Zero K

by Don DeLillo

“Yes, it’s him, it’s me.”

  “Make up your mind,” she whispered.

  I smiled and said that in her presence I tended to be him rather than me. But this is all there was. Her eyes closed and I waited for a time before releasing her hand and leaving the room.

  Ross was walking wall to wall, hands in pockets, not appearing to be deep in thought so much as following the conditioning routine of an innovative fitness system.

  “Yes, it will happen tomorrow,” he said casually.

  “This is not some game that the doctors are playing with Artis.”

  “Or that I’m playing with you.”

  “Tomorrow.”

  “You’ll be alerted early. Be here, this room, first thing, first light.”

  He kept pacing and I sat watching.

  “Is she really at the point where this has to be done now? I know she’s ready for it, eager to test the future. But she thinks, she speaks.”

  “Tremors, spasms, migraines, lesions on the brain, nervous system in collapse.”

  “Sense of humor intact.”

  “There’s nothing left for her on this level. She believes that and so do I.”

  I kept watching him. A new fitness system that stressed the viability of bare feet and hands-in-pockets. I asked him, simply, how many times he’d been here, to the complex, to look and to listen.

  “Five times counting this visit. Twice before with Artis. The experience tightened my idea of myself. I let certain preoccupations fall away. I shrugged them off. I began to think more inwardly.”

  “And Artis.”

  “And Artis, the one who made me understand how the scope and intensity of such an enterprise can become part of someone’s daily life, minute to minute. Wherever I was, wherever I went, or just eating a meal, or trying to get to sleep, this was in my mind, in my skin. People like to say of unique occurrences, implausible situations—people say that no one could make this up. But someone made this up, all of it, and here we are.”

  “Maybe I’m too limited in vision. Inadequate to the experience. All I seem to be doing is relating what I’ve seen and heard in these few days to what I already know. There’s a chain of reverse associations. The cryonic pod, the tube, the capsule, the toll booth, the phone booth, the ticket booth, the shower stall, the sentry box.”

  He said, “You’re forgetting the outhouse.”

  He took his hands out of his pockets and walked faster for a number of minutes and then stopped and stood against the far wall taking exaggerated breaths, loud and deep. He came back to the chair and spoke quietly now.

  “I’ll tell you what’s unsettling.”

  “I’m listening.”

  “Men are supposed to die first. Shouldn’t the man die first? Don’t you have this kind of sixth sense? We feel it within us. We die, they live on. Isn’t this the natural order?”

  “There’s another way to look at it,” I said. “The women die, leaving the men free to kill each other.”

  He seemed to enjoy the remark.

  “Obliging women. Deferring to the needs of their men. Ever-accommodating, self-sacrificing, loving and supporting. Madeline. That was her name, wasn’t it? Your mother?”

  I waited, uneasily.

  “Do you know that she stabbed me once? No, you don’t know this. She never told you. Why would she? She stabbed me in the shoulder with a steak knife. I was at the table eating the steak and she came up behind me and stabbed me in the shoulder. Not a four-star-restaurant steak knife with macho overtones but it hurt like hell anyway. It also made me bleed all over a new shirt. That’s all. Nothing more. I didn’t go to the emergency room, I went to the bathroom, ours, and doctored it pretty well. I didn’t call the cops either. Just a family disagreement although I don’t recall now what the disagreement was. Getting rid of a nice new shirt, that’s what I recall. Maybe she stabbed me because she hated the shirt. Maybe she was getting even with the shirt by stabbing me. These are things in a marriage. Nobody knows what’s in the marriage next door. It’s tough enough figuring out what’s in your own marriage. Where were you at the time? I don’t know, you were beddy-bye, or at summer camp, or walking the dog. Didn’t we have a dog for two weeks? Anyway I made it a point to throw away the steak knife because I didn’t think it would be a suitable utensil for us to use again even if we’d all gathered together and devised scrubbing methods that would render the thing blood-free and germ-free and memory-free. Even if we’d all agreed on the most fastidious methods. You and I and Madeline.”

