The Zero and the One

by Ryan Ruby

  The long white envelope in Zach’s pidge.

  The long white envelope in mine.

  THE METAPHOR OF THE SUN.—Insofar as truth has been correctly identified with the sun, it is not because the sun enlightens, but because a man can approach neither and survive. The desire to solve riddles, to dismantle paradoxes, to discover new continents of fact and the hidden treasures of buried secrets, to know, in short, what one does not know, may be heroic, but it’s also suicidal. The idea that the danger of knowing consists in being blinded by the light of the truth is, in fact, rather quaint; the real experience would undoubtedly have more in common with instantaneous immolation.

  What is this? Owen, what the fuck is this?

  Vera’s voice. Pinched, threatening. Air flowing between clenched teeth. A whirlwind of outrage. Confusion. Horror.

  She wakes me up by waving something in my face. Without my glasses, it looks like a white blur. But there is only one thing she could be holding.

  One moment, let me find my glasses, I tell her, trying to keep calm. I reach toward the chair. Must delay. Vera is dressed. The envelope she is holding, the envelope with Zach’s name on it, Zach’s name in my handwriting, has been opened.

  Most of all, I am conscious of wearing nothing but pants. How absurd, at a time like this, when one is in danger, to think, first and foremost, of what one is wearing. But I feel my unclothed state puts me at a disadvantage. No longer wearing trousers and no longer in possession of the letter, which she must have already read, I feel doubly naked. I grab the nearest clothing to hand, Zach’s suit, from the back of the chair where I’d hung it up last night. As if it were the most ordinary object in the world, I tell Vera, Appears to be a letter. I step into the black trousers. Thread the belt. Hold out my hand. May I see it?

  Vera is not fooled by my pretence of ignorance. You can see it just fine from where you are, she hisses. No, don’t move. Don’t you fucking take another step. Stay right where you are and tell me what this is.

  I put on the shirt. Then the jacket, leaving the unlinked cuffs hanging awkwardly from the sleeves. I draw out a cigarette from the packet and light one. Vera is audibly breathing. Her nostrils expand and contract like accordion bellows. Exasperated by the evasive deliberateness of my movements and combustible with suspicion, it would take only the truth for her to explode into fury. I calmly ask her a question I already know the answer to. Must delay.

  In the book in your jacket pocket! she shrieks. And how did she come to be looking through my pockets? Her voice modulates as she attempts to explain. I was just… just going to take Zach’s suit… to the dry cleaner. I took out the book and the letter just… just fell out.

  So she could lie as well. Just like me. The things we always fail to consider. The ones that lie right before our eyes. How easy it is to take for granted the truthfulness and decency of others when we display so little of it ourselves. What other falsehoods, I wonder, has she told me in response to my falsehoods? Clearly she’d seen the letter in the jacket and pulled it out herself. It was a question, as my tutors had taught me, of procedural justice: the admissibility of evidence wrongfully obtained against what that evidence reveals. Vera’s voice had cracked. Cracked with the knowledge of not standing on entirely firm ethical ground.

  Give me back the letter, Vera. It doesn’t belong to you.

  Don’t take one more step. She holds up her mobile phone with her other hand. I swear to God, if you take one more step, I’ll call the police. She punches three digits into the phone, holding her finger over the send button as if it were the trigger of a pistol.

  And what will you tell them? That you’ve opened up someone else’s post? That’s a criminal offence if I’m not mistaken.

  What I’ll tell them, she snarls, is that two nights ago you raped me and now you’re holding me hostage in my room.

  I reach into Zach’s pocket, the pocket, unhappily for us both, she hadn’t looked into. Does this belong to you by any chance? I ask.

  Puzzled by what she perceives as a non sequitur, she squints to see what I’m rolling between my thumb and my forefinger. When she understands what it is, her eyes expand. They begin to fill with moisture, poised to overflow. Shock. The shock of recognition.

  She gasps. Where did you get that?

  It was included with the letter Zach posted to me. Perhaps you can explain why he did that.

