The Zero and the One

by Ryan Ruby

  I interrupted the Inspector’s question with the same explanation I’d given Claire when I arrived at her door. Luckily, his colleague found it as amusing as she had.

  “You’re taking the piss,” he said. He couldn’t help himself. He began to sniff and wheeze with sickly laughter.

  “Constable,” Thompson said crossly, wondering what had possessed his partner to act so unprofessionally. “You’re forgetting yourself.” Leyland went silent. I could see embarrassment, in the form of a red rash, spreading up his grey neck. He looked like he was on the verge of apologising to me. The Inspector lifted himself from the chair and held out his hand. The Constable gave him the notebook. He flipped through the pages, and then closed it, indicating to his partner with a nod that it was time for them to leave. I also stood up and opened the door for them. “One last question,” he said, turning to me, meeting my eyes. “We found your fingerprints all over the typewriter Zachary Foedern used to write his suicide note. Mind explaining that?”

  I looked down at the floor as my lower lip began to tremble. I could feel my chest and throat tighten. I was on the verge of tears as I told them about the poems we had composed on it in Berlin.

  It was shameful carrying on like that in front of the filth. When the Constable, perhaps to make amends for his earlier indiscretion, offered me a packet of tissues, I had to refuse it.

  “We’ll contact you if we have any further questions, Mr. Whiting,” he said as he followed the Inspector out the door.

  “Wait, Inspector!” I called after him. Thompson looked up at me from halfway down the staircase. “How long will I be needed here? I spoke with Mr. Foedern this morning. I was wondering if I’d be allowed to attend the funeral.”

  ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

  It is with profound gratitude that I wish to acknowledge all those without whom the writing and the reading of this book would not have been possible. To my father for trusting me at a young age with dangerous books and to my mother for forcing me to submit and resubmit this one. To Helen Ison and Mairead McKendry for going on the adventure of youth with me and to Anna Durrett at whose address I spent some of its most memorable moments. To Dory Bavarsky, Pepin Gelardi, Peter Schwartz, and Matthew Cahill for giving an only child the experience of brotherhood and indulging a young writer in his aspirations. To Steve Masover, J. W. McCormack, Jane Mikkelson, Rosie Sherman, Natasha Vargas-Cooper, Sophie Lewis, Kate Zambreno, Dave Golden, Eva Jenke, Ben Mauk, Madeleine LaRue, Saskia Vogel, Maria Alexopoulos, and Amanda DeMarco, the writers, critics, scholars, and lovers of literature in whom this book had the good fortune to find not only its earliest readers, but also its ideal readers. To my friend and agent Melissa Flashman who began representing this book long before it was written, and whose hard work, patience, advice, and support are surely without equal in the history of her profession. To my visionary editor Libby Burton for rescuing it from the drawer and for always giving me permission to take it further. To managing editor Kallie Shimek, copyeditor Roland Ottewell, and proofreader Rick Ball for helping me bridge the divides in our common language. And to Lisa, who was there from the first “A” to the last “l,” and to whom this book and its author will always be dedicated.

  ABOUT THE AUTHOR

  RYAN RUBY was born in 1983. His fiction and criticism have appeared in a variety of literary magazines including The Baffler, Conjunctions, Dissent, Lapham’s Quarterly, and n+1. He has translated two novellas from the French for Readux Books. He lives in Berlin.

  Reading Group Guide for The Zero and the One by Ryan Ruby

  Discussion Questions

  1. The first of many epigraphs in the novel reads: “If something happens once, it may as well have never happened at all. Unfortunately, nothing ever happens only once. Everything is repeated, even nothing.” How does this apply to Owen’s actions in the book?

  2. References are made several times within the novel to a mother in Texas who drowned her five children, believing herself to have been instructed to do so by God. Can a comparison be made between this woman and Zach? Between this woman and Owen?

  3. What are all of the ways that characters in the novel use others as stand-ins? Have you ever found yourself using someone in this way, or being so used?

