Dylar, death, and the emotional load of maskwearing

Rereading DeLillo's "White Noise" during the pandemic

One of the many delights of being fully vaccinated is rediscovering the simple pleasure of taking a walk without a mask. Though wearing a mask outdoors never seriously bothered me, suddenly not having to wear one is akin to the feeling of relieving your feet from ski boots and remembering how unnatural it is to not be able to point and flex your toes. In the past few weeks I have noticed how much lighter I feel with the sun on my face and one less accessory in hand, but also that we have been relieved, to an extent, of a more abstract burden—the emotional load of constantly maintaining staunch vigilance against death and illness.

A defining facet of our country’s COVID crisis has been the refusal by many Americans to shoulder this emotional load. Perhaps it was the fact that our country lacks a vocabulary of social responsibility, or perhaps it was the familiarity of the mask as a personal protective device, but it was so unsurprisingly American when the mask inevitably devolved into a fraught symbol of personal liberty, despite the negative externalities of choosing not to wear a mask. With the encouragement of Trump, a not-insignificant swath of the population came to understand the mask as a symbol of Big Government, a mandatory shield against a virus they preferred to dismiss as insignificant or a hoax. Not wearing a mask became a crude performance of masculinity, or some type of literally toxic bravery, meant to announce that you weren’t a pussy because you weren’t afraid of the flu.

It is hard for me to not just dismiss anti-maskers as the same people who objected to seatbelt laws back in the day, people who will literally die for their right to die preventable deaths at their own hands. But the vehemence with which people fought for their supposed right to decline to wear a piece of fabric which could protect them (or, as was often missing from the debate, protect others), makes me wonder about how we grapple with our fear of dying in different ways. Could the rejection of masks symbolize a forceful rejection of a daily life in which we have to confront our fragility as human beings at every turn?

White Noise falls into that genre of 20th century attempts at the Great American Novel, realist¹ novels by flawed white men featuring flawed white men and their problems, men whose love for their wives is evidently manifested by the myriad ways they can describe their breasts. The protagonist of White Noise is Jack Gladney, a professor of “Hitler Studies” at the small “College-on-the-Hill” in fictional suburban Blacksmith. He and his wife Babette (“tall and fairly ample,” with “chugging” breasts when she runs) live with their four precocious children from previous marriages. Jack Gladney’s most prominent flaw is that he is obsessed with the inevitability of his own death. Though much of the first part of the novel seems to be spent in the chaotic bosom of family life—at the supermarket or in front of television—Gladney is preoccupied, particularly with the question of whether he or his wife will die first. DeLillo’s tone is both sincere and gently satirical, one quarter-turn of the dial stranger than reality: 

At home Denise placed a moist bag of garbage in the kitchen compactor. She started up the machine. The ram stroked downward with a dreadful wrenching sound, full of eerie feeling. Children walked in and out of the kitchen, water dripped in the sink, the washing machine heaved in the entranceway. . . Whining metal, exploding bottles, plastic smashed flat. Denise listened carefully, making sure the mangling din contained the correct sonic elements, which meant the machine was operating properly.

“Eerie feelings” thus constantly threaten the refuge of the domestic. On a trip to the grocery store, Gladney discovers an academic acquaintance cornering Babette and mansplaining Tibetan notions of death to her. The colleague’s pontificating is interrupted only when Gladney and Babette notice that their three-year-old son has somehow managed to climb out of the shopping cart and disappear. The small crisis quickly resolves itself when he is found in another woman’s cart. This is but one reminder offered by DeLillo of the lurking banality of tragedy —Jack and his family spend Friday nights watching the news, eating Chinese food while taking in visuals of unfurling mudslides and volcanic eruptions. A plane at the local airport executes a crash landing. Police drag the river looking for elderly neighbors who wander off and disappeared.

In Part II of the novel, the threat of death looms even larger. Literally. A derailed train causes the release of a toxic substance into the air - “The Airborne Toxic Event.” The Event and its unknown effects become a not-subtle metaphor for death’s inexorability, and it is this threat that shapes the psychological landscape of the rest of the novel. Jack Gladney learns that exposure to the toxin might kill him - in thirty years. So might anything else. 

It was my memory of the Gladney family’s exodus from Blacksmith in the wake of the Airborne Toxic Event that resurfaced as I hurriedly prepared to decamp to Ben’s house in San Francisco in mid-March of last year. It’s hard now to recall the surreal feeling of those early days, when we were still being told by the CDC not to wear masks, when COVID felt like a looming cloud of gas of unknown toxic effect and I felt safest at home with the windows closed. I had started White Noise years ago - I have no idea where my dog-eared and underlined Penguin classic came from - likely permanently borrowed from an old roommate - but never made it past Part II.

The Gladneys are hurriedly ordered to partake in a somewhat farcical evacuation to an abandoned Boy Scout camp with the rest of the local population. Why anyone is any safer at the Boy Scout camp is unclear, though “the sight of nurses and volunteer workers made us feel the children were safe, and the presence of other stranded souls, young women with infants, old and infirm people, gave us a certain staunchness and will.” This is the despite the fact that no one yet knows or understands the extent of the toxic effect of the airborne substance.

I left my apartment in LA and drove to San Francisco on March 17th, unsure what exactly I was driving into, and how long I was going to stay. Before leaving, I grabbed White Noise. In the intervening years, I had not forgotten Jack Gladney sensing that “Death has entered” his body, after he suffers potential exposure when he fills up the tank with gas during his family’s evacuation from town during the Event. The parallels were there—communal frenzy, the absence of knowledge, the sense of participating in some kind of Model U.N. pandemic situation where information was revealed every few hours via a typewritten note in a sealed envelope, But instead of piling into a high school gymnasium or taking shelter at a YMCA camp, most of us were retreating into our homes, at the order of state and local governments issuing apocalyptic-sounding “Shelter in Place” and “Stay At Home” orders. It took only a few days to realize that there was nowhere to go except to go nowhere, except perhaps for New Yorkers who fled to their parents’ and in-laws’ in the suburbs and soon found themselves buying homes in Litchfield. 