  Give it back to me! she cries, lunging toward my hand. I close my fist tightly round the pearl and wing my arm away from her, putting a menacing shoulder forward to discourage her from trying again. She loses control of the mobile phone, which falls to the ground halfway between us. She looks at it, trying to decide whether or not to collect it. Whether to focus her energy on retrieving it or the pearl. She thrusts out her empty palm, just as I had done only moments before. Give it to me! You have no right!

  Right has nothing to do with it! I shout, edging my words with the threat of violence. I have something you want. You have something I want. Let’s swop—and forget this ever happened, okay?

  Swop. Our tokens of sorrow and grief. The plugs we use to keep the hulls of our hearts from flooding. Besides the memories, besides the scars, these objects are all that remains of the person we’ve lost. Her pearl. My letter. A struggle between us. Over who’s to get Zach. In the end.

  I have a better idea, she says, the tone of her voice calmer, more conciliatory. Why don’t you explain what this means. And I’ll tell you what that is. Then we’ll decide what we want to do.

  Fine, I say. I hear the sound of movement in Katie’s room. Our shouting must have woken her up. But would you mind having this conversation in your room? I tilt my head in the direction of Katie’s door. I’m not exactly keen on others hearing what I have to say. Perhaps you feel the same.

  What I have to say. A tale of two letters. The story she wished to hear all along, but hadn’t known it until now. Vera snatches up the mobile and opens the door to her room. The letter and the phone are pressed protectively to her chest. She never once takes her wary eyes off me. I sit on the windowsill, but she remains standing. Her back is against the door. Within reach of the bronze knob. And escape.

  It’s a suicide note, I explain. This she has understood, but she doesn’t interrupt me now. Now she’s confident that, finally, the truth will out.

  With one important difference, it is identical to the one I turned over to the two police detectives who carried out the investigation into Zach’s death and who, with my permission, gave it to your father.

  From her expression I can tell she is making the connexions, beginning to understand.

  There was a pact. A suicide pact. Zach and I were supposed to die together. What happened was this: when I walked through the doorway of the Exam Schools, shortly after half six on June 15th, Zach was already there, smoking a cigarette, waiting for me.

  THE MORAL AND THE TRAGIC.—In practice, everyday morality rarely ever rises to the level of the tragic. Most moral decisions are as simple as basic arithmetic; just so, failures are not matters of knowledge but of social training. Where genuine moral problems are encountered—that is, what are called tragic dilemmas—it is the nature of the dilemma that none of the possible responses ultimately suffices. Any decision, therefore, made in response to a tragic dilemma, will still be, to some more or less pardonable extent, immoral, and any moral agent, when faced with such a dilemma, no matter how much he deliberates, according to whichever ethical system he favours, will not fail to be responsible for this immorality. Nor, if he is truly a man of conscience, will he fail to be permanently damaged by the outcome of his response, whatever it may be.

  When I walked through the doorway of the Exam Schools, shortly after half six on June 15th, Zach was already there, smoking a cigarette, waiting for me. I didn’t see him at first. On the pavement, a crowd of students had gathered, giddy with excitement, many already drunk. They were waiting for their friends to emerge from the imposing wooden doors—so they could trash them.
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  Trashing was an end-of-the-year Oxford tradition. After one of your mates finished his exams, you were supposed to congratulate him for his hard work by covering him in a mix of celebratory substances, the standard ingredients of which were confetti, Silly String, glitter, and shaving foam, although those who were a bit higher up the social ladder would add a spray of champagne, and those who belonged to the secret societies and private clubs, and whose finances were thus inversely proportional to their scruples, had been known to inundate their friends with buckets of mud, raw eggs, and even pig’s blood, which could be had from the butcher in the Covered Market, before dragging them off to the back room of a posh restaurant or club, where they were rumoured to kindle cigars on rolled-up hundred-pound notes and lay waste to crockery and furniture in states that challenged the biological limits of inebriation. Because townies and tourists frequently found themselves as the collateral damage of these indiscriminate bombing raids, and the sordid antics of the clubs and societies sometimes made headlines in the tabloids, the university tried to put a stop to the practice with fines, paradoxically ensuring that it would be a tradition only the rich, who were in any case the worst offenders, could afford to maintain. But university officials were not the only ones who frowned on trashing. Many students, Claire and Tori among them, also found it insufferable, which is why, I suppose, they hadn’t minded when Zach volunteered to collect me from Prelims, whilst they prepared the flat for an entirely more civilised celebration later in the evening.

