White noise

23

1 asked my German teacher to add half an hour to each lesson. It seemed more urgent than ever that I learn the language. His room was cold. He wore foul weather gear and seemed gradually to be piling furniture against the windows.

We sat facing each other in the gloom. I did wonderfully well with vocabulary and rules of grammar. I could have passed a written test easily, made top grades. But I continued to have trouble pronouncing the words. Dunlop did not seem to mind. He enunciated for me over and over, scintillas of dry spit flying toward my face.

We advanced to three lessons a week. He seemed to shed his distracted manner, to become slightly more engaged. Furniture, newspapers, cardboard boxes, sheets of polyethylene continued to accumulate against the walls and windows—items scavenged from ravines. He stared into my mouth as I did my exercises in pronunciation. Once he reached in with his right hand to adjust my tongue. It was a strange and terrible moment, an act of haunting intimacy. No one had ever handled my tongue before.

German shepherds still patrolled the town, accompanied by men in Mylex suits. We welcomed the dogs, got used to them, fed and petted them, but did not adjust well to the sight of costumed men with padded boots, hoses attached to their masks. We associated these outfits with the source of our trouble and fear.

At dinner Denise said, "Why can't they dress in normal clothes?"

"This is what they wear on duty," Babette said. "It doesn't mean we're in danger. The dogs have sniffed out only a few traces of toxic material on the edge of town."

"That's what we're supposed to believe," Heinrich said. "If they released the true findings, there'd be billions of dollars in law suits. Not to mention demonstrations, panic, violence and social disorder."

He seemed to take pleasure in the prospect. Babette said, "That's a little extreme, isn't it?"

"What's extreme, what I said or what would happen?"

"Both. There's no reason to think the results aren't true as published."

"Do you really believe that?" he said.

"Why shouldn't I believe it?"

"Industry would collapse if the true results of any of these investigations were released."

"What investigations?"

"The ones that are going on all over the country."

'That's the point," she said. "Every day on the news there's another toxic spill. Cancerous solvents from storage tanks, arsenic from smokestacks, radioactive water from power plants. How serious can it be if it happens all the time? Isn't the definition of a serious event based on the fact that it's not an everyday occurrence?"

The two girls looked at Heinrich, anticipating a surgically deft rejoinder.

"Forget these spills," he said. "These spills are nothing."

This wasn't the direction any of us had expected him to take. Babette watched him carefully. He cut a lettuce leaf on his salad plate into two equal pieces.

"I wouldn't say they were nothing," she said cautiously. "They're small everyday seepages. They're controllable. But they're not nothing. We have to watch them."

"The sooner we forget these spills, the sooner we can come to grips with the real issue."

"What's the real issue?" I said.

He spoke with his mouth full of lettuce and cucumber.

"The real issue is the kind of radiation that surrounds us every day. Your radio, your TV, your microwave oven, your power lines just outside the door, your radar speed-trap on the highway. For years they told us these low doses weren't dangerous."

"And now?" Babette said.

We watched him use his spoon to mold the mashed potatoes on his plate into the shape of a volcanic mountain. He poured gravy ever so carefully into the opening at the top. Then he set to work ridding his steak of fat, veins and other imperfections. It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.

"This is the big new worry," he said. "Forget spills, fallouts, leakages. It's the things right around you in your own house that'll get you sooner or later. It's the electrical and magnetic fields. Who in this room would believe me if I said that the suicide rate hits an all-time record among people who live near high-voltage power lines? What makes these people so sad and depressed? Just the sight of ugly wires and utility poles? Or does something happen to their brain cells from being exposed to constant rays?"

He immersed a piece of steak in the gravy that sat in the volcanic depression, then put it in his mouth. But he did not begin chewing until he'd scooped some potatoes from the lower slopes and added it to the meat. A tension seemed to be building around the question of whether he could finish the gravy before the potatoes collapsed.

"Forget headaches and fatigue," he said as he chewed. "What about nerve disorders, strange and violent behavior in the home? There are scientific findings. Where do you think all the deformed babies are coming from? Radio and TV, that's where."

The girls looked at him. admiringly. I wanted to argue with him. I wanted to ask him why I should believe these scientific findings but not the results that indicated we were safe from Nyodene contamination. But what could I say, considering my condition? I wanted to tell him that statistical evidence of the kind he was quoting from was by nature inconclusive and misleading. I wanted to say that he would learn to regard all such catastrophic findings with equanimity as he matured, grew out of his confining literalism, developed a spirit of informed and skeptical inquiry, advanced in wisdom and rounded judgment, got old, declined, died.

But I only said, "Terrifying data is now an industry in itself. Different firms compete to see how badly they can scare us."

"I've got news for you," he said. "The brain of a white rat releases calcium ions when it's exposed to radio-frequency waves. Does anyone at this table know what that means?"

Denise looked at her mother.

"Is this what they teach in school today?" Babette said. "What happened to civics, how a bill becomes a law? The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides. I still remember my theorems. The battle of Bunker Hill was really fought on Breed's Hill. Here's one. Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania."

"Was it the Monitor or the Merrimac that got sunk?" I said.

"I don't know but it was Tippecanoe and Tyler too."

"What was that?" Steffie said.

"I want to say he was an Indian running for office. Here's one. Who invented the mechanical reaper and how did it change the face of American agriculture?"

"I'm trying to remember the three kinds of rock," I said. "Igneous, sedimentary and something else."

"What about your logarithms? What about the causes of economic discontent leading up to the Great Grash? Here's one. Who won the Lincoln-Douglas debates? Careful. It's not as obvious as it seems."

"Anthracite and bituminous," I said. "Isosceles and scalene."

The mysterious words came back to me in a rush of confused schoolroom images.

"Here's one. Angles, Saxons and Jutes."

Déjà vu was still a problem in the area. A toll-free hotline had been set up. There were counselors on duty around the clock to talk to people who were troubled by recurring episodes. Perhaps déjà vu and other tics of the mind and body were the durable products of the airborne toxic event. But over a period of time it became possible to interpret such things as signs of a deep-reaching isolation we were beginning to feel. There was no large city with a vaster torment we might use to see our own dilemma in some soothing perspective. No large city to blame for our sense of victimization. No city to hate and fear. No panting megacenter to absorb our woe, to distract us from our unremitting sense of time—

time as the agent of our particular ruin, our chromosome breaks, hysterically multiplying tissue.

"Baba," I whispered between her breasts, that night in bed.

Although we are for a small town remarkably free of resentment, the absence of a polestar metropolis leaves us feeling in our private moments a little lonely.