White noise

35

Babette could not get enough of talk radio. "I hate my face," a woman said. 'This is an ongoing problem with me for years. Of all the faces you could have given me, lookswise, this one has got to be the worst. But how can I not look? Even if you took all my mirrors away, I would still find a way to look. How can I not look on the one hand? But I hate it on the other. In other words I still look. Because whose face is it, obviously? What do I do, forget it's there, pretend it's someone else's? What I'm trying to do with this call, Mel, is find other people who have a problem accepting their face. Here are some questions to get us started. What did you look like before you were born? What will you look like in the afterlife, regardless of race or color?"

Babette wore her sweatsuit almost all the time. It was a plain gray outfit, loose and drooping. She cooked in it, drove the kids to school, wore it to the hardware store and the stationer's. I thought about it for a while, decided there was nothing excessively odd in this, nothing to worry about, no reason to believe she was sinking into apathy and despair.

"How do you feel?" I said. 'Tell the truth."

"What is the truth? I'm spending more time with Wilder. Wilder helps me get by."

"I depend on you to be the healthy outgoing former Babette. I need this as badly as you do, if not more."

"What is need? We all need. Where is the uniqueness in this?"

"Are you feeling basically the same?"

"You mean am I sick unto death? The fear hasn't gone, Jack."

"We have to stay active."

"Active helps but Wilder helps more."

"Is it my imagination," I said, "or is he talking less than ever?"

'There's enough talk. What is talk? I don't want him to talk. The less he talks, the better."

"Denise worries about you."

"Who?"

"Denise."

"Talk is radio," she said.

Denise would not let her mother go running unless she promised to apply layers of sunscreen gel. The girl would follow her out of the house to dash a final glob of lotion across the back of Babette's neck, then stand on her toes to stroke it evenly in. She tried to cover every exposed spot. The brows, the lids. They had bitter arguments about the need for this. Denise said the sun was a risk to a fair-skinned person. Her mother claimed the whole business was publicity for disease.

"Besides, I'm a runner," she said. "A runner by definition is less likely to be struck by damaging rays than a standing or walking figure."

Denise spun in my direction, arms flung out, her body beseeching me to set the woman straight.

'The worst rays are direct," Babette said. "This means the faster a person is moving, the more likely she is to receive only partial hits, glancing rays, deflections."

Denise let her mouth fall open, bent her body at the knees. In truth I wasn't sure her mother was wrong.

"It is all a corporate tie-in," Babette said in summary. 'The sunscreen, the marketing, the fear, the disease. You can't have one without the other."

I took Heinrich and his snake-handling buddy, Orest Mercator, out to the commercial strip for dinner. It was four in the afternoon, the time of day when Orest's training schedule called for his main meal. At his request we went to Vincent's Casa Mario, a blockhouse structure with slit windows that seemed part of some coastal defense system.

I'd found myself thinking of Orest and his snakes and wanted a chance to talk to him further.

We sat in a blood-red booth. Orest gripped the tasseled menu with his chunky hands. His shoulders seemed broader than ever, the serious head partly submerged between them.

"How's the training going?" I said.

"I'm slowing it down a little. I don't want to peak too soon. I know how to take care of my body."

"Heinrich told me you sleep sitting up, to prepare for the cage."

"I perfected that. I'm doing different stuff now."

"Like what?"

"Loading up on carbohydrates."

"That's why we came here," Heinrich said.

"I load up a little more each day."

"It's because of the huge energy he'll be burning up in the cage, being alert, tensing himself when a mamba approaches, whatever."

We ordered pasta and water.

'Tell me, Orest. As you get closer and closer to the time, are you beginning to feel anxious?"

"What anxious? I just want to get in the cage. Sooner the better. This is what Orest Mercator is all about."

"You're not nervous? You don't think about what might happen?"

"He likes to be positive," Heinrich said. "This is the thing today with athletes. You don't dwell on the negative."

"Tell me this, then. What is the negative? What do you think of when you think of the negative?"

"Here's what I think. I'm nothing without the snakes. That's the only negative. The negative is if it doesn't come off, if the humane society doesn't let me in the cage. How can I be the best at what I do if they don't let me do it?"

