White Noise (16 page)

We were among the latecomers in the former group and joined the traffic flow into the main route out of town, a sordid gantlet of used cars, fast food, discount drugs and quad cinemas. As we waited our turn to edge onto the four-lane road we heard the amplified voice above and behind us calling out to darkened homes in a street of sycamores and tall hedges.

“Abandon all domiciles, Now, now. Toxic event, chemical cloud.”

The voice grew louder, faded, grew loud again as the vehicle moved in and out of local streets. Toxic event, chemical cloud. When the words became faint, the cadence itself was still discernible, a recurring sequence in the distance. It seems that danger assigns to public voices the responsibility of a rhythm, as if in metrical units there is a coherence we can use to balance whatever senseless and furious event is about to come rushing around our heads.

We made it onto the road as snow began to fall. We had little to say to each other, our minds not yet adjusted to the actuality of things, the absurd fact of evacuation. Mainly we looked at people in other cars, trying to work out from their faces how frightened we should be. Traffic moved at a crawl but we thought the pace would pick up some miles down the road where there is a break in the barrier divide that would enable our westbound flow to utilize all four lanes. The two opposite lanes were empty, which meant police had already halted traffic coming this way. An encouraging sign. What people in an exodus fear most immediately is that those in positions of authority will long since have fled, leaving us in charge of our own chaos.

The snow came more thickly, the traffic moved in fits and starts. There was a life-style sale at a home furnishing mart. Well-lighted men and women stood by the huge window looking out at us and wondering. It made us feel like fools, like tourists doing all the wrong things. Why were they content to shop for furniture while we sat panicky in slowpoke traffic in a snowstorm? They knew something we didn’t. In a crisis the true facts are whatever other people say they are. No one’s knowledge is less secure than your own.

Air-raid sirens were still sounding in two or more towns. What could those shoppers know that would make them remain behind while a more or less clear path to safety lay before us all? I started pushing buttons on the radio. On a Glassboro station we learned there was new and important information. People already indoors were being asked to stay indoors. We were left to guess the meaning of this. Were the roads impossibly jammed? Was it snowing Nyodene D.?

I kept punching buttons, hoping to find someone with background information. A woman identified as a consumer affairs editor began a discussion of the medical problems that could result from personal contact with the airborne toxic event. Babette and I exchanged a wary glance. She immediately began talking to the girls while I turned the volume down to keep them from learning what they might imagine was in store for them.

“Convulsions, coma, miscarriage,” said the well-informed and sprightly voice.

We passed a three-story motel. Every room was lighted, every window filled with people staring out at us. We were a parade of fools, open not only to the effects of chemical fallout but to the scornful judgment of other people. Why weren’t they out here, sitting in heavy coats behind windshield wipers in the silent snow? It seemed imperative that we get to the Boy Scout camp, scramble into the main building, seal the doors, huddle on camp beds with our juice and coffee, wait for the all-clear.

Cars began to mount the grassy incline at the edge of the road, creating a third lane of severely tilted traffic. Situated in what had formerly been the righthand lane, we didn’t have any choice but to watch these cars pass us at a slightly higher elevation and with a rakish thrust, deviated from the horizontal.

Slowly we approached an overpass, seeing people on foot up there. They carried boxes and suitcases, objects in blankets, a long line of people leaning into the blowing snow. People cradling pets and small children, an old man wearing a blanket over his pajamas, two women shouldering a rolled-up rug. There were people on bicycles, children being pulled on sleds and in wagons. People with supermarket carts, people clad in every kind of bulky outfit, peering out from deep hoods. There was a family wrapped completely in plastic, a single large sheet of transparent polyethylene. They walked beneath their shield in lock step, the man and woman each at one end, three kids between, all of them secondarily wrapped in shimmering rainwear. The whole affair had about it a well-rehearsed and self-satisfied look, as though they’d been waiting for months to strut their stuff. People kept appearing from behind a high rampart and trudging across the overpass, shoulders dusted with snow, hundreds of people moving with a kind of fated determination. A new round of sirens started up. The trudging people did not quicken their pace, did not look down at us or into the night sky for some sign of the wind-driven cloud. They just kept moving across the bridge through patches of snow-raging light. Out in the open, keeping their children near, carrying what they could, they seemed to be part of some ancient destiny, connected in doom and ruin to a whole history of people trekking across wasted landscapes. There was an epic quality about them that made me wonder for the first time at the scope of our predicament.

