Why is it that apparitions, so readily ridiculed and dismissed by the empirically minded, nonetheless succeed in capturing our attention and drawing us in fascination to their strange contours? Though largely diagnosed as epi-religious phenomena that appeal to the superstitious, they possess a kind of traction that keeps them current not only in religious communities, but also more generally in the media, in literature, and in art. As fictions in the world, apparitions seem to move easily between reality and representation, turning up with surprising frequency in a range of artistic and narrative forms. From the “Grilled Cheesus” that appeared in a 2010 episode of the popular television show Glee to a number of recent novels, such as Diane Schoemperlen's Our Lady of the Lost and Found and David Price's Lush Life, apparitions remain a trenchant but enigmatic feature of contemporary American culture.Footnote ¹ In 2005, the artist Robert Wechsler's installation Everything Is Coming up Roses asked viewers to interrogate the idea of the apparition in the age of technological reproducibility. The installation featured a series of T-shirts bearing images of the Virgin of Guadalupe that had been burned onto the fabric using a customized iron. The iron was also included in the artwork, highlighting the profanely serial nature of the supposedly divine image. Wechsler's clever piece calls attention to one reason why apparitions endure: not because they testify to the existence of a higher power, but because they present an unexpected crossing of borders, a blurring of categories. When the divine purportedly appears in the most brute and banal of material forms, it gives us pause – not only because the apparition appeals to a higher power, but because it reassembles the objects in our field of vision, asking us to see familiar things anew. Though we might agree with John A. McClure that “images of saints and divinities appearing on the sides of office buildings or pieces of toast” are “hyperbolic,” they effectively call our attention to the previously unremarkable toast or office building.Footnote ² The apparition dismantles the difference between waste and relic, the eternal and the ephemeral, loss and restoration. In doing so, it reorganizes perception, so that our orientation to objects is temporarily changed.

Nowhere are these effects on perception more visible than when apparitions materialize in urban spaces.Footnote ³ This is in part because the contrast between the urban environment and the religious vision seems especially stark. But it is also because such apparitions repurpose urban surfaces and detritus around which new collectives can take shape. Taking apparitions seriously, then, is a matter of attending not just to the images themselves, but also to the groups that spring up around them. As any reader of Underworld will recall, Don DeLillo does just this at the end of his 1997 novel. In the last scene, a conservative nun is transformed by a vision of a murdered girl whose face appears on a billboard in the South Bronx. Gathered on a traffic island with a crowd of believers, the nun sees what they see and embraces those around her. That fictional vision bears an uncanny resemblance to a concrete image said to resemble the Virgin Mary that materialized on the wall of the Fullerton–Kennedy Expressway of Chicago's Bucktown neighborhood. The image in the underpass became an unexpected site of pilgrimage, a place of communal prayer and belief. Reading the two images together – one from the final pages of a canonical postmodern novel and the other from the walls of a highway underpass – might seem a bizarre endeavor.Footnote ⁴ But situating the fictional apparition next to a “real-life” counterpart stresses the perceptual work that apparitions can perform. It illustrates their ability to consolidate onlookers into temporary communities that see and make seen the material and social inequalities that often characterize urban life in America. In other words, pairing the two examples illustrates what I find most salient about urban apparitions: that rather than reenchant the secular world, they make visible what otherwise remains hidden.

Both DeLillo's apparition and the image from Chicago known as “Underpass Mary” highlight the realities of class dispossession and displacement in the urban environments in which they appear. The apparitions therefore accomplish what John Blair Gamber describes as “the reclamation of waste objects and waste spaces” that acts as “a necessary parallel to the reclamation of cast-off individuals and communities.”Footnote ⁵ How this reclamation occurs is, as I have already suggested, a matter of seeing. Rather than reveal urban inequalities through data or other empirical means, these apparitions work on an affective level, drawing together individuals into groups bound by their perceptual experiences as well as their belief. The patient mode of perception practiced by the onlookers at the end of Underworld and in the underpass does not enhance religious belief as much as it leads to a heightened awareness of the world in which those onlookers are embedded alongside each other. They therefore engage in what Merleau-Ponty calls “perceptual faith,” a pre-reflective faith in the perceived world as real and shared.Footnote ⁶ This perceptual faith allows communities to form around phenomenological experiences of mourning and marginalization, becoming, as Georgiana Banita says of the witnesses in DeLillo's Falling Man, “posttraumatic collectivities of engaged spectatorship [that] emerge around an image.”Footnote ⁷ In other words, a so-called “apparitional sensibility” proves to be rather a perceptual sensitivity that is best suited to the urban settings in which the apparitions here emerge. What both examples suggest, despite their different ontological registers and contexts, is that attunement to the spirituality arising in the fissures of the social order does not simply transport onlookers to transcendent, otherworldly realms. Instead, these images reorganize urban space and the bodies that inhabit it, enabling a collective practice of seeing that offers a clearer, fuller picture of the cities in which they appear.