  He was standing toward the back of the scrum, one shining patent leather shoe on the kerb and one in the road, the only person there with a serious look on his face. As a visiting student, he wasn’t required to sit exams, but he was dressed subfusc anyway, down to the white carnation in the buttonhole of his lapel. His jacket fit him poorly for once, I thought, before I saw the two large bulges in his pockets and understood the reason for it. When he saw me come through the doors—there was an anticipatory swell of cheering from the crowd which died down as soon as all realised I was not the friend they were waiting for—he let his cigarette fall, stamped it out, and lit another. We greeted each other without a word and began to walk, the soles of our shoes echoing on the pavement.

  Although it was summer, a weather system that had been conceived in the North Atlantic a few days earlier had finally begun to drag its belly over the Thames Valley as it pawed its way toward the continent. The sky was prematurely, unseasonably dark, and the High appeared to be an inverted world, one whose steeples, spires, and towers had not so much sprung up from the horizon as dripped like drops of slate and limestone wax down wicks dangling from somewhere deep within the low-lying clouds. The unstable air, warm and damp and windy, seethed with electricity. Any minute now rain would begin to fall, and I immediately regretted not having asked to borrow Claire’s brolly this morning. Zach, it seemed, had forgotten his at the Bevington Road; actually, as I was later to discover, he had deliberately left it behind in his rooms.

  I found myself falling a pace or two behind him as the two mechanical centurions beneath the clock on the Carfax Tower hammered at their brass bells, and he turned, without looking back to see if I was following him, into Cornmarket. Zach’s stride was always brisk (unless it was I who was walking more slowly than usual, reluctance clutching me by the ankles, dread blowing hard against my face and chest), but this time there was something unusual in it. This time he was all business, his attention single-minded, fixed. He remained quiet, his brows tensed, as if he were pondering something that required every last watt his concentration could spare. It occurred to me that he might be nervous, a feeling that, in turn, communicated itself to me.

  Now and again I lost sight of him. Cornmarket had suddenly become an ant colony of black caps and gowns, in various states of cleanness and dryness, madly to-ing and fro-ing between the doors of the colleges, the Exam Schools, and the pubs. I caught up with him again only as the swarm of students began to thin out on Magdalen Street and we stood, our backs to the stone needle of the Martyrs’ Memorial, as we waited in silence for the light to turn green. Rather than turning up St. Giles’, in order to approach Godstow from Jericho, where we might accidentally run into Tori or Claire taking a last-minute trip to the shops to buy something for the party, Zach continued down Beaumont Street, past the Randolph Hotel and the Ashmolean Museum. We would make our way through the small, less foot-trafficked roads behind the gargantuan neoclassical offices of the university press, until we reached the canal. There we would take the towpath north and walk into Port Meadow.

  The canal was largely empty. The few people we saw were occupied, securing their houseboats in anticipation of the coming storm. No one seemed to pay us any mind, or find it at all odd that two students, in academic dress, were taking a stroll up the river on a rainy night rather than celebrating in one of the city’s hundred pubs. Oxford students were famous, after all, for getting up to strange things this time of year. They would have no doubt assumed that he and I were taking the long way to The Perch or The Trout for a pint or ten. Even had they noticed the bulges in Zach’s jacket pockets—which they almost certainly had not, considering how dark and foggy it had become—they would have never guessed what they were.

  It felt like Zach was leading me back in time. To our right, the husk of the old Eagle Ironworks, a soot-stained redbrick foundry, which had in its prime furnished England with everything from manhole cover and decorative gates to ploughing engines and munitions. It had survived the era of coke and steam and ore, but just barely. The local papers regularly featured articles warning that its new American owners were planning to shutter the factory, clear the site, and develop the wharf into a block of flats.

