by Don DeLillo
“And Ross, what about him?”
“Ross was quick to gain a secure understanding.”
“And now here I am, faced with the death of a woman I admire and the rashly premature death of the man she loves, who happens to be my father. And what am I doing? I’m sitting on a bench in an English garden in the middle of a desert waste.”
“We have not encouraged his plan.”
“But you will allow him to do it. You will allow your team to do it.”
“People who spend time here find out eventually who they are. Not through consultation with others but through self-examination, self-revelation. A tract of lost land, a sense of wilderness that is overwhelming. These rooms and halls, a stillness, a state of waiting. Aren’t all of us here waiting for something to happen? Something elsewhere that will further define our purpose here. And something far more intimate as well. Waiting to enter the chamber, waiting to learn what we will confront there. A few of those waiting are fairly healthy, yes, very few, but they’ve chosen to surrender what is left of their current lives to discover a radical level of self-renewal.”
“Ross has always been a master of life expectancy,” I said. “Then, here, now, in the past three or four days, I’m seeing the man disintegrate.”
“Another state of waiting. Waiting to decide finally. He has the rest of this day and a long sleepless night in which to think more deeply into the matter. And if he needs more time, this will be arranged.”
“But in simple human terms, the man believes that he can’t live without the woman.”
“Then you are the one to tell him that what remains is worth a change of mind and heart.”
“What is it that remains? Investment strategies?”
“The son remains.”
“That won’t work,” I said.
“The son and what he might do to keep the father intact in the big bad world.”
His voice had a slight lilt that he tended to accompany with a sway of index and middle fingers. I confronted the impulse to guess the man’s background or to invent it. The name Ben-Ezra was itself an invention, so I decided. The name suited the man, suggesting a composite of biblical and futuristic themes, and here we were in his post-apocalyptic garden. I was sorry he’d told me his name, sorry he’d named himself before I could do it for him.
He wasn’t done with fathers and sons.
“Allow the man the dignity of his choice. Forget his money. He has a life outside the limits of your experience. Grant him the right to his sorrow.”
“His sorrow, yes. His choice, no. And the fact that this is allowable here, this is part of the program.”
“Here and elsewhere, years to come, not uncommon.”
We sat for a time without speaking. He wore dark slippers with tiny bright markings on each instep. I began to ask questions about the Convergence. He gave no direct responses but remarked along the way that the community was still growing, positions to be filled, construction projects to be initiated, subsurface. The airstrip, however, would remain a simple component, without expansion or modernization.
He said, “Isolation is not a drawback to those who understand that isolation is the point.”
I tried to imagine him in ordinary surroundings, in the rear seat of a car moving slowly through crowded streets or at the head of a dinner table in his home on a hilltop above the crowded streets, but the idea carried no conviction. I could see him nowhere but here, on this bench, in the context of an immense emptiness outside the garden walls. He was indigenous. Isolation was the point.
“We understand that the idea of life extension will generate methods that attempt to improve upon the freezing of human bodies. To re-engineer the aging process, to reverse the biochemistry of progressive diseases. We fully expect to be in the forefront of any genuine innovation. Our tech centers in Europe are examining strategies for change. Ideas adaptable to our format. We’re getting ahead of ourselves. This is where we want to be.”
Did such a man have a family? Did he brush his teeth, see a dentist when he had a toothache? Could I even try to imagine his life? Someone else’s life. Not even a minute. Even a minute is unimaginable. Physical, mental, spiritual. Not even the merest second. Too much is pledged into his compact frame.
I told myself to calm down.
He said, “How fragile we are. Isn’t it true? Everyone everywhere on this earth.”
I listened to him speak about the hundreds of millions of people into the future billions who are struggling to find something to eat not once or twice a day but all day every day. He spoke in detail about food systems, weather systems, the loss of forests, the spread of drought, the massive die-offs of birds and ocean life, the levels of carbon dioxide, the lack of drinking water, the waves of virus that envelop broad geographies.
These elements of planetary woe were a natural component of the thinking here but there was no trace of rote recitation. He knew about these matters, he’d studied them, witnessed some aspects of them, dreamt about them. And he spoke in a subdued tone that carried an eloquence I could not help admiring.
Then there was biological warfare with its variant forms of mass extinction. Toxins, agents, replicating entities. And the refugees everywhere, victims of war in great numbers, living in makeshift shelters, unable to return to their crushed cities and towns, dying at sea when their rescue vessels capsize.
He was looking at me, probing for something.
“Don’t you see and feel these things more acutely than you used to? The perils and warnings? Something gathering, no matter how safe you may feel in your wearable technology. All the voice commands and hyper-connections that allow you to become disembodied.”
I told him that what was gathering could well be a kind of psychological pandemic. The fearful perception that tends toward wishfulness. Something people want and need from time to time, purely atmospheric.
I liked that. Purely atmospheric.
He looked at me even more searchingly now, either considering the remark too witless to address or interpreting what I said as a gesture toward social convention, obligatory under the circumstances.
