As the crowds go crazy over the glory of the last strike of the ball, J. Edgar Hoover stands and watches them in the crowd. A little inadequate in the company of Frank Sinatra and Jackie Gleason he has been reserved, holding back in the delusions of powerful men. Makeshift tickertape starts to fall on him from the stands above, and he notices of what it is made. It is a magazine reproduction of Breughel’s The Triumph of Death that falls.

Hoover collects the torn up parts of the picture, makes them whole. On this day, the day of Thomson’s pennant winning home run, and the day that the Soviet Union explodes its first atomic bomb somewhere inside its own borders, October 3 1951, J Edgar Hoover has to hear the world speak differently, and acknowledge, amongst the screams of the crowd and the visions of Breughel’s painting, that there are events, dread and awesome, that won’t join with the public realm of history:

‘This is what he knows, that the genius of the bomb is printed not only in its physics of particles and rays but in the occasion it creates for new secrets. For every atmospheric blast, every glimpse we get of the bared force of nature, that weird peeled eyeball exploding over the desert – for every one of these he reckons a hundred plots go underground, to spawn and skein.’ 12

These events, the plots that go underground, constitute the underworld itself, and it is no mistake that De Lillo uses the language of a viral and atomic nature to describe the disappearance. Go into the underworld and you go temporary, a non-identifiable one amongst many, growing, making webs, a network of atoms. This is both a ‘people's history’ 13 and a new nature. On the day the arms race begins, it is evident that a new man speaks; atomic man begins, and with the coming of mutually assured destruction, of instant global extinction, the old dreams of immortality, artistic or theological, become obsolete. In an instant, everything can go, and so things gain an extra escape-route from public history, a new intimacy of which The Body Artist is almost a bi-product in the giant physics of Underworld. There is a new chance in the perils of atomic death, a chance to be atomic-man, to speak in its voice, to freeze in the pink-light of atomic death 14 and disappear.

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