Chapter 37 Section 35

Babette could never get enough of the talk shows on the radio. "I hate my face," said a woman, "and it's been a problem with me for years. Of all the faces you could possibly show me, this one can only be the ugliest in terms of looks." Yes. But how can I not see? Even if you remove all my mirrors, I will still find a way to see. On the one hand, how can I not see? But on the other hand, I Hate it. In other words, I'm still looking. Because it's obvious, whose face is it? What can I do - forget it's there? Pretend it's someone else's face? What I'm calling, May Well, it's about finding someone else who can't accept their own face. Here are a few questions to get us to the point. Regardless of race or color, what did you look like before you were born? What will you look like after you die?"

Babette wears tracksuits almost all day.It was a plain gray coat that hung loose.She cooks in it, drives the kids to school, and does hardware and stationery shopping.I thought about this for a while and concluded that there was nothing wrong with it, nothing to worry about, no reason to think she was slipping into apathy and despair. "How do you feel?" I said, "Tell me the truth." "What's the actual situation? I'm spending more time with Wilder now. Wilder helps me get through it." "I'm counting on you to be the healthy, cheerful Babette of old again. I need it as much as, if not more urgently, than you do."

"What is a need? We all need it. What's different about it?" "Do you feel basically the same as before?" "You mean, do I still worry about dying? The fear isn't gone, Jack." "We have to stay alive." "The energy helps, but Wilder helps even more." "Is it just my imagination—" I said, "or he's just talking less than he used to." "He talks enough. What's talking? I don't want him talking. The less he talks, the better." "Denise is worried about you." "Who?" "Denise."

"Talking is for the radio." Denise won't let her mother go for a walk unless she promises to put on a few layers of sunscreen.The girl would follow her outside the house, dab the last drop of sunscreen on the nape of Babette's neck, and rub it evenly on tiptoe.She tried to put it on every exposed spot, forehead, eyelids.They had quarreled bitterly about the necessity of doing so.Denise says the sun is a danger for a person with good skin.Her mother claimed that the whole thing was just hype about the disease. "Also, I'm a runner," she says. "A runner, by definition, is less susceptible to harmful rays than someone who is standing or walking."

Denise turned quickly to me, her arms outstretched, her body position begging me to correct this woman's muddled views. "The worst rays are direct," Babbitt said. "That is to say, the faster a person moves, the more likely she is to have only partial invasiveness and oblique radiation." Denise's mouth was open and her body was bent towards her knees.To be honest, I'm really not sure her mother was wrong. "This whole thing is a tie-in," Babette concluded. "Sunscreen, marketing, fear, disease. You can't have one and not have the other."

I took Heinrich and his snake-charmer friend Orest Mercator out to dinner at a strip restaurant.It was four o'clock in the afternoon, and it was the main meal time of Oreste's training schedule every day.At his request, we went to Vincent's Casa Maria, a fortress-like building with slender windows that seemed to be part of some coastal defense system. I found myself missing Oreste and his snake, and wished for a chance to talk to him in depth. We sat under a blood-red awning.Oreste picked up the ribbon-bound menu in his thick hands.His shoulders seemed wider than before, and part of his serious head was buried between them.

"How's the training going?" I said. "I'm slowing down a little bit now. I don't want to get to the top too soon. I know how to take care of my body." "Heinrich told me that you slept sitting up in preparation for the snake cage." "I've done that. I'm working on another thing right now." "For example?" "Eat carbohydrates." "That's why we're here," Heinrich said. "I eat a little more every day." "It's because he has to be on high alert in the cage, like when a mamba is approaching and so on, and that takes a lot of energy."

We ordered pasta and water. "Tell me, Oreste. Are you beginning to feel worried as you get closer, closer, to that moment?" "What worries? I just want to get into the cage, as soon as possible. That's all Oreste Mercator is going to do." "Aren't you nervous? Don't you think about what might happen?" "He likes positive affirmations," Heinrich said. "That's the essence of today's athletes. You don't dwell on negative things." "So tell me this. What's a negative thing? When you think about a negative thing, what do you think about?"

