by Don DeLillo
“Do you drink coffee yet?”
“No,” he said.
“Baba likes a cup when she gets back from class.”
“Make her tea instead.”
“She doesn’t like tea.”
“She can learn, can’t she?”
“The two things have completely different tastes.”
“A habit’s a habit.”
“You have to acquire it first.”
“That’s what I’m saying. Make her tea.”
“Her class is more demanding than it sounds. Coffee relaxes her.”
“That’s why it’s dangerous,” he said.
“It’s not dangerous.”
“Whatever relaxes you is dangerous. If you don’t know that, I might as well be talking to the wall.”
“Murray would also like coffee,” I said, aware of a small note of triumph in my voice.
“Did you see what you just did? You took the coffee can with you to the counter.”
“So what?”
“You didn’t have to. You could have left it by the stove where you were standing and then gone to the counter to get the spoon.”
“You’re saying I carried the coffee can unnecessarily.”
“You carried it in your right hand all the way to the counter, put it down to open the drawer, which you didn’t want to do with your left hand, then got the spoon with your right hand, switched it to your left hand, picked up the coffee can with your right hand and went back to the stove, where you put it down again.”
“That’s what people do.”
“It’s wasted motion. People waste tremendous amounts of motion. You ought to watch Baba make a salad sometime.”
“People don’t deliberate over each tiny motion and gesture. A little waste doesn’t hurt.”
“But over a lifetime?”
“What do you save if you don’t waste?”
“Over a lifetime? You save tremendous amounts of time and energy,” he said.
“What will you do with them?”
“Use them to live longer.”
The truth is I don’t want to die first. Given a choice between loneliness and death, it would take me a fraction of a second to decide. But I don’t want to be alone either. Everything I say to Babette about holes and gaps is true. Her death would leave me scattered, talking to chairs and pillows. Don’t let us die, I want to cry out to that fifth-century sky ablaze with mystery and spiral light. Let us both live forever, in sickness and health, feebleminded, doddering, toothless, liver-spotted, dim-sighted, hallucinating. Who decides these things? What is out there? Who are you?
I watched the coffee bubble up through the center tube and perforated basket into the small pale globe. A marvelous and sad invention, so roundabout, ingenious, human. It was like a philosophical argument rendered in terms of the things of the world—water, metal, brown beans. I had never looked at coffee before.
“When plastic furniture burns, you get cyanide poisoning,” Heinrich said, tapping the Formica tabletop.
He ate a winter peach. I poured a cup of coffee for Murray and together the boy and I went up the stairs to Denise’s room, where the TV set was currently located. The volume was kept way down, the girls engaged in a rapt dialogue with their guest. Murray looked happy to be there. He sat in the middle of the floor taking notes, his toggle coat and touring cap next to him on the rug. The room around him was rich in codes and messages, an archaeology of childhood, things Denise had carried with her since the age of three, from cartoon clocks to werewolf posters. She is the kind of child who feels a protective tenderness toward her own beginnings. It is part of her strategy in a world of displacements to make every effort to restore and preserve, keep things together for their value as remembering objects, a way of fastening herself to a life.
Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. It is not possible to see too much in them, to overindulge your casual gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force, charged waves of identity and being. There are no amateurs in the world of children.
Heinrich stood in a corner of the room, taking up his critical-observer position. I gave Murray his coffee and was about to leave when I glanced in passing at the TV screen. I paused at the door, looked more closely this time. It was true, it was there. I hissed at the others for silence and they swiveled their heads in my direction, baffled and annoyed. Then they followed my gaze to the sturdy TV at the end of the bed.
The face on the screen was Babette’s. Out of our mouths came a silence as wary and deep as an animal growl. Confusion, fear, astonishment spilled from our faces. What did it mean? What was she doing there, in black and white, framed in formal borders? Was she dead, missing, disembodied? Was this her spirit, her secret self, some two-dimensional facsimile released by the power of technology, set free to glide through wavebands, through energy levels, pausing to say good-bye to us from the fluorescent screen?
A strangeness gripped me, a sense of psychic disorientation. It was her all right, the face, the hair, the way she blinks in rapid twos and threes. I’d seen her just an hour ago, eating eggs, but her appearance on the screen made me think of her as some distant figure from the past, some ex-wife and absentee mother, a walker in the mists of the dead. If she was not dead, was I? A two-syllable infantile cry, ba-ba, issued from the deeps of my soul.
All this compressed in seconds. It was only as time drew on, normalized itself, returned to us a sense of our surroundings, the room, the house, the reality in which the TV set stood—it was only then that we understood what was going on.
Babette was teaching her class in the church basement and it was being televised by the local cable station. Either she hadn’t known there would be a camera on hand or she preferred not to tell us, out of embarrassment, love, superstition, whatever causes a person to wish to withhold her image from those who know her.
