by Don DeLillo
“We have plenty.”
“We might need more. Five people. Long halftime. Singing, dancing, sex—what else?”
The teams trotted out to assume their respective positions. Kickoff team, receiving team.
Martin said, “What kept me completely engaged in the events on my TV screen was the World Cup. A global competition. Kick the ball, hit the ball with your head, do not touch the ball with your hands. Ancient traditions. Entire countries involved to the core. A shared religion. Team loses, players fall down on the field.”
“Winning players also fall down on the field,” Diane said.
“People gathered in huge public squares in country after country, the World Cup, cheering, weeping.”
“Falling down in the street.”
“I watched once, briefly. Fake fucking injuries,” Max said. “And what kind of sport is it where you can’t use your hands? Can’t touch the ball with your hands unless you’re the goaltender. It’s like self-repression of the normal impulse. Here’s the ball. Grab it and run with it. This is normal. Grab it and throw it.”
“The World Cup,” Martin said again, close to a whisper. “I could not stop watching.”
Something happened then. The images onscreen began to shake. It was not ordinary visual distortion, it had depth, it formed abstract patterns that dissolved into a rhythmic pulse, a series of elementary units that seemed to thrust forward and then recede. Rectangles, triangles, squares.
They watched and listened. But there was nothing to listen to. Max picked up the remote control device from the floor in front of him and hit the volume button repeatedly but there was no audio.
Then the screen went blank. Max hit the power button. On, off, on. He and Diane checked their phones. Dead. She walked across the room to the house phone, the landline, a sentimental relic. No dial tone. Laptop, lifeless. She approached the computer in the next room and touched various elements but the screen stayed gray.
She returned to Max and stood behind him, hands on his shoulders, and she waited for him to clench his fists and start cursing.
He said calmly, “What is happening to my bet?”
He looked to Martin for an answer.
“Serious money. Where is my bet?”
Martin said, “It could be algorithmic governance. The Chinese. The Chinese watch the Super Bowl. They play American football. The Beijing Barbarians. This is totally true. The joke is on us. They’ve initiated a selective internet apocalypse. They are watching, we are not.”
Max shifted his gaze to Diane, who was seated again, looking at Martin. He was not a man who wisecracked about serious matters. Or were these the only matters he found funny?
Just then there was a snatch of dialogue coming from the blank screen. They tried to identify it. English, Russian, Mandarin, Cantonese? When it stopped, they waited for more. They looked, listened and waited.
“It is not earthly speech,” Diane said. “It is extraterrestrial.”
She wasn’t sure whether she was the one who was joking now. She mentioned the military jets that had flown over the stadium ten or twelve minutes ago, or whenever it was.
Max said, “Happens every year. Our planes, a ritual flyover.”
He repeated the last phrase and looked at Martin for confirmation of its eloquence.
Then he said, “An outdated ritual. We’ve gone beyond all comparisons between football and war. World Wars in Roman numerals, Super Bowls in Roman numerals. War is something else, happening somewhere else.”
“Hidden networks,” Martin said. “Changing by the minute, the microsecond, in ways beyond our imagining. Look at the blank screen. What is it hiding from us?”
Diane said, “Nobody is smarter than the Chinese except for Martin.”
Max was still looking at the young man.
“Say something smart,” he said.
“He quotes Einstein day and night. That’s pretty smart.”
“Okay, a footnote from the 1912 Manuscript. ‘The beautiful and airy concepts of space and time.’ It’s not smart exactly but I keep repeating it.”
“In English or German?”
“Depends.”
“Space and time,” she said.
“Space and time. Spacetime.”
“In class you quoted footnotes. You vanished into footnotes. Einstein, Heisenberg, Gödel. Relativity, uncertainty, incompleteness. I am foolishly trying to imagine all the rooms in all the cities where the game is being broadcast. All the people watching intently or sitting as we are, puzzled, abandoned by science, technology, common sense.”
On an impulse she borrowed Martin’s phone, thinking it might be more adaptable to the current circumstances. She looked at Max. She wanted to call their daughters, one in Boston, married, two kids, and the other somewhere in Europe on holiday. She hit buttons, shook the thing, stared into it, jabbed it with her thumbnail.
Nothing happened.
Martin said, “Somewhere in Chile.”
She waited for more.
He said, “I’m sticking with Einstein no matter what the theorists have disclosed or predicted or imagined concerning gravitational waves, supersymmetries and so on. Einstein and black holes in space. He said it and then we saw it. Billions of times more massive than our sun. He said it many decades ago. His universe became ours. Black holes. The event horizon. The atomic clocks. Seeing the unseeable. North-central Chile. Did I say this?”
“You said everything.”
“The Large Synoptic Survey Telescope.”
“Somewhere in Chile. You said this.”
Max faked a yawn.
“Let’s return to here and now. What we have here is a communications screwup that affects this building and maybe this area and nowhere else and nobody else.”
“So what do we do?”
“We talk to people who live in this building. Our so-called neighbors,” he said.
He looked at her and then stood and shrugged and went out the door.
