Death Kit

by Susan Sontag

  She never fails to come. But always after. The workman arrives first. Diddy driven and counter-driven.

  Upon leaving the elevator on the third floor, meeting and greeting. Considering what heals. Who heals. But Diddy was already thinking of her before.

  When he and his colleagues first clambered into the black limousine, it instantly occurred to Diddy that, on the way to the factory, we might have to pass the Warren Institute.

  Impatient. Looking out of the car window; insisting that the window be rolled down. About to ask. Then, within minutes after so-called Chang drove the car away from the Rushland, Diddy figured out it wasn’t going to happen. Diddy, since childhood, gifted with an excellent sense of direction. On the overnight hikes in the woods his brother and he took, during the summers spent at their grandfather Edward Dalton’s farm in Ohio, Paul was always getting lost; but Diddy’s gift for spatial orientation brought them safely home. Dad had acknowledged Diddy’s talent, too. Before starting first grade, he’d sometimes been allowed to come along when his father went out on house calls in the afternoon. His father would start the motor of the Buick, recite the patient’s address while backing out of the driveway; then let the child tell him how to go. That acute memory for place, even places visited just once, allowed Diddy the Navigator to figure out rapidly that the factory lay in the same general direction as the hospital. But that to reach the factory we ought to take a slightly different route out of the center of town.

  Becoming patient. Diddy could dispense with that quick scanning look at the hospital building he would have managed, had we been carried past it in the black limousine. Could forgo the satisfaction of being able for a brief moment to throw his gaze, let it adhere to the wall: an instantaneous, motorized replica of the gaze of a bashful suitor prowling for hours before his beloved’s darkened house.

  No matter. Diddy intended to phone Hester during the day and tell her he would come by during the evening visiting hours.

  The first day’s session at the plant.

  On time. We’re in a spacious, high-ceilinged, wood-paneled room. High windows with maroon drapes. Portraits of past presidents of the company. Nineteen men seated around the long oval table; each man’s place supplied with an ashtray, a pad of paper, and two finely sharpened pencils. A stenographer at the far wall, taking the minutes.

  Diddy in harness, eager to prove that he can function on the surface of life without slipping into a dark hole. A pompous speech of welcome by Reager. A longer speech by Watkins extolling the company’s democratic structure of decision-making, and not so subtly reminding those present of the profit-sharing scheme enjoyed by all employees in managerial posts. Coffee and sandwiches served; everyone settled down to work. Memoranda and charts passed around the long table, figures scrawled on the blackboard. Whispering and exchanging of notes. Factions were being grouped and battle lines were drawn up. We were jovial. But there is a tacit signal known to everyone that starts the arguing. Bad feelings spill from people’s mouths, like cold greasy coffee.

  When little is at stake, Diddy likes to argue. And what can be at stake when the room is so clean, the space so generously conceived? When everything is so neatly ordered?

  Think, for instance, how much simpler it is for all of us that the conference was divided into exactly two factions. Just two.

  On one side, those who insisted that the new competition could be beaten back by, one, more advertising and, two, a drastic reorganization of distribution and selling procedures. Inefficient personnel had to be weeded out; dealers made to work harder to retain their franchises; and salesmen’s territories reapportioned to conform to shifts in population and buying power, for instance, by doubling the sales force in California. Diddy guessed this was the line that the top brass was backing.

  On the other side, a group of younger executives, advised by some of the scientists and technicians, argued that the basic model of Scope 21 had to be overhauled, to compete favorably with the comparable product being offered at a lower price by the Yugoslavs, and perhaps by the Japanese.

  Had the Japanese really produced something to rival the company’s instrument? Diddy would wait to see it before he fully believed in it. But wait, there it is. The Japanese model. Perched in the center of the oval table. Its caretaker, a balding young scientist, explains that what we’re looking at may be only a provisional version of their photomicrographic outfit. The apparatus, still undergoing tests, hasn’t yet been released by the factory, even for sale in Japan. But, already, a superb instrument. Bound to be available in the States soon.