  4. Zach says that emotions and hardships are cowardly motivations for suicide, and that his motivations are different. After learning more about his past, do you believe his rhetoric about the reason for the suicide pact he proposed to Owen? If not, what do you think his motivations actually were?

  5. Is incest necessarily always wrong? Is it the act that is wrong, or the consequences?

  6. How culpable is Owen for Zach’s death?

  7. In her letter to Owen, Claire writes that she is hasn’t been able to grieve Zach’s death because she has had to help Victoria deal with her loss. Have you ever been in a situation where you were unable to express your emotions because you needed to offer support to someone else?

  8. Zach refers to himself as being “singular” and unique, whereas Vera talks about herself and Zach as being two parts of a single person. What do you think accounts for this difference in how the two of them describe themselves?

  9. What about Zach makes him susceptible to the philosophy expressed in Hans Abendroth’s The Zero and the One?

  10. When is the relationship between Zach and Owen most intimate? When the two of them have sex with a prostitute in Berlin? When they compose their suicide notes? When they meet on the bank of the river to go through with their pact? And what does this say about their relationship?

  A Conversation with Ryan Ruby

  Tell us about the origins of The Zero and the One.

  Some writers begin with a character, a plot, or even an image, but because of the way my mind works, I begin with a form. The idea for a way to tell a story comes to me before I know what story I want to tell and what I end up doing is trying to find the story that can be retrofitted into the formal structure I’ve come up with. In the case of manuscript that would become The Zero and the One, I was trying to find a story that I could be told as a “four-handed novel” with my friend and fellow writer JW McCormack.As the name implies, a four-handed novel is a novel written by two people rather than one: one writer writes a chapter, passes it on to the second writer, who elaborates on what has been written, returns it to the first writer, and so on. The idea I hit upon was a story in which a ghost seeks revenge on someone who had wronged him in life, with one writer writing from the perspective of the vengeful ghost and the other writing from the perspective of the person who has wronged him. “Two characters, let’s call them A and B, have engaged in a suicide pact,” I said, thinking aloud while JW listened patiently over coffee. “But A backs out at the last second. The ghost of B haunts A in an attempt to drive him to suicide, in order to finish what they had started.” JW took a sip from his mug and told me he thought it was a terrible idea.

  The reason I remember this is because we had this conversation on Christmas morning, 2011. I was in Knoxville, Tennessee, celebrating the holiday for the first time with JW, his partner Claudia, and his family. In the hour before dinner, when last-minute preparations were increasing the stress levels in the house, JW suggested we take a walk. A block away was a muddy ditch about ten feet deep and a quarter of a mile long that intersected the street and made up the lower boundary of a field that lay behind the houses on JW’s street. At the midpoint of the ditch, JW told us, was a tree house where local kids stole away to have their first kisses and smoke their first cigarettes. We walked slowly through the ditch, which was lined with kudzu and filled with old washing machines and discarded car parts, careful not to get mud on our clothes. By the time we reached the tree house, dusk had fallen and we had to get back for dinner. I observed that it would be quicker and cleaner if we climbed out of the ditch and walked diagonally across the adjacent field, instead of going back the way we had come. Leading the way, I hopped the fence at the other end of the field and found myself in the driveway of one
of JW’s neighbors’ houses, where a young boy, who couldn’t have been more than ten years old, was standing on his porch, pointing a rifle at me. “You there,” he said, in a high-pitched voice. “Don’t you move.” I lifted my hands above my head and tried to make a panicked gesture to JW, who was now helping Claudia over the fence, to tell them they should stay where they were. “Pardon me, sir,” I said with a shaking voice and exaggerated servility. “I’m a guest of your neighbors, the McCormacks. You’re doing a great job protecting your house, sir. I was wondering if you’d let me and my friends JW and Claudia”—who had not understood until they were standing next to me why I had been waving my upraised hands at them—“pass safely through your driveway, sir.” The boy looked at me skeptically. “And what’s yer name?” I told him. “Nah, Ah’m Ryan,” he said. I couldn’t tell whether he was amused by this happy coincidence or wanted me to know which of us our name really belonged to. He pointed the rifle at the end of the driveway and back at us. “Now, git.”

