by Don DeLillo
“I was hoping it was you.”
“It’s us, barely,” Jim Kripps said.
They took off their coats and tossed them on the sofa and Diane gestured to Martin and spoke his name and there were handshakes and half embraces and Max standing with one clenched fist raised in a gesture of greeting. He saw the bandage on Jim’s forehead and threw a few counterfeit punches.
When everyone was seated, here, there, the newcomers spoke of the flight and the events that followed and the spectacle of the midtown streets, the grid system, all emptied out.
“In darkness.”
“No street lights, store lights, high-rise buildings, skyscrapers, all windows everywhere.”
“Dark.”
“Quarter-moon up there somewhere.”
“And you’re back from Rome.”
“We’re back from Paris,” Tessa said.
Diane thought she was beautiful, mixed parentage, her poetry obscure, intimate, impressive.
The couple lived on the Upper West Side, which would have meant a walk through Central Park in total darkness and then a longer walk uptown.
The conversation became labored after a while, shadowed in disquiet. Jim spoke looking down between his feet and Diane waved her arms indicating events taking place somewhere beyond their shallow grasp.
“Food. Time to eat something,” she said. “But first I’m curious about the food they served on your flight. I know I’m babbling. But I ask people this question and they never remember. Ask about the last restaurant meal even if it was a week ago and they can tell me. No problem. Name of restaurant, name of main course, type of wine, country of origin. But food on planes. First class, business class, economy, none of it matters. People do not remember what they ate.”
“Spinach-and-cheese tortellini,” Tessa said.
No one spoke for a moment.
Then Diane said, “Our food. Here and now. Football food.”
Martin went with her to the kitchen. The others waited quietly in candlelight. Soon Tessa started counting down slowly by sevens from two hundred and three to zero, deadpan, changing languages along the way, and eventually the food arrived, prepared earlier by Max, and all five individuals sat and ate. The kitchen chair, the rocking chair, the armchair, a side chair, a folding chair. None of the guests offered to go home after the meal even when Jim and Tessa got their coats off the sofa and put them back on, simply needing to get warmer. Martin closed his eyes as he chewed his food.
Was each a mystery to the others, however close their involvement, each individual so naturally encased that he or she escaped a final determination, a fixed appraisal by the others in the room?
Max looked at the screen as he ate and when he was finished eating he put the plate down and kept on looking. He took the bottle of bourbon off the floor and the glass with it and poured himself a drink. He put the bottle down and held the glass in both hands.
Then he stared into the blank screen.
PART TWO
It is clear by now that the launch codes are being manipulated remotely by unknown groups or agencies. All nuclear weapons, worldwide, have become dysfunctional. Missiles are not soaring over oceans, bombs are not being dropped from supersonic aircraft.
But the war rolls on and the terms accumulate.
Cyberattacks, digital intrusions, biological aggressions. Anthrax, smallpox, pathogens. The dead and disabled. Starvation, plague and what else?
Power grids collapsing. Our personal perceptions sinking into quantum dominance.
Are the oceans rising rapidly? Is the air getting warmer, hour by hour, minute by minute?
Do people experience memories of earlier conflicts, the spread of terrorism, the shaky video of someone approaching an embassy, a bomb vest strapped to his chest? Pray and die. War that we can see and feel.
Is there a shred of nostalgia in these recollections?
People begin to appear in the streets, warily at first and then in a spirit of release, walking, looking, wondering, women and men, an incidental cluster of adolescents, all escorting each other through the mass insomnia of this inconceivable time.
And isn’t it strange that certain individuals have seemed to accept the shutdown, the burnout? Is this something that they’ve always longed for, subliminally, subatomically? Some people, always some, a minuscule number among the human inhabitants of planet Earth, third planet from the sun, the realm of mortal existence.
* * *
“Nobody wants to call it World War III but this is what it is,” Martin says.
* * *
Seemingly all screens have emptied out, everywhere. What remains for us to see, hear, feel? Do a select number of people have a form of phone implanted in their bodies? A serious question, the young man says. Is this a protection against the global silence that marks our hours, minutes and seconds? Who are such people? How do they access the subcutaneous calls? Is there a body-code, a sort of second heartbeat that conveys a local warning?
It is well past midnight and he is still talking and Diane is still listening and the friends are still here, Jim Kripps and Tessa Berens, with Max crunched in his chair.
Dark energy, phantom waves, hack and counterhack.
Mass surveillance software that makes its own decisions, overruling itself at times.
Satellite tracking data.
Targets in space that remain in space.
All in the living room, all in coats, three wearing gloves as well, four of them apparently listening to Martin, the one standing person, gesturing freely as he speaks.
The way in which time has seemingly jumped forward. Did something happen at midnight to intensify the disruption? And the way in which Martin’s voice is beginning to change.
Bioweapons and the countries that possess them.
He recites a long list that is interrupted by a coughing fit. The others look away. He wipes his mouth with the back of his hand, then inspects the hand and continues talking.
