Don DeLillo: Zero K

“Don’t be quick to draw conclusions about what you see and hear. This place was designed by serious people. Respect the idea. Respect the setting itself. Artis says we ought to regard it as a work-in-progress, an earthwork, a form of earth art, land art. Built up out of the land and sunk down into it as well. Restricted access. Defined by stillness, both human and environmental. A little tomblike as well. The earth is the guiding principle,” he said. “Return to the earth, emerge from the earth.”

• • •

I spent time walking the halls. The halls were nearly empty, three people, at intervals, and I nodded to each, receiving only a single grudging glance. The walls were shades of green. Down one broad hall, turn into another. Blank walls, no windows, doors widely spaced, all doors shut. These were doors of related colors, subdued, and I wondered if there was meaning to be found in these slivers of the spectrum. This is what I did in any new environment. I tried to inject meaning, make the place coherent or at least locate myself within the place, to confirm my uneasy presence.

At the end of the last hall there was a screen jutting from a niche in the ceiling. It began to lower, stretching wall to wall and reaching nearly to the floor. I approached slowly. At first the images were all water. There was water racing through woodlands and surging over riverbanks. There were scenes of rain beating on terraced fields, long moments of nothing but rain, then people everywhere running, others helpless in small boats bouncing over rapids. There were temples flooded, homes pitching down hillsides. I watched as water kept rising in city streets, cars and drivers going under. The size of the screen lifted the effect out of the category of TV news. Everything loomed, scenes lasted long past the usual broadcast breath. It was there in front of me, on my level, immediate and real, a woman sitting life-sized on a lopsided chair in a house collapsed in mudslide. A man, a face, underwater, staring out at me. I had to step back but also had to keep looking. It was hard not to look. Finally I glanced back down the hall waiting for someone to appear, another witness, a person who might stand next to me while the images built and clung.

There was no audio.

Artis was alone in the suite where she and Ross were staying. She sat in an armchair, wearing robe and slippers, and appeared to be asleep.

What do I say? How do I begin?

You look beautiful, I thought, and she did, sadly so, attenuated by illness, lean face and ash-blond hair, uncombed, pale hands folded in her lap. I used to think of her as the Second Wife and then as the Stepmother and then, again, as the Archaeologist. This last product label was not so reductive, mainly because I was finally getting to know her. I liked to imagine that she was the scientist as ascetic, living for periods in crude encampments, someone who might readily adapt to unsparing conditions of another kind.

Why did my father ask me to come here?

He wanted me to be with him when Artis died.

I sat on a cushioned bench, watching and waiting, and soon my thoughts fell away from the still figure in the chair and then there he was, there we were, Ross and I, in miniaturized mindspace.

He was a man shaped by money. He’d made an early reputation by analyzing the profit impact of natural disasters. He liked to talk to me about money. My mother said, What about sex, that’s what he needs to know. The language of money was complicated. He defined terms, drew diagrams, seemed to be living in a state of emergency, planted in the office most days for ten or twelve hours, or rushing to airports, or preparing for conferences. At home he stood before a full-length mirror reciting from memory speeches he was working on about risk appetites and offshore jurisdictions, refining his gestures and facial expressions. He had an affair with an office temp. He ran in the Boston Marathon.

What did I do? I mumbled, I shuffled, I shaved a strip of hair along the middle of my head, front to back — I was his personal antichrist.

He left when I was thirteen. I was doing my trigonometry homework when he told me. He sat across the small desk where my ever-sharpened pencils jutted from an old marmalade jar. I kept doing my homework while he spoke. I examined the formulas on the page and wrote in my notebook, over and over: sine cosine tangent .

Why did my father leave my mother?

Neither ever said.

Years later I lived in a room-and-a-half rental in upper Manhattan. One evening there was my father on TV, an obscure channel, poor reception, Ross in Geneva, sort of double-imaged, speaking French. Did I know that my father spoke French? Was I sure that this man was my father? He made a reference, in subtitles, to the ecology of unemployment. I watched standing up.

And Artis now in this barely believable place, this desert apparition, soon to be preserved, a glacial body in a massive burial chamber. And after that a future beyond imagining. Consider the words alone. Time, fate, chance, immortality . And here is my simpleminded past, my dimpled history, the moments I can’t help summoning because they’re mine, impossible not to see and feel, crawling out of every wall around me.

Ash Wednesday, once, I went to church and stood in line. I looked around at the statues, plaques and pillars, the stained glass windows, and then I went to the altar rail and knelt. The priest approached and made his mark, a splotch of holy ash thumb-printed to my forehead. Dust thou art. I was not Catholic, my parents were not Catholic. I didn’t know what we were. We were Eat and Sleep. We were Take Daddy’s Suit to the Dry Cleaner.

When he left I decided to embrace the idea of being abandoned, or semi-abandoned. My mother and I understood and trusted each other. We went to live in Queens, in a garden apartment that had no garden. This suited us both. I let the hair grow back on my aboriginal shaved head. We went for walks together. Who does this, mother and teenage son, in the United States of America? She did not lecture me, or rarely did, on my swerves out of observable normality. We ate bland food and batted a tennis ball back and forth on a public court.

But the robed priest and the small grinding action of his thumb implanting the ash. And to dust thou shalt return . I walked the streets looking for people who might look at me. I stood in front of store windows studying my reflection. I didn’t know what this was. Was this some freakified gesture of reverence? Was I playing a trick on Holy Mother Church? Or was I simply attempting to thrust myself into meaningful sight? I wanted the stain to last for days and weeks. When I got home my mother leaned back away from me as if to gain perspective. It was the briefest of appraisals. I made it a point not to grin — I had a gravedigger’s grin. She said something about the boring state of Wednesdays throughout the world. A little ash, at minimum expense, and a Wednesday, here and there, she said, becomes something to remember.

Eventually my father and I began to jostle our way through some of the tensions that had kept us at a distance and I accepted certain arrangements he made concerning my education but went nowhere near the businesses he owned.

And years later, it felt like a lifetime later, I began to know the woman who now sat before me, leaning into the light shed by a table lamp nearby.

And in another lifetime, hers, she opened her eyes and saw me sitting there.

“Jeffrey.”

“Arrived late yesterday.”

“Ross told me.”

“And it turns out to be true.”

I took her hand and held it. There seemed to be nothing more to say but we spoke for an hour. Her voice was a near whisper and so was mine, in accord with the circumstances, or the environment itself, the long hushed hallways, the sense of enclosure and isolation, a new generation of earth art, with human bodies in states of suspended animation.