White Noise - Don Delillo [46]
“Why is he on the roof?”
“Heinrich? Something about the train yards,” she said. “It was on the radio.”
“Shouldn’t I get him down?”
“Why?”
“He could fall.”
“Don’t tell him that.”
“Why not?”
“He thinks you underestimate him.”
“He’s on a ledge,” I said. “There must be something I should be doing.”
“The more you show concern, the closer he’ll go to the edge.”
“I know that but I still have to get him down.”
“Coax him back in,” she said. “Be sensitive and caring. Get him to talk about himself. Don’t make sudden movements.”
When I got to the attic he was already back inside, standing by the open window, still looking through the glasses. Abandoned possessions were everywhere, oppressive and soul-worrying, creating a weather of their own among the exposed beams and posts, the fiberglass insulation pads.
“What happened?”
“The radio said a tank car derailed. But I don’t think it derailed from what I could see. I think it got rammed and something punched a hole in it. There’s a lot of smoke and I don’t like the looks of it.”
“What does it look like?”
He handed me the binoculars and stepped aside. Without climbing onto the ledge I couldn’t see the switching yard and the car or cars in question. But the smoke was plainly visible, a heavy black mass hanging in the air beyond the river, more or less shapeless.
“Did you see fire engines?”
“They’re all over the place,” he said. “But it looks to me like they’re not getting too close. It must be pretty toxic or pretty explosive stuff, or both.”
“It won’t come this way.”
“How do you know?”
“It just won’t. The point is you shouldn’t be standing on icy ledges. It worries Baba.”
“You think if you tell me it worries her, I’ll feel guilty and not do it. But if you tell me it worries you, I’ll do it all the time.”
“Shut the window,” I told him.
We went down to the kitchen. Steffie was looking through the brightly colored mail for coupons, lotteries and contests. This was the last day of the holiday break for the grade school and high school. Classes on the Hill would resume in a week. I sent Heinrich outside to clear snow from the walk. I watched him stand out there, utterly still, his head turned slightly, a honed awareness in his stance. It took me a while to realize he was listening to the sirens beyond the river.
An hour later he was back in the attic, this time with a radio and highway map. I climbed the narrow stairs, borrowed the glasses and looked again. It was still there, a slightly larger accumulation, a towering mass in fact, maybe a little blacker now.
“The radio calls it a feathery plume,” he said. “But it’s not a plume.”
“What is it?”
“Like a shapeless growing thing. A dark black breathing thing of smoke. Why do they call it a plume?”
“Air time is valuable. They can’t go into long tortured descriptions. Have they said what kind of chemical it is?”
“It’s called Nyodene Derivative or Nyodene D. It was in a movie we saw in school on toxic wastes. These videotaped rats.”
“What does it cause?”
“The movie wasn’t sure what it does to humans. Mainly it was rats growing urgent lumps.”
“That’s what the movie said. What does the radio say?”
“At first they said skin irritation and sweaty palms. But now they say nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath.”
“This is human nausea we’re talking about. Not rats.”
“Not rats,” he said.
I gave him the binoculars.
“Well it won’t come this way.”
“How do you know?” he said.
“I just know. It’s perfectly calm and still today. And when there’s a wind at this time of year, it blows that way, not this way.”
“What if it blows this way?”
“It won’t.”
“Just this one time.”
“It won’t. Why should it?”
He paused a beat and said in a flat tone, “They just closed part of the interstate.”
“They would want to do that, of course.”
“Why?”
“They just would. A sensible precaution. A way to facilitate movement of service vehicles and such. Any number of reasons that have nothing to do with wind or wind direction.”
Babette’s head appeared at the top of the stairway.