The Zero and the One

by Ryan Ruby

  She goes to sit at the edge of the bed, as if in a trance, without looking at what is beneath her, and her body, finding too little flat space to support its weight, sinks slowly down to the floor. The mobile falls from her slackened fingers. With her other hand, she presses the letter to her heart.

  During her monologue she had paced the room, slowly, looking everywhere—at the ceiling fan, at the floor, at the photos on the noticeboard on the wall—everywhere but at me. Holding her pearl tightly, I lit cigarette after cigarette with my two free fingers, letting the ends fall out of the open window. As she spoke, I was reminded of the impression I had when Zach explained his last-minute change to the choreography of our pact. The person behind the voice seemed entirely absent from it; her lips were merely the membrane through which her memories had become language, through which they diffused into the audible world. As on that occasion, I listened with fear. This time, though, the fear was so mesmerising I never once interrupted her or asked her to clarify what she had said; not once did I try to refute or cast suspicion on her story. This time my fear wasn’t born of a sudden shock, but rather, from the opposite, from a dawning realisation that the wood from which I had built the bridge I was using to cross from ignorance to knowledge was too rotten and unsound to prevent me from falling into the bottomless space that lay below. Now that the circumference of the circle Vera and I had been drawing together was complete, the absent centre it defined looked nothing like it had when we started.

  Now she turns her neck to the window, to me, to see how I have reacted to what she has said. Black lines are running down her cheeks and her upper lip still glistens, even after she runs her sleeve beneath her nose and inhales deeply. What my own face looks like—whether my mouth is hanging open or my eyes are bulging out—I cannot sense. Her interpretation of my expression is clear enough, though. In a voice scarred by speaking, in words that sound like she swallowed all the forking branches she had spoken of, she asks: Are you disgusted?

  At first I’m unable to speak. Disgusted? No: something else. No: something worse. I feel betrayed. By him. And now by you. By you through him, or by him through you. Impossible to say which is worse. Impossible to sort it all out now. Zach was going to have me die. For what? For love, lowliest of motives. Most carnal, most natural, most pedestrian, most causal of motives. Said so himself! The thing must be done for the right reasons, he’d said. Done for freedom’s sake. And for that alone. That was his theory. His theory. And he betrayed it.

  To think: I believed I was the betrayer. To think: of the guilt I felt for not stopping it in time, for going along with it, for participating in it. To think: of my shame at my cowardice—for not going through with it, for allowing my instinct of self-preservation to overcome my faith in his idea.

  Betrayed and jealous. But of whom? Of which one? As there is only one at whom I can direct my anger, only one who is present to hear the words that are now whirlwinding around my skull, it is she who will have to hear them. I stand from the windowsill and take a step toward the bed, my finger pointed straight at her chest.

  When you were fucking me, you were thinking of him! I shout, finally.

  Owen, she says, with infuriating calmness, as if this were exactly what she expected me to say. She repeats my name in a tender whisper as she gathers up her strength and rises from the floor, leaving the letter there, next to the mobile. Can’t you see? You were doing the exact same thing.

  The pearl is clenched in my sweating palm. With my other hand I make a fist. But at this threat she neither flinches nor cries for help. Instead she steps closer, tilting her chin toward me, a sneer on her lips, as if she were ready, keen even, to martyr herself on my knuckles. My shoulder loosens. My elbow locks. A dull, flat sound reaches my ears as a blast of painful warmth spreads across my fingers and shoots up the nerves of my arm.

  Vera staggers back, back onto the bed, her hands fanned out before her face. Twice, quickly, she dabs her nose and her mouth with the tips of her fingers. There is blood on them, blood on her fingers, blood dripping over her lips, down her chin. Our eyes meet and, for a moment, it is unclear which of us is more astonished that I’d actually done what I had just done. I am on the verge of apologising, of prostrating myself before her, of clutching her knees to beg her forgiveness, but her stunned mouth comes to its senses before mine is able to, and she shrieks—with laughter.

