by Don DeLillo
“That’s where the mountains are,” Denise said. “Spaceships can hide from radar or whatever.”
“Why are the mountains upstate?” Steffie said.
“Mountains are always upstate,” Denise told her. “This way the snow melts as planned in the spring and flows downhill to the reservoirs near the cities, which are kept in the lower end of the state for exactly this reason.”
I thought, momentarily, she might be right. It made a curious kind of sense. Or did it? Or was it totally crazy? There had to be large cities in the northern part of some states. Or were they just north of the border in the southern part of states just to the north? What she said could not be true and yet I had trouble, momentarily, disproving it. I could not name cities or mountains to disprove it. There had to be mountains in the southern part of some states. Or did they tend to be below the state line, in the northern part of states to the south? I tried to name state capitals, governors. How could there be a north below a south? Is this what I found confusing? Was this the crux of Denise’s error? Or was she somehow, eerily, right?
The radio said: “Excesses of salt, phosphorus, magnesium.”
Later that night Babette and I sat drinking cocoa. On the kitchen table, among the coupons, the foot-long supermarket receipts, the mail-order catalogs, was a postcard from Mary Alice, my oldest. She is the golden issue of my first marriage to Dana Breedlove, the spy, and is therefore Steffie’s full sister, although ten years and two marriages fell between. Mary Alice is nineteen now and lives in Hawaii, where she works with whales.
Babette picked up a tabloid someone had left on the table.
“Mouse cries have been measured at forty thousand cycles per second. Surgeons use high-frequency tapes of mouse cries to destroy tumors in the human body. Do you believe that?”
“Yes.”
“So do I.”
She put down the newspaper. After a while she said to me urgently, “How do you feel, Jack?”
“I’m all right. I feel fine. Honest. What about you?”
“I wish I hadn’t told you about my condition.”
“Why?”
“Then you wouldn’t have told me you’re going to die first. Here are the two things I want most in the world. Jack not to die first. And Wilder to stay the way he is forever.”
32
MURRAY AND I walked across campus in our European manner, a serenely reflective pace, heads lowered as we conversed. Sometimes one of us gripped the other near the elbow, a gesture of intimacy and physical support. Other times we walked slightly apart, Murray’s hands clasped behind his back, Gladney’s folded monkishly at the abdomen, a somewhat worried touch.
“Your German is coming around?”
“I still speak it badly. The words give me trouble. Howard and I are working on opening remarks for the conference.”
“You call him Howard?”
“Not to his face. I don’t call him anything to his face and he doesn’t call me anything to my face. It’s that kind of relationship. Do you see him at all? You live under the same roof, after all.”
“Fleeting glimpses. The other boarders seem to prefer it that way. He barely exists, we feel.”
“There’s something about him. I’m not sure what it is exactly.”
“He’s flesh-colored,” Murray said.
“True. But that’s not what makes me uneasy.”
“Soft hands.”
“Is that it?”
“Soft hands in a man give me pause. Soft skin in general. Baby skin. I don’t think he shaves.”
“What else?” I said.
“Flecks of dry spittle at the corners of his mouth.”
“You’re right,” I said excitedly. “Dry spit. I feel it hit me in the face when he leans forward to articulate. What else?”
“And a way of looking over a person’s shoulder.”
“You see all this in fleeting glimpses. Remarkable. What else?” I demanded.
“And a rigid carriage that seems at odds with his shuffling walk.”
“Yes, he walks without moving his arms. What else, what else?”
“And something else, something above and beyond all this, something eerie and terrible.”
“Exactly. But what is it? Something I can’t quite identify.”
“There’s a strange air about him, a certain mood, a sense, a presence, an emanation.”
“But what?” I said, surprised to find myself deeply and personally concerned, colored dots dancing at the edge of my vision.
We’d walked thirty paces when Murray began to nod. I watched his face as we walked. He nodded crossing the street and kept nodding all the way past the music library. I walked with him step for step, clutching his elbow, watching his face, waiting for him to speak, not interested in the fact that he’d taken me completely out of my way, and he was still nodding as we approached the entrance to Wilmot Grange, a restored nineteenth-century building at the edge of the campus.
