Underworld

  “I don’t know what you mean by staying a Catholic. I told you what I think about conscience,” she said.

  “It’s only partly that. It’s mainly that I feel I’m part of something unreal. When you hallucinate, the point of any hallucination is that you have a false perception that you think is real. This is just the opposite. This is real. The work, the weapons, the missiles rising out of alfalfa fields. All of it. But it strikes me, more and more, as sheer distortion. It’s a dream someone’s dreaming that has me in it.”

  Maybe Janet was a little annoyed by this. Found it self-indulgent or unconvincing or beside the point.

  “I heard a story not long ago,” he said. “They did a bomb test in the nineteen-fifties in which a hundred pigs were dressed in custom-made GI field jackets and positioned at well-spaced intervals from the blast site. One hundred and eleven, to be exact, pigs, as the story was told to me. Then they exploded the device. Then they examined the uniforms on the barbecued pigs to evaluate the thermal qualities of the material. Because this was the point of the test.”

  Janet didn’t respond because whatever the point of the test, and whatever the point of the story, it was only making her mad.

  “Picture it. Chester whites. A breed of large fat hog with drooping ears. Wearing khaki uniforms with zippers, seams, everything, and with drawstrings drawn because that’s how the regulation reads. And a voice on the loudspeaker’s going, Ten, nine, eight, seven.”

  She told him to get his arm inside the jeep.

  “Is this when history turned to fiction?” he said.

  She looked at him briefly.

  “That’s not the question you’re asking,” she said.

  “What am I asking?”

  “I don’t think you’re asking that question. That’s a large question and I think you’re asking a smaller question and it has nothing to do with pigs in uniforms. You’re talking about something else completely.”

  He didn’t look at her.

  “What am I talking about, Janet?”

  “You tell me,” she said.

  He kept his eyes on the rutted track and didn’t say a word. Acacia slapped and twanged on the windshield and doors. They both watched the track.

  There was a structure about two hundred yards ahead, concrete and bunkerlike, sand-streaked, with slit windows and brambly growth edging up the walls.

  It was nearly sundown and they decided to camp nearby. There was something irresistible about the building, of course, even an unyielding ruin such as this, slabbed private and tight. It stood alone here, with mountains behind it, and carried the tilted lyric of a misplaced object, like some prairie drive-in shut down for years with the audio hookups all askew and the huge screen facing blankly toward a cornfield. It’s the kind of human junk that deepens the landscape, makes it sadder and lonelier and places a vague sad subjective regret at the edge of your response—not regret so much as a sense of time’s own esthetic, how strange and still and beautiful a chunk of concrete can be, lived in fleetingly and abandoned, the soul of wilderness signed by men and women passing through.

  “I’d rather sleep in there,” Janet said, “than do the tent again.”

  There were two slab doors sealed tight and the windows were narrow and high but they went around the back and found an opening at waist height and climbed inside. After all the choppy hours they’d put in, jeep-weaving over rubblestone and sand, the place seemed homey enough. A table, a few chairs, some nude calendars on the wall and a couple of shelves filled with canned food, utensils, safety matches and old magazines.

  Matt thought the bunker might have been constructed to accommodate spotters during exercises, a couple of ordnance guys helicoptered in to check firing accuracy, retrieve tow targets and possibly mark the location of unexploded rockets and bombs.

  Back outside he started a charcoal fire and they ate quickly and unconversationally and scraped the makings and remains into a plastic bag and stowed it in the jeep because they didn’t know what else to do with it.

  They carried their camp bags into the bunker and undressed in the moonlight. Janet sat on the nylon shell, one leg flat, one flexed, and she leaned back like a sunbather at lunch break on the library steps. He approached and lowered himself and felt the sun on her body, the residue of deep heat transferred to his hands and mouth and the way their bodies exchanged a sense of the day and the land, all the heat and blowing dust heavy on their breath, tasted again, fingertipped and felt and smelled.

  But the act was melancholy and slightly odd, it was calm and sweet and loving but also odd and slightly resigned and they lay together without speaking for a long time afterward.

  “I think we ought to turn back in the morning.”

  “Why?” she said. “We came this far.”

  “I think we’ve seen everything there is to see, pretty much.”

  “You haven’t seen the bighorns.”

  “I don’t need to see the bighorns. I don’t need to see the prong-horns either. There are pronghorns out there, antelope.”

  “You barely saw the eagle.”

  “I saw the eagle.”

  “From a distance, barely, in its nest,” she said.

  “The eagle was great. The eagle met every expectation.”

  She slept, he did not.

  He finally told himself the truth, that he’d wanted her to talk him out of his job. This was the question he’d been asking all along. Aren’t you going to tell me that you don’t want me to do this kind of work, for your sake, and the baby we’ll have, and the home we’ll own someday?

  But Janet did not cooperate.

  He understood this finally, that he’d wanted her to think he was making a sacrifice, leaving the Pocket for wife and child. He’d wanted her to say, Come to Boston and marry me.

  But Janet did not say it.

  He wasn’t made for this kind of work. He wanted to leave the job but he didn’t want to do it himself. He wanted her to do it for him.

