But atrocity is nothing new, not to humans, not to animals.  The difference is that in our time it is uniquely well organized, carried out with pens, train carriages, ledgers, barbed wire, work camps, gas.  And this late contribution, the absence of bodies.  No bodies were visible, except the falling ones, on the day America's ticker stopped.  Marketable stories of all kinds had thickened around the injured coast of our city, but the depiction of the dead bodies was forbidden.  It would have been upsetting to have it otherwise.  I moved on with the commuters through the pen.

--Teju Cole, Open City

If the work felt uncanny, it was because it was mortgaged; it was borrowing from future accomplishments as much as pointing to it.

   
     I stood, I made myself stand, in front of the early portrait of his mother.  It yielded nothing.  The woman, in profile, is half-asleep; her head is leaning forward and her eyes are closed.  Pastel on paper.  1896.  He was what, fifteen?  A freak of nature.  I could convince myself I saw space curling around the figure or areas where space flattened suddenly, but I did not see this.  Maybe I did see, however, the self-assurance of a painter who assumed his juvenilia would one day be scoured for the seeds of genius, embarrassing phrase.  If the work felt uncanny, it was because it was mortgaged; it was borrowing from future accomplishments as much as pointing to it.  It had started to rain a little; I could hear it falling on the skylight.

--Ben Lerner, Leaving the Atocha Station

The same drained screen.

     I stood before the screen in the long hallway.  Nothing but sky at first, then an intimation of threat, treetops leaning, unnatural light.  Soon, in seconds, a rotating column of wind, dirt and debris.  It began to fill the frame, a staggered funnel, dark and bent, soundless, and then another, down left, in the far distance, rising from the horizon line.  This was flat land, view unobstructed, the screen all tornado now, an awed silence that I thought would break into open roar.
     Here was our climate enfolding us.  I'd seen many tornadoes on TV news reports and waited for the footage of the rubbled storm path, the aftermath, houses in a shattered line, roofs blown off, siding in collapse.
     It appeared, yes, whole streets leveled, school bus on its side, but also people coming this way, in slow motion, nearly out of the screen and into the hall, carrying what they'd salvaged, a troop of men and women, black and white, in solemn march, and the dead arrayed on ravaged floorboards in front yards.  The camera lingered on the bodies.  The detail-work of their violent end was hard to watch.  But I watched, feeling obligated to something or someone, the victims perhaps, and thinking of myself as lone witness, sworn to the task.
     Now, somewhere else, another town, another time of day, a young woman on a bicycle pedaling fast, foreground, oddly comic motion, quick and jittery, one end of the screen to the other, with a mile-wide storm, a vortex, still far off, crawling up out of the seam of earth and sky, and then cut to an obese man lurching down basement steps, ultra-real, families huddled in garages, faces in the dark, and the girl on the bike again, pedaling the other way now, carefree, without urgency, a scene in an old silent movie, she is Buster Keaton in nitwit innocence, and then a reddish flash and the thing was right here, touching down massively, sucking up half a house, pure power, truck and barn squarely in the path.
     White screen, while I stood watching.
     Total wasteland now, a sheared landscape, the image persisting, the silence as well.  I stood in place for some minutes, waiting, houses gone, girl on bike gone, nothing, finished, done.  The same drained screen.
     I continued to wait, expecting more.  I felt a whiskey belch erupting from some deep sac.  There was nowhere to go and I had no idea what time it was.  My watch was fixed on North American time, eastern standard.

--Don DeLillo, Zero K

     It was the kind of exchange, although exchange isn't really the word, with which I'd grown familiar, a new biopolitical vocabulary for expressing racial and class anxiety: instead of claiming brown and black people were biologically inferior, you claimed they were--for reasons you sympathized with, reasons that weren't really their fault--compromised by the food and drink they ingested; all those artificial dyes had darkened them on the inside.  Your child, who had never so much as sipped a high-fructose carbonated beverage containing phosphoric acid and E150d, was a more sensitive instrument: purer, smarter, free of violence.  This way of thinking allowed one to deploy the vocabularies of sixties radicalism--ecological awareness, anticorporate agitation, etc.--in order to justify the reproduction of social inequality.  It allowed you to redescribe caring for your own genetic material--feeding Lucas the latest in coagulated soy juice--as altruism: it's not just good for Lucas, it's good for the planet.  But from those who of ignorance or desperation have allowed their children's digestive tracts to know deep-fried, mechanically processed chicken, those to happen to be, in Brooklyn, disproportionately black and Latino, Lucas must be protected at whatever cost.

--Ben Lerner, 10:04

In that position we lay and waited for the hurricane.

     Suddenly I became aware of a strange sensation: a faint echo of the radio in the unplugged ear.  It took me a while to realize the downstairs neighbors were tuned to the same station.  I turned to Alex and watched the colors from the movie flicker on her sleeping body, noted the gold necklace she always wore against her collarbone.  I tucked a stray strand of hair behind her ear and then let my hand trail down her face and neck and brush across her breast and stomach in one slow motion I halfheartedly attempted to convince myself was incidental.  I was returning my hand to her hair when I saw her eyes were open.  It took all my will to hold her gaze as opposed to looking away and thereby conceding a transgression; there was only, it seemed, curiosity in her look, no alarm.  After a few moments I reached for my jar of wine as if to suggest that, if anything unusual had happened, it was the result of intoxication; by the time I looked back at her face her eyes were closed.  I put the jar back without drinking and lay beside her and stared at her for a long while and then smoothed her hair back with my palm.  She reached up and took my hand, maybe in her sleep, and pressed it to her chest and held it there, whether to stop or encourage me or neither, I couldn't tell.  In that position we lay and waited for the hurricane.

--Ben Lerner, 10:04

      I wanted to be bookish and failed.  I wanted to steep myself in European literature.  There I was, in our modest garden apartment in a nondescript part of Queens, steeping myself in European literature.  The word "steep" was the whole point.  Once I had decided to steep myself, there was no need to read the work.

--Don DeLillo, "Sine Cosine Tangent"