White Noise

by Don DeLillo

The gun created a second reality for me to inhabit.

How stupid these people were, coming into my office unarmed.

Four Dylar tablets, three Zumwalt bullets.

They were like childhood things you might come across after forty years, seeing their genius for the first time.

“Venomous. Except they weren’t. So Orest got bit for nothing. The jerk.”

Most of the students had already departed, eager to begin the routine hedonism of another bare-limbed summer.

The campus was dark and empty. There was a trembling mist.

Does a gun draw violence to it, attract other guns to its surrounding field of force?

with side effects that could beach a whale.

“Does life have to stop because our half of the earth is dark? Is there something about the night that physically resists a runner? I need to pant and gasp. What is dark? It’s just another name for light.”

I slowed down at the toll gate but did not bother tossing a quarter into the basket. An alarm went off but no one pursued. What’s another quarter to a state that is billions in debt?

A surge, a will, an agitation of the passions. I reached into my pocket, rubbed my knuckles across the grainy stainless steel of the Zumwalt barrel. The man on the radio said: “Void where prohibited.”

Transient pleasures, drastic measures.

I sensed I was part of a network of structures and channels.

“Are you heartsick or soulsick?”

“By coming in here, you agree to a certain behavior,” Mink said. “What behavior?” “Room behavior. The point of rooms is that they’re inside. No one should go into a room unless he understands this. People behave one way in rooms, another way in streets, parks and airports. To enter a room is to agree to a certain kind of behavior.

Close to a violence, close to a death.

“You’re saying there is no death as we know it without the element of fear. People would adjust to it, accept its inevitability.”

“Are you saying death adapts? It eludes our attempts to reason with it?”

Is it better to commit evil and attempt to balance it with an exalted act than to live a resolutely neutral life?

Heaven was a partly cloudy place.

Why shouldn’t it be true? Why shouldn’t they meet somewhere, advanced in time, against a layer of fluffy cumulus, to clasp hands? Why shouldn’t we all meet, as in some epic of protean gods and ordinary people, aloft, well-formed, shining?

“The nonbelievers need the believers. They are desperate to have someone believe.

We are left to believe. Fools, children. Those who have abandoned belief must still believe in us. They are sure that they are right not to believe but they know belief must not fade completely. Hell is when no one believes.

We surrender our lives to make your nonbelief possible.

There was nothing to do but wait for the next sunset, when the sky would ring like bronze.

THIS WAS THE DAY Wilder got on his plastic tricycle, rode it around the block, turned right onto a dead end street and pedaled noisily to the dead end.

Certainly there is awe, it is all awe, it transcends previous categories of awe, but we don’t know whether we are watching in wonder or dread, we don’t know what we are watching or what it means, we don’t know whether it is permanent, a level of experience to which we will gradually adjust, into which our uncertainty will eventually be absorbed, or just some atmospheric weirdness, soon to pass.

The supermarket shelves have been rearranged. It happened one day without warning. There is agitation and panic in the aisles, dismay in the faces of older shoppers. They walk in a fragmented trance, stop and go, clusters of well-dressed figures frozen in the aisles, trying to figure out the pattern, discern the underlying logic, trying to remember where they’d seen the Cream of Wheat. They see no reason for it, find no sense in it.

The terminals are equipped with holographic scanners, which decode the binary secret of every item, infallibly.

This is the language of waves and radiation, or how the dead speak to the living.

And this is where we wait together, regardless of age, our carts stocked with brightly colored goods. A slowly moving line, satisfying, giving us time to glance at the tabloids in the racks. Everything we need that is not food or love is here in the tabloid racks. The tales of the supernatural and the extraterrestrial. The miracle vitami...