  There was something I hadn’t realized until now. Ross had shaved his beard.

  “That night we slept in the same bed, as usual, she and I, and said little or nothing, also as usual.”

  His tone of voice in this final remark was softer, somewhat haunted. I wanted to believe that he’d reached another tier of reminiscence, deeper and not so bleak and suggesting an element of regret and loss, and maybe a share of the blame.

  He went back to the wall and began to pace, arms swinging faster and higher, breath coming in regulated bursts. I didn’t know what to do, or say, or where to go. These were his four walls, not mine, and I began to think of the mindless hours, time zones home, the steady murmur of return.

  • • •

  When I was fourteen I developed a limp. I didn’t care if it looked fake. I practiced at home, walking haltingly room to room, tried not to revert to normal stride after I rose from a chair or got out of bed. It was a limp set between quotation marks and I wasn’t sure whether it was intended to make me visible to others or just to myself.

  I used to look at an old photograph of my mother, Madeline in a pleated dress, age fifteen, and I’d feel sad. But she wasn’t ill, she hadn’t died.

  When she was at work I’d take a phone message for her and write down the information, making certain to tell her when she came home. Then I waited for her to return the call. Actively watched and waited. I reminded her once and then again that the lady from the dry cleaner had called and she looked at me with a certain expression, the one that said I am looking at you this way because there is no point wasting words when you can recognize the look and know that it says what should not need to be said. It made me nervous, not the look but the phone call waiting to be returned. Why isn’t she calling back. What is she doing that’s so important that she can’t call back. Time is passing, the sun is setting, the person is waiting, I am waiting.

  I wanted to be bookish and failed. I wanted to steep myself in European literature. There I was in our modest garden apartment, in a nondescript part of Queens, steeping myself in European literature. The word steep was the whole point. Once I decided to steep myself, there was no need to read the work. I tried at times, made an effort but failed. I was technically unsteeped but also ever-intentioned, seeing myself in the chair reading a book even as I sat in the chair watching a movie on TV with French or German subtitles.

  Later, living elsewhere, I visited Madeline fairly often and began to notice that when we ate a meal together she used paper napkins instead of cloth because, understandably, it was only her, just another solitary meal, or only her and me, which came to the same thing, except that after she set out a plate, fork and knife next to the paper napkin she avoided using the napkin, paper or not, keeping it unsmudged, using a facial tissue sticking out of a nearby box, Kleenex Ultra Soft, ultra doux, to wipe her mouth or fingers, or walking over to the roll of paper towels in the rack above the kitchen sink and tearing off a segment of a single towel and wiping her mouth on it and then folding the segment over the smudged part and bringing it to the table to use again, leaving the paper napkin untouched.

  The limp was my faith, my version of flexing muscles or jumping hurdles. After the early days of its separateness, the limp began to feel natural. At school the kids mainly smirked or mimicked. A girl threw a snowball at me but I interpreted this as a playful gesture and responded accordingly, clutching my groin and wagging my tongue. The limp was something to cling to, a circular way to r
ecognize myself, step by step, as the person who was doing this. Define person, I tell myself. Define human, define animal.

  Madeline went to the theater occasionally with a man named Rick Linville, who was short, friendly and beefy. It was clear to me that there was no romance. Aisle seats, that’s what there was. My mother did not like to be hemmed in and required a seat on the aisle. She did not dress for the theater. She stayed plain, always, face, hands, hair, while I tried to find a name for her friend that was suited to his height, weight and personality. Rick Linville was a skinny name. She listened to my alternatives. First names first. Lester, Chester, Karl-Heinz. Toby, Moby. I was reading from a list I’d made at school. Morton, Norton, Rory, Roland. She looked at me and listened.

  Names. Fake names. When I learned the truth about my father’s name, I was on holiday break from a large midwestern college where all the shirts, sweaters, jeans, shorts and skirts of all the students parading from one place to another tended to blend on sunny football Saturdays into a single swath of florid purple-and-gold as we filled the stadium and bounced in our seats and waited to be tracked by the TV cameras so we could rise and wave and yell and after twenty minutes of this I began to regard the plastic smile on my face as a form of self-inflicted wound.

