by Don DeLillo
“Things I’ve been struggling with for some time,” he said. “Then it became clear. I understood that there’s something I have to do. It’s the only answer.”
“Okay.”
Ross in the armchair, Jeff on the cushioned bench, two tense men in conversation, and Artis in the bedroom waiting to die.
He said, “I’m going with her.”
Did I know what he meant, instantly, reading it in his face, and then did I pretend to be confused?
“You’re going with her.”
It was necessary for me to repeat those words. Going with her. At some level I understood that my role was to think and speak along conventional lines.
“You mean being with her when they take her down and do what they have to do. You want to monitor the proceedings.”
“Going with her, joining her, sharing it, side by side.”
There was a long wait for one of us to resume speaking. The simple fact of these words, the immense force gathering behind them, turning me inside out.
“I know what you’re saying. But the questions I’m supposed to ask don’t seem to be coming.”
“I’ve been thinking about this for some time.”
“You already said that.”
“I don’t want to lead the life I’ll be leading without her.”
“Isn’t this what everyone feels when someone close, someone intimately attached, is about to die?”
“I can only be the man I am.”
That was nice, with a tinge of helplessness.
Another long silence, Ross looking into space. He is going with her. It denied everything he’d ever said and done. It made a comic strip of his life, or of mine. Was this a bid for redemption, some kind of spiritual deliverance after all the acquisitions, all the wealth he’d managed for others and accumulated for himself, the master market strategist, owner of art collections and island retreats and super-midsize jets. Or was he suffering a brief spell of madness with long-range consequences?
What else?
Could it simply be love? All those unconditional words. Had he earned them, man with a fake name, half husband, missing father. I told myself to stop the rant, the spinning inner grievance. A man of his resources choosing to be a frozen specimen in a capsule in a storage facility twenty years before his natural time.
“Aren’t you the man who lectured me on the shortness of the human life span? Our lives measured in seconds. And now you cut it even shorter, by choice.”
“I’m ending one version of my life to enter another and far more permanent version.”
“In the current version, you have regular health checks, I assume. Of course you do. And what do the doctors say? Is there one doctor, a little gimpy man with bad breath? Did he tell you there’s something potentially serious going on in your body?”
He waved away the idea.
“He sent you for tests, then more tests. Lungs, brain, pancreas.”
He looked at me and said, “One dies, the other has to die. It happens, doesn’t it?”
“You’re a healthy man.”
“Yes.”
“And you’re going with her.”
“Yes.”
I wasn’t finished looking for low motives.
“Tell me this. Have you committed crimes?”
“Crimes.”
“Enormous frauds. Doesn’t this happen all the time in your line of work? Investors get swindled. What else? Enormous sums of money get transferred illegally. What else? I don’t know. But these are reasons, right, for a man to disappear.”
“Stop babbling like a fucking idiot.”
“Stop babbling, okay. But one more idiotic question. Aren’t you supposed to die before they do the freezing?”
“There’s a special unit. Zero K. It’s predicated on the subject’s willingness to make a certain kind of transition to the next level.”
“In other words they help you die. But in this case, your case, the individual is nowhere near the end.”
“One dies, the other has to die.”
Again, silence.
“I’m having a completely unreal experience. I’m looking at you and trying to understand that you’re my father. Is that right? The man I’m looking at is my father.”
“This is unreal to you.”
“The man who is telling me these things is my father. Is that right? And he says he is going with her. ‘I am going with her.’ Is that right?”
“Your father, yes. And you’re my son.”
“No, no. I’m not ready for that. You’re getting ahead of me. I’m doing my best to recognize the fact that you’re my father. I’m not ready to be your son.”
“Maybe you ought to think about it.”
“Give me time. In time I may be able to think about it.”
I had a sense of being outside myself, aware of what I was saying but not saying it so much as simply hearing it.
“Do yourself a favor,” he said. “Listen to what I have to say.”
“I think you’ve been brainwashed. You’re a victim of these surroundings. You’re a member of a cult. Don’t you see it? Simple old-fashioned fanaticism. One question. Where is the charismatic leader?”
“I’ve made provisions for you.”
“Do you understand how this reduces me?”
“The future will be secure. Your choice to accept or reject. You’ll leave here tomorrow knowing this. A car will pick you up at noon. The flight arrangements are made.”
“I’m shamed by this, totally diminished.”
“You’ll be met along the way by a colleague of mine who will provide all the details, all the documents you may need, a secure file, to help you decide what it is you want to do from this day on.”
“My choice.”
“Accept, reject.”
I tried to laugh.
“Is there a time limit?”
“All the time you need. Weeks, months, years.”
He was still looking at me. This is the man who was walking barefoot, wall to wall, arms swinging, ten minutes ago. It made sense now. The prisoner pacing his cell, thinking last thoughts, having second thoughts, wondering if there’s a toilet in the special unit.
“And Artis has known this for how long?”
“When I knew it, she knew it. Once I was certain, I told her.”
“And she said what?”
