White Noise - Don Delillo [79]
We sat at the breakfast table after the older kids were gone.
“Have you seen the Stovers’ new dog?”
“No,” I said.
“They think it’s a space alien. Only they’re not joking. I was there yesterday. The animal is strange.”
“Has something been bothering you?”
“I’m fine,” she said.
“I wish you’d tell me. We tell each other everything. We always have.”
“Jack, what could be bothering me?”
“You stare out of windows. You’re different somehow. You don’t quite see things and react to things the way you used to.”
“That’s what their dog does. He stares out of windows. But not just any window. He goes upstairs to the attic and puts his paws up on the sill to look out the highest window. They think he’s waiting for instructions.”
“Denise would kill me if she knew I was going to say this.”
“What?”
“I found the Dylar.”
“What Dylar?”
“It was taped to the radiator cover.”
“Why would I tape something to the radiator cover?”
“That’s exactly what Denise predicted you would say.”
“She’s usually right.”
“I talked to Hookstratten, your doctor.”
“I’m in super shape, really.”
“That’s what he said.”
“Do you know what these cold gray leaden days make me want to do?”
“What?”
“Crawl into bed with a good-looking man. I’ll put Wilder in his play tunnel. You go shave and brush your teeth. Meet you in the bedroom in ten minutes.”
That afternoon I saw Winnie Richards slip out a side door of the Observatory and go loping down a small lawn toward the new buildings. I hurried out of my office and went after her. She kept close to walls, moving in a long-gaited stride. I felt I had made an important sighting of an endangered animal or some phenomenal subhuman like a yeti or sasquatch. It was cold and still leaden. I found I could not gain on her without breaking into a trot. She hurried around the back of Faculty House and I picked up the pace, fearing I was on the verge of losing her. It felt strange to be running. I hadn’t run in many years and didn’t recognize my body in this new format, didn’t recognize the world beneath my feet, hard-surfaced and abrupt. I turned a corner and picked up speed, aware of floating bulk. Up, down, life, death. My robe flew behind me.
I caught up to her in the empty corridor of a one-story building that smelled of embalming fluids. She stood against the wall in a pale green tunic and tennis sneakers. I was too winded to speak and raised my right arm, requesting a delay. Winnie led me to a table in a small room full of bottled brains. The table was fitted with a sink and covered with note pads and lab instruments. She gave me water in a paper cup. I tried to dissociate the taste of the tap water from the sight of the brains and the general odor of preservatives and disinfectants.
“Have you been hiding from me?” I said. “I’ve left notes, phone messages.”
“Not from you, Jack, or anyone in particular.”
“Then why have you been so hard to find?”
“Isn’t this what the twentieth century is all about?”
“What?”
“People go into hiding even when no one is looking for them.”
“Do you really think that’s true?”
“It’s obvious,” she said.
“What about the tablet?”
“An interesting piece of technology. What’s it called?”
“Dylar.”
“Never heard of it,” she said.
“What can you tell me about it? Try not to be too brilliant. I haven’t eaten lunch yet.”
I watched her blush.
“It’s not a tablet in the old sense,” she said. “It’s a drug delivery system. It doesn’t dissolve right away or release its ingredients right away. The medication in Dylar is encased in a polymer membrane. Water from your gastrointestinal tract seeps through the membrane at a carefully controlled rate.”
“What does