The Zero and the One

by Ryan Ruby

  Vera returns to the flat at five. She passes through the door, still lost in the thoughts she has brought with her from the outside; the corners of her eyes have sunk to the angle of capsizing boats. I am sitting more or less where Katie left me, on the sofa, reading. I place the letter between the pages of the book, slip it into my pocket, and rise to greet her. But Vera takes one look in my direction and says she won’t be seen in public with me. Not in that suit.

  At first I think she objects because this is the same suit I wore to the funeral, but it soon becomes clear that what she objects to is the suit itself. Its poor quality. Its unfashionable cut. Its double-digit price tag. We’ve not got the time—and, anyway, I haven’t the money—to buy a new suit and a clean shirt. In a vanquished voice, I tell Vera I’ll understand if she’d prefer to go to the opera with someone else. She dismisses this idea with a curt laugh. No, she meant nothing of the sort. I would simply wear one of Zach’s suits instead.

  I doubt they would fit me. Zach… is… so much taller than I am.

  You look to be the same height to me. How tall are you?

  One metre seventy-five.

  In English, please.

  I look to the ceiling, make the calculations, and answer, Approximately five feet, nine inches.

  As I thought. Exactly the same height.

  She, of course, is dressed exquisitely. A sleeveless dress in gunmetal blue. High-heeled sandals whose leather straps intricately cross the tops of her feet. A silk shawl draped delicately over her shoulders. For the first time, I notice, she’s wearing makeup, her lips an elegant pair of crimson strokes. I couldn’t believe such a beautiful girl had allowed me to sleep with her. And not just any girl—Zach’s sister. It hadn’t been making love, exactly, it was tense and fraught, and not exactly what one would call good. Still, it was a fact. And I had the scar, the physical proof. Just like my connexion with Zach, my connexion with Vera will last as long as I live. As for the sex: the first time is bound to be awkward, isn’t it? Tonight will be better, of that I’m certain.

  Bernard and Rebecca are not home when we arrive. Neither person nor propriety now stands between me and Zach and Vera’s old room. Our room: that’s how she referred to it. In it, Diminovich’s painting hangs over their beds like a cross on the wall of a monk’s cell. Why she called it a double portrait, though, I can’t say. The canvas is split into two horizontal planes: one black, one white. Where the planes meet, the paint, thickly applied, had been mixed by the regular application of the edge of a palette knife or some other straight surface. The resulting pattern looks like the diagram of the pulsar on the cover of the first Joy Division album.

  But I barely have time to study it. Having forgotten that only the day before yesterday she was hell-bent on showing it to me, Vera directs me instead to the wardrobe and slides opened the mirrored door. Our image disappears. In its place are Zach’s suits, eerily shrouded in dry-cleaner’s plastic. The whole collection, minus one. Vera watches me run a finger across the row of sleeves like a student searching a row of books for the shelf mark on the spine of a specific title. She stops me when I touch what looks to be the dress suit he wore to our first tutorial together. I pull the hanger off the wooden rail, drape the suit over one of the beds, and, with a single tear, unseam the plastic from the nave to the chaps.

  I’ve always thought that… this shirt… and this tie… go really well with that suit, she tells me, handing them to me.

  She leaves the room to let me try it on. I think of the other suit, the dinner jacket he was wearing when he died, which would have had a fray in the fabric, no larger than a centimetre in diameter, dead centre, where my palm is now placed. I close my eyes and imagine myself covering up that hole with the tip of my finger, believing, for a moment, that by this small act I could reverse time, undo the cause, heal the wound, and bring my friend back to life. That with a bit of magical thinking I could make things otherwise than they are. Which they never can be.

  I slide the trousers to my waist and button the two buttons. To my surprise, they do not immediately fall back down my legs. Nor do I find myself crushing hem under heel. My thumb fits between the back of the button and the elastic band of my pants, but that’s not a distance too large to be erased by a tucked-in shirt and a belt notched to the farthest hole. The cream shirt is a tad snug in the chest and in the biceps. The stiff collar comes together across my throat and, though it’s somewhat of a stretch, I can breathe without any difficulty. The tie she picked out for me is silk, with small white dots on a dark blue field. Too skinny for a proper Windsor: I’ll have to four-in-hand it. According to a superstition of my father’s, which proves, to my chagrin, to be correct, this means I’ll only manage to tie it properly on the third attempt.

