White noise

31

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CABLE HEALTH, CABLE WEATHER, CABLE NEWS, CABLE NATURE.
No one wanted to cook that night. We all got in the car and went out to the commercial strip in the no man's land beyond the town boundary. The never-ending neon. I pulled in at a place that specialized in chicken parts and brownies. We decided to eat in the car. The car was sufficient for our needs. We wanted to eat, not look around at other people. We wanted to fill our stomachs and get it over with. We didn't need light and space. We certainly didn't need to face each other across a table as we ate, building a subtle and complex cross-network of signals and codes. We were content to eat facing in the same direction, looking only inches past our hands. There was a kind of rigor in this. Denise brought the food out to the car and distributed paper napkins. We settled in to eat. We ate fully dressed, in hats and heavy coats, without speaking, ripping into chicken parts with our hands and teeth. There was a mood of intense concentration, minds converging on a single compelling idea. I was surprised to find I was enormously hungry. I chewed and ate, looking only inches past my hands. This is how hunger shrinks the world. This is the edge of the observable universe of food. Steffie tore off the crisp skin of a breast and gave it to Heinrich. She never ate the skin. Babette sucked a bone. Heinrich traded wings with Denise, a large for a small. He thought small wings were tastier. People gave Babette their bones to clean and suck. I fought off an image of Mr. Cray lazing naked on a motel bed, an unresolved picture collapsing at the edges. We sent Denise to get more food, waiting for her in silence. Then we started in again, half stunned by the dimensions of our pleasure.

Steffie said quietly, "How do astronauts float?"

There was a pause like a missing tick in eternity.

Denise stopped eating to say, 'They're lighter than air."

We all stopped eating. A worried silence ensued.

"There is no air," Heinrich said finally. "They can't be lighter than something that isn't there. Space is a vacuum except for heavy molecules."

"I thought space was cold," Babette said. "If there's no air, how can it be cold? What makes warm or cold? Air, or so I thought. If there's no air, there should be no cold. Like a nothing kind of day."

"How can there be nothing?" Denise said. "There has to be something."

'There is something," Heinrich said in exasperation. 'There's heavy molecules."

"Do-I-need-a-sweater kind of day," Babette said.

There was another pause. We waited to learn if the dialogue was over. Then we set to eating again. We traded unwanted parts in silence, stuck our hands in cartons of rippled fries. Wilder liked the soft white fries and people picked these out and gave them to him. Denise distributed ketchup in little watery pouches.

The interior of the car smelled of grease and licked flesh. We traded parts and gnawed.

Steffie said in a small voice, "How cold is space?"

We all waited once more. Then Heinrich said, "It depends on how high you go. The higher you go, the colder it gets."

"Wait a minute," Babette said. "The higher you go, the closer you get to the sun. So the warmer it gets."

"What makes you think the sun is high?"

"How can the sun be low? You have to look up to see the sun."

"What about at night?" he said.

"It's on the other side of the earth. But people still look up."

"The whole point of Sir Albert Einstein," he said, "is how can the sun be up if you're standing on the sun?"

"The sun is a great molten ball," she said. "It's impossible to stand on the sun."

"He was just saying 'if.' Basically there is no up or down, hot or cold, day or night."

"What is there?"

"Heavy molecules. The whole point of space is to give molecules a chance to cool down after they come shooting off the surface of giant stars."

"If there's no hot or cold, how can molecules cool down?"

"Hot and cold are words. Think of them as words. We have to use words. We can't just grunt."

"It's called the sun's corolla," Denise said to Steffie in a separate discussion. "We saw it the other night on the weather network."

"I thought Corolla was a car," Steffie said.

"Everything's a car," Heinrich said. "The thing you have to understand about giant stars is that they have actual nuclear explosions deep inside the core. Totally forget these Russian IBMs that are supposed to be so awesome. We're talking about a hundred million times bigger explosions."

There was a long pause. No one spoke. We went back to eating for as long as it took to bite off and chew a single mouthful of food.

"It's supposed to be Russian psychics who are causing this crazy weather," Babette said.

"What crazy weather?" I said.

Heinrich said, "We have psychics, they have psychics, supposedly. They want to disrupt our crops by influencing the weather."

"The weather's been normal."

"For Jthis time of year," Denise put in smartly.

