Zero K Read online

  I looked again at the woman in the headscarf, unnamed still. She would not be real until I gave her a name. She was sitting upright now, hands resting on the table, eyes closed. She was in a state of meditation. This is what I wanted to believe. Had she listened to a single word spoken by the Stenmarks? Her mind was empty of words, mantras, sacred syllables.

  I called her Arjuna, then I called her Arjhana. These were pretty names but they weren’t right. Here I was, in a sealed compartment, inventing names, noting accents, improvising histories and nationalities. These were shallow responses to an environment that required abandonment of such distinctions. I needed to discipline myself, be equal to the situation. But when was I ever equal to the situation? What I needed to do was what I was doing.

  I listened to the Stenmarks.

  “In time a religion of death will emerge in response to our prolonged lives.”

  “Bring back death.”

  “Bands of death rebels will set out to kill people at random. Men and women slouching through the countryside, using crude weapons to kill those they encounter.”

  “Voracious bloodbaths with ceremonial aspects.”

  “Pray over the bodies, chant over the bodies, do unspeakably intimate things to the bodies.”

  “Then burn the bodies and smear the ashes on your own bodies.”

  “Or pray over the bodies, chant over the bodies, eat the edible flesh of the bodies. Burn what remains.”

  “In one form or another, people return to their death-haunted roots in order to reaffirm the pattern of extinction.”

  “Death is a tough habit to break.”

  Nils gestured, fist raised, thumb jutting backwards over his shoulder. He was indicating the skull on the wall. And I understood at once, intuitively, that the big raw bony object was their creation and that these two men, bland in appearance, demonologists in spirit, were the individuals responsible for the look and touch and temperament of the entire complex. This was their design, all of it, the tone and flow, the half-sunken structure itself and everything inside it.

  All Stenmark.

  This was their aesthetic of seclusion and concealment, all the elements that I found so eerie and disembodying. The empty halls, the color patterns, the office doors that did or did not open into an office. The mazelike moments, time suspended, content blunted, the lack of explanation. I thought of the movie screens that appeared and vanished, the silent films, the mannequin with no face. I thought of my room, the uncanny plainness of it, the nowhereness, conceived and designed as such, and the rooms like it, maybe five hundred or a thousand, and the idea made me feel again that I was dwindling into indistinctness. And the dead, or maybe dead, or whatever they were, the cryogenic dead, upright in their capsules. This was art in itself, nowhere else but here.

  The brothers altered their method of address, speaking not to the recording devices but directly to the nine men and women in the audience.

  “We spent six years here, without a break, immersed in our work. Then a journey home, brief but fulfilling, and back and forth ever since.”

  “When the time comes.”

  “There is a certain inevitability in these words.”

  “When the time comes, we’ll depart finally from our secure northern home to this desert place. Old and frail, limping and shuffling, to approach the final reckoning.”

  “What will we find here? A promise more assured than the ineffable hereafters of the world’s organized religions.”

  “Do we need a promise? Why not just die? Because we’re human and we cling. In this case not to religious tradition but to the science of present and future.”

  They were speaking quietly and intimately, with a deeper reciprocity than in the earlier exchanges and not a trace of self-display. The audience was stilled, completely fixed.

  “Ready to die does not mean willing to disappear. Body and mind may tell us that it is time to leave the world behind. But we will clutch and grasp and scratch nevertheless.”

  “Two stand-up comics.”

  “Encased in vitreous matter, refashioned cell by cell, waiting for the time.”

  “When the time comes, we’ll return. Who will we be, what will we find? The world itself, decades away, think of it, or sooner, or later. Not so easy to imagine what will be out there, better or worse or so completely altered we will be too astonished to judge.”

  They spoke about ecosystems of the future planet, theorizing—a renewed environment, a ravaged environment—and then Lars held up both hands to signal a respite. It took a moment for the audience to absorb the transition but soon the room settled into silence, the Stenmarks’ silence. The brothers themselves stared dead ahead, empty-eyed.

  The Stenmarks were in their early fifties, this is where I placed them, so thin-skinned and pale that branching blue veins were visible on the backs of their hands, even from where I stood. I decided that they were street anarchists of an earlier era, quietly dedicated to plotting local outrages or larger insurrections, all shaped by their artistic skills, and then I found myself wondering if they were married. Yes, to sisters. I saw them walking in a wooded area, all four, the brothers ahead, then the sisters ahead, a family custom, a game, the distance between the couples coolly measured and carefully maintained. In my half-mad imagining it would be five meters. I made it a point to measure in meters, not in feet or yards.

  Lars dropped his arms, the pause ended, the twins resumed speaking.

  “Some of you may be back here as well. To witness the passage of loved ones. And of course you’ve begun to consider what such a passage might be like for yourselves, one day, each of you, when the time comes.”

  “We understand that some of the things we’ve been saying here today may act as disincentives. This is okay. This is the simple truth of our perspective. But do this. Think of money and immortality.”

  “Here you are, collected, convened. Isn’t this what you’ve been waiting for? A way to claim the myth for yourselves. Life everlasting belongs to those of breathtaking wealth.”

