White Noise - Don Delillo [74]
In bed we lay quietly, my head between her breasts, cushioned as if against some remorseless blow. I was determined not to tell her about the computer verdict. I knew she would be devastated to learn that my death would almost surely precede hers. Her body became the agency of my resolve, my silence. Nightly I moved toward her breasts, nuzzling into that designated space like a wounded sub into its repair dock. I drew courage from her breasts, her warm mouth, her browsing hands, from the skimming tips of her fingers on my back. The lighter the touch, the more determined I was to keep her from knowing. Only her own desperation could break my will.
Once I almost asked her to put on legwarmers before we made love. But it seemed a request more deeply rooted in pathos than in aberrant sexuality and I thought it might make her suspect that something was wrong.
23
I ASKED MY GERMAN TEACHER to add half an hour to each lesson. It seemed more urgent than ever that I learn the language. His room was cold. He wore foul weather gear and seemed gradually to be piling furniture against the windows.
We sat facing each other in the gloom. I did wonderfully well with vocabulary and rules of grammar. I could have passed a written test easily, made top grades. But I continued to have trouble pronouncing the words. Dunlop did not seem to mind. He enunciated for me over and over, scintillas of dry spit flying toward my face.
We advanced to three lessons a week. He seemed to shed his distracted manner, to become slightly more engaged. Furniture, newspapers, cardboard boxes, sheets of polyethylene continued to accumulate against the walls and windows—items scavenged from ravines. He stared into my mouth as I did my exercises in pronunciation. Once he reached in with his right hand to adjust my tongue. It was a strange and terrible moment, an act of haunting intimacy. No one had ever handled my tongue before.
German shepherds still patrolled the town, accompanied by men in Mylex suits. We welcomed the dogs, got used to them, fed and petted them, but did not adjust well to the sight of costumed men with padded boots, hoses attached to their masks. We associated these outfits with the source of our trouble and fear.
At dinner Denise said, “Why can’t they dress in normal clothes?”
“This is what they wear on duty,” Babette said. “It doesn’t mean we’re in danger. The dogs have sniffed out only a few traces of toxic material on the edge of town.”
“That’s what we’re supposed to believe,” Heinrich said. “If they released the true findings, there’d be billions of dollars in lawsuits. Not to mention demonstrations, panic, violence and social disorder.”
He seemed to take pleasure in the prospect. Babette said, “That’s a little extreme, isn’t it?”
“What’s extreme, what I said or what would happen?”
“Both. There’s no reason to think the results aren’t true as published.”
“Do you really believe that?” he said.
“Why shouldn’t I believe it?”
“Industry would collapse if the true results of any of these investigations were released.”
“What investigations?”
“The ones that are going on all over the country.”
“That’s the point,” she said. “Every day on the news there’s another toxic spill. Cancerous solvents from storage tanks, arsenic from smokestacks, radioactive water from power plants. How serious can it be if it happens all the time? Isn’t the definition of a serious event based on the fact that it’s not an everyday occurrence?”
The two girls looked at Heinrich, anticipating a surgically deft rejoinder.
“Forget these spills,” he said. “These spills are nothing.”
This wasn’t the direction any of us had expected him to take. Babette watched him carefully. He cut a lettuce leaf on his salad plate into two equal pieces.
“I wouldn’t say they were nothing,” she said cautiously. “They’re small everyday seepages. They’re controllable. But they’re not nothing. We have to watch them.”
“The sooner we forget these spills, the sooner we can come to grips with the real issue.”
“What’s the real issue?” I said.
He spoke