White Noise - Don Delillo [81]
I leaned across my wife’s body and turned off the radio. She kept on staring. I kissed her lightly on the head.
“Murray says you have important hair.”
She smiled in a pale and depleted way. I put down my notes and eased her around slightly so that she looked straight up as I spoke.
“It’s time for a major dialogue. You know it, I know it. You’ll tell me all about Dylar. If not for my sake, then for your little girl’s. She’s been worried—worried sick. Besides, you have no more room to maneuver. We’ve backed you against the wall. Denise and I. I found the concealed bottle, removed a tablet, had it analyzed by an expert. Those little white disks are superbly engineered. Laser technology, advanced plastics. Dylar is almost as ingenious as the microorganisms that ate the billowing cloud. Who would have believed in the existence of a little white pill that works as a pressure pump in the human body to provide medication safely and effectively, and self-destructs as well? I am struck by the beauty of this. We know something else, something crucially damaging to your case. We know Dylar is not available to the general public. This fact alone justifies our demands for an explanation. There’s really very little left for you to say. Just tell us the nature of the drug. As you well know, I don’t have the temperament to hound people. But Denise is a different kind of person. I’ve been doing all I can to restrain her. If you don’t tell me what I want to know, I’ll unleash your little girl. She’ll come at you with everything she has. She won’t waste time trying to make you feel guilty. Denise believes in a frontal attack. She’ll hammer you right into the ground. You know I’m right, Babette.”
About five minutes passed. She lay there, staring into the ceiling.
“Just let me tell it in my own way,” she said in a small voice.
“Would you like a liqueur?”
“No, thank you.”
“Take your time,” I said. “We’ve got all night. If there’s anything you want or need, just say so. You have only to ask. I’ll be right here for as long as it takes.”
Another moment passed.
“I don’t know exactly when it started. Maybe a year and a half ago. I thought I was going through a phase, some kind of watermark period in my life.”
“Landmark,” I said. “Or watershed.”
“A kind of settling-in-period, I thought. Middle age. Something like that. The condition would go away and I’d forget all about it. But it didn’t go away. I began to think it never would.”
“What condition?”
“Never mind that for now.”
“You’ve been depressed lately. I’ve never seen you like this. This is the whole point of Babette. She’s a joyous person. She doesn’t succumb to gloom or self-pity.”
“Let me tell it, Jack.”
“All right.”
“You know how I am. I think everything is correctable. Given the right attitude and the proper effort, a person can change a harmful condition by reducing it to its simplest parts. You can make lists, invent categories, devise charts and graphs. This is how I am able to teach my students how to stand, sit and walk, even though I know you think these subjects are too obvious and nebulous and generalized to be reduced to component parts. I’m not a very ingenious person but I know how to break things down, how to separate and classify. We can analyze posture, we can analyze eating, drinking and even breathing. How else do you understand the world, is my way of looking at it.”
“I’m right here,” I said. “If there’s anything you want or need, only say the word.”
“When I realized this condition was not about to go away, I set out to understand it better by reducing it to its parts. First I had to find out if it had any parts. I went to libraries and bookstores, read magazines and technical journals, watched cable TV, made lists and diagrams, made multicolored charts, made phone calls to technical writers and scientists, talked to a Sikh holy man in Iron City and even studied the occult, hiding the books in the attic so you and Denise