Zero K

by Don DeLillo

  “But you still visit those who are waiting to die and to be taken down. Their emotional and spiritual needs. And I wonder if you speak the language. Do you speak the language being spoken here?”

  “My entire body rejects it.”

  This was encouraging.

  “I speak only Uzbek now.”

  I didn’t know what to say to that. So I said, “Uzbekistan.”

  He was finished eating, the plate scraped clean, and I wanted to say something before he left the unit. Anything at all. Tell him my name. He was the Monk, who was I? But I had to pause. For a long bare moment I could not think of my name. He stood, pushed back the chair and took a step toward the door. A moment between being no one and someone.

  Then I said, “My name is Jeffrey Lockhart.”

  This was not a remark he could assimilate.

  So I said, “What do you do when you’re not eating or sleeping or talking to people about their spiritual well-being?”

  “I walk the halls,” he said.

  • • •

  Back to the room, to the shaved space.

  All the zones, the sectors, the divisions that I hadn’t seen. Computer centers, commissaries, shelters for attacks or natural disasters, the central command area. Were there recreational facilities? Libraries, movies, chess tournaments, soccer matches? How many numbers in the numbered levels?

  • • •

  He was naked on a slab, not a hair on his body. It was hard to connect the life and times of my father to this remote semblance. Had I ever thought of the human body and what a spectacle it is, the elemental force of it, my father’s body, stripped of everything that might mark it as an individual life. It was a thing fallen into anonymity, all the normal responses dimming now. I did not turn away. I felt obliged to look. I wanted to be contemplative. And at some far point in my wired mind, I may have known a kind of weak redress, the satisfaction of the wronged boy.

  He was alive, hovering at some level of anesthetic calm, and he said something, or maybe something was said, a word or two seeming to rise out of the body spontaneously.

  A woman in a smock and surgical mask stood on the other side of Ross. I looked at her, more or less for approval, and then leaned toward the body.

  “Gesso on linen.”

  I think this is what I heard, then other slurred fragments that were not comprehensible. The sunken face and body. The man’s depressed dick. The rest of him simply limbs, projecting parts.

  I nodded at the sound of the words and exchanged a brief look with the woman and then nodded again. I knew only that gesso was a term used in art, a surface or medium. Gesso on linen.

  I was allowed a moment alone, which I spent staring into space, and then others came to prepare Ross for his long slow sabbatical in the capsule.

  • • •

  I was led to a room in which all four walls were covered with a continuous painted image of the room itself. There were only three pieces of furniture, two chairs and a low table, all depicted from several angles. I remained standing, turning my head and then my body to scan the mural. The fact of four plane surfaces being a likeness of themselves as well as background for three objects of spatial extent struck me as a subject worthy of some deep method of inquiry, phenomenology maybe, but I wasn’t equal to the challenge.

  A woman eventually entered, smallish, brisk in a suede jacket and knit trousers. She had eyes that seemed to stream light and this is what made me realize that she was the woman in the surgical mask who’d stood across from me during the crude viewing of the body.

  She said, “You prefer to stand.”

  “Yes.”

  She considered this, then took a seat at the table. There was a silence. No one entered with tea and cookies on a tray.

  She said, “There were many discussions, Ross and Artis and I. We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? The resources he placed at our disposal were of crucial importance.”

  What else did I see? She wore a scarf that was striking in design and I decided that she was fifty-five years old, of local origin, more or less, and a figure of some authority.

  “After Artis entered the chamber I spent time with your father in New York and in Maine. He was more generous than ever. Although a man transformed. Of course you know this. Reduced to near shreds by the loss. Isn’t it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate? What is it that we want here? Only life. Let it happen. Give us breath.”

  I understood that she was speaking to me out of respect for my father. He had asked, she was complying.

  “We have language to guide us out of dire times. We are able to think and speak about what can conceivably happen in time to come. Why not follow our words bodily into the future tense? If we tell ourselves forthrightly that consciousness will persist, that cryopreservatives will continue to nourish the body, it is the first awakening toward the blessed state. We are here to make it happen, not simply to will it, or crawl toward it, but to place the endeavor in full dimension.”

  Her fingers vibrated when she spoke. I was slightly wary. Here was a woman coiled in thought, instant by instant, determined to make things happen.

  “I’m done with theories and arguments,” I said. “Ross and I, we talked and shouted our way through all the levels.”

  “He said that you never called him Dad. I said, How un-American. He tried to laugh but could not quite manage.”

  In my bland shirt and pants I could imagine myself drifting into the wall painting and going unnoticed, a dusky figure in a corner of the room.

  “Human life is an accidental fusion of tiny particles of organic matter floating in the cosmic dust. Life continuance is less accidental. It utilizes what we’ve learned in the thousands of years of our humanity. Not so random, not so chancy, but not unnatural.”

  “Tell me about your scarf,” I said.

  “Goat cashmere from Inner Mongolia.”

