White noise

27

I had my second medical checkup since the toxic event. No startling numbers on the printout. This death was still too deep to be glimpsed. My doctor, Sundar Chakravarty, asked me about the sudden flurry of checkups. In the past I'd always been afraid to know.

1 told him I was still afraid. He smiled broadly, waiting for the punch line. I shook his hand and headed out the door.

On the way home I drove down Elm intending to make a quick stop at the supermarket. The street was full of emergency vehicles. Farther down I saw bodies scattered about. A man with an armband blew a. whistle at me and stepped in front of my car. I glimpsed other men in Mylex suits. Stretcher-bearers ran across the street. When the man with the whistle drew closer, I was able to make out the letters on his armband: SIMUVAC.

"Back it out," he said. "Street's closed."

"Are you people sure you're ready for a simulation? You may want to wait for one more massive spill. Get your timing down."

"Move it out, get it out. You're in the exposure swath."

"What's that mean?"

"It means you're dead," he told me.

I backed out of the street and parked the car. Then I walked slowly back down Elm, trying to look as though I belonged. I kept close to storefronts, mingled with technicians and marshals, with uniformed personnel. There were buses, police cars, ambulettes. People with electronic equipment appeared to be trying to detect radiation or toxic fallout. In time I approached the volunteer victims. There were twenty or so, prone, supine, draped over curbstones, sitting in the street with woozy looks.

I was startled to see my daughter among them. She lay in the middle of the street, on her back, one arm flung out, her head tilted the other way. I could hardly bear to look. Is this how she thinks of herself at the age of nine—already a victim, trying to polish her skills? How natural she looked, how deeply imbued with the idea of a sweeping disaster. Is this the future she envisions?

I walked over there and squatted down.

"Steffie? Is that you?"

She opened her eyes.

"You're not supposed to be here unless you're a victim," she said.

"I just want to be sure you're okay."

"I'll get in trouble if they see you."

"It's cold. You'll get sick. Does Baba know you're here?"

"I signed up in school an hour ago."

"They at least should hand out blankets," I said.

She closed her eyes. I spoke to her a while longer but she wouldn't answer. There was no trace of irritation or dismissal in her silence. Just conscientiousness. She had a history of being devout in her victimhood.

I went back to the sidewalk. A man's amplified voice boomed across the street from somewhere inside the supermarket.

"I want to welcome all of you on behalf of Advanced Disaster Management, a private consulting firm that conceives and operates simulated evacuations. We are interfacing with twenty-two state bodies in carrying out this advanced disaster drill. The first, I trust, of many. The more we rehearse disaster, the safer we'll be from the real thing. Life seems to work that way, doesn't it? You take your umbrella to the office seventeen straight days, not a drop of rain. The first day you leave it at home, record-breaking downpour. Never fails, does it? This is the mechanism we hope to employ, among others. O-right, on to business. When the siren sounds three long blasts, thousands of hand-picked evacuees will leave their homes and places of employment, get into their vehicles and head for well-equipped emergency shelters. Traffic directors will race to their computerized stations. Updated instructions will be issued on the SIMUVAC broadcast system. Air-sampling people will deploy along the cloud exposure swath. Dairy samplers will test milk and randomized foodstuffs over the next three days along the ingestion swath. We are not simulating a particular spillage today. This is an all-purpose leak or spill. It could be radioactive steam, chemical cloudlets, a haze of unknown origin. The important thing is movement. Get those people out of the swath. We learned a lot during the night of the billowing cloud. But there is no substitute for a planned simulation. If reality intrudes in the form of a car crash or a victim falling off a stretcher, it is important to remember that we are not here to mend broken bones or put out real fires. We are here to simulate. Interruptions can cost lives in a real emergency. If we learn to work around interruptions now, we'll be able to work around them later when it counts. O-right. When the siren sounds two melancholy wails, street captains will make house-to-house searches for those who may have been inadvertently left behind. Birds, goldfish, elderly people, handicapped people, invalids, shut-ins, whatever. Five minutes, victims. All you rescue personnel, remember this is not a blast simulation. Your victims are overcome but not traumatized. Save your tender loving care for the nuclear fireball in June. We're at four minutes and counting. Victims, go limp. And remember you're not here to scream or thrash about. We like a low-profile victim. This isn't New York or L.A. Soft moans will suffice."