“But what?” I said. “But what?”
It wasn’t until four days later that he called me at home, at one in the morning, to whisper helpfully in my ear, “He looks like a man who finds dead bodies erotic.”
I went to one last lesson. The walls and windows were obscured by accumulated objects, which seemed now to be edging toward the middle of the room. The bland-faced man before me closed his eyes and spoke, reciting useful tourist phrases. “Where am I?” “Can you help me?” “It is night and I am lost.” I could hardly bear to sit there. Murray’s remark fixed him forever to a plausible identity. What had been elusive about Howard Dunlop was now pinned down. What had been strange and half creepy was now diseased. A grim lasciviousness escaped his body and seemed to circulate through the barricaded room.
In truth I would miss the lessons. I would also miss the dogs, the German shepherds. One day they were simply gone. Needed elsewhere perhaps or sent back to the desert to sharpen their skills. The men in Mylex suits were still around, however, carrying instruments to measure and probe, riding through town in teams of six or eight in chunky peglike vehicles that resembled Lego toys.
I stood by Wilder’s bed watching him sleep. The voice next door said: “In the four-hundred-thousand-dollar Nabisco Dinah Shore.”
This was the night the insane asylum burned down. Heinrich and I got in the car and went to watch. There were other men at the scene with their adolescent boys. Evidently fathers and sons seek fellowship at such events. Fires help draw them closer, provide a conversational wedge. There is equipment to appraise, the technique of firemen to discuss and criticize. The manliness of firenghting—the virility of fires, one might say—suits the kind of laconic dialogue that fathers and sons can undertake without awkwardness or embarrassment.
“Most of these fires in old buildings start in the electrical wiring,” Heinrich said. “Faulty wiring. That’s one phrase you can’t hang around for long without hearing.”
“Most people don’t burn to death,” I said. “They die of smoke inhalation.”
“That’s the other phrase,” he said.
Flames roared through the dormers. We stood across the street watching part of the roof give way, a tall chimney slowly fold and sink. Pumper trucks kept arriving from other towns, the men descending heavily in their rubber boots and old-fashioned hats. Hoses were manned and trained, a figure rose above the shimmering roof in the grip of a telescopic ladder. We watched the portico begin to go, a far column leaning. A woman in a fiery nightgown walked across the lawn. We gasped, almost in appreciation. She was white-haired and slight, fringed in burning air, and we could see she was mad, so lost to dreams and furies that the fire around her head seemed almost incidental. No one said a word. In all the heat and noise of detonating wood, she brought a silence to her. How powerful and real. How deep a thing was madness. A fire captain hurried toward her, then circled out slightly, disconcerted, as if she were not the person, after all, he had expected to meet here. She went down in a white burst, like a teacup breaking. Fo
ur men were around her now, batting at the flames with helmets and caps.
The great work of containing the blaze went on, a labor that seemed as old and lost as cathedral-building, the men driven by a spirit of lofty communal craft. A Dalmatian sat in the cab of a hook-and-ladder truck.
“It’s funny how you can look at it and look at it,” Heinrich said. “Just like a fire in a fireplace.”
“Are you saying the two kinds of fire are equally compelling?”
“I’m just saying you can look and look.”
“ ‘Man has always been fascinated by fire.’ Is that what you’re saying?”
“This is my first burning building. Give me a chance,” he said.
The fathers and sons crowded the sidewalk, pointing at one or another part of the half gutted structure. Murray, whose rooming house was just yards away, sidled up to us and shook our hands without a word. Windows blew out. We watched another chimney slip through the roof, a few loose bricks tumbling to the lawn. Murray shook our hands again, then disappeared.
