White Noise

'We are here to take care of sick and injured. Only this. You would talk about heaven, you must find another place.'

'Other nuns wear dresses,' I said reasonably. 'Here you still wear the old uniform. The habit, the veil, the clunky shoes. You must believe in tradition. The old heaven and hell, the Latin mass. The Pope is infallible, God created the world in six days. The great old beliefs. Hell is burning lakes, winged demons.'

'You would come in bleeding from the street and tell me six days it took to make a universe?'

'On the seventh He rested.'

'You would talk of angels? Here?'

'Of course here. Where else?'

I was frustrated and puzzled, close to shouting.

'Why not armies that would fight in the sky at the end of the world?'

'Why not? Why are you a nun anyway? Why do you have that picture on the wall?'

She drew back, her eyes filled with contemptuous pleasure.

'It is for others. Not for us.'

'But that's ridiculous. What others?'

'All the others. The others who spend their lives believing that we still believe. It is our task in the world to believe things no one else takes seriously. To abandon such beliefs completely, the human race would die. This is why we are here. A tiny minority. To embody old things, old beliefs. The devil, the angels, heaven, hell. If we did not pretend to believe these things, the world would collapse.'

'Pretend?'

'Of course pretend. Do you think we are stupid? Get out from here.'

'You don't believe in heaven? A nun?'

'If you don't, why should I?'

'If you did, maybe I would.'

'If I did, you would not have to.'

'All the old muddles and quirks,' I said. 'Faith, religion, life everlasting. The great old human gullibilities. Are you saying you don't take them seriously? Your dedication is a pretense?'

'Our pretense is a dedication. Someone must appear to believe. Our lives are no less serious than if we professed real faith, real belief. As belief shrinks from the world, people find it more necessary than ever that someone believe. Wild-eyed men in caves. Nuns in black. Monks who do not speak. We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes. There must always be believers. Fools, idiots, those who hear voices, those who speak in tongues. We are your lunatics. We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible. You are sure that you are right but you don't want everyone to think as you do. There is no truth without fools. We are your fools, your madwomen, rising at dawn to pray, lighting candles, asking statues for good health, long life.'

'You've had long life. Maybe it works.'

She rattled out a laugh, showing teeth so old they were nearly transparent.

'Soon no more. You will lose your believers.'

'You've been praying for nothing all these years?'

'For the world, dumb head.'

'And nothing survives? Death is the end?'

'Do you want to know what I believe or what I pretend to believe?'

'I don't want to hear this. This is terrible.'

'But true.'

'You're a nun. Act like one.'

'We take vows. Poverty, chastity, obedience. Serious vows. A serious life. You could not survive without us.'

'There must be some of you who aren't pretending, who truly believe. I know there are. Centuries of belief don't just peter out in a few years. There were whole fields of study devoted to these subjects. Angelology. A branch of theology just for angels. A science of angels. Great minds debated these things. There are great minds today. They still debate, they still believe.'

'You would come in from the street dragging a body by the foot and talk about angels who live in the sky. Get out from here.'

She said something in German. I failed to understand. She spoke again, at some length, pressing her face toward mine, the words growing harsher, wetter, more guttural. Her eyes showed a terrible delight in my incomprehension. She was spraying me with German. A storm of words. She grew more animated as the speech went on. A gleeful vehemence entered her voice. She spoke faster, more expressively. Blood vessels flared in her eyes and face. I began to detect a cadence, a measured beat. She was reciting something, I decided. Litanies, hymns, catechisms. The mysteries of the rosary perhaps. Taunting me with scornful prayer.

The odd thing is I found it beautiful.

When her voice grew weak, I left the cubicle and wandered around until I found the old doctor. 'Herr Doktor,' I called, feeling like someone in a movie. He activated his hearing aid. I got my prescription, asked if Willie Mink would be all right. He wouldn't, at least not for a while. But he wouldn't die either, which gave him the edge on me.

The drive home was uneventful. I left the car in Stover's driveway. The rear seat was covered with blood. There was blood on the steering wheel, more blood on the dashboard and door handles. The scientific study of the cultural behavior and development of man. Anthropology.

I went upstairs and watched the kids a while. All asleep, fumbling through their dreams, eyes rapidly moving beneath closed lids. I got into bed next to Babette, fully dressed except for my shoes, somehow knowing she wouldn't think it strange. But my mind kept racing, I couldn't sleep. After a while I went down to the kitchen to sit with a cup of coffee, feel the pain in my wrist, the heightened pulse.

There was nothing to do but wait for the next sunset, when the sky would ring like bronze.

40

This was the day Wilder got on his plastic tricycle, rode it around the block, turned right onto a dead end street and pedaled noisily to the dead end. He walked the tricycle around the guard rail and then rode along a paved walkway that went winding past some overgrown lots to a set of twenty concrete steps. The plastic wheels rumbled and screeched. Here our reconstruction yields to the awe-struck account of two elderly women watching from the second-story back porch of a tall house in the trees. He walked the tricycle down the steps, guiding it with a duteous and unsentimental hand, letting it bump right along, as if it were an odd-shaped little sibling, not necessarily cherished. He remounted, rode across the street, rode across the sidewalk, proceeded onto the grassy slope that bordered the expressway. Here the women began to call. Hey, hey, they said, a little tentative at first, not ready to accept the implications of the process unfolding before them. The boy pedaled diagonally down the slope, shrewdly reducing the angle of descent, then paused on the bottom to aim his three-wheeler at the point on the opposite side which seemed to represent the shortest distance across. Hey, sonny, no. Waving their arms, looking frantically for some able-bodied pedestrian to appear on the scene. Wilder, meanwhile, ignoring their cries or not hearing them in the serial whoosh of dashing hatchbacks and vans, began to pedal across the highway, mystically charged. The women could only look, empty-mouthed, each with an arm in the air, a plea for the scene to reverse, the boy to pedal backwards on his faded blue and yellow toy like a cartoon figure on morning TV. The drivers could not quite comprehend. In their knotted posture, belted in, they knew this picture did not belong to the hurtling consciousness of the highway, the broad-ribboned modernist stream. In speed there was sense. In signs, in patterns, in split-second lives. What did it mean, this little rotary blur? Some force in the world had gone awry. They veered, braked, sounded their horns down the long afternoon, an animal lament. The child would not even look at them, pedaled straight for the median strip, a narrow patch of pale grass. He was pumped up, chesty, his arms appearing to move as rapidly as his legs, the round head wagging in a jig of lame-brained determination. He had to