"That's what I think. Without snakes, I'm nothing. That's the only negative thing. The negative thing is, if it doesn't work out, if SPCA won't let me in the snake cage. If they won't let me I act, how can I be the best at what I do?" I love watching Orest eat.He inhales food based on aerodynamic principles, which involves pressure differences, speed of inhalation.Quiet and purposeful, he rolls up the noodles with a fork first, concentrating on himself, looking more self-important each time a morsel of starchy food slides over his tongue. "You know you could be bitten by a snake. We talked about it last time. Did you ever think, what happens when the snake's fangs bite your wrist? Did you think you might die? That's what I want to know. Doesn't death frighten you? Does it haunt your thoughts? Let me get this out of the way, Oreste. Are you afraid of death? Have you ever experienced fear? Does fear make you tremble or In a cold sweat? When you think of the cage and the snake and its fangs, do you feel a shadow descend and pass across the room?"

"What did I read just the day before yesterday? More people are dead today than in the rest of the history of the world put together. What does one more have? Before I tried to make Oreste Mercator When my name enters the Guinness Book of World Records, I will not hesitate to die." I look at my son.I said, "Is he telling us that more people are dying in these twenty-four hours than in the rest of human history?" "He's saying that more people died today than all previous deaths combined." "What death? Please define the meaning of the dead." "He's talking about dead people now."