“Atmospheric, yes. One minute, calm prevails. Then there’s a light in the sky and a sonic boom and a shock wave—and a Russian city enters a compressed reality that would be mystifying if it weren’t so abruptly real. This is nature’s thrust, its command over our efforts, our foresight, every ingenuity we can summon to protect ourselves. The meteor. Chelyabinsk.”
He smiled at me.
“Say it. Go ahead. Chelyabinsk,” he said. “Not so very far from here. Quite near in fact, if anything can be called near in this part of the world. People rush from room to room collecting valuable documents. They prepare to go somewhere that’s safe. They put their cats and dogs in carriers.”
He stopped and thought.
“We reverse the text here, we read the news backwards. From death to life,” he said. “Our devices enter the body dynamically and become the refurbished parts and pathways we need in order to live again.”
“Is the desert where miracles happen? Are we here to repeat the ancient pieties and superstitions?”
It amused him to hear that I was not inclined to yield.
“Such a quaint response to ideas that attempt to confront a decimated future. Try to understand. This is all happening in the future. This future, this instant. If you can’t absorb this idea, best go home now.”
I wondered whether Ross had asked this man to speak to me, enlighten me, expertly, reassuringly. Was I interested in what he had to say? I found myself thinking of the dire night ahead and the morning to come.
“We share a feeling here, a perception. We think of ourselves as transrational. The location itself, the structure itself, the science that bends all previous belief. The testing of human viability.”
He paused here to remove a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and blow his nose, unconditionally, with follow-up swipes and blots, and this made me feel better. Real life, bo
dy functions. I waited for him to finish what he was saying.
“Those of us who are here don’t belong anywhere else. We’ve fallen out of history. We’ve abandoned who we were and where we were in order to be here.”
He inspected the handkerchief and folded it carefully. It took him a moment to ease the small square into his pocket.
“And where is here?” he said. “Untapped reserves of rare minerals and the rolling thunder of oil money and repressive states and human rights violations and bribable officials. Minimal contact. Detachment. Disinfestation.”
I wanted to interpret the marks imprinted on his slippers. These might be a clue to the man’s cultural lineage. I got nowhere with this, feeling the breeze begin to stiffen and hearing the voice once more.
“The site is fixed. We are not in a zone susceptible to earthquakes or to minor swarms but there are seismic countermeasures in every detail of the structure, with every conceivable safeguard against systems failure. Artis will be safe, and Ross if he chooses to accompany her. The site is fixed, we are fixed.”
Ben-Ezra. I needed to think about his real name, his birth name. I needed a form of self-defense, a way to creep insidiously into his life. I’d want to give him a cane to complete the picture, a walking stick, rock maple, man on the bench, both hands resting on the curved handle, shaft perpendicular to the ground, blunt end between his feet.
“Those who eventually emerge from the capsules will be ahistorical humans. They will be free of the flatlines of the past, the attenuated minute and hour.”
“And they will speak a new language, according to Ross.”
“A language isolate, beyond all affiliation with other languages,” he said. “To be taught to some, implanted in others, those already in cryopreservation.”
A system that will offer new meanings, entire new levels of perception.
It will expand our reality, deepen the reach of our intellect.
It will remake us, he said.
We will know ourselves as never before, blood, brain and skin.
We will approximate the logic and beauty of pure mathematics in everyday speech.
No similes, metaphors, analogies.
A language that will not shrink from whatever forms of objective truth we have never before experienced.
He talked, I listened, the subject beginning to approach new magnitudes.
The universe, what it was, what it is, where it is going.
The expanding, accelerating, infinitely evolving universe, so filled with life, with worlds upon never-ending worlds, he said.
The universe, the multiverse, so many cosmic infinities that the idea of repeatability becomes unavoidable.
The idea of two individuals sitting on a bench in a desert garden having the conversation we are having, you and I, word for word, except that they are different individuals, in a different garden, millions of light-years from here—this is an inescapable fact.
Was this the case of an old man getting carried away or was it the younger man’s attempt to resist slick ironies that mattered?
Either way I began to think of him as a crackpot sage.
“It’s only human to want to know more, and then more, and then more,” I said. “But it’s also true that what we don’t know is what makes us human. And there’s no end to not knowing.”
“Go on.”
“And no end to not living forever.”
“Go on,” he said.
“If someone or something has no beginning, then I can believe that he, she or it has no end. But if you’re born or hatched or sprouted, then your days are already numbered.”
He thought for a moment.
“ ‘It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man to tell him that he is at the end of his nature, or that there is no further state to come.’ ”
I waited.
“Seventeenth century,” he said. “Sir Thomas Browne.”
I waited some more. But that was all. Seventeenth century. He left it up to me to reckon our progress since then.
True wind blowing now, garden unstirred, the eerie stillness of flowers, grass and leaves that resist the perceptible rush of air. But the scene is not blandly static. There is tone and color, shimmer everywhere, sun beginning to sink, trees alight in the span of waning day.
