White noise

29

Babette and I moved down the wide aisle, each with a gleaming cart. We passed a family shopping in sign language. I kept seeing colored lights.

"How do you feel?" she said.

"I'm fine. I feel good. How are you?"

"Why don't you have a checkup? Wouldn't you feel better if you found out nothing was there?"

"I've had two checkups. Nothing is there."

"What did Dr. Chakravarty say?"

"What could he say?"

"He speaks English beautifully. I love to hear him speak."

"Not as much as he loves to speak."

"What do you mean he loves to speak? Do you mean he takes every possible opportunity to speak? He's a doctor. He has to speak. In a very real sense you are paying him to speak. Do you mean he flaunts his beautiful English? He rubs your face in it?"

"We need some Class Plus."

"Don't leave me alone," she said.

"I'm just going to aisle five."

"I don't want to be alone, Jack. I believe you know that."

"We're going to come through this thing all right," I said. "Maybe stronger than ever. We're determined to be well. Babette is not a neurotic person. She is strong, healthy, outgoing, affirmative. She says yes to things. This is the point of Babette."

We stayed together in the aisles and at the checkout. Babette bought three tabloids for her next session with Old Man Treadwell. We read them together as we waited on line. Then we went together to the car, loaded the merchandise, sat very close to each other as I drove home.

"Except for my eyes," I said.

"What do you mean?"

"Chakravarty thinks I ought to see an eye man."

"Is it the colored spots again?"

"Yes."

"Stop wearing those dark glasses."

"I can't teach Hitler without them."

"Why not?"

"I need them, that's all."

"They're stupid, they're useless."

"I've built a career," I said. "I may not understand all the elements involved but this is all the more reason not to tamper."

The déjà vu crisis centers closed down. The hotline was quietly discontinued. People seemed on the verge of forgetting. I could hardly blame them even if I felt abandoned to a certain extent, left holding the bag.

I went faithfully to German lessons. I began to work with my teacher on things I might say in welcoming delegates to the Hitler conference, still a number of weeks off. The windows were totally blocked by furniture and debris. Howard Dunlop sat in the middle of the room, his oval face floating in sixty watts of dusty light. I began to suspect I was the only person he ever talked to. I also began to suspect he needed me more than I needed him. A disconcerting and terrible thought.

There was a German-language book on a ruined table near the door. The title was lettered in black in a thick heavy ominous typeface: Das Aegyptische Todtenbuch.

"What's that?" I said.

"The Egyptian Book of the Dead," he whispered. "A best-seller in Germany."

Every so often, when Denise wasn't home, I wandered into her room. I picked up things, put them down, looked behind a curtain, glanced into an open drawer, stuck my foot under the bed and felt around. Absentminded browsing.

Babette listened to talk radio.

I started throwing things away. Things in the top and bottom of my closet, things in boxes in the basement and attic. I threw away correspondence, old paperbacks, magazines I'd been saving to read, pencils that needed sharpening. I threw away tennis shoes, sweat socks, gloves with ragged fingers, old belts and neckties. I came upon stacks of student reports, broken rods for the seats of director's chairs. I threw these away. I threw away every aerosol can that didn't have a top.

The gas meter made a particular noise.

That night on TV I saw newsfilm of policemen carrying a body bag out of someone's backyard in Bakersville. The reporter said two bodies had been found, more were believed buried in the same yard. Perhaps many more. Perhaps twenty bodies, thirty bodies— no one knew for sure. He swept an arm across the area. It was a big backyard.

The reporter was a middle-aged man who spoke clearly and strongly and yet with some degree of intimacy, conveying a sense of frequent contact with his audience, of shared interests and mutual trust. Digging would continue through the night, he said, and the station would cut back to the scene as soon as developments warranted. He made it sound like a lover's promise.

Three nights later I wandered into Heinrich's room, where the TV set was temporarily located. He sat on the floor in a hooded sweatshirt, watching live coverage of the same scene. The backyard was floodlit, men with picks and shovels worked amid mounds of dirt. In the foreground stood the reporter, bareheaded, in a sheepskin coat, in a light snow, giving an update. The police said they had solid information, the diggers were methodical and skilled, the work had been going on for over seventy-two hours. But no more bodies had been found.

The sense of failed expectations was total. A sadness and emptiness hung over the scene. A dejection, a sorry gloom. We felt it ourselves, my son and I, quietly watching. It was in the room, seeping into the air from pulsing streams of electrons. The reporter seemed at first merely apologetic. But as he continued to discuss the absense of mass graves, he grew increasingly forlorn, gesturing at the diggers, shaking his head, almost ready to plead with us for sympathy and understanding. I tried not to feel disappointed.

30

In the dark the mind runs on like a devouring machine, the only thing awake in the universe. I tried to make out the walls, the dresser in the corner. It was the old defenseless feeling. Small, weak, deathbound, alone. Panic, the god of woods and wilderness, half goat. I moved my head to the right, remembering the clock-radio. I watched the numbers change, the progression of digital minutes, odd to even. They glowed green in the dark.