  Diddy wondered how, if they were as inept as Jim claimed, the company officials had gotten hold of it. Perhaps through orthodox means. Perhaps not. Spirited out of the factory in Nagasaki by a defecting employee or disgruntled junior executive. Someone like Jim, only with yellow skin and slant eyes and straight black hair. Maybe that person was “Chang,” who was then paid off with American citizenship, a handsome uniform, and a sinecure which requires him to act occasionally as a chauffeur for the company. Chang, whose real name was something like Mayamoto.

  Let’s not kid ourselves, someone three chairs away from Diddy was saying, about the superiority of the new Japanese instrument to ours.

  Not what the bosses wanted to hear. “Draw those curtains, Goldberg, will you? The light’s in my eyes,” said Reager irritably. (Now) Reager took the floor. Saying that the problem could and ought to be solved in Washington. What about the government’s obligation to use the tariff to protect domestic industries, which couldn’t possibly compete with the prices set by foreign manufacturers supplied with endless cheap labor? Yugoslavs and Japs, indeed! And as for improvements, you gentlemen know that no expense in that sphere has ever been spared. Eighty years of pioneering research stands behind this company. It is unstinting research that made the Micro-Recorderscope the outstanding instrument of its type in the world today.

  Diddy tired of boasting and lies. Tired of having his faith tested. If Reager made the realistic challenge to the company’s position into a crisis of faith among his employees, he was a fool. No one wanted to believe what couldn’t be believed. Even though everyone wants to believe something.

  Reager had probably not wanted the conference at all. His idea: to have as little as possible happen. Business was good. Who can imagine things to be different from the way they are today?

  But times are changing. The junior men leap back with their arguments as soon as the old man stops.

  Who is right? Everybody. Diddy found the arguments of both sides sound. Which policy, then, should be adopted? Both. But that’s not likely to happen, is it? Most unlikely that in a single week of meetings the company would embark on two major and mutually exclusive programs of development. We’ll be able to choose only one. Which will Diddy choose? His own recommendations, which he’s to present this afternoon and which took most of his evenings in the last two weeks to prepare, were the outline of a new advertising campaign. Quite properly. Diddy minds his own business. Wishes other people would mind theirs. And he knows that, in the larger dispute, he’s expected to stand behind Reager and the old guard. An easily assembled majority—even though Watkins, sucking on his pipe at the far end of the oval table, had said nothing yet. But of the other eighteen, Diddy estimated, five would line up with Comensky and Goldberg of R&D. Leaving ten behind Reager, if Diddy counted himself.

  But shouldn’t count himself in yet. Today he feels like doing the unexpected. He’d been impressed by the minority faction, who came equipped with elaborate diagrams drawn with India ink and models, twice the actual size, of the revamped Micro-Recorderscope, and with long opaque words that spilled from their mouths. Still hadn’t decided which faction to support. But suspected (now) it would be that of the scientists and technicians. Let Reager blow his top. I’m tired of humoring him.

  When the meeting broke for lunch, it was already one-thirty. Today we were eating here; uniformed waitresses were already wheeling in carts with food. Diddy we
nt out to the phone booth in the hall, called the Warren Institute. Finding that Hester didn’t have a phone in her room yet, he left his message with the floor nurse.

  When he returned to the conference room, the work materials had already been cleared from the table and nineteen place settings laid out over a mammoth white plastic tablecloth. Diddy hadn’t realized how the room stank of tobacco. Before sitting down to his meal, got the pole and pulled the top half of one of the high windows halfway down. Maybe he wasn’t just oppressed by the smoke but stalling, too. Not believing he could manage another meal after that heroic breakfast. Certainly not overdone slices of roast beef with lumpy succotash. But Diddy did eat. More than he thought he could.

  The rest of the afternoon dragged by, painfully. Diddy got up to make his presentation of the new advertising campaign, then concluded by expressing doubts that this tactic would indeed reverse the tide of competition running against the company. Suppose a choice has to be made—between allocating funds for more advertising or putting more money into the hands of the scientists. “In such a case, I’d advocate pouring every last cent into research.” When Diddy sat down, Jim gave him a toy salute from across the table.