Until refreshing my memory for the purposes of writing this piece, I truthfully couldn’t remember much else about White Noise, which I attempted to read in those early days where I was unable to focus on very much. I remembered the logjam of cars dropping kids off at college, the logjam of cars getting out of town, the feeling of the bourgeoisie experiencing crisis on a scale it never expected to, a college town, confrontation of unnameable fears while I was being forced to do the same. COVID, like the airborne event, brought the ever-lurking fear of death to the surface. What made less of an impression on me, evidently, was the substantial aspect of the plot that revolves around the great lengths gone to by Babette to secure access to an experimental  drug called “Dylar,” which purports to alleviate the fear of death. 

Given my own not-insignificant fear of dying, it is remarkable that the Dylar subplot didn’t register with me. But I suppose I had not yet made a connection between my conscious terror in the early unfolding of the pandemic and its physical side effects. To the extent I felt unwell while I was reading White Noise, I presumed it was COVID; by the time I arrived in San Francisco, it was clear that Ben had contracted the virus in New York. For a week he experienced intermittent fevers and chills. A week later, an unfamiliar achiness settled into my bones and didn’t lift for days. A walk to Target to pick up laundry detergent left me gasping for breath. I spilled bleach in my kitchen and couldn’t smell it. But because it was so early, because we hadn’t been to China or been in contact with someone with a confirmed case of COVID, we didn’t qualify for testing. 

It is difficult to approach one’s fear of dying head-on. It is somewhat embarrassing to admit that you haven’t made peace with the singlemost defining aspect of human existence and to reveal your own greedy smallness. Great artists grapple with this fear in far more interesting and abstract ways than this essay. DeLillo comes at it obliquely, capturing through fiction and satire our desperation to medicate, to distract ourselves from the inevitable and unknowable moment of our own demise. Perhaps others simply refuse to wear masks. DeLillo writes:

“How strange it is. We have these deep terrible lingering fears about ourselves and the people we love. Yet we walk around, talk to people, eat and drink. We manage to function. The feelings are deep and real. Shouldn’t they paralyze us? How is it we can survive them, at least for a while? We drive a car, we teach a class. How is it no one sees how deeply afraid we were, last night, this morning? Is it something we all hide from each other, by mutual consent? Or do we share the same secret without knowing it? Wear the same disguise?” 

It was around the time my sense of smell and taste returned that I began to feel like something else was off. Though by all accounts, I had recovered from COVID, I could no longer get through the day without a nap. I broke out in inexplicable hives. As the weeks and months passed, my physical symptoms took different forms, none of them lasting longer than two weeks. Shortness of breath one month, dizziness the next, then a metallic taste in my mouth. I constantly felt like I had a urinary tract infection. I read “Homeland Elegies” by Ayad Ahktar and convinced myself I had the rare cardiac arrhythmia that killed a young pregnant woman. In the middle of the work day, I would retreat to the floor of my living room, where I would lie on a yoga mat with my legs up the wall under a weighted blanket, trying to catch my breath. I seemed incapable of convincing my body that I was safe, even as, at least consciously, my fear of contracting the virus again had dissipated. I was still nervous about my parents, of course, but that nervousness was conscious, communal, and constantly discussed with friends. Even as I began to recognize that what was happening to my body was a result of anxiety, I seemed powerless to alleviate my physical discomfort. 

It took me eight months to admit I needed something stronger than a weighted blanket. I probably could have benefited from medication years ago, but it took living within earshot of the blaring siren of death for most of 2020 before I sought it out. I’m lucky that the first thing I was prescribed worked and grateful that my symptoms have ceased, thanks to a tiny dose of a tiny pill that I take every morning, my own little Dylar. I recognize that my predilection towards psychosomatic distress was exacerbated by living in a world where precautions against infection had to be taken at every turn, where threats lurked in the button that needed to be pressed to cross the street or the shopping cart handle. How much easier (if more disastrous) might it have been to decide that the virus wasn’t serious, that it wasn’t a threat that required us to barricade ourselves inside our homes and wait in lines outside the grocery store?

As conscious as I am of my fear of dying and its attendant trappings—hospitals, doctors, needles, beeping, etc.—medication has not helped me make peace with my own human frailty. Nor have I accepted the frailty of my newfound happiness in the last year. Each morning last year that I woke up next to Ben and realized I would get to spend another strange day with him in our bizarre new world, my heart would ache, wondering how long the sweetness could possibly last. How could it last given our imperfect science, our blunt tools for saving lives, our scarce resources, our individuality society’s inability to prioritize sacrifice for the common good?

For the moment, I’m unable to bear the weight of this question without the help of medication. In 2020, it was impossible to ignore the inevitability of tragedy finding its way into our lives, one way or another. My reaction was to load up on hand sanitizer and masks, to miss Christmas with my family for the first time in 32 years—to cling to life by taking all possible precautions. For others, clinging to life meant hugging, hosting barbeques, and attending weddings. Not wearing a mask was, perhaps, no less a rejection of death than wearing a mask was for others. I fear we are too fargone as a divided society for a policy solution to emerge from this realization. Nevertheless, remembering that we all are silently bearing a fear of death, regardless of whether we are hiding it behind a mask, helps temper my disdain and wonder what it would take to be less fearful of death, how we might cope as our ancestors did, without the aid of Dylar or Lexipro or painkillers.

1. Realist-ish, depending on the white man.