After a while I woke up Babette. Warm air came rising from her body as she shifted toward me. Contented air. A mixture of forgetfulness and sleep. Where am I, who are you, what was I dreaming?

"We have to talk," I said.

She mumbled things, seemed to fend off some hovering presence. When I reached for the lamp, she gave me a backhand punch in the arm. The light went on. She retreated toward the radio, covering her head and moaning.

"You can't get away. There are things we have to talk about. I want access to Mr. Gray. I want the real name of Gray Research."

All she could do was moan, "No."

"I'm reasonable about this. I have a sense of perspective. No huge hopes or expectations. I only want to check it out, give it a try. I don't believe in magical objects. I only say, 'Let me try, let me see.' I've been lying here for hours practically paralyzed. I'm drenched in sweat. Feel my chest, Babette."

"Five more minutes. I need to sleep."

"Feel. Give me your hand. See how wet."

"We all sweat," she said. "What is sweat?"

"There are rivulets here."

"You want to ingest. No good, Jack."

"All I ask is a few minutes alone with Mr. Gray, to find out if I qualify."

"He'll think you want to kill him."

"But that's crazy. I'd be crazy. How can I kill him?"

"He'll know I told you about the motel."

"The motel is over and done. I can't change the motel. Do I kill the only man who can relieve my pain? Feel under my arms if you don't believe me."

"He'll think you're a husband with a grudge."

"The motel is frankly small grief. Do I kill him and feel better? He doesn't have to know who I am. I make up an identity, I invent a context. Help me, please."

"Don't tell me you sweat. What is sweat? I gave the man my word."

In the morning we sat at the kitchen table. The clothes dryer was running in the entranceway. I listened to the tapping sound of buttons and zippers as they struck the surface of the drum.

"I already know what I want to say to him. I'll be descriptive, clinical. No philosophy or theology. I'll appeal to the pragmatist in him. He's bound to be impressed by the fact that I'm actually scheduled to die. This is frankly more than you could claim. My need is intense. I believe he'll respond to this. Besides, he'll want another crack at a live subject. That's the way these people are."

"How do I know you won't kill him?"

"You're my wife. Am I a killer?"

"You're a man, Jack. We all know about men and their insane rage. This is something men are very good at. Insane and violent jealousy. Homicidal rage. When people are good at something, it's only natural that they look for a chance to do this thing. If I were good at it, I would do it. It happens I'm not. So instead of going into homicidal rages, I read to the blind. In other words I know my limits. I am willing to settle for less."

"What did I do to deserve this? This is not like you. Sarcastic, mocking."

"Leave it alone," she said. "Dylar was my mistake. I won't let you make it yours as well."

We listened to the tap and scratch of buttons and zipper tabs. It was time for me to leave for school. The voice upstairs remarked: "A California think-tank says the next world war may be fought over salt."

All afternoon I stood by the window in my office, watching the Observatory. It was growing dark when Winnie Richards appeared at the side door, looked both ways, then began moving in a wolf-trot along the sloping turf. I hurried out of my office and down the stairs. In seconds I was out on a cobbled path, running. Almost at once I experienced a strange elation, the kind of bracing thrill that marks the recovery of a lost pleasure. I saw her turn a corner in a controlled skid before she disappeared behind a maintenance building. I ran as fast as I could, cutting loose, cutting into the wind, running chest out, head high, my arms pumping hard. She reappeared at the edge of the library, an alert and stealthy figure moving beneath the arched windows, nearly lost to the dusk. When she drew near the steps she suddenly accelerated, going full tilt from what was almost a standing start. This was a deft and lovely maneuver that I was able to appreciate even as it put me at a disadvantage. I decided to cut behind the library and pick her up on the long straight approach to the chemistry labs. Briefly I ran alongside the members of the lacrosse team as they charged off a field after practice. We ran step for step, the players waving their sticks in a ritualized manner and chanting something I couldn't understand. When I reached the broad path I was gasping for breath. Winnie was nowhere in sight. I ran through the faculty parking lot, past the starkly modern chapel, around the administration building. The wind was audible now, creaking in the high bare branches. I ran to the east, changed my mind, stood looking around, removed my glasses to peer. I wanted to run, I was willing to run. I would run as far as I could, run through the night, run to forget why I was running. After some moments I saw a figure loping up a hill at the edge of the campus. It had to be her. I started running again, knowing she was too far away, would disappear over the crest of the hill, would not resurface for weeks. I put everything I had into a final climbing burst, charging over concrete, grass, then gravel, lungs burning in my chest, a heaviness in my legs that seemed the very pull of the earth, its most intimate and telling judgment, the law of falling bodies.

