White Noise

  Her hair is a fanatical blonde mop a particular tawny hue that used to be called dirty blonde. If she were a petite woman the hair would be too cute too mischievous and contrived. Size gives her tousled aspect a certain seriousness. Ample women do not plan such things. They lack the guile for conspiracies of the body.

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 We regard the rest of the house as storage space for furniture toys all the unused objects of earlier marriages and different sets of children the gifts of lost in laws the hand-me-downs and rummages. Things boxes. Why do these possessions carry such sorrowful weight? There is a darkness attached to them a foreboding. They make me wary not of personal failure and defeat but of something more general something large in scope and content.

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 His basket held generic food and drink non brand items and plain white packages with white packages with simple labeling.. There was a white can labeled canned peaches. There was a white package of bacon without a plastic window for viewing a representative slice. A jar of roasted nuts had a white wrapper bearing the words irregular peanuts. This is the new austerity, he said, flavorless packaging. It appeals to me. I feel I'm not only saving money but contributing to some kind of spiritual consensus . It's like World War 3. Everything is white. They'll take our bright colors away and use them in the war effort. 

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 He is trying to develop a vulnerability that women will find attractive. He works at it consciously like a man in a gym with weights and a mirror. But his effort so far have produced only this half sneaky look sheepish and wheedling..

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His complexion was of a tone I want to call flesh-colored. Howard Dunlop was his name. He said he was a former chiropractor, but didn’t offer a reason why he was no longer active and didn't say when he’d learned German, or why, and something in his manner kept me from asking. 

We sat in his dark crowded room at the boarding house. An ironing board stood unfolded at the window. There were chipped enamel pots, trays of utensils set on a dresser. The furniture wa vague, foundling. At the borders of the room were the elemental things. An exposed radiator, an army-blanketed cot. Dunlop sa at the edge of a straight chair, intoning generalities of grammar. When he switched from English to German, it was as though a cord had been twisted in his larynx. An abrupt emotion entered his voice, a scrape and gargle that sounded like the stirmng d some beast’s ambition. He gaped at me and gestured, he croaked, he verged on strangulation. Sounds came spewing from the base of his tongue, harsh noises damp with passion. He was only demonstrating certain basic pronunciation patterns but the transformation in his face and voice made me think he was making a passage between levels of being. 

I sat there taking notes. 

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 This is the society of kids. I tell my students they're already too old to figure importantly in the making of society. Minute by minute they’re beginning to diverge from ca Ney ‘Even as we sit here,’ I tell them, ‘you are spinning out from Mie core, becoming less recognizable as a group, less targetable by advertisers and mass-producers of culture. Kids are a true universal. But you’re well beyond that, already beginning to drift, to feel estranged from the products you consume. Who are they designed for? What is your place in the marketing scheme? Once you're out of school, it is only a matter of time before you experience the vast loneliness and dissatisfaction of consumers who have lost their group identity.’ Then I tap my pencil on the table to indicate time passing ominously.” 

&

I'll  give anyone in this car five dollars,” Heinrich said, “if they can name the population of Bolivia.” 

“Bolivians,” my daughter said. 

The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Overcloseness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps something even deeper, like the need to survive. Murray says we are fragile creatures surrounded by a world of hostile facts. Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works toward sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate. I tell Murray that ignorance and confusion can’t possibly be the driving forces behind family solidarity. What an idea, what a subversion. He asks me why the strongest family units exist in the least developed societies. Not to know is a weapon of survival, he says. Magic and superstition become entrenched as the powerful orthodoxy of the clan. The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted. What a heartless theory, I say. But Murray insists it’s true. 

&

....cheese graters and paring knives. I shopped with reckless abandon, I shopped for immediate needs and distant contingencies. I shopped for its own sake, looking and touching, inspecting merchandise | had no intention of buying, then buying it. I sent clerks into their fabric books and pattern books to search for elusive designs. | began to grow in value and self-regard. I filled myself out, found new aspects of myself, located a person I’d forgotten existed. Brightness settled around me. We crossed from furniture to men’s wear, walking through cosmetics. Our images appeared on mir. rored columns, in glassware and chrome, on TV monitors in se. curity rooms. I traded money for goods. The more money I spent, the less important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums. These sums poured off my skin like so much rain. These sums in fact came back to me in the form of existential credit. I felt expansive, inclined to be sweepingly generous, and told the kids to pick out their Christmas gifts here and now. I gestured in what I felt was an expansive manner. I could tell they were impressed. They fanned out across the area, each of them suddenly inclined to be private, shadowy, even secretive. Periodically one of them would return to register the name of an item with Babette, careful not to let the others know what it was. I myself was not to be bothered with tedious details. I was the benefactor, the one who dispenses gifts, bonuses, bribes, baksheesh. The children knew it was the nature of such things that I could not be expected to engage in technical discussions about the gifts themselves. We ate another meal. A band played live Muzak. Voices rose ten stories from the gardens and promenades, a roar that echoed and swirled through the vast gallery, mixing with noises from the tiers, with shuffling feet and chiming bells, the hum of escalators, the sound of people eating, the human buzz of some vivid and happy transaction 

