White Noise - Don Delillo [127]
“But repression is totally false and mechanical. Everybody knows that. We’re not supposed to deny our nature.”
“It’s natural to deny our nature, according to Murray. It’s the whole point of being different from animals.”
“But that’s crazy.”
“It’s the only way to survive,” I said from her breasts.
She stroked my shoulder, thinking about this. Gray flashes of a staticky man standing near a double bed. His body distorted, rippling, unfinished. I didn’t have to imagine his motel companion. Our bodies were one surface, hers and mine, but the delectations of touch were preempted by Mr. Gray. It was his pleasure I experienced, his hold over Babette, his cheap and sleazy power. Down the hall an eager voice said: “If you keep misplacing your ball of string, cage it in a Barney basket, attach some organizer clips to your kitchen corkboard, fasten the basket to the clips. Simple!”
The next day I started carrying the Zumwalt automatic to school. It was in the flap pocket of my jacket when I lectured, it was in the top drawer of my desk when I received visitors in the office. The gun created a second reality for me to inhabit. The air was bright, swirling around my head. Nameless feelings pressed thrillingly on my chest. It was a reality I could control, secretly dominate.
How stupid these people were, coming into my office unarmed.
Late one afternoon I took the gun out of my desk and examined it carefully. Only three bullets remained in the magazine. I wondered how Vernon Dickey had used the missing ammo (or whatever bullets are called by people familiar with firearms). Four Dylar tablets, three Zumwalt bullets. Why was I surprised to find that the bullets were so unmistakably bullet-shaped? I guess I thought new names and shapes had been given to just about everything in the decades since I first became aware of objects and their functions. The weapon was gun-shaped, the little pointed projectiles reassuringly bullet-shaped. They were like childhood things you might come across after forty years, seeing their genius for the first time.
That evening I heard Heinrich in his room, moodily singing “The Streets of Laredo.” I stopped in to ask whether Orest had entered the cage yet.
“They said it was not humane. There was no place that would let him do it officially. He had to go underground.”
“Where is underground?”
“Watertown. Orest and his trainer. They found a public notary there who said he would certify a document that said that Orest Mercator spent so many days incarcerated with these venomous reptiles blah blah blah.”
“Where would they find a large glass cage in Watertown?”
“They wouldn’t.”
“What would they find?”
“A room in the only hotel. Plus there were only three snakes. And he got bit in four minutes.”
“You mean the hotel let them place poisonous snakes in the room?”
“The hotel didn’t know. The man who arranged the snakes carried them up in an airline bag. It was a whole massive deception except the man showed up with three snakes instead of the agreed twenty-seven.”
“In other words he told them he had access to twenty-seven snakes.”
“Venomous. Except they weren’t. So Orest got bit for nothing. The jerk.”
“Suddenly he’s a jerk.”
“They had all this antivenom which they couldn’t even use. The first four minutes.”
“How does he feel?”
“How would you feel if you were a jerk?”
“Glad to be alive,” I said.
“Not Orest. He dropped out of sight. He went into complete seclusion. Nobody’s seen him since it happened. He doesn’t answer the door, he doesn’t answer the phone, he doesn’t show up at school. The total package.”
I decided to wander over to my office and glance at some final exams. Most of the students had already departed, eager to begin the routine hedonism of another bare-limbed summer. The campus was dark and empty. There was a trembling mist. Passing a line of trees, I thought I sensed someone edge in behind me, maybe thirty yards away. When I looked, the path was clear. Was it the gun that was making me jumpy? Does a gun draw violence