by Don DeLillo
“That’s what we’re supposed to believe,” Heinrich said. “If they released the true findings, there’d be billions of dollars in lawsuits. Not to mention demonstrations, panic, violence and social disorder.”
He seemed to take pleasure in the prospect. Babette said, “That’s a little extreme, isn’t it?”
“What’s extreme, what I said or what would happen?”
“Both. There’s no reason to think the results aren’t true as published.”
“Do you really believe that?” he said.
“Why shouldn’t I believe it?”
“Industry would collapse if the true results of any of these investigations were released.”
“What investigations?”
“The ones that are going on all over the country.”
“That’s the point,” she said. “Every day on the news there’s another toxic spill. Cancerous solvents from storage tanks, arsenic from smokestacks, radioactive water from power plants. How serious can it be if it happens all the time? Isn’t the definition of a serious event based on the fact that it’s not an everyday occurrence?”
The two girls looked at Heinrich, anticipating a surgically deft rejoinder.
“Forget these spills,” he said. “These spills are nothing.”
This wasn’t the direction any of us had expected him to take. Babette watched him carefully. He cut a lettuce leaf on his salad plate into two equal pieces.
“I wouldn’t say they were nothing,” she said cautiously. “They’re small everyday seepages. They’re controllable. But they’re not nothing. We have to watch them.”
“The sooner we forget these spills, the sooner we can come to grips with the real issue.”
“What’s the real issue?” I said.
He spoke with his mouth full of lettuce and cucumber.
“The real issue is the kind of radiation that surrounds us every day. Your radio, your TV, your microwave oven, your power lines just outside the door, your radar speed-trap on the highway. For years they told us these low doses weren’t dangerous.”
“And now?” Babette said.
We watched him use his spoon to mold the mashed potatoes on his plate into the shape of a volcanic mountain. He poured gravy ever so carefully into the opening at the top. Then he set to work ridding his steak of fat, veins and other imperfections. It occurred to me that eating is the only form of professionalism most people ever attain.
“This is the big new worry,” he said. “Forget spills, fallouts, leakages. It’s the things right around you in your own house that’ll get you sooner or later. It’s the electrical and magnetic fields. Who in this room would believe me if I said that the suicide rate hits an all-time record among people who live near high-voltage power lines? What makes these people so sad and depressed? Just the sight of ugly wires and utility poles? Or does something happen to their brain cells from being exposed to constant rays?”
He immersed a piece of steak in the gravy that sat in the volcanic depression, then put it in his mouth. But he did not begin chewing until he’d scooped some potatoes from the lower slopes and added it to the meat. A tension seemed to be building around the question of whether he could finish the gravy before the potatoes collapsed.
“Forget headaches and fatigue,” he said as he chewed. “What about nerve disorders, strange and violent behavior in the home? There are scientific findings. Where do you think all the deformed babies are coming from? Radio and TV, that’s where.”
The girls looked at him admiringly. I wanted to argue with him. I wanted to ask him why I should believe these scientific findings but not the results that indicated we were safe from Nyodene contamination. But what could I say, considering my condition? I wanted to tell him that statistical evidence of the kind he was quoting from was by nature inconclusive and misleading. I wanted to say that he would learn to regard all such catastrophic findings with equanimity as he matured, grew out of his confining literalism, developed a spirit of informed and skeptical inquiry, advanced in wisdom and rounded judgment, got old, declined, died.
But I only said, “Terrifying data is now an industry in itself. Different firms compete to see how badly they can scare us.”
“I’ve got news for you,” he said. “The brain of a white rat releases calcium ions when it’s exposed to radio-frequency waves. Does anyone at this table know what that means?”
Denise looked at her mother.
“Is this what they teach in school today?” Babette said. “What happened to civics, how a bill becomes a law? The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two sides. I still remember my theorems. The battle of Bunker Hill was really fought on Breed’s Hill. Here’s one. Latvia, Estonia and Lithuania.”
“Was it the Monitor or the Merrimac that got sunk?” I said.
“I don’t know but it was Tippecanoe and Tyler too.”
“What was that?” Steffie said.
“I want to say he was an Indian running for office. Here’s one. Who invented the mechanical reaper and how did it change the face of American agriculture?”
“I’m trying to remember the three kinds of rock,” I said. “Igneous, sedimentary and something else.”
“What about your logarithms? What about the causes of economic discontent leading up to the Great Crash? Here’s one. Who won the Lincoln-Douglas debates? Careful. It’s not as obvious as it seems.”