The radio said: “It’s the rainbow hologram that gives this credit card a marketing intrigue.”

We moved slowly beneath the overpass, hearing a flurry of automobile horns and the imploring wail of an ambulance stuck in traffic. Fifty yards ahead the traffic narrowed to one lane and we soon saw why. One of the cars had skidded off the incline and barreled into a vehicle in our lane. Horns quacked up and down the line. A helicopter sat just above us, shining a white beam down on the mass of collapsed metal. People sat dazed on the grass, being tended to by a pair of bearded paramedics. Two people were bloody. There was blood on a smashed window. Blood soaked upward through newly fallen snow. Drops of blood speckled a tan handbag. The scene of injured people, medics, smoking steel, all washed in a strong and eerie light, took on the eloquence of a formal composition. We passed silently by, feeling curiously reverent, even uplifted by the sight of the heaped cars and fallen people.

Heinrich kept watching through the rear window, taking up his binoculars as the scene dwindled in the distance. He described for us in detail the number and placement of bodies, the skid marks, the vehicular damage. When the wreck was no longer visible, he talked about everything that had happened since the air-raid siren at dinner. He spoke enthusiastically, with a sense of appreciation for the vivid and unexpected. I thought we’d all occupied the same mental state, subdued, worried, confused. It hadn’t occurred to me that one of us might find these events brilliantly stimulating. I looked at him in the rearview mirror. He sat slouched in the camouflage jacket with Velcro closures, steeped happily in disaster. He talked about the snow, the traffic, the trudging people. He speculated on how far we were from the abandoned camp, what sort of primitive accommodations might be available there. I’d never heard him go on about something with such spirited enjoyment. He was practically giddy. He must have known we could all die. Was this some kind of end-of-the-world elation? Did he seek distraction from his own small miseries in some violent and overwhelming event? His voice betrayed a craving for terrible things.

“Is this a mild winter or a harsh winter?” Steffie said.

“Compared to what?” Denise said.

“I don’t know.”

I thought I saw Babette slip something into her mouth. I took my eye off the road for a moment, watched her carefully. She looked straight ahead. I pretended to return my attention to the road but quickly turned once more, catching her off guard as she seemed to swallow whatever it was she’d put in her mouth.

“What’s that?” I said.

“Drive the car, Jack.”

“I saw your throat contract. You swallowed something.”

“Just a Life Saver. Drive the car please.”

“You place a Life Saver in your mouth and you swallow it without an interval of sucking?”

“Swallow what? It’s still in my mouth.”

She thrust her face toward me, using her tongue to make a small lump in her cheek. A clear-cut amateurish bluff.

“But you swallowed something. I saw.”

“That was just saliva that I didn’t know what to do with. Drive the car, would you?”

I sensed that Denise was getting interested and decided not to pursue the matter. This was not the time to be questioning her mother about medications, side effects and so on. Wilder was asleep, leaning into Babette’s arm. The windshield wipers made sweaty arcs. From the radio we learned that dogs trained to sniff out Nyodene D. were being sent to the area from a chemical detection center in a remote part of New Mexico.

Denise said, “Did they ever think about what happens to the dogs when they get close enough to this stuff to smell it?”

“Nothing happens to the dogs,” Babette said.

“How do you know?”

“Because it only affects humans and rats.”

“I don’t believe you.”

“Ask Jack.”

“Ask Heinrich,” I said.

“It could be true,” he said, clearly lying. “They use rats to test for things that humans can catch, so it means we get the same diseases, rats and humans. Besides, they wouldn’t use dogs if they thought it could hurt them.”