The two sat quietly for a moment. It occurred to her that she didn’t know how to sit quietly with Martin.
“Something to eat.”
“Maybe at halftime. If halftime ever comes.”
“Einstein,” she said. “The manuscript.”
“Yes, the words and phrases that he crossed out. We can see him think.”
“What else?”
“The nature of the handwritten text. The numbers, letters, expressions.”
“What expressions?”
“ ‘The force that the field exerts.’ ‘The theorem of the inertia of energy.’ ”
“What else?”
“ ‘World point.’ ‘World line.’ ”
“What else?”
“ ‘Weltpunkt.’ ‘Weltlinie.’ ”
“What else?”
“The way the facsimile pages become less pale but only briefly until the book nears the end.”
“What else?”
“A slipcase, a hard cover, pages ten inches by fifteen inches. A big thing, I heft it, I turn the pages, I scan the pages.”
“What else?” she said.
“This is Einstein, his handwriting, his formulas, his letters and numbers. The sheer physical beauty of the pages.”
This was erotic in a way, this exchange. His responses were quick, his voice suggesting the eagerness of someone who has retained what truly matters.
She kept looking straight ahead at the blank screen.
“What else? What else?”
“Four words.”
“What are they?”
“ ‘Additional theorem of velocities.’ ”
“Say it again.”
He said it again. She wanted to hear it one more time but she decided they ought to stop now. Teacher and student in a reverse coupling.
Martin Dekker. His full name, or most of it. She closed her eyes and said the name to herself. She said, Martin Dekker, will you live alone forever? The blank screen seemed a possible answer.
Then
she turned and looked at him.
“So where is he? Where are the others?”
“Who are the others?”
“The two empty chairs. Old friends, more or less. Husband, wife. Returning from Paris, I think. Or Rome.”
“Or north-central Chile.”
“North-central Chile.”
Max came back and went directly to the window across the room, looking down on empty Sunday streets. They talked about the doors he knocked on and the doors he bypassed. This became the main subject, doors as paneled structures worth describing, scratched, stained, recently painted. This floor, near neighbors, why get involved. One floor down, five doors, three responses, he said, holding up his hand, three fingers extended. Floor below that, four responses, two mentioned the game.
“We’re waiting,” she said.
“They saw and heard what we saw and heard. We stood in the hallway becoming neighbors for the first time. Men, women, nodding our heads.”
“Did you introduce yourselves?”
“We nodded our heads.”
“Okay. Important question. Is the elevator working?”
“I took the stairs.”
“Okay. And did anyone have an idea about what is happening?”
“Something technical. Nobody blamed the Chinese. A systems failure. Also a sunspot. This was a serious response. A guy smoking a pipe. No, I did not tell him that smoking is not allowed in this building.”
“Since you yourself. An occasional cigar,” she said to Martin.
“A sunspot. A strong magnetic field. I stared at him.”
“You gave him your death-penalty look.”
“He said the experts will make adjustments.”
Max stayed at the window, repeating this last remark in a whisper.
Diane waited for Martin to speak. She knew what she wanted him to say. But he didn’t say it. So she attempted a playful version in the form of a question.
“Is this the casual embrace that marks the fall of world civilization?”
She forced a brief stab of laughter and waited for someone to say something.
-3-
Life can get so interesting that we forget to be afraid.
In the van, through the quiet streets, Jim waited for Tessa to look at him so they could trade looks.
There were others crammed into the vehicle, two flight attendants, a man talking to himself in French, a man talking to his phone, shaking it, cursing it. Others, moaning. Still others, quiet, trying to retrieve what had happened, who they were.
They were a wobbling mass of metal, glass and human life, down out of the sky.
Someone said, “We came down. I could not believe we were sort of floating.”
Someone else said, “I don’t know about floating. Maybe at first. But we hit hard.”
“Did we miss the runway?”
“A crash landing. Flames,” a woman said. “We were skidding and I looked out the window. Wing on fire.”
Jim Kripps tried to remember what he saw. He tried to remember being afraid.
He had a cut on his forehead, a laceration, bloodless now. Tessa kept looking at it, almost wanted to touch it; maybe she thought this would help them remember. To touch, embrace, speak nonstop. Their phones were dead but this was no surprise. One of the passengers had a twisted arm, missing teeth. There were other injuries. The driver had told them that they were going to a clinic.
Tessa Berens. She knew her name. She had her passport, her money and her coat but no baggage or notebook, no sense of having gone through customs, no memory of fear. She was trying to bring things to mind more clearly. Jim was here and he was solid company, a man who worked as a claims adjuster for an insurance company.
Why was this so reassuring?
It was cold and dark but there was a jogger in the street, a woman in shorts and a T-shirt moving at a steady pace in the lane reserved for bicycles. They passed others here and there, hurrying, remote, just a few, no one sharing the barest glance.
“All we need is rain,” Jim said, “and we’d know we were characters in a movie.”
The cabin attendants were quiet, uniforms in slight disarray. Two or three questions directed their way from others in the van. Faint response, then nothing.