“Anthracite and bituminous,” I said. “Isosceles and scalene.”
The mysterious words came back to me in a rush of confused schoolroom images.
“Here’s one. Angles, Saxons and Jutes.”
Déjà vu was still a problem in the area. A toll-free hotline had been set up. There were counselors on duty around the clock to talk to people who were troubled by recurring episodes. Perhaps déjà vu and other tics of the mind and body were the durable products of the airborne toxic event. But over a period of time it became possible to interpret such things as signs of a deep-reaching isolation we were beginning to feel. There was no large city with a vaster torment we might use to see our own dilemma in some soothing perspective. No large city to blame for our sense of victimization. No city to hate and fear. No panting megacenter to absorb our woe, to distract us from our unremitting sense of time—time as the agent of our particular ruin, our chromosome breaks, hysterically multiplying tissue.
“Baba,” I whispered between her breasts, that night in bed.
Although we are for a small town remarkably free of resentment, the absence of a polestar metropolis leaves us feeling in our private moments a little lonely.
24
IT WAS THE FOLLOWING NIGHT that I discovered the Dylar. An amber bottle of lightweight plastic. It was taped to the underside of the radiator cover in the bathroom. I found it when the radiator began knocking and I removed the cover to study the valve in an earnest and methodical way, trying to disguise to myself the helplessness I felt.
I went at once to find Denise. She was in bed watching TV. When I told her what I’d found we went quietly into the bathroom and looked at the bottle together. It was easy to see the word Dylar through the transparent tape. Neither of us touched a thing, so great was our surprise at finding the medication concealed in this manner. We regarded the little tablets with solemn concern. Then we exchanged a look fraught with implication.
Without a word we replaced the radiator cover, bottle intact, and went back to Denise’s room. The voice at the end of the bed said: “Meanwhile here is a quick and attractive lemon garnish suitable for any sea food.”
Denise sat on the bed, looking past me, past the TV set, past the posters and souvenirs. Her eyes were narrowed, her face set in a thoughtful scowl.
“We say nothing to Baba.”
“All right,” I said.
“She’ll only say she doesn’t remember why she put it there.”
“What is Dylar? That’s what I want to know. There are only three or four places she could have gone to get the pr
escription filled, within a reasonable distance. A pharmacist can tell us what the stuff is for. I’ll get in the car first thing in the morning.”
“I already did that,” she said.
“When?”
“Around Christmas. I went to three drugstores and talked to the Indians behind the counters in the back.”
“I think they’re Pakistanis.”
“Whatever.”
“What did they tell you about Dylar?”
“Never heard of it.”
“Did you ask them to look it up? They must have lists of the most recent medications. Supplements, updates.”
“They looked. It’s not on any list.”
“Unlisted,” I said.
“We’ll have to call her doctor.”
“I’ll call him now. I’ll call him at home.”
“Surprise him,” she said, with a certain ruthlessness.
“If I get him at home, he won’t be screened by an answering service, a receptionist, a nurse, the young and good-humored doctor who shares his suite of offices and whose role in life is to treat the established doctor’s rejects. Once you’re shunted from the older doctor to the younger doctor, it means that you and your disease are second-rate.”
“Call him at home,” she said. “Wake him up. Trick him into telling us what we want to know.”
The only phone was in the kitchen. I ambled down the hall, glancing into our bedroom to make sure Babette was still there, ironing blouses and listening to a call-in show on the radio, a form of entertainment she’d recently become addicted to. I went down to the kitchen, found the doctor’s name in the phone book and dialed his home number.
The doctor’s name was Hookstratten. It sounded sort of German. I’d met him once—a stooped man with a bird-wattled face and deep voice. Denise had said to trick him but the only way to do that was within a context of honesty and truthfulness. If I pretended to be a stranger seeking information about Dylar, he would either hang up or tell me to come into the office.
He answered on the fourth or fifth ring. I told him who I was and said I was concerned about Babette. Concerned enough to call him at home—an admittedly rash act but one I hoped he’d be able to understand. I said I was fairly sure it was the medication he’d prescribed for her that was causing the problem.
“What problem?”
“Memory lapse.”
“You would call a doctor at home to talk about memory lapse. If everyone with memory lapse called a doctor at home, what would we have? The ripple effect would be tremendous.”
I told him the lapses were frequent.