Plenty has been said about the religious dimensions of DeLillo's work. From John A. McClure's reading of the “earth-centered mysticism” in White Noise to Jeffrey T. Nealon's recent account of reading as belief in Mao II, several scholars have addressed the way that DeLillo's fiction often registers “something beyond.”Footnote ⁸ And ample attention has been paid to the apparition at the end of Underworld: among many others, Peter Boxall, John Duvall, Amy Hungerford, Mark Osteen and Timothy Parrish have incisively examined the novel's final tale of a vision amidst despair and ruination. Most critics turn from the apparition itself to DeLillo's language in order to demonstrate how the author's phrasing emphasizes, as the characters repeat throughout Underworld, that indeed, “everything is connected.” While the scene undoubtedly exposes the links between weapons and waste, consumerism and religion, capitalism and terror, the critical tendency to focus on the redemptive or transcendent qualities of the final scene obscures what is most potent about the images on the billboard: that they reposition a culture's waste at its center in order to call attention to the material conditions of urban life. The apparition offers less a flight from reality than a heightened awareness of inequality. In Postmodern Belief, Amy Hungerford aptly suggests that Underworld establishes a mystical relation to the material world, insisting that religious practice attends to the physical details and textures of even the most unassuming objects.Footnote ⁹ Indeed, as John A. McClure writes, religious experience in DeLillo's fiction does not emanate “from some transcendental beyond but from the world itself and its inhabitants.”Footnote ¹⁰

Indeed, the final scene of Underworld is assembled from the grit and grime of the American city – the waste – that DeLillo's sprawling novel catalogs. The narrative winds its way from the New York Giants’ Polo Grounds in 1951 to the Bronx in the late 1990s via a juvenile detention center in Minnesota; a desert dotted with artfully repurposed military planes in New Mexico; and, of course, the graffiti-covered, garbage-strewn streets of New York City in the 1970s. Nick Shay, the protagonist of the novel, works as a “waste analyst” and DeLillo is deliberate in pointing out that the detritus that Nick attempts to keep at bay in his job is the unlikely source material for the novel's final, miraculous vision. The novel's focus on waste raises the question: in a culture of so much excess, how can faith survive? Nick offers a cryptic answer that I have taken as one epigraph for this essay: in American life at the turn of the millennium, waste itself has become a religious thing. Nick says this when he describes the reverence and dread he sees reserved for trash as it is separated, packed, buried, shipped, and handled with great care.

But the final scene, with its overt religious content – a nun witnessing a miraculous vision – suggests that waste is religious insofar as it is the unseen, nearly mythical by-product of American capitalism's incessant drive toward total efficiency and hygiene. In her work on American modernity and depression, Jani Scandura tracks the changing relationship with rubbish from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s. She discusses the landfill as a site of “complex masking,” by which trash could be “contained, ordered, and regulated,” exiled to “a space that could be distinguished and set at the margin of American industrial life.”Footnote ¹¹ Like other postmodernist writers and artists, DeLillo reclaims trash from these hidden margins and puts it on display.Footnote ¹² Reworking trash into a religious vision, DeLillo narrates an especially potent scene of unmasking in which the miraculous points readers back to the impoverished environment that the novel's characters inhabit.Footnote ¹³

It is not through the eyes of Nick, the waste analyst, that we encounter the “uncanny occurrence” that springs forth at the city's margins.Footnote ¹⁴ Instead, it is Sister Edgar, a nun who appears throughout the sections of the novel set in the Bronx, who confronts the image. Sister Edgar is a cruel disciplinarian (she is a terror to her students) and a strict traditionalist (she still wears a habit in the style of Vatican II), and she is afraid that the poor she serves will contaminate her (she wears latex gloves to touch them). But she is deeply affected when a girl whom she has been trying to help is raped and murdered in the housing project where she lives. During her trips to deliver food to people living in “the inner ghetto, a slice of the South Bronx called the Wall,” Sister Edgar notices Esmeralda, a girl who “forages in empty lots for discarded clothes, plucks spoiled fruit from garbage bags behind bodegas, who is sometimes seen running through the trees and weeds, a shadow on the rubbled walls of demolished structures” (810). Instead of the usual repulsion that she feels for the Wall's residents, Sister Edgar sees Esmeralda, who lives off and amidst waste, as a “creature of sylvan myth,” “a reprieve from the Wall's endless distress,” “a source of personal hope” (811).Footnote ¹⁵ The elderly nun wants to save “the radiant grace in the girl,” to “save her from danger, bring her to candles and ashes and palms, to belief in the mystical body” (811). But after her brutal murder, Esmeralda becomes the mystical body herself, and, in a reversal of roles, it is the girl who brings Sister Edgar a kind of redemption that works through collective perceptual faith.

Shortly after Esmeralda's death, people begin to see a mysterious image of the girl on a billboard above the Harlem River. Crowds gather to witness the ghostly apparition, which is visible for fleeting moments when oncoming commuter trains shine their headlights onto the billboard. When Sister Edgar stands with the crowd and witnesses the vision, she strips off her gloves and shakes hands with and embraces the people around her. No longer set apart like a refuse worker shielded by protective garb, she at last enters into the state of spiritual communion that until this moment has been missing from her aseptic religious life. Sister Edgar's epiphany here at the novel's end represents only one conversion among many. An abandoned place, a fractured community, and a senseless death are momentarily transformed by this conclusion. The novel suggests that these transformations are possible only when the material world, its refuse and rubbish (for which Esmeralda herself is clearly a metaphor), are revisited through a new mode of perception.