Soon there was a smell of acrid matter. It could have been insulation burning—polystyrene sheathing for pipes and wires—or one or more of a dozen other substances. A sharp and bitter stink filled the air, overpowering the odor of smoke and charred stone. It changed the mood of the people on the sidewalk. Some put hankies to their faces, others left abruptly in disgust. Whatever caused the odor, I sensed that it made people feel betrayed. An ancient, spacious and terrible drama was being compromised by something unnatural, some small and nasty intrusion. Our eyes began to burn. The crowd broke up. It was as though we’d been forced to recognize the existence of a second kind of death. One was real, the other synthetic. The odor drove us away but beneath it and far worse was the sense that death came two ways, sometimes at once, and how death entered your mouth and nose, how death smelled, could somehow make a difference to your soul.
We hurried to our cars, thinking of the homeless, the mad, the dead, but also of ourselves now. This is what the odor of that burning material did. It complicated our sadness, brought us closer to the secret of our own eventual end.
At home I fixed warm milk for us both. I was surprised to see him drink it. He gripped the mug with both hands, talked about the noise of the conflagration, the air-fed wallop of combustion, like a ramjet thrusting. I almost expected him to thank me for the nice fire. We sat there drinking our milk. After a while he went into his closet to chin.
I sat up late thinking of Mr. Gray. Gray-bodied, staticky, unfinished. The picture wobbled and rolled, the edges of his body flared with random distortion. Lately I’d found myself thinking of him often. Sometimes as Mr. Gray the composite. Four or more grayish figures engaged in a pioneering work. Scientists, visionaries. Their wavy bodies passing through each other, mingling, blending, fusing. A little like extraterrestrials. Smarter than the rest of us, selfless, sexless, determined to engineer us out of our fear. But when the bodies fused I was left with a single figure, the project manager, a hazy gray seducer moving in ripples across a motel room. Bedward, plotward. I saw my wife reclining on her side, voluptuously rounded, the eternal waiting nude. I saw her as he did. Dependent, submissive, emotionally captive. I felt his mastery and control. The dominance of his postion. He was taking over my mind, this man I’d never seen, this half image, the barest smidge of brainlight. His bleak hands enfolded a rose-white breast. How vivid and living it was, what a tactile delight, dusted with russet freckles about the tip. I experienced aural torment. Heard them in their purling foreplay, the love babble and buzzing flesh. Heard the sloppings and smackings, the swash of wet mouths, bedsprings sinking in. An interval of mumbled adjustments. Then gloom moved in around the gray-sheeted bed, a circle slowly closing.
Panasonic.
33
WHAT TIME WAS IT when I opened my eyes, sensing someone or something nearby? Was it an odd-numbered hour? The room was soft and webby. I stretched my legs, blinked, slowly focused on a familiar object. It was Wilder, standing two feet from the bed, gazing into my face. We spent a long moment in mutual contemplation. His great round head, set as it was on a small-limbed and squattish body, gave him the look of a primitive clay figurine, some household idol of obscure and cultic derivation. I had the feeling he wanted to show me something. As I slipped quietly out of bed, he walked in his quilted booties out of the room. I followed him into the hall and toward the window that looks out on our backyard. I was barefoot and robeless and felt a chill pass through the Hong Kong polyester of my pajamas. Wilder stood looking out the window, his chin about an inch above the sill. It seemed I’d spent my life in lop-sided pajamas, the shirt buttons inserted in mismatching slits, the fly undone and drooping. Was it dawn already? Were those crows I heard screaming in the trees?
