White Noise - Don Delillo [98]
“I don’t know.”
“Do I risk death by driving fast around curves? Am I supposed to go rock climbing on weekends?”
“I don’t know,” she said. “I wish I knew.”
“Do I scale the sheer facade of a ninety-story building, wearing a clip-on belt? What do I do, Winnie? Do I sit in a cage full of African snakes like my son’s best friend? This is what people do today.”
“I think what you do, Jack, is forget the medicine in that tablet. There is no medicine, obviously.”
She was right. They were all right. Go on with my life, raise my kids, teach my students. Try not to think of that staticky figure in the Grayview Motel putting his unfinished hands on my wife.
“I’m still sad, Winnie, but you’ve given my sadness a richness and depth it has never known before.”
She turned away, blushing.
I said, “You’re more than a fair-weather friend—you’re a true enemy.”
She turned exceedingly red.
I said, “Brilliant people never think of the lives they smash, being brilliant.”
I watched her blush. She used both hands to pull her knit cap down over her ears. We took a last look at the sky and started walking down the hill.
31
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No one wanted to cook that night. We all got in the car and went out to the commercial strip in the no man’s land beyond the town boundary. The never-ending neon. I pulled in at a place that specialized in chicken parts and brownies. We decided to eat in the car. The car was sufficient for our needs. We wanted to eat, not look around at other people. We wanted to fill our stomachs and get it over with. We didn’t need light and space. We certainly didn’t need to face each other across a table as we ate, building a subtle and complex cross-network of signals and codes. We were content to eat facing in the same direction, looking only inches past our hands. There was a kind of rigor in this. Denise brought the food out to the car and distributed paper napkins. We settled in to eat. We ate fully dressed, in hats and heavy coats, without speaking, ripping into chicken parts with our hands and teeth. There was a mood of intense concentration, minds converging on a single compelling idea. I was surprised to find I was enormously hungry. I chewed and ate, looking only inches past my hands. This is how hunger shrinks the world. This is the edge of the observable universe of food. Steffie tore off the crisp skin of a breast and gave it to Heinrich. She never ate the skin. Babette sucked a bone. Heinrich traded wings with Denise, a large for a small. He thought small wings were tastier. People gave Babette their bones to clean and suck. I fought off an image of Mr. Gray lazing naked on a motel bed, an unresolved picture collapsing at the edges. We sent Denise to get more food, waiting for her in silence. Then we started in again, half stunned by the dimensions of our pleasure.
Steffie said quietly, “How do astronauts float?”
There was a pause like a missing tick in eternity.
Denise stopped eating to say, “They’re lighter than air.”
We all stopped eating. A worried silence ensued.
“There is no air,” Heinrich said finally. “They can’t be lighter than something that isn’t there. Space is a vacuum except for heavy molecules.”
“I thought space was cold,” Babette said. “If there’s no air, how can