White Noise - Don Delillo [69]
Then we heard the rotors. Through the stark trees we saw it, the immense toxic cloud, lighted now by eighteen choppers—immense almost beyond comprehension, beyond legend and rumor, a roiling bloated slug-shaped mass. It seemed to be generating its own inner storms. There were cracklings and sputterings, flashes of light, long looping streaks of chemical flame. The car horns blared and moaned. The helicopters throbbed like giant appliances. We sat in the car, in the snowy woods, saying nothing. The great cloud, beyond its turbulent core, was silver-tipped in the spotlights. It moved horribly and sluglike through the night, the choppers seeming to putter ineffectually around its edges. In its tremendous size, its dark and bulky menace, its escorting aircraft, the cloud resembled a national promotion for death, a multimillion-dollar campaign backed by radio spots, heavy print and billboard, TV saturation. There was a high-tension discharge of vivid light. The horn-blowing increased in volume.
I recalled with a shock that I was technically dead. The interview with the SIMUVAC technician came back to me in terrible detail. I felt sick on several levels.
There was nothing to do but try to get the family to safety. I kept pushing toward the headlights, the sound of blowing horns. Wilder was asleep, planing in uniform spaces. I hit the accelerator, jerked the wheel, arm-wrestled the car through a stand of white pine.
Through his mask Heinrich said, “Did you ever really look at your eye?”
“What do you mean?” Denise said, showing immediate interest, as though we were lazing away a midsummer day on the front porch.
“Your own eye. Do you know which part is which?”
“You mean like the iris, the pupil?”
“Those are the publicized parts. What about the vitreous body? What about the lens? The lens is tricky. How many people even know they have a lens? They think ‘lens’ must be ‘camera.’ ”
“What about the ear?” Denise said in a muffled voice.
“If the eye is a mystery, totally forget the ear. Just say ‘cochlea’ to somebody, they look at you like, ‘Who’s this guy?’ There’s this whole world right inside our own body.”
“Nobody even cares,” she said.
“How can people live their whole lives without knowing the names of their own parts of the body?”
“What about the glands?” she said.
“Animal glands you can eat. The Arabs eat glands.”
“The French eat glands,” Babette said through gauze. “The Arabs eat eyes, speaking of eyes.”
“What parts?” Denise said.
“The whole eye. The sheep eye.”
“They don’t eat the lashes,” Heinrich said.
“Do sheep have lashes?” Steffie said.
“Ask your father,” Babette said.
The car forded a creek which I didn’t know was there until we were in it. I struggled to get us over the opposite bank. Snow fell thickly through the high beams. The muffled dialogue went on. I reflected that our current predicament seemed to be of merely glancing interest to some of us. I wanted them to pay attention to the toxic event. I wanted to be appreciated for my efforts in getting us to the parkway. I thought of telling them about the computer tally, the time-factored death I carried in my chromosomes and blood. Self-pity oozed through my soul. I tried to relax and enjoy it.
“I’ll give anybody in this car five dollars,” Heinrich said through his protective mask, “if you can tell me whether more people died building the pyramids in Egypt or building the Great Wall of China—and you have to say how many died in each place, within fifty people.”
I followed three snowmobiles across an open field. They conveyed a mood of clever fun. The toxic event was still in view, chemical tracers shooting in slow arcs out of its interior. We passed families on foot, saw a line of paired red lights winding through the dark. When we edged out of the woods, people in other cars gave us sleepy looks. It took ninety minutes to reach the parkway, another thirty to get to the cloverleaf, where we spun off toward Iron City. It was here that we met up with the group from the Kung Fu Palace. Tooting horns, waving children.