by Don DeLillo
“What did I do to deserve this? This is not like you. Sarcastic, mocking.”
“Leave it alone,” she said. “Dylar was my mistake. I won’t let you make it yours as well.”
We listened to the tap and scratch of buttons and zipper tabs. It was time for me to leave for school. The voice upstairs remarked: “A California think-tank says the next world war may be fought over salt.”
All afternoon I stood by the window in my office, watching the Observatory. It was growing dark when Winnie Richards appeared at the side door, looked both ways, then began moving in a wolf-trot along the sloping turf. I hurried out of my office and down the stairs. In seconds I was out on a cobbled path, running. Almost at once I experienced a strange elation, the kind of bracing thrill that marks the recovery of a lost pleasure. I saw her turn a corner in a controlled skid before she disappeared behind a maintenance building. I ran as fast as I could, cutting loose, cutting into the wind, running chest out, head high, my arms pumping hard. She reappeared at the edge of the library, an alert and stealthy figure moving beneath the arched windows, nearly lost to the dusk. When she drew near the steps she suddenly accelerated, going full tilt from what was almost a standing start. This was a deft and lovely maneuver that I was able to appreciate even as it put me at a disadvantage. I decided to cut behind the library and pick her up on the long straight approach to the chemistry labs. Briefly I ran alongside the members of the lacrosse team as they charged off a field after practice. We ran step for step, the players waving their sticks in a ritualized manner and chanting something I couldn’t understand. When I reached the broad path I was gasping for breath. Winnie was nowhere in sight. I ran through the faculty parking lot, past the starkly modern chapel, around the administration building. The wind was audible now, creaking in the high bare branches. I ran to the east, changed my mind, stood looking around, removed my glasses to peer. I wanted to run, I was willing to run. I would run as far as I could, run through the night, run to forget why I was running. After some moments I saw a figure loping up a hill at the edge of the campus. It had to be her. I started running again, knowing she was too far away, would disappear over the crest of the hill, would not resurface for weeks. I put everything I had into a final climbing burst, charging over concrete, grass, then gravel, lungs burning in my chest, a heaviness in my legs that seemed the very pull of the earth, its most intimate and telling judgment, the law of falling bodies.
How surprised I was, nearing the top of the hill, to see that she had stopped. She wore a Gore-Tex jacket puffed up with insulation and she was looking to the west. I walked slowly toward her. When I cleared a row of private homes I saw what it was that had made her pause. The edge of the earth trembled in a darkish haze. Upon it lay the sun, going down like a ship in a burning sea. Another postmodern sunset, rich in romantic imagery. Why try to describe it? It’s enough to say that everything in our field of vision seemed to exist in order to gather the light of this event. Not that this was one of the stronger sunsets. There had been more dynamic colors, a deeper sense of narrative sweep.
“Hi, Jack. I didn’t know you came up here.”
“I usually go to the highway overpass.”
“Isn’t this something?”
“It’s beautiful all right.”
“Makes me think. It really does.”
“What do you think about?”
“What can you think about in the face of this kind of beauty? I get scared, I know that.”
“This isn’t one of the scarier ones.”
“It scares me. Boy, look at it.”
“Did you see last Tuesday? A powerful and stunning sunset. I rate this one average. Maybe they’re beginning to wind down.”
“I hope not,” she said. “I’d miss them.”
“Could be the toxic residue in the atmosphere is diminishing.”
“There’s a school of thought that says it’s not residue from the cloud that causes the sunsets. It’s residue from the microorganisms that ate the cloud.”
We stood there watching a surge of florid light, like a heart pumping in a documentary on color TV.
“Remember the saucer-shaped pill?”
“Of course,” she said. “A super piece of engineering.”
“I found out what it’s designed to do. It’s designed to solve an ancient problem. Fear of death. It encourages the brain to produce fear-of-death inhibitors.”
“But we still die.”
“Everyone dies, yes.”
“We just won’t be afraid,” she said.
“That’s right.”
“Interesting, I guess.”
“Dylar was designed by a secret research group. I believe some of these people are psychobiologists. I wonder if you’ve heard rumors of a group working secretly on fear of death.”
“I’d be the last to hear. No one can ever find me. When they do find me, it’s to tell me something important.”
“What could be more important?”
“You’re talking about gossip, rumors. This is thin stuff, Jack. Who are these people, where is their base?”
“That’s why I’ve been chasing you. I thought you’d know something about them. I don’t even know what a psychobiologist is.”
“It’s a catchall sort of thing. Interdisciplinary. The real work is in the pits.”
“Isn’t there anything you can tell me?”
Something in my voice made her turn to look at me. Winnie was barely into her thirties but she had a sane and practiced eye for the half-concealed disasters that constitute a life. A narrow face partly hidden by wispy brown ringlets, eyes bright and excited. She had the beaky and hollow-boned look of a great wading creature. Small prim mouth. A smile that was permanently in conflict with some inner stricture against the seductiveness of humor. Murray told me once he had a crush on her, found her physical awkwardness a sign of an intelligence developing almost too rapidly, and I thought I knew what he meant. She was poking and snatching at the world around, overrunning it at times.