“Frequent. I know your wife. This is the wife who came to me one night with a crying child. ‘My child is crying.’ She would come to a medical doctor who is a private corporation and ask him to treat a child for crying. Now I pick up the phone and it’s the husband. You would call a doctor in his home after ten o‘clock at night. You would say to him, ‘Memory lapse.’ Why not tell me she has gas? Call me at home for gas?”
“Frequent and prolonged, doctor. It has to be the medication.”
“What medication?”
“Dylar.”
“Never heard of it.”
“A small white tablet. Comes in an amber bottle.”
“You would describe a tablet as small and white and expect a doctor to respond, at home, after ten at night. Why not tell me it is round? This is crucial to our case.”
“It’s an unlisted drug.”
“I never saw it. I certainly never prescribed it for your wife. She’s a very healthy woman so far as it’s within my ability to ascertain such things, being subject as I am to the same human failings as the next fellow.”
This sounded like a malpractice disclaimer. Maybe he was reading it from a printed card like a detective informing a suspect of his constitutional rights. I thanked him, hung up, called my own doctor at home. He answered on the seventh ring, said he thought Dylar was an island in the Persian Gulf, one of those oil terminals crucial to the survival of the West. A woman did the weather in the background.
I went upstairs and told Denise not to worry. I would take a tablet from the bottle and have it analyzed by someone in the chemistry department at the college. I waited for her to tell me she’d already done that. But she just nodded grimly and I headed down the hall, stopping in Heinrich’s room to say goodnight. He was doing chinning exercises in the closet, using a bar clamped to the doorway.
“Where did you get that?”
“It’s Mercator’s.”
“Who’s that?”
“He’s this senior I hang around with now. He’s almost nineteen and he’s still in high school. To give you some idea.”
“Some idea of what?”
“How big he is. He bench-presses these awesome amounts.”
“Why do you want to chin? What does chinning accomplish?”
“What does anything accomplish? Maybe I just want to build up my body to compensate for other things.”
“What other things?”
“My hairline’s getting worse, to name just one.”
“It’s not getting worse. Ask Baba if you don’t believe me. She has a sharp eye for things like that.”
“My mother told me to see a dermatologist.”
“I don’t think that’s necessary at this stage.”
“I already went.”
“What did he say?”
“It was a she. My mother told me to go to a woman.”
“What did she say?”
“She said I have a dense donor site.”
“What does that mean?”
“She can take hair from other parts of my head and surgically implant it where it’s needed. Not that it makes any difference. I’d just as soon be bald. I can easily see myself totally bald. There are kids my age with cancer. Their hair falls out from chemotherapy. Why should I be different?”
He was standing in the closet peering out at me. I decided to change the subject.
“If you really think chinning helps, why don’t you stand outside the closet and do your exercises facing in? Why stand in that dark musty space?”
“If you think this is strange, you ought to see what Mercator’s doing.”
“What’s he doing?”
“He’s training to break the world endurance record for sitting in a cage full of poisonous snakes, for the Guinness Book of Records. He goes to Glassboro three times a week where they have this exotic pet shop. The owner lets him feed the mamba and the puff adder. To get him accustomed. Totally forget your North American rattlesnake. The puff adder is the most venomous snake in the world.”
“Every time I see newsfilm of someone in his fourth week of sitting in a cage full of snakes, I find myself wishing he’d get bitten.”
“So do I,” Heinrich said.
“Why is that?”
“He’s asking for it.”
“That’s right. Most of us spend our lives avoiding danger. Who do these people think they are?”
“They ask for it. Let them get it.”
I paused a while, savoring the rare moment of agreement.
“What else does your friend do to train?”
“He sits for long periods in one place, getting his bladder accustomed. He’s down to two meals a day. He sleeps sitting up, two hours at a time. He wants to train himself to wake up gradually, without sudden movements, which could startle a mamba.”
“It seems a strange ambition.”
“Mambas are sensitive.”
“But if it makes him happy.”
“He thinks he’s happy but it’s just a nerve cell in his brain that’s getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.”
I got out of bed in the middle of the night and went to the small room at the end of the hall to watch Steffie and Wilder sleep. I remained at this task, motionless, for nearly an hour, feeling refreshed and expanded in unnameable ways.
I was surprised, entering our bedroom, to find Babette standing at a window look
ing out into the steely night. She gave no sign that she’d noticed my absence from the bed and did not seem to hear when I climbed back in, burying myself beneath the covers.
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 neuro-chemist 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.