“Why not?”

“A dog is a mammal.”

“So’s a rat,” Denise said.

“A rat is a vermin,” Babette said.

“Mostly what a rat is,” Heinrich said, “is a rodent.”

“It’s also a vermin.”

“A cockroach is a vermin,” Steffie said.

“A cockroach is an insect. You count the legs is how you know.”

“It’s also a vermin.”

“Does a cockroach get cancer? No,” Denise said. “That must mean a rat is more like a human than it is like a cockroach, even if they’re both vermins, since a rat and a human can get cancer but a cockroach can’t.”

“In other words,” Heinrich said, “she’s saying that two things that are mammals have more in common than two things that are only vermins.”

“Are you people telling me,” Babette said, “that a rat is not only a vermin and a rodent but a mammal too?”

Snow turned to sleet, sleet to rain.

We reached the point where the concrete barrier gives way to a twenty-yard stretch of landscaped median no higher than a curbstone. But instead of a state trooper directing traffic into two extra lanes, we saw a Mylex-suited man waving us away from the opening. Just beyond him was the scrap-metal burial mound of a Winnebago and a snowplow. The huge and tortured wreck emitted a wisp of rusty smoke. Brightly colored plastic utensils were scattered for some distance. There was no sign of victims or fresh blood, leading us to believe that some time had passed since the recreational vehicle mounted the plow, probably in a moment when opportunism seemed an easily defensible failing, given the situation. It must have been the blinding snow that caused the driver to leap the median without noting an object on the other side.

“I saw all this before,” Steffie said.

“What do you mean?” I said.

“This happened once before. Just like this. The man in the yellow suit and gas mask. The big wreck sitting in the snow. It was totally and exactly like this. We were all here in the car. Rain made little holes in the snow. Everything.”

It was Heinrich who’d told me that exposure to the chemical waste could cause a person to experience a sense of
déjà vu.
Steffie wasn’t there when he said it, but she could have heard it on the kitchen radio, where she and Denise had probably learned about sweaty palms and vomiting before developing these symptoms themselves. I didn’t think Steffie knew what
déja vu
meant, but it was possible Babette had told her.
Déjà vu,
however, was no longer a working symptom of Nyodene contamination. It had been preempted by coma, convulsions, and miscarriage. If Steffie had learned about
déjà vu
on the radio but then missed the subsequent upgrading to more deadly conditions, it could mean she was in a position to be tricked by her own apparatus of suggestibility. She and Denise had been lagging all evening. They were late with sweaty palms, late with nausea, late again with
déjà vu.
What did it all mean? Did Steffie truly imagine she’d seen the wreck before or did she only imagine she’d imagined it? Is it possible to have a false perception of an illusion? Is there a true
déjà vu
and a false
déjà vu?
I wondered whether her palms had been truly sweaty or whether she’d simply imagined a sense of wetness. And was she so open to suggestion that she would develop every symptom as it was announced?

I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own disasters.

But what if she hadn’t heard the radio, didn’t know what
déjà vu
was? What if she was developing real symptoms by natural means? Maybe the scientists were right in the first place, with their original announcements, before they revised upward. Which was worse, the real condition or the self-created one, and did it matter? I wondered about these and allied questions. As I drove I found myself giving and taking an oral examination based on the kind of quibbling fine-points that had entertained several centuries’ worth of medieval idlers. Could a nine-year-old girl suffer a miscarriage due to the power of suggestion? Would she have to be pregnant first? Could the power of suggestion be strong enough to work backward in this manner, from miscarriage to pregnancy to menstruation to ovulation? Which comes first, menstruation or ovulation? Are we talking about mere symptoms or deeply entrenched conditions? Is a symptom a sign or a thing? What is a thing and how do we know it’s not another thing?

I turned off the radio, not to help me think but to keep me from thinking. Vehicles lurched and skidded. Someone threw a gum wrapper out a side window and Babette made an indignant speech about inconsiderate people littering the highways and countryside.