White Noise - Don Delillo [66]
“Why are so many people having these episodes now?”
“Because death is in the air,” he said gently. “It is liberating suppressed material. It is getting us closer to things we haven’t learned about ourselves. Most of us have probably seen our own death but haven’t known how to make the material surface. Maybe when we die, the first thing we’ll say is, ‘I know this feeling. I was here before.’ ”
He put his hands back on my shoulders, studied me with renewed and touching sadness. We heard the prostitutes call out to someone.
“I’d like to lose interest in myself,” I told Murray. “Is there any chance of that happening?”
“None. Better men have tried.”
“I guess you’re right.”
“It’s obvious.”
“I wish there was something I could do. I wish I could out-think the problem.”
“Work harder on your Hitler,” he said.
I looked at him. How much did he know?
The car window opened a crack. One of the women said to Murray, “All right, I’ll do it for twenty-five.”
“Have you checked with your representative?” he said.
She rolled down the window to peer at him. She had the opaque look of a hair-curlered woman on the evening news whose house had been buried in mud.
“You know who I mean,” Murray said. “The fellow who sees to your emotional needs in return for one hundred percent of your earnings. The fellow you depend on to beat you up when you’re bad.”
“Bobby? He’s in Iron City, keeping out of the cloud. He doesn’t like to expose himself unless it’s absolutely necessary.”
The women laughed, six heads bobbing. It was insider’s laughter, a little overdone, meant to identify them as people bound together in ways not easily appreciated by the rest of us.
A second window opened half an inch, a bright mouth appeared. “The type pimp Bobby is, he likes to use his mind.”
A second round of laughter. We weren’t sure whether it was at Bobby’s expense, or ours, or theirs. The windows went up.
“It’s none of my business,” I said, “but what is it she’s willing to do with you for twenty-five dollars?”
“The Heimlich maneuver.”
I studied the part of his face that lay between the touring cap and beard. He seemed deep in thought, gazing at the car. The windows were fogged, the women’s heads capped in cigarette smoke.
“Of course we’d have to find a vertical space,” he said absently.
“You don’t really expect her to lodge a chunk of food in her wind-pipe.”
He looked at me, half startled. “What? No, no, that won’t be necessary. As long as she makes gagging and choking sounds. As long as she sighs deeply when I jolt the pelvis. As long as she collapses helplessly backward into my life-saving embrace.”
He took off his glove to shake my hand. Then he went over to the car to work out details with the woman in question. I watched him knock on the rear door. After a moment it opened and he squeezed into the back seat. I walked over to one of the oil drums. Three men and a woman stood around the fire, passing rumors back and forth.
Three of the live deer at the Kung Fu Palace were dead. The governor was dead, his pilot and co-pilot seriously injured after a crash landing in a shopping mall. Two of the men at the switching yard were dead, tiny acid burns visible in their Mylex suits. Packs of German shepherds, the Nyodene-sniffing dogs, had shed their parachutes and were being set loose in the affected communities. There was a rash of UFO sightings in the area. There was widespread looting by men in plastic sheets. Two looters were dead. Six National Guardsmen were dead, killed in a firefight that broke out after a racial incident. There were reports of miscarriages, babies born prematurely. There were sightings of additional billowing clouds.
The people who relayed these pieces of unverified information did so with a certain respectful dread, bouncing on their toes in the cold, arms crossed on their