  Owen! You’re worse than a girl! Vera shouts from the other room. What’s taking so long?

  Where does Zach keep his cufflinks? I call back.

  Check the desk drawer: they should be in a small jewel case! comes the response from outside.

  In the box, there is an assortment of shirt studs, collar stays, and cufflinks. It’s my first time wearing a French-cuffed shirt, and it takes me a minute or two to twist each link into place. Now the final test. The jacket. With its thin lapels, its two buttons, and a label on the inside pocket marked, as I suspected, with a Jermyn Street address.

  There’s an urgent rapping on the door. We’re running out of time here!

  What should I do with my suit?

  Just leave it here! We’ll come back and pick it up tomorrow.

  The book with the letter inside is peeking out of the pocket of my suit. I hesitate for a moment and then fish out the pearl and the book. Better, I think, to keep them close, on my own person, than to leave them here where they might be discovered. As I hastily transfer the two items from one pocket to the other, where, it occurs to me, they will feel right at home, the letter slips out and falls to the floor. Cursing, I pick it up and stuff it back into the book at random: there’s no time now to find the place it had been keeping. But before I do, something on the page catches my eye. There, three lines from the top, is the very aphorism I’d been searching for. In the margin, Zach had written no commentary, only the following fateful words: Discuss w/ O.

  THE MEANING OF LIFE.—Anyone for whom “the meaning of life” is a meaningful problem should be considered an extremely dangerous person. Either because he believes he knows the solution to the problem, or because he believes there isn’t one.

  When Zach texted, I was sitting in the JCR with a few other students watching David Dimbleby present the BBC’s coverage of the general election. The room was mostly empty. The biggest story that evening was not the election result—from the exit polls, it appeared Labour would win in a landslide, conserving the same number of seats in Parliament they had won four years before, returning Tony Blair to Number 10, making him the first Labour PM to serve two consecutive terms—but the voter turnout, which was projected to fall to the lowest levels in almost a century. Translating Zach’s electoral theories across the Atlantic, I myself had contributed to this statistic, though Claire and Tori had not, the former out of a sense of duty and the latter because she wholeheartedly agreed with Labour’s manifesto. My father had certainly voted as well, casting a futile ballot at the polling station at the primary school on South Street. No doubt at that very moment he was also watching telly, lager in hand, cursing through his teeth.

  Usually Zach and I made plans to see each other the old-fashioned way, by pidging each other short notes. That he had texted meant he had something urgent to tell me. Are you at Tori and Claire’s? read the dark letters on the orange screen. It never failed to amuse me that he bothered to use proper punctuation and grammar in his texts, specially as he never activated his mobile’s T9 function. As with the emails necessity sometimes forced him to write, he considered the ownership of a mobile phone an unholy compromise with the twenty-first century (his parents, he explained, made him buy one when he came to Oxfor
d). The abbreviations, initialisms, and omissions that made textese an efficient means of communication were, to him, signs of widespread leveling down. I texted back to say I was at the JCR. Good, came the reply. Drop by the Macmillan Building when you’re done.

  Named for the former Prime Minister and University Chancellor, the Mac, as everyone but Zach called it, was the most modern building at Pembroke. The unsightly structure was located just around the corner from Staircase XVI, wisely tucked away from general contemplation. I made my way there, walking along the path round the grass of Chapel Quad, where, despite the impending examinations, a drunken game of croquet was in progress. An errantly malletted ball struck my shoe as I passed, which provoked a chorus of infantile laughter amongst the players. I kept walking, making no effort to return the ball to them. One of them shouted something I didn’t hear at first, which was then distorted when taken up by the whole group. “Lapdog! Lapdog!” was how it sounded to me. Was that what they were saying? Could they possibly have been saying that?

