The Silence

by Don DeLillo

  Diane was beginning to be impressed.

  He said, “Coach of the offense. Murphy, Murray, Mumphrey, dialing up some innovations.”

  He kept on talking, changing his tone, calm now, measured, persuasive.

  “Wireless the way you want it. Soothes and moisturizes. Gives you twice as much for the same low cost. Reduces the risk of heart-and-mind disease.”

  Then, singing, “Yes yes yes, never fails to bless bless bless.”

  Diane was stunned. Is it the bourbon that’s giving him this lilt, this flourish of football dialect and commercial jargon. Never happened before, not with bourbon, scotch, beer, marijuana. She was enjoying this, at least she thought she was, based on how much longer he kept broadcasting.

  Or is it the blank screen, is it a negative impulse that provoked his imagination, the sense that the game is happening somewhere in Deep Space outside the fragile reach of our current awareness, in some transrational warp that belongs to Martin’s time frame, not ours.

  Max said in a squeaky voice, “Sometimes I wish I was human, man, woman, child, so I could taste this flavorful prune juice.”

  He said, “Perpetual Postmortem Financing. Start your exclusive arrangements online.”

  Then, “Play resumes, quarter two, hands, feet, knees, head, chest, crotch, hitting and getting hit. Super Bowl Fifty-Six. Our National Death Wish.”

  Diane whispered to Martin that there was no reason why they couldn’t converse. Max had his game and he was beyond distraction.

  The young man said quietly, “I’ve been taking a medication.”

  “Yes.”

  “The oral route.”

  “Yes. We all do this. A little white pill.”

  “There are side effects.”

  “A small pellet or tablet. White, pink, whatever.”

  “Could be constipation. Could be diarrhea.”

  “Yes,” she whispered.

  “Could be the feeling that others can hear your thoughts or control your behavior.”

  “I don’t think I know about this.”

  “Irrational fear. Distrust of others. I can show you the insert,” he said. “I carry it with me.”

  Max was scratching his forearm again, not with his fingers this time but with his knuckles.

  He said, “Field goal attempt from near midfield—fake, fake, fake!”

  The screen. Diane kept edging her head around to make sure it was blank. She could not understand why this was reassuring to her.

  “Let’s go down to the field,” Max said. “Esther, tell us what’s happening.”

  He raised his head now, phantom microphone in hand, and he spoke to a camera well above field level, his voice pitched to a higher tonal range.

  “Here on the sidelines, this team exudes confidence despite the spate of injuries.”

  “The spate of injuries.”

  “That’s right, Lester. I talked to the coordinator, offense, defense, whatever. He’s happy as a pig in shit.”

  “Thank you, Esther. Now, back to the action.”

  It began to occur to Diane that Martin was speaking, although not necessarily to her.

  “I look in the mirror and I don’t know who I’m looking at,” he said. “The face looking back at me doesn’t seem to be mine. But then again why should it? Is the mirror a truly reflective surface? And is this the face that other people see? Or is it something or someone that I invent? Does the medication I’m taking release this second self? I look at the face with interest. Interest and an element of confusion. Do other people experience this, ever? Our faces. And what do people see when they walk along the street and look at each other? Is it the same thing that I see? All our lives, all this looking. People looking. But seeing what?”

  Max had stopped announcing. He was looking at Martin. They both were, husband and wife. The young man was peering into what is called the middle distance, staring carefully, in a measured way, and he was still talking.

  “One escape is the movies. I tell my students. They sit and listen. Foreign-language films in black-and-white. Films in unfamiliar languages. A dead language, a subfamily, a dialect, an artificial language. Do not read subtitles. I tell them forthrightly. Avoid reading the printed translation of the spoken dialogue at the bottom of the screen. We want pure film, pure language. Indo-Iranian. Sino-Tibetan. People talking. They walk, talk, eat, drink. The stark power of black-and-white. The image, the optically formed duplicate. My students sit and listen. Smart young men and women. But they never seem to be looking at me.”

  “They’re listening,” Diane said, “and that’s what matters.”

  Max was in the kitchen putting food on plates. She wanted to go for a walk, alone. Or she wanted Max to go for a walk and Martin to go home. Where are the others, Tessa and Jim and all the others, travelers, wanderers, pilgrims, people in houses and apartments and village hutments. Where are the cars and trucks, the traffic noises? Super Sunday. Is everyone at home or in darkened bars and social clubs, trying to watch the game? Think of the many millions of blank screens. Try to imagine the disabled phones.

  What happens to people who live inside their phones?

  Max returned to his bourbon. Diane realized that the young man was standing now, abandoning his customary slouch, head back, looking straight up.

  She thought for a moment.

  “The painted ceilings. Rome,” she said. “The tourists looking up.”

  “Standing absolutely still.”

  “Saints and angels. Jesus of Nazareth.”

  “The luminous figure. The Nazarene. Einstein,” he said.

  -5-

  Lost systems in the crux of everyday life.

  The clinic was a sprawl of halls and rooms at street level and Jim and Tessa walked past doors, exit signs, blinking red lights, posted notices lettered by hand. Staff members hurried past wearing street clothes under their flapping tunics.