  A cruel laughter, metallic and harsh. A cold laughter, demented in its volume and violence. Hideous laughter that feeds off itself like a feud between delirium and frenzy, miraculously gaining strength as it continues, consuming and convulsing her entire body. Her neck whips from side to side, spotting the bed sheets with blood and saliva, as if she were having a seizure, as if she were possessed. The nails of one hand are sunk into her scalp, the fingers of the other tear at her necklace. Her chest pitches and heaves.

  Vera. Stop. Stop it.

  Yes, I had struck her, a line had been crossed, but rather than putting her in my power, the opposite had occurred. Her indifference to the blow, her knowledge that I had lost any standing to tell her to do anything, to ask anything of her, reduced me to pleading for her mercy. Although she couldn’t know it, to my ears, her laughter was an echo. It reminded me of Zach’s cruel, cold, hideous laughter in the brothel in Berlin. In her laughter I hear, as I heard then in his, the sound of pure contempt, a cracked eruption of disdain that made a mockery of the impotent fury he had provoked in Nadya and she had provoked in me.

  Please, Vera. I’m begging you to stop.

  But I may as well have been begging the laughter itself. With this madness in my ears, it’s impossible to think clearly, the sound drives away all thoughts. All thoughts save one: It has to stop. I clap my palm over her open mouth, the palm with the pearl in it, holding my hand there, over her nose and chin, where the blood is drying brown on her skin. The pearl catches in her throat and immediately cuts her laughter short. She gags involuntarily and tries to sit up, to cough, to dislodge the object by sticking a finger down her throat, but I straddle her and press her back to the bed. Spread out behind her, the sheets ripple like the surface of a river agitated by a thousand slants of falling water.

  I lean toward her, my nose almost touching the back of my hand. I shout: Vera, stop. Stop for fuck’s sake. You’re not listening, are you? I’m telling you to fucking stop.

  Her eyes widen, her dark pupils focus on me, the source of danger. The Vera who had seemed to vanish in laughter becomes recognisable again. She bites at my hand and claws at my face, attempting to free herself from my grip, a shrill whinnying of animal defiance escaping from her nose. With her dwindling strength, she tries to swallow, but her Adam’s apple, like a spent casing that remains lodged in the chamber, will not budge. Her cheeks are turning blue. Now it is she who is begging me to stop, with her wide, terrified eyes, the only means of expression my hands have left her. Her pupils stutter, as if they were asking, Why are you doing this?

  Don’t you see? I whimper, answering the question she could not verbalise. Can’t you see? It’s what Zach would have wanted. Don’t you understand? It’s what he would have wanted…

  On the pale green screen of the mobile on the floor are the three numbers she had dialled before we disappeared into her room to tell each other the truth about ourselves, to reveal the monsters we were to each other, numbers I recognise straight away from countless films and television shows. I press the call button and hold the mobile to my ear. Listening to the ringing, I think of the future that awaits me on the other end of the call. All the people I’ll have to explain myself to. All the people I’ll never be able to explain myself to. My parents. The Foederns. Claire and Victoria. The Master, the Inspector, the Constable, and the press. Barristers. Magistrates. Wardens.

  New York, Nine One One. What is your emergency?

  I’d like to report a murder. One Nine Five Stanton Street, Six C.

  I press the red button.

  On the bed, Vera’s arms are sprawled ba
ck above her head, her unmoving eyes fixed on the slowly spinning ceiling fan. I close the lids with my palm, then curl up next to her, my cheek on her still, silent chest. I fold her limp arm around my waist, close my eyes, and await the arrival of the police.

  FALSE GODS, TRUE BELIEVERS.—Three strategies are available to the believer who has been betrayed by his God. The believer can repudiate the false God, he can redouble his faith in him, or he can fill the void of his absence by attempting to take his place.

  The presence of the two officers in the Master’s rooms made me feel guilty. Not moral guilt, which had been instantaneous upon hearing the gunshot, but legal guilt, potential culpability. To my knowledge I had committed no crime. Although I had failed to report what I knew, a skilful barrister might have argued that I acted in self-defence. But the great advantage of the police is their ability to inspire the belief that you had done, merely by questioning you about it. Perhaps that’s why they’re called the filth, because their suspicion rubs off on you.