The vision of Esmeralda draws believers and skeptics alike into a ritual that alters their space and their senses. Those who come to see the apparition assemble in a forgotten pocket of New York City's northern limits. They cram “onto a traffic island in the bottommost Bronx, amidst “all that old industrial muscle with its fretful desolation – the ramps that shoot tall weeds and the waste burner coughing toxic fumes and the old railroad bridge spanning the Harlem River, an openwork tower at either end” (818). Far from the orderly, glittering grid of moneyed Manhattan, the vision of Esmeralda calls pilgrims to the industrial ruins at the city's margins, to an impoverished landscape that seems brutally mined to feed the gluttony of the island's wealthier inhabitants. DeLillo's description of the neglected freight yard and eerie structures paints a portrait of a no-man's-land, forgotten except as a place to pass through.

Once stationed here, the people on the traffic island gaze upward, at “a billboard floating in the gloom – an advertising sign scaffolded high above the riverbank meant to attract the doped-over glances of commuters on the trains that run incessantly down from the northern suburbs into the thick of Manhattan money and glut” (818). The apparition draws readers’ attention and that of two hundred pilgrims to this overlooked place. Esmeralda appears on this “billboard floating in the gloom” and remakes the surface, inflecting the ephemeral with the eternal and also exposing the many pieces that make up a single simulacrum. The billboard suspended above the urban wasteland is a complex thing even before it reveals the image of the dead girl. It is one of those “gigantic objects” that Miriam Hansen, glossing Walter Benjamin, claims can “place the perceptual subject vis-à-vis the image as an object but within a dynamic visual, sensorial environment.”Footnote ¹⁶ DeLillo's extensive description of the billboard alerts us to the web of entangled images and references that hide in plain sight on it:

The irony of the image, which advertises a brand of orange juice by rendering it part of “the suburban dream,” is obvious. The “perfectly formed” white hand, the cliché willows and lake of the background, and the nearly pornographic contours of the juice itself make the billboard a cruel reminder of plenty that sails above a community of people living in dire poverty. Sister Edgar's association of the image's lavish details with the art and architecture of the medieval church implies the holy dimensions that consumption and advertising have reached at the end of the twentieth century.

DeLillo's indictment of the billboard and the desire it is meant to kindle does not end there. In American Magic and Dread, Mark Osteen tracks the many previous appearances of orange that appear throughout the novel in a “complex skein [that] indicates a unity linking advertising, war, religion, and underground art” (215).Footnote ¹⁷ Most significant in this skein is a moment in Vietnam, when the protagonist's younger brother Matt Shay notices “black drums near the perimeter” (462) of his military compound. The drums, he says, “resembled cans of frozen Minute Maid” (463), and prompt him to wonder, “how can you tell the difference between orange juice and agent orange if the same massive system connects them at levels outside your comprehension?” (465). It is not only the “massive system” of global capitalism that seems to connect poison and sustenance, advertising and war; the system goes so far as to re-present the toxic artifacts of history as “little orange-and-black people.” The dubiously racialized cans, sprung forth from a white hand, evoke specters and stories that jar violently with the description of cuteness.

If the cans are “so familiar” that they become congenial beings, the appearance of Esmeralda defamiliarizes these objects so that they allow onlookers and readers to see anew. As Peter Boxall puts it, the apparition “transform[s] a marker of banal multinational capital into a sign of divine redemption.”Footnote ¹⁸ DeLillo stresses, however, that this “redemption” lies in the mode of observation that the apparition engenders. Onlookers stand transfixed, and they direct their eyes into an anxiously focused, collective gaze much different from the “doped-over glances” of the commuters who habitually see the billboard without noticing it. Sister Edgar and the crowd, not knowing “how long they're supposed to wait or exactly what is supposed to happen,” stare at the billboard (820). This is an apt description of perceptual faith, which binds the members of the crowd together before the vision even appears. This mode of perception requires the type of engagement that Walter Benjamin described in his explorations of mimesis and innervation. Writing of the gambler's intense concentration, he described a “bodily presence of mind,” a form of “heightened receptivity that allows the spark [to leap] within the body from one point to the next.”Footnote ¹⁹ Awaiting the arrival of the unknown, the crowd develops a single consciousness, thrumming with a shared energy like a steadily vibrating tuning fork. They demonstrate perfectly what Benjamin described as the “innervation of the collective,” a phenomenon he saw as characteristic of urban modernity because it collapses the distance between bodies and images.Footnote ²⁰ The apparition thus promotes a perceptual mode that opposes the “freaking network coverage” which sensationalizes and depersonalizes the “tragic life and death of a homeless child.” The billboard is less a symptom of what DeLillo earlier calls “an epidemic of seeing” than, rather, an image that can only be seen through the kind of attunement that Sister Edgar carries out alongside other onlookers who patiently await the arrival of the unknown (812).

