White Noise

by Don DeLillo

Their summer has been bloated with criminal pleasures, as always.

“I have trouble imagining death at that income level,” she said. “Maybe there is no death as we know it. Just documents changing hands.”

Things, boxes. Why do these possessions carry such sorrowful weight? There is a darkness attached to them, a foreboding. They make me wary not of personal failure and defeat but of something more general, something large in scope and content.

Something lurked inside the truth, she said.

“Once you’ve seen the signs about the barn, it becomes impossible to see the barn.” He fell silent once more. People with

We’ve agreed to be part of a collective perception.

“What was the barn like before it was photographed?”

Shouldn’t death, I thought, be a swan dive, graceful, white-winged and smooth, leaving the surface undisturbed?

“Flavorless packaging. It appeals to me. I feel I’m not only saving money but contributing to some kind of spiritual consensus. It’s like World War III. Everything is white. They’ll take our bright colors away and use them in the war effort.”

I want to immerse myself in American magic and dread.

Man’s guilt in history and in the tides of his own blood has been complicated by technology, the daily seeping falsehearted death.

He works well into the night, plotting chess moves in a game he plays by mail with a convicted killer in the penitentiary.

We edge nearer death every time we plot. It is like a contract that all must sign, the plotters as well as those who are the targets of the plot.”

‘He entered me.’ We’re not lobbies or elevators.

This is the space reserved for irony, sympathy and fond amusement, the means by which we rescue ourselves from the past.

I feel I’m learning important things every day. Death, disease, afterlife, outer space. It’s all much clearer here. I can think and see.”

And over it all, or under it all, a dull and unlocatable roar, as of some form of swarming life just outside the range of human apprehension.

Here we don’t die, we shop. But the difference is less marked than you think.”

“Supermarkets this large and clean and modern are a revelation to me.

Dying is a quality of the air.

Her friends had phone numbers only, a race of people with a seven-bit analog consciousness.

How do you know whether something is really what you want to do or just some kind of nerve impulse in the brain? Some minor little activity takes place somewhere in this unimportant place in one of the brain hemispheres and suddenly I want to go to Montana or I don’t want to go to Montana. How do I know I really want to go and it isn’t just some neurons firing or something? Maybe it’s just an accidental flash in the medulla and suddenly there I am in Montana and I find out I really didn’t want to go there in the first place. I can’t control what happens in my brain, so how can I be sure what I want to do ten seconds from now, much less Montana next summer?

The system had blessed my life. I felt its support and approval. The system hardware, the mainframe sitting in a locked room in some distant city. What a pleasing interaction.

The digital reading on the clock-radio was 3:51. Always odd numbers at times like this. What does it mean? Is death odd-numbered?

Once you’re out of school, it is only a matter of time before you experience the vast loneliness and dissatisfaction of consumers who have lost their group identity.’

Look at the wealth of data concealed in the grid, in the bright packaging, the jingles, the slice-of-life commercials, the products hurtling out of darkness, the coded messages and endless repetitions, like chants, like mantras. ‘Coke is it, Coke is it, Coke is it.’

“Sounds like a boring life.” “I hope it lasts forever,” she said.

I turned to meteorology for comfort. I read weather maps, collected books on weather, attended launchings of weather balloons. I realized weather was something I’d been looking for all my life. It brought me a sense of peace and security I’d never experienced.

I’ve taught meteorology in church basements, in trailer parks, in people’s dens and living rooms.

The American mystery deepens.

Every disaster made us wish for more, for something bigger, grander, more sweeping.

People had no tolerance for your particular hardship unless you knew how to entertain them with it.

We need an occasional catastrophe to break up the incessant bombardment of information.”

“The flow is constant,” Alfonse said. “Words, pictures, numbers, facts, graphics, statistics, specks, waves, particles, motes. Only a catastrophe gets our attention. We want them, we need them, we depend on them. As long as they happen somewhere else. This is where California comes in. Mud slides, brush fires, coastal erosion, earthquakes, mass killings, et cetera. We can relax and enjoy these disasters because in our hearts we feel that California deserves whatever it gets. Californians invented the concept of life-style. This alone warrants their doom.”

This is why California is so important. We not only enjoy seeing them punished for their relaxed life-style and progressive social ideas but we know we’re not missing anything. The cameras are right there. They’re standing by. Nothing terrible escapes their scrutiny.”

“For most people there are only two places in the world. Where they live and their TV set. If a thing happens on television, we have every right to find it fascinating, whatever it is.”

“It’s obvious,” Lasher said. “We all feel bad. But we can enjoy it on that level.”

They’ve forgotten how to collect data.

He began to withdraw from the real world, to enter the state of his own dying.”

His mother probably saw it all, as on a nineteen-inch screen, years before her own death.”

To become a crowd is to keep out death. To break off from the crowd is to risk death as an individual, to face dying alone. Crowds came for this reason above all others. They were there to be a crowd.”

The family is the cradle of the world’s misinformation. There must be something in family life that generates factual error. Overcloseness, the noise and heat of being. Perhaps something even deeper, like the need to survive.

Facts threaten our happiness and security. The deeper we delve into the nature of things, the looser our structure may seem to become. The family process works toward sealing off the world. Small errors grow heads, fictions proliferate.

The family is strongest where objective reality is most likely to be misinterpreted.

I traded money for goods. The more money I spent, the less important it seemed. I was bigger than these sums. These sums poured off my skin like so much rain. These sums in fact came back to me in the form of existential credit.

It’s what Janet has always wanted. Peace of mind in a profit-oriented context.”

“Where’s the media?” she said. “There is no media in Iron City.” “They went through all that for nothing?”

Barring mechanical failures, turbulent weather and terrorist acts, Tweedy said, an aircraft traveling at the speed of sound may be the last refuge of gracious living and civilized manners known to man.

The power of the dead is that we think they see us all the time. The dead have a presence. Is there a level of energy composed solely of the dead? They are also in the ground, of course, asleep and crumbling. Perhaps we are what they dream.

MR. TREADWELL’S SISTER DIED. Her first name was Gladys. The doctor said she died of lingering dread, a result of the four days and nights she and her brother had spent in the Mid-Village Mall, lost and confused.