Zero K

by Don DeLillo

  She spoke a kind of shadow language, pausing, thinking, trying to remember, and when she came back to this moment, this room, she had to place me, re-situate me, Jeffrey, son of, seated across from her. I was Jeff to everyone but Artis. That extra syllable, in her tender voice, made me self-aware, or aware of a second self, more agreeable and dependable, a man who walks with his shoulders squared, pure fiction.

  “Sometimes in a dark room,” I said, “I will shut my eyes. I walk into the room and shut my eyes. Or, in the bedroom, I wait until I approach the lamp that sits on the bureau next to the bed. Then I shut my eyes. Is this a surrender to the dark? I don’t know what this is. Is this an accommodation? Let the dark dictate the terms of the situation? What is this? Sounds like something a weird kid does. The kid I used to be. But I do it even now. I walk into a dark room and maybe wait a moment and stand in the doorway and then shut my eyes. Am I testing myself by doubling the dark?”

  We were quiet for a time.

  “Things we do and then forget about,” she said.

  “Except that we don’t forget. People like us.”

  I liked saying that. People like us.

  “One of those small divots of personality. This is what Ross says. He says that I’m a foreign country. Small things, then smaller. This has become my state of being.”

  “I make my way toward the bureau in the dark bedroom and try to sense the location of the table lamp and then feel or grope for the lampshade and reach under the lampshade for the on-off thing, the knob, the switch that will turn on the light.”

  “Then you open your eyes.”

  “Or do I? The weird kid might keep them closed.”

  “But only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays,” she said, barely managing to make her way through the familiar strand of days.

  Someone came out of a back room, a woman, gray jumpsuit, dark hair, dark face, businesslike expression. She wore latex gloves and stood in position behind Artis, looking at me.

  Time to leave.

  Artis said weakly, “It is only me, the body in the shower, one person enclosed in plastic watching a drop of water skate down the wet curtain. The moment is there to be forgotten. This seems the ultimate point. It’s a moment never to be thought of except when it’s in the process of unfolding. Maybe this is why it doesn’t seem peculiar. It is only me. I don’t think about it. I simply live within it and then leave it behind. But not forever. Leave it behind except for now, in this particular place, where everything I’ve ever said and done and thought about is near to hand, right here, to be gathered tightly so it doesn’t disappear when I open my eyes to the second life.”

  • • •

  It was called a food unit and this is what it was, a component, a module, four undersized tables and one other person, a man who wore what appeared to be a monk’s cloak. I ate and watched, using stealth glances. He cut his food and chewed it, introspectively. When he stood up to leave, I saw faded blue jeans below the cloak and tennis shoes below the jeans. The food was edible but not always nameable.

  I entered my room by placing the disk on my wristband against the magnetic fixture embedded in the middle panel of the door. The room was small and featureless. It was generic to the point of being a thing with walls. The ceiling was low, the bed was bedlike, the chair was a chair. There were no windows.

  In twenty-four hours, based on the clinical estimate, Artis would be dead, which meant that I would be on my way home while Ross remained for a time to determine firsthand that the series of cryonic actions was proceeding on schedule.

  But I was already feeling trapped. Visitors were not permitted to leave the building and even with nowhere to go out there, among those Precambrian rocks, I felt the effects of this restriction. The room was not equipped with digital connections and my smartphone was brain-dead here. I did stretching exercises to get the blood pumping. I did sit-ups and squat-jumps. I tried to remember the dream of the previous night.

  The room made me feel that I was being absorbed into the essential content of the place. I sat in the chair, eyes closed. I saw myself sitting here. I saw the complex itself from somewhere in the stratosphere, solid welded mass and variously pitched roofs, sun-struck walls.

  I saw the drops of water that Artis had watched, one by one, trickling down the inside of the shower curtain.

  I saw Artis vaguely naked, facing into the spray of water, the image of her eyes closed within the fact of my eyes closed.

  I wanted to get out of the chair, walk out of the room, say goodbye to her and leave. I managed to talk myself up to a standing position and then open the door. But all I did was walk the halls.

  - 4 -

  I walked the halls. The doors here were painted in gradations of muted blue and I tried to name the shades. Sea, sky, butterfly, indigo. All these were wrong and I began to feel more foolish with every step I took and every door I scrutinized. I wanted to see a door open and a person emerge. I wanted to know where I was and what was happening around me. A woman came striding by, briskly, and I resisted an impulse to name her like a color, or examine her for signs of something, clues to something.

  Then the idea hit me. Simple. There was nothing behind the doors. I walked and thought. I speculated. There were areas on certain floors that contained offices. Elsewhere the halls were pure design, the doors simply one element in the overarching scheme, which Ross had described in a general way. I wondered whether this was visionary art, involving colors, forms and local materials, art meant to accompany and surround the hardwired initiative, the core work of scientists, counselors, technicians and medical personnel.

  I liked the idea. It fit the circumstances, it met the standards of unlikelihood, or daring dumb luck, that can mark the most compelling art. All I had to do was knock on a door. Pick a color, pick a door and knock. If no one opens the door, knock on the next door and the next. But I was wary of betraying my father’s trust in bringing me here. Then there were the hidden cameras. There would have to be surveillance of these hallways, with blank faces in hushed rooms scanning the monitors.

