by Don DeLillo
*
“Nagasaki was an embarrassment to the art of war.”
*
“The nuclear nations have a stockpile of fissionable material I would estimate in the neighborhood of sixty thousand megatons in terms of explosive power. That’s a personal estimate, based on whatever tech-data I’ve been able to accumulate in the journals and bulletins, accurate within a factor of maybe three or four. But just for the heck of it, figure that out in terms of pounds of TNT. That’s pounds now, not tons. I bet you can’t do it without paper and pencil. The trick is to keep count of the zeros.”
*
“War is the ultimate realization of modern technology. For centuries men have tested themselves in war. War was the final test, the great experience, the privilege, the honor, the self-sacrifice or what have you, the absolutely ultimate determination of what kind of man you were. War was the great challenge and the great evaluator. It told you how much you were worth. But it’s different today. Few men want to go off and fight. We prove ourselves, our manhood, in other ways, in making money, in skydiving, in hunting mountain lions with bow and arrow, in acquiring power of one kind or another. And I think we can forget ideology. People invent that problem, at least as far as the U.S. is concerned. It has no real bearing as far as we’re concerned. Obviously we can live with Communism; we’ve been doing it long enough. So people invent that. That’s the grotesque sense of patriotism at work in this country. Today we can say that war is a test of opposing technologies. We can say this more than ever because it’s more true than it ever was. Look, what would our cartoonists do if they wanted to satirize the Chinese, if we were in a period of extreme tension with the Chinese and the editorial cartoonists wanted to stir up a little patriotism? Would they draw slanted eyes and pigtails the way they drew buck teeth for the Japanese in the forties? No, no, they wouldn’t make fun of the people at all. They’d satirize the machines, the nuclear capability, the weapons and such of the Chinese. They’d draw firecrackers and kites. War has always told men what they were capable of under stress. Now it informs the machines. It’s the best test of a country’s technological skills. Are all your gaseous diffusion plants going at top efficiency? Are your ICBM guidance and control mechanisms ready to work perfectly? You get the answers when war breaks out. Your technology doesn’t know how good it is until it goes to war, until it’s been tested in the ultimate way. I don’t think we care too much about individual bravery anymore. It’s better to be efficient than brave. So that’s it then. It’s regrettable but there it is. And your technology isn’t any good if it can’t beat the enemy’s. Your weapons have to be more efficient than theirs, more reliable, more accurate, more deadly. Your technology has to reach peak efficiency. It has to stretch itself out, overreach itself; it has to improve itself almost instantaneously. It won’t do this without the stress of war. War brings out the best in technology.”
*
“Major, there’s no way to express thirty million dead. No words. So certain men are recruited to reinvent the language.”
“I don’t make up the words, Gary.”
“They don’t explain, they don’t clarify, they don’t express. They’re painkillers. Everything becomes abstract. I admit it’s fascinating in a way. I also admit the problem goes deeper than just saying some crypto-Goebbels in the Pentagon is distorting the language.”
“Somebody has to get it before the public regardless of language. It has to be aired in public debate, clinically, the whole thing, no punches pulled, no matter how terrible the subject is and regardless of language. It has to be discussed.”
“I don’t necessarily disagree.”
“Look, Gary, if I go out and talk to different groups about this sort of thing, it doesn’t make me some kind of monster who likes to expound or whatever the word is on the consequences of nuclear exchange, who likes to stand up there before a group and talk about mass death and all the rest of it. If I try to inform people so they’ll do something about the situation, the gravity of it, then I’m performing a service, or at least it seems to me. I’m not some kind of monstrous creature who enjoys talking about the spectacle of megadeath, the unprecedented scale of this kind of thing. It has to be talked about and expounded on. It has to be described for people, clinically and graphically, so they’ll know just what it is they’re facing.”
“I don’t necessarily disagree, major.”
“The greatest thrill of my life was getting a ride in the XB-seventy. That was the greatest thrill of my life.”
*
“Weapons technology is so specialized that nobody has to feel any guilt. Responsibility is distributed too thinly for that. It’s the old warriors like myself who have to take the blame for what the so-called technocrats and multi-dimensional men are up to.”
*
“What did you want to see me about exactly?”
“Just nuclear war, sir. What it might be like.”
*
“First to sixth hour after detonation the ground-zero circle is drenched with fallout. By the end of the first day the dose-rate begins to slow down. After a few months it slows down considerably. It all depends on the megatons, the fission yield, air or surface burst, wind velocity, mean pressure altitude, descent time, median particle size.”