“We have to remember to keep telling ourselves that we’re still alive,” Tessa said, loud enough for the others to hear.
The man speaking French began to direct questions to the driver. Tessa tried to interpret for Jim.
The driver slowed down, keeping pace with the running woman. He had no response to questions in any language. An elderly man said that he had to get to a toilet. But the driver did not increase the speed, clearly determined to stay aligned with the runner.
The woman just kept running, looking straight ahead.
-4-
How saints and angels haunt the empty churches at midnight, forgotten by the awed swarms of daytime tourists.
Max was back in his chair, cursing the situation. He kept looking at the blank screen. He kept saying Jesus , or good Christ, or Jesus H. Christ.
Diane sat at an angle now, able to watch both men. She told Max that this was a good time for him to prepare the halftime snack. It was possible, wasn’t it, that reception would resume in a few minutes, the game in normal progress, and she added that she didn’t believe a word of it.
Max went to the liquor cabinet instead of the kitchen and poured himself a glass of bourbon called Widow Jane, aged ten years in American oak.
On most occasions he would announce this to anyone in the room. Aged ten years in American oak. It was something he liked saying, a hint of irony in his voice.
This time he said nothing and did not offer to pour a glass for Martin. His wife drank wine but only with dinner, not with football.
He muttered the name Jesus several more times and sat looking at the screen, glass in hand, waiting.
Diane looked at Martin. She liked to do this. She pretended to study him. She thought of him as Young Martin, the title of a chapter in a book.
Then she said quietly, “Jesus of Nazareth.”
Would Martin respond as she imagined he would?
“The radiant name,” he said.
“We say this. You say it and I say it. What did Einstein say?”
“He said, ‘I am a Jew but I am enthralled by the luminous figure of the Nazarene.’ ”
Max was staring into the blank screen. He looked and drank. Diane tried to keep her eyes on Martin. She knew that the name Jesus of Nazareth carried an intangible quality that drew him into its aura. He did not belong to a particular religion and did not feel reverence for any being of alleged supernatural power.
It was the name that gripped him. The beauty of the name. The name and place.
Max was leaning forward. He seemed to be trying to induce an image to appear on the screen through force of will.
Diane said, “Rome, Max, Rome. You remember this. Jesus in the churches and on the walls and ceilings of the palazzos. You remember better than I do. The one particular palazzo with tourists moving slowly room to room. Enormous paintings. The walls and ceilings. The one place in particular.”
She looked at Martin. He was not a tiny cuddly childlike man. She thought of him as a mind trying to escape its commitment to the long slack body with flapping hands that seemed barely attached to his arms. She felt guilty for asking him to sit in a kitchen chair that didn’t even have a cushioned seat.
“I tried to sneak us into a guided tour but Max wouldn’t let me. He hated the idea of a guide,” she said. “The paintings, the furniture, the statues in the long galleries. Arched ceilings with stunning murals. Totally, massively incredible.”
She was looking into empty space now.
“Which palazzo?” she said to Max. “You remember. I do not.”
Max sipped his drink, nodding slightly.
In one gallery tourists with headsets, motionless, lives suspended, looking up at the painted figure on the ceiling, angels, saints
, Jesus in his garments, his raiment.
She spoke enthusiastically, head back, a momentary guide.
“How many years ago? Max.”
He only nodded.
Martin said, “His raiment. I try to think of a rumpled garment embedded in the word.”
“Others with audio guides hand-held, pressed to their ears. Voices in how many languages. I think of them even now, before I go to sleep, the still figures in the long galleries.”
“Staring at the ceiling,” Martin said.
“Max. When was it exactly? One year fades into the next. I’m getting older by the minute.”
Max said, “This team is ready to step out of the shadows and capture the moment.”
He seemed to be scrutinizing the blank screen.
The young man looked at the woman, the wife, the former professor, the friend, who found nothing, anywhere, to look at.
Max said, “During this one blistering stretch, the offense has been pounding, pounding, pounding.”
She was reluctant to interrupt, to say something, anything, and finally she glanced over at Martin simply because it seemed essential to exchange a puzzled look with someone, anyone.
Max said, “Avoids the sack, gets it away—intercepted!”
It was time for another slug of bourbon and he paused and drank. His use of language was confident, she thought, emerging from a broadcast level deep in his unconscious mind, all these decades of indigenous discourse muddied up by the nature of the game, men hitting each other, men slamming each other into the turf.
“Ground game, ground game, crowd chanting, stadium rocking.”
Half sentences, bare words, repetitions. Diane wanted to think of it as a kind of plainsong, monophonic, ritualistic, but then told herself that this is pretentious nonsense.
Max speaking from deep in his throat, the voice of the crowd.
“De-fense. De-fense. De-fense.”
He got up, stretched, sat, drank.
“Number seventy-seven, what’s-his-name, looks bewildered, doesn’t he? Penalty for spitting in opponent’s face.”
He said, “These teams are evenly matched more or less. Punting from midfield. A barn burner of a game.”