White Noise - Don Delillo [82]
“All this without my knowing. The whole point of Babette is that she speaks to me, she reveals and confides.”
“This is not a story about your disappointment at my silence. The theme of this story is my pain and my attempts to end it.”
“I’ll make some hot chocolate. Would you like that?”
“Stay. This is a crucial part. All this energy, this research, study and concealment, but I was getting nowhere. The condition would not yield. It hung over my life, gave me no rest. Then one day I was reading to Mr. Treadwell from the National Examiner. An ad caught my eye. Never mind exactly what it said. Volunteers wanted for secret research. This is all you have to know.”
“I thought it was my former wives who practiced guile. Sweet deceivers. Tense, breathy, high-cheekboned, bilingual.”
“I answered the ad and was interviewed by a small firm doing research in psychobiology. Do you know what that is?”
“No.”
“Do you know how complex the human brain is?”
“I have some idea.”
“No, you don’t. Let’s call the company Gray Research, although that’s not the true name. Let’s call my contact Mr. Gray. Mr. Gray is a composite. I was eventually in touch with three or four or more people at the firm.”
“One of those long low pale brick buildings with electrified fencing and low-profile shrubbery.”
“I never saw their headquarters. Never mind why. The point is I took test after test. Emotional, psychological, motor response, brain activity. Mr. Gray said there were three finalists and I was one of them.”
“Finalists for what?”
“We were to be test subjects in the development of a super experimental and top secret drug, code-name Dylar, that he’d been working on for years. He’d found a Dylar receptor in the human brain and was putting the finishing touches on the tablet itself. But he also told me there were dangers in running tests on a human. I could die. I could live but my brain could die. The left side of my brain could die but the right side could live. This would mean that the left side of my body would live but the right side would die. There were many grim specters. I could walk sideways but not forward. I could not distinguish words from things, so that if someone said ‘speeding bullet,’ I would fall to the floor and take cover. Mr. Gray wanted me to know the risks. There were releases and other documents for me to sign. The firm had lawyers, priests.”
“They let you go ahead, a human test animal.”
“No, they didn’t. They said it was way too risky—legally, ethically and so forth. They went to work designing computer molecules and computer brains. I refused to accept this. I’d come so far, come so close. I want you to try to understand what happened next. If I’m going to tell you the story at all, I have to include this aspect of it, this grubby little corner of the human heart. You say Babette reveals and confides.”
“This is the point of Babette.”
“Good. I will reveal and confide. Mr. Gray and I made a private arrangement. Forget the priests, the lawyers, the psychobiologists. We would conduct the experiments on our own. I would be cured of my condition, he would be acclaimed for a wonderful medical breakthrough.”
“What’s so grubby about this?”
“It involved an indiscretion. This was the only way I could get Mr. Gray to let me use the drug. It was my last resort, my last hope. First I’d offered him my mind. Now I offered my body.”
I felt a sensation of warmth creeping up my back and radiating outward across my shoulders. Babette looked straight up. I was propped on an elbow, facing her, studying her features. When I spoke finally it was in a reasonable and inquiring voice—the voice of a man who seeks genuinely to understand some timeless human riddle.
“How do you offer your body to a composite of three or more people? This is a compound person. He is like a police sketch of one person’s eyebrows, another person’s nose. Let’s concentrate on the genitals. How many sets are we talking about?”
“Just one person’s, Jack. A key person, the project manager.”
“So we are no longer referring