Certain countries. Once rabid proponents of nuclear arms, now speaking the language of living weaponry.
Germs, genes, spores, powders.
* * *
Diane begins to understand that he is using an accent. Not just a voice speaking in a manner not his own but a voice meant to belong to a particular individual. This is Martin’s version of Albert Einstein speaking English.
She is not sure that what he is saying is pure fiction. Something about him, his tone of voice, adopted accent, a sense that he has access to world events, whatever that means, however he is able to allow censored news to reach him. He said it himself, people with phones implanted in their bodies.
She understands that this is foolish, all of it. She also knows that there is something in her former student’s essential nature that makes such speculation possible.
She is babbling again but only to herself this time.
She decides to say nothing to the others about the accent that Martin is using. He speaks more softly now, hands caressing the words.
Wave structure, metric tensor, covariant qualities.
It may be too complicated to bring Einstein into the room. And she doesn’t know whether these are terms out of the 1912 Manuscript, Martin’s bible, his playbook, or simply noises floating in the air, the language of World War III.
He sounds either brilliant or unbalanced, Martin does, not Einstein, as he recites the names of those scientists attending a conference in Brussels in 1927, twenty-eight men and one woman, Marie Curie, Madame Curie, name after name, with Einstein referring to himself in Martin’s voice as Albert Einstein—seated-front-and-center.
And now he swings from accented English into living German. Diane tries to follow what he is saying but quickly loses all sense of it. There is no hint of parody or self-parody. It is all in Martin’s mind as he stands alone at the mirror in his apartment except that he is not there, he is here, thinking aloud, drawing inward, shaking his head.
Einstein’s parents were Pauline and Hermann.
She understa
nds this simple sentence but does not try to keep listening. She wants him to stop and will tell him so. He stands up straight, speaking earnestly either as himself or as Einstein, and does it matter?
Max stands and stretches. Max Stenner. Max. This is all it takes to silence the young man.
“We’re being zombified,” Max says. “We’re being bird-brained.”
He walks toward the front door, talking to them over his shoulder.
“I’m done with all this. Sunday or is it Monday? February whatever. It’s my expiration date.”
Nobody knows what he means by this.
He zippers his jacket and leaves and Diane thinks of him walking down the stairs, one step, then another. Her mind is operating in slow motion now. She almost feels obliged to sit in front of the TV set on his behalf, waiting for something to splash onto the screen.
Martin resumes speaking for a time, back to English, unaccented.
Internet arms race, wireless signals, countersurveillance.
“Data breaches,” he says. “Cryptocurrencies.”
He speaks this last term looking directly at Diane.
Cryptocurrencies.
She builds the word in her mind, unhyphenated.
They are looking at each other now.
She says, “Cryptocurrencies.”
She doesn’t have to ask him what this means.
He says, “Money running wild. Not a new development. No government standard. Financial mayhem.”
“And it is happening when?”
“Now,” he says. “Has been happening. Will continue to happen.”
“Cryptocurrencies.”
“Now.”
“Crypto,” she says, pausing, keeping her eyes on Martin. “Currencies.”
Somewhere within all those syllables, something secret, covert, intimate.
* * *
Then Tessa speaks.
She says, “What if?”
This results in a long pause, a shift in mood. They wait for more.
“What if all this is some kind of living breathing fantasy?”
“Made more or less real,” Jim says.
“What if we are not what we think we are? What if the world we know is being completely rearranged as we stand and watch or sit and talk?”
She raises a hand and lets the fingers flap up and down in a gesture of everyday babble.
“Has time leaped forward, as our young man says, or has it collapsed? And will people in the streets become flash mobs, running wild, breaking and entering, everywhere, planet-wide, rejecting the past, completely unmoored from all the habits and patterns?”
No one moves toward the window to look.
“What comes next?” Tessa says. “It was always at the edges of our perception. Power out, technology slipping away, one aspect, then another. We’ve seen it happening repeatedly, this country and elsewhere, storms and wildfires and evacuations, typhoons, tornadoes, drought, dense fog, foul air. Landslides, tsunamis, disappearing rivers, houses collapsing, entire buildings crumbling, skies blotted out by pollution. I’m sorry and I’ll try to shut up. But remaining fresh in every memory, virus, plague, the march through airport terminals, the face masks, the city streets emptied out.”
Tessa notes the silence that attends her pauses.
“From the one blank screen in this apartment to the situation that surrounds us. What is happening? Who is doing this to us? Have our minds been digitally remastered? Are we an experiment that happens to be falling apart, a scheme set in motion by forces outside our reckoning? This is not the first time these questions have been asked. Scientists have said things, written things, physicists, philosophers.”
* * *
In the second silence all heads turn toward Martin.
He speaks of satellites in orbit that are able to see everything. The street where we live, the building we work in, the socks we are wearing. A rain of asteroids. The sky thick with them. Could happen anytime. Asteroids that become meteorites as they approach a planet. Entire exoplanets blown away.