  I didn’t think of the untouched paper napkin as a marginal matter. This was the unseeable texture of a life except that I was seeing it. This is who she was. And as I came to know who she was, seeing it with each visit, my sense of attentiveness deepened. I tended to overinterpret what I saw, yes, but I saw it often and could not help thinking that these small moments were far more telling than they might appear to be, although I wasn’t sure what they told, the paper napkin, the utensils in the cabinet drawer, the way she removes the clean spoon from the drain basket and makes it a point not to place it in the cabinet drawer on top of all the other clean spoons of the same size but beneath the others in order to maintain a chronology, a proper sequence. Most-recently-used spoons, forks and knives at the bottom, next-to-be-used at the top. Utensils in the middle would work their way to the top as those at the top were used and then cleaned and dried and placed at the bottom.

  I wanted to read Gombrowicz in Polish. I didn’t know a word of Polish. I only knew the writer’s name and kept repeating it silently and otherwise. Witold Gombrowicz. I wanted to read him in the original. The phrase appealed to me. Read him in the original. Madeline and I at dinner, there we are, some kind of muggy stew in cereal bowls, I’m fourteen or fifteen and keep repeating the name softly, Gombrowicz, Witold Gombrowicz, seeing it spelled out in my head and saying it, first name and last—how could you not love it—until my mother elevates her gaze from the bowl and delivers a steely whisper, Enough.

  She was adept at knowing what time it was. No wristwatch, no clock in view. I might test her, without warning, when we were taking a walk, she and I, block by block, and she was always able to report the time within a three- or four-minute margin of variation. This was Madeline. She watched the traffic channel with accompanying weather reports. She stared at the newspaper but not necessarily at the news. She watched a bird land on the rail of the small balcony that jutted from the living room and she kept watching, motionless, the bird also watching whatever it was watching, still, sunlit, alert, prepared to flee. She hated the small orange day-glo price stickers on grocery cartons, medicine bottles and tubes of body lotion, a sticker on a peach, unforgivably, and I’d watch her dig her thumbnail under the sticker to remove it, get it out of her sight, but more than that, to adhere to a principle, and sometimes it took minutes before she was able to pry the thing loose, calmly, in fragments, and then roll it in her fingers and toss it in the trash can under the kitchen sink. She and the bird and the way I stood and watched, a sparrow, sometimes a goldfinch, knowing if I moved my hand the bird would fly off the rail and the fact of knowing this, the possibility of my intercession, made me wonder if my mother would even notice that the bird was gone, but all I did was stiffen my posture, invisibly, and wait for something to happen.

  I’d take a phone message from her friend Rick Linville and tell her he’d called and then wait for her to call back. Your theater friend Rick, I’d say, and then recite his phone number, once, twice, three times, out of spite, watching her put the groceries away, methodically, like the forensic preservation of someone’s war-torn remains.

  She cooked sparse meals for us and drank wine rarely—and never, to my knowledge, hard liquor. Sometimes she let me prepare a meal while she issued casual instructions from the kitchen table, where she sat doing work she’d brought home from the office. These were the simple timelines that shaped the day and deepened her presence. I wanted to believe that she was my mother far more compellingly than my father was my father. But he was gone so there was no point matching them up.

  She wanted the paper napkin untouched. She was substituting paper for cloth and then judging the paper to be indistinguishable from cloth. I told myself there would eventually be a lineage, a scheme of direct descent—cloth napkins, paper napkins, paper towels, facial tissues, sneeze tissues, toilet tissues, then down into the garbage for scraps of reusable plastic packaging minus the day-glo price stickers, which she’d already removed and crumpled.