The image appears to the waiting crowd when the lights of an oncoming commuter train hit the billboard. At that moment, DeLillo describes how the apparition elicits moans and cries of “unstoppered belief”:

Sister Edgar's response to the apparition amounts to a physical transformation. She waits and watches, and waits again, emotion rising within her each time the train lamps illuminate the billboard. Finally, the appearance of this “angelus of the clearest joy” moves the germ-phobic nun to yank off her gloves and embrace the members of the crowd that surrounds her. The image of “Esmeralda on the lake” makes Edgar feel that “everything [is] near at hand” (823). Though this sensation may well be apocalyptic, it most immediately connotes the group to which Edgar suddenly belongs – the men and women whom she quite literally lays her hands upon for the first time. The apparition's ability to foster such unity, to transform commuters briefly into community, not only comes from its assumed divinity or transcendence; it makes legible the grief of those who live in “the Wall,” allowing the atomized feeling of loss to be expressed and shared.

Of course the apparition is a potent instance of the novel's central concern with the recycling and repurposing of waste. The image of Esmeralda – a forgotten girl on a forgotten billboard in a forgotten corner of the city – reflects the endless capacity of the “waste product” to return itself to the heart of the culture that seeks to eliminate it.Footnote ²¹ Sister Edgar knows that the apparition may be nothing more than a fluke wherein an image from a papered-over ad shows through the juice ad, but she nonetheless surrenders to the “sense of someone living in the image, an animating spirit” (822). The double ontological status of the image (it is simultaneously brute matter and divine presence) is the very thing that gives the apparition its significance and traction. Like the cans of orange juice that evoke the canisters of agent orange, the image on the billboard evokes the dead girl and therefore repositions society's secrets at its center, insisting upon the novel's refrain that “everything is connected.”Footnote ²² Among these connections, the bond between rubbish and relic is made explicit: even Sister Edgar, whose belief is so great that she experiences a profound transformation, acknowledges the profane means by which the image is actually produced. Sister Edgar's profound transformation lies not so much in the proof that the vision on the billboard might offer of an afterlife for the murdered girl, but in its ability to join the nun to her community through an embodied way of seeing. The connections forged between the spiritual and the urban stress the onlookers’ inherence in the world.Footnote ²³

The image is ephemeral – in the train lights it appears for “less than half a second and the spot is dark again” and then, after a few evenings, it is removed (822). The apparition's fleeting appearance demands the acute attention that is so crucial to the formation of community; its disappearance enforces the extension of the effects of this attention beyond the moment of spectatorship. Or, more precisely, the apparition exposes certain social and material realities because it is ephemeral; its transience is what requires the bodily and temporal investments of onlookers. When Esmeralda's likeness disappears, presumably removed by city officials or advertising employees, the elimination seems at first tragic and total:

The hole that the white surface cuts in space, the words that advertise the newly blank billboard, the train lights that now illuminate nothing: it would appear that the vision lacked traction, and that its fleeting presence yielded only a temporary, illusory moment of transcendence. This is how Mark Osteen reads the scene when he writes, “Doubt soon leaches in to taint this moment of rapture. The apparition becomes commercialized and turns into an occasion for phony sentimentality. Finally the ad is taken down, leaving the lonely words Space Available to represent the void left in the hearts of believers” (258). But the common tag line, “Space Available,” ironically highlights the very condition that makes the apparition possible. These two words curiously double back upon themselves, declaring the now empty billboard a tabula rasa, ready to receive the contours of another projection. The blank space thus preserves the dead girl's afterimage, suggesting that the changing surfaces of the city can provide temporary homes for an array of images.

The “hole in space” also gives way to a last image – a strange literalization of that amorphous blankness – that critics have cited as the ultimate evidence that in Underworld everything is indeed connected. After her revelation in the Bronx, Sister Edgar has “nothing left to do but die and this is precisely what she does” (824). She “awakens” not in Heaven, but in cyberspace, and the very last pages of the novel contain a dreamlike meditation on her afterlife in this virtual state. Her habit now shed, Sister Edgar taps into a “glow, a lustrous rushing force that seems to flow from a billion distant net nodes” (825). As David Cowart describes it, DeLillo's cyberspace is “the contemporary secular world's often paranoid model of universal linkage where again, ‘[e]verything is connected’ amid ‘intersecting systems’ now virtualized.”Footnote ²⁴ The power to read and recognize equivalences made manifest on the traffic island in New York City lingers even after the apparition has vanished. Esmeralda on the Lake has caused Sister Edgar to attend to the details of waste and open herself to communion with others; this way of seeing continues in her digitized afterlife. So although what Sister Edgar sees before her in this cyber-heaven is destructive images of atomic bomb explosions, detonating in a symphony of colors, what she feels is “another fusion taking place,” a way of joining to other users and other pieces of information that float in the “lunar milk of the data stream” (826). Without her experience at the billboard in the South Bronx, it seems impossible that in her afterlife, such as it is, Sister Edgar would translate destruction into unity.