  Three people came toward me, one of them a boy in a motorized wheelchair that resembled a toilet. He was nine or ten and watched me all the way. His upper body was tilted severely to one side but his eyes were alert and I wanted to stop and talk to him. The adults made it clear that this was not possible. They flanked the wheelchair and stared straight ahead, into authorized space, stranding me in my pause, my good intentions.

  Soon I was turning a corner and going down a hall with walls painted raw umber, a thick runny pigment meant to resemble mud, I thought. There were matching doors, all doors the same. There was also a recess in the wall and a figure standing there, arms, legs, head, torso, a thing fixed in place. I saw that it was a mannequin, naked, hairless, without facial features, and it was reddish brown, maybe russet or simply rust. There were breasts, it had breasts, and I stopped to study the figure, a molded plastic version of the human body, a jointed model of a woman. I imagined placing a hand on a breast. This seemed required, particularly if you are me. The head was a near oval, arms positioned in a manner that I tried to decipher—self-defense, withdrawal, with one foot set to the rear. The figure was rooted to the floor, not enclosed in protective glass. A hand on a breast, a hand sliding up a thigh. It’s something I would have done once upon a time. Here and now, the cameras in place, the monitors, an alarm mechanism on the body itself—I was sure of this. I stood back and looked. The stillness of the figure, the empty face, the empty hallway, the figure at night, a dummy, in fear, drawing away. I moved farther back and kept on looking.

  Finally I decided that I had to find out whether there was anything behind the doors. I dismissed the possible consequences. I walked down the hall, chose a door and knocked. I waited, went to the next door and knocked. Waited, went to the next door and knocked. I did this six times and told myself one more door and this time the door opened and a man stood there in suit, tie and turban. I looked at him, considering what I m
ight say.

  “I must have the wrong door,” I said.

  He gave me a hard look.

  “They’re all the wrong door,” he said.

  It took me a while to find my father’s office.

  • • •

  Once, when they were still married, my father called my mother a fishwife. This may have been a joke but it sent me to the dictionary to look up the word. Coarse woman, a shrew. I had to look up shrew. A scold, a nag, from Old English for shrewmouse. I had to look up shrewmouse. The book sent me back to shrew, sense 1. A small insectivorous mammal. I had to look up insectivorous. The book said it meant feeding on insects, from Latin insectus, for insect, plus Latin vora, for vorous. I had to look up vorous.

  Three or four years later I was trying to read a lengthy and intense European novel, written in the 1930s, translated from the German, and I came across the word fishwife. It swept me back into the marriage. But when I tried to imagine their life together, mother and father minus me, I came up with nothing, I knew nothing. Ross and Madeline alone, what did they say, what were they like, who were they? All I felt was a shattered space where my father used to be. And here was my mother, sitting across a room, a thin woman in trousers and a gray shirt. When she asked me about the book, I made a gesture of helplessness. The book was a challenge, a secondhand paperback crammed with huge and violent emotions in small crowded type on waterlogged pages. She told me to put it down and pick it up again in three years. But I wanted to read it now, I needed it now, even if I knew I’d never finish. I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books. I liked sitting on our tiny concrete balcony, reading, with a fractional view of the ring of glass and steel where my father worked, amid lower Manhattan’s bridges and towers.

  • • •

  When Ross was not seated behind a desk, he was standing by a window. But there were no windows in this office.

  I said, “And Artis.”

  “Being examined. Soon to be medicated. She spends time, necessarily, in a medicated state. She calls it languid contentment.”

  “I like that.”

  He repeated the phrase. He liked it too. He was in shirtsleeves, wearing his dark glasses, nostalgically called KGBs—polarized, with swoop lenses and variable tint.

  “We had a talk, she and I.”

  “She told me. You’ll see her again, talk again. Tomorrow,” he said.

  “In the meantime. This place.”

  “What about it?”

  “I knew only what little you told me. I was traveling blind. First the car and driver, then the company plane, Boston to New York.”

  “Super-midsize jet.”

  “Two men came aboard. Then New York to London.”

  “Colleagues.”

  “Who said nothing to me. Not that I minded.”

  “And who got off at Gatwick.”

  “I thought it was Heathrow.”

  “It was Gatwick,” he said.

  “Then somebody came aboard and took my passport and brought it back and we were airborne again. I was alone in the cabin. I think I slept. I ate something, I slept, then we landed. I never saw the pilot. I was guessing Frankfurt. Somebody came aboard, took my passport, brought it back. I checked the stamp.”

  “Zurich,” he said.

  “Then three people boarded, man, two women. The older woman smiled at me. I tried to hear what they were saying.”

  “They were speaking Portuguese.”

  He was enjoying this, straight-faced, slumped in the chair, his remarks directed toward the ceiling.

  “They talked but did not eat. I had a snack, or maybe that was later, in the next stage. We landed and they got off and somebody came aboard and led me onto the tarmac to another plane. He was a baldheaded guy about seven feet tall wearing a dark suit and a large silver medallion on a chain around his neck.”

