Back in the NYC apartment a threesome is awaiting their arrival for the big viewing of the Superbowl. Drinks and snacks are ready. There sit Diane, Max, and Diane's former student, Martin, who is in his early thirties. Routine, boredom, and ennui await the kickoff and the arrival of the other couple and expected excitement. The national diversion on a small scale. A question hovers in the air: "What are we doing here, that is the question," says Vladimir in Samuel Becket's Waiting for Godot. "And we are blessed in this, that we happen to know the answer."
Do we?
Back on the plane, something happens, "a massive knocking somewhere below them. The screen went blank." Knock, Knock. Who's there? Death. "Are we afraid?" she said. The plane crash-lands because all the electronics have failed.
Back in the high-rise aerie, the threesome talk in clipped voices like the robotic Alexa. While her husband Max sits and drinks bourbon and stares at the big screen, Diane, in search of something to excite her, prods the gangling Martin with absurd questions to which he quickly responds with gibberish that gives her a sexual frisson. Boredom is a powerful force.
The kickoff is minutes away. "Something happened then." The images on the screen shake, get distorted, and then the screen goes blank. Their phones go dead. At first they think it is a local outage, but it soon becomes apparent that what happened on the plane was happening everywhere and that the entire electronic grid was down, all electricity, the internet out. Max keeps staring at the blank screen, cursing. He starts announcing out loud the invisible game:
Play resumes, quarter two, hands, feet, knees, head, chest, crotch, hitting and getting hit. Super Bowl Fifty-Six. Our National Death Wish.
Martin tells Diane he is taking a medication, and a side effect can be that others can hear your thoughts or control your behavior. "Yes, we all do this," he says. "A little white pill."
It seems madness has walked in. Blank screens. Disoriented minds.
Soon Tess and Jim, after visiting the darkened hospital with others from the plane crash to have Jim's head wound attended to, walk to the apartment through darkening empty streets for the absent game. Martin says, "Are we living in a makeshift reality? Have I already said this? A future that isn't supposed to take form just yet?"
The five sit and eat by candlelight as cold joins the darkness of the encroaching night. "Was each a mystery to the others, however close their involvement, each individual so naturally encased that he or she escapes a final determination, a fixed appraisal by the others in the room?"
No one knows what has happened, who or what is behind the digital takedown. Or who they really are. Martin says, "Nobody want to call it World War III but this is what it is." His madness pours from his mouth, a ranting filled with the kinds of questions and thoughts many would think if the digital takedown really happened, the kinds of questions more and more people are now asking. Will DeLillo be prescient again: Is a digital "attack" coming soon?
Martin's words:
Certain countries. Once rabid proponents of nuclear arms, now speaking the language of living weaponry. Germs , genes, spores, powders.
DeLillo:
Cyberattacks, digital intrusions, biological aggressions. Anthrax, smallpox, pathogens. The dead and the disabled. Starvation, plague, and what else. Power grids collapsing. Our personal perception sinking into quantum dominance"And isn't it strange that certain individuals have seemed to have accepted the shutdown, the burnout?"
The five of them sit and talk on and on in the silence. Each delivers a closing monologue, as if it's closing time and the last drinks have been served. Say what you want. What has happened? Speak. Was this foreseeable? Have we been zombified? Lost our ability to think, to communicate, to grasp what's happening around and within us? Have our digital addictions destroyed our humanity? Have we reached our expiration dates? Who is doing this to us?
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