  Several months later, I was in Oxford, visiting my partner, who had recently gotten a job there, and I was looking for a way to join her permanently. A magazine based in Europe had recently announced a novella competition, with a sizable check and paid travel for the winner. I decided that I would try out the idea I had shared with JW and submit the story of the failed suicide pact, starting with the chapters narrated by A, now Owen, the one who had backed out at the last second. But by the time the deadline for the competition had arrived, I was way above the allotted word count and hadn’t even begun writing the chapters from the ghost’s—now called Zach—perspective. The ghost’s chapters would never end up being written, but the final form of The Zero and the One would mirror the original conception as a four-handed novel, alternating not between the perspectives of a living person and a ghost, but between Oxford and New York, the two principal settings. And many of the elements from that Christmas—a stranger far from home, a gun, a muddy field, accented English, class differences, first love and first cigarettes, a dangerous double—would ultimately find their way into the fabric of the finished book.

  What was your process in writing The Zero and the One?

  It would probably an exaggeration to say that The Zero and the One was the result of anything so orderly as a process. Before I started working on it, I already had a few failed manuscripts under my belt, but each project dictates its own rules of composition, every book you want to write teaches you how to write it, in real time, and I’m not sure how much knowledge gets transferred from one project to the next. What writing this book taught me about myself is that I’m not the kind of writer who models his day on other forms of labor: I don’t have a set work space, or a set work time, or a daily word quota I have to hit like some writers do. The Zero and the One was written at cafés, in libraries, in a cabin in the woods, during walks, in a cubicle when I was supposed to be giving office hours, in bed before sleep. It was written on trains, subways, planes, and park benches. It was written at all hours of the day and night. With a pen in a notebook and on cocktail napkins and in the margins of books. On my laptop and on my smart phone. The only constants through out the whole “process” were pharmaceutical: caffeine and nicotine.

  If there was anything I tried to do while I was writing the first draft it was to achieve a state of pure openness and maximum suggestibility. For me, the most difficult thing about writing fiction is overcoming a certain vertiginous sense of arbitrariness. In fiction, unlike philosophy, the principle of sufficient reason does not apply, and the ground for the choices you make in one sentence can be found only in the choices you have made in a previous sentence. You have to create the logic of your book from scratch, which requires, in the beginning, a massive bootstrapping operation. To avoid feeling overwhelmed by Blanchot’s paradoxical idea that writing is, for this very reason, impossible, once I had the premise of the book in mind, I decided to give into arbitrariness and to allow the world dictate the details to me.

  So the book is set in Oxford, New York, and Berlin because that’s where I happened to be at the time of writing. Cypress Hills Cemetery, where Zach is buried, was on the midway point of my commute to work, where I was teaching a course on ancient philosophy, just like Dr. Inwit (whose CV, incidentally,I lifted directly from Pierre Hadot, the French philosopher and historian whose books Philosophy as a Way of Life and The Veil of Isis were important influences on The Zero and the One). People who sold me copies of the Big Issue in Oxford or asked me for change in New York would end up in the story. If I happened to be reading a book I liked that was relevant to one of the emerging themes of the book, I’d simply have one of my characters refer to it or allude to it. I’d treat the graffiti and advertisements I saw on bits of conversation I heard during my walks from café to café as messages directly related to my writing. The effect of this, besides being very useful for composition, is that what starts off as arbitrary begins to strike you as coincidental, then uncanny, and finally preordained.By the time I finished the first draft, I felt that I wasn’t writing my novel so much as living in the conditions of its production, which is probably a better recipe for insanity than it is a process for writing, but there you have it.

  What is your background in philosophy?