"It's dead now, what do you mean? Every dead person is dead now." "He's talking about the people in the grave, the known dead you can count." I listened intently, trying to grasp their meaning.A second plate of food was brought to Oreste. "But people sometimes lie in graves for hundreds of years. Is he saying there are more dead people in graves than anywhere else?" "It depends on what you mean by 'anywhere else.'" "I can't tell what I mean. Drowned, blown up." "More people are dying now than at any time before. That's all he said." I looked at him for a while, then turned to Oreste. "You're facing death on purpose. You're doing what people spend their entire lives trying not to do: die. I wonder why." "My trainer said: 'Breathe, don't think.' He said: 'Go be a snake and you'll see how a snake stays still.'" "He has a coach now," Heinrich said. "He's one," Oreste said. "Iron City has some Sunnis living near the airport." "Most of the Sunnis are Korean. But I think my coach is an Arab." I said, "You mean, most of them are Korean?" "He's Sunni," Oreste said. "But the majority of Unification Church members are Korean. Of course, not all of them are, only their leadership is." They think about it.I watched Orest eat.I watched as he forked spaghetti down his throat.The stern head was motionless, save for a passage through which the food slid off the mechanical forks.What purpose he conveyed!What a consciousness to follow the routine of movements so meticulously!If each of us is the core of our own being, Oreste seems committed to expanding this core to make it everything.Is greater self-mastery what athletes do?We might envy their heroics that have nothing to do with sports.They create a danger while escaping it with some deeper awareness; they exist within the vision of the angels and are able to make a leap from ordinary death.But is Oreste an athlete?He did nothing but sit—sixty-seven days in a glass snake cage, waiting to be bitten in front of everyone. "You won't be able to defend yourself," I said, "and more than that, you'll be sharing a cage with the slimiest, most feared and repulsed animal in the world—snakes. People have nightmares about snakes, crawling, Writhing, cold-blooded, egg-laying vertebrates. People go to psychiatrists for that. Snakes occupy a special slimy place in our collective unconscious. Yet you voluntarily enter an enclosed space with thirty or forty The most venomous snakes are locked together." "What slimy? They're not slimy." "The famous 'Slimy' is a myth," says Heinrich, "and he's going into a cage with a Gabon viper with two-inch fangs. Maybe a dozen African mambas ...the mamba just happens to be the fastest land snake in the world. Isn't talking about 'slimy' a bit wild?" "That's exactly my point. Fangs. Snake bites. Fifty thousand people a year die from snake bites. It was on TV last night." "Everything was on TV last night," Oreste said. I really admire this answer.I guess I like him as a person too.He was building a regal self out of some vulgar desire.He would train gritty, address himself in the third person, and eat carbs.His coaches are always there for him, and his friends are drawn to the dangerous atmosphere he inspires.As he draws closer to the critical moment, the strength of his life increases. "His trainer is teaching him how to breathe the old-fashioned, Sunni Muslim way. A snake has only one shape. A person can be a thousand." "Go and be a snake," said Oreste. "People are getting more and more interested," Heinrich said, "like it's starting to be a thing, like he's actually going to do it, like they believe him now. It's a package deal .” If the ego is death, how can it be stronger than death? I asked for the bill.Several times Mr. Gray flashed before his eyes.A dripping figure in gray panties and socks.I pulled a few bills out of my wallet and ran my fingers vigorously to make sure no other bills were stuck to them.In the motel mirror you can see my wife's whole body, white body, full breasts, pink knees, stubby toes, wearing only a pair of mint colored foot warmers, she looks like a carnival leader college sophomores. When we got home, I found her ironing in the bedroom. "What are you doing?" I said. "Listen to the radio. But it just went silent." "If you thought we were done with Mr Gray, now is the time to give you an update." "Are we talking about Mr. Gray as a complex, or Mr. Gray as an individual? The difference is huge!" "Of course. Denise compacted the pills." "Does that mean we're done with that complex?" "I don't know what that means." "Does that mean you've given your male attention to the man in the motel?" "I didn't say that." "You don't have to say that. You're a man. Men follow the trajectory of murderous rage. It's the trajectory of biology, ordinary blind and silent male biology." "It's so neat, and it even irons the handkerchief!" "Jack, when you died, I was on the ground, lying there. Maybe eventually, a long time later, they'll find me curled up in the dark, a woman who can't speak, can't move. But now During this time, I will not help you find this man or his drugs." "The eternal wisdom of the woman who irons and sews." "Ask yourself what more you want to do to assuage your age-old fears, or to avenge your childish, silly, wounded masculinity." I went across the corridor to help Steffi pack."They weren't jeering—they were saying, 'Bruce, Bruce,'" a sportscaster said. Denise and Wilder stayed with her.From the secretive atmosphere, I deduced that Denise must be giving advice on the issue of visiting distant parents.Steffi was on a flight out of Boston with stops in Iron City and Mexico City, but she didn't have to change planes, so it seemed easier. "How do I know I'll recognize my mother?" "You met her last year," I said, "and you liked her." "What if she refuses to send me back?" "We thank Denise for that thought. Thank you, Denise. Don't worry, she'll get you back." "What if she doesn't?" Denise said. "It happens, you know." "It won't happen this time." "You have to kidnap her back." "There will be no need for that." "If necessary?" Steffi said. "Would you do that?" Denise said. "It won't happen in a million years." “It happens all the time,” she said. “One parent takes the child and another parent hires kidnappers to get her back.” "What if she detains me?" Steffi said. "What will you do?" "He had to send people to Mexico. That was the only thing he could do." "But would he do it himself?" she said. "Your mother understands she can't keep you," I said, "she's been traveling all the time. So it's out of the question." "Don't worry," Denise told her, "no matter what he says now, he'll get you back in time." Steffi looked at me with great interest and curiosity.I told her I would go to Mexico myself and do everything I could to get her back.She looks at Denise. "Better hire someone," suggested the older girl. "Then you'll have someone who's done it before." Babette comes in and takes Wilder away. "So you're all here," she said. "We're all going to the airport with Steffi. We're all going, all going, all going." "Bruce, Bruce." There was an evacuation the next day involving a noxious smell.Cars marked SIMUVAC can be seen everywhere.Men in Milex suits patrol the streets, many of them armed with hazard-measuring instruments.The consultancy that designed the evacuation has assembled a small group of volunteers to go into a police car in the supermarket car park, where they will be filmed by a computer.First, the nausea and vomiting that I made myself for half an hour.This episode will be videotaped and sent somewhere for analysis. Three days later, there was a really poisonous smell coming from the other side of the river.For a while everything in the town seemed to stand still, except for serious thinking.Traffic is slower and drivers are extra polite.There was no sign of official action, no minibuses or small ambulances painted in the basic colors of red, yellow and blue.People avoid direct eye contact.There is a pungent stench in the nostrils and a peppery tang on the tongue.Over time, the subjective desire to do nothing seems to deepen and take hold.Still others simply denied that they had ever smelled anything.When it comes to smell, that's always the case.Some claim not to see the irony of their own inaction.They took part in a "simulated evacuation" exercise, but are now reluctant to run for their lives.Someone wondered what was causing the smell, someone looked worried, and someone said there was nothing to worry about because they couldn't see a professional.Our eyes started to water. About three hours after our initial awareness of the gas, it dissipated abruptly, preventing us from scrutinizing it solemnly.

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