  But Janet did not do it. And she knew all along what was in his heart. And she had no patience with his arias of the unreal. Whatever we’re doing in secret, she’d say, they’re doing something worse.

  The wind drove out of the east from time to time and he heard an animal near the jeep, going for the garbage.

  No, he was not a weaponeer. But that wasn’t the point. He’d wanted her to feel responsible, and guilty, for making him change his life. What an edge that would give him in the years to come.

  At Army Intelligence School he did double shifts of classwork, surrounded every edgy minute by combat analysts, language experts, counterintelligence guys snooping out drug use, by agent trainees on simulated missions, a spook for every body function.

  They sent him to Vietnam, to Phu Bai, and the first thing he saw when he entered the compound was a flourish of spray-paint graffiti on the wall of a supply shed. Om mani padme hum. Matt knew this was some kind of mantra, a thing hippies chanted in Central Park, but could it also be the motto of the 131st Aviation Company?

  From this point on he had trouble with the input.

  He worked in a quonset hut, cranking rolls of film across a light box. This was the take from aerial recon, an endless series of images sucked up by the belly cameras of surveillance planes. It was all about lost information, how to recover the minutest unit of data and identify it as a truck driven by a man smoking a French cigarette, going down the Ho Chi Minh trail.

  He tossed a frisbee to a gook dog and watched the animal leap and twist.

  There were rumors about a secret war, bombs in unnumbered tons dropped from B-52s. Laos, Chaos, Cambodia. Except the tons were not unnumbered but conscientiously counted because this is how we earn our stripes, by quantifying the product.

  Matt was a spec 5, the same pay grade as a sergeant but less command authority. That was okay with him.

  The rocket attacks were not okay, or the mortar rounds that came arcing down out of the rain.

  The rains came and the sirens sou
nded and he went to the nearest entrenchment, a shelter put together with sandbags and construction debris, with an open sewer running through.

  The heat and heroin came and there was the odd body found facedown in the muddy company street, a casualty of smack.

  Someone hung a photo of Nixon in the quonset hut, two men flanking him, familiar somehow but unrecallable, and there were rumors about a substance stored in black drums near the perimeter of the compound.

  In the movie version you’d freeze the frame with the dog in midleap about to snare the frisbee. A park on a summer’s day somewhere in America—that would be the irony of the shot, with a solo guitar producing the bitter screech of feedback.

  This is what happens when part of a system’s output is returned to the input.

  Yes, someone tacked up a magazine page and Matt could not quite identify the two men who flanked the President but they weren’t politicians or corporation heads. A curly-haired man, handsome and smiling. And a sad-eyed guy with a honker nose and the leaden aspect of an immigrant in a borrowed suit.

  He cranked the film across the light box. When he found a dot on the film he tried to make a determination. It was a truck or a truck stop or a tunnel entrance or a gun emplacement or a family grilling burgers at a picnic.

  It was hot and monotonous and planes came and went all the time, gunships, transports, medium bombers, stratotankers, fighter jets, executive jets, a little pink Piper carrying an instructor and a student and finally converted cargo planes spraying the jungles with a herbicide stored in black drums that had identifying orange stripes.

  There were rumors about whole other wars, just to the east, or was it west?

  The drums resembled cans of frozen Minute Maid enlarged by a crazed strain of DNA. And the substance in the drums contained, so the rumor went, a cancer-causing agent.

  He heard the rumors and the mortars and felt the monsoon heat and heard the universal slogan of the war.

  Stay stoned, man.

  He’d wanted to come to Vietnam. He’d been back and forth in his mind about the war but thought this was a thing he had to do, a form of self-reckoning—stay straight, be brave, answer when your country calls. But there was also something else, the older blood-borne force known as family.

  He could not evade the sense of responsibility. It was there to be confronted. He did not want to slip away, sneak through, get off cheap, dodge, desert, resist, chicken out, turn tail, flee to Canada, Sweden or San Francisco, as his old man had done.

  When he found a dot on the film he translated it into letters, numbers, coordinates, grids and entire systems of knowledge.

  Om mani padme hum.

  In fact the dog didn’t leap at all but only watched the frisbee sail past, more or less disdainfully.

  A dot was a visual mantra, an object that had no properties except location.

  The jewel in the heart of the lotus.

  He was in his sleeping bag but wasn’t asleep. He wanted company and woke up Janet. He stuck his arm out of the bag and reached over and shook her awake.

  “I want the same things you want.”

  “All right, Matthew.”

  “I want us to be surrounded by familiar things. I’m excited about it. I want to start right away.”

  “You ought to wait. Stay where you are. Work for another year at this job. See what happens,” she said.

  “I want to think up nicknames for our children. Do you know what I mean? I want us to be surrounded. I want photographs, silverware, things we’ll pass on some day. I want to talk about what we’re having for dinner. You like baked clams? We’ve barely ever talked about food, you and I.”

  “Stay where you are,” she told him. “Don’t do anything in a hurry.”

  “I’m excited about this. I wish it wasn’t going to take so long to get out of here. I’d like to start driving basically right now.”

  “Go to sleep,” she told him.

  “There are so many things to talk about.”

