Your phone is wasted; don't seek its advice.
Just as he seemed to perceive the attacks of September 11, 2001 four years before they occurred, does DeLillo know something that most would prefer to avoid? Are we like Tessa, who wishes to just go home and return to normality but who feels she is "in a tumbling void"?
When her husband Jim hears her say something about home, "he realizes it is simply fake, a dead language."
"Home," he says finally. "Where is that?"
DeLillo has been asking that for decades.
Are we and he like Max, who ends the book understanding nothing and staring into a blank screen?
Or can we see the biggest secret staring us straight in the face?
I can't help thinking that DeLillo tipped his hand at the end of Underworld when he has the book's protagonist, Nick Shay, born and bred like his creator in the Italian Arthur Ave. section of the Bronx, say what he longs for:
I long for the days of disorder. I want them back, the days when I was alive on the earth, rippling in the quick of my skin, heedless and real. I was dumb-muscled and angry and real. This is what I long for, the breach of peace, the days of disarray when I walked real streets and did things slap-bang and felt angry and ready all the time, a danger to others and a distant mystery to myself.
Can we get back into our skins or are we doomed to tumble into a void? The signs are not too encouraging.
My wife and I were recently hiking on a narrow mountain trail along which we encountered not a soul. We came to an isolated spot overlooking a valley to the east. We stopped, looked, and listened. Not a sound. Not even birds. Just beautiful silence. There was so much to hear there. When we continued on, we saw a couple with a dog up ahead. The man and woman each wore a mask. When they saw us, mask-less criminals, they quickly stepped off the trail. The woman pulled the dog close to her and the man took out and checked his phone. As we passed, they said not a word, but their eyes spoke fear. I was wondering if the man was texting the police.
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