by Don DeLillo
“Don’t use that term. You know how I feel about that usage.”
“He effected what is called entry. In other words he inserted himself. One minute he was fully dressed, putting the car rental keys on the dresser. The next minute he was inside you.”
“No one was inside anyone. That is stupid usage. I did what I had to do. I was remote. I was operating outside myself. It was a capitalist transaction. You cherish the wife who tells you everything. I am doing my best to be that person.”
“All right, I’m only trying to understand. How many times did you go to this motel?”
“More or less on a continuing basis for some months. That was the agreement.”
I felt heat rising along the back of my neck. I watched her carefully. A sadness showed in her eyes. I lay back and looked at the ceiling. The radio came on. She began to cry softly.
“There’s some Jell-O with banana slices,” I said. “Steffie made it.”
“She’s a good girl.”
“I can easily get you some.”
“No, thank you.”
“Why did the radio come on?”
“The auto-timer is broken. I’ll take it to the shop tomorrow.”
“I’ll take it.”
“It’s all right,” she said. “It’s no trouble. I can easily take it.”
“Did you enjoy having sex with him?”
“I only remember the TV up near the ceiling, aimed down at us.”
“Did he have a sense of humor? I know women appreciate men who can joke about sex. I can’t, unfortunately, and after this I don’t think there’s much chance I’ll be able to learn.”
“It’s better if you know him as Mr. Gray. That’s all. He’s not tall, short, young or old. He doesn’t laugh or cry. It’s for your own good.”
“I have a question. Why didn’t Gray Research run tests on animals? Animals must be better than computers in some respects.”
“That’s just the point. No animal has this condition. This is a human condition. Animals fear many things, Mr. Gray said. But their brains aren’t sophisticated enough to accommodate this particular state of mind.”
For the first time I began to get an inkling of what she’d been talking about all along. My body went cold. I felt hollow inside. I rose from my supine position, once again propping myself on an elbow to look down at her. She started to cry again.
“You have to tell me, Babette. You’ve taken me this far, put me through this much. I have to know. What’s the condition?”
The longer she wept, the more certain I became that I knew what she was going to say. I felt an impulse to get dressed and leave, take a room somewhere until this whole thing blew over. Babette raised her face to me, sorrowing and pale, her eyes showing a helpless desolation. We faced each other, propped on elbows, like a sculpture of lounging philosophers in a classical academy. The radio turned itself off.
“I’m afraid to die,” she said. “I think about it all the time. It won’t go away.”
“Don’t tell me this. This is terrible.”
“I can’t help it. How can I help it?”
“I don’t want to know. Save it for our old age. You’re still young, you get plenty of exercise. This is not a reasonable fear.”
“It haunts me, Jack. I can’t get it off my mind. I know I’m not supposed to experience such a fear so consciously and so steadily. What can I do? It’s just there. That’s why I was so quick to notice Mr. Gray’s ad in the tabloid I was reading aloud. The headline hit home. FEAR OF DEATH, it said. I think about it all the time. You’re disappointed. I can tell.”
“Disappointed?”
“You thought the condition would be more specific. I wish it was. But a person doesn’t search for months and months to corner the solution to some daily little ailment.”
I tried to talk her out of it.
“How can you be sure it is death you fear? Death is so vague. No one knows what it is, what it feels like or looks like. Maybe you just have a personal problem that surfaces in the form of a great universal subject.”
“What problem?”
“Something you’re hiding from yourself. Your weight maybe.”
“I’ve lost weight. What about my height?”
“I know you’ve lost weight. That’s just my point. You practically ooze good health. You reek of it. Hookstratten confirms this, your own doctor. There must be something else, an underlying problem.”
“What could be more underlying than death?”
I tried to persuade her it was not as serious as she thought.
“Baba, everyone fears death. Why should you be different? You yourself said earlier it is a human condition. There’s no one who has lived past the age of seven who hasn’t worried about dying.”
“At some level everyone fears death. I fear it right up front. I don’t know how or why it happened. But I can’t be the only one or why would Gray Research spend millions on a pill?”
“That’s what I said. You’re not the only one. There are hundreds of thousands of people. Isn’t it reassuring to know that? You’re like the woman on the radio who got phone calls from a missile base. She wanted to find others whose own psychotic experiences would make her feel less isolated.”
“But Mr. Gray said I was extra sensitive to the terror of death. He gave me a battery of tests. That’s why he was eager to use me.”
“This is what I find odd. You concealed your terror for so long. If you’re able to conceal such a thing from a husband and children, maybe it is not so severe.”
“This is not the story of a wife’s deception. You can’t sidestep the true story, Jack. It is too big.”
I kept my voice calm. I spoke to her as one of those reclining philosophers might address a younger member of the academy, someone whose work is promising and fitfully brilliant but perhaps too heavily dependent on the scholarship of the senior fellow.
“Baba, I am the one in this family who is obsessed by death. I have always been the one.”
“You never said.”
“To protect you from worry. To keep you animated, vital and happy. You are the happy one. I am the doomed fool. That’s what I can’t forgive you for. Telling me you’re not the woman I believed you were. I’m hurt, I’m devastated.”