  It may very well be that this speech hasn’t pleased either faction. But at this point, Diddy couldn’t care less. Is Diddy pleased with himself? That’s what’s important. Does the old anodyne of work still deaden the pain, still take him out of himself? Transform him into nothing more than a function of his situation? Perhaps too much has happened in the last twenty-four hours. Can’t be as opaque as he’d like. Not any more. Diddy becoming vitrified, like paper soaked in grease.

  Diddy tuned out of most of the ensuing discussion. Words are starting to thicken again, and acquire that curious muffled edge, something like an echo, that renders them almost material and makes their meaning easier to ignore. Diddy wants to ignore whatever he can. Doesn’t notice that, by four o’clock, his back has begun to ache from slouching so long. In a roomy chair that’s mainly wood, with only a token skin of leather on the seat. For better or for worse, Diddy not very observant this afternoon. Diddy, inside himself. Which, for Diddy, doesn’t necessarily mean being in his body. In his mind, then?

  Pass over the failure of words, their hypermaterialization. Other ways that Diddy has of understanding the world are failing, too. A lapse in sensation itself.

  Except for registering changes in the temperature and amount of tobacco pollution in the high-ceilinged room.

  Except for being annoyed by the fidgeting and chain-smoking of Ambergate, the company’s treasurer, sitting to Diddy’s left.

  Except for watching Pete La Salle, head of Export, Watkins’ nephew, skillfully dozing without the others noticing.

  Except for noticing with mild revulsion that Buchanan of the Production Department, sitting to his right, chews his cuticles savagely.

  Except for following the subtle waning of the afternoon light streaming through the high windows of the conference room.

  A random suite of prickly impressions. Apart from which, Diddy is hardly present. Being somewhere inside himself, anticipating this evening. Repeatedly, Diddy the Romantic cautioned himself to have sensible thoughts about Hester. Making love with a girl once often means nothing these days: no more to her than to you. And even if their encounter was truly audacious and sexually stirring, don’t expect its special quality to live on in this evening’s meeting. With another room, another demon of place. Expect nothing. Yesterday was unique. Diddy transfixed with bewilderment, guilt, fear, and the longing for a healing touch. Hester in her endless darkness, frightened by the train’s unexplained stop in the tunnel. Their encounter on the Privateer was too charged and urgent. Its searing flavor bound to be diluted in the milky atmosphere of ordinary circumstances.

  * * *

  A good thing that he has thus prepared himself. For the hospital visit, both rich and empty, was a strain. It starts badly. With Hester thanking Diddy for the flowers, in words that sound lifeless and dutiful. Again, they’re sharing the same enclosed space. (Now) a medium-sized room on the seventh floor of the principal building of the Warren Institute. Generous dimensions for a private room. And with a handsome view of Monroe Park. Diddy wishes she could see out the window. Unnerved by the blind girl’s infinite enclosure in herself. As he hadn’t been, really, yesterday. But Hester seems diminished, less absolute in this room than in the train compartment, or in the corridor, or in the washroom, or in the club car. Or even when she materialized sporadically in Diddy’s head during last night’s excoriating vigil.

  Wait. Probably, it’s not some change in Hester herself. Not her fault, any more than his. Her aunt’s? For Hester and Diddy weren’t alone. Mrs. Nayburn was in the room when Diddy arrived; and she stayed, she stayed. From the beginning, heaping attention on him; virtually ignoring her niece. As the woman becomes more flattering, loquacious, overbearing, Hester lapses deeper into the same inert passivity Diddy noticed, and was frustrated by, in the early part of the train journey.

  Consider the only other time the three of them were alone in the same space: when they rode out to the hospital in a taxi last night. Had they been as uncomfortable as (now)? Diddy tried to recall. Blank, at least about this. All he remembers is wanting to break away from them for a second in the waiting room. To buy a newspaper. In case, by some miracle of printing technology, a late afternoon’s violent death can be processed so swiftly into words, afterwards into type face, that the story appears in the evening paper. Then realizing that was absurd … Except for continuing sporadically to wish he had gone for a newspaper before getting into the taxi and feeling more of the same indigestible anxiety and numbness he’d been enduring for hours, he could remember nothing of the taxi ride.

