Zero K

by Don DeLillo

  “She was essentially one thing. She was your mother.”

  “Say her name.”

  “Did we ever say each other’s name, she and I?”

  “Say her name.”

  “People who are married to each other as we were, in our uncommon way, which is not so uncommon, do they ever say each other’s name?”

  “Just once. I need to hear you say it.”

  “We had a son. We said his name.”

  “Indulge me. Go ahead. Say it.”

  “Do you remember what you said a minute ago? You can forget your name in this place. People lose their names in a number of ways.”

  “Madeline,” I said. “My mother, Madeline.”

  “Now I remember, yes.”

  He smiled and settled back in an attitude of fake reminiscence, then changed expression, a well-timed maneuver, addressing me sharply.

  “Think about this, what is here and who is here. Think about the end of all the petty misery you’ve been hoarding for years. Think beyond personal experience. Leave it back there. What’s happening in this community is not just a creation of medical science. There are social theorists involved, and biologists, and futurists, and geneticists, and climatologists, and neuroscientists, and psychologists, and ethicists, if that’s the right word.”

  “Where are they?”

  “Some are here permanently, others come and go. There are the numbered levels. All the vital minds. Global English, yes, but other languages as well. Translators when necessary, human and electronic. There are philologists designing an advanced language unique to the Convergence. Word roots, inflections, even gestures. People will learn it and speak it. A language that will enable us to express things we can’t express now, see things we can’t see now, see ourselves and others in ways that unite us, broaden every possibility.”

  He tossed down another dram or two, then held the glass under his nose and sniffed. It was empty, for now.

  “We fully expect that this site we occupy will eventually become the heart of a new metropolis, maybe an independent state, different from any we’ve known. This is what I mean when I call myself a serious man.”

  “With serious money.”

  “Yes, money.”

  “Tons of it.”

  “And other benefactors. Individuals, foundations, corporations, secret funding from various governments by way of their intelligence agencies. This idea is a revelation to smart people in many disciplines. They understand that now is the time. Not just the science and technology but political and even military strategies. Another way to think and live.”

  He poured carefully, an amount he liked to call a fingerbreadth. His glass, then mine.

  “First for Artis, of course. For the woman she is, for what she means to me. Then the leap into total acceptance. The conviction, the principle.”

  Think of it this way, he told me. Think of your life span measured in years and then measured in seconds. Years, eighty years. Sounds okay by current standards. And then seconds, he said. Your life in seconds. What’s the equivalent of eighty years?

  He paused, maybe running the numbers. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades.

  Seconds, he said. Start counting. Your life in seconds. Think of the age of the earth, the geologic eras, oceans appearing and disappearing. Think of the age of the galaxy, the age of the universe. All those billions of years. And us, you and me. We live and die in a flash.

  Seconds, he said. We can measure our time in seconds.

  He wore a blue dress shirt, no tie, top two buttons undone. I played with the idea that the shirt’s color matched one of the hall doors of my recent experience. Maybe I was trying to undermine the discourse, a form of self-defense.

  He took off his glasses and set them down. He looked tired, he looked older. I watched him drink and then pour and I waved off the thrust bottle.

  I said, “If someone had told me all this, weeks ago, this place, these ideas, someone I trust completely, I guess I would have believed it. But I’m here, and it’s all around me, and I have trouble believing it.”

  “You need a good night’s sleep.”

  “Bishkek. Is that it?”

  “And Almaty. But at a considerable distance, both. And to the north somewhere, way up, far up, that’s where the Soviets tested their nuclear bombs.”

  We thought about this.

  “You have to get beyond your experience,” he said. “Beyond your limitations.”

  “I need a window to look out of. That’s my limitation.”

  He raised his glass and waited for me to match the gesture.

