Underworld

They are trading garbage in the commodity pits in Chicago. They are making synthetic feces in Dallas. You can sell your testicles to a firm in Russia that will give you four thousand dollars and then remove the items surgically and mash them up and extract the vital substances and market the resulting syrupy stuff as rejuvenating beauty cream, for a profit that is awesome.

We take the TV set out of the cool room at the back of the house, Lainie's old room, our daughter, which is my mother's old room now, the room with the humidifier and the resilvered mirror and the good hard healthy bed, and we build bookshelves there. % At Waste Containment IVe become a sort of executive emeritus. I go to the office now and then but mostly travel and speak. I visit colleges and research facilities, where I'm introduced as a waste analyst. I talk to them about the vacated military bases being converted to landfill use, about the bunker system under a mountain in Nevada that will or will not accommodate thousands of steel canisters of radioactive waste for ten thousand years. Then we eat lunch. The waste may or may not explode, seventy thousand tons of spent fuel, and I fly to London and Zurich to attend conferences in the rain and sleet.

I rearrange books on the old shelves and match and mix for the new shelves and then I stand there looking. I stand in the living room and look. Or I walk through the house and look at the things we own and feel the odd mortality that clings to every object. The finer and rarer the object, the more lonely it makes me feel, and I don't know how to account for this.

Marian midfifties is lean and tanned and not so edgy now, it's clear, and a little more measured in her approach to the moment. The moment, suddenly, no longer matters. We take drives in the desert and sometimes I tell her things she didn't know, or knew at an unlearned level, the way you know you're sleepy or sad.

When I come across his name on a document it always makes me pause, it gives me pause, the name in jumpy type on some stamped document, James Nicholas Costanza, the raised stamp that marks a thing official, the document in the dusty bottom drawer, the sense of slight confusion until I realize who he is.

I drive out there sometimes and see grackles sparking across the landfill, down past the Indian tribe streets, and sometimes I take our granddaughter along when she is here on a visit and we see the sage gray truss of the waste facility and the planes in their landing patterns and the showy desert plants spilling over the pastel walls above the parking area.

I fly to Zurich and Lisbon to exchange ideas and make proposals and it is the kind of desperate crisis, the intractability of waste, that doesn't really seem to be taking place except in the conference reports and the newspapers. It is not otherwise touchable somehow, for all the menacing heft and breadth of the material, the actual pulsing thing.

Everybody is everywhere at once. Jeff likes to say this, our son, who still lives at home and still says things with the smirky sort of shyness he has brought with him out of adolescence, a quality that turns nearly everything he says into a lubricious hint about some secret he is keeping.

They are making synthetic feces in Dallas. They have perfected a form of simulated human waste in order to test diapers and other protective garments. The compound comes in a dry mix made of starches, fibers, resins, gelatins and polyvinyls. You add water for desired consistency. The color is usually brown.

Nostra aetate, as the popes like to say. In our time.

He went out to get a pack of cigarettes and never came back. He smoked Lucky Strikes. He smoked the brand where they said, Light up a Lucky-it's light-up time. Be happy-go Lucky. That was another thing they said.

Jeff has jobs on and off, waits on tables in a food court somewhere, and spends tremendous amounts of time with his computer. He visits a website devoted to miracles. There are many reports, he tells us, of people flocking to uranium mines in order to cure themselves. They come from Europe, Canada and Australia, on crutches and in wheelchairs, and they sit in tunnels under rangeland in Montana, where the radon emissions are many hundreds of times higher than the federal safety level. They are trying to cure themselves of arthritis, diabetes, blindness and cancer. There are reports that crippled dogs have risen and walked. Jeff tells us this and smirks shyly, either because he thinks it's funny or because he thinks it's funny and believes it.

We have bookshelves built in the cool room at the back of the house, my mother's old room, and you know how time slips by when you are doing books, arranging and rearranging, the way time goes by untouched, matching and mixing inventively, and then you stand in the room and look.