I liked to watch Orest eat. He inhaled food according to aerodynamic principles. Pressure differences, intake velocities. He went at it silently and purposefully, loading up, centering himself, appearing to grow more self-important with each clump of starch that slid over his tongue.

"You know you can get bitten. We talked about it last time. Do you think about what happens after the fangs close on your wrist? Do you think about dying? This is what I want to know. Does death scare you? Does it haunt your thoughts? Let me put my cards on the table, Orest. Are you afraid to die? Do you experience fear? Does fear make you tremble or sweat? Do you feel a shadow fall across the room when you think of the cage, the snakes, the fangs?"

"What did I read just the other day? There are more people dead today than in the rest of world history put together. What's one extra? I'd just as soon die while I'm trying to put Orest Mercator's name in the record book."

I looked at my son. I said, "Is he trying to tell us there are more people dying in this twenty-four-hour period than in the rest of human history up to now?"

"He's saying the dead are greater today than ever before, combined."

"What dead? Define the dead."

"He's saying people now dead."

"What do you mean, now dead? Everybody who's dead is now dead."

"He's saying people in graves. The known dead. Those you can count."

I was listening intently, trying to grasp what they meant. A second plate of food came for Orest.

"But people sometimes stay in graves for hundreds of years. Is he saying there are more dead people in graves than anywhere else?"

"It depends on what you mean by anywhere else."

"I don't know what I mean. The drowned. The blown-to-bits."

"There are more dead now than ever before. That's all he's saying."

I looked at him a while longer. Then I turned to Orest.

"You are intentionally facing death. You are setting out to do exactly what people spend their lives trying not to do. Die. I want to know why."

"My trainer says, 'Breathe, don't think.' He says, 'Be a snake and you'll know the stillness of a snake.'"

"He has a trainer now," Heinrich said.

"He's a Sunny Moslem," Orest said.

"Iron City has some Sunnies out near the airport."

"The Sunnies are mostly Korean. Except mine's an Arab, I think."

I said, "Don't you mean the Moonies are mostly Korean?"

"He's a Sunny," Orest said.

"But it's the Moonies who are mostly Korean. Except they're not, of course. It's only the leadership."

They thought about this. I watched Orest eat. I watched him pitchfork the spaghetti down his gullet. The serious head sat motionless, an entryway for the food. that flew off the mechanical fork. What purpose he conveyed, what sense of a fixed course of action pursued absolutely. If each of us is the center of his or her existence, Orest seemed intent on enlarging the center, making it everything. Is this what athletes do, occupy the self more fully? It's possible we envy them for a prowess that has little to do with sport. In building toward a danger, they escape it in some deeper sense, they dwell in some angelic scan, able to leap free of everyday dying. But was Orest an athlete? He would do nothing but sit— sit for sixty-seven days in a glass cage, waiting to be publicly bitten.

"You will not be able to defend yourself," I said. "Not only that but you will be in a cage with the most slimy, feared and repulsive creatures on earth. Snakes. People have nightmares about snakes. Crawling slithering cold-blooded egg-laying vertebrates. People go to psychiatrists. Snakes have a special slimy place in our collective unconscious. And you are voluntarily getting into an enclosed space with thirty or forty of the most venomous snakes in the world."

"What slimy? They're not slimy."

"The famous sliminess is a myth," Heinrich said. "He's getting into a cage with Gaboon vipers with two-inch fangs. Maybe a dozen mambas. The mamba happens to be the fastest-moving land snake in the world. Isn't sliminess a little besides the point?"

"That's my argument exactly. Fangs. Snakebite. Fifty thousand people a year die of snakebite. It was on television last night."

"Everything was on television last night," Orest said.

I admired the reply. I guess I admired him too. He was creating an imperial self out of some tabloid aspiration. He would train relentlessly, speak of himself in the third person, load up on carbohydrates. His trainer was always there, his friends drawn to the aura of inspired risk. He would grow in life-strength as he neared the time.

"His trainer is teaching him how to breathe in the old way, the Sunny Moslem way. A snake is one thing. A person can be a thousand things."

"Be a snake," Orest said.

"People are getting interested," Heinrich said. "It's like it's starting to build. Like he's really going to do it. Like they believe him now. The total package."

If the self is death, how can it also be stronger than death?

