White Noise - Don Delillo [101]
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