In her work on the Catholic vision of DeLillo's work, Amy Hungerford argues that in Sister Edgar's Internet afterlife, “something close to the traditional Catholic model of redemption is at work.”Footnote ²⁵ Hungerford points out that while DeLillo may retain “only a general mystical sense that nevertheless bears the imprint of the Catholic doctrine,” the doctrine of transubstantiation is not entirely irrelevant to an understanding of this final scene.Footnote ²⁶ Sister Edgar does appear to learn from the apparition that the divine can hide within the profane: billboards look like medieval churches, homeless girls like angels, strangers whom she has feared become family, and in the leveling abstractions of the Internet even war can bear a striking resembling to its opposite, that “single seraphic” word with which DeLillo ends his novel: “Peace” (827).Footnote ²⁷ But we might reverse the conventional logic of transubstantiation to make sense of this ending. Instead of insensate matter being seen to carry something greater or divine within it, here we are once again returned to the material world from which DeLillo assembles his visions. If the Internet afterlife into which Sister Edgar awakens seems to grant transcendence from the physical limitations of earthly life, this final resonant word assumes undeniably physical dimensions, emerging like another apparition out of the surrounding matter that previously goes unnoticed. As the pixels on the screen assemble to form the word “Peace,” what becomes visible for the first time is “the thick lived tenor of things … the plied lives of the simplest surface,” and the reader is asked to “imagine the word on the screen becoming a thing in the world” (827).

DeLillo's parting word, shimmering in the ether of the Internet, seems to materialize as a thing to be touched. The word and the miraculous face become analogous: they emerge and then vanish, but not before they have revealed how communities may come together around an apparition. The vision of Esmeralda is akin to the pixels coalescing to form “Peace,” and this word also names what the apparition has the power to produce: a perceptual mode that gives rise to a transient, non-dominative orientation toward the world.Footnote ²⁸ The doubling of the word itself attests to that power. For its homonym, piece, reminds readers that for the “asthmatic children and sickle-cell adults, the [people with] AIDS and the cocaine babies” living in the “inner ghetto” of the South Bronx, to claim, even for a short time, a small piece of the world is an act of restitution – an act that enables mourning and a working through of shared grief, an act that initiates a momentary armistice in the midst of unending struggles (811). To attain Peace in the debris-strewn Underworld of DeLillo's making, one must focus on its pieces: the layered billboards, the swinging train lamps, the quivering pixels. That focus moves the reader from a purely literary investment in DeLillo's language to the power that perception and attention have to reorganize what has been forgotten, discarded, or destroyed.

The final sequence of Underworld illustrates how an apparition tethers transcendence to the material world in order to describe a mode of perception that reveals the margins of city life at the end of the twentieth century. The image I turn to now likewise demonstrates how the community that forms around an apparition can illuminate dimensions of urban life that are usually ignored. The example here, from 2005, with its many similarities to the vision on the billboard above the Bronx, makes Underworld's fictional ending quite literally concrete. Like Esmeralda on the billboard, the image on an underpass wall in Chicago calls attention to its own materiality, its transience, and the ways that it interrupts the hurried rhythms of the city and its inhabitants. Reading the two images together emphasizes the way that urban apparitions point onlookers toward the divine only to return them to the disenfranchisement that has become characteristic of American city life.

Figure 1.

Underpass Mary appears in Chicago in 2005.

In April 2005, seven years after the publication of Underworld, an image appeared in Chicago on the walls of the Fullerton underpass of the Kennedy Expressway (Figure 1). Word began to spread that the image was that of the Virgin Mary. Despite the Department of Transportation's official statement that explained the apparition was simply a stain created by water leaking from the highway overhead, mixing with the road salt that had been scattered during the winter and penetrating the concrete walls of the underpass, the image quickly began to attract attention. Media outlets credited Obdulia Delgado with discovering the stain during her drive home from work at St. Elizabeth's Hospital: “I was so stunned I couldn't move. People were honking. It was a dream. I don't even know how I got home.”Footnote ²⁹ Scores of visitors flocked to the underpass – calling themselves the “Fullerton Avenue Pilgrims,” they came to touch the image; say prayers in its presence; take photographs; and leave flowers, candles, and other tokens of devotion (Figure 2). Local newspapers were filled with the words of these pilgrims, who extolled the virtues of “Underpass Mary” despite others’ skepticism. The Chicago Tribune, for instance, quoted Irene Munoz: “It's very emotional. It's very real. I never believed anyone who saw these things. But I believe now.”Footnote ³⁰

Figure 2.

Tokens of devotion.

City officials were forced to acknowledge the practical problems that this image was causing: police were sent to patrol the area and direct the traffic that slowed to a crawl along the expressway as a result of the burgeoning number of pilgrims. Although visitors wondered whether city officials might try to remove the image, the initial response indicated otherwise: “We're treating this just like we treat any type of roadside memorial,” claimed Illinois Department of Transportation spokesman Mike Claffey, “We have no plans to clean this site.”Footnote ³¹ But after her three-week stay, Underpass Mary's fate seemed sealed when a man who was later arrested for damage to state property used black shoe polish to paint “BIG LIE” in large letters across the image. Newspaper articles report that bystanders stood by and “wept as a coat of brown paint was rolled over the stain.”Footnote ³² The resonance of this curious story with the apparition from Underworld indicates that the visions of fiction may clarify the moments when matter refuses to remain inert and traces of magic seem to animate the world. Like Esmeralda, Underpass Mary is an image born out of the city's waste – an ephemeral figure that highlights spaces and conflicts in the urban environment in which it emerges.

