White Noise - Don Delillo [116]
“What if she keeps me?” Steffie said. “What will you do?”
“He’ll have to send people to Mexico. That’s the only thing he can do.”
“But will he do it?” she said.
“Your mother knows she can’t keep you,” I said. “She travels all the time. It’s out of the question.”
“Don’t worry,” Denise told her. “No matter what he says now, he’ll get you back when the time comes.”
Steffie looked at me with deep interest and curiosity. I told her I would travel to Mexico myself and do whatever had to be done to get her back here. She looked at Denise.
“It’s better to hire people,” the older girl said helpfully. “That way you have someone who’s done it before.”
Babette came in and picked up Wilder.
“There you are,” she said. “We’re going to the airport with Steffie. Yes we are. Yes yes.”
“Bruce, Bruce.”
The next day there was an evacuation for noxious odor. SIMUVAC vehicles were everywhere. Men in Mylex suits patrolled the streets, many of them carrying instruments to measure harm. The consulting firm that conceived the evacuation gathered a small group of computer-screened volunteers in a police van in the supermarket parking lot. There was half an hour of self-induced gagging and vomiting. The episode was recorded on videotape and sent somewhere for analysis.
Three days later an actual noxious odor drifted across the river. A pause, a careful thoughtfulness, seemed to settle on the town. Traffic moved more slowly, drivers were exceedingly polite. There was no sign of official action, no jitneys or ambulettes painted in primary colors. People avoided looking at each other directly. An irritating sting in the nostrils, a taste of copper on the tongue. As time passed, the will to do nothing seemed to deepen, to fix itself firmly. There were those who denied they smelled anything at all. It is always that way with odors. There were those who professed not to see the irony of their inaction. They’d taken part in the SIMUVAC exercise but were reluctant to flee now. There were those who wondered what caused the odor, those who looked worried, those who said the absence of technical personnel meant there was nothing to worry about. Our eyes began to water.
About three hours after we’d first become aware of it, the vapor suddenly lifted, saving us from our formal deliberations.
36
NOW AND THEN I thought of the Zumwalt automatic hidden in the bedroom.
The time of dangling insects arrived. White houses with caterpillars dangling from the eaves. White stones in driveways. You can walk at night down the middle of the street and hear women talking on the telephone. Warmer weather produces voices in the dark. They are talking about their adolescent sons. How big, how fast. The sons are almost frightening. The quantities they eat. The way they loom in doorways. These are the days that are full of wormy bugs. They are in the grass, stuck to the siding, hanging in the air, hanging from the trees and eaves, stuck to the window screens. The women talk long-distance to the grandparents of the growing boys. They share the Trimline phone, beamish old folks in hand-knit sweaters on fixed incomes.
What happens to them when the commercial ends?
I got a call myself one night. The operator said, “There’s a Mother Devi that wishes to talk collect to a Jack Gladney. Do you accept?”
“Hello, Janet. What do you want?”
“Just to say hello. To ask how you are. We haven’t talked in ages.”
“Talked?”
“Swami wants to know if our son is coming to the ashram this summer.”
“Our son?”
“Yours, mine and his. Swami regards the children of his followers as his children.”
“I sent a daughter to Mexico last week. When she gets back, I’ll be ready to talk about the son.”
“Swami says Montana will be good for the boy. He will grow out, fill out. These are his touchy years.”
“Why are you calling? Seriously.”
“Just to greet you, Jack. We greet each other here.”
“Is he one of those whimsical swamis with a snow-white beard? Sort of fun to look at?”
“We’re serious people here. The cycle of history has but four ages. We happen to be in the last of these. There is