  “I took you to the playground, that old ruin of a playground where we were living then. I put you on the swing and I pushed and waited and pushed,” he said. “The swing flew out, the swing came back. I put you on the seesaw. I stood on the other side of the balancing bar and pushed down slowly on my end of the plank. You went up in the air, your hands fastened to the grip. Then I raised the plank at my end and watched you drop down. Up and down. A little faster now. Up and down, up and down. I made sure you held tight to the handgrip. I said, See-saw, see-saw.”

  I paused a moment and then raised my glass, waiting for whatever was next.

  • • •

  I stood before the screen in the long hallway. Nothing but sky at first, then an intimation of threat, treetops leaning, unnatural light. Soon, in seconds, a rotating column of wind, dirt and debris. It began to fill the frame, a staggered funnel, dark and bent, soundless, and then another, down left, in the far distance, rising from the horizon line. This was flat land, view unobstructed, the screen all tornado now, an awed silence that I thought would break into open roar.

  Here was our climate enfolding us. I’d seen many tornadoes on TV news reports and waited for the footage of the rubbled storm path, the aftermath, houses in a shattered line, roofs blown off, siding in collapse.

  It appeared, yes, whole streets leveled, school bus on its side, but also people coming this way, in slow motion, nearly out of the screen and into the hall, carrying what they’d salvaged, a troop of men and women, black and white, in solemn march, and the dead arrayed on ravaged floorboards in front yards. The camera lingered on the bodies. The detailwork of their violent end was hard to watch. But I watched, feeling obligated to something or someone, the victims perhaps, and thinking of myself as lone witness, sworn to the task.

  Now, somewhere else, another town, another time of day, a young woman on a bicycle pedaling past, foreground, oddly comic motion, quick and jittery, one end of the screen to the other, with a mile-wide storm, a vortex, still far off, crawling up out of the seam of earth and sky, and then cut to an obese man lurching down basement steps, ultra-real, families huddled in garages, faces in the dark, and the girl on the bike again, pedaling the other way now, carefree, without urgency, a scene in an old silent movie, she is Buster Keaton in nitwit innocence, and then a reddish flash of light and the thing was right here, touching down massively, sucking up half a house, pure power, truck and barn squarely in the path.

  White screen, while I stood waiting.

  Total wasteland now, a sheared landscape, the image persisting, the silence as well. I stood in place for some minutes, waiting, houses gone, girl on bike gone, nothing, finished, done. The same drained screen.

  I continued to wait, expecting more. I felt a whiskey belch erupting from some deep sac. There was nowhere to go and I had no idea what time it was. My watch was fixed on North American time, eastern standard.

  - 5 -

  I’d seen him once before, here in the food unit, the man in the monk’s cloak. He did not look up when I entered. A meal appeared in a slot near the door and I took the plate, glass and utensils to a table positioned diagonally to his, across a narrow aisle.

  He had a long face and large hands, head narrowing toward the top, hair cropped to the skull, leaving sparse gray stubble. The cloak was the same one he’d been wearing last time, old and wrinkled, purplish, with g
old embellishments. It had no sleeves. What emerged from the cloak were pajama sleeves, striped.

  I examined the food, took a bite and decided to assume that he spoke English.

  “What is this we’re eating?”

  He looked over at my plate, although not at me.

  “It’s called morning plov.”

  I took another bite and tried to associate the taste with the name.

  “Can you tell me what that is?”

  “Carrots and onions, some mutton, some rice.”

  “I see the rice.”

  “Oshi nahor,” he said.

  We ate quietly for a time.

  “What do you do here?”

  “I talk to the dying.”

  “You reassure them.”

  “What do I reassure them of?”

  “The continuation. The reawakening.”

  “Do you believe that?”

  “Don’t you?” I said.

  “I don’t think I want to. I just talk about the end. Calmly, quietly.”

  “But the idea itself. The reason behind this entire venture. You don’t accept it.”

  “I want to die and be finished forever. Don’t you want to die?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “What’s the point of living if we don’t die at the end of it?”

  In his voice I tried to detect origins in some secluded bend of the English language, pitch and tone possibly hedged by time, tradition and other languages.

  “What brought you here?”

  He had to think about this.