It is the very practices of everyday urban life that bring Underpass Mary into being. Only under distinctly modern, material conditions can this infusion of the eternal into the present occur. Like the billboard and the subway train of Underworld, the elements that contribute to the creation of Underpass Mary – the salting of wintry roads, cars driving along the highway, water running off city streets – are visible, daily practices in Chicago. But their aggregate effects draw attention to an aspect of the city's infrastructure that normally recedes from sight. While the highway has long been a distinctly American symbol of mobility and freedom, the subterranean passages and urban grottoes they create are physically and figuratively overlooked. In a city where verticality continues to be the dominant architectural paradigm and the public transportation system, “the El,” takes its name from its aboveground elevation, underpasses might be said to constitute Chicago's most chthonic world.Footnote ³³ Returning to the work of Walter Benjamin here is instructive, since here, in the underworld of the mid-western metropolis, the water stain becomes what Benjamin called a wish image (ein Wunschbild), a vision that articulates a collective fantasy by reaching back to the ur-past. In The Arcades Project, Benjamin suggests that the wish image “is that wherein what has been comes together in a flash with the now to form a constellation.”Footnote ³⁴ Although the flash may have been more literal in the case of Esmeralda, whose likeness appeared only in the gleam of the train lights, it is true in the Chicago underpass that the stain, which also proves temporary, reaches back to a past that is otherwise occluded by city life. Indeed, the stain highlights the temporal disjunctions of its surroundings: even the names of the streets that branch out from the underpass allude to a past that the city effaces by channeling it into a series of place names whose historical content fades in the quotidian usage of these urban markers: Shakespeare, Webster, and Hamilton Avenue intersect with Palmer and Dickens Avenue in the shadow of the overhead Kennedy Expressway.Footnote ³⁵

Just as the apparition sheds light on a largely neglected space, Underpass Mary also brings the devotional practices of a minority group to the forefront, thus exposing a history of displacement and dispossession. While Catholicism generally posits Mary as a model intercessor, Latino Catholics have a long history of seizing upon this fact and engaging it in material ways.Footnote ³⁶ Even if we doubt the accuracy of the news stories reporting that the majority of devoted pilgrims visiting the underpass were Latino, the very fact that the site was incorporated into such a narrative highlights the special relevance that the apparition may have for one of Chicago's largest minority groups. A quick glance at the history of Underpass Mary's surroundings suggests that the pilgrimage and devotional practices of Chicago's Latinos represent an effort to temporarily (re)claim urban territory from which they have been displaced by aggressive gentrification.Footnote ³⁷ For the brief moment that Underpass Mary takes up residence in Bucktown, that displacement is countered. The apparition in the underpass reorganizes movement and enables a newly formed collective, like that of Sister Edgar and her fellow onlookers, to claim both visibility and space.

Figure 3.

Image pair from NBC Chicago.

We can read such claims in the photographs that show the site soon after its discovery (Figure 2). Shortly after the image made news, a visitor to the underpass placed a gold-framed painting directly next to the stain. The painting does not depict a conventionally Roman Catholic version of the Madonna; instead, it shows Our Lady of Guadalupe, the icon of Mexican origin that represents a mestiza Virgin with her head bowed and veiled in a manner similar to that of the figure on the underpass wall. In order to offer a sort of legend to readers and viewers, several news outlets also ran a photograph of a statute of the Virgin Mary alongside one of the underpass (Figure 3). Intentionally or not, the statue cited in the photograph is most certainly one of Our Lady of Guadalupe, who is said to have appeared – as an apparition – to a peasant on the hills of the desert Tepeyac near Mexico City (Figure 4). If, as Michael Taussig claims, apparitions can be understood as forces of translation “between home and shrine, between profane and sacred, and not least between official and unofficial voices,” the figure of Guadalupe is especially suited to these transformations.Footnote ³⁸La Virgen Morena – the dark-skinned virgin – syncretically represents both the Virgin Mary and the indigenous Mexican goddess Tonantzin. Both a figure of colonization (during the conquest, Spaniards used this aspect of the Virgin's multiplicity to gain converts) and of resistance (Mexicans continued to worship their deities in the guise of a Catholic figure), this mestiza Mary sustains the “in-between” state of translation.Footnote ³⁹

Figure 4.

Our Lady of Guadalupe.

While the media's visual instruction seems to target viewers disinclined to see anything divine in the stain, the pairing of the photographs has the distinct effect of creating a lasting link between the statue of Guadalupe and the figure in the underpass. Once the stain is identified as a Marianic apparition, it becomes nearly impossible not to see the supplicating figure – the downward-turned head, the folded arms, the flowing veil. And while the average viewer may not be drawn into the community of believers that the image assembles, these mediated scenes disseminate the culturally specific claims to legitimacy that the Latino pilgrims enact in their visits to the Underpass. As Robert Orsi has explained, “acting upon the urban environment in [religious] ways [allows] immigrants and migrants to deny the arrangements of space, the understanding of poverty, the marginalization or ostracism of the foreign, and the alienation of the streets built into the urban landscape by law and architecture.”Footnote ⁴⁰ Underpass Mary and her subsequent circulation likewise make possible the rejection of marginalizing, alienating practices, but with a crucial difference: because the apparition appears “of its own accord,” it is as if the urban environment authorizes the pilgrims’ claims independently of their own actions. This is, of course, a defining characteristic of apparitions – their seemingly autonomous materialization bestows them a special legitimizing force, from the desert of Tepeyac to a traffic island in the Bronx.Footnote ⁴¹ Rather than a site that must be built, the underpass in Chicago emerges as a space where religious belief and political frustrations can be expressed. As an emergent image, the apparition constitutes a site onto which grief and grievances, such as we saw in Underworld, can be cathected. Underpass Mary simultaneously produces and binds together the energies of believers so that each pilgrim is joined, however temporarily, to the community that occupies the underpass with its presence and prayers.

