Underworld

never think of the term as a marker of geography. It's a reference to time, a statement about time, about all the densities of being and experience, it's time disguised, it's light-up time, shifting smoky time tricked out as some locus of stable arrangement. When people use that term they're talking about the way things used to be before they moved out here, the way the world used to be, not just New Jersey or South Philly, or before their parents moved, or grandparents, and about the way things still exist in some private relativity theory, some smoky shifting mind dimension, or before the other men and women came this way, the ones in Con-estoga wagons, a term we learned in grade school, a back-east term, stemming from the place where the wagons were made.

The room was very nearly empty and they were playing blues.

'Be nice to her,' I said. 'Go home, talk to her, make nice. You know this phrase? Make nice. They use this phrase when you were a Negro child in St. Louis, Sims?'

'They came to take the census.'

'You're right. Let's leave,' I said.

'Your father knew him. This means-what?'

'It means he knew him.'

'In other words I have to show respect. I have to be reverent when I mention his name. This guy who runs a criminal enterprise in narcotics, extortion, what else. Murder, attempted murder, what else.'

'Waste carting,' I said.

'Could be. Why not? And I have to respect him. Because he was nice to your father.'

'You're right. Let's leave,' I said.

'I didn't say I wanted to leave. I don't want to leave.'

'Tell her you're sorry and take a bath,' I told him.

Half an hour later we were in the last club of the night, a blues room with an air of desperation, and the waiter resembled the old guy from two or three places ago, facially resembled-he wore a standard waiter's getup but looked a lot, I thought, like the other guy, in the football T-shirt, three or four places ago, or whenever it was, the T-shirt and cotton nose plug.

'This place reminds me. You know how they're always saying, Where were you when such and such? Where were you when Kennedy? Well, remember the time the lights went out. This place reminds me. The great Northeast blackout.'

'Am I supposed to ask where you were?' he said.

'Thirty million people affected.'

'I was in Germany. I never knew what caused it. What caused it?'

'Nobody remembers. Thirty million people. Not one of us remembers.'

'But you remember where you were.'

'Ask me where I was. I was in a bar that was a little like this place,' I said. 'Dead souls, sad jazz. Palm trees painted on the wall.'

'This place doesn't have palm trees on the wall.'

'Even better, even more similar. And the lights went out.'

'They made a movie. I was in Germany,' he said.

'Maybe they didn't have jazz at this other place. Maybe they used to have jazz but stopped. They had a jazz policy that became a policy of no jazz, which is much the same thing if you examine it closely.'

He didn't resemble the old guy from three or four places ago. That's

'Wait wait wait wait wait wait.'

'Think about it,' he said.

He plucked his shirt, he did a thing big men do, he used both hands to pluck his shirt away from his chest and then he shook it, half dainty, letting his upper body breathe.

'Sims, you and I.'

'Just think about it.'

'We're not, remember, we don't have a word, you and I, for the science of dark forces. For what is behind an event. We don't accept the validity of this word or this science. Remember that conversation?'

'This is another conversation. And in this conversation I'm saying, Think about it.'

'But you and I. We go against the tide, Sims. The tide is easy, it's irresponsible. We're responsible men. We've established this. We don't believe there are secret forces undermining our lives.'

'Thirty million people affected by your local blackout. But only twenty-five million, they're saying, black people in the whole huge country.'

'If that's the number, that's the number.'

'And this is all you can say. We have an issue that's crying out for, really, scrutiny, to use one of your words.'

'Go ahead, scrutinize it.'

'Ibu're willing to accept this number.'

'Twenty-five million. Yes, why not?'

'You don't think this number is way too low.'

'Twenty-five million's not so low. It's twenty-five million,' I said.

'You don't think this number is totally underreported.'

'Why do you say scrutiny is my word?'

'Because you used it.'

'This makes it my word?'

'I didn't use it. You used it.'

'I believe the number. It's a believable number to me.'

'You don't think somebody's afraid that if the real number is reported, white people gonna go weak in the knees and black people gonna get all pumped up with, Hey we oughta be gettin' more of this and more of that and more of the other.'

'Yes, and what?'

'And my mother told me to hide.'

'What for?'

'What for. That's the point. I didn't know what for. She thought, I don't know what she thought. I went and hid, you know. Two people at the door with clipboards. She said, Get inside, stay down.'

'Stay down.'

'She said, Stay down. I don't know what I thought and I don't know what she thought.'

'It was only the census.'

'Don't say only the census.'

'You tell me I'm going a little gray. And I'm supposed to understand how this is worse than total baldness.'

'Because it's in my history, it's in my family,' he said. 'I'm supposed to go bald. It's expected of me. Stay down, she said.'

'Stay down.'

'You believe the census, Nick?'

He sat there with his loosened tie and wrinkled jacket, relighting the discontinued cigar, a line of sundown pink visible above the jut of his lower lip.

'What do you want me to say? Yes, I believe it. No, I don't believe it.'

'I want you to say what you believe.'

'Because I can sense we're about to enter some touchy area.'

'What do you believe?' he said.

'I believe the census. Why shouldn't I believe it?'

He gave me a flat-eyed look with a nice tightness to it.

'You believe it.'

'Why shouldn't I believe it?'

'You believe the numbers. You believe there's only twenty-five million, for example, black people in America.'