Underworld

don't think you ought to be isolating these sites. Isolate the most toxic waste, okay. This makes it grander, more ominous and magical. But basic household waste ought to be placed in the cities that produce it. Bring garbage into the open. Let people see it and respect it. Don't hide your waste facilities. Make an architecture of waste. Design gorgeous buildings to recycle waste and invite people to collect their own garbage and bring it with them to the press rams and conveyors. Get to know your garbage. And the hot stuff, the chemical waste, the nuclear waste, this becomes a remote landscape of nostalgia. Bus tours and postcards, I guarantee it.'

Sims wasn't sure he liked this.

'What kind of nostalgia?'

'Don't underestimate our capacity for complex longings. Nostalgia for the banned materials of civilization, for the brute force of old industries and old conflicts.'

Detwiler had been a fringe figure in the sixties, a garbage guerrilla who stole and analyzed the household trash of a number of famous people. He issued mock-comintern manifestos about the contents, with personal asides, and the underground press was quick to print this stuff. His activities had a crisp climax when he was arrested for snatching the garbage of J. Edgar Hoover from the rear of the Director's house in northwest Washington and this is what people remembered, what I remembered when I first reheard the name Jesse Detwiler. He'd earned a brief feverish fame in the chronicles of the time, part of the strolling band of tambourine girls and bomb makers, levitators and acid droppers and lost children.

A bird flew across the width of the crater, a finch or wren, moving with the nervous fleetness, the urgency of sundown.

Detwiler said that cities rose on garbage, inch by inch, gaining elevation through the decades as buried debris increased. Garbage always got layered over or pushed to the edges, in a room or in a landscape. But it had its own momentum. It pushed back. It pushed into every space available, dictating construction patterns and altering systems of ritual. And it produced rats and paranoia. People were compelled to develop an organized response. This meant they had to come up with a resourceful means of disposal and build a social structure to carry it out- workers, managers, haulers, scavengers. Civilization is built, history is driven-

He talked in his talk-show way, focused, practiced, generically intimate. He was a waste hustler, looking for book deals and documentary films, and I don't think he cared whether we were two people listening or half a million.

'See, we have everything backwards,' he said.

Civilization did not rise and flourish as men hammered out hunting scenes on bronze gates and whispered philosophy under the stars, with garbage as a noisome offshoot, swept away and forgotten. No, garbage rose first, inciting people to build a civilization in response, in self-defense. We had to find ways to discard our waste, to use what we couldn't discard, to reprocess what we couldn't use. Garbage pushed back. It mounted and spread. And it forced us to develop the logic and rigor that would lead to systematic investigations of reality, to science, art, music, mathematics.

The sun went down.

'Do you really believe that?' I said.

'Bet your ass I believe it. I teach it at UCLA. I take my students into garbage dumps and make them understand the civilization they live in. Consume or die. That's the mandate of the culture. And it all ends up in the dump. We make stupendous amounts of garbage, then we react to it, not only technologically but in our hearts and minds. We let it shape us. We let it control our thinking. Garbage comes first, then we build a system to deal with it.'

The rim clouds took on a chromium edge and the high sky was still an easy noonish blue. But the pit went dark in a hurry, the vast plastic liner wind-lapped and making the eeriest sort of music, just outside the wave-fold of nature, and the surface was indigo now, still faintly sky-streaked, washed by gradations of shade and motion. We stood a moment watching and then went back to the car. Detwiler sat in the middle of the rear seat, needling us about dumping our garbage on sacred Indian land. And about Whiz Go's vanguard status. He thought the firm had the hard-core appetites of any traditional company

We drove an empty road.

'You tracking the rumors, Sims? This ship you've got.'

'It's not my area.'

'Cruising the oceans of the world trying to dump some hellish substance.'

'I'm looking the other way,' Sims said.

'Look this way. I hear it's headed back to the U.S.'

'ibu know more than we do.' Sims hated saying this. 'What do we know, Nick?'

'We're not sixties people. We're forties and fifties people.'

'We're limited,' Sims said.

'We don't know much of anything.'

'We listened to the radio,' Sims said. 'We know the Lone Ranger and Ton to.'

'From out of the past,' I said.

'The thundering hoofbeats of the great horse Silver.'

'A fiery horse with the speed of light.'

'This is what we know, Jesse.'

'A cloud of dust.'

'And a hearty hi-yo Silver.'

Deep-pitching our voices to the baritone drama of the old radio show.

'Guys think you're funny,' Detwiler said. 'Bet you don't know the name of Tonto's horse. Come on, Sims. You know the white man's horse. Why don't you know the Indian's horse?'

I didn't think I liked Detwiler but I liked to listen to him. Sims did not. Sims wanted to get him in another headlock, not so fraternal this time. No, he didn't know the Indian's horse and maybe it bothered him a little.

Jesse kept talking.

'The more dangerous the waste, the more heroic it will become. Irradiated ground. The way the Indians venerate this terrain now, we'll come to see it as sacred in the next century. Plutonium National Park. The last haunt of the white gods. Tourists wearing respirator masks and protective suits.'

I said, 'What was the name of the Indian's horse?'

'Scout, okay? And I'm amazed and shocked. This is a deep cultural failure, you guys. Tonto's horse. You have to know this.'

He leaned toward us, needling.

'A ship carrying thousands of barrels of industrial waste. Or is it CIA heroin? I can believe this myself. You know why? Because it's easy to believe. We'd be stupid not to believe it. Knowing what we know.'

'What do we know?' Sims said.

Choppers in formation, ten or twelve, coming at us right over the road, large assault transports lighted like manic angels, and they passed above us with a rackety blast that sucked the air out of the car and left us limp and ducking.

'That everything's connected,' Jesse said.

Not that I completely disliked my previous job. I wrote speeches mainly for corporate chairmen, ruddy white- haired guys with big ravaged noses, patriarchs of this or that industry. They tended to be sportsmen who flew in company planes to remote lakes in Canada, where they fished the last unspoiled waters of the continent. I went along on one such trip with a chairman named McHenry, a sweet and decent man in fact who owned a number of software companies that had contracts with the government, And his grandsons were at the lake, a pair of white- browed boys in down vests, primed for blood sport. And I stood and looked at the old lakeside house with its cedar shakes and tall chimneys and all the shabby and splintery porch furniture of a backwoods retreat. I looked at the house and missed it on some curious level. It might have been some object of my own past, some augury in reverse, stately rustic and high-ceilinged and mothballed in the unused rooms, with thick scratchy blankets on the guest beds, bearing college emblems- the promise of things I'd never had but somehow seemed to know, collectively, at the edge of memory. And the way the boys handled their shotguns, born to it, you see-they were kids and I was a man but I think I took a measure of instruction from them, Johno and Todd, not that I joined them