  Other people from the van entered rooms or formed lines or stood around talking. A few had remained in the vehicle, destination unknown.

  There was a woman crouched down on a stool in a cramped space, a cubbyhole.

  “The administrator,” Tessa said. “The functionary.”

  They joined a long line of people waiting to see the woman. The hall lights kept dimming.

  After a time Jim said, “Why are we standing here?”

  “You have a wound.”

  “A wound. On my head. I forgot.”

  “You forgot. Let me have a look,” Tessa said. “A gash. Shapeless. When we crash-landed and undid our seatbelts and jumped up to get the hell out of there, I saw that you were bleeding.”

  “Hit my head on the window.”

  “Let’s be patient and wait on line and then see what the official on the stool has to say.”

  “But first.”

  “But first,” she said.

  They left the line and eventually found a vacant toilet. In that scant space he eased her against a bare wall and she opened her coat and unbuckled his belt and pulled down his pants and shorts and asked him if his head hurt and he responded by undressing her slowly and carefully and they talked about what they were doing, how, where, when, suggesting, advising, trying not to laugh, her body slowly lowering along the wall and he buckled his knees to maintain distance and rhythm.

  Someone was knocking on the door, then speaking into it. Show some consideration. Another voice then, accented. Tessa whispered a list of nationalities as they completed the act and crudely wiped each other with tissues from the dispenser adjacent to the mirror.

  They finished dressing and looked at each other for a long moment. This look summed up the day and their survival and the depth of their connection. The state of things, the world outside, this would require another kind of look whenever it became appropriate.

  Then they went out the door and down the hall. The line was much shorter now and they decided to take their place and wait.

  “I guess we can walk to their building from here if that’s
the only way to get there.”

  “They’re our friends. They’ll feed us.”

  “They’ll listen to our story.”

  “They’ll tell us what they know.”

  “The Super Bowl. Where is it happening?”

  “Somewhere temperate, in sunlight and shadow,” he said, “before shouting thousands.”

  The woman in the cubbyhole looked up at them, another set of faces and bodies, all day, people standing, talking, listening, waiting for instructions concerning where to go, who to see, which hall, which door, and she nodded as if knowing in advance who they were and what they wanted.

  She seemed glued to the stool she was sitting on.

  “Our plane, we experienced a crash landing,” Tessa said. “He suffered an injury.”

  Jim towered above the woman and he leaned over and pointed to the wound, feeling like a schoolboy injured at playtime.

  “I have nothing to do with actual human bodies. No look, no touch. I will send you to an examining room,” she said, “where a trained individual will either treat you or send you to someone else somewhere else. Everyone I’ve seen today has a story. You two are the plane crash. Others are the abandoned subway, the stalled elevators, then the empty office buildings, the barricaded storefronts. I tell them that we are here for injured people. I am not here to dispense advice concerning the current situation. What is the current situation?”

  She pointed to the blank screen in the panel of devices set into the wall in front of her. She was middle-aged, dressed in high boots, sturdy jeans, a heavy sweater, with rings on three fingers.

  “I can tell you this. Whatever is going on, it has crushed our technology. The word itself seems outdated to me, lost in space. Where is the leap of authority to our secure devices, our encryption capacities, our tweets, trolls and bots. Is everything in the datasphere subject to distortion and theft? And do we simply have to sit here and mourn our fate?”

  Jim was still stooped over, displaying his wound. The woman leaned forward and twisted her head to look up at him.

  She said, “Why am I telling you this? Because your plane crashed, more or less, and you are eager to hear what is going on. And because I’m still a talky little kid when the circumstances warrant.”

  Tessa said, “We’re here to listen.”

  The overhead lights blinked and dimmed and then went out. There was instant silence throughout the clinic. Everyone waiting. A sense also of fear-in-waiting because it wasn’t clear yet what this might mean, how radical, how permanent an aberration in what was already a drastic shift of events.

  The woman spoke first, in a whisper, telling them where she was born and raised, names of parents and grandparents, sisters and brothers, schools, clinics, hospitals, her voice suggesting an intimate calm tinged with hysteria.

  They waited.

  She resumed with her first marriage, first cellphone, divorce, travel, French boyfriend, riots in the streets.

  They waited some more.

  “No e-mail,” she said, leaning back, palms up. “More or less unthinkable. What do we do? Who do we blame?”

  Gestures barely visible.

  “E-mail-less. Try to imagine it. Say it. Hear how it sounds. E-mail-less.”

  Her head bouncing slightly with each spoken syllable. Someone with a flashlight was standing in the doorway, training the beam on each of them, once and then again, before leaving without a word.

  A brief pause and then the woman resumed speaking in the dark, her whisper more intense now.

  “The more advanced, the more vulnerable. Our systems of surveillance, our facial recognition devices, our imagery resolution. How do we know who we are? We know it’s getting cold in here. What happens when we have to leave? No light, no heat. Going home, living where I live, above a restaurant called Truth and Beauty, if the subways and buses are not running, if the taxis are gone, elevator in the building immobilized, and if, and if, and if. I love my cubicle but I don’t want to die here.”