  She was asleep inside a minute. Matt lay there helpless against his racing mind. He understood finally that he wouldn’t be able to sleep and he decided to watch the sun come up over the desert.

  He put on his pants and a sweater and went out behind the bunker about fifty yards, where he switched off the flashlight.

  Then he sat in the dirt and waited.

  He remembered how he’d felt sitting in a chair at the bombhead party, locked in a gravitational field, his head buzzing with suspicion.

  He thought of the photograph of Nixon and wondered if the state had taken on the paranoia of the individual or was it the other way around.

  He remembered how he felt cranking film across the light box and wondering where the dots connected.

  Because everything connects in the end, or only seems to, or seems to only because it does.

  At the light box he was a parody of the traditional figure in the basement room, the lone inventor stooped over his worktable, piecing together the pins, springs and wires of some eccentric contraption, the lightbulb idea that would change the world.

  And the voice with the Hungarian accent, Eric Deming speaking into his face in the crowded room.

  The dots on the film might have been trucks going down the supply route or new model cars coming off the line or condoms that look like fingers on a latex glove.

  And someone in the quonset hut had to tell him who they were. Nixon flanked by a couple of ballplayers, old-time guys, a winner-loser sort of thing, joined at the hip for life.

  He sat in the dust with his eyes closed and smelled the wet resin of a creosote bush and began to sense light about to break somewhere.

  People hide in their basement rooms. They take to the bunkers and tunnels as weapons roll identically off the line and begin to light up the sky.

  And how can you tell the difference between orange juice and agent orange if the same massive system connects them at levels outside your comprehension?

  And how can you tell if this is true when you’re already systemed under, prepared to half believe everything because this is the only intelligent response?

  People hide in dark dank places, where mushrooms grow, sprouting quickly.

  The dots he marked with his grease pencil became computer bits in Da Nang, Sunday brunch in Saigon and mission briefings in Thailand, he guessed, or Guam.

  When you alter a single minor component, the system adapts at once.

  Somebody had to give him the names. The president flanked by Thomson and Branca, Bobby and Ralph, the binary hero-goat inseparable to the end.

  A mushroom with a fleshy cap that might be poisonous or magical. In Siberia somewhere the shamans ate the cap and were born again. What did they see in their trance state? Was it a cloud shaped like a mushroom?

  He was in the Pocket even then, cranking film all night long, waiting for the mortar rounds to come raining down. They made a crunch like a kid eating cereal on TV.

  And how can you tell the difference between syringes and missiles if you’ve become so pliant, ready to half believe everything and to fix conviction in nothing?

  And how can you know if the image existed before the bomb was invented? There may have been an underworld of images known only to tribal priests, mediums between visible reality and the spirit world, and they popped magic mushrooms and saw a fiery cloud that predated the image on the U.S. Army training film.

  Watched from a safe distance, says the narrator, this explosion is one of the most beautiful sights ever seen by man.

  He was in the Pocket even then, in a way, but did not think along the systems track to the culmination of his tedious little labors. The thousand-pound bombs clustering out of the bays of B-52s like finned pellets of excrement, cratering the jungle trail.

  But they were the enemy so what the hell.

  And they’re the enemy still, or someone is, and he opened his eyes and saw the sky go an odd sort of mad granny gray.

  Ideas used to come from below. Now they’re every
where above you, connecting things and grids universally.

  The binary black-white yes-no zero-one hero-goat.

  And the two men flanking the president in the photo tacked up on the quonset wall. The tallish handsome fellow and the bushy-browed immigrant. Could just as easily be Oppenheimer and Teller, their bodies greased with suntan oil as they quote Hindu scriptures to each other.

  Om does not rhyme with bomb. It only looks that way.

  Death and magic, that’s the mushroom. Or death and immortal life. Psilocybin is a compound obtained from a Mexican mushroom that can turn your soul into fissionable material, according to scholars of the phenomenon.

  They are everywhere at the same time, endlessly connected, and you half believe the most implausible things because you’d be stupid not to.

  All technology refers to the bomb.

  He sat in the dust with his eyes opened and realized the sun was rising behind him and wondered what this meant.

  It meant he’d been facing in the wrong direction all along.

  Matt drove the jeep, Janet drowsed next to him, drowsed a while and got bounced awake and nodded off again.

  He felt good, clear-minded, he drove and thought, he saw everything, he identified plants without the book.

  The sun was still very low and the track would take them right into it for a time before veering gradually north.

  He saw the rubble turn to sand.

  He saw the silty limestone bottoms of dried-out creeks that paralleled the track.

  He heard the wing-whir of mourning doves breaking out of the bush.

  He saw a dust devil on a level stretch of desert doing slow-motion spirals.

  There was an odd charged pause.

  Then the roar descended on them, so close it stopped his blood, and Janet grabbed an arm. No, first she fell against him, knocked sideways by the force of the noise, a flat cracking boom, and then she snatched his arm and missed and grabbed again. He sat there with his head hammered into his shoulders. The jeep left the track but he freed his arm from Janet’s clutch and steered it back. He realized his other arm was raised just over his head, curled above him in defense.