  There was another man whose name she would not tell me. She saw him on Fridays only, twice a month maybe, or only once, and never in my presence, and I imagined a married man, a wanted man, a man with a past, a foreigner in a belted raincoat with straps on the shoulders. This was a cover-up for the uneasiness I felt. I stopped asking questions about the man and then the Fridays ended and I felt better and started asking questions again. I asked whether he wore a belted raincoat with straps on the shoulders. It’s called a trench coat, she said, and there was something final in her voice so I decided to terminate the man in the crash of a small plane off the coast of Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, body unrecovered.

  Certain words seemed to be located in the air ahead of me, within arm’s reach. Bessarabian, penetralia, pellucid, falafel. I saw myself in these words. I saw myself in the limp, in the way I refined and nurtured it. But I killed the limp whenever my father showed up to take me to the Museum of Natural History. This was the estranged husbands’ native terrain and there we were, fathers and sons, wandering among the dinosaurs and the bones of human predecessors.

  She gave me a wristwatch and on my way home from school I kept checking the minute hand, regarding it as a geographical marker, a sort of circumnavigation device indicating certain places I might be approaching somewhere in the northern or southern hemisphere depending on where the minute hand was when I started walking, possibly Cape Town to Tierra del Fuego to Easter Island and then maybe to Tonga. I wasn’t sure whether Tonga was on the semicircular route but the name of the place qualified it for inclusion, along with the name Captain Cook, who sighted Tonga or visited Tonga or sailed back to Britain with a Tongan on board.

  When the marriage died, my mother began working full-time. Same office, same boss, a lawyer who specialized in real estate. She’d studied Portuguese in her two years of college and this was useful because a number of the firm’s clients were Brazilians interested in buying apartments in Manhattan, often for investment purposes. Eventually she began to handle the details of transactions among the seller’s attorney, the mortgage firm and the managing agent. People buying, selling, investing. Father, mother, money.

  I understood years later that the strands of attachment could be put into words. My mother was the loving source, the reliable presence, a firm balance between me and my little felonies of self-perception. She did not press me to be more social or to spend more time on homework. She did not forbid me to watch the sex channel. She said that it was time for me to resume a normal stride. She said that the limp is a heartless perversion of true infirmity. She told me that the pale crescent at the base of the fingernail is called the lunula, the loon-ya-la. She told me that the indentation in skin between the nose and the upper lip is called the philtrum. In the ancien
t Chinese art of face-reading, the philtrum represents such-and-such. She could not remember exactly what.

  I decided that the man she saw on Fridays was probably Brazilian. He was more interesting to me than Rick Linville, who had a name and a shape, but there was always the implicit subject of how the Friday evenings ended, what they said and did together, in English and Portuguese, which I needed to keep nameless and shapeless, and then there was her silence concerning the man himself, and maybe it wasn’t even a man. That’s the other thing I found myself confronting. Maybe it wasn’t even a man. Things that come to mind, out of nowhere or everywhere, who knows, who cares, so what. I took a walk around the corner and watched the senior citizens play tennis on the asphalt court.

  Then came the day and year when I glanced at a magazine on a newsstand in an airport somewhere and there was Ross Lockhart on the cover of Newsweek with two other godheads of world finance. He wore a pinstriped suit and restyled hair and I called Madeline so I could refer to his serial killer’s sideburns. Her neighbor picked up the phone, the woman with the metal cane, the quad cane, and she told me that my mother had suffered a stroke and that I must come home at once.

  In memory the actors are locked in position, unlifelike. Me in a chair with a book or magazine, my mother watching TV without the sound.

  Ordinary moments make the life. This is what she knew to be trustworthy and this is what I learned, eventually, from those years we spent together. No leaps or falls. I inhale the little drizzly details of the past and know who I am. What I failed to know before is clearer now, filtered up through time, an experience belonging to no one else, not remotely, no one, anyone, ever. I watch her use the roller to remove lint from her cloth coat. Define coat, I tell myself. Define time, define space.

  • • •

  “You shaved your beard. Took me a few minutes to notice. I was just getting adjusted to the beard.”

  “There are things I’ve been thinking about.”

  “Okay.”