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  • Almost Nothing Left of Nowhere: On Don Delillo's The Silence
  • Justin Taylor (bio)

1. In a tumbling void

Despite the shortness of the book, a fair amount of patience and force of will on the part of the reader [is presumed].

—Einstein, Preface to Relativity: the Special and General Theory (1916)

Jim Kripps, an insurance claims adjuster, and his wife Tessa Berens, a poet, are on a plane. They're flying home from Paris to New York City. Jim is fussing with the flight tracker on his seatback screen. He reports time, altitude, and temperature to Tessa, who tries to remember the first name of "Mr. Celsius" without resorting to looking it up on her phone. At first, she doesn't think she'll be able to manage it, but then she does. "She found this satisfying. Came out of nowhere. There is almost nothing left of nowhere." [End Page 159]

Jim and Tessa will land in Newark, where they plan to take a cab directly to their friends Max Stenner and Diane Lucas's apartment on the Upper West Side, to have dinner and watch the 2022 Super Bowl. Max has placed a big bet on the game. "Let the impulse dictate the logic" is his gambler's creed. (I would argue it's DeLillo's creed as well.) Max never reveals the details or the stakes of his bets to anyone. Martin Dekker, the other guest at the gathering, is a former student of Diane's. She's a retired physics professor, and Martin is a physics teacher himself now, at a charter high school in the Bronx. It is noted in passing that "for the past year Diane has been telling the young man to return to earth." What does that mean? Tough to say. Martin has an outsize interest in Einstein. "I'm sticking with Einstein no matter what the theorists have disclosed or predicted or imagined," he declaims. "He said it and then we saw it. Billions of times more massive than our sun. He said it many decades ago. His universe became ours."

Martin is particularly consumed by Einstein's 1912 Manuscript on the Special Theory of Relativity. He is taken with its document-ness and human traces, what Walter Benjamin would have called its aura. "We can see him think," Martin gushes, thrilled by the inks that Einstein used, his marginalia and cross outs, "his handwriting, his formulas, his letters and numbers. The sheer physical beauty of the pages." Diane is nurturing an almost abstract attraction to Martin that escapes Max's notice or perhaps simply fails to ignite his interest in the same way that the game does.

(For those of you playing along at home, Martin's edition of Einstein's theory must be the full-color facsimile published by George Braziller in 1996, since he can hardly have hold of the original manuscript. Incidentally, such an object is one of high Benjaminian ambivalence, replicating the original at a level of detail unimaginable before the advent of mechanical reproduction—in [End Page 160] this case, digital imaging and printing—in order to successfully fabricate the very aura of authenticity that Benjamin believed all mechanically reproduced artworks lacked.)

"Something happened then." We never find out what it is or who is responsible for it, but the effect is immediate and total: the electrical grid fails, screens go blank, the internet disappears. Jim and Tessa's plane begins to plummet from the sky. Jim sustains a head wound during the rough landing so they take a shuttle van to a clinic in Manhattan, where they squeeze in a quick fuck in the public bathroom before talking to the desk nurse. She gives them a sense of the scope of the disaster: "Everyone I've seen today has a story. You two are the plane crash. Others are the abandoned subway, the stalled elevators, then the empty office buildings, the barricaded storefronts." After Jim gets his wound looked at, the couple continues, as though under some entrancement, to the Super Bowl watch party, where Max—also in a kind of trance—is intermittently "broadcasting" the non-occurring football game. He supplies color commentary...

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