“I don’t know what your personal involvement is with this substance,” she said, “but I think it’s a mistake to lose one’s sense of death, even one’s fear of death. Isn’t death the boundary we need? Doesn’t it give a precious texture to life, a sense of definition? You have to ask yourself whether anything you do in this life would have beauty and meaning without the knowledge you carry of a final line, a border or limit.”
I watch light climb into the rounded summits of high-altitude clouds. Clorets, Velamints, Freedent.
“People think I’m spacey,” she said. “I have a spacey theory about human fear, sure enough. Picture yourself, Jack, a confirmed home-body, a sedentary fellow who finds himself walking in a deep wood. You spot something out of the corner of your eye. Before you know anything else, you know that this thing is very large and that it has no place in your ordinary frame of reference. A flaw in the world picture. Either it shouldn’t be here or you shouldn’t. Now the thing comes into full view. It is a grizzly bear, enormous, shiny brown, swaggering, dripping slime from its bared fangs. Jack, you have never seen a large animal in the wild. The sight of this grizzer is so electrifyingly strange that it gives you a renewed sense of yourself, a fresh awareness of the self—the self in terms of a unique and horrific situation. You see yourself in a new and intense way. You rediscover yourself. You are lit up for your own imminent dismemberment. The beast on hind legs has enabled you to see who you are as if for the first time, outside familiar surroundings, alone, distinct, whole. The name we give to this complicated process is fear.”
“Fear is self-awareness raised to a higher level.”
“That’s right, Jack.”
“And death?” I said.
“Self, self, self. If death can be seen as less strange and unreferenced, your sense of self in relation to death will diminish, and so will your fear.”
“What do I do to make death less strange? How do I go about it?”
“I don’t know.”
“Do I risk death by driving fast around curves? Am I supposed to go rock climbing on weekends?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I wish I knew.”
“Do I scale the sheer facade of a ninety-story building, wearing a clip-on belt? What do I do, Winnie? Do I sit in a cage full of African snakes like my son’s best friend? This is what people do today.”
“I think what you do, Jack, is forget the medicine in that tablet. There is no medicine, obviously.”
She was right. They were all right. Go on with my life, raise my kids, teach my students. Try not to think of that staticky figure in the Grayview Motel putting his unfinished hands on my wife.
“I’m still sad, Winnie, but you’ve given my sadness a richness and depth it has never known before.”
She turned away, blushing.
I said, “You’re more than a fair-weather friend—you’re a true enemy.”
She turned exceedingly red.
I said, “Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.”
I watched her blush. She used both hands to pull her knit cap down over her ears. We took a last look at the sky and started walking down the hill.
31
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No one wanted to cook that night. We all got in the car and went out to the commercial strip in the no man’s land beyond the town boundary. The never-ending neon. I pulled in at a place that specialized in chicken parts and brownies. We decided to eat in the car. The car was sufficient for our needs. We wanted to eat, not look around at other people. We wanted to fill our stomachs and get it over with. We didn’t need light and space. We certainly didn’t need to face each other across a table as we ate, building a subtle and complex cross-network of signals and codes. We were content to eat facing in the same direction, looking only inches past our hands. There was a kind of rigor in this. Denise brought the food out to the car and distributed paper napkins. We settled in to eat. We ate fully dressed, in hats and heavy coats, without speaking, ripping into chicken parts with our hands and teeth. There was a mood of intense concentration, minds converging on a single compelling idea. I was surprised to find I was enormously hungry. I chewed and ate, looking only inches past my hands. This is how hunger shrinks the world. This is the edge of the observable universe of food. Steffie tore off the crisp skin of a breast and gave it to Heinrich. She never ate the skin. Babette sucked a bone. Heinrich traded wings with Denise, a large for a small. He thought small wings were tastier. People gave Babette their bones to clean and suck. I fought off an image of Mr. Gray lazing naked on a motel bed, an unresolved picture collapsing at the edges. We sent Denise to get more food, waiting for her in silence. Then we started in again, half stunned by the dimensions of our pleasure.
Steffie said quietly, “How do astronauts float?”
There was a pause like a missing tick in eternity.
Denise stopped eating to say, “They’re lighter than air.”
We all stopped eating. A worried silence ensued.
“There is no air,” Heinrich said finally. “They can’t be lighter than something that isn’t there. Space is a vacuum except for heavy molecules.”
“I thought space was cold,” Babette said. “If there’s no air, how can it be cold? What makes warm or cold? Air, or so I thought. If there’s no air, there should be no cold. Like a nothing kind of day.”
“How can there be nothing?” Denise said. “There has to be something.”
“There is something,” Heinrich said in exasperation. “There’s heavy molecules.”