I called for the check. Extraneous flashes of Mr. Gray. A drizzling image in gray shorts and socks. I lifted several bills from my wallet, rubbing hard with my fingers to make sure there weren't others stuck to them. In the motel mirror was my full-length wife, white-bodied, full-bosomed, pink-kneed, stub-toed, wearing only peppermint legwarmers, like a sophomore leading cheers at an orgy.

When we got home, I found her ironing in the bedroom.

"What are you doing?" I said.

"Listening to the radio. Except it just went off."

"If you thought we were finished with Mr. Gray, it's time to bring you up to date."

"Are we talking about Mr. Gray the composite or Mr. Gray the individual? It makes all the difference."

"It certainly does. Denise compacted the pills."

"Does that mean we're all through with the composite?"

"I don't know what it means."

"Does it mean you've turned your male attention to the individual in the motel?"

"I didn't say that."

"You don't have to say it. You're a male. A male follows the path of homicidal rage. It is the biological path. The path of plain dumb blind male biology."

"How smug, ironing handkerchiefs."

"Jack, when you die, I will just fall to the floor and stay there. Eventually, maybe, after a very long time, they will find me crouching in the dark, a woman without speech or gesture. But in the meantime I will not help you find this man or his medication."

'The eternal wisdom of those who iron and sew."

"Ask yourself what it is you want more, to ease your ancient fear or to revenge your childish dopey injured male pride."

I went down the hall to help Steffie finish packing. A sports announcer said: "They're not booing—they're saying, 'Bruce, Bruce.'" Denise and Wilder were in there with her. I gathered from the veiled atmosphere that Denise had been giving confidential advice on visits to distant parents. Steffie's flight would originate in Boston and make two stops between Iron City and Mexico City but she wouldn't have to change planes, so the situation seemed manageable.

"How do I know I'll recognize my mother?"

"You saw her last year," I said. "You liked her."

"What if she refuses to send me back?"

"We have Denise to thank for that idea, don't we? Thank you, Denise. Don't worry. She'll send you back."

"What if she doesn't?" Denise said. "It happens, you know."

"It won't happen this time."

"You'll have to kidnap her back."

"That won't be necessary."

"What if it is?" Steffie said.

"Would you do it?" Denise said.

"It won't happen in a million years."

"It happens all the time," she said. "One parent takes the child, the other parent hires kidnappers to get her back."

"What if she keeps me?" Steffie said. "What will you do?"

"He'll have to send people to Mexico. That's the only thing he can do."

"But will he do it?" she said.

"Your mother knows she can't keep you," I said. "She travels all the time. It's out of the question."

"Don't worry," Denise told her. "No matter what he says now, he'll get you back when the time comes."

Steffie looked at me with deep interest and curiosity. I told her I would travel to Mexico myself and do whatever had to be done to get her back here. She looked at Denise.

"It's better to hire people," the older girl said helpfully. "That way you have someone who's done it before."

Babette came in and picked up Wilder.

'There you are," she said. "We're going to the airport with Steffie. Yes we are. Yes yes."

"Bruce, Bruce."

The next day there was an evacuation for noxious odor. SIMUVAC vehicles were everywhere. Men in Mylex suits patrolled the streets, many of them carrying instruments to measure harm. The consulting firm that conceived the evacuation gathered a small group of computer-screened volunteers in a police van in the supermarket parking lot. There was half an hour of self-induced gagging and vomiting. The episode was recorded on videotape and sent somewhere for analysis.

Three days later an actual noxious odor drifted across the river. A pause, a careful thoughtfulness, seemed to settle on the town. Traffic moved more slowly, drivers were exceedingly polite. There was no sign of official action, no jitneys or ambulettes painted in primary colors. People avoided looking at each other directly. An irritating sting in the nostrils, a taste of copper on the tongue. As time passed, the will to do nothing seemed to deepen, to fix itself firmly. There were those who denied they smelled anything at all. It is always that way with odors. There were those who professed not to see the irony of their inaction. They'd taken part in the SIMUVAC exercise but were reluctant to flee now. There were those who wondered what caused the odor, those who looked worried, those who said the absence of technical personnel meant there was nothing to worry about. Our eyes began to water.

About three hours after we'd first become aware of it, the vapor suddenly lifted, saving us from our formal deliberations.