White Noise - Don Delillo [43]
Babette looked up from her eggs and hash browns and said to me with a quiet intensity, “Life is good, Jack.”
“What brings this on?”
“I just think it ought to be said.”
“Do you feel better now that you’ve said it?”
“I have terrible dreams,” she murmured.
Who will die first? She says she wants to die first because she would feel unbearably lonely and sad without me, especially if the children were grown and living elsewhere. She is adamant about this. She sincerely wants to precede me. She discusses the subject with such argumentative force that it’s obvious she thinks we have a choice in the matter. She also thinks nothing can happen to us as long as there are dependent children in the house. The kids are a guarantee of our relative longevity. We’re safe as long as they’re around. But once they get big and scatter, she wants to be the first to go. She sounds almost eager. She is afraid I will die unexpectedly, sneakily, slipping away in the night. It isn’t that she doesn’t cherish life; it’s being left alone that frightens her. The emptiness, the sense of cosmic darkness.
MasterCard, Visa, American Express.
I tell her I want to die first. I’ve gotten so used to her that I would feel miserably incomplete. We are two views of the same person. I would spend the rest of my life turning to speak to her. No one there, a hole in space and time. She claims my death would leave a bigger hole in her life than her death would leave in mine. This is the level of our discourse. The relative size of holes, abysses and gaps. We have serious arguments on this level. She says if her death is capable of leaving a large hole in my life, my death would leave an abyss in hers, a great yawning gulf. I counter with a profound depth or void. And so it goes into the night. These arguments never seem foolish at the time. Such is the dignifying power of our subject.
She put on a long glossy padded coat—it looked segmented, exoskeletal, designed for the ocean floor—and went out to teach her class in posture. Steffie moved soundlessly through the house carrying small plastic bags she used for lining the wicker baskets scattered about. She did this once or twice a week with the quiet and conscientious air of someone who does not want credit for saving lives. Murray came over to talk to the two girls and Wilder, something he did from time to time as part of his investigation into what he called the society of kids. He talked about the otherworldly babble of the American family. He seemed to think we were a visionary group, open to special forms of consciousness. There were huge amounts of data flowing through the house, waiting to be analyzed.
He went upstairs with the three kids to watch TV. Heinrich walked into the kitchen, sat at the table and gripped a fork tightly in each hand. The refrigerator throbbed massively. I flipped a switch and somewhere beneath the sink a grinding mechanism reduced parings, rinds and animal fats to tiny drainable fragments, with a motorized surge that made me retreat two paces. I took the forks out of my son’s hands and put them in the dishwasher.
“Do you drink coffee yet?”
“No,” he said.
“Baba likes a cup when she gets back from class.”
“Make her tea instead.”
“She doesn’t like tea.”
“She can learn, can’t she?”
“The two things have completely different tastes.”
“A habit’s a habit.”
“You have to acquire it first.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Make her tea.”
“Her class is more demanding than it sounds. Coffee relaxes her.”
“That’s why it’s dangerous,” he said.
“It’s not dangerous.”
“Whatever relaxes you is dangerous. If you don’t know that, I might as well be talking to the wall.”
“Murray would also like coffee,” I said, aware of a small note of triumph in my voice.
“Did you see what you just did? You took the coffee can with you to the counter.”
“So what?”
“You didn’t have to. You could have left it by the stove where you were standing and then gone to the counter to get the spoon.”
“You’re saying I carried the coffee can unnecessarily.”
“You