White Noise - Don Delillo [32]
They came out of the small bright lobby onto the street. It was cold, empty and dark. The boy walked next to his mother, holding her hand, still crying, and they seemed a picture of such amateurish sadness and calamity that I nearly started laughing—laughing not at the sadness but at the picture they made of it, at the disparity between their grief and its appearances. My feelings of tenderness and pity were undermined by the sight of them crossing the sidewalk in their bundled clothing, the child determinedly weeping, his mother drooping as she walked, wild-haired, a wretched and pathetic pair. They were inadequate to the spoken grief, the great single-minded anguish. Does this explain the existence of professional mourners? They keep a wake from lapsing into comic pathos.
“What did the doctor say?”
“Give him an aspirin and put him to bed.”
“That’s what Denise said.”
“I told him that. He said, ‘Well, why didn’t you do it?’ ”
“Why didn’t we?”
“She’s a child, not a doctor—that’s why.”
“Did you tell him that?”
“I don’t know what I told him,” she said. “I’m never in control of what I say to doctors, much less what they say to me. There’s some kind of disturbance in the air.”
“I know exactly what you mean.”
“It’s like having a conversation during a spacewalk, dangling in those heavy suits.”
“Everything drifts and floats.”
“I lie to doctors all the time.”
“So do I.”
“But why?” she said.
As I started the car I realized his crying had changed in pitch and quality. The rhythmic urgency had given way to a sustained, inarticulate and mournful sound. He was keening now. These were expressions of Mideastern lament, of an anguish so accessible that it rushes to overwhelm whatever immediately caused it. There was something permanent and soul-struck in this crying. It was a sound of inbred desolation.
“What do we do?”
“Think of something,” she said.
“There’s still fifteen minutes before your class is due to start. Let’s take him to the hospital, to the emergency entrance. Just to see what they say.”
“You can’t take a child to an emergency ward because he’s crying. If anything is not an emergency, this would be it.”
“I’ll wait in the car,” I said.
“What do I tell them? ‘My child is crying.’ Do they even have an emergency ward?”
“Don’t you remember? We took the Stovers this past summer.”
“Why?”
“Their car was being repaired.”
“Never mind.”
“They inhaled the spray mist from some kind of stain remover.”
“Take me to my class,” she said.
Posture. When I pulled up in front of the church, some of her students were walking down the steps to the basement entrance. Babette looked at her son—a searching, pleading and desperate look. He was in the sixth hour of his crying. She ran along the sidewalk and into the building.
I thought of taking him to the hospital. But if a doctor who examined the boy thoroughly in his cozy office with paintings on the wall in elaborate gilded frames could find nothing wrong, then what could emergency technicians do, people trained to leap on chests and pound at static hearts?
I picked him up and set him against the steering wheel, facing me, his feet on my thighs. The huge lament continued, wave on wave. It was a sound so large and pure I could almost listen to it, try consciously to apprehend it, as one sets up a mental register in a concert hall or theater. He was not sniveling or blubbering. He was crying out, saying nameless things in a way that touched me with its depth and richness.