White Noise - Don Delillo [114]
“You’re not nervous? You don’t think about what might happen?”
“He likes to be positive,” Heinrich said. “This is the thing today with athletes. You don’t dwell on the negative.”
“Tell me this, then. What is the negative? What do you think of when you think of the negative?”
“Here’s what I think. I’m nothing without the snakes. That’s the only negative. The negative is if it doesn’t come off, if the humane society doesn’t let me in the cage. How can I be the best at what I do if they don’t let me do it?”
I liked to watch Orest eat. He inhaled food according to aerodynamic principles. Pressure differences, intake velocities. He went at it silently and purposefully, loading up, centering himself, appearing to grow more self-important with each clump of starch that slid over his tongue.
“You know you can get bitten. We talked about it last time. Do you think about what happens after the fangs close on your wrist? Do you think about dying? This is what I want to know. Does death scare you? Does it haunt your thoughts? Let me put my cards on the table, Orest. Are you afraid to die? Do you experience fear? Does fear make you tremble or sweat? Do you feel a shadow fall across the room when you think of the cage, the snakes, the fangs?”
“What did I read just the other day? There are more people dead today than in the rest of world history put together. What’s one extra? I’d just as soon die while I’m trying to put Orest Mercator’s name in the record book.”
I looked at my son. I said, “Is he trying to tell us there are more people dying in this twenty-four-hour period than in the rest of human history up to now?”
“He’s saying the dead are greater today than ever before, combined.”
“What dead? Define the dead.”
“He’s saying people now dead.”
“What do you mean, now dead? Everybody who’s dead is now dead.”
“He’s saying people in graves. The known dead. Those you can count.”
I was listening intently, trying to grasp what they meant. A second plate of food came for Orest.
“But people sometimes stay in graves for hundreds of years. Is he saying there are more dead people in graves than anywhere else?”
“It depends on what you mean by anywhere else.”
“I don’t know what I mean. The drowned. The blown-to-bits.”
“There are more dead now than ever before. That’s all he’s saying.”
I looked at him a while longer. Then I turned to Orest.
“You are intentionally facing death. You are setting out to do exactly what people spend their lives trying not to do. Die. I want to know why.”
“My trainer says, ‘Breathe, don’t think.’ He says, ‘Be a snake and you’ll know the stillness of a snake.’ ”
“He has a trainer now,” Heinrich said.
“He’s a Sunny Moslem,” Orest said.
“Iron City has some Sunnies out near the airport.”
“The Sunnies are mostly Korean. Except mine’s an Arab, I think.”
I said, “Don’t you mean the Moonies are mostly Korean?”
“He’s a Sunny,” Orest said.
“But it’s the Moonies who are mostly Korean. Except they’re not, of course. It’s only the leadership.”
They thought about this. I watched Orest eat. I watched him pitchfork the spaghetti down his gullet. The serious head sat motionless, an entryway for the food that flew off the mechanical fork. What purpose he conveyed, what sense of a fixed course of action pursued absolutely. If each of us is the center of his or her existence, Orest seemed intent on enlarging the center, making it everything. Is this what athletes do, occupy the self more fully? It’s possible we envy them for a prowess that has little to do with sport. In building toward a danger, they escape it in some deeper sense, they dwell in some angelic scan, able to leap free of everyday dying. But was Orest an athlete? He would do nothing but sit—sit for sixty-seven days in a glass cage, waiting to be publicly bitten.
“You will not be able to defend yourself,” I said. “Not only that but you will be in a cage with the most slimy, feared and repulsive creatures on earth. Snakes. People have nightmares about snakes. Crawling slithering cold-blooded egg-laying