White Noise

Soon there was a smell of acrid matter. It could have been insulation burning-polystyrene sheathing for pipes and wires- or one or more of a dozen other substances. A sharp and bitter stink filled the air, overpowering the odor of smoke and charred stone. It changed the mood of the people on the sidewalk. Some put hankies to their faces, others left abruptly in disgust. Whatever caused the odor, I sensed that it made people feel betrayed. An ancient, spacious and terrible drama was being compromised by something unnatural, some small and nasty intrusion. Our eyes began to burn. The crowd broke up. It was as though we'd been forced to recognize the existence of a second kind of death. One was real, the other synthetic. The odor drove us away but beneath it and far worse was the sense that death came two ways, sometimes at once, and how death entered your mouth and nose, how death smelled, could somehow make a difference to your soul.

We hurried to our cars, thinking of the homeless, the mad, the dead, but also of ourselves now. This is what the odor of that burning material did. It complicated our sadness, brought us closer to the secret of our own eventual end.

At home I fixed warm milk for us both. I was surprised to see him drink it. He gripped the mug with both hands, talked about the noise of the conflagration, the air-fed wallop of combustion, like a ramjet thrusting. I almost expected him to thank me for the nice fire. We sat there drinking our milk. After a while he went into his closet to chin.

I sat up late thinking of Mr. Gray. Gray-bodied, staticky, unfinished. The picture wobbled and rolled, the edges of his body flared with random distortion. Lately I'd found myself thinking of him often. Sometimes as Mr. Gray the composite. Four or more grayish figures engaged in a pioneering work. Scientists, visionaries. Their wavy bodies passing through each other, mingling, blending, fusing. A little like extraterrestrials. Smarter than the rest of us, selfless, sexless, determined to engineer us out of our fear. But when the bodies fused 1 was left with a single figure, the project manager, a hazy gray seducer moving in ripples across a motel room. Bedward, plotward. I saw my wife reclining on her side, voluptuously rounded, the eternal waiting nude. I saw her as he did. Dependent, submissive, emotionally captive. I felt his mastery and control. The dominance of his postion. He was taking over my mind, this man I'd never seen, this half image, the barest smidge of brainlight. His bleak hands enfolded a rose-white breast. How vivid and living it was, what a tactile delight, dusted with russet freckles about the tip. I experienced aural torment. Heard them in their purling foreplay, the love babble and buzzing flesh. Heard the sloppings and smackings, the swash of wet mouths, bedsprings sinking in. An interval of mumbled adjustments. Then gloom moved in around the gray-sheeted bed, a circle slowly closing.

Panasonic.

33

What time was it when I opened my eyes, sensing someone or something nearby? Was it an odd-numbered hour? The room was soft and webby. I stretched my legs, blinked- slowly focused on a familiar object. It was Wilder, standing two feet from the bed, gazing into my face. We spent a long moment in mutual contemplation. His great round head, set as it was on a small-limbed and squattish body, gave him the look of a primitive clay figurine, some household idol of obscure and cultic derivation. I had the feeling he wanted to show me something. As I slipped quietly out of bed, he walked in his quilted booties out of the room. I followed him into the hall and toward the window that looks out on our backyard. I was barefoot and robeless and felt a chill pass through the Hong Kong polyester of my pajamas. Wilder stood looking out the window, his chin about an inch above the sill. It seemed I'd spent my life in lopsided pajamas, the shirt buttons inserted in mismatching slits, the fly undone and drooping. Was it dawn already? Were those crows I heard screaming in the trees?

