by Don DeLillo
At noon a rumor swept the city. Technicians were being lowered in slings from army helicopters in order to plant microorganisms in the core of the toxic cloud. These organisms were genetic recombinations that had a built-in appetite for the particular toxic agents in Nyodene D. They would literally consume the billowing cloud, eat it up, break it down, decompose it.
This stunning innovation, so similar in nature to something we might come across in the National Enquirer or the Star, made us feel a little weary, glutted in an insubstantial way, as after a junk food spree. I wandered through the room, as I’d done in the Boy Scout barracks, moving from one conversational knot to another. No one seemed to know how a group of microorganisms could consume enough toxic material to rid the sky of such a dense and enormous cloud. No one knew what would happen to the toxic waste once it was eaten or to the microorganisms once they were finished eating.
Everywhere in the room children were striking mock karate poses. When I got back to our area, Babette sat alone in a scarf and knitted cap.
“I don’t like this latest rumor,” she said.
“Too far-fetched? You think there’s no chance a bunch of organisms can eat their way through the toxic event.”
“I think there’s every chance in the world. I don’t doubt for a minute they have these little organisms packaged in cardboard with plastic see-through bubbles, like ballpoint refills. That’s what worries me.”
“The very existence of custom-made organisms.”
“The very idea, the very existence, the wondrous ingenuity. On the one hand I definitely admire it. Just to think there are people out there who can conjure such things. A cloud-eating microbe or whatever. There is just no end of surprise. All the amazement that’s left in the world is microscopic. But I can live with that. What scares me is have they thought it through completely?”
“You feel a vague foreboding,” I said.
“I feel they’re working on the superstitious part of my nature. Every advance is worse than the one before because it makes me more scared.”
“Scared of what?”
“The sky, the earth, I don’t know.”
“The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.”
“Why is that?” she said.
At three p.m. Steffie was still wearing the protective mask. She walked along the walls, a set of pale green eyes, discerning, alert, secretive. She watched people as if they could not see her watching, as if the mask covered her eyes instead of leaving them exposed. People thought she was playing a game. They winked at her, said hi. I was certain it would take at least another day before she felt safe enough to remove the protective device. She was solemn about warnings, interpreted danger as a state too lacking in detail and precision to be confined to a certain time and place. I knew we would simply have to wait for her to forget the amplified voice, the sirens, the night ride through the woods. In the meantime the mask, setting off her eyes, dramatized her sensitivity to episodes of stress and alarm. It seemed to bring her closer to the real concerns of the world, honed her in its wind.
At seven p.m. a man carrying a tiny TV set began to walk slowly through the room, making a speech as he went. He was middle-aged or older, a clear-eyed and erect man wearing a fur-lined cap with lowered flaps. He held the TV set well up in the air and out away from his body and during the course of his speech he turned completely around several times as he walked in order to display the blank screen to all of us in the room.
“There’s nothing on network,” he said to us. “Not a word, not a picture. On the Glassboro channel we rate fifty-two words by actual count. No film footage, no live report. Does this kind of thing happen so often that nobody cares anymore? Don’t those people know what we’ve been through? We were scared to death. We still are. We left our homes, we drove through blizzards, we saw the cloud. It was a deadly specter, right there above us. Is it possible nobody gives substantial coverage to such a thing? Half a minute, twenty seconds? Are they telling us it was insignificant, it was piddling? Are they so callous? Are they so bored by spills and contaminations and wastes? Do they think this is just television? ‘There’s too much television already—why show more?’ Don’t they know it’s real? Shouldn’t the streets be crawling with cameramen and soundmen and reporters? Shouldn’t we be yelling out the window at them, ‘Leave us alone, we’ve been through enough, get out of here with your vile instruments of intrusion.’ Do they have to have two hundred dead, rare disaster footage, before they come flocking to a given site in their helicopters and network limos? What exactly has to happen before they stick microphones in our faces and hound us to the doorsteps of our homes, camping out on our lawns, creating the usual media circus? Haven’t we earned the right to despise their idiot questions? Look at us in this place. We are quarantined. We are like lepers in medieval times. They won’t let us out of here. They leave food at the foot of the stairs and tiptoe away to safety. This is the most terrifying time of our lives. Everything we love and have worked for is under serious threat. But we look around and see no response from the official organs of the media. The airborne toxic event is a horrifying thing. Our fear is enormous. Even if there hasn’t been great loss of life, don’t we deserve some attention for our suffering, our human worry, our terror? Isn’t fear news?”
Applause. A sustained burst of shouting and hand-clapping. The speaker slowly turned one more time, displaying the little TV to his audience. When he completed his turn, he was face to face with me, no more than ten inches away. A change came over his wind-beaten face, a slight befuddlement, the shock of some minor fact jarred loose.