*
“Ten megatons of fission produce one million curies of strontium ninety. What does that do to milk calcium levels? There’s a factor-four discrimination against strontium in the human body. Newly forming bone attains a level eight times greater than the level that’s acceptable. Then there’s cerium one forty-four, plutonium two thirty-nine, barium one-forty. What else have we got? Zinc sixty-five in fish. Also radioiodine. That’s milk, children, thyroid cancer.”
*
“The average lethal mutation in an autosome persists for twenty-two generations.”
*
“The aging process, the natural aging process means there’s a slowdown in cell turnover, cellular turnover. Now you get a cell population exposed to a particular radiation dose and what you have is an aggravation of the slowdown thing, the radiation on top of the natural degenerative body process. The average life span undergoes a decrease. If you’re exposed to three-hundred-R whole-body radiation, say within seven days of when the thing hits, and then say another hundred R over the entire first year, you lose about eleven years, you undergo a life-span reduction of eleven years. Sublethal doses also cause reproduction problems. There are problems with microcephalic offspring. There are abnormal terminations and stillbirths. There’s a problem with inferior skeletal maturation of male and female progeny. There is formation of abnormal lens tissue in offspring. There are chromosome breaks. There is sterility of course. There is general reduction of body size of male offspring six years of age and under. However, the Japanese data indicates that congenital malformation frequency would not necessarily vary from the norm as far as the first post-bomb generation is concerned.”
*
“The rate is six per thousand per one hundred R. That’s twenty-four hundred lethal genetic events per four hundred thousand people exposed to one hundred roentgens. Hiroshima supports this formula.”
*
The sun. The desert. The sky. The silence. The flat stones. The insects. “The wind and the clouds. The moon. The stars. The west and east. The song, the color, the smell of the earth.
I headed back to campus through the desert. The sun was low, swept by slowly moving clouds in its decline, a crust of moon also visible, more pure in silence than the setting sun. I walked quickly, the only moving thing. Nothing else stirred, not even waning light folding over stone and not the slightest flick of an insect at the perimeter of vision. The sound of my feet was the only sound, my body all there was of moving parts. I counted cadence for a few beats in a pleasantly regimental voice, nonchalant and southern. The wind was light and dry. The plants did not move in the wind. I remembered the black stone, the stone painted black. I wondered if I’d be able to find it. It
was important at that moment to come upon something that could be defined in one sense only, something not probable or variable, a thing unalterably itself. I ruled out the stone, too rich in enigma. I began counting cadence again. I managed the southern accent fairly well. I had a talent for accents, although I didn’t make use of it very often because it seemed too easy a way to get people to laugh. I marched a bit longer. Then I saw something that terrified me. I stood absolutely still, as if motion might impede my understanding of this moment. It was three yards in front of me, excrement, a low mound of it, simple shit, nothing more, yet strange and vile in this wilderness, perhaps the one thing that did not betray its definition. I tried not to look any longer. I held my breath, fearing whatever smell might still be clinging to that spot. I wanted my senses to deny this experience, leaving it for wind and dust. There was the graven art of a curse in that sight. It was overwhelming, a terminal act, nullity in the very word, shit, as of dogs squatting near partly eaten bodies, rot repeating itself; defecation, as of old women in nursing homes fouling their beds; feces, as of specimen, sample, analysis, diagnosis, bleak assessments of disease in the bowels; dung, as of dry straw erupting with microscopic eggs; excrement, as of final matter voided, the chemical stink of self discontinued; offal, as of butchered animals’ intestines slick with shit and blood; shit everywhere, shit in life cycle, shit as earth as food as shit, wise men sitting impassively in shit, armies retreating in that stench, shit as history, holy men praying to shit, scientists tasting it, volumes to be compiled on color and texture and scent, shit’s infinite treachery, everywhere this whisper of inexistence. I hurried toward campus. All around me the day was ending. I crossed the highway and walked along the side of the road. There was a car in the distance, coming toward me. The wind picked up briefly. The low clouds moved across the horizon. In time the college’s buildings would come into view. I looked down at the road as I walked. The wind picked up again. I thought of men embedded in the ground, all killed, billions, flesh cauterized into the earth, bits of bone and hair and nails, man-planet, a fresh intelligence revolving through the system. Once again I rebuked myself for misspent reflections. I could hear the car now, just barely, a small murderous hum, as of unnamed sounds at the end of a hall. Perhaps there is no silence. Or maybe it’s just that time is too compact to allow for silence to be felt. But in some form of void, freed from consciousness, the mind remakes itself. What we must know must be learned from blanked-out pages. To begin to reword the overflowing world. To subtract and disjoin. To re-recite the alphabet. To make elemental lists. To call something by its name and need no other sound. I looked up. The car passed me, an army staff vehicle with a large circular antenna. Soon the campus lights were visible and I stopped for a few seconds, watching the day burn out.
