Zero K

by Don DeLillo

  That was my father. Who was my mother?

  She was Madeline Siebert, originally from a small town in southern Arizona. A cactus on a postage stamp, she called it.

  She drapes her coat on a hanger whose hooked upper part she twists so that it fits over the top of the open closet door. Then she runs the roller over the back of the coat. It’s satisfying for me to watch this, maybe because I can imagine Madeline taking commonplace pleasure in the simple act of draping her coat on a hanger, strategically arranging the coat on a closet door and then removing the accumulated lint with a roller.

  Define lint, I tell myself. Define hanger. Then I try to do it. These occasions stick and hold, among other bent relics of adolescence.

  I returned to the library a few times, regular hours, main floor, tapestry over the mantelpiece, but did not tell my father.

  - 6 -

  There were three men seated cross-legged on mats with nothing but sky behind them. They wore loose-fitting garments, unmatched, and sat with heads bowed, two of them, the other looking straight ahead. Each man held a container at his side, a squat bottle or can. Two of them had candles in simple holders within reach. After a moment they began, in sequence, left to right, seemingly unplanned, to take up the bottles and pour the liquid on chest, arms and legs. Then two of them, eyes closed, advanced to head and face, pouring slowly. The third man, in the middle, put the bottle to his mouth and drank. I watched his face contort, mouth opening reflexively to allow the fumes to escape. Kerosene or gasoline or lamp oil. He emptied the remaining contents on his head and set the bottle down. They all set the bottles down. The first two men held the lighted candles to their shirtfronts and trouser legs and the third man took a book of matches from his breast pocket and finally, after several failed attempts, managed to strike a flame.

  I stepped back from the screen. My face was still twisted in response to the third man’s reaction when the kerosene passed through his gullet and entered his system. The burning men, mouths open, swayed above me. I stepped farther back. They were formless, soundless, screaming.

  I turned and walked down the hall. The images were everywhere around me, those awful seconds, the distress I felt when the man kept striking the match without getting a flame. I wanted him to light the match. It would be unbearable for him, one blackened match-head after another, to sit between his comrades while they burned.

  There was someone standing at the end of the hall, a woman, watching me. Here I was, a lost tourist, unnoticed to this point, a man in retreat from a video screen. The images were still near and pressing but the woman was not looking past me. The screen could have been blank or showing a bare field on a gray day. When I drew near she gestured, faintly, head tilted left, and we turned into a narrow corridor that ended at right angles to another long hall.

  She was small, older than I, forties, in a long dress and pink slippers. I said nothing about the burnings. I would respect the format, say nothing, be ready for anything. We walked step for step along the hall. I glanced at the clinging dress in floral design and the woman’s dark hair wound tight in a ribboned swirl. She was not a mannequin and this was not a film but I had to wonder whether this interval had any more spread and breadth than just another sequestered moment, bordered by closed doors.

  We entered a passageway that dead-ended in what appeared to be a solid surface. My escort recited a series of brief words and this activated a viewing slot in the surface ahead. I took a long step forward and found myself, at an elevated position, staring through the slot at the far wall of a long narrow room.

  An oversized human skull was mounted on a pedestal jutting from the wall. The skull was cracked in places, stained with age, a lurid coppery bronze, a drained gray. The eyeholes were rimmed with jewels and the jagged teeth painted silver.

  Then there was the room itself, austere, with rock-hewn walls and floor. A man and woman were seated at an oak table with scarred surface. No nameplates, no documents littering the table. They were talking, not necessarily to each other, and facing them were nine people in natural scatter on wooden benches, their backs to me.

  I knew the escort would be gone but I corrupted the moment by looking back, like an ordinary person, to check. She was gone, yes, and there was a sliding door about five paces behind me in the process of closing.

  The woman at the table was speaking about great human spectacles, the white-clad faithful in Mecca, the hadj, mass devotion, millions, year after year, and Hindus gathered on the banks of the Ganges, millions, tens of millions, a festival of immortality.

  She looked frail in a long loose tunic and headscarf, speaking softly and precisely, and I tried to determine the geography of her gracefully accented English, her cinnamon skin.

  “Think of the Pope appearing on the balcony above Saint Peter’s Square. Enormous numbers of people assembled to be blessed,” she said, “to be reassured. The Pope is here to bless their future, to reassure them of the spirit life ahead, beyond the last breath.”

  I tried to imagine myself among the countless clenched bodies brought together in awed wonder but could not sustain the notion.

  “What we have here is small, painstaking and private. One by one, now and then, people enter the chamber. In an average day, how many? There is no average day. And there is no posturing here. No warping of the body in remorse, submission, obedience, worship. We do not kiss rings or slippers. There are no prayer rugs.”

  She sat crouched, one hand grasping the other, each considered phrase an emblem of her dedication, so I chose to think.

  “But is there a link to older beliefs and practices? Are we a radical technology that simply renews and extends those swarming traditions of everlasting life?”