  Zach was sitting alone in the common room on the first floor watching a film, drinking champagne straight from the bottle. He drank regularly now. Since Berlin his fingers were rarely far from a pint or a martini or a glass of whisky. I took a seat next to him. “Want some?” he asked. “My sister had it shipped to me all the way from New York.” He passed me the bottle. I took a sip, winced briefly, and examined the white label. Bollinger. Special Cuvée Brut. 1980. I know very little about wine, but it looked quite dear. He was drinking it lukewarm.

  “What’s the occasion?”

  Without taking his eyes off the telly, he mumbled—to the room as much as to me—“It’s our birthday.” It struck me as odd that I didn’t know this already, and that he didn’t know when my birthday was. On the screen, Peter O’Toole lay prostrate before a tomb in the crypt of a cathedral, surrounded by monks in black robes who were taking turns flagellating him.

  “That makes you—what—twenty-one, doesn’t it?” I was trying to sound excited, wondering what had put him in such a foul mood. “That’s a big birthday for you Yanks, isn’t it? Let’s ring Tori and Claire. They’ll meet us at Freud’s and I’ll buy your drinks for a change. Your first legal martini. It would be a real honour.”

  “Thanks. But I’d rather not. I absolutely hate birthdays. Ours especially. Besides, as you’ve probably guessed, there’s something I want to talk to you about.”

  He stood up. O’Toole, now wearing a crown and a cloak, was telling a group of armour-clad barons that justice would seek out the murderers of Thomas Becket.

  “You’re not going to finish watching, then?” I asked.

  “No need. It’s almost over anyway.” He touched the remote and the screen went black. I followed him out of the Mac, back to Staircase XVI. The bottle of champagne Vera had sent him was left half-full on the wooden table.

  I sat down, as I usually did when I visited Zach, on the bed, the only empty surface in his rooms. I expected him to clear off the books piled on the chair and join me. Instead, he motioned me over to the desk. He opened the voluminous drawer meant to hold file folders and pointed into the depths, where I saw two pistols and a box of cartridges. He took one out, cradling it like a newborn cat in his upturned palms, and presented it to me. I’d never held a firearm before.

  “It’s heavy,” I observed, not knowing what else to say. At that moment, the object struck me as an absurd prop, a prop he’d requisitioned from the warehouse of his imagination for the film of his life. I threaded my finger around the trigger and thrust out my arm, aiming it with one eye closed at one of the mosquito stains on the wall, pretending I was in the title sequence of a Bond film. Step into the circle. Turn and fire. Blood drips down the screen. Theme song: you only live twice, live and let die, the world is not enough. Though I’d seen it done innumerable times in the cinema, holding the pistol and aiming the barrel and touching the trigger still didn’t feel at all natural.

  “Be careful,” he said. “It’s loaded.”

  I looked at him incredulously. For once, he didn’t curl his lip or raise his eyebrow. My arm dropped to my side. I brought the pistol before my chest, supporting it in my palms with the same fearful reverence as he had. When he took it back from me, I unconsciously wiped my hands on the sides of my trousers, as if I’d just been handling something filthy. I remarked on the age of the pistol and asked him if it still worked.

  “Of course it does!” He looked offended. “I’ve even tested it!” Then, after a sharp breath, he summoned the courage to tell me what he was planning to use it for. He spoke slowly. Deliberately. Fixing me with a stare. “Owen,” he said, “I’ve decided to end my life.”

  What he had told me at The Bear after our tutorial on the Phaedo returned to me in a flash. That’s where you’re wrong, he had said. It wasn’t only a paper. Could it have been true? What if, for the boy of a thousand theories, this was the one he took seriously enough to put into practice? I looked at the pistol in his hands and then back at him. My eyes begged him to break character. I longed to see the withering smile appear on his face, but his features remained stiff, intensely studying my reaction to what he had just said, compelling me to respond, though again I had no idea what to say. Finally, in a faltering voice, I asked him what he thought happened when we died, hoping by my question to return our discussion to the plane of the purely theoretical. We had talked a great deal about preparations for death. But never about what happened after.