“I always thought of you as someone who might muse on death. You might take walks and muse. But all those times we talked about who will die first, you never said you were afraid.”
“The same goes for you. ‘As soon as the kids are grown.’ You made it sound like a trip to Spain.”
“I do want to die first,” she said, “but that doesn’t mean I’m not afraid. I’m terribly afraid. I’m afraid all the time.”
“I’ve been afraid for more than half my life.”
“What do you want me to say? Your fear is older and wiser than mine?”
“I wake up sweating. I break out in killer sweats.”
“I chew gum because my throat constricts.”
“I have no body. I’m only a mind or a self, alone in a vast space.”
“I seize up,” she said.
“I’m too weak to move. I lack all sense of resolve, determination.”
“I thought about my mother dying. Then she died.”
“I think about everyone dying. Not just myself. I lapse into terrible reveries.”
“I felt so guilty. I thought her death was connected to my thinking about it. I feel the same way about my own death. The more I think about it, the sooner it will happen.”
“How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same
disguise.”
“What if death is nothing but sound?”
“Electrical noise.”
“You hear it forever. Sound all around. How awful.”
“Uniform, white.”
“Sometimes it sweeps over me,” she said. “Sometimes it insinuates itself into my mind, little by little. I try to talk to it. ‘Not now, Death.’ ”
“I lie in the dark looking at the clock. Always odd numbers. One thirty-seven in the morning. Three fifty-nine in the morning.”
“Death is odd-numbered. That’s what the Sikh told me. The holy man in Iron City.”
“You’re my strength, my life-force. How can I persuade you that this is a terrible mistake? I’ve watched you bathe Wilder, iron my gown. These deep and simple pleasures are lost to me now. Don’t you see the enormity of what you’ve done?”
“Sometimes it hits me like a blow,” she said. “I almost physically want to reel.”
“Is this why I married Babette? So she would conceal the truth from me, conceal objects from me, join in a sexual conspiracy at my expense? All plots move in one direction,” I told her grimly.
We held each other tightly for a long time, our bodies clenched in an embrace that included elements of love, grief, tenderness, sex and struggle. How subtly we shifted emotions, found shadings, using the scantest movement of our arms, our loins, the slightest intake of breath, to reach agreement on our fear, to advance our competition, to assert our root desires against the chaos in our souls.
Leaded, unleaded, super unleaded.
We lay naked after love, wet and gleaming. I pulled the covers up over us. We spoke in drowsy whispers for a while. The radio came on.
“I’m right here,” I said. “Whatever you want or need, however difficult, tell me and it’s done.”
“A drink of water.”
“Of course.”
“I’ll go with you,” she said.
“Stay, rest.”
“I don’t want to be alone.”
We put on our robes, went to the bathroom for water. She drank while I pissed. On our way back to the bedroom I put my arm around her and we walked half toppling toward each other, like adolescents on a beach. I waited by the side of the bed as she rearranged the sheets neatly, put the pillows in place. She curled up immediately for sleep but there were still things I wanted to know, things I had to say.
“Precisely what was accomplished by the people at Gray Research?”
“They isolated the fear-of-death part of the brain. Dylar speeds relief to that sector.”
“Incredible.”
“It’s not just a powerful tranquilizer. The drug specifically interacts with neurotransmitters in the brain that are related to the fear of death. Every emotion or sensation has its own neurotransmitters. Mr. Gray found fear of death and then went to work on finding the chemicals that would induce the brain to make its own inhibitors.”
“Amazing and frightening.”
“Everything that goes on in your whole life is a result of molecules rushing around somewhere in your brain.”
“Heinrich’s brain theories. They’re all true. We’re the sum of our chemical impulses. Don’t tell me this. It’s unbearable to think about.”
“They can trace everything you say, do and feel to the number of molecules in a certain region.”
“What happens to good and evil in this system? Passion, envy and hate? Do they become a tangle of neurons? Are you telling me that a whole tradition of human failings is now at an end, that cowardice, sadism, molestation are meaningless terms? Are we being asked to regard these things nostalgically? What about murderous rage? A murderer used to have a certain fearsome size to him. His crime was large. What happens when we reduce it to cells and molecules? My son plays chess with a murderer. He told me all this. I didn’t want to listen.”
“Can I sleep now?”
“Wait. If Dylar speeds relief, why have you been so sad these past days, staring into space?”
“Simple. The drug’s not working.”
Her voice broke when she said these words. She raised the comforter over her head. I could only stare at the hilly terrain. A man on talk radio said: “I was getting mixed messages about my sexuality.” I stroked her head and body over the quilted bedspread.
“Can you elaborate, Baba? I’m right here. I want to help.”
“Mr. Gray gave me sixty tablets in two bottles. This would be more than enough, he said. One tablet every seventy-two hours. The discharge of medication is so gradual and precise that there’s no overlapping from one pill to the next. I finished the first bottle sometime in late November, early December.”
“Denise found it.”
“She did?”