This was the week a policeman saw a body thrown from a UFO. It happened while he was on routine patrol on the outskirts of Classboro. The rain-soaked corpse of an unidentified male was found later that night, fully clothed. An autopsy disclosed that death was due to multiple fractures and heart failure—the result, perhaps, of a ghastly shock. Under hypnosis, the policeman, Jerry Tee Walker, relived in detail the baffling sight of the neon-bright object that resembled an enormous spinning top as it hovered eighty feet above a field. Officer Walker, a Vietnam vet, said the bizarre scene reminded him of helicopter crews throwing Vietcong suspects out the door. Incredibly, as he watched a hatch come open and the body plummet to the ground, Walker sensed an eerie message being psychically transmitted to his brain. Police hypnotists plan to intensify their sessions in an attempt to uncover the message.

There were sightings all over the area. An energizing mental current, a snaky glow, seemed to pass from town to town. It didn't matter whether you believed in these things or not. They were an excitement, a wave, a tremor. Some voice or noise would crack across the sky and we would be lifted out of death. People drove speculatively to the edges of towns, where some would turn back, some decide to venture toward remoter areas which seemed in these past days to exist under a spell, a hallowed expectation. The air grew soft and mild. A neighbor's dog barked through the night.

In the fast food parking lot we ate our brownies. Crumbs stuck to the heels of our hands. We inhaled the crumbs, we licked the fingers. As we got close to finishing, the physical extent of our awareness began to expand. Food's borders yielded to the wider world. We looked past our hands. We looked through the windows, at the cars and lights. We looked at the people leaving the restaurant, men, women and children carrying cartons of food, leaning into the wind. An impatience began to flow from the three bodies in the rear seat. They wanted to be home, not here. They wanted to blink an eye and find themselves in their rooms, with their things, not sitting in a cramped car on this windswept concrete plain. Journeys home were always a test. I started up the car, knowing it was only a matter of seconds before the massed restlessness took on elements of threat. We could feel it coming, Babette and I. A sulky menace brewed back there. They would attack us, using the classic strategy of fighting among themselves. But attack us for what reason? For not getting them home faster? For being older and bigger and somewhat steadier of mood than they were? Would they attack us for our status as protectors— protectors who must sooner or later fail? Or was it simply who we were that they attacked, our voices, features, gestures, ways of walking and laughing, our eye color, hair color, skin tone, our chromosomes and cells?

As if to head them off, as if she could not bear the implications of their threat, Babette said pleasantly, "Why is it these UFOs are mostly seen upstate? The best sightings are upstate. People get abducted and taken aboard. Fanners see burn marks where saucers landed. A woman gives birth to a UFO baby, so she says. Always upstate."

"That's where the mountains are," Denise said. "Spaceships can hide from radar or whatever."

"Why are the mountains upstate?" Steffie said.

"Mountains are always upstate," Denise told her. "This way the snow melts as planned in the spring and flows downhill to the reservoirs near the cities, which are kept in the lower end of the state for exactly this reason."

I thought, momentarily, she might be right. It made a curious kind of sense. Or did it? Or was it totally crazy? There had to be large cities in the northern part of some states. Or were they just north of the border in the southern part of states just to the north? What she s.aid could not be true and yet I had trouble, momentarily, disproving it. I could not name cities or mountains to disprove it. There had to be mountains in the southern part of some states. Or did they tend to be below the state line, in the northern part of states to the south? I tried to name state capitals, governors. How could there be a north below a south? Is this what I found confusing? Was this the crux of Denise's error? Or was she somehow, eerily, right?

The radio said: "Excesses of salt, phosphorus, magnesium."

Later that night Babette and I sat drinking cocoa. On the kitchen table, among the coupons, the foot-long supermarket receipts, the mail-order catalogs, was a postcard from Mary Alice, my oldest. She is the golden issue of my first marriage to Dana Breedlove, the spy, and is therefore Steffie's full sister, although ten years and two marriages fell between. Mary Alice is nineteen now and lives in Hawaii, where she works with whales.

Babette picked up a tabloid someone had left on the table.

"Mouse cries have been measured at forty thousand cycles per second. Surgeons use high-frequency tapes of mouse cries to destroy tumors in the human body. Do you believe that?"

"Yes."

"So do I."

She put down the newspaper. After a while she said to me urgently, "How do you feel, Jack?"

"I'm all right. I feel fine. Honest. What about you?"

"I wish I hadn't told you about my condition."

"Why?"

"Then you wouldn't have told me you're going to die first. Here are the two things I want most in the world. Jack not to die first. And Wilder to stay the way he is forever."