  “Maybe something someone said. I just drifted in. I was living in Tashkent during the unrest. Many hundreds dead all through the country. They boil people to death there. The medieval mind. I tend to enter countries in their periods of violent unrest. I was learning to speak Uzbek and helping educate the children of one of the provincial officials. I taught them English word by word and tried to minister to the man’s wife, who had been ill for several years. I performed the functions of a cleric.”

  He took some food, chewed and swallowed. I did the same and waited for him to continue. The food was beginning to taste like what it was, now that he’d identified it for me. Mutton. Morning plov. It seemed he had nothing further to say.

  “And are you a cleric?”

  “I was a member of a post-evangelist group. We were radical breakaways from the world council. We had chapters in seven countries. The number kept changing. Five, seven, four, eight. We met in simple structures that we built ourselves. Mastabas. Inspired by tombs in very ancient Egypt.”

  “Mastabas.”

  “Flat roof, sloped walls, rectangular base.”

  “You met in tombs.”

  “We were fiercely awaiting the year, the day, the moment.”

  “Something would happen.”

  “What would it be? A meteoroid, a solid mass of stone or metal. An asteroid falling from space, two hundred kilometers in diameter. We knew the astrophysics. An object striking the earth.”

  “You wanted it to happen.”

  “We lusted after it. We prayed for it incessantly. It would come from out there, the great expanse of the galaxies, the infinite reach that contains every particle of matter. All the mysteries.”

  “Then it happened.”

  “Things fall into the ocean. Satellites falling out of orbit, space probes, space debris, pieces of space junk, man-made. Always the ocean,” he said. “Then it happened. A thing hits skimmingly.”

  “Chelyabinsk,” I said.

  He let the name dangle. The name itself was a justification. Such events really happen. Those who devote themselves to the occurrence of such events, whatever the scale, whatever the damage, are not dealing in make-believe.

  He said, “Siberia was put there to catch these things.”

  I understood that he did not see the person he was talking to. He had the drifter’s inclination to be impervious to names and faces. These were interchangeable components room to room, country to country. He did not talk so much as narrate. He traced a wavy line, his, and there was usually someone willing to be the random body that he told his stories to.

  “I know there’s a hospice here. Is this where you talk to the dying?”

  “They call it a hospice. They call it a safehold. I don’t know what it is. An escort takes me there every day, down in the numbered levels.”

  He talked about advanced equipment, trained staff. Still, it made him think of twelfth-century Jerusalem, he said, where an order of knights cared for the pilgrims. He imagined at times that he was walking among lepers and plague victims, seeing gaunt faces from old Flemish paintings.

  “I think of the bleedings, purgings and baths administered by the knights, the Templars. People from everywhere, the sick and dying, those who tend to them, those who pray for them.”

  “Then you remember who and where you are.”

  “I remember who I am. I am the hospitaler. Where I am, this has never mattered.”

  Ross had also made a reference to pilgrims. This place may not have been intended as the new Jerusalem but people made long journeys to find a form of higher being here, or at least a scientific process that will keep their body tissue from decomposing.

  “Does your room have a window?”

  “I don’t want a window. What’s on the other side of a window? Pure dumb distraction.”

  “But the room itself, if it’s like my room, the size of it.”

  “The room is a solace, a meditation. I can raise my hand and touch the ceiling.”

  “A monk’s cell, yes. And the cloak. I’m looking at the cloak you’re wearing.”

  “It’s called a scapular.”

  “A monk’s cloak. But so unmonklike. Aren’t such cloaks gray or brown or black or white?”

  “Russian monks, Greek monks.”

  “Okay.”

  “Carthusian monks, Franciscan monks, Tibetan monks. Monks in Japan, monks in the Sinai desert.”

  “Your cloak, this one. Where is it from?”

  “I saw it draped over a chair. I still visualize the scene.”

  “You took it.”

  “The moment I saw it, I knew it was mine. It was predetermined.”

  I could have asked a question or two. Whose chair, which room, what city, which country? But I understood that this would have been an affront to the man’s method of narration.

