White Noise - Don Delillo [89]
“What’s your hurry? You’re nineteen years old. You’ll find hundreds of ways to die that are better than snakes.”
What kind of name is Orest? I studied his features. He might have been Hispanic, Middle Eastern, Central Asian, a dark-skinned Eastern European, a light-skinned black. Did he have an accent? I wasn’t sure. Was he a Samoan, a native North American, a Sephardic Jew? It was getting hard to know what you couldn’t say to people.
He said to me, “How many pounds can you bench-press?”
“I don’t know. Not very many.”
“Did you ever punch somebody in the face?”
“Maybe a glancing blow, once, a long time ago.”
“I’m looking to punch somebody in the face. Bare-fisted. Hard as I can. To find out what it feels like.”
Heinrich grinned like a stool pigeon in the movies. The siren began to sound—two melancholy blasts. I went inside as the two boys checked the clipboard for house numbers. Babette was in the kitchen giving Wilder some lunch.
“He’s wearing a reflector vest,” I said.
“It’s in case there’s haze, he won’t get hit by fleeing vehicles.”
“I don’t think anyone’s bothered to flee. How do you feel?”
“Better,” she said.
“So do I.”
“I think it’s being with Wilder that picks me up.”
“I know what you mean. I always feel good when I’m with Wilder. Is it because pleasures don’t cling to him? He is selfish without being grasping, selfish in a totally unbounded and natural way. There’s something wonderful about the way he drops one thing, grabs for another. I get annoyed when the other kids don’t fully appreciate special moments or occasions. They let things slide away that should be kept and savored. But when Wilder does it, I see the spirit of genius at work.”
“That may be true but there’s something else about him that gives me a lift. Something bigger, grander, that I can’t quite put my finger on.”
“Remind me to ask Murray,” I said.
She spooned soup into the child’s mouth, creating facial expressions for him to mimic and saying, “Yes yes yes yes yes yes yes.”
“One thing I have to ask. Where is the Dylar?”
“Forget it, Jack. Fool’s gold or whatever the appropriate term.”
“A cruel illusion. I know. But I’d like to keep the tablets in a safe place, if only as physical evidence that Dylar exists. If your left brain should decide to die, I want to be able to sue someone. There are four tablets left. Where are they?”
“Are you telling me they’re not behind the radiator cover?”
“That’s right.”
“I didn’t move them, honest.”
“Is it possible you threw them away in an angry or depressed moment? I only want them for the sake of historical accuracy. Like White House tapes. They go into the archives.”
“You haven’t been pretested,” she said. “Even one pill can be dangerous to ingest.”
“I don’t want to ingest.”
“Yes, you do.”
“We are being coaxed out of the ingestion swath. Where is Mr. Gray? I may want to sue him as a matter of principle.”
“We made a pact, he and I.”
“Tuesdays and Fridays. The Grayview Motel.”
“That’s not what I mean. I promised not to reveal his true identity to anyone. Considering what you’re after, that promise goes double. It’s more for your good than his. I’m not telling, Jack. Let’s just resume our lives. Let’s tell each other we’ll do the best we can. Yes yes yes yes yes.”
I drove to the grade school and parked across the street from the main entrance. Twenty minutes later they came surging out, about three hundred kids, babbling, gleeful, casually amuck. They called brilliant insults, informed and spacious obscenities, hit each other with bookbags, knit caps. I sat in the driver’s seat scanning the mass of faces, feeling like a dope dealer or pervert.
When I spotted Denise I blew the horn and she came over. This was the first time I’d ever picked her up at school and she gave me a wary and hard-eyed look as she passed in front of the car—a look that indicated she was in no mood for news of a separation or divorce. I took the river road home. She scrutinized