White Noise - Don Delillo [104]
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 levels 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