  It was increasingly clear that she was a significant member of this undertaking. If the Stenmark twins were the creative core, the jokester visionaries, did this woman generate the income, set the direction? Was she one of the individuals who originated the idea of the Convergence, setting it in this harsh geography, beyond the limits of believability and law. A financier, a philosopher, a scientist who has broadened her role here. What was her particular experience? I would not inquire. And I would not ask her name or create one for her. This was my version of progress. Time to go home.

  But she said there was one final site that Ross wanted me to visit. She led me to a veer, she and I with two escorts, and we went farther into the numbered levels than I’d gone before. How did I know this? I felt it, bone-deep, although no evidence of lapsed time or ostensible distance was apparent.

  I was taken to an alcove and fitted with a breathing apparatus and a protective suit that resembled spacewear. It was not cumbersome and it allowed me to immerse myself in the unreal state of the occasion.

  The woman said, “It’s only natural that we’ve endured some setbacks, a few stalled plans, an occasional mishap. There have been instances of hopes frustrated.”

  She was looking out at me from her respirator.

  “There are measures in effect that will maintain your father’s support although not at previous levels. There’s a foundation and an administrator and a number of inhibiting limits and safeguards and time factors.”

  “You have support from other directions.”

  “Of course, always. But what Ross did for us was a turning point. His unwavering faith, his worldwide resources.”

  “You’ve had defections perhaps.”

  “His willingness to be a participant in the most telling manner.”

  We were led slowly along a narrow passageway.

  On one wall there was a cracked clay tablet set horizontally and bearing a tightly compressed line of numbers, letters, square roots, cube roots, plus and minus signs, and there were parentheses, infinities and other symbols with an equal si
gn in the midst of it all, an indication of logical or mathematical equality.

  I didn’t know what the equation was meant to signify and I had no intention of asking. Then I thought of the Convergence, the name itself, the word itself. Two distinct forces approaching a point of intersection. The merger, breath to breath, of end and beginning. Could the equation on the plaque be a scientific expression of what happens to a single human body when the forces of death and life join?

  “Where is he now?”

  “He’s in the process of cooldown. Or soon will be,” she said. “You are the son. Of course he made me to understand that you have reservations about this concept, this location as well. Skepticism is a virtue on certain occasions, although often a shallow one. But he never characterized you as a man with a closed mind.”

  I wasn’t only his son, I was the son, the survivor, the heir apparent.

  We encountered access tubes and airlocks and entered the cryostorage section. We were without escorts now and we went along a walkway that was slightly elevated. Soon an open area came into view and seconds later I saw what was in it.

  There were rows of human bodies in gleaming pods and I had to stop walking to absorb what I was seeing. There were lines, files, long columns of naked men and women in frozen suspension. She waited for me and we approached slowly, at a height that provided clear perspective.

  All pods faced in the same direction, dozens, then hundreds, and our path took us through the middle of these structured ranks. The bodies were arranged across an enormous floor space, people of various skin color, uniformly positioned, eyes closed, arms crossed on chest, legs pressed tight, no sign of excess flesh.

  I recalled the three body pods that Ross and I had looked at on my earlier visit. Those were humans entrapped, enfeebled, individual lives stranded in some border region of a wishful future.

  Here, there were no lives to think about or imagine. This was pure spectacle, a single entity, the bodies regal in their cryonic bearing. It was a form of visionary art, it was body art with broad implications.

  The only life that came to mind belonged to Artis. I thought of Artis in her fieldwork, the time of mud trenches and crawl spaces, the objects dug up, earth-crusted tools and weapons, incised limestone fragments. And was there something nearly prehistoric about the artifacts ranged before me now? Archaeology for a future age.

  I waited for the woman with the Mongolian scarf to tell me that here was a civilization designed to be reborn one day long after the catastrophic collapse of everything on the surface. But we walked and paused and walked again, in silence.

  If this is what my father wanted me to see, then it was my corresponding duty to feel a twinge of awe and gratitude. And I did. Here was science awash in irrepressible fantasy. I could not stifle my admiration.

  I thought finally of lavishly choreographed dance routines from Hollywood musicals of many decades past, dancers synchronized in the manner of a marching army. Here, there were no cuts or dissolves or soundtracks, no motion at all, but I kept on looking.

  In time I followed the woman along a corridor that had murals of ravaged landscapes, on and on, scenes meant to be prophetic, a doubled landscape, each wall repeating the facing wall—disfigured hills, valleys and meadows. I looked left and right and left again, testing one wall against the other. The paintings had a kind of spiderwork finesse, a delicacy that intensified the ruin.

  We came finally to an arched doorway that led into a small narrow room, stone-walled, in faint light. She gestured and I entered and after several steps forward I had to stop.

  At the far wall there were two streamlined casings, taller than those I’d just seen. One was empty, the other held the body of a woman. There was nothing else in the room. I did not approach for a closer look. It seemed required of me to maintain an intervening space.

  The woman was Artis. Who else would it be? But it took a while before I was able to absorb the image, the reality, attach her name to it, let the moment seep into me. I took a few steps forward, finally, noting that her body stance did not match the pose of all the others in their pods.

  Her body seemed lit from within. She stood erect, on her toes, shaved head tilted upward, eyes closed, breasts firm. It was an idealized human, encased, but it was also Artis. Her arms were at her sides, fingers cusped at thighs, legs parted slightly.

