Underworld

We built pyramids of waste above and below the earth. The more hazardous the waste, the deeper we tried to sink it. The word pluto-nium comes from Pluto, god of the dead and ruler of the underworld. They took him out to the marshes and wasted him as we say today, or used to say until it got changed to something else.

I liked to hurry home from the airport and get into my trunks and T-shirt. I ran along the drainage canal with Sufi voices tracking through my head and sometimes I saw a plane taking off, all light and climb and calculus, and I thought of my son Jeffrey when he was younger-the gift he thought he possessed to take an aircraft out of the sky, the mastery of space and matter, a power and control that rose damnably from the curse of unbelonging.

And sometimes I sat with her through the mass, the mass in English, what a stark thing it was, without murmur or reverberation, but still the best part of my week, and I took her arm and led her out of the church and she was not a small woman but seemed to be dwindling, passing episodically out of flesh-she felt like rice paper under my hand.

He used to shave with a towel draped over his shoulder, wearing his undershirt, his singlet, and the blade made a noise I liked to listen to, a sandpaper scrape on his heavy beard, and the brush in the shaving cup, the Gem blade and the draped towel and the hot water from the tap-heat and skill and cutting edge.

Dominus vobiscum, the priest used to say, and we'd push our way out of the vestibule, several kids chanting, Dominick go frisk 'em. What was Latin for if you couldn't reduce the formal codes to the jostled argot of the street?

It was science-fiction stuff or horror-movie stuff except that Jeff was too shy and frightened to test it in the world, even with his sister whistling in his ear to make the thing explode.

5

Brian Classic called late sometimes. He called in streaks, late at night, four calls in one weekend maybe, and what did he talk about when he called? The office, of course, bringing up matters he could not easily discuss in the tower itself, or the latest national scandal maybe, with anatomical details, or he'd carry on about a movie he wanted me to rent, guns and drugs-he thought it made us better buddies.

He also did it as a provocation. Brian believed I was safely encased, solid, with a house and family folded around me, surer than he was, older but also physically superior, physically fit, a man of hardier stuff, this was his own stated theme-a man who keeps his counsel. And it greatly fazed him, it made him want to chip away, make boyish forays, place claims on my attention.

When the phone rang at a certain hour, Marian and I exchanged the Brian look-had to be him.

'You will not believe where I am. Get over here right away. This place is astonishing. You're the only person I can bear to share it with. Come alone,' he said.

It took me a while to find the place. I kept crossing MO, out where the map begins to go white, low stucco buildings with satellite dishes-tractor parts and diesel tune-ups, sand and rock and self-defense. Then I spotted a cluster of shops that matched Brian's description, a neat clean minimall, painted sort of rancho pink and green, three of the outlets not yet open for business, and I parked near the last shop on the left, the only going concern, called Condomology.

College kids, gently unkempt. They stood between the shelves talking and browsing, going through the catalogs and reading the small print on the product boxes, and others mixed in, slightly older men and women, they had professions and soft slacks with knife pleats and a certain ease of bearing and belonging, the package of attitudes and values known as lifestyle.

Brian pushed me into a corner so I could scan the area. Wide aisles, the carpeting was soft and pale and the aisles were wide and there were wall paintings, five panels on each of the two long walls showing scenes of an ice-cream parlor of the nineteen-forties and -fifties. A soda jerk behind a marble counter making a strawberry float for a couple of girls in school jerseys and bobby socks-that was one mural, flat-painted, painted in a style not current to the scene, and the effect was interesting, completely undreamy. Brian was studying my lower jaw for some reaction. I heard music in the deep distance, a crooner doing lost songs, the kind of ballad that sometimes included a verse or two in slurred Italian, and it was all nicely subdued, I thought, unaffected, without patronizing humor.

Brian whispered at me sharply, as if I hadn't noticed.

'Condoms.'

That's what it was all right, condoms, the whole place was condoms, shelves filled with a hundred kinds of protection, male and female, spermicides, body butter, latex gloves, silicone lubricants, with books, manuals, videos, special displays, with novelty items of the big-dick little-dick type, and T-shirts of course, and baseball caps with condom logos.

'And the place is strategically located, out at the new frontier,' he said. 'I can see a satellite city growing out from this one shop, a thousand buildings, this is my vision, sort of spoked around the condom outlet. Like some medieval town with the castle smack at the center.'

'They built their castles on the periphery.'

'Fuck you. Show some amazement. They have peach-flavored rubbers. And kids come here to socialize, to hang around and see what's doing. I'm waiting to hear Al Hibbler sing 'Unchained Melody' '

'Al Hibbler was good.'

'Good? Fuck you good. He was amazing. You think Ray Charles is blind? Al Hibbler, that was blind. Show some response.'

He led me down an aisle. My response was, Look at all these condoms. Studded, snug, ribbed, bareback. We used to say, Don't go in bareback. Meaning wear a rubber or you'll knock her up. Now there were rubbers called barebacks, electronically tested for sheerness and sensitivity.

'These will replace running shoes,' Brian said. 'Kids will shoot each other for expensive lambskin condoms.'

There were loose condoms sold in bowls, in candy jars-grab a handful. A woman looked at a display model of a polyurethane sheath with flexible rings at either end. Brian knew her from the automated teller machine at his bank-hello, how are you, hi, hello. There were finger condoms and full-body condoms, oral condoms with a minty savor. There were condom cases, pocket-sized, and a condom you could wear as a hat.

Brian said, 'My brother carried a rubber in his wallet all through adolescence. He showed it to me once, I think I was twelve. Flipped open his wallet and showed me this little wizened thing like a deflated penis and I don't think I ever recovered. This was a world I wasn't ready to enter. I could understand sex on the animal level. This was something else entirely. Something about the material, the plasticky sort of rubber, the look and touch, he made me touch it, and the whole nature and function of the thing, I don't know, it was alien and unsettling. Sex alone was tough enough to encounter. This was technology they wanted to wrap around my dick. This was mass- produced latex they used to paint battleships.'

'You were a sensitive boy.'

'I was scrawny and mute, barely human. You were a strapping kid who beat the crap out of kids like me.'

'We didn't have any kids like you,' I told him.

'You carried a rubber?'

'In the little slit pocket in my dungarees.'

'By the time I was sixteen they weren't doing that anymore.'

'They're doing it now,' I said.

'I don't think my brother ever used the condom in his wallet. When he got a car he put it in the car. He put it in the glove compartment. That's when I think he finally got to use it.'

A man was singing softly along, crooning the lyrics on the sound system. He moved haltingly toward us pushing a cylinder of oxygen on wheels, a gray-haired guy, with tubes from the tank running all the way up into his nose. The tank was the size of a dachshund in a custom case. And he sang, he crooned in a rasping voice-he had the phrasing, the timing just right, the lazy line endings, some insipid lyric about a farewell letter, only altered in