How surprised I was, nearing the top of the hill, to see that she had stopped. She wore a Gore-Tex jacket puffed up with insulation and she was looking to the west. I walked slowly toward her. When I cleared a row of private homes I saw what it was that had made her pause. The edge of the earth trembled in a darkish haze. Upon it lay the sun, going down like a ship in a burning sea. Another postmodern sunset, rich in romantic imagery. Why try to describe it? It's enough to sáy that everything in our field of vision seemed to exist in order to gather the light of this event. Not that this was one of the stronger sunsets. There had been more dynamic colors, a deeper sense of narrative sweep.

"Hi, Jack. I didn't know you came up here."

"I usually go to the highway overpass."

"Isn't this something?"

"It's beautiful all right."

"Makes me think. It really does."

"What do you think about?"

"What can you think about in the face of this kind of beauty? I get scared, I know that."

"This isn't one of the scarier ones."

"It scares me. Boy, look at it."

"Did you see last Tuesday? A powerful and stunning sunset. I rate this one average. Maybe they're beginning to wind down."

"I hope not," she said. "I'd miss them."

"Could be the toxic residue in the atmosphere is diminishing."

"There's a school of thought that says it's not residue from the cloud that causes the sunsets. It's residue from the microorganisms that ate the cloud."

We stood there watching a surge of florid light, like a heart pumping in a documentary on color TV.

"Remember the saucer-shaped pill?"

"Of course," she said. "A super piece of engineering."

"I found out what it's designed to do. It's designed to solve an ancient problem. Fear of death. It encourages the brain to produce fear-of-death inhibitors."

"But we still die."

"Everyone dies, yes."

"We just won't be afraid," she said.

"That's right."

"Interesting, I guess."

"Dylar was designed by a secret research group. I believe some of these people are psychobiologists. I wonder if you've heard rumors of a group working secretly on fear of death."

"I'd be the last to hear. No one can ever find me. When they do find me, it's to tell me something important."

"What could be more important?"

"You're talking about gossip, rumors. This is thin stuff, Jack. Who are these people, where is their base?"

"That's why I've been chasing you. I thought you'd know something about them. I don't even know what a psychobiologist is."

"It's a catchall sort of thing. Interdisciplinary. The real work is in the pits."

"Isn't there anything you can tell me?"

Something in my voice made her turn to look at me. Winnie was barely into her thirties but she had a sane and practiced eye for the half-concealed disasters that constitute a life. A narrow face partly hidden by wispy brown ringlets, eyes bright and excited. She had the beaky and hollow-boned look of a great wading creature. Small prim mouth. A smile that was permanently in conflict with some inner stricture against the seductiveness of humor. Murray told me once he had a crush on her, found her physical awkwardness a sign of an intelligence developing almost too rapidly, and I thought I knew what he meant. She was poking and snatching at the world around, overrunning it at times.

"I don't know what your personal involvement is with this substance," she said, "but I think it's a mistake to lose one's sense of death, even one's fear of death. Isn't death the boundary we need? Doesn't it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit."

I watch light climb into the rounded summits of high-altitude clouds. Clorets, Velamints, Freedent.

"People think I'm spacey," she said. "I have a spacey theory about human fear, sure enough. Picture yourself, Jack, a confirmed homebody, a sedentary fellow who finds himself walking in a deep wood. You spot something out of the corner of your eye. Before you know anything else, you know that this thing is very large and that it has no place in your ordinary frame of reference. A flaw in the world picture. Either it shouldn't be here or you shouldn't. Now the thing comes into full view. It is a grizzly bear, enormous, shiny brown, swaggering, dripping slime from its bared fangs. Jack, you have never seen a large animal in the wild. The sight of this grizzer is so electrifyingly strange that it gives you a renewed sense of yourself, a fresh awareness of the self—the self in terms of a unique and horrific situation. You see yourself in a new and intense way. You rediscover yourself. You are lit up for your own imminent dismemberment. The beast on hind legs has enabled you to see who you are as if for the first time, outside familiar surroundings, alone, distinct, whole. The name we give to this complicated process is fear."

"Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level."

"That's right, Jack."

"And death?" I said.

"Self, self, self. If death can be seen as less strange and unreferenced, your sense of self in relation to death will diminish, and so will your fear."

"What do I do to make death less strange? How do I go about it?"

"I don't know."

"Do I risk death by driving fast around curves? Am I supposed to go rock climbing on weekends?"

"I don't know," she said. "I wish I knew."

"Do I scale the sheer facade of a ninety-story building, wearing a clip-on belt? What do I do, Winnie? Do I sit in a cage full of African snakes like my son's best friend? This is what people do today."

"I think what you do, Jack, is forget the medicine in that tablet. There is no medicine, obviously."

She was right. They were all right. Gp on with my life, raise my kids, teach my students. Try not to think of that staticky figure in the Grayview Motel putting his unfinished hands on my wife.

"I'm still sad, Winnie, but you've given my sadness a richness and depth it has never known before."

She turned away, blushing.

I said, "You're more than a fair-weather friend—you're a true enemy."

She turned exceedingly red.

I said, "Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant."

I watched her blush. She used both hands to pull her knit cap down over her ears. We took a last look at the sky and started walking down the hill.