don't know what you mean by staying a Catholic. I told you what I think about conscience,' she said.

'It's only partly that. It's mainly that I feel I'm part of something unreal. When you hallucinate, the point of any hallucination is that you have a false perception that you think is real. This is just the opposite. This is real. The work, the weapons, the missiles rising out of alfalfa fields. All of it. But it strikes me, more and more, as sheer distortion. It's a dream someone's dreaming that has me in it.'

Maybe Janet was a little annoyed by this. Found it self-indulgent or unconvincing or beside the point.

'I heard a story not long ago,' he said. 'They did a bomb test in the nineteen-fifties in which a hundred pigs were dressed in custom-made GI field jackets and positioned at well-spaced intervals from the blast site. One hundred and eleven, to be exact, pigs, as the story was told to me. Then they exploded the device. Then they examined the uni-forms on the barbecued pigs to evaluate the thermal qualities of the material. Because this was the point of the test.'

Janet didn't respond because whatever the point of the test, and whatever the point of the story, it was only making her mad.

'Picture it. Chester whites. A breed of large fat hog with drooping ears. Wearing khaki uniforms with zippers, seams, everything, and with drawstrings drawn because that's how the regulation reads. And a voice on the loudspeaker's going, Ten, nine, eight, seven.'

She told him to get his arm inside the jeep.

'Is this when history turned to fiction?' he said.

She looked at him briefly.

'That's not the question you're asking,' she said.

'What am I asking?'

'I don't think you're asking that question. That's a large question and I think you're asking a smaller question and it has nothing to do with pigs in uniforms. You're talking about something else completely.'

He didn't look at her.

'What am I talking about, Janet?'

'You tell me,' she said.

He kept his eyes on the rutted track and didn't say a word. Acacia slapped and twanged on the windshield and doors. They both watched the track.

There was a structure about two hundred yards ahead, concrete and bunkerlike, sand-streaked, with slit windows and brambly growth edging up the walls.

It was nearly sundown and they decided to camp nearby. There was something irresistible about the building, of course, even an unyielding ruin such as this, slabbed private and tight. It stood alone here, with mountains behind it, and carried the tilted lyric of a misplaced object, like some prairie drive-in shut down for years with the audio hookups all askew and the huge screen facing blankly toward a cornfield. It's the kind of human junk that deepens the landscape, makes it sadder and lonelier and places a vague sad subjective regret at the edge of your response-not regret so much as a sense of time's own esthetic, how strange and still and beautiful a chunk of concrete can be, lived in fleetingly and abandoned, the soul of wilderness signed by men and women passing