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happy to be there. He sat in the middle of the floor taking notes, his toggle coat and touring cap next to him on the rug. The room around him was rich in codes and messages, an archaeology of childhood, things Denise had carried with her since the age of three, from cartoon clocks to werewolf posters. She is the kind of child who feels a protective tenderness toward her own beginnings. It is part of her strategy in a world of displacements to make every effort to restore and preserve, keep things together for their value as remembering objects, a way of fastening herself to a life. 

&

“I don’t like this latest rumor,” she said. 

“Too far-fetched? You think there’s no chance a bunch of or. ganisms can eat their way through the toxic event.” 

“I think there’s every chance in the world. I don’t doubt for a minute they have these little organisms packaged in cardboard with plastic see-through bubbles, like ballpoint refills. That’s what worries me.” 

“The very existence of custom-made organisms.” 

“The very idea, the very existence, the wondrous ingenuity. On the one hand I definitely admire it. Just to think there are people out there who can conjure such things. A cloud-eating microbe or whatever. There is just no end of surprise. All the amazement that’s left in the world is microscopic. But I can live with that. What scares me is have they thought it through completely?” 

“You feel a vague foreboding,” I said. 

“I feel they’re working on the superstitious part of my nature. Every advance is worse than the one before because it makes me more scared.” 

“Scared of what?” 

“The sky, the earth, I don’t know.”  

“The greater the scientific advance, the more primitive the fear.” | 

&

Our newspaper is delivered by a middle-aged Iranian driving a Nissan Sentra. Something about the car makes me uneasy...the car waiting with its headlights on, at dawn, as the man places the newspaper on the front steps. I tell myself I have reached an age, the age of unreliable menace. The world is full of abandoned meanings. In the commonplace I find unexpected themes and intensities. 

&

This was the night the insane asylum burned down. Heinrich and I got in the car and went to watch. There were other men at the scene with their adolescent boys. Evidently fathers and sons seek fellowship at such events. Fires help draw them closer, provide a conversational wedge. There is equipment to appraise, the technique of firemen to discuss and criticize. The manliness of firefighting—the virility of fires, one might say—suits the kind of laconic dialogue that fathers and sons can undertake without awkwardness or embarrassment. 

“Most of these fires in old buildings start in the electrical wiring,” Heinrich said. “Faulty wiring. That’s one phrase you can’t hang around for long without hearing.” 

“Most people don’t burn to death,” I said. “They die of smoke inhalation.” 

“That’s the other phrase,” he said. 

Flames roared through the dormers. We stood across the street watching part of the roof give way, a tall chimney slowly fold and sink. Pumper trucks kept armving from other towns, the men descending heavily in their rubber boots and old-fashioned hats. Hoses were manned and trained, a figure rose above the shimmering roof in the grip of a telescopic ladder. We watched the portico begin to go, a far column leaning. A woman in a fiery nightgown walked across the lawn. We gasped, almost in appretiation. She was white-haired and slight, fringed in burning air, and we could see she was mad, so lost to dreams and furies that the fire around her head seemed almost incidental. No one said aword. In all the heat and noise of detonating wood, she brought asilence to her. How powerful and real. How deep a thing was madness. A fire captain hurried toward her, then circled out slightly, disconcerted, as if she were not the person, after all, he had expected to meet here. She went down in a white burst, like a teacup breaking. Four men were around her now, batting at the flames with helmets and caps. 

The great work of containing the blaze went on, a labor that seemed as old and lost as cathedral-building, the men driven by a spirit of lofty communal craft. A Dalmatian sat in the cab of g hook-and-ladder truck. 

“It’s funny how you can look at it and look at it,” Heinrich said, “Just like a fire in a fireplace.” oe 

“Are you saying the two kinds of fire are equally compelling” 

“I’m just saying you can look and look.” 

“‘Man has always been fascinated by fire.’ Is that what you're saying?” 

“This is my first burning building. Give me a chance,” he said. 

The fathers and sons crowded the sidewalk, pointing at one or another part of the half gutted structure. Murray, whose rooming house was just yards away, sidled up to us and shook our hands without a word. Windows blew out. We watched another chimney slip through the roof, a few loose bricks tumbling to the lawn. Murray shook our hands again, then disappeared. 

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.(lt 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.