  On my way back from my second session with the NHS psychiatrist, I stopped in to the college library, which, except for the librarian at the enquiry desk, was completely empty. I managed to locate the relevant statutes in a volume of the Parliamentary Record. Suicide, I read, had been decriminalised in 1961. Whilst suicide pacts were no longer considered murder, “a person who aids, abets, counsels or procures the suicide of another, or an attempt by another to commit suicide, shall be liable on conviction on indictment to imprisonment for a term not exceeding fourteen years.” Surely that refers to euthanasia, I thought, suddenly feeling rather queasy. At the bottom, the reader was directed to consult various related statutes. I flipped to the text of the Homicide Act of 1957, where, to my horror, in Part 1, Section 4, I read the following: “It shall be manslaughter, and shall not be murder, for a person acting in pursuance of a suicide pact between him and another to kill the other or be a party to the other being killed by a third person.” Consulting the sentencing guidelines did nothing to stop the feeling that the ground was slipping from beneath my feet.

  I entered my staircase and heard the sound of two voices I recognised. The Inspector and the Constable were waiting for me outside my door. Our appointment was not scheduled for another two hours and it was meant to occur at the police station on St. Aldate’s. What were they doing here? What had they found out? I let them in—what else could I do?—resolved to lie my way through as much of their surprise visit as I could.

  Lying was something, once a rarity for me, that I was now becoming quite good at. With the help of some advice Zach had given me on the U-Bahn in Berlin, I was able to recover my calm. Sinking into the paranoia induced by the pills we had ingested and the hash we had smoked, I was convinced that everyone, the polizei included, knew we were on drugs. This is the secret of keeping a secret, he said to me then. You must have absolute confidence that no one will know what you know unless you tell them yourself. These were the words that would help me survive Thompson and Leyland’s interrogation. In order for me to escape punishment for what I had done to Zach, it was clear that I would have to become him, to think as he thought, and speak in his assured voice.

  Inspector Thompson sat in my desk chair; Constable Leyland stood at his side. I was thus forced to sit on my bed, feeling rather disadvantaged by this arrangement. Perhaps that was their intention. According to what the telly had led me to believe is standard police procedure, the Inspector asked me to describe my activities on the night of 15 June, whilst his colleague transcribed my answers into the leather-bound notebook he’d flipped open.

  “That’s three nights ago? The night before I found…” I paused. “His suicide note.”

  They nodded in tandem. “Starting at six in the evening,” said the Inspector.

  “Well, let’s see. At half six I would have just finished Prelims. Which I took at the Exam Schools on the High. Because he was a visiting student, Zach didn’t have to take exams, so he met me outside—”

  “How did he seem to you?” interrupted Constable Leyland.

  “Are you referring to his emotional state? Nothing out of the ordinary so far as I could tell.”

  The Constable flipped through his notebook, looking for a piece of information. “The Head Porter, Richard… Hughes… told us he was wearing a dinner jacket and a gown when he left college. Didn’t that seem a tad strange to you?”

  “Not at all. Why should it have done?”

  “He was dressed subfusc”—he air quoted the term—“even though as you claim he wasn’t taking exams?” At first I flinched at the Constable’s needless scepticism. Then I had to suppress a smile. The Constable was making a complete prat of himself, mistaking his ignorance of the minutiae of college customs for evidence of my untruthfulness.

  I blinked heavily, as if I didn’t understand what he was asking. Then I said, “Ah yes, I see what you mean. No, that wasn’t at all out of character for Zach. Exams were being taken, therefore he was dressed subfusc. He never missed an opportunity to do a thing like that. Anyway, we were supposed to meet up later with Tori and Claire to celebrate.”

  “Tori and Claire?” asked the Inspector.

  “Victoria Harwood and Claire Caldwell. Tori is Zach’s girlfriend. Claire is mine,” I said, emphasising the present tense.