The sun. The desert. The sky. The silence. The flat stones. The insects. The wind and the clouds. The moon. The stars. The west and east. The song, the color, the smell of the earth.
Blast area. Fire area. Body-burn area.
17
MYNA CORBETT SAT next to me in our exobiology class. The instructor was a little man named Alan Zapalac, who liked to be called Zap. He was about five feet four inches tall, not much older than the rest of us, and very mobile in his teaching methods. He had a distinctly limited stride, moving back and forth across the front of the room as he spoke, sometimes stalking the aisles. He spoke quickly, flowing over his own words, laughing almost in embarrassment when he said something he knew was quite perceptive. He waved his arms a lot and smiled maniacally at our more ridiculous statements. Every so often he sat on top of his desk or on the windowsill, his small feet pedaling the air.
“Formic acid trickles through the great halls of the universe. Way out there the thing is evolving, has evolved, is about to evolve, whatever synthesis you can guess at, methane, ammonia, hydrogen, water vapor, all acted on by present or unknown forms of energy to form amino acids which in turn are developed into proteins which in turn are acted on by nucleic acids to give us life in neon lettering across the sky, what harmony, what religion. Dextrorotation, think of it. I look at your faces and see no sign that this word rings any kind of bell. Somebody give me a sign. The person making any kind of intelligible comment gets to clap the erasers after class. The real point is how to grasp it, how to get beyond pure formulations and discussions of isotope content and get into the mystery of it. Four point five billion years. Science is religion, did you know that? Consider what it is we’re talking about. Earthly origins, meteorites dropping from the heavens, creation of the solar system. But in approaching each other to discuss this thing we have to get through all the barriers imposed by all the allied sciences and disciplines — that of multiple definitions, that of cross-references nobody’s even begun to put in any coherent form, that of terminologies which are untranslatable, that of expensive duplications, that of inconsistencies in even the most sophisticated testing equipment, that of speed outrunning itself in terms of who in what discipline is developing unforeseen procedures which completely wipe out so-and-so in what other discipline. Let me tell you about my childhood in Oregon.”
Myna had a few words with Zapalac after class and then we left with two friends of hers, sisters, Esther and Vera Chalk, and had a picnic behind the Quonset hut. Myna had made meatless and breadless organic sandwiches; one of the Chalk girls brought along raw carrots and celery tonic. The sisters complimented Myna on her funky crystal-beaded suede dress. Then the three of them talked about me as I lay on the blanket with my arms crossed over my eyes. They said nice things mostly, how well-built I was, how my nose was slightly off-line in a pleasant way. Esther lifted my arms off my face during the part about the nose; she wanted to confirm something. Then we ate lunch and listened to Myna read a short story about a solar system inhabited by oxycephalic creatures who give birth to their own mothers. When it was over, Vera Chalk poured her tonic into a plastic cup.
“Zapalac gives me goose bumps,” she said.
“I just adore that little man,” Esther said. “He conveys a real primitive-appeal type thing.”
“Did you hear him on electron bombardment? I swear he made poetry out of it.”
“I like his teeth,” Myna said.
“They’re real white,” Esther said.
“It’s not that so much. It’s how small they are.”
“Remember daddy’s teeth?” Vera said.
“They were gruesome.”
“They were horse teeth. Gaa. I have a shit fit just thinking about them. Gaa.”
“They were gruesome beyond belief. They were the perfect teeth for someone like him.”
“My father’s teeth are okay,” Myna said. “It’s the rest of him.”
“Raw carrots are good for the teeth,” Esther said. “Most people think it’s carrots for the eyesight, milk for the teeth. But it’s dumb to subdivide things that way. Carrots nourish the body and all the extensions of the body. It’s carrots for whole-body harmony.”
“She’s into carrots pretty heavy,” Vera said.
“How you chew them’s important. You sort of project your jaw outward and then chomp down hard. You’re supposed to think of the numeral seventeen while you’re chewing them. The numeral seventeen is a numeral of immortal life. Raw vegetables have a link-up with certain forms of numerology.”
“I don’t know how Zapalac’s teeth could chew anything,” Myna said. “They’re so small and tiny. I picture him eating a lot of soup and a lot of strained foods.”
“Tell them about daddy’s thumbs,” Vera said.
“Don’t remind me please.”
“Our daddy had these gross thumbs. They were huge. They were immense, Gary. And they were so ugly they’d make you physically sick just to look at them. But we used to sneak little looks anyway and we were always afraid he’d catch us.”
