White Noise (30 page)

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 matter 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.”

“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

M
URRAY 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. Four men were around her now, batting at the flames with helmets and caps.