  “Kings, queens, emperors, pharaohs.”

  “It’s no longer a teasing whisper you hear in your sleep. This is real. You can think beyond the godlike touch of fingertip billions. Take the existential leap. Rewrite the sad grim grieving playscript of death in the usual manner.”

  This was not a sales pitch. I didn’t know what this was, a challenge, a taunt, a thrust at the vanity of the moneyed elect or simply an attempt to tell them what they’ve always wanted to hear even if they didn’t know it.

  “Isn’t the pod familiar to us from our time in the womb? And when we return, at what age will we find ourselves? Our choice, your choice. Just fill in the blanks on the application form.”

  I was tired of all this dying and stood away from the viewing slot. But there was no escaping the sound of voices, the brothers reciting a series of Swedish or Norwegian words and then another series of Norwegian or Danish words and then again a series, a list, a litany of German words. I understood a few but not others, not most, nearly none, I realized, as the recitation went on, words in most cases beginning with the syllables welt, wort or tod. This was art that haunts a room, the sonic art of monotone, of incantation, and my response to their voices and all the grave and soaring themes of the afternoon was to drop into a crouch and execute a series of squat-jumps. I jumped and squatted, squatted and jumped, arms thrust upward, five, ten, fifteen times, and then again, down and up, sheer release, and I counted aloud in muttered grunts.

  Soon I developed a parallel image of myself as an arboreal ape flinging long hairy arms over its head, hopping and barking in self-defense, building muscles, burning fat.

  At some point I became aware that someone else was addressing the audience. It was Miklos, whose surname I’d forgotten—the blinking man in neutered translation speaking now on the subject of being and nonbeing. I kept squatting and jumping.

  When I returned to the slot the Stenmark twins were gone, Miklos was still speaking and t
he woman in the headscarf was positioned as before, seated upright in the chair, hands flat on the table. Her eyes were still closed, everything the same except that now, as I watched, I knew her name. She was Artis. Who else would she be but Artis? That was her name.

  • • •

  I stood in the locked compartment waiting for the sliding door to open. I knew it was wrong to think of it as a sliding door. There had to be an advanced term in use here, a technical word or phrase, but I resisted the implied challenge to consider possibilities.

  The escort was waiting when the door slid open. We went along a corridor and then another, wordless once again, both of us, and I expected in minutes to be seeing Ross in his office or suite.

  We came to a door and the escort stood and waited. I looked at her and then at the door and we both waited. I realized there was something I wanted, a cigarette. This was a recidivistic need, to grab the semi-crushed pack in my breast pocket, light up quickly, inhale slowly.

  I looked at the escort again and understood finally what was happening here. This was my door, the door to my room. I went ahead and opened it and the woman did not leave. I thought of the moment in the stone room when Ross had swiveled on his bench and turned to look at me with a certain expression on his face, a knowingness, father to son, man to man, and in retrospect I realized that he was referring to the situation he’d arranged for me, this situation.

  I sat on the bed and watched her undress.

  I watched her unravel the ribbon from her hair, slowly, and the hair fall about her shoulders.

  I leaned over and took one of her felt slippers in my hand as she eased her foot out of it.

  I watched the long dress float down her body to the floor.

  I stood and moved into her, smearing her into the wall, imagining an imprint, a body mark that would take days to melt away.

  In bed I wanted to hear her speak to me in her language, Uzbek, Kazakh, whatever it was, but I understood that this was an intimacy not suited to the occasion.

  I thought of nothing for a time, all hands and body.

  Then stillness, and the cigarette to think about again, the one I’d wanted when we were standing outside the door.

  I listened to us breathe and found myself imagining the landscape that enclosed us, planing it down, making it abstract, the tender edges of our centeredness.

  I watched her dress, slowly, and decided not to give her a name. She blended better, nameless, with the room.

  - 7 -

  Ross Lockhart is a fake name. My mother mentioned this casually one day when I was nineteen or twenty. Ross told her that he’d taken this action right after he got out of college. He’d been thinking about it for years, first in a spirit of fantasy, then with determination, building a list of names that he inspected critically, with a certain detachment, each deletion bringing him closer to self-realization.

  This was the term Madeline used, self-realization, speaking in her mild documentary voice as she sat watching TV without the sound.

  It was a challenge, he told her. It was an incentive, an inducement. It would motivate him to work harder, think more clearly, begin to see himself differently. In time he would become the man he’d only glimpsed when Ross Lockhart was a series of alphabetic strokes on a sheet of paper.

  I was standing behind my mother while she spoke. I held a take-out turkey sandwich in one hand, a glass of ginger ale in the other, and the recollection is shaped by the way I stood there thinking and chewing, each bite of the sandwich becoming more deliberate as I concentrated intently on what Madeline was telling me.

  I was coming to know the man better now, second by second, word by word, and myself as well. Here was the explanation for the way I walked, talked and tied my shoes. And how interesting it was, in the mere fragments of Madeline’s brief narrative, that so many things became so readily apparent. This was the decoding of my baffled adolescence. I was someone I was not supposed to be.

