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