Underworld

subject.

I was in my early forties, hired away from a thin-blooded job as a corporate speechwriter and public relations aide, and I was ready for something new, for a faith to embrace.

Corporations are great and appalling things. They take you and shape you in nearly nothing flat, twist and swivel you. And they do it without overt persuasion, they do it with smiles and nods, a collective inflection of the voice. You stand at the head of a corridor and by the time you walk to the far end you have adopted the comprehensive philosophy of the firm, the Weltanschauung. I use this grave and layered word because somewhere in its depths there is a whisper of mystical contemplation that seems totally appropriate to the subject of waste.

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?'

'Well 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