The Zero and the One

by Ryan Ruby

  “No. I trust your taste.”

  At the club I bought the two condoms and stopped for a fortifier at the bar. I wasn’t going to do what I was about to do without another drink. If Zach wondered why I’d taken so long, I’d tell him that there was a queue. A metal band was playing the club. The guitarist and the bass player had their Marshall stacks turned up too loud for the tiny room, so I had to shout “Ein Jameson’s, bitte!” three times before I was understood.

  The glass appeared and I drank the gold liquid in a single swallow, slamming it down on the counter. I sneered at myself for making such a contrived gesture. I felt then, as I’d felt so often since I met Zach, that I was reenacting a scene, stepping into a fantasy of life rather than actually living. Granted, for me this represented a marginal increase in spontaneity, but it was still one degree removed from spontaneity proper. I had tried to live through books—Zach was showing me what it would be like to live in one. That was where he got that look from, that calm, unflappable expression he wore even when his face also bore the marks of some other emotion, like enthusiasm or melancholy. It was the expression of a seasoned spectator for whom nothing, not even the radically novel, is unforeseeable or unexpected. I saw him genuinely surprised only once—exactly once. Quite possibly it was the first time as well. The first and last time.

  Zach was waiting for me. He pointed over the road, at a figure leaning against a streetlamp that illuminated the ornate Moorish façade of an imposing, onion-domed building.

  “See that girl over there. That’s Nadya—or so she says. That’s our girl. Speaks pretty decent English actually. I’ve already negotiated the program with her. Turns out you pay by the time and not by the act. Double for two of course. And not unreasonable rates. I mean, I assume we’re being overcharged. But to pay anything else? That would actually be criminal.”

  Nadya wore the same uniform as the other prostitutes on Oranienburger Straße: knee-high platform boots, miniskirt, long faux-fur-collared coat, black plastic corset, hip pack. She had a round face and dark, expressionless eyes. Her black hair was set back in a bun. Her broad shoulders, large breasts, and solid legs suggested peasant stock to me. She must have come to Berlin from some mudsunk village in Eastern Europe. Romania. Ukraine. Poland, perhaps. I’ve never been a good judge of age, but I reckoned Nadya to have been anywhere from five to fifteen years older than we were. Whatever the number really was, it was obvious from her eyes that she was no longer young, and probably never had had the chance to be.

  We followed her up a few fluorescent-lit flights in a concrete block of flats located so close to the course the Wall had once taken that it could have only been the former lodgings of the most loyal functionaries and servile bureaucrats of the GDR. Now it was a brothel, with many cunning passages, many contrived corridors. On the jaundiced walls above the metal banisters were portrait-sized discolorations and angry-looking slogans in black spray paint. My stomach was roiling with booze and nerves and the increasing certainty that what we were about to do was wrong.

  In the room, Nadya hung up her coat and turned on an old lamp that revealed a quiltless, pillow-free bed. In one corner were two wooden chairs and a table, with a clean ashtray, a jug of water, and a small stack of plastic cups. In the other, a coal stove. The place reminded me of a Travelodge. Its shabbiness didn’t seem to dampen Zach’s spirits, though. Quite the contrary. This slumming was blatantly turning him on. Whilst Nadia counted the money he had given her in the wardrobe toilet, he took hold of the two chairs and positioned them side by side facing the bed.

  “Well,” I said, wondering what he was doing with the chairs. “Shall I wait outside, then?”

  He looked at me, genuinely perplexed. “What do you mean?”

  “You’d like me to go first? I’d rather not go—”

  “No, we’re going to do this at the same time.”

  “What! At the same time! You didn’t tell me that we—”

  “Must have slipped my mind,” he said crossly. He didn’t approve of my sudden vacillation, which he must have taken as a sign that I was bottling out. “Look. I don’t just want to fuck some whore. It’s not even about fucking the whore. It’s about fucking the whore together. It’s about us. Doing this. Together. Don’t you understand?” His eyes flitted back and forth, searching my face for some sign that, yes, I understood. “Besides, it’s what I’ve paid for. If you don’t like it, you can renegotiate the terms with her yourself.”

