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 understands 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.