There was someone sitting in the backyard. A white-haired man sitting erect in the old wicker chair, a figure of eerie stillness and composure. At first, dazed and sleepy, I didn't know what to make of the sight. It seemed to need a more careful interpretation than I was able to provide at the moment. I thought one thing, that he'd been inserted there for some purpose. Then fear began to enter, palpable and overwhelming, a fist clenching repeatedly in my chest. Who was he, what was happening here? I realized Wilder was no longer next to me. I reached the doorway to his room just in time to see his head sink into the pillow. By the time I got to the bed, he was fast asleep. I didn't know what to do. I felt cold, white. I worked my way back to the window, gripping a doorknob, a handrail, as if to remind myself of the nature and being of real things. He was still out there, gazing into the hedges. I saw him in profile in the uncertain light, motionless and knowing. Was he as old as I'd first thought-or was the white hair purely emblematic, part of his allegorical force? That was it, of course. He would be Death, or Death's errand-runner, a hollow-eyed technician from the plague era, from the era of inquisitions, endless wars, of bedlams and leprosariums. He would be an aphorist of last things, giving me the barest glance-civilized, ironic-as he spoke his deft and stylish line about my journey out. I watched for a long time, waiting for him to move a hand. His stillness was commanding. I felt myself getting whiter by the second. What does it mean to become white? How does it feel to see Death in the flesh, come to gather you in? I was scared to the marrow. I was cold and hot, dry and wet, myself and someone else. The fist clenched in my chest. I went to the staircase and sat on the top step, looking into my hands. So much remained. Every word and thing a bead-work of bright creation. My own plain hand, crosshatched and whorled in a mesh of expressive lines, a life terrain, might itself be the object of a person's study and wonder for years. A cosmology against the void.

I got to my feet and went back to the window. He was still there. I went into the bathroom to hide. I closed the toilet lid and sat there a while, wondering what to do next. I didn't want him in the house.

I paced for a time. I ran cold water over my hands and wrists, splashed it in my face. I felt light and heavy, muddled and alert. I took a scenic paperweight from the shelf by the door. Inside the plastic disk floated a 3-D picture of the Grand Canyon, the colors zooming and receding as I turned the object in the light. Fluctuating planes. I liked this phrase. It seemed the very music of existence. If only one could see death as just another surface one inhabits for a time. Another facet of cosmic reason. A zoom down Bright Angel Trail.

i turned to immediate things. If I wanted to keep him out of the house, the thing to do was go outside. First 1 would look in on the smaller children. I moved quietly through the rooms on bare white feet. I looked for a blanket to adjust, a toy to remove from a child's warm grasp, feeling I'd wandered into a TV moment. All was still and well. Would they regard a parent's death as just another form of divorce?

I looked in on Heinrich. He occupied the top left corner of the bed, his body tightly wound like the kind of trick device that uncoils abruptly when it's touched. I stood in the doorway nodding.

I looked in on Babette. She was many levels down, a girl again, a figure running in a dream. I kissed her head, smelling the warm musty air that carried up from sleep. I spotted my copy of Mein Kampf in a pile of books and journals. The radio came on. I hurried out of the room, fearing that some call-in voice, some stranger's soul-lament, would be the last thing I heard in this world.

I went down to the kitchen. I looked through the window. He was there in the wicker armchair on the wet grass. I opened the inner door and then the storm door. I went outside, the copy of Mein Kampf clutched to my stomach. When the storm door banged shut, the man's head jerked and his legs came uncrossed. He got to his feet and turned in my direction. The sense of eerie and invincible stillness washed off, the aura of knowingness, the feeling he conveyed of an ancient and terrible secret. A second figure began to emerge from the numinous ruins of the first, began to assume effective form, develop in the crisp light as a set of movements, lines and features, a contour, a living person whose distinctive physical traits seemed more and more familiar as I watched them come into existence, a little amazed.

It was not Death that stood before me but only Vernon Dickey, my father-in-law.

'Was I asleep?' he said.

'What are you doing out here?'

'Didn't want to wake you folks.'

'Did we know you were coming?'

'I didn't know it myself till yesterday afternoon. Drove straight through. Fourteen hours.'

'Babette will be happy to see you.'

'I just bet.'

We went inside. I put the coffee pot on the stove. Vernon sat at the table in his battered denim jacket, playing with the lid of an old Zippo. He had the look of a ladies' man in the crash-dive of his career. His silvery hair had a