mr. treadwell's sister died. her first name was gladys. the doctor said she died of lingering dread, a result of thefour days and nights she and her brother had spent in the mid-village mall, lost and confused.
a man in glassboro died when the rear wheel of his car separated from the axle. an idiosyncrasy of that particularmodel.
the lieutenant governor of the state died of undisclosed natural causes, after a long illness. we all know what thatmeans.
a mechanicsville man died outside tokyo during a siege of the airport by ten thousand helmeted students.
when i read obituaries i always note the age of the deceased. automatically i relate this figure to my own age. fouryears to go, i think. nine more years. two years and i'm dead. the power of numbers is never more evident thanwhen we use them to speculate on the time of our dying. sometimes i bargain with myself. would i be willing toaccept sixty-five, genghis khan's age on dying? suleiman the magnificent made it to seventy-six. that sounds allright, especially the way i feel now, but how will it sound when i'm seventy-three?
it's hard to imagine these men feeling sad about death. attila the hun died young. he was still in his forties. did hefeel sorry for himself, succumb to self-pity and depression? he was the king of the huns, the invader of europe, thescourge of god. i want to believe he lay in his tent, wrapped in animal skins, as in some internationally financedmovie epic, and said brave cruel things to his aides and retainers. no weakening of the spirit. no sense of the irony ofhuman existence, that we are the highest form of life on earth and yet ineffably sad because we know what no otheranimal knows, that we must die. attila did not look through the opening in his tent and gesture at some lame dogstanding at the edge of the fire waiting to be thrown a scrap of meat. he did not say, "that pathetic flea-ridden beastis better off than the greatest ruler of men. it doesn't know what we know, it doesn't feel what we feel, it can't be sadas we are sad."i want to believe he was not afraid. he accepted death as an experience that flows naturally from life, a wild ridethrough the forest, as would befit someone known as the scourge of god. this is how it ended for him, with hisattendants cutting off their hair and disfiguring their own faces in barbarian tribute, as the camera pulls back out ofthe tent and pans across the night sky of the fifth century a.d., clear and uncontaminated, bright-banded withshimmering worlds.
babette looked up from her eggs and hash browns and said to me with a quiet intensity, "life is good, jack.""what brings this on?""i just think it ought to be said.""do you feel better now that you've said it?""i have terrible dreams," she murmured.
who will die first? she says she wants to die first because she would feel unbearably lonely and sad without me,especially if the children were grown and living elsewhere. she is adamant about this. she sincerely wants to precedeme. she discusses the subject with such argumentative force that it's obvious she thinks we have a choice in thematter. she also thinks nothing can happen to us as long as there are dependent children in the house. the kids are aguarantee of our relative longevity. we're safe as long as they're around. but once they get big and scatter, she wantsto be the first to go. she sounds almost eager. she is afraid i will die unexpectedly, sneakily, slipping away in thenight. it isn't that she doesn't cherish life; it's being left alone that frightens her. the emptiness, the sense of cosmicdarkness.
mastercard, visa, american express.
i tell her i want to die first. i've gotten so used to her that i would feel miserably incomplete. we are two views of thesame person. i would spend the rest of my life turning to speak to her.
no one there, a hole in space and time. she claims my death would leave a bigger hole in her life than her deathwould leave in mine. this is the level of our discourse. the relative size of holes, abysses and gaps. we have seriousarguments on this level. she says if her death is capable of leaving a large hole in my life, my death would leave anabyss in hers, a great yawning gulf. i counter with a profound depth or void. and so it goes into the night. thesearguments never seem foolish at the time. such is the dignifying power of our subject.
she put on a long glossy padded coat—it looked segmented, exoskeletal, designed for the ocean floor—and went outto teach her class in posture. steffie moved soundlessly through the house carrying small plastic bags she used forlining the wicker baskets scattered about. she did this once or twice a week with the quiet and conscientious air ofsomeone who does not want credit for saving lives. murray came over to talk to the two girls and wilder, somethinghe did from time to time as part of his investigation into what he called the society of kids. he talked about theotherworldly babble of the american family. he seemed to think we were a visionary group, open to special forms ofconsciousness. there were huge amounts of data flowing through the house, waiting to be analyzed.
he went upstairs with the three kids to watch tv. heinrich walked into the kitchen, sat at the table and gripped a forktightly in each hand. the refrigerator throbbed massively. i flipped a switch and somewhere beneath the sink agrinding mechanism reduced parings, rinds and animal fats to tiny drainable fragments, with a motorized surge thatmade me retreat two paces. i took the forks out of my son's hands and put them in the dishwasher.
"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 getthe 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 todo with your left hand, then got the spoon with your right hand, switched it to your left hand, picked up the coffee canwith 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 saladsometime.""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 asecond to decide. but i don't want to be alone either. everything i say to babette about holes and gaps is true. herdeath would leave me scattered, talking to chairs and pillows. don't let us die, i want to cry out to that fifth centurysky 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 marvelousand sad invention, so roundabout, ingenious, human. it was like a philosophical argument rendered in terms of thethings 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'sroom, where the tv set was currently located. the volume was kept way down, the girls engaged in a rapt dialoguewith their guest. murray looked happy to be there. he sat in the middle of the floor taking notes, his toggle coat andtouring cap next to him on the rug. the room around him was rich in codes and messages, an archaeology ofchildhood, things denise had carried with her since the age of three, from cartoon clocks to werewolf posters. she isthe kind of child who feels a protective tenderness toward her own beginnings. it is part of her strategy in a world ofdisplacements to make every effort to restore and preserve, keep things together for their value as rememberingobjects, 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 yourcasual gift for the study of character. it is all there, in full force, charged waves of identity and being. there are noamateurs 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 wasabout to leave when i glanced in passing at the tv screen. i paused at the door, looked more closely this time. it wastrue, 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 andwhite, framed in formal borders? was she dead, missing, disembodied? was this her spirit, her secret self, sometwo-dimensional facsimile released by the power of technology, set free to glide through wavebands, through energylevels, 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 blinksin rapid twos and threes. i'd seen her just an hour ago, eating eggs, but her appearance on the screen made me think ofher as some distant figure from the past, some ex-wife and absentee mother, a walker in the mists of the dead. if shewas 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 oursurroundings, the room, the house, the reality in which the tv set stood—it was only then that we understood whatwas going on.
babette was teaching her class in the church basement and it was being televised by the local cable station. either shehadn'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 thepicture that mattered, the face in black and white, animated but also flat, distanced, sealed off, timeless. it was butwasn't her. once again i began to think murray might be on to something. waves and radiation. something leakedthrough the mesh. she was shining a light on us, she was coming into being, endlessly being formed and reformed asthe 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 onlytelevision—whatever that was, however it worked—and not some journey out of life or death, not some mysteriousseparation. 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 thatwere mainly fabricated. as the camera pulled back to allow babette to demonstrate some fine point of standing orwalking, 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, stuckhis hand behind the set to adjust the recessed knobs. when he tried another channel, the sound boomed out, raw andfuzzy. back at the cable station, he couldn't raise a buzz and as we watched babette finish the lesson, we were in amood of odd misgiving. but as soon as the program ended, the two girls got excited again and went downstairs towait 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 andswells, as murray took notes.
ii the airborne toxic event