  I came to philosophy at the time when I suspect most people do, in adolescence, when the sorts of questions philosophy has historically posed seem at both fresh and urgent. Had you asked me at the time, I would have told you that I wanted to be a poet, but in order to know how to write poetry, I had the intuition that, besides being familiar with the poetic canon, I needed to know how language itself worked. I’m not sure how I came to that conclusion, but I would later learn to recognize this as a properly philosophical (and entirely false) intuition: in order to have practical knowledge one must first have theoretical knowledge. So, when I began to read philosophy, in a truly haphazard and unsystematic way, alongside the existentialists, whose arguments that there is no god, that religious belief is a form of bad faith, and that we’re condemned to be radically free tend to appeal to adolescents, I started to read the philosopher that Timemagazine, of all things, had recently declared to be the most important philosopher of the twentieth century, though I’d never heard of him: Ludwig Wittgenstein, philosopher of language.

  Needless to say, I couldn’t make heads or tails of the Tractatus or the Investigations. But, to paraphrase T.S. Eliot, whom Wittgenstein met through Bertrand Russell, philosophy can communicate before it’s understood. What I didn’t understand intrigued me enough to make Wittgenstein a centerpiece of my study of philosophy at Columbia and Oxford and then at the University of Chicago, where I attempted to marry my interest in Wittgensteinean “ordinary language theory” with political theory. But even as a fledgling academic, my approach remained literary: I was interested in philosophy not as a set of problems, per se, but as a genre of writing that had developed over history. Anyway, I had come to be convinced by Wittgenstein’s argument—echoed later by Richard Rorty, the subject of my master’s thesis—that there were no such things as philosophical problems, only misunderstandings about the way we used language, and that, really, philosophy—considered as a scientific rather than literary enterprise—had little left to do. As Rorty himself put it, Wittgenstein “ended by trying to work out honorable terms on which philosophy might surrender to poetry.” I graduated from Chicago feeling that I had taken a long detour from my original plan and began looking for a way to combine poetry and philosophy in one genre. The obvious choice was the novel.

  Who are the novelists that influenced you in the making of this book?

  I think it’s pretty clear by now that I consider myself a reader, first and foremost. When reading is your greatest pleasure, it’s only natural that you want to imitate what you’ve read and try your hand at writing, and I’m particularly susceptible to influence. In fact, I’d go so far to call myself omni-influenceable and I think it shows:The Zero and the One is a book that wears its literary, phil
osophical, musical, and artistic precedents on its sleeve. At the level of plot, the two books it bears the most obvious resemblance to are Brideshead Revisited and The Talented Mr. Ripley, which are both about outsiders who strike up parasitic, homoerotic friendships with young men from upper-class families. At the level of style, the New York chapters borrow from the disorienting choppy first person present narrative techniques of the nouveau roman, while the Oxford chapters, drenched in nostalgia and dread, are written in a kind of lyricism which I hope reminds readers of prose stylists like Nabokov, Banville, and Marías. Thematically, the book is indebted to, among others, Lacan’s interpretation of Poe’s “The Purloined Letter,” René Girard’s interpretation of Dostoevsky’s The Possessed, and John Irwin’s interpretation of Faulkner’s The Sound and the Fury, all of which are concerned with radical evil and the conscious, philosophicallyjustified violation of taboos like suicide and incest.

  But at an even deeper level than this, the very texture of The Zero and the One is made out of other books and not a single reference or allusion to other writers is without some ramification for the characters and their ability or failure to uncover the mysteries at the heart of the plot. What I hoped to accomplish by this was to allow every sentence to contain the whole of the book in miniature and to operate on many levels simultaneously. This use of allusions and literary motifs is itself a technique that is not original to me, and it is perhaps a sign, if I may say so without sounding too coy, that the author from whom I borrowed it, and who has arguably had the greatest influence on what I think a novel should be and do, is the one who is not once mentioned in the book, nor will he be mentioned here.