I decided I didn't want to watch. I went back to the car and headed home. The sirens emitted the first three blasts as I pulled up in front of the house. Heinrich was sitting on the front steps, wearing a reflector vest and his camouflage cap. With him was an older boy. He had a powerful compact body of uncertain pigmentation. No one on our street seemed to be evacuating. Heinrich consulted a clipboard.

"What's going on?"

"I'm a street captain," he said.

"Did you know Steffie was a victim?"

"She said she might be."

"Why didn't you tell me?"

"So they pick her up and put her in an ambulance. What's the problem?"

"I don't know what the problem is."

"If she wants to do it, she should do it."

"She seems so well-adjusted to the role."

"It could save her life someday," he said.

"How can pretending to be injured or dead save a person's life?"

"If she does it now, she might not have to do it later. The more you practice something, the less likely it is to actually happen."

'That's what the consultant said."

"It's a gimmick but it works."

"Who's this?"

"This is Orest Mercator. He's going to help me check for leftovers."

"You're the one who wants to sit in a cage full of deadly snakes. Can you tell me why?"

"Because I'm going for the record," Orest said.

"Why would you want to get killed going for a record?"

"What killed? Who said anything about killed?"

"You'll be surrounded by rare and deadly reptiles."

"They're the best at what they do. I want to be the best at what I do."

"What do you do?"

"I sit in a cage for sixty-seven days. That's what it takes to break the record."

"Do you understand that you are risking death for a couple of lines in a paperback book?"

He looked searchingly at Heinrich, obviously holding the boy responsible for this idiotic line of questioning.

"They will bite you," I went on.

"They won't bite me."

"How do you know?"

"Because I know."

"These are real snakes, Orest. One bite, that's it."

"One bite if they bite. But they won't bite."

"They are real. You are real. People get bitten all the time. The venom is deadly."

"People get bitten. But I won't."

I found myself saying, "You will, you will. These snakes don't know you find death inconceivable. They don't know you're young and strong and you think death applies to everyone but you. They will bite and you will die."

I paused, shamed by the passion of my argument. I was surprised to see him look at me with a certain interest, a certain grudging respect. Perhaps the unbecoming force of my outburst brought home to him the gravity of his task, filled him with intimations of an unwieldy fate.

'They want to bite, they bite," he said. "At least I go right away. These snakes are the best, the quickest. A puff adder bites me, I die in seconds."

"What's your hurry? You're nineteen years old. You'll find hundreds of ways to die that are better than snakes."

What kind of name is Orest? I studied his features. He might have been Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Central Asian, a dark-skinned Eastern European, a light-skinned black. Did he have an accent? I wasn't sure. Was he a Samoan, a native North American, a Sephardic Jew? It was getting hard to know what you couldn't say to people.

He said to me, "How many pounds can you bench-press?"

"I don't know. Not very many."

"Did you ever punch somebody in the face?"

"Maybe a glancing blow, once, a long time ago."

"I'm looking to punch somebody in the face. Bare-fisted. Hard as I can. To find out what it feels like."

Heinrich grinned like a stool pigeon in the movies. The siren began to sound—two melancholy blasts. I went inside as the two boys checked the clipboard for house numbers. Babette was in the kitchen giving Wilder some lunch.

"He's wearing a reflector vest," I said.

"It's in case there's haze, he won't get hit by fleeing vehicles."

"I don't think anyone's bothered to flee. How do you feel?"

"Better," she said.

"So do I."

"I think it's being with Wilder that picks me up."

"I know what you mean. I always feel good when I'm with Wilder. Is it because pleasures don't cling to him? He is selfish without being grasping, selfish in a totally unbounded and natural way. There's something wonderful about the way he drops one thing, grabs for another. I get annoyed when the other kids don't fully appreciate special moments or occasions. They let things slide away that should be kept and savored. But when Wilder does it, I see the spirit of genius at work."

