Don DeLillo - Zero K

She wanted the paper napkin untouched. She was substituting paper for cloth and then judging the paper to be indistinguishable from cloth. I told myself there would eventually be a lineage, a scheme of direct descent — cloth napkins, paper napkins, paper towels, facial tissues, sneeze tissues, toilet tissues, then down into the garbage for scraps of reusable plastic packaging minus the day-glo price stickers, which she’d already removed and crumpled.

There was another man whose name she would not tell me. She saw him on Fridays only, twice a month maybe, or only once, and never in my presence, and I imagined a married man, a wanted man, a man with a past, a foreigner in a belted raincoat with straps on the shoulders. This was a cover-up for the uneasiness I felt. I stopped asking questions about the man and then the Fridays ended and I felt better and started asking questions again. I asked whether he wore a belted raincoat with straps on the shoulders. It’s called a trench coat, she said, and there was something final in her voice so I decided to terminate the man in the crash of a small plane off the coast of Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, body unrecovered.

Certain words seemed to be located in the air ahead of me, within arm’s reach. Bessarabian, penetralia, pellucid, falafel . I saw myself in these words. I saw myself in the limp, in the way I refined and nurtured it. But I killed the limp whenever my father showed up to take me to the Museum of Natural History. This was the estranged husbands’ native terrain and there we were, fathers and sons, wandering among the dinosaurs and the bones of human predecessors.

She gave me a wristwatch and on my way home from school I kept checking the minute hand, regarding it as a geographical marker, a sort of circumnavigation device indicating certain places I might be approaching somewhere in the northern or southern hemisphere depending on where the minute hand was when I started walking, possibly Cape Town to Tierra del Fuego to Easter Island and then maybe to Tonga. I wasn’t sure whether Tonga was on the semicircular route but the name of the place qualified it for inclusion, along with the name Captain Cook, who sighted Tonga or visited Tonga or sailed back to Britain with a Tongan on board.

When the marriage died, my mother began working full-time. Same office, same boss, a lawyer who specialized in real estate. She’d studied Portuguese in her two years of college and this was useful because a number of the firm’s clients were Brazilians interested in buying apartments in Manhattan, often for investment purposes. Eventually she began to handle the details of transactions among the seller’s attorney, the mortgage firm and the managing agent. People buying, selling, investing. Father, mother, money.

I understood years later that the strands of attachment could be put into words. My mother was the loving source, the reliable presence, a firm balance between me and my little felonies of self-perception. She did not press me to be more social or to spend more time on homework. She did not forbid me to watch the sex channel. She said that it was time for me to resume a normal stride. She said that the limp is a heartless perversion of true infirmity. She told me that the pale crescent at the base of the fingernail is called the lunula, the loon -ya-la. She told me that the indentation in skin between the nose and the upper lip is called the philtrum. In the ancient Chinese art of face-reading, the philtrum represents such-and-such. She could not remember exactly what.

I decided that the man she saw on Fridays was probably Brazilian. He was more interesting to me than Rick Linville, who had a name and a shape, but there was always the implicit subject of how the Friday evenings ended, what they said and did together, in English and Portuguese, which I needed to keep nameless and shapeless, and then there was her silence concerning the man himself, and maybe it wasn’t even a man. That’s the other thing I found myself confronting. Maybe it wasn’t even a man. Things that come to mind, out of nowhere or everywhere, who knows, who cares, so what. I took a walk around the corner and watched the senior citizens play tennis on the asphalt court.

Then came the day and year when I glanced at a magazine on a newsstand in an airport somewhere and there was Ross Lockhart on the cover of Newsweek with two other godheads of world finance. He wore a pinstriped suit and restyled hair and I called Madeline so I could refer to his serial killer’s sideburns. Her neighbor picked up the phone, the woman with the metal cane, the quad cane, and she told me that my mother had suffered a stroke and that I must come home at once.

In memory the actors are locked in position, unlifelike. Me in a chair with a book or magazine, my mother watching TV without the sound.

Ordinary moments make the life. This is what she knew to be trustworthy and this is what I learned, eventually, from those years we spent together. No leaps or falls. I inhale the little drizzly details of the past and know who I am. What I failed to know before is clearer now, filtered up through time, an experience belonging to no one else, not remotely, no one, anyone, ever. I watch her use the roller to remove lint from her cloth coat. Define coat , I tell myself. Define time , define space .

• • •

“You shaved your beard. Took me a few minutes to notice. I was just getting adjusted to the beard.”

“There are things I’ve been thinking about.”

“Okay.”

“Things I’ve been struggling with for some time,” he said. “Then it became clear. I understood that there’s something I have to do. It’s the only answer.”

“Okay.”

Ross in the armchair, Jeff on the cushioned bench, two tense men in conversation, and Artis in the bedroom waiting to die.

He said, “I’m going with her.”

Did I know what he meant, instantly, reading it in his face, and then did I pretend to be confused?

“You’re going with her.”

It was necessary for me to repeat those words. Going with her . At some level I understood that my role was to think and speak along conventional lines.

“You mean being with her when they take her down and do what they have to do. You want to monitor the proceedings.”

“Going with her, joining her, sharing it, side by side.”

There was a long wait for one of us to resume speaking. The simple fact of these words, the immense force gathering behind them, turning me inside out.

“I know what you’re saying. But the questions I’m supposed to ask don’t seem to be coming.”

“I’ve been thinking about this for some time.”

“You already said that.”

“I don’t want to lead the life I’ll be leading without her.”

“Isn’t this what everyone feels when someone close, someone intimately attached, is about to die?”

“I can only be the man I am.”

That was nice, with a tinge of helplessness.

Another long silence, Ross looking into space. He is going with her. It denied everything he’d ever said and done. It made a comic strip of his life, or of mine. Was this a bid for redemption, some kind of spiritual deliverance after all the acquisitions, all the wealth he’d managed for others and accumulated for himself, the master market strategist, owner of art collections and island retreats and super-midsize jets. Or was he suffering a brief spell of madness with long-range consequences?

What else?

Could it simply be love? All those unconditional words. Had he earned them, man with a fake name, half husband, missing father. I told myself to stop the rant, the spinning inner grievance. A man of his resources choosing to be a frozen specimen in a capsule in a storage facility twenty years before his natural time.