Zero K Page 4

  She continued to speak and seemed at times to lose the pattern, the intonation. She tended to sail away from a word or syllable, eyes searching back for the sensations she was trying to describe. She was all face and hands, body gathered up within the folds of the robe.

  “But that’s not the end of the story, is it?”

  The question pleased her.

  “No, it’s not.”

  “Will it happen again?”

  “Yes, exactly. This is what I think about. I will become a clinical specimen. Advances will be made through the years. Parts of the body replaced or rebuilt. Note the documentary tone. I’ve talked to people here. A reassembling, atom by atom. I have every belief that I will reawaken to a new perception of the world.”

  “The world as it really is.”

  “At a time that’s not necessarily so far off. And this is what I think about when I try to imagine the future. I will be reborn into a deeper and truer reality. Lines of brilliant light, every material thing in its fullness, a holy object.”

  I’d led her into this song of Life Ever After and now I didn’t know how to respond. It was outside my range, all of it. Artis knew the rigors of science. She had worked in a number of countries, taught in several universities. She had observed, identified, investigated and explained many levels of human development. But holy objects, where were they? They were everywhere, of course—in museums and libraries and places of worship and in the excavated earth, in stone and mud ruins, and she’d dug them out and held them in her hands. I imagined her blowing dust from the chipped head of a tiny bronze god. But the future she’d just described was another matter, a purer aura. This was transcendence, the promise of a lyric intensity outside the measure of normal experience.

  “Do you know the procedures you’ll be undergoing, the details, how they do it.”

  “I know exactly.”

  “Do you think about the future? What will it be like to come back? The same body, yes, or an enhanced body, but what about the mind? Is consciousness unaltered? Are you the same person? You die as someone with a certain name and with all the history and memory and mystery gathered in that person and that name. But do you wake up with all of that intact? Is it simply a long night’s sleep?”

  “Ross and I have a running joke. Who will I be at the reawakening? Will my soul have left my body and migrated to another body somewhere? What’s the word I’m looking for? Or will I wake up thinking I’m a fruit bat in the Philippines? Hungry for insects.”

  “And the real Artis. Where is she?”

  “Drifting into the body of a baby boy. The son of local sheepherders.”

  “The word is metempsychosis.”

  “Thank you.”

  I didn’t know what was around us in the room. All I saw was the woman in the chair.

  “Day after tomorrow,” I said. “Or is it tomorrow?”

  “Doesn’t matter.”

  “I think it’s tomorrow. Days have no grip here.”

  She closed her eyes for a moment and then looked at me as if we were meeting for the first time.

  “How old are you?”

  “Thirty-four.”

  “You’re just starting.”

  “Starting what?” I said.

  Ross came in from one of the back rooms wearing a gym suit and athletic socks, a man shrouded in lost sleep. He took a chair from the rear wall and positioned it next to the armchair where Artis sat, placing his hand on hers.

  “Back then,” I said to him, “you used to jog in an outfit like that.”

  “Back then.”

  “Maybe not such a designer item.”

  “Back then I used to smoke a pack and a half a day.”

  “Was the jogging supposed to counteract the smoking?”

  “It was supposed to counteract everything.”

  Three of us. I realized we hadn’t been in the same room for many months. We three. Now, unimaginably, we are here, another kind of convergence, the day before they come and take her. This is how I thought of it. They would come and take her. They would arrive with a gurney that had a reclining back, allowing her to sit up. They would have capsules, vials and syringes. They would fit her with a half-mask respirator.

  Ross said, “Artis and I jogged. Didn’t we? We used to run along the Hudson River down to Battery Park and back. We ran in Lisbon, remember, six a.m., up that steep street to the chapel and the view. We ran in the Pantanal. In Brazil,” he said for my benefit, “on that high path that put us practically in the jungle.”

  I thought of the bed and the cane. My mother in bed, at the end, and the woman in the doorway, her friend and neighbor, ever nameless, leaning on a cane, a quad cane, a metal cane with four little splayed legs.

  Ross talking, recalling things, near to babbling now. Animals and birds they’d seen close-range, and he named them, and plant species, and he named them, and the view from their plane at low altitude swinging over the Mato Grosso.

  They would come and take her. They would wheel her into an elevator and take her down to one of the so-called numbered levels. She would die, chemically prompted, in a subzero vault, in a highly precise medical procedure guided by mass delusion, by superstition and arrogance and self-deception.

  I felt a surge of anger. I hadn’t known until now the depth of my objections to what was happening here, a response obscurely coiled within the rhythms of my father’s voice in his desperate reminiscence.

  Someone appeared holding a tray, a man with teapot, cups, saucers. He placed the tray on a folding table by my father’s chair.

  Either way she dies, I thought. At home, in bed, husband and stepson and friends at her side. Or here, in this regimental outpost, where everything happens somewhere else.

  The tea brought a pause to the room. We sat quietly until the man was gone. Ross licked his finger and touched the pot. Then he poured, intently, trying hard not to spill.

  The tea made me angry all over again. The cups and saucers. The careful pouring.