  Why hadn’t she told me sooner? I waited for her to shrug off the question but she showed no sign of having heard it. All she did was take her eyes off the TV screen long enough to tell me, over her shoulder, what his real name was.

  He was born Nicholas Satterswaite. I stared at the far wall and thought about this. I spoke the name inaudibly, moving my lips, over and over. Here was the man laid out before me, balls and all. This was my authentic father, a man who chose to abandon his generational history, all the lives up to mine that were folded into the letters of this name.

  When he looks in the mirror he sees a simulated man.

  Madeline went back to her TV and I chewed my food and counted the letters. Twenty letters in the full name, twelve in the surname. These numbers told me nothing—what could they tell me? But I needed to get inside the name, work it, wedge myself into it. With the name Satterswaite, who would I have been and what would I have become? I was still, then, at nineteen, in the process of becoming.

  I understood the lure of an invented name, people emerging from shadow selves into iridescent fictions. But this was my father’s design, not mine. The name Lockhart was all wrong for me. Too tight, too clenched. The solid and decisive Lockhart, the firm closure of Lockhart. The name excluded me. All I could do was peer into it from outside. This is how I understood the matter, standing behind my mother, reminding myself that she did not take the name Lockhart when she married the man.

  I wondered what would have happened if I’d learned the truth sooner. Jeffrey Satterswaite. It’s possible that I would have been able to stop mumbling, gain weight, add muscle, eat raw clams and get girls to look at me in a spirit of serious appraisal.

  But did I really care about origins? It was hard to believe that I would ever make an attempt to explore the genealogy of Satterswaite, to locate the people and places embedded in the name. Did I want to be part of an extended family, somebody’s grandson, nephew, cousin?

  Madeline and I were each what the other needed. We were singly met. I looked at the TV screen and asked her what there was about the name Nicholas Satterswaite that made him eager to abandon it. The indistinctness of it, she said. The forgettability. The variations in spelling and maybe even pronunciation. From an isolated American viewpoint, the name comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. And then, in contrast, the Anglo-Saxon ancestry of the name. The responsibility this implies. The way his father used the name as a point of reference against which the boy was measured.

  But what about the name Lockhart? What is the ancestry? What is the responsibility? She didn’t know, I didn’t know. Did Ross know?

  Onscreen there was a traffic report with live coverage of cars on an expressway, shot from above. This was the traffic channel, twenty-four hours a day, and after a while, with the sound off and the cars coming into view and passing out of view, never-endingly, the scene floated out of its shallow reality. She watched, I watched, and the scene became apparitional. I stared at the traffic and counted off eight cars and then twelve more, the letters in the real name, first and last, totaling twenty. I kept doing this, eight cars, then twelve. I spelled the name aloud, expecting a possible correction from Madeline. But why would she know or care how the name was spelled?

  This is what emerges from that day, maybe that entire year, the way I watched the cars and counted the letters and chewed the sandwich, maple-glazed turkey breast on rye bread from the deli down the street, with never enough mustard.

  • • •

  I’d slept well in body-warmed sheets and wasn’t sure whether the meal in front of me was breakfast or lunch. The food itself contained no clue. Why did this make sense? Because the Stenmark Brothers had designed the food units. I imagined their plan. Hundreds of units sized progressively, four tables, sixteen tables, one hundred and fifty-six tables, each unit painstakingly utilitarian, the plates and utensils, the tables and chairs, the food itself, all of it in the spirit of a well-disciplined dream.

  I ate slowly, trying to taste the food. I thought of Artis. This is the day when they come an
d take her. But how do I think about what will happen once her heart stops beating? How does Ross think about it? I wasn’t sure what I wanted to believe, that his trust in the process was genuine or that he’d devised this strength of conviction over time to drown out doubt. Doesn’t the fact of imminent death encourage the deepest self-delusion? Artis in the chair sipping tea, the shaky voice and hands, body narrowed to a memory.

  The Monk walked in then, nearly startling me, and the small room seemed to gather itself about him. He wore a hooded sweatshirt under the cloak, the hood flopped down behind his neck. Plate, glass and utensils appeared in the slot and he took these to the table. I let him settle into the chair and position the plate.

  “I’ve been hoping to see you again. I have a question.”

  He paused, not anticipating the question but only wondering if that intrusive noise was a human voice, someone speaking to him.

  I waited until he began to eat.

  “The screens,” I said. “They appear in the halls and disappear into the ceiling. Last screen, last film, a self-immolation. Have you seen it? I thought they were monks. Were they monks? I thought they were kneeling on prayer mats. Three men. Awful to see. Have you seen it?”

  “I don’t look at the screens. The screens are a distraction. But there are monks, yes, in Tibet, in China, in India, setting themselves aflame.”

  “In protest,” I said.

  This remark was too obvious to provoke further comment from the man. I think I expected some credit for raising the subject and for having witnessed the terrible moment itself onscreen, men dying for a cause.

  Then he said, “Monks and former monks and nuns and others.”