Jack Gladney Timeline and Summary

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• Jack watches a bunch of station wagons bringing young students onto the university campus.
• After a short lunch with his colleague Murray Siskind, Jack goes with Murray to visit a tourist trap called "The Most Photographed Barn in America."
• As part of a Friday night ritual, Jack orders Chinese food for his family and sits with them to watch TV.
• During a visit to the supermarket, Jack and his wife Babette run into Murray. Murray hits on Babette, but Jack doesn't seem threatened.
• Jack has a short and frustrating conversation with his son Heinrich about whether people's eyes and ears can show them the truth of the world. Heinrich says that eyes and ears are completely flawed, and even a sentence as simple as "it's raining outside" can't be proven true or false.
• Jack hears that there has been an evacuation at his children's school. No one knows what has caused the evacuation, but apparently, a member of the emergency measures team died while inspecting the building.
• Back at the supermarket, Jack's stepdaughter Denise tells him that Babette is secretly taking some sort of medication. Jack resolves to follow up on it.
• Jack wakes up in the middle of the night sweating profusely. He has had a dream that made him fear he was going to die, but the fear doesn't go away once he's woken up.
• Jack agrees to come and help Murray give a lecture to a class. Murray is trying to pioneer a new area of study around Elvis Presley, using Jack's Hitler Studies as his model. He and Jack trade off random facts about Hitler and Elvis, including how much each man loved his mother.
• Jack goes to the airport to pick up Bee, a daughter from one of his previous marriages. It turns out Bee's plane has nearly crashed, and everyone getting off is super rattled. But Bee seems to be unaffected.
• One day, Heinrich tells Jack that there's been a chemical spill at a rail yard near their family home. At first, Jack says it's nothing to worry about. But eventually, the authorities come and order Jack and his family to evacuate.
• While evacuating, Jack accidentally exposes himself to the poisonous chemical called Nyodene D. He later finds out from an evacuation officer that the chemical may eventually kill him.
• After everyone is allowed back to their homes, Jack finds a pill bottle of something called Dylar taped to the underside of the radiator cover in his bathroom. He goes immediately to his daughter Denise, wondering what to do next.
• They know that Babette will play dumb, so they call her doctor. The doctor has no clue what Dylar is, and tells Jack not to call him at home.
• Jack decides to take one of the pills for analysis by a colleague at the university. The colleague says that she can't tell what the drug is or what it's for, except that it does something to the brain.
• Jack confronts Babette about the Dylar in bed. She reveals that she volunteered to be a test subject for an experimental drug that can take away a person's fear of death. But after the tests were officially shut down, she sought out the maker of the drug and offered her body for more Dylar. Jack is crushed, and can't stop thinking about some other man having sex with his wife.
• Jack does for several checkups to see if the Nyodene D. has had any negative effects on his health. It turns out there's some sort of mass building up inside him. He also pesters Babette about revealing who slept with her and gave her drugs. She'll only tell him a fake name: "Mr. Gray."
• Jack looks outside one day and sees an eerie figure sitting perfectly still outside his house. He's convinced that the figure is either Mr. Gray or the Grim Reaper coming to take him away. When he goes outside, though, he realizes that the figure is just Vernon, Babette's father.
• Vernon hangs around the house for a while. Before leaving, he gives Jack a handgun to protect his family. After some convincing, Jack accepts the offer.
• Jack's colleague at the university discovers who Mr. Gray is, and tells Jack where to find him. Jack takes his new gun and plans to kill Mr. Gray, whose real name is Willie Mink.
• Jack goes to Mink's motel and shoots him in the gut. He wants the death to look like a suicide, so he puts the gun in Mink's dead hand. Except Mink isn't dead, and he shoots Jack through the arm. The shot seems to jar Jack back into his normal conscience, and he takes Willie for treatment at a hospital.
• Jack returns home and tries to develop a better attitude toward the fact that he'll die someday.