  At that moment Nadya returned. Zach and I exchanged a tense glance. When I said nothing and remained in the room, he patted the edge of the bed, signalling that she should come and sit. “Will you do me a favor?” he said to her, pointing to the top of his head. “Let your hair down.” She pulled the hairgrips out of the bun and shook her head back and forth, letting the dark curls fall to her bare shoulders. When we were seated in the chairs in front of her, he put his hands together like a penitent in prayer, slowly opening his fingers to indicate that this was what she was to do with her legs.

  “Very good,” he told her. “Now the panties. Slowly.”

  “Panteez?”

  “Yes, off.” He put his hands to his belt and pantomimed knickers. “Slowwwwly.” When she pulled the red-and-black twist of fabric to the top of her boots he said Stop! and made upside-down quotation marks with the fingers of his right hand. She started to play with herself. “Now both hands. That’s right. Both hands.”

  He lit a cigarette and examined her with a cold expression. After a few drags, he stamped it out in the ashtray. He stood up and began to unbutton his shirt. I followed, refraining as best as I could from looking at his unclothed body. Nadya stopped masturbating and slid her knickers fully off, careful not to let them catch on her tall heels. On her knees, she unbuckled our belts, using one hand for his and one hand for mine. It was then, as she began sucking Zach off, that I looked at him. He was concentrating on her mouth, oblivious to me. In the garish light of the room, his immaculate torso—defined without being muscular, slim without being gaunt—gave off a delicate, blue-tinged glow. Unlike mine, his body was perfectly hairless, save for the dark tufts beneath his arms, and the one in which Nadya’s nose was now buried. The long lashes of his half-open eyes began to flicker; his lips separated slightly. He lifted his hand to his face, running his fingers through his fringe. As he did, I noticed the two thick lines, paler than his pale skin, crossing his bicep. I blinked. I had been staring. Zach’s jaw was clenched. He exhaled sharply through his nose and tapped the back of her head to let her know that it was time to switch.

  My trousers had collected around my ankles. Whilst I fumbled with the condom, Nadya took them off, the way a mother would undress a child. She lay me on the bed with a gentle authority, straddled me, and began to move back and forth. Her breasts, which pendulated closer and closer to my face, gave off the faint smell of powder and milk. Zach grabbed the cheeks of her arse, spread them, gobbed, and thrusted. Nadya didn’t even look back at him. She stared indifferently at the blank wall above my head. Zach’s eyes were fully closed, his mind elsewhere, evidently recreating some private fantasy. Mine were still fixed on his arm. The three of us rocked in an awkward rhythm for what seemed like an eternity, though it couldn’t have been more than a few seconds before I came and slipped out. My cheeks were warm and, in all likelihood, red.

  We reshuffled. I got up, stripped the condom off, threw it into the bin, and began to dress again, with no comment from Zach, who had taken my place on the mattress. I sat in one of the chairs and smoked the remainder of Zach’s crooked cigarette waiting with mounting unease for them to finish up.

  They were now looking straight into each other’s eyes, with what seemed to me like intense mutual contempt. Their bodies were at that moment disgusting to me. Two sordid pumping pistons of meat. How, I wondered, could anyone find this activity meaningful, let alone beautiful? Nadya started to scream and moan, not out of any pleasure Zach was causing her, but in the histrionic manner that would be called f
or by the director of a skin flick. He found the noises she was making absurd, hilariously so, but his sardonic burst of laughter was brought to a sudden halt when she slapped him hard across the face. I shot up from my chair. Zach looked stunned for a second. Then he began to laugh again, louder and crueller than before.

  She rose from the bed and informed us that our time was up. I felt a surge of compassion for her, followed shortly thereafter by a stab of concern for what would happen if she reached for her mobile and rang her pimp. I lunged toward the bed and grabbed Zach by the arm. He shot me a dazed and hostile look, as if he had no idea who I was or why I was touching him. Then his eyes widened and a grin crawled across his face.

  No longer naked, Nadya was searching her hip pack. The mobile appeared, just as I feared. Whilst she touched the buttons with her curved red thumbnail, I threw Zach’s clothes on his lap and shouted, “We need to bugger off. Now. Now! Do you understand me?”

