(White Noise, p.

102)
He ate a winter peach. I poured a cup of coffee for Muyrray and together the boy and I
went up the stairs to Denise’s room, where the TV set was currently located. The volume was
kept way down, the girls engaged in a rapt dialogue with their guest. Muyrraty looked 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.
Make no mistake. I take these children seriously. nIt is not possible to see too much in
them, to overindulge your casual gift for the study of character. It is all there, in full force,
charged waves of identity and being. There are no amateurs 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 was about to leave when I glanced in passing at the TV screen. I paused at
the door, looked more closely this time. It was true, 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 faze
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 and white, framed in formal borders? Was she dead, missing,
disembodied? Was this her spirit, her secret self, some two-dimensional facsimile released by the
power of technology, set free to glide through wavebands, through energy levels, 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 blinks in rapid twos and threes. I'd seen her just an hour ago, eating eggs,
but her appearance on the screen made me think of her as some distant figure from the past,
some ex-wife and absentee mother, a walker in the mists of the dead. If she was 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 our surroundings, the room, the house, the reality in which the TV set stood—it
was only then that we understood what was going on.
Babette was teaching her class in the church basement and it was being televised by the
local cable station. Either she hadn'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 the picture that mattered, the face in black and white, animated but also
flat, distanced, sealed off, timeless. It was but wasn't her. Once again I began to think Murray
might be on to something. Waves and radiation. Something leaked through the mesh. She was
shining a light on us, she was coming into being, endlessly being formed and reformed as the
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 only television—whatever that was, however it worked—and not some
journey out of life or death, not some mysterious separation. 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 that were mainly fabricated. As the camera pulled back to allow Babette to
demonstrate some fine point of standing or walking, 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, stuck his hand behind the set to adjust the recessed
knobs. When he tried another channel, the sound boomed out, raw and fuzzy. Back at the cable
station, he couldn't raise a buzz and as we watched Babette finish the lesson, we were in a mood
of odd misgiving. But as soon as the program ended, the two girls got excited again and went
downstairs to wait 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 and swells, as Murray took notes.

Excerpt 2 (p. 306, last chapter):

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 slow down to get onto the raised median, rearing up to let the front wheel edge over,
extremely deliberate in his movements, following some numbered scheme, and the cars went
wailing past, horns blowing belatedly, drivers' eyes searching the rearview mirror. He walked the
tricycle across the grass. The women watched him regain a firm placement on the seat. Stay, they
called. Do not go. No, no. Like foreigners reduced to simple phrases. The cars kept coming,
whipping into the straightaway, endless streaking traffic. He set off to cross the last three lanes,
dropping off the median like a bouncing ball, front wheel, rear wheels. Then the head-wagging
race to the other side. Cars dodged, strayed, climbed the curbstone, astonished heads appearing
in the side windows. The furiously pedaling boy could not know how slow he seemed to be
moving from the vantage point of the women on the porch. The women were silent by now,
outside the event, suddenly tired. How slow he moved, how mistaken he was in thinking he was
breezing right along. It made them tired. The horns kept blowing, sound waves mixing in the air,
flattening, calling back from vanished cars, scolding. He reached the other side, briefly rode
parallel to the traffic, seemed to lose his balance, fall away, going down the embankment in a
multicolored tumble. When he reappeared a second later, he was sitting in a water furrow, part of
the intermittent creek that accompanies the highway. Stunned, he made the decision to cry. It
took him a moment, mud and water everywhere, the tricycle on its side. The women began to
call once more, each raising an arm to revoke the action. Boy in the water, they said. Look, help,
drown. And he seemed, on his seat in the creek, profoundly howling, to have heard them for the
first time, looking up over the earthen mound and into the trees across the expressway. This
frightened them all the more. They called and waved, were approaching the early phases of
uncontrollable terror when a passing motorist, as such people are called, alertly pulled over, got
out of the car, skidded down the embankment and lifted the boy from the murky shallows,
holding him aloft for the clamoring elders to see.