“Try to understand that she and I share a life. The decision I made only deepens the bond. She said nothing. She simply looked at me in a way I can’t begin to describe. We want to be together.”
I had nothing to say to this. Other subjects eluded me as well except for one detail.
“Those in authority here. They will carry out your wishes.”
“We don’t need to get into that.”
“They will do this for you. Because it’s you. Simple injection, serious criminal act.”
“Let it go,” he said.
“And in return, what? You’ve framed wills and trusts and testaments granting them certain resources and holdings well beyond what you’ve already given them.”
“Finished?”
“Is it outright murder? Is it a form of assisted suicide that’s horribly premature? Or is it a metaphysical crime that needs to be analyzed by philosophers?”
He said, “Enough.”
“Die a while, then live forever.”
I didn’t know what else to say, what to do, where to go. Three, four, five days, however long I’d been here—time compressed, time drawn tight, overlapping time, dayless, nightless, many doors, no windows. I understood of course that this place was located at the far margins of plausibility. He’d said so himself. No one could make this up, he’d said. This was the point, their point, in three dimensions. A literal landmark of implausibility.
“I need a window to look out of. I need to know there’s something out there, out beyond these doors and walls.”
“There’s a window in the spare room next to the bedroom.”
I said, �
��Never mind,” and remained on the bench.
I’d mentioned a window because I assumed there would not be a window. Maybe I wanted one more thing to work against me. Pity the trapped man.
“You thought you knew who your father was. Isn’t this what you meant when you said you felt reduced by this decision?”
“I don’t know what I meant.”
He told me that I hadn’t done anything yet. Hadn’t lived yet. All you do is pass the time, he said. He mentioned my determined drift, week to week, year to year. He wanted to know if this was threatened by what he’d just told me. Job to job, city to city.
“You’re taking too much credit,” I said.
He was peering into my face.
The counter career, he said. The noncareer. Will this have to change now? He called it my little church of noncommitment.
He was getting angrier. Didn’t matter what he said. Words themselves, the momentum of his voice, this was shaping the moment.
“The women you’ve known. Do you get interested in them according to guidelines you’ve entered on your smartphone? Can’t last, won’t last, never last.”
She stabbed him. My mother stabbed this man with a steak knife.
My turn now.
“Going with her. You’re turning Artis into a mirage,” I said. “You’re walking straight into a distortion of light.”
He seemed ready to spring.
I said quietly, “Will you be able to make executive decisions from cold storage? Scrutinize the links between economic growth and equity returns? Firm up the client franchise? Is China still outperforming India?”
He hit me, slammed the heel of his hand off my chest, and it hurt. The bench wobbled under my shifted weight. I got up and walked across the floor to the spare room, where I went directly to the window. Stood and looked. Spare land, skin and bones, distant ridges whose height I could not estimate without a dependable reference. Sky pale and bare, day fading in the west, if it was the west, if it was the sky.
I stepped back gradually and watched the view reduce itself within the limits of the window frame. Then I looked at the window itself, tall and narrow, top-ended by an arch. A lancet window, I thought, recalling the term, and this brought me back to myself, to a diminished perspective, something steadfast, a word with a meaning.
The bed was unmade, clothing scattered, and I understood that this was where my father slept and would sleep again, one more night, tonight, except that he would not sleep. Artis was in the adjoining room and I walked in and paused and then approached the bed. I saw that she was awake. I said nothing and simply leaned forward. Then I waited for her to recognize me.
Moving her lips, three unspoken words.
Come with us.
It was a joke, a last loving joke, but her face showed no sign of a smile.
Ross was back to pacing, wall to wall, more slowly now. He wore his dark glasses, which meant he was now invisible, at least to me. I headed out the door. He did not remind me to be here, this room, first thing, first light.
Love for a woman, yes. But I recalled what the Stenmark twins had said in the stone room, speaking directly to the wealthy benefactors. Take the leap, they said. Live the billionaire’s myth of immortality. And why not now, I thought. What else was there for Ross to acquire? Give the futurists their blood money and they will make it possible for you to live forever.
The pod would be his final shrine of entitlement.
- 9 -
I knocked on a door and waited. I went to the next door and knocked and waited. Then I went down the hall knocking on doors and not waiting. It occurred to me that I’d done this two or three days earlier, or maybe it was two or three years. I walked and knocked and looked back eventually to see if any doors had opened. I imagined a telephone ringing on a desk behind one of the doors, ringer on Lo. I knocked on the door and reached for the doorknob, realizing there was no doorknob. I looked for a fixture on the door that might accommodate the disk on my wristband. I went down the hall and turned the corner and checked every door, knocking first and then searching for a magnetic component. The doors were painted in various pastels. I stood back against the opposite wall, where there were no doors, and scanned the doors that faced me, ten or eleven doors, and saw that none exactly matched another. This was art that belongs to the afterlife. It was art that accompanies last things, simple, dreamlike and delirious. You’re dead, it said. I went down the hall and turned the corner and knocked on the first door.
