White Noise - Don Delillo [112]
“Exactly how elevated is my potassium?”
“It has gone through the roof, evidently.”
“What might this be a sign of?”
“It could mean nothing, it could mean a very great deal indeed.”
“How great?”
“Now we are getting into semantics,” he said.
“What I’m trying to get at is could this potassium be an indication of some condition just beginning to manifest itself, some condition caused perhaps by an ingestion, an exposure, an involuntary spillage-intake, some substance in the air or the rain?”
“Have you in fact come into contact with such a substance?”
“No,” I said.
“Are you sure?”
“Positive. Why, do the numbers show some sign of possible exposure?”
“If you haven’t been exposed, then they couldn’t very well show a sign, could they?”
“Then we agree,” I said.
“Tell me this, Mr. Gladney, in all honesty. How do you feel?”
“To the best of my knowledge, I feel very well. First-rate. I feel better than I have in years, relatively speaking.”
“What do you mean, relatively speaking?”
“Given the fact I’m older now.”
He looked at me carefully. He seemed to be trying to stare me down. Then he made a note on my record. I might have been a child facing the school principal over a series of unexcused absences.
I said, “How can we tell whether the elevation is true or false?”
“I will send you to Glassboro for further tests. Would you like that? There is a brand-new facility called Autumn Harvest Farms. They have gleaming new equipment. You won’t be disappointed, wait and see. It gleams, absolutely.”
“All right. But is potassium the only thing we have to watch?”
“The less you know, the better. Go to Glassboro. Tell them to delve thoroughly. No stone unturned. Tell them to send you back to me with sealed results. I will analyze them down to the smallest detail. I will absolutely pick them apart. They have the know-how at Harvest Farms, the most delicate of instruments, I promise you. The best of third-world technicians, the latest procedures.”
His bright smile hung there like a peach on a tree.
“Together, as doctor and patient, we can do things that neither of us could do separately. There is not enough emphasis on prevention. An ounce of prevention, goes the saying. Is this a proverb or a maxim? Surely professor can tell us.”
“I’ll need time to think about it.”
“In any case, prevention is the thing, isn’t it? I’ve just seen the latest issue of American Mortician. Quite a shocking picture. The industry is barely adequate to accommodating the vast numbers of dead.”
Babette was right. He spoke English beautifully. I went home and started throwing things away. I threw away fishing lures, dead tennis balls, torn luggage. I ransacked the attic for old furniture, discarded lampshades, warped screens, bent curtain rods. I threw away picture frames, shoe trees, umbrella stands, wall brackets, highchairs and cribs, collapsible TV trays, beanbag chairs, broken turntables. I threw away shelf paper, faded stationery, manuscripts of articles I’d written, galley proofs of the same articles, the journals in which the articles were printed. The more things I threw away, the more I found. The house was a sepia maze of old and tired things. There was an immensity of things, an overburdening weight, a connection, a mortality. I stalked the rooms, flinging things into cardboard boxes. Plastic electric fans, burnt-out toasters, Star Trek needlepoints. It took well over an hour to get everything down to the sidewalk. No one helped me. I didn’t want help or company or human understanding. I just wanted to get the stuff out of the house. I sat on the front steps alone, waiting for a sense of ease and peace to settle in the air around me.
A woman passing on the street said, “A decongestant, an antihistamine, a cough suppressant, a pain reliever.”
35
BABETTE COULD NOT GET ENOUGH of talk radio. “I hate my face,” a woman said. “This is an ongoing problem with me for years. Of all the faces you could have given me, lookswise, this one has got