  “What do you do when you’re not tending to people in their last hours or days?”

  “This is everything I do. I talk to people, I bless them. They ask me to hold their hands, they tell me their lives. Those with strength enough left to talk or to listen.”

  I watched him get to his feet, a taller man than he’d seemed at first glimpse. The cloak was knee-length and his pajama bottoms flapped as he moved toward the door. He wore high-top sneakers, black-and-white. I did not want to regard him as a comic figure. He was clearly not. I felt, in fact, reduced by his presence, his appearance, by what he said, his trail of happenstance. The cloak was a fetish, a serious one, a monk’s scapular, a shaman’s cape, carrying what he believed to be spiritual powers.

  “Is this tea I’m drinking?”

  “Green tea,” he said.

  I waited for a word or phrase in Uzbek.

  • • •

  Artis said, “It was ten or twelve years ago, surgery, right eye. When it was over they gave me a protective eye shield to wear for a limited time. I sat in a chair at home wearing the shield. There was a nurse, Ross had arranged a nurse, unnecessarily. We followed all the guidelines in the instruction sheet. I slept in the chair for an hour and when I woke up I removed the shield and looked around and everything looked different. I was astonished. What was I seeing? I was seeing what is always there. The bed, the windows, the walls, the floor. But the brightness of it, the radiance. The bedspread and pillow cases, the rich color, the depths of color, something from within. Never before, ever,” she said.

  Two of us, sitting as we had the da
y before, and I had to lean in to hear what she was saying. She let time pass before she was ready to continue.

  “I’m aware that when we see something, we are getting only a measure of information, a sense, an inkling of what is really there to see. I don’t know the details or the terminology but I do know that the optic nerve is not telling the full truth. We’re seeing only intimations. The rest is our invention, our way of reconstructing what is actual, if there is any such thing, philosophically, that we can call actual. I know that research is being done here, somewhere in this complex, on future models of human vision. Experiments using robots, lab animals, who knows, people like me.”

  She was looking directly at me now. She made me see myself, briefly, as the person who was standing here being looked at. Fairly tall man with thick webbed hair, prehistoric hair. This was all I could borrow from the deep probe maintained by the woman in the chair.

  She replaced me now with what she’d seen that day.

  “But the sight of it, the familiar room now transformed,” she said. “And the windows, what did I see? A sky of the sheerest wildest blue. I said nothing to the nurse. What would I say? And the rug, my god, Persian was only a pretty word until now. Am I exaggerating when I say there was something in the shapes and colors, the symmetry of the weave, the warmth, the blush, I don’t know what to call it. I became mesmerized by the rug and then by the window frame, white, simply white, but I had never seen white such as this and I was not taking some painkillers that might alter perception, just eyedrops four times a day. A white of enormous depth, white without contrast, I didn’t need contrast, white as it is. Am I sure I’m not overstating, inventing outright? I remember clearly what I thought. I thought, Is this the world as it truly looks? Is this the reality we haven’t learned how to see? This was not an afterthought. Is this the world that animals see? I thought of this in the first few moments, looking out the window, seeing treetops and sky. Is this the world that only animals are capable of seeing? The world that belongs to hawks, to tigers in the wild.”

  She gestured throughout but only barely, a hand sifting repeatedly, sorting through the memories, the images.

  “I sent the nurse home and went to bed early with the shield on my eye. This was one of the guidelines. In the morning I removed the shield and walked around the house and looked out the windows. My vision was improved but only ordinarily so. The experience was gone, the radiance in things. The nurse returned, Ross called from the airport, I followed the guidelines. It was a sunny day and I took a walk. Or the experience hadn’t drifted away and the radiance hadn’t faded—it was all simply re-suppressed. What a word. The way we see and think, what our senses will allow, this had to take precedence. What else could I expect? Am I so extraordinary? I returned to see the doctor a few days later. I tried to tell him what I’d seen. Then I looked at his face and stopped.”