  Artis said, “This place, all of it, seems transitional to me. Filled with people coming and going. Then the others, those who are leaving in one sense, as I am, but staying in another sense, as I am. Staying and waiting. The only thing that’s not ephemeral is the art. It’s not made for an audience. It’s made simply to be here. It’s here, it’s fixed, it’s part of the foundation, set in stone. The painted walls, the simulated doors, the movie screens in the halls. Other installations elsewhere.”

  “The mannequin,” I said.

  Ross leaned toward me.

  “The mannequin. Where?”

  “I don’t know where. The woman in the hallway. The woman gesturing, sort of fearfully. The rust-colored woman. Naked woman.”

  “Where else?” he said.

  “I don’t know.”

  “You’ve seen no other mannequins? No other figures, naked or otherwise?”

  “None, absolutely.”

  “When you arrived,” he said. “What did you see?”

  “The land, the sky, the buildings. The car driving off.”

  “What else?”

  “I think I told you. Two men at the entrance waiting to escort me. I didn’t see them until I approached. Then a security check, thorough.”

  “What else?”

  I thought about what else. I also wondered why we were having this idle talk under these dire circumstances. Is this what happens in the midst of terminal matters? We retreat into neutral space.

  “You saw something else, off to the side, maybe fifty meters away, before you entered the building.”

  “What did I see?”

  “Two women,” he said. “In long hooded garments.”

  “Two women in chadors. Of course. Just standing there in the heat and dust.”

  “The first glimpse of art,” he said.

  “Never occurred to me.”

  “Standing absolutely still,” he said.

  “Mannequins,” Artis said.

  “To be seen or not seen. D
oesn’t matter,” he said.

  “I never imagined they weren’t real people. I knew the word. Chadors. Or burqas. Or whatever the other names. This was all I needed to know.”

  I reached forward and took a teacup from Ross and handed it to Artis. We three. Someone had trimmed and combed her hair, clipping it close to the temples. This seemed almost a rule of order, accentuating the drawn face and stranding the eyes in their dilated state. But I was looking too closely. I was trying to see what she was feeling, in spirit more than body and in the wisping hesitations between words.

  She said, “I feel artificially myself. I’m someone who’s supposed to be me.”

  I thought about this.

  She said, “My voice is different. I hear it when I speak in a way that’s not natural. It’s my voice but it doesn’t seem to be coming from me.”

  “Medication,” Ross said. “That’s all it is.”

  “It seems to be coming from outside me. Not all the time but sometimes. It’s like I’m twins, joined at the hip, and my sister is speaking. But that’s not it at all.”

  “Medication,” he said.

  “Things come to mind that probably happened. I know at a certain age we remember things that never took place. This is different. These things happened but they feel mistakenly induced. Is that what I want to say? An electronic signal gone wrong.”

  I’m someone who’s supposed to be me.

  This was a sentence to be analyzed by students of logic or ontology. We waited for her to continue. She spoke in serial fragments now, with stops or rests, and I found myself lowering my head in a sort of prayerful concentration.

  “I’m so eager. I can’t tell you. To do this thing. Enter another dimension. And then return. For ever more. A word I say to myself. Again and again. So beautiful. For ever more. Say it. And say it. And say it.”

  The way she cradled her teacup, an heirloom that needed protecting, and to hold it awkwardly or set it down carelessly would betray generational memories.

  Ross sitting here in his green-and-white gym suit with possibly matching jockstrap.

  “Forevermore,” he said.

  It was my turn now and I managed to whisper the word. Then her hands began to shake and I put my cup down and reached for her cup and handed it to my father.

  • • •

  I was afraid of other people’s houses. After school sometimes a friend might talk me into going to his house or apartment to do our homework together. It was a shock, the way people lived, other people, those who weren’t me. I didn’t know how to respond, the clinging intimacy of it, kitchen slop, pan handles jutting from the sink. Did I want to be curious, amused, indifferent, superior? Just walking past a bathroom, a woman’s stocking draped over the towel rack, pill bottles on the windowsill, some open, some capsized, a child’s slipper in the bathtub. It made me want to run and hide, partly from my own fastidiousness. The bedrooms with unmade beds, somebody’s socks on the floor, the old woman in nightclothes, barefoot, an entire life gathered up in a chair by the bed, hunched frame and muttering face. Who are these people, minute to minute and year after year? It made me want to go home and stay there.

  I thought that I would eventually build a life in opposition to my father’s career in global finance. We talked about this, Madeline and I, half seriously. Would I write poetry, live in a basement room, study philosophy, become a professor of transfinite mathematics at an obscure college in west-central somewhere.

  Then there was Ross, buying the work of young artists, encouraging them to use the studio he’d built on his property in Maine. Figurative, abstract, conceptual, post-minimal, these were unheralded men and women needing space, time and funding. I tried to convince myself that Ross was using them to smother my response to his bloated portfolio.

  In the end I followed the course that suited me. Cross-stream pricing consultant. Implementation analyst—clustered and nonclustered environments. These jobs were swallowed up by the words that described them. The job title was the job. The job looked back at me from the monitors on the desk where I absorbed my situation in full command of the fact that this was where I belonged.