  In the hospital room. The aunt is firing questions at Diddy about his family background, his college, his job. The size of his apartment and its location. “Oh, how nice! From what I read in the papers, you can’t be too careful about getting into a good neighborhood in New York these days. It’s getting to be that a white person is hardly safe anywhere now.…” Since Diddy’s apartment isn’t in a “good neighborhood,” he can’t decide whether Mrs. Nayburn, besides being compulsively ugly-hearted, is ignorant about New York, devious, or merely inattentive. More questions. When Diddy said she might have heard of his brother, who was a concert pianist, she went up an octave, shrilling: “My goodness! Don’t tell me your brother is Paul Harron. Really? How exciting!” Not only has she heard of Paul, she owns his recording of the Tchaikovsky Piano Concerto. Was she going to ask Diddy to get an autograph for her? This wasn’t the first time Diddy regretted mentioning Paul to a new friend or acquaintance. Paul’s name doesn’t fly out of Diddy’s mouth horizontally, light; it falls to the floor with a thump. To mention his brother can’t help but sound weighted, like bragging. Diddy worried that’s what the girl may think: her silence distresses him. But knew better than to suspect her aunt may also decide he was boasting. Modesty or reticence wasn’t within Mrs. Nayburn’s range. The only delicacy with such a woman: to be absolutely mute. Since everything he discloses seems to please her.

  The all too predictable climax arrives when she nervously ventures to inquire whether Diddy is married. Diddy, angry, tries to expel the word “Divorced” from his mouth in a casual tone. Damn the woman’s prying! She must have fixed on him as a prospective husband for her handicapped niece not later than the very moment that extravagant batch of flowers was delivered this morning to Hester’s room. Maybe she’s not counting on the success of the forthcoming operation. And the immoderate warmth of Mrs. Nayburn’s attentions to Diddy suggests that Hester has no other suiters; at least none that her aunt approves of—or knows about.

  Diddy unused to having what he wants, or might want, handed to him without heavy effort. Though women liked him, Diddy never altogether trusted their approval. A precarious sense of his own manhood. The self-contempt that began to infect his will when Paul overtook, then outstripped him in vitality
and achievement. A shameful envy of the blind, uncompassionate vitality of men who looked like Incardona; men of the sort Diddy’s always disapproved of and disliked, been disliked by, feared. It follows then that should Diddy want Hester, he should have to overcome almost insurmountable barriers. And just this normal state of affairs, her aunt was suggesting, wasn’t true (now); as if Hester was hers to dispose of. Mrs. Nayburn was promising wordlessly that the girl might be his without a struggle.

  No competition? Despite the girl’s beauty?

  Long fine blond hair, hidden eyes, delicate hooked nose, wide mouth, slim neck, fleshy shoulders, full bosom, thickish supple waist … Hester is beautiful, isn’t she? Diddy trying to be fair, to see the girl (now) as extraordinary and compelling as she appeared to him yesterday. But her aunt’s indiscriminate chatter and his necessarily mechanical responses have muted Diddy’s energies for perceiving, silenced his feelings, frozen the nerves that animate his flesh. Diddy the Stupefied. About to stand up, say good night to both of them. When Mrs. Nayburn, sensing perhaps that she wasn’t furthering what she took to be her niece’s interests by staying around, gets up quicker. “Lovey, I just remembered I have to buy some things.” To him: “You’ll keep Hester company for the rest of the hour, won’t you … Dalton? May I call you Dalton?”

  “Of course,” Diddy says.

  Laden with one parcel and a bulging shopping bag like those of yesterday, Mrs. Nayburn leaves the room. Almost immediately, the air lightens. Breathing itself less oppressive. Diddy started feeling looser, more whole. His blood starts to flow, his nerves begin to pulse, his vision clears. Can (now) really look at the girl.

  Smothered in nightgown, sheets, and a blanket; the shapeless body extending the length of the bed gives little hint of what Diddy knows to be its subtle contours. What’s unchanged is Hester’s face, a fourth of which is masked by the dark glasses.