“I saw this before,” he finally said to me.
“Saw what before?”
“You were standing there, I was standing here. Like a leap into the fourth dimension. Your features incredibly sharp and clear. Light hair, washed-out eyes, pinkish nose, nondescript mouth and chin, sweaty-type complexion, average jowls, slumped shoulders, big hands and feet. It all happened before. Steam hissing in the pipes. Tiny little hairs standing out in your pores. That identical look on your face.”
“What look?” I said.
“Haunted, ashen, lost.”
It was nine days before they told us we could go back home.
III
Dylarama
22
THE SUPERMARKET IS FULL of elderly people who look lost among the dazzling hedgerows. Some people are too small to reach the upper shelves; some people block the aisles with their carts; some are clumsy and slow to react; some are forgetful, some confused; some move about muttering with the wary look of people in institutional corridors.
I pushed my cart along the aisle. Wilder sat inside, on the collapsible shelf, trying to grab items whose shape and radiance excited his system of sensory analysis. There were two new developments in the supermarket, a butcher’s corner and a bakery, and the oven aroma of bread and cake combined with the sight of a bloodstained man pounding at strips of living veal was pretty exciting for us all.
“Dristan Ultra, Dristan Ultra.”
The other excitement was the snow. Heavy snow predicted, later today or tonight. It brought out the crowds, those who feared the roads would soon be impassable, those too old to walk safely in snow and ice, those who thought the storm would isolate them in their homes for days or weeks. Older people in particular were susceptible to news of impending calamity as it was forecast on TV by grave men standing before digital radar maps or pulsing photographs of the planet. Whipped into a frenzy, they hurried to the supermarket to stock up before the weather mass moved in. Snow watch, said the forecasters. Snow alert. Snowplows. Snow mixed with sleet and freezing rain. It was already snowing in the west. It was already moving to the east. They gripped this news like a pygmy skull. Snow showers. Snow flurries. Snow warnings. Driving snow. Blowing snow. Deep and drifting snow. Accumulations, devastations. The old people shopped in a panic. When TV didn’t fill them with rage, it scared them half to death. They whispered to each
other in the checkout lines. Traveler’s advisory, zero visibility. When does it hit? How many inches? How many days? They became secretive, shifty, appeared to withhold the latest and worst news from others, appeared to blend a cunning with their haste, tried to hurry out before someone questioned the extent of their purchases. Hoarders in a war. Greedy, guilty.
I saw Murray in the generic food area, carrying a Teflon skillet. I stopped to watch him for a while. He talked to four or five people, occasionally pausing to scrawl some notes in a spiral book. He managed to write with the skillet wedged awkwardly under his arm.
Wilder called out to him, a tree-top screech, and I wheeled the cart over.
“How is that good woman of yours?”
“Fine,” I said.
“Does this kid talk yet?”
“Now and then. He likes to pick his spots.”
“You know that matter you helped me with? The Elvis Presley power struggle?”
“Sure. I came in and lectured.”
“It turns out, tragically, that I would have won anyway.”
“What happened?”
“Cotsakis, my rival, is no longer among the living.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means he’s dead.”
“Dead?”
“Lost in the surf off Malibu. During the term break. I found out an hour ago. Came right here.”
I was suddenly aware of the dense environmental texture. The automatic doors opened and closed, breathing abruptly. Colors and odors seemed sharper. The sound of gliding feet emerged from a dozen other noises, from the sublittoral drone of maintenance systems, from the rustle of newsprint as shoppers scanned their horoscopes in the tabloids up front, from the whispers of elderly women with talcumed faces, from the steady rattle of cars going over a loose manhole cover just outside the entrance. Gliding feet. I heard them clearly, a sad numb shuffle in every aisle.
“How are the girls?” Murray said.
“Fine.”
“Back in school?”
“Yes.”
“Now that the scare is over.”
“Yes. Steffie no longer wears her protective mask.”
“I want to buy some New York cuts,” he said, gesturing toward the butcher.
The phrase seemed familiar, but what did it mean?
“Unpackaged meat, fresh bread,” he went on. “Exotic fruits, rare cheeses. Products from twenty countries. It’s like being at some cross-roads of the ancient world, a Persian bazaar or boom town on the Tigris. How are you, Jack?”
What did he mean, how are you?
“Poor Cotsakis, lost in the surf,” I said. “That enormous man.”
“That’s the one.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“He was big all right.”
“Enormously so.”
“I don’t know what to say either. Except better him than me.”
“He must have weighed three hundred pounds.”
