White Noise - Don Delillo [59]
“What’s wrong?” I said to her.
“Didn’t you hear what the voice said?”
“Exposure.”
“That’s right,” she said sharply.
“What’s that got to do with us?”
“Not us,” she said. “You.”
“Why me?”
“Aren’t you the one who got out of the car to fill the gas tank?”
“Where was the airborne event when I did that?”
“Just ahead of us. Don’t you remember? You got back in the car and we went a little ways and then there it was in all those lights.”
“You’re saying when I got out of the car, the cloud may have been close enough to rain all over me.”
“It’s not your fault,” she said impatiently, “but you were practically right in it for about two and a half minutes.”
I made my way up front. Two lines were forming. A to M and N to Z. At the end of each line was a folding table with a microcomputer on it. Technicians milled about, men and women with lapel badges and color-coded armbands. I stood behind the life-jacket-wearing family. They looked bright, happy and well-drilled. The thick orange vests did not seem especially out of place even though we were on more or less dry land, well above sea level, many miles from the nearest ominous body of water. Stark upheavals bring out every sort of quaint aberration by the very suddenness of their coming. Dashes of color and idiosyncrasy marked the scene from beginning to end.
The lines were not long. When I reached the A-to-M desk, the man seated there typed out data on his keyboard. My name, age, medical history, so on. He was a gaunt young man who seemed suspicious of conversation that strayed outside certain unspecified guidelines. Over the left sleeve on his khaki jacket he wore a green armband bearing the word SIMUVAC.
I related the circumstances of my presumed exposure.
“How long were you out there?”
“Two and a half minutes,” I said. “Is that considered long or short?”
“Anything that puts you in contact with actual emissions means we have a situation.”
“Why didn’t the drifting cloud disperse in all that wind and rain?”
“This is not your everyday cirrus. This is a high-definition event. It is packed with dense concentrations of byproduct. You could almost toss a hook in there and tow it out to sea, which I’m exaggerating to make a point.”
“What about people in the car? I had to open the door to get out and get back in.”
“There are known degrees of exposure. I’d say their situation is they’re minimal risks. It’s the two and a half minutes standing right in it that makes me wince. Actual skin and orifice contact. This is Nyodene D. A whole new generation of toxic waste. What we call state of the art. One part per million million can send a rat into a permanent state.”
He regarded me with the grimly superior air of a combat veteran. Obviously he didn’t think much of people whose complacent and overprotected lives did not allow for encounters with brain-dead rats. I wanted this man on my side. He had access to data. I was prepared to be servile and fawning if it would keep him from dropping casually shattering remarks about my degree of exposure and chances for survival.
“That’s quite an armband you’ve got there. What does SIMUVAC mean? Sounds important.”
“Short for simulated evacuation. A new state program they’re still battling over funds for.”
“But this evacuation isn’t simulated. It’s real.”
“We know that. But we thought we could use it as a model.”
“A form of practice? Are you saying you saw a chance to use the real event in order to rehearse the simulation?”
“We took it right into the streets.”
“How is it going?” I said.
“The insertion curve isn’t as smooth as we would like. There’s a probability excess. Plus which we don’t have our victims laid out where we’d want them if this was an actual simulation. In other