By equating the site with a roadside memorial (“We're treating this just like we treat any type of roadside memorial”), city officials highlight the structural and affective parallels between Esmeralda and Underpass Mary. While the billboard in DeLillo's novel is more explicitly a roadside memorial insofar as it commemorates Esmeralda's death, the underpass also becomes a site where grief may be expressed and shared. Like the roadside memorial, the apparition is a temporary form that works to “preserve a material presence in the face of an embodied absence.”Footnote ⁴² Despite its ability to affirm the belief or hope of onlookers, the image in the underpass simultaneously elicits emotions and practices typically associated with mourning. The spontaneous shrine in the underpass bears flowers, candles, and written prayers: the same items found at memorials commemorating the dead, or at vigils held in their honor. Whether city officials make the analogy to a roadside memorial for lack of more specific nomenclature or in an attempt to neutralize the image, they gesture to the fact that apparitions seem to evoke or mark a loss. Those losses become present in the apparition so that they can be perceived. The images serve as obdurate, material reminders of loss, therefore functioning like the “lost body” that Laura Tanner argues thwarts fictions of disembodiment.Footnote ⁴³ Although the crowd in DeLillo's novel mourns a particular loss, the visitors to the underpass in Chicago make visible the losses that urban processes of gentrification, displacement, and dispossession enact. Apparitions’ transience, and the way that, in these cases, they bring waste, inequality, and neglect into view, provide onlookers with an impression of the world not only as infused with the divine, but also as impoverished.

But what becomes of the perceptual faith practiced in the underpass and the losses that it illuminates when the stain's tenure in Chicago is brought to an end? Despite ongoing complaints that the image was causing excessive traffic around the underpass, it was not until the stain was written over with the words “BIG LIE” that the city took action and painted over the site. The meaning of the “big lie” remains unclear. (Is it the belief in a water stain as a divine image? The story of immaculate conception? The idea that Mary could help anyone in the modern world?) Nonetheless, it was this act of what is officially deemed as vandalism, rather than the stain itself, that could not be overlooked by the city. Although it is tempting to conclude that the intentional violation of public ordinances poses a greater threat to the city's logics than the so-called “apparitional sensibility” of a minority group, it seems equally possible that the official response indicates a reluctance to intervene in the original appearance of the image. The city tolerated the appearance of the stain, the shrine built around it, and the pilgrimages to the underpass. Although it likens the site to a roadside memorial, this tolerance seems to endorse the image as a true apparition. It is the graffiti – the declaration of the stain as a lie – that finally prompts the paint-over.

Chicago's Department of Transportation thus tried to sentence the Lady of the Underpass to invisibility with a few broad, acrylic strokes, erasing the strange stain as well as the trace of the human hand registered by the written graffiti. The coat of brown paint is meant to reclaim the urban space from the pilgrims and end the life of this anomalous apparition. But as history has repeatedly shown, violence against images adds new chapters to their long lives.Footnote ⁴⁴ The disappearance of Underpass Mary meant that the image itself could be mourned, its now-concealed contours longingly recollected as the emblem of a redemptive moment never fully actualized. What is more, the image survives in photographs printed in newspapers, posted on the Internet, and captured by visitors’ cameras and cell phones (Figure 5). In his essay on the practice of “sacred photography” by pilgrims to a Marian apparition site in Flushing Meadows Corona Park, Daniel Wojcik calls these photographs “miraculous mementos, created on sacred grounds, which then become accessories to personal devotion.”Footnote ⁴⁵ Thanks to technologies of pictures and pixels, mobiles and message boards, it seems as if the energies gathered in the underpass are dispersed most effectively by the image's disappearance.

Figure 5.

Capturing Underpass Mary.

But the reproductions of Underpass Mary online seem less like “miraculous mementos” than a reminder that the apparition is of a material order that cannot be so easily archived. The story of Underpass Mary, like that of Esmeralda, leads onlookers from the city streets into cyberspace. The image from the underpass becomes, like the word “Peace” at the end of Underworld, “a sequence of pulses on a dullish screen” (827). And like that word, online images of the stain seem stripped of the magic that might come with physical proximity to the apparition and other onlookers, so that the remaining function of these pictures on a screen is simply, as DeLillo writes, to “make you pensive” (827). The cyber-afterlife of Underpass Mary is one that emphasizes the cracks and bends of urban life that the stain reveals over its potential divinity. The painted-over wall also serves as a reminder that the city's surfaces remain ready to receive the outline of another projection. The underpass, like DeLillo's billboard, is another “space available.”

Figure 6.