  Farther on, we crossed a stone footbridge and came at last to the entrance of Port Meadow, a pasture stretching from Jericho to Wolvercote. Port Meadow remained to this day common land, where cattle and horses were allowed by law to graze freely, as they had done under feudalism. Beneath these patches of mud and thistle, which caked the leather of our shoes and caught in the hems of our trousers, archaeologists had unearthed a Neolithic burial site, shards of Roman pottery, Cavalier fortifications from the Civil War, and the scattered rubbish of soldiers closer to us in time, my grandfather among them, who encamped here following the evacuation from Dunkirk.

  Save for the cows, which had taken to their knees, and a gaggle of geese, which glared and honked at us as we passed, we were now completely alone. I looked over my shoulder. Beyond the darkening line of poplars on the edge of the meadow I could no longer see the dreaming spires of the High, where we had come from centuries ago, or so it felt. The only visible structure was the campanile of St. Barnabas Church, on Hart Street, behind the university press, and it was slowly disappearing behind a slow-moving wall of fog.

  I stopped: “This has gone far enough, hasn’t it?” It was the first time either of us had spoken, and the words stuck in my throat, as if they were also lumbering through a muddy field. Zach misheard me, or deliberately misconstrued what I’d said. He pointed off in the distance, beyond the bend in the river. “No. We still have a little farther to go,” he said and continued walking. I hesitated for a moment, not sure whether I ought to follow him. The first drops of rain were falling on my forehead. The poplars began to sway in the intensifying wind. I wiped my glasses dry with the untucked tail of my shirt and took a final look in the direction of the city, wishing I were still there, standing on the steps of the Exam Schools, part of a past that still belonged to me. Zach was now a dozen paces ahead of me; soon I wouldn’t be able to see where he had gone and I’d find myself alone in the large, empty meadow. Reluctantly, I quickened my steps to catch up with him.

  Godstow Abbey, I had read, was built to house nuns of the Benedictine Order and to educate the daughters of the local gentry. Now it lay in ruins. All that remained of it were the south walls of the chapel, a ragged triangle with empty tracery and two long rectangles with tufts of moss and grass peeking out of the gaps
in the uneven stonework. At their base, the walls were slowly being swallowed up by the marshy ground, which sloped downward toward the river. Here called the Isis, the Thames is no more than a stream five metres from bank to bank, so narrow that it’s almost impossible to believe that this little twist of dark green water becomes the river that flows beneath London Bridge and out to the North Sea.

  Zach contemplated the ruins critically for a moment, with the look of a man adjusting his hair in a mirror. According to legend, the place where we were standing was haunted ground. I wondered if he knew it. The mistress of Henry II was poisoned by his jealous queen and buried here. Throughout the Middle Ages, the abbey was a popular shrine and pilgrimage site, until it was destroyed during the dissolution of the monasteries. After the Civil War it was abandoned to the picks of local quarrymen and the pens of minor Romantics, who found in its picturesque setting and melancholy history inspiration for heroic couplets on the subject of illicit love.

  When he was satisfied, Zach sat cross-legged on the top of the slope, his back to the river. His shoes and his trousers were covered in mud. What a shame, I couldn’t help but think, to ruin such a smart suit. He motioned for me to sit opposite him, my back to the abbey walls. “It’s time,” he said, fixing me with a stare. Then he reached into his pockets. He entwined our arms as if we were a wedding couple drinking a glass of champagne before the cutting of the cake. But in our hands he had not placed two flutes, but two pistols, now pointed chest level. I could feel his breath on my face.

  When we were finally in position, he disentangled his arm from mine, shaking his head. “No,” he said. “This isn’t right.”

  My shoulders, which were hunched and tense, frozen until that moment in an uncomfortable shrug, the curve of my clavicles nearly touching the angle of my jaws, relaxed, and I exhaled. My arm, rigid and sore, stopped quivering. I loosened my grip on the handle and lifted my finger from the trigger. So it had been a test after all, only a test, and by stepping with him to the very edge of death, by demonstrating to him and to myself that I was not afraid to look down at an unending drop, or was at least able to overcome my fear of the heights, I had passed. Now all that remained was for him to explain exactly how.