  I had to push him out the door and down the stairs, holding him so he wouldn’t trip as he pulled on his trousers and buckled his belt. As soon as we were outside, my hand flew up, catching the attention of a beige taxi. Zach slumped into the passenger seat and leant his head against the window. His shirt was still open and one of the points of his collar jutted up to his cheek. Oblivious to the danger he had put us in, he looked inordinately pleased with himself. I gave the driver the address of our flat and looked through the black window. Nadya was conferring with a blur whose basic features—white male, shaved head, yellow teeth, leather jacket, brass knuckles—I could only imagine. What I saw clearly enough was that she was pointing in our direction. “Fahren Sie schnell, bitte!” I shouted at the front seat, making use of one of the few German phrases I knew. The driver accelerated through the light and we turned the corner. I took another look through the back window and heard Zach, who must have been watching me in the rearview mirror, say, “Jesus, Owen. Relax. No one’s following us.”

  GENIUS.—Genius is the ability to know when to take a metaphor literally and when to take the literal metaphorically.

  At the Foederns’, Bernard gives my hand the same vigorous pump with which he’d taken his leave of me, first in Berlin, then in Oxford a week ago. I’d spoken with him the day I brought the note to Richard at the Porter’s Lodge. And when the inquest was complete and the death had been officially ruled a suicide, I helped him clean out Zach’s rooms.

  Barring the typewriter and the box of cartridges, which remained in the custody of the police, the room was just as he’d left it: an utter shambles. His bed was unmade. Three ashtrays, filled to the brim, made the room reek of stale smoke. Suits and shirts were left in piles on the floor, some ripped, some stained with wine or ink. His wood-handled umbrella was open and overturned in a corner. A chess problem was halted in progress on the travel set on his desk. The rubbish bin overflowed with sweet wrappers, dried-out tea bags, aluminium cans, crumpled-up papers, empty pens, used condoms, and the blue packets of the brand of French cigarettes he’d taught me to fancy. There were books stacked everywhere but on the beige metal shelves where they belonged. Instead, on them were several back issues of Theory and every Big Issue published since his arrival in September. Dotting the walls were the brown-and-red smudges of the flies and mosquitoes he had whacked with the magazines; they had been left there for months like severed heads impaled on the spikes of some mad prince’s castle walls to serve as a warning to future invaders not to fly through his window.

  From the disorderliness of the room, it would have been easy to make inferences about the extreme mental agitation of the occupant. But this would have been a case of ex post facto reasoning. In truth, the room was always that filthy. I thought of the scout Zach dismissed and hoped Richard wouldn’t report her for any dereliction of duty.

  The temptations of retrospection were nonetheless difficult not to yield to. Every object Bernard and I buried in the two black suitcases he had bought earlier that morning was saturated with prefiguration. Specially the books. The Sorrows of Young Werther and The Blind Owl. Anna Karenina and The Possessed. Madame Bovary and Mrs. Dalloway. The Sound and the Fury. Works by Seneca and Petronius. By Kleist and Thomas Bernhard. By Chikamatsu and Mishima. The collected poems of Crane, Plath, and Berryman. The essays of Montaigne, Hume, and Schopenhauer. The Myth of Sisyphus and The Space of Literature. His tattered copy of The Zero and the One and the copy of the Phaedo that was missing its title page. Research, I couldn’t help but think. It was all research. For his father’s sake, I’m glad he didn’t trifle with Durkheim, whose famous study of suicide has its subject printed in big letters on the spine.

  Distraught, Bernard offered them all to me, the books and the clothes, anything I wished, but I declined, saying it was best to wait until more time had passed in case there was something here he—or Mrs. Foedern or Vera—would regret parting with later. When he absolutely insisted I take something, I immediately went for The Zero and the One. I wanted to search it for clues he might have scribbled in the margins or for insights hidden in the passages he had underlined.

  Now that I am standing in his kitchen, Bernard is offering me something else: a tumbler containing two fingers of scotch. He motions for me to join him on the sofa. I take a coaster from the stack on the coffee table with the chess set and put the glass on it. To make conversation, I ask if it was he who taught Zach how to play.