Underpass Mary Reappears in 2008.

In fact, the space available on the underpass wall ultimately housed another iteration of Underpass Mary. As if to affirm that the image was possessed of its own will, determined to refuse the city's decision, the stain's contours began to reemerge over time through the layer of brown paint. Devoted volunteers carefully scraped the paint from the wall and cleaned off the shoe polish graffiti, and, months after her disappearance, Underpass Mary made her unexpected return (Figure 6). Although the shrine in the underpass assumed a more permanent form and believers cited the apparition's perseverance as proof of its divinity, for others the latest iteration of the image highlights just how precarious Underpass Mary always was. Upon its second appearance, the stain no longer looked quite the same, and its slight mutations became a new topic of conversation. In May 2009, Teatro Vista, a production company “firmly committed to sharing and celebrating the riches of Latino culture with all Chicago theater audiences,” staged playwright Tanya Saracho's Our Lady of the Underpass.Footnote ⁴⁶ The play, a sort of docudrama compiled from the many interviews that Saracho conducted at the site, unfolds in front of a large set piece: a meticulously re-created copy of the underpass wall with its stain (Figure 7). If the backdrop affirms the apparition's material presence and the possibility for its endless movement between reality and representation, the dialogue of the play points to the limited ways in which the spell cast by Underpass Mary may at last be broken.

Figure 7.

Set piece. Our Lady of the Underpass.

In the final act of the play, Saracho's characters address the apparition's “second coming,” expressing their ambivalence about this altered version of the Lady of the Underpass. One character, a woman called Terri and described in the script as “a young Latina woman in her late 20s, maybe early 30s,” examines the recently uncovered image: “Now it doesn't look like when I first drove by. You know what it looks like now? Like that painting of the guy doing this (puts hands on cheeks and opens mouth and eyes). And he looks like he's melting?”Footnote ⁴⁷ Not only does Terri's allusion to Edvard Munch's The Scream here affirm the apparition's link to grief or anguish; the reference also instantiates the first real rupture in the forms of belief that the stain has otherwise catalyzed. By noting the resemblance of the stain to an iconic painting, Saracho's character disrupts belief with comedy. Terri's comparison, played for laughs, finally brings the strange humor that has been latent in the story of Underpass Mary to the surface. Saracho's joke equates the water stain with an iconic image of Western art but also deflates the apparition by highlighting its arbitrary, citational nature. The joke works something like the words “Big Lie,” which were scrawled upon the image in order to diminish its divinity. But these words were what caused the city to paint the wall, therefore setting the stage for the apparition's reappearance that Terri discusses. The joke thus insists that faith in the modern metropolis is, as I have suggested, a matter of seeing as it is a matter of belief: how and where does one choose to look, and what does one choose to see? To see the apparition in the underpass – to “read” it adequately – requires not so much faith as flexibility. It asks onlookers to open their eyes to the hidden energies that course through unseen spaces in their cities, and to the mutability of even the most solid structures. Whether she is Holy Mother; miraculous vision; or just a coincidental mix of salt, water, and concrete, Underpass Mary insists on the profane that inheres in the divine, refracting the everyday, urban practices that give rise to this curious apparition in the first place.

When the magic of the apparition is dismantled by a joke, or the image itself mutates, fades, or is erased, what remains in its wake? DeLillo puts this question to his readers, wondering what becomes of the apparition's meaning once the image has vanished:

DeLillo's language here belies the full force of his own narrative. For even if he allows that “the power of transcendence” may linger long after the billboard goes blank or the underpass is emptied, that power is said to satisfy a petty craving – a desire for material evidence that can “stand against” doubt and disbelief. But the apparition at the end of Underworld has asked readers to linger in their doubt and disbelief, to consider what becomes of faith when objects of devotion are both “wishful silhouette” and things that “throb on the hot horizon.”

By reconfiguring waste, the apparitions reveal hidden energies and unseen spaces within the city. Esmeralda and Underpass Mary engender unexpected visions of the city in which matter is reorganized and the distance between the modern and the mythic ceases to exist. The “hot horizon” that DeLillo names is therefore one that moves forever into the future, as apparitions prove to be the most resilient of ephemeral forms. Apparitions like these frequently reappear in various guises, both fictive and “real,” because the desire to discover material evidence of the divine never vanishes and the world offers ample material out of which that evidence may be constructed. Rather than dismissing these apparitions as outlandish instances catering to a susceptible crowd or a willing audience, we can consider the apparition's persistence as a trenchant phenomenon, one that shapes a perceptual mode especially suited to discerning urban life under late capitalism.

When considered in this light, these apparitions condition the senses so that witnesses and readers are better prepared to reckon with an urban world that continues to be defined by restless renewal and perpetual loss. Already in 1927, Willa Cather articulated such an idea: in Death Comes for the Archbishop she wrote that apparitions “rest not so much upon faces or voices or healing power coming suddenly near to us from afar off, but upon our perceptions being made finer, so that for a moment our eyes can see and our ears can hear what is there always about us.”Footnote ⁴⁸ The billboard miracle and the concrete Virgin may only last for a moment, but in that moment they make visible what has been forgotten or discarded; they make legible the struggles and modes of longing that have long been about us.”