White Noise - Don Delillo [78]
“Every time I see newsfilm of someone in his fourth week of sitting in a cage full of snakes, I find myself wishing he’d get bitten.”
“So do I,” Heinrich said.
“Why is that?”
“He’s asking for it.”
“That’s right. Most of us spend our lives avoiding danger. Who do these people think they are?”
“They ask for it. Let them get it.”
I paused a while, savoring the rare moment of agreement.
“What else does your friend do to train?”
“He sits for long periods in one place, getting his bladder accustomed. He’s down to two meals a day. He sleeps sitting up, two hours at a time. He wants to train himself to wake up gradually, without sudden movements, which could startle a mamba.”
“It seems a strange ambition.”
“Mambas are sensitive.”
“But if it makes him happy.”
“He thinks he’s happy but it’s just a nerve cell in his brain that’s getting too much stimulation or too little stimulation.”
I got out of bed in the middle of the night and went to the small room at the end of the hall to watch Steffie and Wilder sleep. I remained at this task, motionless, for nearly an hour, feeling refreshed and expanded in unnameable ways.
I was surprised, entering our bedroom, to find Babette standing at a window looking out into the steely night. She gave no sign that she’d noticed my absence from the bed and did not seem to hear when I climbed back in, burying myself beneath the covers.
25
OUR NEWSPAPER is delivered by a middle-aged Iranian driving a Nissan Sentra. Something about the car makes me uneasy—the car waiting with its headlights on, at dawn, as the man places the newspaper on the front steps. I tell myself I have reached an age, the age of unreliable menace. The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities.
I sat at my desk in the office staring down at the white tablet. It was more or less flying-saucer-shaped, a streamlined disk with the tiniest of holes at one end. It was only after moments of intense scrutiny that I’d been able to spot the hole.
The tablet was not chalky like aspirin and not exactly capsule-slick either. It felt strange in the hand, curiously sensitive to the touch but at the same time giving the impression that it was synthetic, insoluble, elaborately engineered.
I walked over to a small domed building known as the Observatory and gave the tablet to Winnie Richards, a young research neuro-chemist whose work was said to be brilliant. She was a tall gawky furtive woman who blushed when someone said something funny. Some of the New York émigrés liked to visit her cubicle and deliver rapid-fire one-liners, just to see her face turn red.
I watched her sit at the cluttered desk for two or three minutes, slowly rotating the tablet between her thumb and index finger. She licked it and shrugged.
“Certainly doesn’t taste like much.”
“How long will it take to analyze the contents?”
“There’s a dolphin’s brain in my in-box but come see me in forty-eight hours.”
Winnie was well-known on the Hill for moving from place to place without being seen. No one knew how she managed this or why she found it necessary. Maybe she was self-conscious about her awkward frame, her craning look and odd lope. Maybe she had a phobia concerning open spaces, although the spaces at the college were mainly snug and quaint. Perhaps the world of people and things had such an impact on her, struck her with the force of some rough and naked body—made her blush in fact—that she found it easier to avoid frequent contact. Maybe she was tired of being called brilliant. In any case I had trouble locating her all the rest of that week. She was not to be seen on the lawns and walks, was absent from her cubicle whenever I looked in.
At home Denise made it a point not to bring up the subject of Dylar. She did not want to put pressure on me and even avoided eye contact, as if an exchange of significant looks was more than our secret knowledge could bear. Babette, for her part, could not seem to produce a look