“Do-I-need-a-sweater kind of day,” Babette said.
There was another pause. We waited to learn if the dialogue was over. Then we set to eating again. We traded unwanted parts in silence, stuck our hands in cartoons of rippled fries. Wilder liked the soft white fries and people picked these out and gave them to him. Denise distributed ketchup in little watery pouches. The interior of the car smelled of grease and licked flesh. We traded parts and gnawed.
Steffie said in a small voice, “How cold is space?”
We all waited once more. Then Heinrich said, “It depends on how high you go. The higher you go, the colder it gets.”
“Wait a minute,” Babette said. “The higher you go, the closer you get to the sun. So the warmer it gets.”
“What makes you think the sun is high?”
“How can the sun be low? You have to look up to see the sun.”
“What about at night?” he said.
“It’s on the other side of the earth. But people still look up.”
“The whole point of Sir Albert Einstein,” he said, “is how can the sun be up if you’re standing on the sun?”
“The sun is a great molten ball,” she said. “It’s impossible to stand on the sun.”
“He was just saying ‘if.’ Basically there is no up or down, hot or cold, day or night.”
“What is there?”
“Heavy molecules. The whole point of space is to give molecules a chance to cool down after they come shooting off the surface of giant stars.”
“If there’s no hot or cold, how can molecules cool down?”
“Hot and cold are words. Think of them as words. We have to use words. We can’t just grunt.”
“It’s called the sun’s corolla,” Denise said to Steffie in a separate discussion. “We saw it the other night on the weather network.”
“I thought Corolla was a car,” Steffie said.
“Everything’s a car,” Heinrich said. “The thing you have to understand about giant stars is that they have actual nuclear explosions deep inside the core. Totally forget these Russian IBMs that are supposed to be so awesome. We’re talking about a hundred million times bigger explosions.”
There was a long pause. No one spoke. We went back to eating for as long as it took to bite off and chew a single mouthful of food.
“It’s supposed to be Russian psychics who are causing this crazy weather,” Babette said.
“What crazy weather?” I said.
Heinrich said, “We have psychics, they have psychics, supposedly. They want to disrupt our crops by influencing the weather.”
“The weather’s been normal.”
“For this time of year,” Denise put in smartly.
This was the week a policeman saw a body thrown from a UFO. It happened while he was on routine patrol on the outskirts of Glassboro. The rain-soaked corpse of an unidentified male was found later that night, fully clothed. An autopsy disclosed that death was due to multiple fractures and heart failure—the result, perhaps, of a ghastly shock. Under hypnosis, the policeman, Jerry Tee Walker, relived in detail the baffling sight of the neon-bright object that resembled an enormous spinning top as it hovered eighty feet above a field. Officer Walker, a Vietnam vet, said the bizarre scene reminded him of helicopter crews throwing Vietcong suspects out the door. Incredibly, as he watched a hatch come open and the body plummet to the ground, Walker sensed an eerie message being psychically transmitted to his brain. Police hypnotists plan to intensify their sessions in an attempt to uncover the message.
There were sightings all over the area. An energizing mental current, a snaky glow, seemed to pass from town to town. It didn’t matt
er whether you believed in these things or not. They were an excitement, a wave, a tremor. Some voice or noise would crack across the sky and we would be lifted out of death. People drove speculatively to the edges of towns, where some would turn back, some decide to venture toward remoter areas which seemed in these past days to exist under a spell, a hallowed expectation. The air grew soft and mild. A neighbor’s dog barked through the night.
In the fast food parking lot we ate our brownies. Crumbs stuck to the heels of our hands. We inhaled the crumbs, we licked the fingers. As we got close to finishing, the physical extent of our awareness began to expand. Food’s borders yielded to the wider world. We looked past our hands. We looked through the windows, at the cars and lights. We looked at the people leaving the restaurant, men, women and children carrying cartons of food, leaning into the wind. An impatience began to flow from the three bodies in the rear seat. They wanted to be home, not here. They wanted to blink an eye and find themselves in their rooms, with their things, not sitting in a cramped car on this windswept concrete plain. Journeys home were always a test. I started up the car, knowing it was only a matter of seconds before the massed restlessness took on elements of threat. We could feel it coming, Babette and I. A sulky menace brewed back there. They would attack us, using the classic strategy of fighting among themselves. But attack us for what reason? For not getting them home faster? For being older and bigger and somewhat steadier of mood than they were? Would they attack us for our status as protectors—protectors who must sooner or later fail? Or was it simply who we were that they attacked, our voices, features, gestures, ways of walking and laughing, our eye color, hair color, skin tone, our chromosomes and cells?
As if to head them off, as if she could not bear the implications of their threat, Babette said pleasantly, “Why is it these UFOs are mostly seen upstate? The best sightings are upstate. People get abducted and taken aboard. Farmers see burn marks where saucers landed. A woman gives birth to a UFO baby, so she says. Always upstate.”
