The Silence by Don DeLillo.
Title: The Silence.
Author: Don DeLillo.
Genre: Fiction, apocalyptic fiction, technology.
Country: U.S.
Language: English
Publication Date: 2020.
Summary: It is Super Bowl Sunday in the year 2022. Five people, dinner, an apartment on the east side of Manhattan. The retired physics professor and her husband and her former student waiting for the couple who will join them after what becomes a dramatic flight from Paris. The conversation ranges from a survey telescope in north-central Chile to a favorite brand of bourbon to Einstein's 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity. Then something happens and the digital connections that have transformed our lives are severed. What follows is a conversation about what makes us human.
My rating: 3/10.
My review:
♥ "Time in London eighteen eleven. Arrival time sixteen thirty-two. That was the last arrival time. Reassuring, I guess. Time in Paris nineteen eleven. Altitude thirty-three thousand and three feet. Durée du vol three sixteen."
Saying the words and numbers, speaking, detailing, allowed these indicators to live a while, officially noted, or voluntarily noted-the audible scan, he thought, of where and when.
♥ Everything predetermined, a long flight, what we think and say, out immersion in a single sustained overtone, the engine roar, how we accept the need to accommodate it, keep it tolerable even if it isn't.
♥ "Speaking of remember, I remember now," she said.
"What?"
"Came out of nowhere. Anders."
"Anders."
"The first name of Mr. Celsius."
"Anders," he said.
"Anders Celsius."
She found this satisfying. Came out of nowhere. There is almost nothing left of nowhere. When a missing fact emerges without digital assistance, each person announces it to the other while looking off into a remote distance, the otherworld of what was known and lost.
♥ "Children on this flight. Well-behaved," he said.
"They know they're not in economy. They sense their responsibility."
♥ He decided to sleep for half an hour or until an attendant showed up with a snack before they landed. Tea and sweets. The plane began to bounce side to side. He knew that he was supposed to ignore this and that Tessa was supposed to shrug and say. Smooth ride up to now. The seatbelt sign flashed red. He tightened his seatbelt and looked at the screen while she went into a deeper crouch, her body nearly folding into her notebook. The bouncing became severe, altitude, air temperature, speed, he kept reading the screen but saying nothing. They were drowning in noise. A woman came staggering down the aisle, returning to the front row after a visit to the toilet, grabbing seatbacks for balance. Voices on the intercom, one of the pilots in French and then one of the attendants in English, and he thought that he might resume reading aloud from the screen but decided this would be a case of witless persistence in the midst of mental and physical distress. She was looking at him now, not writing just looking, and it occurred to him that he ought to move his seat to its upright position. She was already upright and she slid her food tray into the slot and put her notebook and pen in the seat pocket. A massive knocking somewhere below them. The screen went blank. Pilot speaking French, no English follow-up. Jim gripped the arms of his seat and then checked Tessa's seatbelt and retightened his. He imagined that every passenger was looking straight ahead into the six o'clock news, at home, on Channel 4, waiting for word of their crashed airliner.
"Are we afraid?" she said.
He let this question hover, thinking tea and sweets, tea and sweets.
♥ Let the impulse dictate the logic.
This was the gambler's creed, his formal statement of belief.
♥ "I am waiting for him to die first so he can tell me in his final breath how much money he has pissed away in the years of our something-or-other partnership."
"Ask her how many years."
The young man said nothing.
"Thirty-seven-years," Diane said. "Not unhappily but in states of dire routine, two people so clutched together that the day is coming when each of us will forget the other's name."
♥ 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 Marin 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?"
♥ 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."
♥ Life can get so interesting that we forget to be afraid.
♥ How saints and angels haunt the empty churches at midnight, forgotten by the awed swarms of daytime tourists.
♥ 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."
♥ "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 Kim 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?
♥ 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.
♥ "The Super Bowl. Where is it happening?"
"Somewhere temperate, in sunlight and shadow," he said, "before shouting thousands."
♥ "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? ..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."
♥ The pauses were turning into silences and beginning to feel like the wrong kind of normal.
♥ 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 aggression. 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 sort 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.
♥ Certain countries. Once rabid proponents of nuclear arms, now speaking the language of living weaponry.
Germs, genes, spores, powders.
♥ 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."
Tess 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."
♥ 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 then 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.
♥ 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.