"That may be true but there's something else about him that gives me a lift. Something bigger, grander, that I can't quite put my finger on."

"Remind me to ask Murray," I said.

She spooned soup into the child's mouth, creating facial expressions for him to mimic and saying, "Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes."

"One thing I have to ask. Where is the Dylar?"

"Forget it, Jack. Fool's gold or whatever the appropriate term."

"A cruel illusion. I know. But I'd like to keep the tablets in a safe place, if only as physical evidence that Dylar exists. If your left brain should decide to die, I want to be able to sue someone. There are four tablets left. Where are they?"

"Are you telling me they're not behind the radiator cover?"

"That's right."

"I didn't move them, honest."

"Is it possible you threw them away in an angry or depressed moment? I only want them for the sake of historical accuracy. Like White House tapes. They go into the archives."

"You haven't been pretested," she said. "Even one pill can be dangerous to ingest."

"I don't want to ingest."

"Yes, you do."

"We are being coaxed out of the ingestion swath. Where is Mr. Gray? I may want to sue him as a matter of principle."

"We made a pact, he and I."

"Tuesdays and Fridays. The Grayview Motel."

"That's not what I mean. I promised not to reveal his true identity to anyone. Considering what you're after, that promise goes double. It's more for your good than his. I'm not telling, Jack. Let's just resume our lives. Let's tell each other we'll do the best we can. Yes yes yes yes yes."

I drove to the grade school and parked across the street from the main entrance. Twenty minutes later they came surging out, about three hundred kids, babbling, gleeful, casually amuck. They called brilliant insults, informed and spacious obscenities, hit each other with bookbags, knit caps. I sat in the driver's seat scanning the mass of faces, feeling like a dope dealer or pervert.

When I spotted Denise I blew the horn and she came over. This was the first time I'd ever picked her up at school and she gave me a wary and hard-eyed look as she passed in front of the car— a look that indicated she was in no mood for news of a separation or divorce. I took the river road home. She scrutinized my profile.

"It's about Dylar," I said. "The medication has nothing to do with Baba's memory problems. In fact just the opposite. She takes Dylar to improve her memory."

"I don't believe you."

"Why not?"

"Because you wouldn't come and get me at school just to tell me that. Because we already found out you can't get it with a prescription. Because I talked to her doctor and he never heard of it."

"You called him at home?"

"At the office."

"Dylar is a little too special for a G.P."

"Is my mother a drug addict?"

"You're smarter than that," I said.

"No, I'm not."

"We'd like to know what you did with the bottle. There were some tablets left."

"How do you know I took them?"

1 know it, you know it.

"If somebody wants to tell me what Dylar really is, maybe we'll get somewhere."

"There's something you don't know," I said. "Your mother no longer takes the medication. Whatever your reason for holding the bottle, it's just not valid anymore."

We'd looped around to the west and were now driving through the college campus. Automatically I reached into my jacket for the dark glasses and put them on.

"Then I'll throw it away," she said.

Over the next few days I tried an assortment of arguments, some nearly breathtaking in their delicate webby texture. I even enlisted Babette, convincing her that the bottle belonged in adult hands. But the girl's will was supremely resistant. Her life as a legal entity had been shaped by other people's bargaining and haggling and she was determined to follow a code too rigid to allow for the trade-off, the settlement. She would keep the object hidden until we told her its secret.

It was probably just as well. The drug could be dangerous, after all. And I was not a believer in easy solutions, something to swallow that would rid my soul of an ancient fear. But I could not help thinking about that saucer-shaped tablet. Would it ever work, could it work for some but not others? It was the benign counterpart of the Nyodene menace. Tumbling from the back of my tongue down into my stomach. The drug core dissolving, releasing benevolent chemicals into my bloodstream, flooding the fear-of-death part of my brain. The pill itself silently self-destructing in a tiny inward burst, a polymer implosion, discreet and precise and considerate.

Technology with a human face.