by Don DeLillo
“I thought this would be a good time to cut down on fatty things,” she said.
“Why now especially?”
“This is a time for discipline, mental toughness. We’re practically at the edge.”
“I think it’s interesting that you regard a possible disaster for yourself, your family and thousands of other people as an opportunity to cut down on fatty foods.”
“You take discipline where you can find it,” she said. “If I don’t eat my yogurt now, I may as well stop buying the stuff forever. Except I think I’ll skip the wheat germ.”
The brand name was foreign-looking. I picked up the jar of wheat germ and examined the label closely.
“It’s German,” I told her. “Eat it.”
There were people in pajamas and slippers. A man with a rifle slung over his shoulder. Kids crawling into sleeping bags. Babette gestured, wanting me to lean closer.
“Let’s keep the radio turned off,” she whispered. “So the girls can’t hear. They haven’t gotten beyond déjà vu. I want to keep it that way.”
“What if the symptoms are real?”
“How could they be real?”
“Why couldn’t they be real?”
“They get them only when they’re broadcast,” she whispered.
“Did Steffie hear about déjà vu on the radio?”
“She must have.”
“How do you know? Were you with her when it was broadcast?”
“I’m not sure.”
“Think hard.”
“I can’t remember.”
“Do you remember telling her what déjà vu means?”
She spooned some yogurt out of the carton, seemed to pause, deep in thought.
“This happened before,” she said finally.
“What happened before?”
“Eating yogurt, sitting here, talking about déjà vu.”
“I don’t want to hear this.”
“The yogurt was on my spoon. I saw it in a flash. The whole experience. Natural, whole-milk, low-fat.”
The yogurt was still on the spoon. I watched her put the spoon to her mouth, thoughtfully, trying to measure the action against the illusion of a matching original. From my squatting position I motioned her to lean closer.
“Heinrich seems to be coming out of his shell,” I whispered.
“Where is he? I haven’t seen him.”
“See that knot of people? He’s right in the middle. He’s telling them what he knows about the toxic event.”
“What does he know?”
“Quite a lot, it turns out.”
“Why didn’t he tell us?” she whispered.
“He’s probably tired of us. He doesn’t think it’s worth his while to be funny and charming in front of his family. That’s the way sons are. We represent the wrong kind of challenge.”
“Funny and charming?”
“I guess he had it in him all the while. It was a question of finding the right time to exercise his gifts.”
She moved closer, our heads almost touching.
“Don’t you think you ought to go over there?” she said. “Let him see you in the crowd. Show him that his father is present at his big moment.”
“He’ll only get upset if he sees me in the crowd.”
“Why?”
“I’m his father.”
“So if you go over there, you’ll ruin things by embarrassing him and cramping his style because of the father-son thing. And if you don’t go over, he’ll never know you saw him in his big moment and he’ll think he has to behave in your presence the way he’s always behaved, sort of peevishly and defensive, instead of in this new, delightful and expansive manner.”
“It’s a double bind.”
“What if I went over?” she whispered.
“He’ll think I sent you.”
“Would that be so awful?”
“He thinks I use you to get him to do what I want.”
“There may be some truth in that, Jack. But then what are stepparents for if they can’t be used in little skirmishes between blood relatives?”
I moved still closer, lowered my voice even more.
“Just a Life Saver,” I said.
“What?”
“Just some saliva that you didn’t know what to do with.”
“It was a Life Saver,” she whispered, making an O with her thumb and index finger.
“Give me one.”
“It was the last one.”
“What flavor—quick”
“Cherry.”
I puckered my lips and made little sucking sounds. The black man with the tracts came over and squatted next to me. We engaged in an earnest and prolonged handshake. He studied me openly, giving the impression that he had traveled this rugged distance, uprooting his family, not to escape the chemical event but to find the one person who would understand what he had to say.
“It’s happening everywhere, isn’t it?”
“More or less,” I said.
“And what’s the government doing about it?”
“Nothing.”
“You said it, I didn’t. There’s only one word in the language to describe what’s being done and you found it exactly. I’m not surprised at all. But when you think about it, what can they do? Because what is coming is definitely coming. No government in the world is big enough to stop it. Does a man like yourself know the size of India’s standing army?”
“One million.”
“I didn’t say it, you did. One million soldiers and they can’t stop it. Do you know who’s got the biggest standing army in the world?”
“It’s either China or Russia, although the Vietnamese ought to be mentioned.”
“Tell me this,” he said. “Can the Vietnamese stop it?”
“No.”
“It’s here, isn’t it? People feel it. We know in our bones. God’s kingdom is coming.”
He was a rangy man with sparse hair and a gap between his two front teeth. He squatted easily, seemed loose-jointed and comfortable. I realized he was wearing a suit and tie with running shoes.
“Are these great days?” he said.
I studied his face, trying to find a clue to the right answer.
“Do you feel it coming? Is it on the way? Do you want it to come?”
