White Noise (25 page)

“I don’t know exactly when it started. Maybe a year and a half ago. I thought I was going through a phase, some kind of watermark period in my life.”

“Landmark,” I said. “Or watershed.”

“A kind of settling-in-period, I thought. Middle age. Something like that. The condition would go away and I’d forget all about it. But it didn’t go away. I began to think it never would.”

“What condition?”

“Never mind that for now.”

“You’ve been depressed lately. I’ve never seen you like this. This is the whole point of Babette. She’s a joyous person. She doesn’t succumb to gloom or self-pity.”

“Let me tell it, Jack.”

“All right.”

“You know how I am. I think everything is correctable. Given the right attitude and the proper effort, a person can change a harmful condition by reducing it to its simplest parts. You can make lists, invent categories, devise charts and graphs. This is how I am able to teach my students how to stand, sit and walk, even though I know you think these subjects are too obvious and nebulous and generalized to be reduced to component parts. I’m not a very ingenious person but I know how to break things down, how to separate and classify. We can analyze posture, we can analyze eating, drinking and even breathing. How else do you understand the world, is my way of looking at it.”

“I’m right here,” I said. “If there’s anything you want or need, only say the word.”

“When I realized this condition was not about to go away, I set out to understand it better by reducing it to its parts. First I had to find out if it had any parts. I went to libraries and bookstores, read magazines and technical journals, watched cable TV, made lists and diagrams, made multicolored charts, made phone calls to technical writers and scientists, talked to a Sikh holy man in Iron City and even studied the occult, hiding the books in the attic so you and Denise wouldn’t find them and wonder what was going on.”

“All this without my knowing. The whole point of Babette is that she speaks to me, she reveals and confides.”

“This is not a story about your disappointment at my silence. The theme of this story is my pain and my attempts to end it.”

“I’ll make some hot chocolate. Would you like that?”

“Stay. This is a crucial part. All this energy, this research, study and concealment, but I was getting nowhere. The condition would not yield. It hung over my life, gave me no rest. Then one day I was reading to Mr. Treadwell from the
National Examiner.
An ad caught my eye. Never mind exactly what it said. Volunteers wanted for secret research. This is all you have to know.”

“I thought it was my former wives who practiced guile. Sweet deceivers. Tense, breathy, high-cheekboned, bilingual.”

“I answered the ad and was interviewed by a small firm doing research in psychobiology. Do you know what that is?”

“No.”

“Do you know how complex the human brain is?”

“I have some idea.”

“No, you don’t. Let’s call the company Gray Research, although that’s not the true name. Let’s call my contact Mr. Gray. Mr. Gray is a composite. I was eventually in touch with three or four or more people at the firm.”

“One of those long low pale brick buildings with electrified fencing and low-profile shrubbery.”

“I never saw their headquarters. Never mind why. The point is I took test after test. Emotional, psychological, motor response, brain activity. Mr. Gray said there were three finalists and I was one of them.”

“Finalists for what?”

“We were to be test subjects in the development of a super experimental and top secret drug, code-name Dylar, that he’d been working on for years. He’d found a Dylar receptor in the human brain and was putting the finishing touches on the tablet itself. But he also told me there were dangers in running tests on a human. I could die. I could live but my brain could die. The left side of my brain could die but the right side could live. This would mean that the left side of my body would live but the right side would die. There were many grim specters. I could walk sideways but not forward. I could not distinguish words from things, so that if someone said ‘speeding bullet,’ I would fall to the floor and take cover. Mr. Gray wanted me to know the risks. There were releases and other documents for me to sign. The firm had lawyers, priests.”

“They let you go ahead, a human test animal.”

“No, they didn’t. They said it was way too risky—legally, ethically and so forth. They went to work designing computer molecules and computer brains. I refused to accept this. I’d come so far, come so close. I want you to try to understand what happened next. If I’m going to tell you the story at all, I have to include this aspect of it, this grubby little corner of the human heart. You say Babette reveals and confides.”

“This is the point of Babette.”

“Good. I will reveal and confide. Mr. Gray and I made a private arrangement. Forget the priests, the lawyers, the psychobiologists. We would conduct the experiments on our own. I would be cured of my condition, he would be acclaimed for a wonderful medical breakthrough.”

“What’s so grubby about this?”

“It involved an indiscretion. This was the only way I could get Mr. Gray to let me use the drug. It was my last resort, my last hope. First I’d offered him my mind. Now I offered my body.”

I felt a sensation of warmth creeping up my back and radiating outward across my shoulders. Babette looked straight up. I was propped on an elbow, facing her, studying her features. When I spoke finally it was in a reasonable and inquiring voice—the voice of a man who seeks genuinely to understand some timeless human riddle.

“How do you offer your body to a composite of three or more people? This is a compound person. He is like a police sketch of one person’s eyebrows, another person’s nose. Let’s concentrate on the genitals. How many sets are we talking about?”

“Just one person’s, Jack. A key person, the project manager.”

“So we are no longer referring to the Mr. Gray who is a composite.”

“He is now one person. We went to a grubby little motel room. Never mind where or when. It had the TV up near the ceiling. This is all I remember. Grubby, tacky. I was heartsick. But so, so desperate.”

“You call this an indiscretion, as if we haven’t had a revolution in frank and bold language. Call it what it was, describe it honestly, give it the credit it deserves. You entered a motel room, excited by its impersonality, the functionalism and bad taste of the furnishings. You walked barefoot on the fire-retardant carpet. Mr. Gray went around opening doors, looking for a full-length mirror. He watched you undress. You lay on the bed, embracing. Then he entered you.”

“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.”