White noise

32

Murray and I walked across campus in our European manner, a serenely reflective pace, heads lowered as we conversed. Sometimes one of us gripped the other near the elbow, a gesture of intimacy and physical support. Other times we walked slightly apart, Murray's hands clasped behind his back, Gladney's folded monkishly at the abdomen, a somewhat worried touch.

"Your German is coming around?"

"I still speak it badly. The words give me trouble. Howard and I are working on opening remarks for the conference."

"You call him Howard?"

"Not to his face. I don't call him anything to his face and he doesn't call me anything to my face. It's that kind of relationship. Do you see him at all? You live under the same roof, after all."

"Fleeting glimpses. The other boarders seem to prefer it that way. He barely exists, we feel."

"There's something about him. I'm not sure what it is exactly."

"He's flesh-colored," Murray said.

"True. But that's not what makes me uneasy."

"Soft hands."

"Is that it?"

"Soft hands in a man give me pause. Soft skin in general. Baby skin. I don't think he shaves."

"What else?" I said.

"Flecks of dry spittle at the corners of his mouth."

"You're right," I said excitedly. "Dry spit. I feel it hit me in the face when he leans forward to articulate. What else?"

"And a way of looking over a person's shoulder."

"You see all this in fleeting glimpses. Remarkable. What else?" I demanded.

"And a rigid carriage that seems at odds with his shuffling walk."

"Yes, he walks without moving his arms. What else, what else?"

"And something else, something above and beyond all this, something eerie and terrible."

"Exactly. But what is it? Something I can't quite identify."

"There's a strange air about him, a certain mood, a sense, a presence, an emanation."

"But what?" I said, surprised to find myself deeply and personally concerned, colored dots dancing at the edge of my vision.

We'd walked thirty paces when Murray began to nod. I watched his face as we walked. He nodded crossing the street and kept nodding all the way past the music library. I walked with him step for step, clutching his elbow, watching his face, waiting for him to speak, not interested in the fact that he'd taken me completely out of my way, and he was still nodding as we approached the entrance to Wilmot Grange, a restored nineteenth-century building at the edge of the campus.

"But what?" I said. "But what?"

It wasn't until four days later that he called me at home, at one in the morning, to whisper helpfully in my ear, "He looks like a man who finds dead bodies erotic."

I went to one last lesson. The walls and windows were obscured by accumulated objects, which seemed now to be edging toward the middle of the room. The bland-faced man before me closed his eyes and spoke, reciting useful tourist phrases. "Where am I?" "Can you help me?" "It is night and I am lost." I could hardly bear to sit there. Murray's remark fixed him forever to a plausible identity. What had been elusive about Howard Dunlop was now pinned down. What had been strange and half creepy was now diseased. A grim lasciviousness escaped his body and seemed to circulate through the barricaded room.

In truth I would miss the lessons. I would also miss the dogs, the German shepherds. One day they were simply gone. Needed elsewhere perhaps or sent back to the desert to sharpen their skills. The men in Mylex suits were still around, however, carrying instruments to measure and probe, riding through town in teams of six or eight in chunky peglike vehicles that resembled Lego toys.

I stood by Wilder's bed watching him sleep. The voice next door said: "In the four-hundred-thousand-dollar Nabisco Dinah Shore."

This was the night the insane asylum burned down. Heinrich and I got in the car and went to watch. There were other men at the scene with their adolescent boys. Evidently fathers and sons seek fellowship at such events. Fires help draw them closer, provide a conversational wedge. There is equipment to appraise, the technique of firemen to discuss and criticize. The manliness of firefighting—the virility of fires, one might say—suits the kind of laconic dialogue that fathers and sons can undertake without awkwardness or embarrassment.

"Most of these fires in old buildings start in the electrical wiring," Heinrich said. "Faulty wiring. That's one phrase you can't hang around for long without hearing."

"Most people don't burn to death," I said. 'They die of smoke inhalation."

'That's the other phrase," he said.