In my room I tried to think about the matter. Ross could not be the only one here who was ready to enter the chamber well before the body failed. Were these people deranged or were they in the forefront of a new consciousness? I lay on the bed and looked at the ceiling. The father-son exchange should have been more measured considering the nature of the revelation. I’d said foolish and indefensible things. In the morning I would talk to Ross and then remain at his side as he and Artis were taken down.
I slept a while and then went to the food unit. Empty, odorless, Monkless, no food in the slot, late for lunch, early for dinner, but do they observe these conventions?
I didn’t want to go back to my room. Bed, chair, wall, so on, so on, so on.
Come with us, she said.
• • •
Fires were burning onscreen and a fleet of air tankers hung a thick haze of chemicals over the scorched treetops.
Then a single figure walking through a town’s empty streets with homes imploded by heat and flame and lawn ornaments shriveled to a crisp.
Then a satellite image of twin lines of white smoke snaking across a gray landscape.
Elsewhere now people wearing facemasks, hundreds moving at camera level, walking or being carried by others, and was this a disease, a virus, long ranks of slow-moving men and women, and is it something spread by insects or vermin and carried on airborne dust, dead-eyed individuals, in the thousands now, walking at a stricken pace that resembled forever.
Then a woman seated on the roof of her car, head in hands, flames—the fire again—moving down the foothills in the near distance.
Then grass fires sweeping across the flatlands and a herd of bison, silhouetted in bright flame, going at a gallop parallel to barbed-wire fencing and out of the frame.
There was a quick cut to enormous ocean waves approaching and then water surging over seawalls and sets of imagery merging, skillfully edited but hard to absorb, towers shaking, a bridge collapsing, a tremendous close-up view of ash and lava blasting out of an opening in the earth’s crust and I wanted it to last longer, it was right here, just above me, lava, magma, molten rock, but a few seconds later a dried lakebed appeared with one bent tree trunk standing and then back to wildfires in forested land and in open country and sweeping down into town and onto highways.
Then long views of wooded hillsides being swallowed in rolling smoke and a crew of firefighters in helmets and backpacks vanishing up a mountain trail and reappearing in a forest of splintered pines and bared bronze earth.
Then, up close, screen about to burst with flames that jump a stream and appear to spring into the camera and out toward the hallway where I stand watching.
• • •
I walked randomly for a time, seeing a woman open a door and enter whatever kind of space was situated there. I followed a work crew for fifty meters before I detoured into a corridor and went down a long ramp toward a door that had a doorknob. I hesitated, mind blank, and then turned the knob and pushed open the door and walked into earth, air and sky.
Here was a walled garden, trees, shrubs, flowering plants. I stood and looked. The heat was less severe than it had been on the day I’d arrived. This is what I needed, away from the rooms, the halls, the units—a place outside where I might think calmly about what I would see and hear and feel in the scene to come, at first light, when Artis and Ross were taken down. I walked for half a minute along a winding stone path before I realized, dumbly, that this was not a desert oasis but a proper English garden with t
rimmed hedges, shade trees, wild roses climbing a trellis. Something even stranger then, tree bark, blades of grass, every sort of flower—all seemingly coated or enameled, bearing a faint glaze. None of this was natural, all of it unruffled by the breeze that swept across the garden.
Trees and plants were labeled and I read some of the Latin names, which only deepened the mystery or the paradox or the ruse, whatever it was. It was the Stenmark twins, that’s what it was. Carpinus betulus fastigiata, a pyramidal tree, green foliage, narrow trunk that felt clean and smooth to the touch, some kind of plastic or fiberglass, museum quality, and I kept checking labels, could not seem to stop, fragments of Latin sideswiping and intermingling, Helianthus decapetalus, tapered leaves, whorl of bright yellow petals, then a bench in the shadow of a tall oak and a still figure seated there, apparently human, in a loose gray shirt, gray trousers and silver skullcap. He turned my way and nodded, a gesture of permission, and I approached slowly. He was a man of considerable age, lean, with buttery brown skin, a pointed face and slender hands, neck tendons like bridge cables.
“You’re the son,” he said.
“I guess so, yes.”
“I wonder how you managed to avoid the usual safeguards, making your way here.”
“I think my disk malfunctioned. My wrist ornament.”
“Magically,” he said. “And there’s a breeze this evening. Also magical.”
He invited me to share the bench, which resembled a foreshortened church pew. His name was Ben-Ezra and he liked to come out here, he said, and think about the time, many years away, when he would return to the garden and sit on the same bench, reborn, and think about the time when he used to sit here, usually alone, and imagine that very moment.
“Same trees, same ivy.”
“So I expect,” he said.
“Or something completely different.”
“What is here now is what is completely different. This is the lunar afterlife of the planet. Fabricated materials, a survival garden. It has its particular link to a life that is no longer in transit.”
“Doesn’t the garden also suggest a kind of mockery? Or is it a kind of nostalgia?”
“Much too soon for you to shake free of the conventions that you’ve brought here with you.”