White noise

25

Our newspaper is delivered by a middle-aged Iranian driving a Nissan Sentra. Something about the car makes me uneasy— the car waiting with its headlights on, at dawn, as the man places the newspaper on the front steps. I tell myself I have reached an age, the age of unreliable menace. The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.

I sat at my desk in the office staring down at the white tablet. It was more or less flying-saucer-shaped, a streamlined disk with the tiniest of holes at one end. It was only after moments of intense scrutiny that I'd been able to spot the hole.

The tablet was not chalky like aspirin and not exactly capsule-slick either. It felt strange in the hand, curiously sensitive to the touch but at the same time giving the impression that it was synthetic, insoluble, elaborately engineered.

I walked over to a small domed building known as the Observatory and gave the tablet to Winnie Richards, a" young research neurochemist whose work was said to be brilliant. She was a tall gawky furtive woman who blushed when someone said something funny. Some of the New York émigrés liked to visit her cubicle and deliver rapid-fire one-liners, just to see her face turn red.

I watched her sit at the cluttered desk for two or three minutes, slowly rotating the tablet between her thumb and index finger. She licked it and shrugged.

"Certainly doesn't taste like much."

"How long will it take to analyze the contents?"

"There's a dolphin's brain in my in-box but come see me in forty-eight hours."

Winnie was well-known on the Hill for moving from place to place without being seen. No one knew how she managed this or why she found it necessary. Maybe she was self-conscious about her awkward frame, her craning look and odd lope. Maybe she had a phobia concerning open spaces, although the spaces at the college were mainly snug and quaint. Perhaps the world of people and things had such an impact on her, struck her with the force of some rough and naked body—made her blush in fact—that she found it easier to avoid frequent contact. Maybe she was tired of being called brilliant. In any case I had trouble locating her all the rest of that week. She was not to be seen on the lawns and walks, was absent from her cubicle whenever I looked in.

At home Denise made it a point not to bring up the subject of Dylar. She did not want to put pressure on me and even avoided eye contact, as if an exchange of significant looks was more than our secret knowledge could bear. Babette, for her part, could not seem to produce a look that wasn't significant. In the middle of conversations she turned to gaze at snowfalls, sunsets or parked cars in a sculptured and eternal way. These contemplations began to worry me. She'd always been an outward-looking woman with a bracing sense of particularity, a trust in the tangible and real. This private gazing was a form of estrangement not only from those of us around her but from the very things she watched so endlessly.

We sat at the breakfast table after the older kids were gone.

"Have you seen the Stovers' new dog?"

"No," I said.

'They think it's a space alien. Only they're not joking. I was there yesterday. The animal is strange."

"Has something been bothering you?"

"I'm fine," she said.

"I wish you'd tell me. We tell each other everything. We always have."

"Jack, what could be bothering me?"

"You stare out of windows. You're different somehow. You don't quite see things and react to things the way you used to."

"That's what their dog does. He stares out of windows. But not just any window. He goes upstairs to the attic and puts his paws up on the sill to look out the highest window. They think he's waiting for instructions."

"Denise would kill me if she knew I was going to say this."

"What?"

"I found the Dylar."

"What Dylar?"

"It was taped to the radiator cover."

"Why would I tape something to the radiator cover?"

'That's exactly what Denise predicted you would say."

"She's usually right."

"I talked to Hookstratten, your doctor."

"I'm in super shape, really."

"That's what he said."

"Do you know what these cold gray leaden days make me want to do?"

"What?"

"Crawl into bed with a good-looking man. I'll put Wilder in his play tunnel. You go shave and brush your teeth. Meet you in the bedroom in ten minutes."

That afternoon I saw Winnie Richards slip out a side door of the Observatory and go loping down a small lawn toward the new buildings. I hurried out of my office and went after her. She kept close to walls, moving in a long-gaited stride. I felt I had made an important sighting of an endangered animal or some phenomenal subhuman like a yeti or sasquatch. It was cold and still leaden. I found I could not gain on her without breaking into a trot. She hurried around the back of Faculty House and I picked up the pace, fearing I was on the verge of losing her. It felt strange to be running. I hadn't run in many years and didn't recognize my body in this new format, didn't recognize the world beneath my feet, hard-surfaced and abrupt. I turned a corner and picked up speed, aware of floating bulk. Up, down, life, death. My robe flew behind me.