  Someone on the benches turned and looked my way. It was my father, giving me a slow and knowing nod. Here they are, he seemed to be saying, two of the people whose ideas and theories determine the shape of this endeavor. The vital minds, as he’d described them earlier. And the others, they had to be benefactors, as Ross was, the support mechanism, the money people, seated in this stone room, on backless benches, here to learn something about the philosophical heart of the Convergence.

  The man began to speak. There was a tone, a ripple somewhere nearby, and his words, in one of the languages of Central Europe, became a smooth digital genderless English.

  “This is the future, this remoteness, this sunken dimension. Solid but also elusive in a way. A set of coordinates mapped from space. And one of our objectives is to establish a consciousness that blends with the environment.”

  He was short and round, high forehead, frizzed hair. He was a blinker, he kept blinking. Talking was an effort and he cranked his hand in rotary motions as he spoke.

  “Do we see ourselves living outside time, outside history?”

  The woman brought us back to earth.

  “Hopes and dreams of the future often fail to account for the complexity, the reality of life as it exists on this planet. We understand that. The hungry, the homeless, the besieged, the warring factions and religions and sects and nations. The crushed economies. The wild surges of weather. Can we be impervious to terrorism? Can we ward off threats of cyberattack? Will we be able to remain truly self-sufficient here?”

  The speakers seemed to be directing their remarks somewhere beyond the assembled group. I assumed that there were recording devices, sound and image, outside my range of vision, and that this discussion was intended primarily for the archives.

  I also assumed that my presence was meant to be known only to father and son and to the escort with the swirled hair.

  They were talking about the end, everybody’s end. The woman was looking down now, speaking into the rough wood of the table. I imagined that she was a person who fasted periodically, days without food, sips of water only. I imagined that she’d spent early time in Britain and the U.S., enveloped in her studies, learning how to withdraw, how to conceal herself.

  “We are at the mercy of our star,” she said.


  The sun is an unknown entity. They spoke of solar storms, flares and superflares, coronal mass ejections. The man tried to find adequate metaphors. He cranked his hand in odd synchrony with his references to earth orbit. I watched the woman, bowed down, silent for a time in the setting of billions of years, our vulnerable earth, the comets, asteroids, random strikes, the past extinctions, the current loss of species.

  “Catastrophe is our bedtime story.”

  Blinking man beginning to enjoy himself, I thought.

  “To some extent we are here in this location to design a response to whatever eventual calamity may strike the planet. Are we simulating the end in order to study it, possibly to survive it? Are we adjusting the future, moving it into our immediate time frame? At some point in the future, death will become unacceptable even as the life of the planet becomes more fragile.”

  I saw him at home, head of the table, family dinner, overfurnished room in an old movie. He was a professor, I thought, who’d abandoned the university to pursue the challenge of ideas in this sunken dimension as he’d called it.

  “Catastrophe is built into the early brain.”

  I decided to give him a name. I would give them names, both of them, just for the hell of it, and to stay involved, expand the tenuous role of the concealed man, the surreptitious witness.

  “It’s an escape from our personal mortality. Catastrophe. It overwhelms what is weak and fearful in our bodies and minds. We face the end but not alone. We lose ourselves in the core of the storm.”

  I listened carefully to what he was saying. Nicely translated but I didn’t believe a word of it. It was a kind of wishful poetry. It didn’t apply to real people, real fear. Or was I being small-minded, too limited in perspective?

  “We are here to learn the power of solitude. We are here to reconsider everything about life’s end. And we will emerge in cyberhuman form into a universe that will speak to us in a very different way.”

  I thought of several names and rejected them. Then I came up with Szabo. I didn’t know if this name was a product of his country of origin but it didn’t matter. There were no countries of origin here. I liked the name. It suited his bulging body. Miklos Szabo. It had an earthy savor that contrasted nicely with the programmed voice in translation.

  I studied the woman as she spoke. She spoke to no one. She spoke into free space. She needed one name only. No family name, no family, no strong involvements, no hobbies, no particular place she was obliged to return to, no reason not to be here.

  The headscarf was her flag of independence.

  “Solitude, yes. Think of being alone and frozen in the crypt, the capsule. Will new technologies allow the brain to function at the level of identity? This is what you may have to confront. The conscious mind. Solitude in extremis. Alone. Think of the word itself. Middle English. All one. You cast off the person. The person is the mask, the created character in the medley of dramas that constitute your life. The mask drops away and the person becomes you in its truest meaning. All one. The self. What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others?”

  Artis has spoken about being artificially herself. Was this the character, the half fiction who would soon be transformed, or reduced, or intensified, becoming pure self, suspended in ice? I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted to think about a name for the woman.

  She spoke, with pauses, about the nature of time. What happens to the idea of continuum—past, present, future—in the cryonic chamber? Will you understand days, years and minutes? Will this faculty diminish and die? How human are you without your sense of time? More human than ever? Or do you become fetal, an unborn thing?

  She looked at Miklos Szabo, the Old World professor, and I imagined him in a three-piece suit, someone from the 1930s, a renowned philosopher having an illicit romance with a woman named Magda.