There was someone sitting in the backyard. A white-haired man sitting erect in the old wicker chair, a figure of eerie stillness and composure. At first, dazed and sleepy, I didn’t know what to make of the sight. It seemed to need a more careful interpretation than I was able to provide at the moment. I thought one thing, that he’d been inserted there for some purpose. Then fear began to enter, palpable and overwhelming, a fist clenching repeatedly in my chest. Who was he, what was happening here? I realized Wilder was no longer next to me. I reached the doorway to his room just in time to see his head sink into the pillow. By the time I got to the bed, he was fast asleep. I didn’t know what to do. I felt cold, white. I worked my way back to the window, gripping a doorknob, a handrail, as if to remind myself of the nature and being of real things. He was still out there, gazing into the hedges. I saw him in profile in the uncertain light, motionless and knowing. Was he as old as I’d first thought—or was the white hair purely emblematic, part of his allegorical force? That was it, of course. He would be Death, or Death’s errand-runner, a hollow-eyed technician from the plague era, from the era of inquisitions, endless wars, of bedlams and leprosariums. He would be an aphorist of last things, giving me the barest glance—civilized, ironic—as he spoke his deft and stylish line about my journey out. I watched for a long time, waiting for him to move a hand. His stillness was commanding. I felt myself getting whiter by the second. What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in? I was scared to the marrow. I was cold and hot, dry and wet, myself and someone else. The fist clenched in my chest. I went to the staircase and sat on the top step, looking into my hands. So much remained. Every word and thing a beadwork of bright creation. My own plain hand, crosshatched and whorled in a mesh of expressive lines, a life terrain, might itself be the object of a person’s study and wonder for years. A cosmology against the void.
I got to my feet and went back to the window. He was still there. I went into the bathroom to hide. I closed the toilet lid and sat there a while, wondering what to do next. I didn’t want him in the house.
I paced for a time. I ran cold water over my hands and wrists, splashed it in my face. I felt light and heavy, muddled and alert. I took a scenic paperweight from the shelf by the door. Inside the plastic disk floated a 3-D picture of the Grand Canyon, the colors zooming and receding as I turned the object in the light. Fluctuating planes. I liked this phrase. It seemed the very music of existence. If only one could see death as just another surface one inhabits for a time. Another facet of cosmic reason. A zoom down Bright Angel Trail.
I turned to immediate things. If I wanted to keep him out of the house, the thing to do was go outside. First I would look in on the smaller children. I moved quietly through the rooms on bare white feet. I looked for a blanket to adjust, a toy to remove from a child’s warm grasp, feeling I’d wandered into a TV moment. All was still and well. Would they regard a parent’s death as just another form of divorce?
I looked in on Heinrich. He occupied the top left corner of the bed, his body tightly wound like the kind of trick device that uncoils abruptly when it’s touched. I stood in the doorway nodding.
I looked in on Babette. She was many lev
els down, a girl again, a figure running in a dream. I kissed her head, smelling the warm musty air that carried up from sleep. I spotted my copy of Mein Kampf in a pile of books and journals. The radio came on. I hurried out of the room, fearing that some call-in voice, some stranger’s soul-lament, would be the last thing I heard in this world.
I went down to the kitchen. I looked through the window. He was there in the wicker armchair on the wet grass. I opened the inner door and then the storm door. I went outside, the copy of Mein Kampf clutched to my stomach. When the storm door banged shut, the man’s head jerked and his legs came uncrossed. He got to his feet and turned in my direction. The sense of eerie and invincible stillness washed off, the aura of knowingness, the feeling he conveyed of an ancient and terrible secret. A second figure began to emerge from the numinous ruins of the first, began to assume effective form, develop in the crisp light as a set of movements, lines and features, a contour, a living person whose distinctive physical traits seemed more and more familiar as I watched them come into existence, a little amazed.
It was not Death that stood before me but only Vernon Dickey, my father-in-law.
“Was I asleep?” he said.
“What are you doing out here?”
“Didn’t want to wake you folks.”
“Did we know you were coming?”
“I didn’t know it myself till yesterday afternoon. Drove straight through. Fourteen hours.”
“Babette will be happy to see you.”
“I just bet.”
We went inside. I put the coffeepot on the stove. Vernon sat at the table in his battered denim jacket, playing with the lid of an old Zippo. He had the look of a ladies’ man in the crash-dive of his career. His silvery hair had a wan tinge to it, a yellowish discolor, and he combed it back in a ducktail. He wore about four days’ stubble. His chronic cough had taken on a jagged edge, an element of irresponsibility. Babette worried less about his condition than about the fact that he took such sardonic pleasure in his own hackings and spasms, as if there were something fatefully attractive in this terrible noise. He still wore a garrison belt with a longhorn buckle.