Why not us. Why not now.
“All we have to do is consider our situation,” he says. “Whatever is out there, we are still people, the human slivers of a civilization.”
He lets the phrase linger. The human slivers.
* * *
Tessa begins to separate herself. She seeps away to the sound of the young man’s voice. She thinks into herself. She sees herself. She is different from these people. She imagines taking off her clothes, nonerotically, to show them who she is.
Be serious. Be here. Or what about somewhere nearby, the bedroom. They’ve had near-death, they’ve had sex, they need sleep, and she looks at Jim, leaning her head just slightly toward the hallway.
He asks Diane about the bedroom. A long flight, a long day, a brief sleep would be nice.
She watches them walk down the hall. In the dwindling spirit of this astonishing time, she isn’t surprised. Sleep, obviously, understandably, after what they’ve experienced. She tries to remember whether she made the bed this morning, cleaned the room. Max sometimes cleans; he cleans and then inspects, scrupulously.
There is only one bedroom, one bed, but let it belong to Jim Kripps and Tessa whatever-her-last-name-is. They’ll be headed home at first light.
* * *
Martin is speaking again.
“The drone wars. Never mind country of origin. The drones have become autonomous.”
He begins to notice that he and Diane are the only ones left in the living room.
“Drones above us now. Flinging warnings at each other. Their weapon being a form of the language isolate. A language known only to drones.”
How did this happen, five people down to two. The man remains standing and they look at each other. The woman realizes that she is still in the thrall of cryptocurrencies.
She says the word and waits for him to respond.
Finally he says, “Cryptocurrencies, microplastics. The dangers at every level. Eat, drink, invest. Breathe, inhale, draw oxygen into the lungs. Walk, run, stand. And now in the purest snow from the alpine wilderness, from the arctic wasteland.”
“What?”
“Plastics, microplastics. In our air, our water, our food.”
She had hoped to hear something libidinal, arousing. She understands that he has something more to say and she looks and waits.
He says, “Greenland is disappearing.”
She gets to her feet and faces him.
She says, “Martin Dekker. You know what we want, don’t you?”
They could sidestep their way into the kitchen and she could stand with her back pressed to the two vertical bars of the refrigerator door and they could do it quickly, forgettably, in the spirit of the onward moment.
He unbuckles his belt and drops his pants. He stands there, stricken, in his checkered shorts, looking taller than ever. She tells him to say something in German and when he does, a substantial statement recited quickly, she asks for a translation.
He says, “Capitalism is an economic system in which the means of production and distribution are privately or corporately owned, and development is proportionate to the accumulation and reinvestment of profits gained in a free market.”
She nods, half-smiling, and motions for him to lift his trousers and buckle his belt. She finds it satisfying to mimic his belt-buckling. She understands that sex with her former student may be a sleazy little tremor in her mind but is nowhere present in her body.
She expects him to walk out the door and hates to think of him trying to get home in whatever circumstances now prevail. Instead he takes three long strides to the nearest chair and sits there, looking into space.
* * *
In the bedroom Tessa thinks about going home, being home, the place, finally, where they don’t see each other, walk past each other, say what when the other speaks, aware only of a familiar shape making noise somewhere nearby.
Jim is nearby now, next to her on the bed, asleep, his bod
y shaking slightly.
There is a poem she wants to work on, tomorrow, next day, when she is fully awake, at her desk at home, the first line bouncing around in her brain for a while.
In a tumbling void.
She will see the line when she closes her eyes and concentrates. See the letters set against a dark background and then slowly open her eyes to whatever is in front of her, dominant objects only inches high, a paperweight, a photograph, a toy taxicab.
Jim is awake now. He takes a long time to build to a spacious yawn. Tessa says something in a language that he does not recognize until he realizes it is simply fake, a dead language, a dialect, an idiolect (whatever that is) or something else completely.
“Home,” he says finally. “Where is that?”
* * *
Max is making his way through the crowded streets when he grudgingly recalls something the young man said and wonders if what he is seeing here and now is an aspect of Martin Dekker’s mind repositioned in three dimensions.
Is it like this in other cities, people on a rampage, nowhere to go? Do crowds in a Canadian city spill down to join crowds here? Is Europe one impossible crowd? What time is it in Europe? Are the public squares swarming with people, tens of thousands, and all of Asia and Africa and elsewhere?
Names of countries keep rolling through his mind and people are trying to talk to him and to each other and he thinks of his daughter with two kids and a husband in Boston and the other daughter traveling somewhere and for one strange and compressed and claustrophobic moment he forgets their names.
He stands against a wall and watches.
In other times, more or less ordinary, there are always people staring into their phones, morning, noon, night, middle of the sidewalk, oblivious to everyone hurrying past, engrossed, mesmerized, consumed by the device, or walking toward him and then veering away, but they can’t do it now, all the digital addicts, phones shut down, everything down down down.