  “Time is too difficult,” he said.

  This made me smile. I stood hunched at the viewing slot, which was situated just below eye level, and found myself looking again at the skull across the room, an artifact of the region and possible object of plunder and the last thing I might have expected to find in this environment of scientific approaches to life’s end. It was about five times the size of an ordinary human skull and it wore a headpiece, which I hadn’t fully registered earlier. This was an imposing skullcap in the shape of many tiny birds, set flat to the skull, a golden flock, wingtips connected.

  It looked real, the cranium of a giant, blunt in its deathliness, disconcerting in its craftwork, its silvery grin, a folk art too sardonic to be affecting. I imagined the room empty of people and furniture, rock-walled, stone-cold, and maybe the skull seemed right at home.

  Two men entered the room, tall and fair-skinned, twins, in old workpants and matching gray T-shirts. They stood one to either side of the table and spoke without introduction, each yielding to the other in flawless transition.

  “This is the first split second of the first cosmic year. We are becoming citizens of the universe.”

  “There are questions of course.”

  “Once we master life extension and approach the possibility of becoming ever renewable, what happens to our energies, our aspirations?”

  “The social institutions we’ve built.”

  “Are we designing a future culture of lethargy and self-indulgence?”

  “Isn’t death a blessing? Doesn’t it define the value of our lives, minute to minute, year to year?”

  “Many other questions.”

  “Isn’t it sufficient to live a little longer through advanced technology? Do we need to go on and on and on?”

  “Why subvert innovative science with sloppy human excess?”

  “Does literal immortality compress our enduring artforms and cultural wonders into nothingness?”

  “What will poets write about?”

  “What happens to history? What happens to money? What happens to God?”

  “Many other questions.”

  “Aren’t we easing the way toward uncontrollable levels of population, environmental stress?”

  “Too many living bodies, too little space.”

  “Won’t we become a planet of the old and stooped, tens of billions with toothless grins?”

  “What about those who die? The others. There will always be others. Why should some keep living while others die?”

  “Half the world is redoing its kitchens, the other half is starving.”

  “Do we want to believe that every condition afflicting the mind and body will be curable in the context of our boundless longevity?”

  “Many other questions.”

  “The defining element of life is that it ends.”

  “Nature wants to kill us off in order to return to its untouched and uncorrupted form.”

  “What good are we if we live forever?”

  “What ultimate truth will we confront?”

  “Isn’t the sting of our eventual dying what makes us precious to the people in our lives?”

  “Many other questions.”

  “What does it mean to die?”

  “Where are the dead?”

  “When do you stop being who you are?”

  “Many other questions.”

  “What happens to war?”

  “Will this development mark the end of war or a new level of widespread conflict?”

  “With individual death no longer inevitable, what will happen to the lurking idea of nuclear destruction?”

  “Will all traditional limits begin to disappear?”

  “Will the missiles talk themselves out of the launchers?”

  “Does technology have a death wish?”

  “Many other questions.”

  “But we reject these questions. They miss the point of our endeavor. We want to stretch the boundaries of what it means to be human—stretch and the
n surpass. We want to do whatever we are capable of doing in order to alter human thought and bend the energies of civilization.”

  They spoke in this manner for a time. They weren’t scientists or social theorists. What were they? They were adventurers of a kind that I could not quite identify.

  “We have remade this wasteland, this secluded desert shit-hole, in order to separate ourselves from reasonableness, from this burden of what is called responsible thinking.”

  “Here, today, in this room, we are speaking into the future, to those who may judge us as brave or quaint or foolish.”

  “Consider two possibilities.”

  “We wanted to rewrite the future, all our futures, and ended with a single empty page.”

  “Or—we were among those few who altered all life on the planet, for all time to come.”

  I named them the Stenmark twins. They were the Stenmark twins. Jan and Lars, or Nils and Sven.

  “The dormants in their capsules, their pods. Those now and those to come.”

  “Are they actually dead? Can we call them dead?”

  “Death is a cultural artifact, not a strict determination of what is humanly inevitable.”

  “And are they who they were before they entered the chamber?”

  “We will colonize their bodies with nanobots.”

  “Refresh their organs, regenerate their systems.”

  “Embryonic stem cells.”

  “Enzymes, proteins, nucleotides.”

  “They will be subjects for us to study, toys for us to play with.”

  Sven leaned toward his audience, carrying this last phrase with him, and there was a ripple of amused response from the benefactors.

  “Nano-units implanted in the suitable receptors of the brain. Russian novels, the films of Bergman, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky. Classic works of art. Children reciting nursery rhymes in many languages. The propositions of Wittgenstein, an audiotext of logic and philosophy. Family photographs and videos, the pornography of your choice. In the capsule you dream of old lovers and listen to Bach, to Billie Holiday. You study the intertwined structures of music and mathematics. You reread the plays of Ibsen, revisit the rivers and streams of sentences in Hemingway.”