  It was a beautiful sight. It was the human body as a model of creation. I believed this. It was a body in this instance that would not age. And it was Artis, here, alone, who carried the themes of this entire complex into some measure of respect.

  I thought to share my feelings, if only by look or gesture, a simple nod of the head, but when I turned to find the woman who’d led me here, she was gone.

  The empty capsule would belong to Ross of course. His body shape would be restored, face toned, his brain (in local lore) geared to function at some damped level of identity. How could this man and woman have known, years ago, that they would reside in such an environment, on this subplanet, in this isolated room, naked and absolute, more or less immortal.

  I looked for a time, then turned to find an escort standing in the doorway, younger person, genderless.

  But I wasn’t ready to leave. I remained, eyes closed, thinking, remembering. Artis and her story of counting drops of water on a shower curtain. Here, the things to count, internally, will be endless. Forevermore. Her word. The savor of that word. I opened my eyes and looked a while longer, the son, the stepson, the privileged witness.

  Artis belonged here, Ross did not.

  • • •

  I followed the escort into the veer and then out along a series of halls where there was a closed door every twenty meters or so. We came to an intersection and the escort pointed down an empty hallway. It was all simple sentences, subject, predicate, object, things narrowing down, and I was alone now, my body shrinking into the long expanse.

  Then a wrinkle, a crease in the smooth surface, and I saw the screen at the end of the hall just as it began to lower, and here I am again, waiting for something to happen.

  The first figures appeared even before the screen had fully unfurled.

  Troops in black-and-white come striding out of the mist.

  It’s a formidable image, undercut nearly at once by the crushed body of a soldier in camouflage gear sprawled in the front seat of a wrecked vehicle.

  Stray dogs roaming the streets of an abandoned urban district. A minaret visible at the edge of the screen.

  Troops in snowfall, crouched together, ten men spooning some slop from wooden bowls.

  An aerial shot of white military trucks passing through a barren landscape. Maybe a drone image, I thought. Trying to sound informed, if only to myself.

  I realized there was a soundtrack. Faint noises, engines revving, remote gunfire, voices barely audible.

  Two armed men seated in the bed of a pickup truck, each with a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

  Men in robes and headscarves throwing stones at a target that remains offscreen.

  Half a dozen troops poised within a ruined battlement, looking over the parapet, rifle butts protruding from the wall notches, and one soldier wears a comic-strip facemask, brightly colored, long pink face with green eyebrows, rouged cheeks and a leering red mouth. Everything else is black-and-white.

  I did not have to ask myself what the purpose was, the meaning behind all this, the mindset. It was Stenmark. It was here because. The visual equivalent, more or less, of his address to the group in the boardroom.

  The boardroom. When was that? Who exactly was in the group? Stenmark’s world war. The man passionate, trembling at times.

  Men in black walking single-file, each with a long sword, sunup, ritual murder, black head to foot, a chill discipline marking their stride.

  Soldiers asleep in a bunker, stacks of sandbags.

  Exodus: masses of people carrying whatever possessions they can manage, clothing, floor lamps, carpets, dogs. Flames rising across the screen
behind them.

  It takes me a while to notice that the soundtrack has become pure sound. A prolonged signal that rejects any trace of expressive intent.

  Riot police tossing stun grenades at people retreating across a broad promenade.

  Two elderly people on bicycles in devastated terrain. In time they ride alongside a column of tanks in a snowy field, a single limp body visible in a ditch.

  Bodies: slaughtered men in a jungle clearing, vultures stepping among the corpses.

  It was awful and I watched. I began to think of others watching, other screens, other halls, level after level throughout the entire complex.

  Children outside a minivan, waiting to enter, black smoke hanging still in the distance, one child looking back that way, the others turned toward the camera, faces blank.

  Hand-to-hand, six or seven men with knives and bayonets, some in camo jackets, concentrated bloodletting, up close, a tall man staggered, ready to fall, the others thrusting into the instant of stop-action.

  Another drone image, ruined town, ghost town, small figures scavenging among the rubble.

  A soldier’s unshaved face, the raw warrior breed, black knit cap, cigarette jutting from his mouth.

  A cleric in rapid stride, Orthodox priest, canonical garments, his cape, his cassock, people marching behind him, others joining, folding into the picture, fists raised.

  Facedown corpse on a potholed road, bomb debris everywhere.

  The halls are jammed with people watching the screens. All of them thinking my thoughts.

  Another comic-strip facemask, a cartoon facemask, a soldier among others, formed up, rifle held across upper body, his white face, purple nose, red lips curled in a sardonic sneer.

  A woman in a chador, seen from the rear, stepping out of a car and walking head-down into a crowded square where a few people notice and watch and then begin to scatter, camera pulling back, then the blast, purely visual, seeming to rip the screen apart and shred the air around us. All those watching.

  Mourners at graveside, some with automatic weapons strapped over their shoulders, the same black smoke seen earlier, a long way off, not climbing or spreading but utterly, eerily still, resembling a painted backdrop.