White Noise

The more things I threw away, the more I found. The house was a sepia maze of old and tired things. There was an immensity of things, an overburdening weight, a connection, a mortality. I stalked the rooms, flinging things into cardboard boxes. Plastic electric fans, burnt-out toasters, Star Trek needlepoints. It took well over an hour to get everything down to the sidewalk. No one helped me. I didn't want help or company or human understanding. I just wanted to get the stuff out of the house. I sat on the front steps alone, waiting for a sense of ease and peace to settle in the air around me.

A woman passing on the street said, 'A decongestant, an antihistamine, a cough suppressant, a pain reliever.'

35

Babette could not get enough of talk radio. 'I hate my face,' a woman said. 'This is an ongoing problem with me for years. Of all the faces you could have given me, lookswise, this one has got to be the worst. But how can I not look? Even if you took all my mirrors away, I would still find a way to look. How can I not look on the one hand? But I hate it on the other. In other words I still look. Because whose face is it, obviously? What do I do, forget it's there, pretend it's someone else's? What I'm trying to do with this call, Mel, is find other people who have a problem accepting their face. Here are some questions to get us started. What did you look like before you were born? What will you look like in the afterlife, regardless of race or color?'

Babette wore her sweatsuit almost all the time. It was a plain gray outfit, loose and drooping. She cooked in it, drove the kids to school, wore it to the hardware store and the stationer's. I thought about it for a while, decided there was nothing excessively odd in this, nothing to worry about, no reason to believe she was sinking into apathy and despair.

'How do you feel?' I said. 'Tell the truth.'

'What is the truth? I'm spending more time with Wilder. Wilder helps me get by.'

'I depend on you to be the healthy outgoing former Babette. I need this as badly as you do, if not more.'

'What is need? We all need. Where is the uniqueness in this?'

'Are you feeling basically the same?'

'You mean am I sick unto death? The fear hasn't gone, Jack.'

'We have to stay active.'

'Active helps but Wilder helps more.'

'Is it my imagination,' I said, 'or is he talking less than ever?'

'There's enough talk. What is talk? I don't want him to talk. The less he talks, the better.'

'Denise worries about you.'

'Who?'

'Denise.'

'Talk is radio,' she said.

Denise would not let her mother go running unless she promised to apply layers of sunscreen gel. The girl would follow her out of the house to dash a final glob of lotion across the back of Babette's neck, then stand on her toes to stroke it evenly in. She tried to cover every exposed spot. The brows, the lids. They had bitter arguments about the need for this. Denise said the sun was a risk to a fair-skinned person. Her mother claimed the whole business was publicity for disease.

'Besides, I'm a runner,' she said. 'A runner by definition is less likely to be struck by damaging rays than a standing or walking figure.'

Denise spun in my direction, arms flung out, her body beseeching me to set the woman straight.

'The worst rays are direct,' Babette said. 'This means the faster a person is moving, the more likely she is to receive only partial hits, glancing rays, deflections.'

Denise let her mouth fall open, bent her body at the knees. In truth I wasn't sure her mother was wrong.

'It is all a corporate tie-in,' Babette said in summary. 'The sunscreen, the marketing, the fear, the disease. You can't have one without the other.'

I took Heinrich and his snake-handling buddy, Orest Mercator, out to the commercial strip for dinner. It was four in the afternoon, the time of day when Orest's training schedule called for his main meal. At his request we went to Vincent's Casa Mario, a blockhouse structure with slit windows that seemed part of some coastal defense system.

I'd found myself thinking of Orest and his snakes and wanted a chance to talk to him further.

We sat in a blood-red booth. Orest gripped the tasseled menu with his chunky hands. His shoulders seemed broader than ever, the serious head partly submerged between them.

'How's the training going?' I said.

'I'm slowing it down a little. I don't want to peak too soon. I know how to take care of my body.'

'Heinrich told me you sleep sitting up, to prepare for the cage.'

'I perfected that. I'm doing different stuff now.'

'Like what?'

'Loading up on carbohydrates.'

'That's why we came here,' Heinrich said.

'I load up a little more each day.'

'It's because of the huge energy he'll be burning up in the cage, being alert, tensing himself when a mamba approaches, whatever.'

We ordered pasta and water.

'Tell me, Orest. As you get closer and closer to the time, are you beginning to feel anxious?'

'What anxious? I just want to get in the cage. Sooner the better. This is what Orest Mercator is all about.'

'You're not nervous? You don't think about what might happen?'

'He likes to be positive,' Heinrich said. 'This is the thing today with athletes. You don't dwell on the negative.'

'Tell me this, then. What is the negative? What do you think of when you think of the negative?'

'Here's what I think. I'm nothing without the snakes. That's the only negative. The negative is if it doesn't come off, if the humane society doesn't let me in the cage. How can I be the best at what I do if they don't let me do it?'

I liked to watch Orest eat. He inhaled food according to aerodynamic principles. Pressure differences, intake velocities. He went at it silently and purposefully, loading up, centering himself, appearing to grow more self- important with each clump of starch that slid over his tongue.

'You know you can get bitten. We talked about it last time. Do you think about what happens after the fangs close on your wrist? Do you think about dying? This is what I want to know. Does death scare you? Does it haunt your thoughts? Let me put my cards on the table, Orest. Are you afraid to die? Do you experience fear? Does fear make you tremble or sweat? Do you feel a shadow fall across the room when you think of the cage, the snakes, the fangs?'

'What did I read just the other day? There are more people dead today than in the rest of world history put together. What's one extra? I'd just as soon die while I'm trying to put Orest Mercator's name in the record book.'

I looked at my son. I said, 'Is he trying to tell us there are more people dying in this twenty-four-hour period than in the rest of human history up to now?'

'He's saying the dead are greater today than ever before, combined.'

'What dead? Define the dead.'

'He's saying people now dead.'

'What do you mean, now dead? Everybody who's dead is now dead.'

'He's saying people in graves. The known dead. Those you can count.'

I was listening intently, trying to grasp what they meant. A second plate of food came for Orest.

'But people sometimes stay in graves for hundreds of years. Is he saying there are more dead people in graves than anywhere else?'