“Oh, easily.”
“What do you think, two ninety, three hundred?”
“Three hundred easily.”
“Dead. A big man like that.”
“What can we say?”
“I thought I was big.”
“He was on another level. You’re big on your level.”
“Not that I knew him. I didn’t know him at all.”
“It’s better not knowing them when they die. It’s better them than us.”
“To be so enormous. Then to die.”
“To be lost without a trace. To be swept away.”
“I can picture him so clearly.”
“It’s strange in a way, isn’t it,” he said, “that we can picture the dead.”
I took Wilder along the fruit bins. The fruit was gleaming and wet, hard-edged. There was a self-conscious quality about it. It looked carefully observed, like four-color fruit in a guide to photography. We veered right at the plastic jugs of spring water and headed for the checkout. I liked being with Wilder. The world was a series of fleeting gratifications. He took what he could, then immediately forgot it in the rush of a subsequent pleasure. It was this forgetfulness I envied and admired.
The woman at the terminal asked him a number of questions, providing her own replies in a babyish voice.
Some of the houses in town were showing signs of neglect. The park benches needed repair, the broken streets needed resurfacing. Signs of the times. But the supermarket did not change, except for the better. It was well-stocked, musical and bright. This was the key, it seemed to us. Everything was fine, would continue to be fine, would eventually get even better as long as the supermarket did not slip.
Early that evening I drove Babette to her class in posture. We stopped on the parkway overpass and got out to look at the sunset. Ever since the airborne toxic event, the sunsets had become almost unbearably beautiful. Not that there was a measurable connection. If the special character of Nyodene Derivative (added to the everyday drift of effluents, pollutants, contaminants and deliriants) had caused this aesthetic leap from already brilliant sunsets to broad towering ruddled visionary skyscapes, tinged with dread, no one had been able to prove it.
“What else can we believe?” Babette said. “How else can we explain?”
“I don’t know.”
“We’re not at the edge of the ocean or desert. We ought to have timid winter sunsets. But look at the blazing sky. It’s so beautiful and dramatic. Sunsets used to last five minutes. Now they last an hour.”
“Why is that?”
“Why is that?” she said.
This spot on the overpass offered a broad prospect west. People had been coming here ever since the first of the new sunsets, parking their own cars, standing around in the bitter wind to chat nervously and look. There were four cars here already, others certain to come. The overpass had become a scenic lookout. The police were reluctant to enforce the parking ban. It was one of those situations, like the olympics for the handicapped, that make all the restrictions seem petty.
Later I drove back to the Congregational church to pick her up. Denise and Wilder came along for the ride. Babette in jeans and legwarmers was a fine and stirring sight. Legwarmers lend a note of paramilitary poise, a hint of archaic warriorhood. When she shoveled snow, she wore a furry headband as well. It made me think of the fifth century A.D. Men standing around campfires speaking in subdued tones in their Turkic and Mongol dialects. Clear skies. The fearless exemplary death of Attila the Hun.
“How was class?” Denise said.
“It’s going so well they want me to teach another course.”
“In what?”
“Jack won’t believe this.”
“In what?” I said.
“Eating and drinking. It’s called Eating and Drinking: Basic Parameters. Which, I admit, is a little more stupid than it absolutely has to be.”
“What could you teach?” Denise said.
“That’s just it. It’s practically inexhaustible. Eat light foods in warm weather. Drink plenty of liquids.”
“But everybody knows that.”
“Knowledge changes every day. People like to have their beliefs reinforced. Don’t lie down after eating a heavy meal. Don’t drink liquor on an empty stomach. If you must swim, wait at least an hour after eating. The world is more complicated for adults than it is for children. We didn’t grow up with all these shifting facts and attitudes. One day they just started appearing. So people need to be reassured by someone in a position of authority that a certain way to do something is the right way or the wrong way, at least for the time being. I’m the closest they could find, that’s all.”
A staticky piece of lint clung to the TV screen.
In bed we lay quietly, my head between her breasts, cushioned as if against some remorseless blow. I was determined not to tell her about the computer verdict. I knew she would be devastated to learn that my death would almost surely precede hers. Her body became the agency of my resolve, my silence. Nightly I move
d toward her breasts, nuzzling into that designated space like a wounded sub into its repair dock. I drew courage from her breasts, her warm mouth, her browsing hands, from the skimming tips of her fingers on my back. The lighter the touch, the more determined I was to keep her from knowing. Only her own desperation could break my will.
Once I almost asked her to put on legwarmers before we made love. But it seemed a request more deeply rooted in pathos than in aberrant sexuality and I thought it might make her suspect that something was wrong.
23
I 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.”