  Constable Leyland wrote down the names in his notebook, then looked at his colleague. Thompson was glaring at him, reproachfully it seemed to me, as if he were upset that this was not information they already had. “We shall have to have a word with Miss Harwood and Miss Caldwell, won’t we?” he said. To which the Constable replied, “Yes, we shall.” In my most helpful voice, I provided them with their college affiliation and their address.

  “So you were supposed to meet up with Miss Harwood and Miss Caldwell,” Thompson continued when Leyland had finished writing. “But you didn’t. Or at least not straight away. Why not?”

  “Zach said there were still things to get for the party before the shops closed. I assumed he meant to collect a few more bottles of champagne. I told him I was hungry and was going to get a bite to eat. And that I’d see him at Tori and Claire’s in a few hours.”

  “And so you went for supper—”

  “For a snack,” I corrected. The Inspector was surprised I’d the gall to interrupt him like that, especially over what he clearly perceived to be an irrelevant distinction. If he was going to speak with Tori and Claire, though, such a difference would amount to a contradiction. I explained that Tori was cooking supper at the flat and I only wanted something to hold me over until then.

  “Right, then. A snack. Where?”

  I told him I’d got something to eat in the Covered Market, but now another problem presented itself to me. I had a missing half hour to account for. “Then I walked over to the White Horse,” I said. “And had a pint. I think I lost track of time, because it wasn’t until round half seven that I made my way to the Bevington Road.”

  “Then you went straight to see Miss Harwood and Miss Caldwell?”

  “Correct. By my estimate I arrived a little after eight.”

  “And Zach never arrived that evening,” the Constable stated. “Didn’t you at least find that rather strange?”

  “I did. We all did, in fact. We sent him texts all night, asking where he’d disappeared to.” Once more, Thompson and Leyland met each other’s glance. As they were in possession of Zach’s mobile with our text messages on it, they could confirm what I said was true. “But Zach never answers his mobile,” I told them. “Still, Tori, Zach’s girlfriend,” I reminded them, “was particularly hurt by it. They’d had a row the previous day. And so we all accepted that this was the reason he never came in the end, although I was suspicious of that, I should have guessed that he was lying to me when we met outside the Exam Schools. But things like that happened all the time with him. With them, I mean. I didn’t even give it another thought until I found the note in my pidge the next morning.”

  Inspector Thompson asked, “
Did Miss Harwood mention what the row was about?”

  “She didn’t. Claire told me about it, in fact, but she didn’t give me any details. I assume it was about their relationship.” I described their row over the Commemoration Ball. “But if you want to know what really happened you’ll have to ask Tori herself.”

  “We certainly shall,” the Constable said. “Now. Richard Hughes claims that when he saw you the next morning you weren’t wearing your dinner jacket.”

  “That’s also true.”

  He began to approach my wardrobe. “Let’s have a look at it, shall we?”

  “I’m terribly sorry, Constable. I’m afraid that’s not going to be possible at the moment.” With one hand on the wardrobe handle, the Constable stopped. With a suspicious look Inspector Thompson asked me for an explanation. “Because it’s at the dry cleaner’s,” I said. “I dropped it off the morning of. The next morning, that is. On my way back to college. Just before I discovered the note.”

  “What for?”

  “Why did I drop it off, you mean? Because it was filthy, of course.” The two officers were naturally interested in this particular detail. Fine, I thought, I’ll give you what you think you want. “Covered in mud, I mean. Specially the trousers.”

  “Mud?” said the Inspector, attempting to feign confusion, or surprise. “You say you walked from the Exam Schools to the Covered Market to Broad Street to the Bevington Road. How would you have managed to get the trousers of your dinner jacket muddy?” It was at that moment I knew for certain what I had suspected since I began answering their questions. They had already found Zach’s body—that much we all knew I knew—but they hadn’t definitively ruled out the possibility of foul play, or even outright homicide, with me as the prime suspect. “Mr. Whiting? How—”