Underworld

'How many letters did I write saying I was nowhere near the combat zone?'

'You were in the country. That was near enough for me.'

'The country's not that small. If they fired a shot in Khe Sanh, I wasn't about to get hit wherever I was sitting, comfortably indoors, doing my drudge work.'

'You were luckier than a lot of others.'

'You sure you don't want to go?'

'I'm staying here,' she said.

They sat there with the fruit between them. He heard rain glancing off the window, sounding cool and fresh, and he looked at his mother. She didn't see peaches with leafy stems as works of art.

'I'm going to early mass.'

'Say hello to God for me. I'll have coffee waiting when you get back.'

'He erased it,' she said. 'Because what else was he supposed to do?'

She said good night and went inside. The cats vanished while he made up the sofa. Nick was always the subject, ultimately. Every subject, ground down and sifted through, yielded a little Nicky, or a version of the distant adult, or the adolescent half lout looking to hit someone. These were the terms of the kinship. He lay in the dark and listened to the rain. He felt little. He felt small and lost. His wife was little. He had undersized kids. They did nothing in the world that would ever be noticed. They were innocent. There was a curse of innocence that he carried with him. Against his brother, against the stature of danger and rage he could only pose the fact of his secondness, his meek freedom from guilt.

There was a noise near the door. He didn't move for a moment. He lay there listening. The rain hit hard now, splashy, rattling the window. He heard the noise again and got up. He put on his glasses and looked through the peephole. He edged the door slowly open. He looked into the hallway, long and prison-lit, left and right, rows of closed doors, all blank and still, and he was a grown man in his mother's house, afraid of noises in the hall.

7

How deep is time? How far down into the life of matter do we have to go before we understand what time is?

The old science teacher, Bronzini, moved through the snow, slogging, dragging happily, head down, his cigar box tucked under his arm-the scissors, the combs, the electric clipper to do the nape of Eddie's neck.

We head out into space, we brave space, line up the launch window and blast off, we swing around the planet in a song. But time binds us to aging flesh. Not that he minded growing old. But as a point of argument, in theory only, he wondered what we'd learn by going deeper into structures beneath the standard model, down under the quantum, a million billion times smaller than the old Greek atom.

The snow came down, enormous star-tipped flakes, feathery wet on his lashes, stuck and gone, and he raised his head to see parked cars humped and stunned, nothing moving in the streets, snow on the back of his hand- touches flesh and disappears.

He climbed the stairs to Eddie's apartment and rang the bell, No ding or buzz, no sawtooth whine. He knocked on the metal sheath that covered the door and heard Mercedes approach in her slappy shoes.

She opened up, calling back to Eddie, 'You'll never guess who is it.'

Bronzini handed her the cigar box, Garcia y Vega, fine cigars since 1882. He took off his checked cap and gave it to her. He got out of the old belted greatcoat he'd bought cheap at Freight Liquidation, where you go for factory discounts, for irregular suits and dresses, cardigans hijacked by mistake-they thought they were getting cigarettes. He gave her the coat. He wiggled his hands to show no gloves. Then he bent to unbuckle his galoshes, stepping out of them half dizzy from the bending.

'Eddie, look, he wears slippers under his boots. The man is unde-scribable.'

He embraced the woman and the coat and then moved into the living room rubbing his hands like a man treading across a Persian rug toward a birch fire and a snifter of rare brandy. Eddie sat there smiling, the real Eddie Robles who lived inside the imposter, inside the haunted likeness, arthritic, emphysemic, with ulcerated veins in his legs, retired more or less from everything.

'I woke up this morning and I knew it,' Bronzini said.

'You knew it.'

'Time for Eddie's haircut.'

'In a blizzard. You woke up but you didn't look out the window.'

'It's a gentle snowfall. Old-fashioned. You should go walking.'

'Walking,' Eddie said. 'You have any idea what you're saying? Sit down, you're making me nervous.'

'I can't give you a haircut sitting down. Where are my tools of the trade?'

'I should give you. You're the one who needs his hair cut. You should carry a violin, Albert.'

'You don't want to play chess with me anymore. There's no one left in the world I can defeat in chess, trounce-I can trounce the way I trounce you. So you have to submit to the barber's moves. It's a beautiful snowfall from out of the past. Incidentally, Mercedes. Where is she? Your doorbell's not working.'

They sat drinking hot chocolate. What Albert wanted was a shot of hootch from an imported bottle. He imagined the warm wincing sting of a trickle of scotch. Durable, that was the beauty of the thing. It hit you so it lasted. The chairman scotched rumors of a takeover. A wedge you stick behind a wheel to keep a vehicle from rolling. That's a scotch. So is a line drawn on the ground, as in hopscotch, he thought.

'Doorbell. Only the doorbell?' Mercedes said.

'The elevator of course. But we know about the elevator.'

'You know about the plaster?' she said. 'I put newspapers in the cracks. Someday they find this place and they know exactly when the trouble started, from the newspapers.'

'Let the man live,' Eddie said. 'Talk about something else.'

'My own elevator, this is a problem,' Bronzini said. 'Periodic breakdowns.'

'Four flights?'

'Five flights.'

'Let the man live,' Eddie said.

'Five flights with his heart?'

'Talk about something else.'

Mercedes was heavy, disposed to gesture, swaying in the chair, hand-sweeping, but ably taking care of feeble Eddie, the imposter, the aching and stiff-jointed and gasping man. The old Eddie of the subways was a robust guy, selling tokens from a booth in that cinema dimness of bad air and sprocketing trains, immune to the hell rattle of the express, and she tended him now with expert love, with knowledge and command, and when she got mad at something it made Albert want to hide because he was a coward of blunt emotion, things met head-on and direct.

'They put up the bobwire to save us from drug dealers. But what about the water when it rains? Comes right in. I don't want to see winter end. I rather be cold. I rather jam newspapers in the cracks. Because when the snow melts.'

'The man is happy. Let him live,' Eddie said.

She got a kitchen chair for Eddie to sit on. She got the cigar box and put it on the table and opened it. She went away and came back with a bath towel, which she placed over her husband's upper body and then spread down around his knees. She fastened the two upper corners at the back of his neck, loosely, and then she looked across at Albert, who shared her satisfaction with all the collateral matters, the stir of preparations, crucial to the business of the haircut.

Albert took the implements out of the cigar box. He set them on the table a couple of inches apart. The short black rubberized comb, tapered for sideburns. The tortoiseshell comb with a handle and three missing teeth, called a rake comb. The beautiful pair of scissors, made in Italy, a family possession for generations, one of those things that turns up among the effects of the deceased, suddenly seen anew, an everyday treasure, filigreed shanks and a spur attached to one loop, a curved projection to support the middle finger. You put your index finger