  Is it very different at home, or on the street, or waiting at the gate to board a flight? I maintain myself on the puppet drug of personal technology. Every touch of a button brings the neural rush of finding something I never knew and never needed to know until it appears at my anxious fingertips, where it remains for a shaky second before disappearing forever.

  My mother had a roller that picked up lint. I don’t know why this fascinated me. I used to watch her guide the device over the back of her cloth coat. I tried to define the word roller without sneaking a look in the dictionary. I sat and thought, forgot to keep thinking, then started over, scribbling words on a pad, feeling dumber, on and off, into the night and the following day.

  A rotating cylindrical device that collects bits of fiber sticking to the surface of a garment.

  There was something satisfying and hard-won about this even if I made it a point not to check the dictionary definition. The roller itself seemed an eighteenth-century tool, something to wash horses with. I’d been doing this for a while, attempting to define a word for an object or even a concept. Define loyalty, define truth. I had to stop before it killed me.

  The ecology of unemployment, Ross said on TV, in French, with subtitles. I tried to think about this. But I was afraid of the conclusion I might draw, that the expression was not pretentious jargon, that the expression made sense, opening out into a cogent argument concerning important issues.

  When I found an apartment in Manhattan, and found a job, and then looked for another job, I spent whole weekends walking, sometimes with a girlfriend. There was one so tall and thin she was foldable. She lived on First Avenue and First Street and I didn’t know whether her name was spelled Gale or Gail and I decided to wait a while before asking, thinking of her as one spelling one day, the other spelling the next day, and trying to determine whether it made a difference in the way I thought of her, looked at her, talked to her and touched her.

  • • •

  The room in the long empty hall. The chair, the bed, the bare walls, the low ceiling. Sitting in the room and then wandering the halls I could feel myself lapsing into my smallest self, all the vainglorious ideas around me shrunk into personal reverie because what am I in this place but someone in need of self-defense.

  • • •

  The smell of other people’s houses. There was the kid who posed for me in his mother’s hat and gloves, although it could have been worse. The kid who said that he and his sister had to take turns swabbing lotion on their father’s toenails to control some hideous creeping fungus. He thought this was funny. Why didn’t I laugh? He kept repeating the word fungus while we sat at the kitchen table to do our homework together. A half slice of withered toast slumped in a saucer still damp with spilled coffee. Sine cosine tangent. Fungus fungus fungus.

  It was the most interesting idea of my life up to now, Gale or Gail, even if it yielded nothing in the way of insight into the spelling of a woman’s name and its effect on the glide of a man’s hand over the woman’s body.

  Systems administrator at a networking site. Human resource planner—global mobility. The drift, job to job, sometimes city to city, was integral to the man I was. I was outside the subject, almost always, whatever the subject was. The idea was to test myself, tentatively. These were mind challenges without a negative subtext. Nothing at stake. Solutions research manager—simulation models.

  Madeline, in a rare instance of judgment, leaned across the table in the museum cafeteria where we’d met for lunch.

  The vivid boy, she whispered. The shapeless man.

  The Monk had said that he could get out of the chair and raise a hand and touch the ceiling. In my room I tried to do this and managed, on tiptoes. The moment I sat down I felt a shiver of anonymity.

  Then there I am on the subway with Paula from Twin Falls, Idaho, eager tourist and
manager of a steakhouse, and there is the man at the other end of the car, addressing the riders, hardship and loss, always a jarring moment, the man who works his way through the train, car to car, jobless, homeless, here to tell his story, paper cup in hand. The eyes of every rider are resolutely blank but we see him, of course, veteran riders, experts in covert looks, as he manages a steady passage through the car despite the train’s seismic waves and shakes. Then there is Paula, who watches him openly, who studies him in an analytical way, violating the code. This is rush hour and we are standing, she and I, and I give her a hockey hip check, which she ignores. The subway is the man’s total environment, or nearly so, all the way out to Rockaway and up into the Bronx, and he carries with him a claim on our sympathies, even a certain authority that we regard with wary respect, aside from the fact that we would like him to disappear. I put a couple of dollars into his paper cup, hip-checking Paula again, this time for fun, and the man heaves open the door between cars and now I’m the one who’s getting a few of the shady glances earlier sent his way.

  I walk into the bedroom. There’s no wall switch in the room. The lamp sits on the bureau next to the bed. The room is dark. I shut my eyes. Are there other people who shut their eyes in a dark room? Is this a meaningless quirk? Or am I behaving in a way that has a psychological basis, with a name and a history? Here is my mind, there is my brain. I stand a while and think about this.

  Ross dragging me along to the Morgan Library to read the spines of fifteenth-century books. He stood gazing at the jeweled cover of the Lindau Gospels in a display case. He arranged access to the second and third tiers, the balconies, after hours, up the hidden staircase, two of us crouching and whispering along the inlaid walnut bookshelves. A Gutenberg Bible, then another, century after century, elegant grillwork crisscrossing the shelves.