“For years, many years, I’ve been writing in a little notebook. Ideas, memories, words, one notebook after another, a huge number by now stacked up in cabinets, desk drawers and elsewhere, and I revisit old notebooks sometimes and it amazes me to read what I thought was worth writing. The words carry me back into dead time. Little blue notebooks, maybe three inches by four inches, to be slipped into my jacket pocket, and I have dozens untouched at home, still to be filled. I take two or three whenever I travel and I look and listen and scribble something on a page. This is my journal. Means nothing to anyone but me. Could be a line of poetry that I will cross out seconds later. Could be an item on a supermarket shelf, the package design, the name of the product, take out the notebook, take out the ballpoint pen, so on and so on. But all I want to do now is go home. Jim and I. If we have to walk, fine, yes, in daylight. Will the sun be shining? Will the sun be in the sky at all? Who knows what any of this means? Is our normal experience simply being stilled? Are we witnessing a deviation in nature itself? A kind of virtual reality? This leads me to say that it’s time to shut up, Tessa. When I say this, try to understand that it’s not a self-critical comment but a point of self-importance. I write, I think, I advise, I stare into space. Is it natural at a time like this to be thinking and talking in philosophical terms as some of us have been doing? Or should we be practical? Food, shelter, friends, flush the toilet if we can? Tend to the simplest physical things. Touch, feel, bite, chew. The body has a mind of its own.”
* * *
Martin Dekker up and down. Once again he stands and speaks, immersed in his nowhere stare.
“Time to stop, isn’t it? But I keep seeing the name. Einstein. Einstein’s Theory of Relativity causing riots in the streets or am I imagining this because it’s late and I haven’t slept and barely eaten and the people here with me are not listening to what I say. Einstein speaking beyond our current situation, which I’ve referred to as World War III. Einstein had no premonition concerning how this war would be fought but he made it clear that the next major conflict, World War IV, would be fought with sticks and stones. And the Special Theory, dated 1912, one hundred and ten years ago. Manuscript brown ink, unwatermarked paper and then the paper improves and the ink goes black. This is what I carry in my head, for better or bad or worse. What else? I need a shave. That’s what else. I need to look into a mirror and remind myself that it’s time for a shave. But if I leave this living room and walk into the lavatory, will I ever come back? Face in the mirror. Granular surveillance. Tech-dome. Two-factor verification. Gateway tracking. I can’t help myself. The terms surround me. I try to think sometimes in a prehistoric context. A flagstone image, a cave drawing. All these grainy shreds of our long human memory. And then Einstein. The exhilarating language. German, English. ‘Dependence of mass on energy.’ I want to walk with him across the Princeton campus. Saying nothing, silent. Two men walking.”
Then he says, “And the streets, these streets. I don’t have to go to the window. Crowds dispersed. Streets empty.”
This is what young Martin says, looking down into his parted fingers.
“The world is everything, the individual nothing. Do we all understand that?”
* * *
Max is not listening. He understands nothing. He sits in front of the TV set with his hands folded behind his neck, elbows jutting.
Then he stares into the blank screen.
More from the Author
Zero K
The Angel Esmeralda
Point Omega
Underworld
Falling Man
Love-Lies-Bleeding
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
© JOYCE RAVID
Don DeLillo is the author of seventeen novels including White Noise, Libra, Underworld, Falling Man and Zero K. He has won the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction, the PEN/Saul Bellow Award, the Jerusalem Prize for his complete body of work and the William Dean Howells Medal from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. His story collection, The Angel Esmeralda, was a finalist for the Story Prize and the PEN/Faulkner Award for Fiction. In 2013, DeLillo was awarded the Library of Congress Prize for American Fiction, and in 2015, the National Book Foundation awarded DeLillo its Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.
SimonandSchuster.com
www.SimonandSchuster.com/Authors/Don-DeLillo
@ScribnerBooks
Also by Don DeLillo
NOVELS
Americana
End Zone
Great Jones Street
Ratner’s Star
Players
Running Dog
The Names
White Noise
Libra
Mao II
Underworld
The Body Artist
Cosmopolis
Falling Man
Point Omega
Zero K
STORIES
The Angel Esmeralda
PLAYS
The Day Room
Valparaiso
Love-Lies-Bleeding
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This book is a work of fiction. Any references to historical events, real people, or real places are used fictitiously. Other names, characters, places, and events are products of the author’s imagination, and any resemblance to actual events or places or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.
Copyright © 2020 by Don DeLillo
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First Scribner hardcover edition October 2020
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