He bounced on his toes as he spoke.
“Wars, famines, earthquakes, volcanic eruptions. It’s all beginning to jell. In your own words, is there anything that can stop it from coming once it picks up momentum?”
“No.”
“You said it, I didn’t. Floods, tornados, epidemics of strange new diseases. Is it a sign? Is it the truth? Are you ready?”
“Do people really feel it in their bones?” I said.
“Good news travels fast.”
“Do people talk about it? On your door-to-door visits, do you get the impression they want it?”
“It’s not do they want it. It’s where do I go to sign up. It’s get me out of here right now. People ask, ‘Is there seasonal change in God’s kingdom?’ They ask, ‘Are there bridge tolls and returnable bottles?’ In other words I’m saying they’re getting right down to it.”
“You feel it’s a ground swell.”
“A sudden gathering. Exactly put. I took one look and I knew. This is a man who understands.”
“Earthquakes are not up, statistically.”
He gave me a condescending smile. I felt it was richly deserved, although I wasn’t sure why. Maybe it was prissy to be quoting statistics in the face of powerful beliefs, fears, desires.
“How do you plan to spend your resurrection?” he said, as though asking about a long weekend coming up.
“We all get one?”
“You’re either among the wicked or among the saved. The wicked get to rot as they walk down the street. They get to feel their own eyes slide out of their sockets. You’ll know them by their stickiness and lost parts. People tracking slime of their own making. All the flashiness of Armageddon is in
the rotting. The saved know each other by their neatness and reserve. He doesn’t have showy ways is how you know a saved person.”
He was a serious man, he was matter-of-fact and practical, down to his running shoes. I wondered about his eerie self-assurance, his freedom from doubt. Is this the point of Armageddon? No ambiguity, no more doubt. He was ready to run into the next world. He was forcing the next world to seep into my consciousness, stupendous events that seemed matter-of-fact to him, self-evident, reasonable, imminent, true. I did not feel Armageddon in my bones but I worried about all those people who did, who were ready for it, wishing hard, making phone calls and bank withdrawals. If enough people want it to happen, will it happen? How many people are enough people? Why are we talking to each other from this aboriginal crouch?
He handed me a pamphlet called “Twenty Common Mistakes About the End of the World.” I struggled out of the squatting posture, feeling dizziness and back-pain. At the front of the hall a woman was saying something about exposure to toxic agents. Her small voice was almost lost in the shuffling roar of the barracks, the kind of low-level rumble that humans routinely make in large enclosed places. Denise had put down her reference work and was giving me a hard-eyed look. It was the look she usually saved for her father and his latest loss of foothold.
“What’s wrong?” I said to her.
“Didn’t you hear what the voice said?”
“Exposure.”
“That’s right,” she said sharply.
“What’s that got to do with us?”
“Not us,” she said. “You.”
“Why me?”
“Aren’t you the one who got out of the car to fill the gas tank?”
“Where was the airborne event when I did that?”
“Just ahead of us. Don’t you remember? You got back in the car and we went a little ways and then there it was in all those lights.”
“You’re saying when I got out of the car, the cloud may have been close enough to rain all over me.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said impatiently, “but you were practically right in it for about two and a half minutes.”
I made my way up front. Two lines were forming. A to M and N to Z. At the end of each line was a folding table with a microcomputer on it. Technicians milled about, men and women with lapel badges and color-coded armbands. I stood behind the life-jacket-wearing family. They looked bright, happy and well-drilled. The thick orange vests did not seem especially out of place even though we were on more or less dry land, well above sea level, many miles from the nearest ominous body of water. Stark upheavals bring out every sort of quaint aberration by the very suddenness of their coming. Dashes of color and idiosyncrasy marked the scene from beginning to end.
The lines were not long. When I reached the A-to-M desk, the man seated there typed out data on his keyboard. My name, age, medical history, so on. He was a gaunt young man who seemed suspicious of conversation that strayed outside certain unspecified guidelines. Over the left sleeve on his khaki jacket he wore a green armband bearing the word SIMUVAC.
I related the circumstances of my presumed exposure.
“How long were you out there?”
“Two and a half minutes,” I said. “Is that considered long or short?”
“Anything that puts you in contact with actual emissions means we have a situation.”
“Why didn’t the drifting cloud disperse in all that wind and rain?”
“This is not your everyday cirrus. This is a high-definition event. It is packed with dense concentrations of byproduct. You could almost toss a hook in there and tow it out to sea, which I’m exaggerating to make a point.”
“What about people in the car? I had to open the door to get out and get back in.”
“There are known degrees of exposure. I’d say their situation is they’re minimal risks. It’s the two and a half minutes standing right in it that makes me wince. Actual skin and orifice contact. This is Nyodene D. A whole new generation of toxic waste. What we call state of the art. One part per million million can send a rat into a permanent state.”