I caught up to her in the empty corridor of a one-story building that smelled of embalming fluids. She stood against the wall in a pale green tunic and tennis sneakers. I was too winded to speak and raised my right arm, requesting a delay. Winnie led me to a table in a small room full of bottled brains. The table was fitted with a sink and covered with note pads and lab instruments. She gave me water in a paper cup. I tried to dissociate the taste of the tap water from the sight of the brains and the general odor of preservatives and disinfectants.

"Have you been hiding from me?" I said. "I've left notes, phone messages."

"Not from you, Jack, or anyone in particular."

"Then why have you been so hard to find?"

"Isn't this what the twentieth century is all about?"

"What?"

"People go into hiding even when no one is looking for them."

"Do you really think that's true?"

"It's obvious," she said.

"What about the tablet?"

"An interesting piece of technology. What's it called?"

"Dylar."

"Never heard of it," she said.

"What can you tell me about it? Try not to be too brilliant. I haven't eaten lunch yet."

I watched her blush.

"It's not a tablet in the old sense," she said. "It's a drug delivery system. It doesn't dissolve right away or release its ingredients right away. The medication in Dylar is encased in a polymer membrane. Water from your gastrointestinal tract seeps through the membrane at a carefully controlled rate."

"What does the water do?"

"It dissolves the medication encased in the membrane. Slowly, gradually, precisely. The medicine then passes out of the polymer tablet through a single small hole. Once again the rate is carefully controlled."

"It took me a while to spot the hole."

"That's because it's laser-drilled. It's not only tiny but stunningly precise in its dimensions."

"Lasers, polymers."

"I'm not an expert in any of this, Jack, but I can tell you it's a wonderful little system."

"What's the point of all this precision?"

"I would think the controlled dosage is meant to eliminate the hit-or-miss effect of pills and capsules. The drug is delivered at specified rates for extended periods. You avoid the classic pattern of overdosage followed by underdosage. You don't get a burst of medication followed by the merest trickle. No upset stomach, queasiness, vomiting, muscle cramps, et cetera. This system is efficient."

"I'm impressed. I'm even dazzled. But what happens to the polymer tablet after the medication is pumped out of it?"

"It self-destructs. It implodes minutely of its own massive gravitation. We've entered the realm of physics. Once the plastic membrane is reduced to microscopic particles, it passes harmlessly out of the body in the time-honored way."

"Fantastic. Now tell me what the medication is designed to do? What is Dylar? What are the chemical components?"

"I don't know," she said.

"Of course you know. You're brilliant. Everyone says so."

"What else can they say? I do neurochemistry. No one knows what that is."

"Other scientists have some idea. They must. And they say you're brilliant."

"We're all brilliant. Isn't that the understanding around here? You call me brilliant, I call you brilliant. It's a form of communal ego."

"No one calls me brilliant. They call me shrewd. They say I latched on to something big. I filled an opening no one knew existed."

"There are openings for brilliance too. It's my turn, that's all. Besides, I'm built funny and walk funny. If they couldn't call me brilliant, they would be forced to say cruel things about me. How awful for everyone."

She clutched some files to her chest.

"Jack, all I can tell you for certain is that the substance contained in Dylar is some kind of psychopharmaceutical. It's probably designed to interact with a distant part of the human cortex. Look around you. Brains everywhere. Sharks, whales, dolphins, great apes. None of them remotely matches the human brain in complexity. The human brain is not my field. I have only a bare working knowledge of the human brain but it's enough to make me proud to be an American. Your brain has a trillion neurons and every neuron has ten thousand little dendrites. The system of intercommunication is awe-inspiring. It's like a galaxy that you can hold in your hand, only more complex, more mysterious."

"Why does this make you proud to be an American?"

"The infant's brain develops in response to stimuli. We still lead the world in stimuli."

I sipped my water.

"I wish I knew more," she said. "But the precise nature of the medication eludes me. I can tell you one thing. It is not on the market."

"But I found it in an ordinary prescription vial."

"I don't care where you found it. I'm pretty sure I'd recognize the ingredients of a known brain-receptor drug. This one is unknown."

She began to shoot quick looks toward the door. Her eyes were bright and fearful. I realized there were noises in the corridor. Voices, shuffling feet. I watched Winnie back toward a rear door. I decided I wanted to see her blush one more time. She put an arm behind her, unlatched the door, turned quickly and went running into the gray afternoon. I tried to think of something funny to say.