A stream of commercials appeared and Diane looked at Max. Beer, whiskey, peanuts, soap and soda. She turned toward the young man.
She said, “Max doesn’t stop watching. He becomes a consumer who had no intention of buying something. One hundred commercials in the next three or four hours.”
“I watch them.”
“He doesn’t laugh or cry. But he watches.”
Two other chairs, flanking the couple, ready for the latecomers.
Martin was always on time, neatly dressed, clean shaven, living alone in the Bronx where he taught high school physics and walked the streets unseen. It was a charter school, gifted students, and he was their semi-eccentric guide into the dense wonders of their subject.
“Halftime maybe I eat something,” Max said. “But I keep on watching.”
“He also listens.”
“I watch and I listen.”
“The sound down low.”
“Like it is now,” Max said.
“We can talk.”
“We talk, we listen, we eat, we drink, we watch.”
For the past year Diane has been telling the young man to return to earth. He barely occupied a chair, seemed only fitfully present, an original cliché, different from others, not a predictable or superficial figure but a man lost in his compulsive study of Einstein’s 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity.
He tended to fall into a pale trance. Was this a sickness, a condition?
Onscreen an announcer and a former coach discussed the two quarterbacks. Max liked to complain about the way in which pro football has been reduced to two players, easier to deal with than the ever-shuffling units.
The opening kickoff was one commercial away. Max stood and rotated his upper body, this way and that, as far as it would go, feet firmly in place, and then looked straight ahead for about ten seconds. When he sat, Diane nodded as if allowing the proceedings onscreen to continue as planned.
The camera swept the crowd.
She said, “Imagine being there. Planted in a seat somewhere in the higher reaches of the stadium. What’s the stadium called? Which corporation or product is it named after?”
She raised an arm, indicating a pause while she thought of a name for the stadium.
“The Benzedrex Nasal Decongestant Memorial Coliseum.”
Max made a gesture of applause, hands not quite touching. He wanted to know where the others were, whether their flight was delayed, whether traffic was the problem, and will they bring something to eat and drink at halftime.
“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.