  “You were in Minsk.”

  “Minsk,” I said.

  “Which is in Belarus.”

  “I don’t think anybody stamped my passport. The plane was different from the original.”

  “Rusjet charter.”

  “Smaller, fewer amenities, no other passengers. Belarus,” I said.

  “You flew southeast from there.”

  “I was drowsy, stupefied, half-dead. I’m not sure whether the next stage was stop or nonstop. I’m not sure how many stages in the entire trip. I slept, dreamt, hallucinated.”

  “What were you doing in Boston?”

  “My girlfriend lives there.”

  “You and your girlfriends never seem to live in the same city. Why is that?”

  “It makes time more precious.”

  “Very different here,” he said.

  “I know. I’ve learned this. There is no time.”

  “Or time is so overwhelming that we don’t feel it pass in the same way.”

  “You hide from it.”

  “We defer to it,” he said.

  It was my turn to slump in the chair. I wanted a cigarette. I’d stopped smoking twice and wanted to start and stop again. I envisioned it as a lifelong cycle.

  “Do I ask the question or do I accept the situation passively? I want to know the rules.”

  “What’s the question?”

  “Where are we?” I said.

  He nodded slowly, examining the matter. Then he laughed.

  “The nearest city of any size is across the border, called Bishkek. It’s the capital of Kyrgyzstan. Then there’s Almaty, bigger, more distant, in Kazakhstan. But Almaty is not the capital. It used to be the capital. The capital is now Astana, which has gold skyscrapers and indoor shopping malls where people lounge on sand beaches before plunging into wave pools. Once you know the local names and how to spell them, you’ll feel less detached.”

  “I won’t be here that long.”

  “True,” he said. “But there’s a change in the estimate concerning Artis. They expect it to happen one day later.”

  “I thought the timing was extremely precise.”

  “You don’t have to stay. She’ll understand.”

  “I’ll stay. Of course I’ll stay.”

  “Even under the most detailed guidance, the body tends to influence certain decisions.”

  “Is she dying naturally or is the last breath being induced?”

  “You understand there’s something beyond the last breath. You understand this is only the preface to something larger, to what is next.”

  “It seems very businesslike.”

  “It will be very gentle in fact.”

  “Gentle.”

  “It will be quick, safe and painless.”

  “Safe,” I said.

  “They need it to happen in complete synchronization with the methods they’ve been fine-tuning. Best suited to her body, her illness. She could live weeks longer, yes, but to what end?”

  He was leaning forward now, elbows on the desk.

  I said, “Why here?”

  “There are laboratories and tech centers in two other countries. This is the base, central command.”

  “But why so isolated? Why not Switzerland? Why not a suburb of Houston?”

  “This is what we want, this separation. We have what is needed. Durable energy sources and strong mechanized systems. Blast walls and fortified floors. Structural redundancy. Fire safety. Security patrols, land and air. Elaborate cyberdefense. And so on.”

  Structural redundancy. He liked saying that. He opened a drawer in the desk, then held up a bottle of Irish whiskey. He pointed to a tray that held two glasses and I went across the room to get it. Back at the desk I inspected the glasses, looking for infiltrations of sand and grit.

  “People in offices here. Hidden away. What are they doing?”

  “They’re making the future. A new idea of the future. Different from the others.”

  “And it has to be here.”

  “This is land traveled by nomads for thousands of years. She
epherders in open country. It’s not battered and compacted by history. History is buried here. Thirty years ago Artis worked on a dig somewhere north and east of here, near China. History in burial mounds. We’re outside the limits. We’re forgetting everything we knew.”

  “You can forget your name in this place.”

  He raised his glass and drank. The whiskey was a rare blend, triple distilled, production strictly limited. He’d given me the details years ago.

  “What about the money?”

  “Whose?”

  “Yours. You’re in big, obviously.”

  “I used to think I was a serious man. The work I did, the effort and dedication. Then, later, the time I was able to devote to other matters, to art, educating myself to the ideas and traditions and innovations. Came to love it,” he said. “The work itself, a picture on a wall. Then I got started on rare books. Spent hours and days in libraries, in restricted areas, and it wasn’t a need for acquisition.”

  “You had access denied to others.”

  “But I wasn’t there to acquire. I was there to stand and look, or squat and look. To read the titles on the spines of priceless books in the caged stacks. Artis and I. You and I, once, in New York.”

  I felt the smooth burn of the whiskey going down and closed my eyes for a moment, listening to Ross reciting titles he recalled from libraries in several world capitals.

  “But what’s more serious than money?” I said. “What’s the term? Exposure. What’s your exposure in this project?”

  I spoke without an edge. I said these things quietly, without irony.

  “Once I was educated to the significance of the idea, and the potential behind it, the enormous implications,” he said, “I made a decision that I’ve never second-guessed.”

  “Have you ever second-guessed anything?”

  “My first marriage,” he said.

  I stared into my glass.

  “And who was she?”

  “Good question. Profound question. We had a son but other than that.”

  I didn’t want to look at him.

  “But who was she?”