  When he was very young, he answers. But only the basics. Pretty soon I had to send him over to the Manhattan Chess Club where he would be with players of his own caliber. It was getting a little embarrassing, being beaten by a nine-year-old.

  Yes, I say, with good humour. We also stopped playing after a few games when it became clear I’d never win.

  His teacher told me he could see as many as ten moves ahead.

  Ten moves ahead: in chess, a way to win; in life, a way to lose. Not yet into the midgame of his life, Zach had scanned the pieces, toppled his king to the board, and extended a hand to the cold phalanges of his opponent. Checkmated by Death. As it was with him, so too will it be with us. What prevented me from following him, then? Is it that I don’t confuse metaphors for life with life itself? Or that I just can’t see ten moves ahead? Zach thought there was more dignity in conceding defeat than there was in playing out the moves that would lead to the inevitable outcome, the only possible outcome. What if what I lacked was not his vision, but his courage?

  Rebecca and Vera have just come up in the lift. I shake Rebecca’s hand and go to do the same with Vera, but like Katie before her, she bypasses my hand and kisses me on the cheek. She wears jeans and a t-shirt, both black; in place of the mourning ribbon, she has kept on the string of pearls.

  Paper plates are distributed round the dining room table. The cartons of noodles, dumplings, vegetables, and rice are passed from hand to hand, followed by soft drinks. We each rip off a paper towel from the roll. The Foederns unsheathe their chopsticks, rubbing them together to clear away splinters, whereas I transfer the food to my plate with the fork Vera brought me from the kitchen, as she wondered aloud how a person could have got so far in life without having mastered the use of chopsticks.

  The disposable dishware and the red and grey aluminium cans look out of place on the design-store placemats and coasters Rebecca has lain out on the thick glass tabletop. Not that any of us proves particularly keen on eating. The three pairs of chopsticks and the lone fork only make it from plate to mouth at long intervals. The plates are going to soak through with sauce before any of us contemplates a second helping. Next to me, Vera is merely pushing the noodles round her plate. Her cheekbones look swollen, her grey-tinted skin drawn. Her lips are pale and dry. Like me, she probably hasn’t finished a meal in a week.

  The conversation wanders and all too deliberately avoids mention of the person whose chair I can’t help but feel I’m sitting in. At first, there is only idle talk. Rebecca halfheartedly volunteers an observation about the weather (improving, in her opinion) before appraising us of going
s-on at her gallery (the opening of a group show of new painters was less than a month away) where she’d stopped in for an hour, on her way to the Chinese restaurant.

  Then it is Bernard’s turn. Today he rang Moscow to tender his resignation to someone he calls Ilya, the director, I gather, of the film he was producing, the one whose name he was so careful not to mention in Berlin. It’s impossible not to notice the change in him. How his eyes, once tensed like a cat on the point of pouncing, are now as stupefied as its unsuspecting prey; how his speech, once delivered in quick bursts, now trails off at the end of sentences, as if he saw no point in going on to the next one. Even the shape of his face seems to have lost definition now that he is no longer troubling to contain the growth of ashen stubble on his cheeks and chin and neck.

  I colour when Rebecca asks Vera about her session with her psychiatrist. But Vera answers without hesitation. What Dr. Stein and I discussed today was the difference between mourning and melancholia, she tells the table. Mourning is a perfectly normal and healthy response to loss. But it can easily turn into melancholia, a pathological introjection of guilt and anger. Unlike mourning, melancholia has long-term effects on mental health, and that’s why Dr. Stein thinks it’s important for me to actively work through my grief in our sessions together.

  Her response couldn’t have been more different than mine when I was sent to counselling. With the NHS psychiatrist, I was taciturn and uncooperative, treating our session as an interrogation to survive rather than as an opportunity to heal. When I phoned my parents to tell them that my friend had been killed in an accident (that’s the word I used, accident) and that I’d be spending nearly all the money I’d saved that year to fly to the funeral in New York, I certainly did not mention that the college had all but forced me to see a therapist. Just imagining my father’s expression were I to say, My mate killed himself and I’ve been to see a shrink, makes me cringe.