With the sound down low we couldn’t hear what she was saying. But no one bothered to adjust the volume. It was the picture that mattered, the face in black and white, animated but also flat, distanced, sealed off, timeless. It was but wasn’t her. Once again I began to think Murray might be on to something. Waves and radiation. Something leaked through the mesh. She was shining a light on us, she was coming into being, endlessly being formed and reformed as the muscles in her face worked at smiling and speaking, as the electronic dots swarmed.
We were being shot through with Babette. Her image was projected on our bodies, swam in us and through us. Babette of electrons and photons, of whatever forces produced that gray light we took to be her face.
The kids were flushed with excitement but I felt a certain disquiet. I tried to tell myself it was only television—whatever that was, however it worked—and not some journey out of life or death, not some mysterious separation. Murray looked up at me, smiling in his sneaky way.
Only Wilder remained calm. He watched his mother, spoke to her in half-words, sensible-sounding fragments that were mainly fabricated. As the camera pulled back to allow Babette to demonstrate some fine point of standing or walking, Wilder approached the set and touched her body, leaving a handprint on the dusty surface of the screen.
Then Denise crawled up to the set and turned the volume dial. Nothing happened. There was no sound, no voice, nothing. She turned to look at me, a moment of renewed confusion. Heinrich advanced, fiddled with the dial, stuck his hand behind the set to adjust the recessed knobs. When he tried another channel, the sound boomed out, raw and fuzzy. Back at the cable station, he couldn’t raise a buzz and as we watched Babette finish the lesson, we were in a mood of odd misgiving. But as soon as the program ended, the two girls got excited again and went downstairs to wait for Babette at the door and surprise her with news of what they’d seen.
The small boy remained at the TV set, within inches of the dark screen, crying softly, uncertainly, in low heaves and swells, as Murray took notes.
II
The Airborne Toxic Event
21
> AFTER A NIGHT of dream-lit snows the air turned clear and still. There was a taut blue quality in the January light, a hardness and confidence. The sound of boots on packed snow, the contrails streaked cleanly in the high sky. Weather was very much the point, although I didn’t know it at first.
I turned into our street and walked past men bent over shovels in their driveways, breathing vapor. A squirrel moved along a limb in a flowing motion, a passage so continuous it seemed to be its own physical law, different from the ones we’ve learned to trust. When I was halfway down the street I saw Heinrich crouched on a small ledge outside our attic window. He wore his camouflage jacket and cap, an outfit with complex meaning for him, at fourteen, struggling to grow and to escape notice simultaneously, his secrets known to us all. He looked east through binoculars.
I went around back to the kitchen. In the entranceway the washer and dryer were vibrating nicely. I could tell from Babette’s voice that the person she was talking to on the phone was her father. An impatience mixed with guilt and apprehension. I stood behind her, put my cold hands to her cheeks. A little thing I liked to do. She hung up the phone.
“Why is he on the roof?”
“Heinrich? Something about the train yards,” she said. “It was on the radio.”
“Shouldn’t I get him down?”
“Why?”
“He could fall.”
“Don’t tell him that.”
“Why not?”
“He thinks you underestimate him.”
“He’s on a ledge,” I said. “There must be something I should be doing.”
“The more you show concern, the closer he’ll go to the edge.”
“I know that but I still have to get him down.”
“Coax him back in,” she said. “Be sensitive and caring. Get him to talk about himself. Don’t make sudden movements.”
When I got to the attic he was already back inside, standing by the open window, still looking through the glasses. Abandoned possessions were everywhere, oppressive and soul-worrying, creating a weather of their own among the exposed beams and posts, the fiberglass insulation pads.
“What happened?”
“The radio said a tank car derailed. But I don’t think it derailed from what I could see. I think it got rammed and something punched a hole in it. There’s a lot of smoke and I don’t like the looks of it.”
“What does it look like?”
He handed me the binoculars and stepped aside. Without climbing onto the ledge I couldn’t see the switching yard and the car or cars in question. But the smoke was plainly visible, a heavy black mass hanging in the air beyond the river, more or less shapeless.
“Did you see fire engines?”
“They’re all over the place,” he said. “But it looks to me like they’re not getting too close. It must be pretty toxic or pretty explosive stuff, or both.”
“It won’t come this way.”
“How do you know?”
“It just won’t. The point is you shouldn’t be standing on icy ledges. It worries Baba.”
“You think if you tell me it worries her, I’ll feel guilty and not do it. But if you tell me it worries you, I’ll do it all the time.”
“Shut the window,” I told him.
We went down to the kitchen. Steffie was looking through the brightly colored mail for coupons, lotteries and contests. This was the last day of the holiday break for the grade school and high school. Classes on the Hill would resume in a week. I sent Heinrich outside to clear snow from the walk. I watched him stand out there, utterly still, his head turned slightly, a honed awareness in his stance. It took me a while to realize he was listening to the sirens beyond the river.
An hour later he was back in the attic, this time with a radio and highway map. I climbed the narrow stairs, borrowed the glasses and looked again. It was still there, a slightly larger accumulation, a towering mass in fact, maybe a little blacker now.
