Don DeLillo - Zero K

The bed was unmade, clothing scattered, and I understood that this was where my father slept and would sleep again, one more night, tonight, except that he would not sleep. Artis was in the adjoining room and I walked in and paused and then approached the bed. I saw that she was awake. I said nothing and simply leaned forward. Then I waited for her to recognize me.

Moving her lips, three unspoken words.

Come with us .

It was a joke, a last loving joke, but her face showed no sign of a smile.

Ross was back to pacing, wall to wall, more slowly now. He wore his dark glasses, which meant he was now invisible, at least to me. I headed out the door. He did not remind me to be here, this room, first thing, first light.

Love for a woman, yes. But I recalled what the Stenmark twins had said in the stone room, speaking directly to the wealthy benefactors. Take the leap, they said. Live the billionaire’s myth of immortality. And why not now, I thought. What else was there for Ross to acquire? Give the futurists their blood money and they will make it possible for you to live forever.

The pod would be his final shrine of entitlement.

I knocked on a door and waited. I went to the next door and knocked and waited. Then I went down the hall knocking on doors and not waiting. It occurred to me that I’d done this two or three days earlier, or maybe it was two or three years. I walked and knocked and looked back eventually to see if any doors had opened. I imagined a telephone ringing on a desk behind one of the doors, ringer on Lo. I knocked on the door and reached for the doorknob, realizing there was no doorknob. I looked for a fixture on the door that might accommodate the disk on my wristband. I went down the hall and turned the corner and checked every door, knocking first and then searching for a magnetic component. The doors were painted in various pastels. I stood back against the opposite wall, where there were no doors, and scanned the doors that faced me, ten or eleven doors, and saw that none exactly matched another. This was art that belongs to the afterlife. It was art that accompanies last things, simple, dreamlike and delirious. You’re dead, it said. I went down the hall and turned the corner and knocked on the first door.

In my room I tried to think about the matter. Ross could not be the only one here who was ready to enter the chamber well before the body failed. Were these people deranged or were they in the forefront of a new consciousness? I lay on the bed and looked at the ceiling. The father-son exchange should have been more measured considering the nature of the revelation. I’d said foolish and indefensible things. In the morning I would talk to Ross and then remain at his side as he and Artis were taken down.

I slept a while and then went to the food unit. Empty, odorless, Monkless, no food in the slot, late for lunch, early for dinner, but do they observe these conventions?

I didn’t want to go back to my room. Bed, chair, wall, so on, so on, so on.

Come with us , she said.

• • •

Fires were burning onscreen and a fleet of air tankers hung a thick haze of chemicals over the scorched treetops.

Then a single figure walking through a town’s empty streets with homes imploded by heat and flame and lawn ornaments shriveled to a crisp.

Then a satellite image of twin lines of white smoke snaking across a gray landscape.

Elsewhere now people wearing facemasks, hundreds moving at camera level, walking or being carried by others, and was this a disease, a virus, long ranks of slow-moving men and women, and is it something spread by insects or vermin and carried on airborne dust, dead-eyed individuals, in the thousands now, walking at a stricken pace that resembled forever.

Then a woman seated on the roof of her car, head in hands, flames — the fire again — moving down the foothills in the near distance.

Then grass fires sweeping across the flatlands and a herd of bison, silhouetted in bright flame, going at a gallop parallel to barbed-wire fencing and out of the frame.

There was a quick cut to enormous ocean waves approaching and then water surging over seawalls and sets of imagery merging, skillfully edited but hard to absorb, towers shaking, a bridge collapsing, a tremendous close-up view of ash and lava blasting out of an opening in the earth’s crust and I wanted it to last longer, it was right here, just above me, lava, magma, molten rock, but a few seconds later a dried lakebed appeared with one bent tree trunk standing and then back to wildfires in forested land and in open country and sweeping down into town and onto highways.

Then long views of wooded hillsides being swallowed in rolling smoke and a crew of firefighters in helmets and backpacks vanishing up a mountain trail and reappearing in a forest of splintered pines and bared bronze earth.

Then, up close, screen about to burst with flames that jump a stream and appear to spring into the camera and out toward the hallway where I stand watching.

• • •

I walked randomly for a time, seeing a woman open a door and enter whatever kind of space was situated there. I followed a work crew for fifty meters before I detoured into a corridor and went down a long ramp toward a door that had a doorknob. I hesitated, mind blank, and then turned the knob and pushed open the door and walked into earth, air and sky.

Here was a walled garden, trees, shrubs, flowering plants. I stood and looked. The heat was less severe than it had been on the day I’d arrived. This is what I needed, away from the rooms, the halls, the units — a place outside where I might think calmly about what I would see and hear and feel in the scene to come, at first light, when Artis and Ross were taken down. I walked for half a minute along a winding stone path before I realized, dumbly, that this was not a desert oasis but a proper English garden with trimmed hedges, shade trees, wild roses climbing a trellis. Something even stranger then, tree bark, blades of grass, every sort of flower — all seemingly coated or enameled, bearing a faint glaze. None of this was natural, all of it unruffled by the breeze that swept across the garden.

Trees and plants were labeled and I read some of the Latin names, which only deepened the mystery or the paradox or the ruse, whatever it was. It was the Stenmark twins, that’s what it was. Carpinus betulus fastigiata , a pyramidal tree, green foliage, narrow trunk that felt clean and smooth to the touch, some kind of plastic or fiberglass, museum quality, and I kept checking labels, could not seem to stop, fragments of Latin sideswiping and intermingling, Helianthus decapetalus , tapered leaves, whorl of bright yellow petals, then a bench in the shadow of a tall oak and a still figure seated there, apparently human, in a loose gray shirt, gray trousers and silver skullcap. He turned my way and nodded, a gesture of permission, and I approached slowly. He was a man of considerable age, lean, with buttery brown skin, a pointed face and slender hands, neck tendons like bridge cables.

“You’re the son,” he said.

“I guess so, yes.”

“I wonder how you managed to avoid the usual safeguards, making your way here.”

“I think my disk malfunctioned. My wrist ornament.”

“Magically,” he said. “And there’s a breeze this evening. Also magical.”

He invited me to share the bench, which resembled a foreshortened church pew. His name was Ben-Ezra and he liked to come out here, he said, and think about the time, many years away, when he would return to the garden and sit on the same bench, reborn, and think about the time when he used to sit here, usually alone, and imagine that very moment.

“Same trees, same ivy.”