Don DeLillo - Zero K

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

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 and 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.”

“One of them drank kerosene or gasoline.”

“They sit in lotus position or run through the streets. A burning man running through the streets. If I saw such a thing, firsthand, I would run with him. And if he ran screaming, I would scream with him. And when he collapsed, I would collapse.”