  “Nothing at all,” he responded, as I knew he would.

  “Doesn’t that thought frighten you?”

  “Why should it? Death will remove the fear of death along with everything else.”

  “What I mean is: won’t you miss being conscious and perceiving the world and experiencing new things?”

  “To do so would require me to imaginatively project myself into a state I will never experience. But imagining the abyss doesn’t terrify me. Unlike most people, not a day goes by when I don’t think of death. Most people try to run away from death, and that’s why they live such meaningless lives. To embrace death freely is to prove that life actually matters. Life will never mean as much, experience will never feel so full, if you are fully conscious when you die. And the only way to do that is to plan your death. What I want to do is to exchange ten thousand experiences that don’t matter for one that really does. Since the moment I decided to die, I’ve felt the most extreme freedom. I’ve been released from manners and politeness and morality—which are all just euphemisms for the fear of death. Now that they’ve become limited, each and every moment has correspondingly increased in intensity. The last one is going to be the most intense of all. I just know it. In fact, I’ve never been more certain of anything in my life.”

  “But what if you’re wrong? Don’t you worry that, daft as they sound, all the things people have said about the afterlife are actually true?”

  Zach placed the pistol on the table and walked over to the tower of books he’d stacked on the floor. It wasn’t necessary to ask which book he was preparing to quote from.

  Swishing page after page between his forefinger and thumb, he bent the book three-quarters in. Holding it in one hand, he read, “‘The early Church did not put an end to the cult of martyrs to promote an essentially worldly…’ No, it’s a little further, the passage I’m looking for. ‘… promises a fundamental stability… That’s why, in Dostoevsky’s novel…’ Ah yes, here.” He held up his finger and spoke deliberately for emphasis: “‘That’s why in Dostoevsky’s novel The Possessed, Kirillov isn’t entirely mistaken about the outcome of his suicide. When he kills himself, he will indeed kill God, as he believes. Suicide violates the most fundamental of Christian moral principles precisely because it permanently disrupts the very stability of identity God’s existence is intended to guarantee. In killing himself Kirillov becomes God, that is, something that does not exist.’”

  He looked at me insistently, waiting for me to understand the passage, to feel the lo
gic of the argument wash over me with the same force of revelation he had obviously experienced when he read it. Perhaps what Abendroth had written made more sense if you knew the novel, but all I had read of Dostoevsky was Notes from Underground and The Double. I asked Zach what he thought it meant.

  “It means that—in answer to your question—we shouldn’t fear God’s punishment, because he who kills himself shows that God does not exist. For the suicide there is precisely no one to fear. But it’s not God we should be worrying about, it’s Nature.” He continued reading. “‘The Divine was invented by the primitive imagination as a weapon against death, but when this fact is forgotten, the weapon is turned back against its inventor. When the Death of God is finally announced, those who have killed him do not realise that something will inevitably take His place. Nor do they suspect the obvious usurper: Nature. Rather than vanishing along with God, the problem of suicide actually intensifies. It goes from being a mortal sin to an unnatural act. Thus, in order for Kirillov to be truly successful, he would have to perform a miracle: he would have to kill himself twice.’”

  Zach closed the book, placed it on the table, and grabbed the pistol. “What we have to fear, Owen, is not some future state no one has ever seen, but what we already see around us, everywhere around us, right now. It is all of this,” he said, gesturing around the room with the pistol, before placing it back in the drawer, “that the unnatural act of suicide strikes against.”

  The drawer slid shut and we both looked at it for a moment, in silence. I felt overwhelmed by a sense of unreality. I had the unsettling impression that were I to have opened the drawer again, it would be empty. Zach’s words were contaminating the things he described. Suddenly, the objects in the room, including me, seemed to lack all substance. Everything had been hollowed out, drained of significance, menacing in its meaninglessness. Without taking my eyes off the shape that until that moment I would have had no qualms about calling the handle of a drawer, I asked of the now invisible pistols, “Why two of them, then?” half expecting he’d have no idea what I was referring to.