White Noise - Don Delillo [26]
“I forget things all the time.”
“What do you take?”
“Blood pressure pills, stress pills, allergy pills, eye drops, aspirin. Run of the mill.”
“I looked in the medicine chest in your bathroom.”
“No Dylar?”
“I thought there might be a new bottle.”
“The doctor prescribed thirty pills. That was it. Run of the mill. Everybody takes something.”
“I still want to know,” she said.
All this time she’d been turned away from me. There were plot potentials in this situation, chances for people to make devious maneuvers, secret plans. But now she shifted position, used an elbow to prop her upper body and watched me speculatively from the foot of the bed.
“Can I ask you something?”
“Sure,” I said.
“You won’t get mad?”
“You know what’s in my medicine chest. What secrets are left?”
“Why did you name Heinrich Heinrich?”
“Fair question.”
“You don’t have to answer.”
“Good question. No reason why you shouldn’t ask.”
“So why did you?”
“I thought it was a forceful name, a strong name. It has a kind of authority.”
“Is he named after anyone?”
“No. He was born shortly after I started the department and I guess I wanted to acknowledge my good fortune. I wanted to do something German. I felt a gesture was called for.”
“Heinrich Gerhardt Gladney?”
“I thought it had an authority that might cling to him. I though it was forceful and impressive and I still do. I wanted to shield him, make him unafraid. People were naming their children Kim, Kelly and Tracy.”
There was a long silence. She kept watching me. Her features, crowded somewhat in the center of her face, gave to her moments of concentration a puggish and half-belligerent look.
“Do you think I miscalculated?”
“It’s not for me to say.”
“There’s something about German names, the German language, German things. I don’t know what it is exactly. It’s just there. In the middle of it all is Hitler, of course.”
“He was on again last night.”
“He’s always on. We couldn’t have television without him.”
“They lost the war,” she said. “How great could they be?”
“A valid point. But it’s not a question of greatness. It’s not a question of good and evil. I don’t know what it is. Look at it this way. Some people always wear a favorite color. Some people carry a gun. Some people put on a uniform and feel bigger, stronger, safer. It’s in this area that my obsessions dwell.”
Steffie came in wearing Denise’s green visor. I didn’t know what this meant. She climbed up on the bed and all three of us went through my German-English dictionary, looking for words that sound about the same in both languages, like orgy and shoe.
Heinrich came running down the hall, burst into the room. “Come on, hurry up, plane crash footage.” Then he was out the door, the girls were off the bed, all three of them running along the hall to the TV set.
I sat in bed a little stunned. The swiftness and noise of their leaving had put the room in a state of molecular agitation. In the debris of invisible matter, the question seemed to be, What is happening here? By the time I got to the room at the end of the hall, there was only a puff of black smoke at the edge of the screen. But the crash was shown two more times, once in stop-action replay, as an analyst attempted to explain the reason for the plunge. A jet trainer in an air show in New Zealand.
We had two closet doors that opened by themselves.
That night, a Friday, we gathered in front of the set, as was the custom and the rule, with take-out Chinese. There were floods, earthquakes, mud slides, erupting volcanoes. We’d never before been so attentive to our duty, our Friday assembly. Heinrich was not sullen, I was not bored. Steffie, brought close to tears by a sitcom husband arguing with his wife, appeared totally absorbed in these documentary clips of calamity and death. Babette tried to switch to a comedy series about a group of racially mixed kids who build their own communications satellite. She was startled by the force of our objection. We were otherwise silent, watching houses slide into the ocean, whole villages crackle and ignite in a mass of advancing