Don DeLillo - Zero K

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.

That was my father. Who was my mother?

She was Madeline Siebert, originally from a small town in southern Arizona. A cactus on a postage stamp, she called it.

She drapes her coat on a hanger whose hooked upper part she twists so that it fits over the top of the open closet door. Then she runs the roller over the back of the coat. It’s satisfying for me to watch this, maybe because I can imagine Madeline taking commonplace pleasure in the simple act of draping her coat on a hanger, strategically arranging the coat on a closet door and then removing the accumulated lint with a roller.

Define lint , I tell myself. Define hanger . Then I try to do it. These occasions stick and hold, among other bent relics of adolescence.

I returned to the library a few times, regular hours, main floor, tapestry over the mantelpiece, but did not tell my father.

There were three men seated cross-legged on mats with nothing but sky behind them. They wore loose-fitting garments, unmatched, and sat with heads bowed, two of them, the other looking straight ahead. Each man held a container at his side, a squat bottle or can. Two of them had candles in simple holders within reach. After a moment they began, in sequence, left to right, seemingly unplanned, to take up the bottles and pour the liquid on chest, arms and legs. Then two of them, eyes closed, advanced to head and face, pouring slowly. The third man, in the middle, put the bottle to his mouth and drank. I watched his face contort, mouth opening reflexively to allow the fumes to escape. Kerosene or gasoline or lamp oil. He emptied the remaining contents on his head and set the bottle down. They all set the bottles down. The first two men held the lighted candles to their shirtfronts and trouser legs and the third man took a book of matches from his breast pocket and finally, after several failed attempts, managed to strike a flame.

I stepped back from the screen. My face was still twisted in response to the third man’s reaction when the kerosene passed through his gullet and entered his system. The burning men, mouths open, swayed above me. I stepped farther back. They were formless, soundless, screaming.

I turned and walked down the hall. The images were everywhere around me, those awful seconds, the distress I felt when the man kept striking the match without getting a flame. I wanted him to light the match. It would be unbearable for him, one blackened match-head after another, to sit between his comrades while they burned.

There was someone standing at the end of the hall, a woman, watching me. Here I was, a lost tourist, unnoticed to this point, a man in retreat from a video screen. The images were still near and pressing but the woman was not looking past me. The screen could have been blank or showing a bare field on a gray day. When I drew near she gestured, faintly, head tilted left, and we turned into a narrow corridor that ended at right angles to another long hall.

She was small, older than I, forties, in a long dress and pink slippers. I said nothing about the burnings. I would respect the format, say nothing, be ready for anything. We walked step for step along the hall. I glanced at the clinging dress in floral design and the woman’s dark hair wound tight in a ribboned swirl. She was not a mannequin and this was not a film but I had to wonder whether this interval had any more spread and breadth than just another sequestered moment, bordered by closed doors.

We entered a passageway that dead-ended in what appeared to be a solid surface. My escort recited a series of brief words and this activated a viewing slot in the surface ahead. I took a long step forward and found myself, at an elevated position, staring through the slot at the far wall of a long narrow room.

An oversized human skull was mounted on a pedestal jutting from the wall. The skull was cracked in places, stained with age, a lurid coppery bronze, a drained gray. The eyeholes were rimmed with jewels and the jagged teeth painted silver.

Then there was the room itself, austere, with rock-hewn walls and floor. A man and woman were seated at an oak table with scarred surface. No nameplates, no documents littering the table. They were talking, not necessarily to each other, and facing them were nine people in natural scatter on wooden benches, their backs to me.

I knew the escort would be gone but I corrupted the moment by looking back, like an ordinary person, to check. She was gone, yes, and there was a sliding door about five paces behind me in the process of closing.

The woman at the table was speaking about great human spectacles, the white-clad faithful in Mecca, the hadj, mass devotion, millions, year after year, and Hindus gathered on the banks of the Ganges, millions, tens of millions, a festival of immortality.

She looked frail in a long loose tunic and headscarf, speaking softly and precisely, and I tried to determine the geography of her gracefully accented English, her cinnamon skin.

“Think of the Pope appearing on the balcony above Saint Peter’s Square. Enormous numbers of people assembled to be blessed,” she said, “to be reassured. The Pope is here to bless their future, to reassure them of the spirit life ahead, beyond the last breath.”

I tried to imagine myself among the countless clenched bodies brought together in awed wonder but could not sustain the notion.