  She was quiet for a time. When the lights returned, dimly, Jim was standing straight up, expressionless. A tall white android.

  The woman spoke in a normal voice now.

  “Okay I see the wound and I can say without hesitation that you need to go down the hall, third room on the left.”

  She pointed in that direction and then put on a pair of wool gloves and pointed again, authoritatively.

  “And when you’re finished there, then what?”

  “We’re going to see friends,” Tessa said. “As originally planned.”

  “How will you get there?”

  “Walk.”

  “Then what?” the woman said.

  “Then what?” Jim said.

  They waited for Tessa to add her voice to the elemental dilemma but she simply shrugged.

  In a room down the hall a young man in an oversized tunic and a baseball cap stood on his toes to brush a medication on Jim’s wound and then bandage it securely. Jim started to shake his hand and then changed his mind and they left.

  Out in the street they talked about the woman they’d seen jogging when they were in the van. It would have been encouraging to see her again. The wind was fierce and they walked quickly, heads down. The only person to be seen was a hobbling man pushing a battered cart that probably contained everything he owned. He paused to wave at them and then stepped away from the cart and took a few long strides, body bent, to imitate their movements. They waved back and kept on going. At a major intersection the digital traffic warden was stilled, one levered arm raised slightly.

  There was nothing for them to do but keep on walking.

  -6-

  Counting down by sevens in the future that takes shape too soon.

  There were six candles placed around the living room and Diane had just put a match to the last of them.

  She said, “Is this a situation where we have to think about what we’re going to say before we say it?”

  “The semi-darkness. It’s somewhere in the mass mind,” Martin said. “The pause, the sense of having experienced this before. Some kind of natural breakdown or foreign intrusion. A cautionary sense that we inherit from our grandparents or great-grandparents or back beyond. People in the grip of serious threat.”

  “Is that who we are?”

  “I’m talking too much,” he said. “I’m grinding out theories and speculations.”

  The young man was standing at the window and Diane wondered if he planned to head home to the Bronx. She imagined that he might have to walk all the way, up through East Harlem to one of the bridges. Were pedestrians allowed to cross or were the bridges for cars and buses only? Was anything operating normally out there?

  The thought softened her, made her think that she might offer to accommodate him for the night. The sofa, a blanket, not so complicated.

  Stove dead, refrigerator dead. Heat beginning to fade into the walls. Max Stenner was in his chair, eyes on the blank screen. It seemed to be his turn to speak. She sensed it, nodded and waited.

  He said, “Let’s eat now. Or the food will go hard or soft or warm or cold or whatever.”

  They thought about this. But nobody moved in the direction of the kitchen.

  Then Martin said, “Football.”

  A reminder of how the long afternoon had started. He made a gesture, strange for such an individual, the action in slow motion of a player throwing a football, body poised, left arm thrust forward, providing balance, right arm set back, hand gripping football.

  Here was Martin Dekker and there was Diane Lucas standing across the room, puzzled by the apparition.

  He seemed lost in the pose but returned eventually to a natural stance. Max was back to his blank screen. The pauses were turning into silences and beginning to feel like the wrong kind of normal. Diane waited for her husband to pour more whiskey but he showed no interest, at least for now. Everything that was simple and declarative, where did it go?

  Martin said, “Are we living in a makeshift reality? Ha
ve I already said this? A future that isn’t supposed to take form just yet?”

  “A power station failed. That’s all,” she said. “Consider the situation in those terms. A facility along the Hudson River.”

  “Artificial intelligence that betrays who we are and how we live and think.”

  “Lights back on, heat back on, our collective mind back where it was, more or less, in a day or two.”

  “The artificial future. The neural interface.”

  They seemed determined not to look at each other.

  Martin, speaking to no one in particular, raised the subject of his students. Global origins, assorted accents, all smart, specially selected for his course, ready for anything he might say, whatever assignment, whatever proposal he might advance concerning areas of study beyond physics. He’d recited names to them. Thaumatology, ontology, eschatology, epistemology. He could not stop himself. Metaphysics, phenomenology, transcendentalism. He paused and thought and kept going. Teleology, etiology, ontogeny, phylogeny. They looked, they listened, they sniffed the stale air. This is why they were there, all of them, students and teacher.

  “And one of the students recited a dream he’d had. It was a dream of words, not images. Two words. He woke up with those words and just stared into space. Umbrella’d ambuscade. Umbrella with an apostrophe d. And ambuscade. He had to look up the latter word. How could he dream of a word he’d never encountered? Ambuscade. Ambush. But it was umbrella with an apostrophe d that seemed a true mystery. And the two words joined. Umbrella’d ambuscade.”

  He waited for a time.

  “All this in the Bronx,” he said finally, making Diane smile. “There I stood listening to the young men and women discuss the matter, the students, my students, and I wondered, myself, what to make of the term. Ten men with umbrellas? Preparing an attack? And the student whose dream it was, he was looking at me as if I were responsible for what happened in his sleep. All my fault. Apostrophe d.”

  There was a knock on the door. It sounded weary, elevators not working, people having to climb eight flights. Diane was standing right there but paused before reaching for the doorknob.