“She’s been on your trail ever since.”
“Where did I leave it?”
“In the kitchen trash.”
“Why did I do that? That was careless.”
“What about the second bottle?” I said.
“You found the second bottle.”
“I know. I’m asking how many tablets you’ve taken.”
“I’ve now taken twenty-five from that bottle. That’s fifty-five all told. Five left.”
“Four left. I had one analyzed.”
“Did you tell me that?”
“Yes. And has there been any change at all in your condition.”
She allowed the top of her head to emerge.
“At first I thought so. The very beginning was the most hopeful time. Since then no improvement. I’ve grown more and more discouraged. Let me sleep now, Jack.”
“Remember we had dinner at Murray’s one night? On the way home we talked about your memory lapses. You said you weren’t sure whether or not you were taking medication. You couldn’t remember, you said. This was a lie, of course.”
“I guess so,” she said.
“But you weren’t lying about memory lapses in general. Denise and I assumed your forgetfulness was a side effect of whatever drug you were taking.”
The whole head emerged.
“Totally wrong,” she said. “It wasn’t a side effect of the drug. It was a side effect of the condition. Mr. Gray said my loss of memory is a desperate attempt to counteract my fear of death. It’s like a war of neurons. I am able to forget many things but I fail when it comes to death. And now Mr. Gray has failed as well.”
“Does he know that?”
“I left a message on his answering machine.”
“What did he say when he called back?”
“He sent me a tape in the mail, which I took over to the Stovers to play. He said he was literally sorry, whatever that means. He said I was not the right subject after all. He is sure it will work someday, soon, with someone, somewhere. He said he made a mistake with me. It was too random. He was too eager.”
It was the middle of the night. We were both exhausted. But we’d come so far, said so much, that I knew we couldn’t stop just yet. I took a deep breath. Then I lay back, staring into the ceiling. Babette leaned across my body to turn off the lamp. Then she pressed a button on the radio, killing the voices. A thousand other nights had ended more or less like this. I felt her sink into the bed.
“There’s something I promised myself I wouldn’t tell you.”
“Can it wait until morning?” she said.
“I’m tentatively scheduled to die. It won’t happen tomorrow or the next day. But it is in the works.”
I went on to tell her about my exposure to Nyodene D., speaking matter-of-factly, tonelessly, in short declarative sentences. I told her about the computer technician, the way he’d tapped into my history to produce a pessimistic massive tally. We are the sum total of our data, I told her, just as we are the sum total of our chemical impulses. I tried to explain how hard I’d struggled to keep the news from her. But after her own revelations, this seemed the wrong kind of secret to be keeping.
“So we are no longer talking about fear and floating terror,” I said. “This is the hard and heavy thing, the fa
ct itself.”
Slowly she emerged from beneath the covers. She climbed on top of me, sobbing. I felt her fingers clawing at my shoulders and neck. The warm tears fell on my lips. She beat me on the chest, seized my left hand and bit the flesh between the thumb and index finger. Her sobs became a grunting sound, full of terrible desperate effort. She took my head in her hands, gently and yet fiercely, and rocked it to and fro on the pillow, an act I could not connect to anything she’d ever done, anything she seemed to be.
Later, after she’d fallen off my body and into a restless sleep, I kept on staring into the dark. The radio came on. I threw off the covers and went into the bathroom. Denise’s scenic paperweights sat on a dusty shelf by the door. I ran water over my hands and wrists. I splashed cold water on my face. The only towel around was a small pink handcloth with a tic-tac-toe design. I dried myself slowly and carefully. Then I tilted the radiator cover away from the wall and stuck my hand underneath. The bottle of Dylar was gone.
27
I HAD MY SECOND MEDICAL CHECKUP since the toxic event. No startling numbers on the printout. This death was still too deep to be glimpsed. My doctor, Sundar Chakravarty, asked me about the sudden flurry of checkups. In the past I’d always been afraid to know.
I told him I was still afraid. He smiled broadly, waiting for the punch line. I shook his hand and headed out the door.
On the way home I drove down Elm intending to make a quick stop at the supermarket. The street was full of emergency vehicles. Farther down I saw bodies scattered about. A man with an armbandblew a whistle at me and stepped in front of my car. I glimpsed other men in Mylex suits. Stretcher-bearers ran across the street. When the man with the whistle drew closer, I was able to make out the letters on his armband: SIMUVAC.
“Back it out,” he said. “Street’s closed.”
“Are you people sure you’re ready for a simulation? You may want to wait for one more massive spill. Get your timing down.”
“Move it out, get it out. You’re in the exposure swath.”
“What’s that mean?”
“It means you’re dead,” he told me.
I backed out of the street and parked the car. Then I walked slowly back down Elm, trying to look as though I belonged. I kept close to storefronts, mingled with technicians and marshals, with uniformed personnel. There were buses, police cars, ambulettes. People with electronic equipment appeared to be trying to detect radiation or toxic fallout. In time I approached the volunteer victims. There were twenty or so, prone, supine, draped over curbstones, sitting in the street with woozy looks.