He regarded me with the grimly superior air of a combat veteran. Obviously he didn’t think much of people whose complacent and overprotected lives did not allow for encounters with brain-dead rats. I wanted this man on my side. He had access to data. I was prepared to be servile and fawning if it would keep him from dropping casually shattering remarks about my degree of exposure and chances for survival.
“That’s quite an armband you’ve got there. What does SIMUVAC mean? Sounds important.”
“Short for simulated evacuation. A new state program they’re still battling over funds for.”
“But this evacuation isn’t simulated. It’s real.”
“We know that. But we thought we could use it as a model.”
“A form of practice? Are you saying you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?”
“We took it right into the streets.”
“How is it going?” I said.
“The insertion curve isn’t as smooth as we would like. There’s a probability excess. Plus which we don’t have our victims laid out where we’d want them if this was an actual simulation. In other words we’re forced to take our victims as we find them. We didn’t get a jump on computer traffic. Suddenly it just spilled out, three-dimensionally, all over the landscape. You have to make allowances for the fact that everything we see tonight is real. There’s a lot of polishing we still have to do. But that’s what this exercise is all about.”
“What about the computers? Is that real data you’re running through the system or is it just practice stuff?”
“You watch,” he said.
He spent a fair amount of time tapping on the keys and then studying coded responses on the data screen—a considerably longer time, it seemed to me, than he’d devoted to the people who’d preceded me in line. In fact I began to feel that others were watching me. I stood with my arms folded, trying to create a picture of an impassive man, someone in line at a hardware store waiting for the girl at the register to ring up his heavy-duty rope. It seemed the only way to neutralize events, to counteract the passage of computerized dots that registered my life and death. Look at no one, reveal nothing, remain still. The genius of the primitive mind is that it can render human helplessness in noble and beautiful ways.
“You’re generating big numbers,” he said, peering at the screen.
“I was out there only two and a half minutes. That’s how many seconds?”
“It’s not just you were out there so many seconds. It’s your whole data profile. I tapped into your history. I’m getting bracketed numbers with pulsing stars.”
“What does that mean?”
“You’d rather not know.”
He made a silencing gesture as if something of particular morbid interest was appearing on the screen. I wondered what he meant when he said he’d tapped into my history. Where was it located exactly? Some state or federal agency, some insurance company or credit firm or medical clearinghouse? What history was he referring to? I’d told him some basic things. Height, weight, childhood diseases. What else did he know? Did he know about my wives, my involvement with Hitler, my dreams and fears?
He had a skinny neck and jug-handle ears to go with his starved skull—the innocent prewar look of a rural murderer.
“Am I going to die?”
“Not as such,” he said.
“What do you mean?”
“Not in so many words.”
“How many words does it take?”
“It’s not a question of words. It’s a question of years. We’ll know more in fifteen years. In the meantime we definitely have a situation.”
“What will we know in fifteen years?”
“If you’re still alive at the time, we’ll know that much more than we do now. Nyodene D. has a life span of thirty years. You’ll have made it halfway through.”
“I
thought it was forty years.”
“Forty years in the soil. Thirty years in the human body.”
“So, to outlive this substance, I will have to make it into my eighties. Then I can begin to relax.”
“Knowing what we know at this time.”
“But the general consensus seems to be that we don’t know enough at this time to be sure of anything.”
“Let me answer like so. If I was a rat I wouldn’t want to be anywhere within a two hundred mile radius of the airborne event.”
“What if you were a human?”
He looked at me carefully. I stood with my arms folded, staring over his head toward the front door of the barracks. To look at him would be to declare my vulnerability.
“I wouldn’t worry about what I can’t see or feel,” he said. “I’d go ahead and live my life. Get married, settle down, have kids. There’s no reason you can’t do these things, knowing what we know.”
“But you said we have a situation.”
“I didn’t say it. The computer did. The whole system says it. It’s what we call a massive data-base tally. Gladney, J. A. K. I punch in the name, the substance, the exposure time and then I tap into your computer history. Your genetics, your personals, your medicals, your psychologicals, your police-and-hospitals. It comes back pulsing stars. This doesn’t mean anything is going to happen to you as such, at least not today or tomorrow. It just means you are the sum total of your data. No man escapes that.”
“And this massive so-called tally is not a simulation despite that armband you’re wearing. It is real.”
“It is real,” he said.
I stood absolutely still. If they thought I was already dead, they might be inclined to leave me alone. I think I felt as I would if a doctor had held an X-ray to the light showing a star-shaped hole at the center of one of my vital organs. Death has entered. It is inside you. You are said to be dying and yet are separate from the dying, can ponder it at your leisure, literally see on the X-ray photograph or computer screen the horrible alien logic of it all. It is when death is rendered graphically, is televised so to speak, that you sense an eerie separation between your condition and yourself. A network of symbols has been introduced, an entire awesome technology wrested from the gods. It makes you feel like a stranger in your own dying.