I'll tell you what I long for, the days of disarray, when I didn't give a damn or a fuck or a farthing.

Matt came out for the funeral, he flew out the night before with two of his kids and then broke down at the gravesite and they saw this and were astonished. They were shocked to see this because they thought of him as a father, not a son, and they looked away and then sneaked a glance and then looked away again when he fell against me and wept, and they saw me put an arm around him and had to adjust to this, the shock of seeing him as a brother and a son.

I still respond to that thing you feel in an office, wearing a crisp suit and sensing the linked grids lap around you. It is all about the enfolding drone of the computers and fax machines. It is about the cell phones slotted in the desk chargers, the voice mail and e-mail-a sense of order and command reinforced by the office itself and the bronze tower that encases the office and by all the contact points that shimmer in the air somewhere.

We remove the wax paper from cereal boxes before we put the boxes out for collection. The streets are dark and empty. We do clear glass versus colored glass and it is remarkable really how quiet it is, a Stillness that feels old and settled, with landmark status, the yard waste, the paper bags pressed flat, the hour after sunset when a pause obtains in the world and you forget for a second where you are.

They sit on wooden benches in the mines and breathe radon air and soak their feet in deadly radon water and they pray and chant and sing soaring hymns or maybe just ordinary songs, dinky sing-alongs, the kind of songs that people have always sung, doing things in groups.

When we go for long drives-we go for long drives out past the retirement compounds and onto the long straight interstate where kestrels sit spaced on the power lines and sometimes I apply suntan lotion to my arms and face and there's a smell of beach, a sense of heat and beach, the haze of slick stuff across the hair on my forearm and the way the tube pops and sucks when it goes empty-I get reminded of something way back when.

No one talks about the Texas Highway Killer anymore. You never hear the name. The name used to be in the air, always on the verge of being spoken, of reentering the broadcast band and causing a brief excitation along the lined highways, but the shootings have evidently ended and the name is gone now. But sometimes I think of him and wonder if he is still out there, driving and looking, not done with this thing at all but only waiting.

When I tell her things she listens with a high clear alertness, so vigilant and still, and she seems to know what I'm going to say before I say it. I tell her about the time I spent in correction and why they put me there and she seems to know it, at some level, already. She looks at me as if I were seventeen. She sees me at seventeen. We take long walks along the drainage canal. All the hints and intimations, all the things she spied in me at the beginning of our time together-come to some completion now. If not for me, then for her. Because I don't know what happened, do I?

We bundle the newspapers but do not tie them in twine, which is always the temptation.

He enters seventeen characters and then dot com miraculum. And the miracles come scrolling down. At dinner one night he tells us about a miracle in the Bronx. Jeff is shy about the Bronx, shy and guilty. He thinks it is part of the American gulag, a place so distant from his experience that those who've emerged can't possibly be willing to spend a moment in a room with someone like him. But here we are at the table, sharing a meal, and he tells us about a miracle that took place earlier in the decade and is still a matter of some debate, at least on the web, the net. A young girl was the victim of a terrible ‹ crime. Body found in a vacant lot amid dense debris. Identified and buried. The girl memorialized on a graffiti wall nearby. And then the miracle of the images and the subsequent crush of people and the belief and disbelief. Mostly belief, it seems. We ask him questions but he is tentative with this kind of material. He is shy. He feels he doesn't have the credentials to relate a tale of such intensity, all that suffering and faith and openness of emotion, transpiring in the Bronx. I tell him what better place for the study of wonders.

It is a hundred and eight degrees out on the street, a hundred and ten, a hundred and twelve, and I go to the airport and fly to Lisbon and Madrid, or I stand in the living room and look at the books.

Jeff is a lurker. He visits sites but does not post. He gathers the waves and rays. He adds components and functions and sits before a spreading mass of compatible hardware. The real miracle is the web, the net, where everybody is everywhere at once, and he is there among them, unseen.