“You sit alone in a quiet room at home and you listen carefully. What is it you hear? Not traffic in the street, not voices or rain or someone’s radio,” he said. “You hear something but what? It’s not room tone or ambient sound. It’s something that may change as your listening deepens, second after second, and the sound is growing louder now—not louder but somehow wider, sustaining itself, encircling itself. What is it? The mind, the life itself, your life? Or is it the world, not the material mass, land and sea, but what inhabits the world, the flood of human existence. The world hum. Do you hear it, yourself, ever?”
I could not invent a name for him. I could not imagine him as a younger man. He was born old. He has lived his life on this bench. He is a permanent part of the bench, Ben-Ezra, slippers, skullcap, long spidery fingers, a body at rest in a spun-glass garden.
• • •
I left him there and began to wander out past the flowerbeds, on a dirt path now, pushing through a gated part of the garden wall into deeper stands of counterfeit trees. Then something stopped me cold, a figure standing in scant light, nearly inseparable from the trees, face and body scorched brown, arms crossed on chest, fists clenched, and even when I knew that I was staring at a mannequin, I remained in place, rooted as the figure itself.
It scared me, a thing without features, naked, sexless, no longer a dummy dress-form but a sentinel, posing forbiddingly. This was different from the mannequin I’d seen in an empty hallway. There was a tension in this encounter and I walked on warily and saw several others, half hidden in the trees. I didn’t look at them so much as watch them, scrutinize them nervously. Their stillness seemed willed. They stood with arms crossed or arms at sides or arms thrust forward, one of them armless, one of them headless, strong dumbstruck objects that belonged here, painted in dark washes.
In a small clearing there was a structure jutting upward at a slant from ground level, a rooflike projection above an entranceway. I walked down eight or nine steps into a vaulted interior, a crypt, dimly lit, dank, all cracked gray stone, with recesses in the walls where bodies were placed, half bodies, mannequins as preserved corpses, head to waist in shabby hooded garments, each to its niche.
I stood there and tried to absorb what I was seeing. I searched for the word. There was a word I wanted, not crypt or grotto, and in the meantime all I could do was look intently and try to accumulate the details. These mannequins had features, all worn down, eroded, eyes, nose, mouth, ruined faces every one, ash gray, and shriveled hands, barely intact. There were roughly twenty such figures and a few that were full-bodied, standing, in old gray shredded robes, heads bowed. I walked along, bodies on both sides of me, and the sight was overwhelming, and the place itself, the word itself—the word was catacomb.
These figures, these desert saints, mummified, desiccated in their underground burial chamber, the claustrophobic power of the scene, the faint stink of rot. I was breathless for a moment. Could I avoid interpreting the figures as an ancestral version of the upright men and women in their cryonic capsules, actual humans on the verge of immortality? I didn’t want interpretation. I wanted to see and feel what was here, even if I was unequal to the experience as it folded over me.
How could it be that mannequins had this effect, deeper even than the sight of embalmed human beings centuries old in a church or monastery? I’d never been to such a site, to a charnel house in Italy or France, but I could not imagine a stronger response. What was I seeing in this hole in the ground? Not sculpted marble or a delicate strip of pinewood hand-carved with a chisel and highlighted in gold leaf. These were pieces of plastic, synthetic compounds draped in dead men’s hoods and robes, and they brought a faint yearnin
g to the scene, the illusion of humanoid aspiration. But I was interpreting again, wasn’t I? Feeling hungry and weak and so scraped raw by the day’s events that I expected statues to speak.
Farther along, beyond the two rows of bodies, there was a floating white light and I needed to put a hand to my face when I drew near, deflecting the glare. Here were figures submerged in a pit, mannequins in convoluted mass, naked, arms jutting, heads horribly twisted, bare skulls, an entanglement of tumbled forms with jointed limbs and bodies, neutered humans, men and women stripped of identity, faces blank except for one unpigmented figure, albino, staring at me, pink eyes flashing.
• • •
In the food unit I put my face nearly into the plate and chewed the last few bites of dinner. All the food units throughout the complex, one person in each, stacked in my mind. I went to my room, turned on the light and sat in the chair thinking. It felt as though I’d done this a thousand times, same room every time, same person in the chair. I found myself listening. I tried to empty my mind and simply listen. I wanted to hear what Ben-Ezra had described, the oceanic sound of people living and thinking and talking, billions, everywhere, waiting for trains, marching to war, licking food off their fingers. Or simply being who they are.
The world hum.
- 10 -
I need to come at this in the simplest way.
He sits staring into the wall, a man unreachably apart. He is already locked in retrospection, seeing Artis, I thought, in drifting images, something he can’t control, flaring memories, apparitions, all set in motion by the fact of his decision.
He will not be going with her.
It was pounding him down, everything, the stone weight of a lifetime, everything he’d ever said and done brought to this moment. Here he is, wan and slack, hair mussed, tie unknotted, hands loosely folded at his crotch. I stand nearby, not knowing how to stand, how to adjust to the occasion, but determined to watch him openly. His eyes are empty of any plea he might make for understanding. How things change overnight, and what was hard and fast becomes some limp witness to a man’s wavering heart, and where the man had spoken forcefully the day before, striding wall to wall, he now sits slumped, thinking of the woman he has abandoned.