Flames roared through the dormers. We stood across the street watching part of the roof give way, a tall chimney slowly fold and sink. Pumper trucks kept arriving from other towns, the men descending heavily in their rubber boots and old-fashioned hats. Hoses were manned and trained, a figure rose above the shimmering roof in the grip of a telescopic ladder. We watched the portico begin to go, a far column leaning. A woman in a fiery nightgown walked across the lawn. We gasped, almost in appreciation. She was white-haired and slight, fringed in burning air, and we could see she was mad, so lost to dreams and furies that the fire around her head seemed almost incidental. No one said a word. In all the heat and noise of detonating wood, she brought a silence to her. How powerful and real. How deep a thing was madness. A fire captain hurried toward her, then circled out slightly, disconcerted, as if she were not the person, after all, he had expected to meet here. She went down in a white burst, like a teacup breaking. Four men were around her now, batting at the flames with helmets and caps.

The great work of containing the blaze went on, a labor that seemed as old and lost as cathedral-building, the men driven by a spirit of lofty communal craft. A Dalmatian sat in the cab of a hook-and-ladder truck.

"It's funny how you can look at it and look at it," Heinrich said. "Just like a fire in a fireplace."

"Are you saying the two kinds of fire are equally compelling?"

"I'm just saying you can look and look."

"'Man has always been fascinated by fire.' Is that what you're saying?"

"This is my first burning building. Give me a chance," he said.

The fathers and sons crowded the sidewalk, pointing at one or another part of the half gutted structure. Murray, whose rooming house was just yards away, sidled up to us and shook our hands without a word. Windows blew out. We watched another chimney slip through the roof, a few loose bricks tumbling to the lawn. Murray shook our hands again, then disappeared.

Soon there was a smell of acrid matter. It could have been insulation burning—polystyrene sheathing for pipes and wires— or one or more of a dozen other substances. A sharp and bitter stink filled the air, overpowering the odor of smoke and charred stone. It changed the mood of the people on the sidewalk. Some put hankies to their faces, others left abruptly in disgust. Whatever caused the odor, I sensed that it made people feel betrayed. An ancient, spacious and terrible drama was being compromised by something unnatural, some small and nasty intrusion. Our eyes began to burn. The crowd broke up. It was as though we'd been forced to recognize the existence of a second kind of death. One was real, the other synthetic. The odor drove us away but beneath it and far worse was the sense that death came two ways, sometimes at once, and how death entered your mouth and nose, how death smelled, could somehow make a difference to your soul.

We hurried to our cars, thinking of the homeless, the mad, the dead, but also of ourselves now. This is what the odor of that burning material did. It complicated our sadness, brought us closer to the secret of our own eventual end.

At home I fixed warm milk for us both. I was surprised to see him drink it. He gripped the mug with both hands, talked about the noise of the conflagration, the air-fed wallop of combustion, like a ramjet thrusting. I almost expected him to thank me for the nice fire. We sat there drinking our milk. After a while he went into his closet to chin.

I sat up late thinking of Mr. Gray. Gray-bodied, staticky, unfinished. The picture wobbled and rolled, the edges of his body flared with random distortion. Lately I'd found myself thinking of him often. Sometimes as Mr. Gray the composite. Four or more grayish figures engaged in a pioneering work. Scientists, visionaries. Their wavy bodies passing through each other, mingling, blending, fusing. A little like extraterrestrials. Smarter than the rest of us, selfless, sexless, determined to engineer us out of our fear. But when the bodies fused 1 was left with a single figure, the project manager, a hazy gray seducer moving in ripples across a motel room. Bedward, plotward. I saw my wife reclining on her side, voluptuously rounded, the eternal waiting nude. I saw her as he did. Dependent, submissive, emotionally captive. I felt his mastery and control. The dominance of his postion. He was taking over my mind, this man I'd never seen, this half image, the barest smidge of brainlight. His bleak hands enfolded a rose-white breast. How vivid and living it was, what a tactile delight, dusted with russet freckles about the tip. I experienced aural torment. Heard them in their purling foreplay, the love babble and buzzing flesh. Heard the sloppings and smackings, the swash of wet mouths, bedsprings sinking in. An interval of mumbled adjustments. Then gloom moved in around the gray-sheeted bed, a circle slowly closing.

Panasonic.