White Noise - Don Delillo [53]
“Are you people telling me,” Babette said, “that a rat is not only a vermin and a rodent but a mammal too?”
Snow turned to sleet, sleet to rain.
We reached the point where the concrete barrier gives way to a twenty-yard stretch of landscaped median no higher than a curbstone. But instead of a state trooper directing traffic into two extra lanes, we saw a Mylex-suited man waving us away from the opening. Just beyond him was the scrap-metal burial mound of a Winnebago and a snowplow. The huge and tortured wreck emitted a wisp of rusty smoke. Brightly colored plastic utensils were scattered for some distance. There was no sign of victims or fresh blood, leading us to believe that some time had passed since the recreational vehicle mounted the plow, probably in a moment when opportunism seemed an easily defensible failing, given the situation. It must have been the blinding snow that caused the driver to leap the median without noting an object on the other side.
“I saw all this before,” Steffie said.
“What do you mean?” I said.
“This happened once before. Just like this. The man in the yellow suit and gas mask. The big wreck sitting in the snow. It was totally and exactly like this. We were all here in the car. Rain made little holes in the snow. Everything.”
It was Heinrich who’d told me that exposure to the chemical waste could cause a person to experience a sense of déjà vu. Steffie wasn’t there when he said it, but she could have heard it on the kitchen radio, where she and Denise had probably learned about sweaty palms and vomiting before developing these symptoms themselves. I didn’t think Steffie knew what déja vu meant, but it was possible Babette had told her. Déjà vu, however, was no longer a working symptom of Nyodene contamination. It had been preempted by coma, convulsions, and miscarriage. If Steffie had learned about déjà vu on the radio but then missed the subsequent upgrading to more deadly conditions, it could mean she was in a position to be tricked by her own apparatus of suggestibility. She and Denise had been lagging all evening. They were late with sweaty palms, late with nausea, late again with déjà vu. What did it all mean? Did Steffie truly imagine she’d seen the wreck before or did she only imagine she’d imagined it? Is it possible to have a false perception of an illusion? Is there a true déjà vu and a false déjà vu? I wondered whether her palms had been truly sweaty or whether she’d simply imagined a sense of wetness. And was she so open to suggestion that she would develop every symptom as it was announced?
I feel sad for people and the queer part we play in our own disasters.
But what if she hadn’t heard the radio, didn’t know what déjà vu was? What if she was developing real symptoms by natural means? Maybe the scientists were right in the first place, with their original announcements, before they revised upward. Which was worse, the real condition or the self-created one, and did it matter? I wondered about these and allied questions. As I drove I found myself giving and taking an oral examination based on the kind of quibbling fine-points that had entertained several centuries’ worth of medieval idlers. Could a nine-year-old girl suffer a miscarriage due to the power of suggestion? Would she have to be pregnant first? Could the power of suggestion be strong enough to work backward in this manner, from miscarriage to pregnancy to menstruation to ovulation? Which comes first, menstruation or ovulation? Are we talking about mere symptoms or deeply entrenched conditions? Is a symptom a sign or a thing? What is a thing and how do we know it’s not another thing?
I turned off the radio, not to help me think but to keep me from thinking. Vehicles lurched and skidded. Someone threw a gum wrapper out a side window and Babette made an indignant speech about inconsiderate people littering the highways and countryside.
“I’ll tell you something else that’s happened before,” Heinrich said. “We’re running out of gas.”