Don DeLillo - Zero K

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 the 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.