“The radio calls it a feathery plume,” he said. “But it’s not a plume.”
“What is it?”
“Like a shapeless growing thing. A dark black breathing thing of smoke. Why do they call it a plume?”
“Air time is valuable. They can’t go into long tortured descriptions. Have they said what kind of chemical it is?”
“It’s called Nyodene Derivative or Nyodene D. It was in a movie we saw in school on toxic wastes. These videotaped rats.”
“What does it cause?”
“The movie wasn’t sure what it does to humans. Mainly it was rats growing urgent lumps.”
“That’s what the movie said. What does the radio say?”
“At first they said skin irritation and sweaty palms. But now they say nausea, vomiting, shortness of breath.”
“This is human nausea we’re talking about. Not rats.”
“Not rats,” he said.
I gave him the binoculars.
“Well it won’t come this way.”
“How do you know?” he said.
“I just know. It’s perfectly calm and still today. And when there’s a wind at this time of year, it blows that way, not this way.”
“What if it blows this way?”
“It won’t.”
“Just this one time.”
“It won’t. Why should it?”
He paused a beat and said in a flat tone, “They just closed part of the interstate.”
“They would want to do that, of course.”
“Why?”
“They just would. A sensible precaution. A way to facilitate movement of service vehicles and such. Any number of reasons that have nothing to do with wind or wind direction.”
Babette’s head appeared at the top of the stairway. She said a neighbor had told her the spill from the tank car was thirty-five thousand gallons. People were being told to stay out of the area. A feathery plume hung over the site. She also said the girls were complaining of sweaty palms.
“There’s been a correction,” Heinrich told her. “Tell them they ought to be throwing up.”
A helicopter flew over, headed in the direction of the accident. The voice on the radio said: “Available for a limited time only with optional megabyte hard disk.”
Babette’s head sank out of sight. I watched Heinrich tape the road map to two posts. Then I went down to the kitchen to pay some bills, aware of colored spots whirling atomically somewhere to the right and behind me.
Steffie said, “Can you see the feathery plume from the attic window?”
“It’s not a plume.”
“But will we have to leave our homes?”
“Of course not.”
“How do you know?”
“I just know.”
“Remember how we couldn’t go to school?”
“That was inside. This is outside.”
We heard police sirens blowing. I watched Steffie’s lips form the sequence: wow wow wow wow. She smiled in a certain way when she saw me watching, as though gently startled out of some absentminded pleasure.
Denise walked in, rubbing her hands on her jeans.
“They’re using snow-blowers to blow stuff onto the spill,” she said.
“What kind of stuff?”
“I don’t know but it’s supposed to make the spill harmless, which doesn’t explain what they’re doing about the actual plume.”
“They’re keeping it from getting bigger,” I said. “When do we eat?”
“I don’t know but if it gets any bigger it’ll get here with or without a wind.”
“It won’t get here,” I said.
“How do you know?”
“Because it won’t.”
She looked at her palms and went upstairs. The phone rang. Babette walked into the kitchen and picked it up. She looked at me as she listened. I wrote two checks, periodically glancing up to see if she was still looking at me. She seemed to study my face for the hidden meaning of the message she was receiving. I puckered my lips in a way I knew she dislike
d.
“That was the Stovers,” she said. “They spoke directly with the weather center outside Glassboro. They’re not calling it a feathery plume anymore.”
“What are they calling it?”
“A black billowing cloud.”
“That’s a little more accurate, which means they’re coming to grips with the thing. Good.”
“There’s more,” she said. “It’s expected that some sort of air mass may be moving down from Canada.”
“There’s always an air mass moving down from Canada.”
“That’s true,” she said. “There’s certainly nothing new in that. And since Canada is to the north, if the billowing cloud is blown due south, it will miss us by a comfortable margin.”
“When do we eat?” I said.
We heard sirens again, a different set this time, a larger sound—not police, fire, ambulance. They were air-raid sirens, I realized, and they seemed to be blowing in Sawyersville, a small community to the northeast.
Steffie washed her hands at the kitchen sink and went upstairs. Babette started taking things out of the refrigerator. I grabbed her by the inside of the thigh as she passed the table. She squirmed deliciously, a package of frozen corn in her hand.
“Maybe we ought to be more concerned about the billowing cloud,” she said. “It’s because of the kids we keep saying nothing’s going to happen. We don’t want to scare them.”
“Nothing is going to happen.”
“I know nothing’s going to happen, you know nothing’s going to happen. But at some level we ought to think about it anyway, just in case.”
“These things happen to poor people who live in exposed areas. Society is set up in such a way that it’s the poor and the uneducated who suffer the main impact of natural and man-made disasters. People in low-lying areas get the floods, people in shanties get the hurricanes and tornados. I’m a college professor. Did you ever see a college professor rowing a boat down his own street in one of those TV floods? We live in a neat and pleasant town near a college with a quaint name. These things don’t happen in places like Blacksmith.”