Don DeLillo - Zero K

“So I expect,” he said.

“Or something completely different.”

“What is here now is what is completely different. This is the lunar afterlife of the planet. Fabricated materials, a survival garden. It has its particular link to a life that is no longer in transit.”

“Doesn’t the garden also suggest a kind of mockery? Or is it a kind of nostalgia?”

“Much too soon for you to shake free of the conventions that you’ve brought here with you.”

“And Ross, what about him?”

“Ross was quick to gain a secure understanding.”

“And now here I am, faced with the death of a woman I admire and the rashly premature death of the man she loves, who happens to be my father. And what am I doing? I’m sitting on a bench in an English garden in the middle of a desert waste.”

“We have not encouraged his plan.”

“But you will allow him to do it. You will allow your team to do it.”

“People who spend time here find out eventually who they are. Not through consultation with others but through self-examination, self-revelation. A tract of lost land, a sense of wilderness that is overwhelming. These rooms and halls, a stillness, a state of waiting. Aren’t all of us here waiting for something to happen? Something elsewhere that will further define our purpose here. And something far more intimate as well. Waiting to enter the chamber, waiting to learn what we will confront there. A few of those waiting are fairly healthy, yes, very few, but they’ve chosen to surrender what is left of their current lives to discover a radical level of self-renewal.”

“Ross has always been a master of life expectancy,” I said. “Then, here, now, in the past three or four days, I’m seeing the man disintegrate.”

“Another state of waiting. Waiting to decide finally. He has the rest of this day and a long sleepless night in which to think more deeply into the matter. And if he needs more time, this will be arranged.”

“But in simple human terms, the man believes that he can’t live without the woman.”

“Then you are the one to tell him that what remains is worth a change of mind and heart.”

“What is it that remains? Investment strategies?”

“The son remains.”

“That won’t work,” I said.

“The son and what he might do to keep the father intact in the big bad world.”

His voice had a slight lilt that he tended to accompany with a sway of index and middle fingers. I confronted the impulse to guess the man’s background or to invent it. The name Ben-Ezra was itself an invention, so I decided. The name suited the man, suggesting a composite of biblical and futuristic themes, and here we were in his post-apocalyptic garden. I was sorry he’d told me his name, sorry he’d named himself before I could do it for him.

He wasn’t done with fathers and sons.

“Allow the man the dignity of his choice. Forget his money. He has a life outside the limits of your experience. Grant him the right to his sorrow.”

“His sorrow, yes. His choice, no. And the fact that this is allowable here, this is part of the program.”

“Here and elsewhere, years to come, not uncommon.”

We sat for a time without speaking. He wore dark slippers with tiny bright markings on each instep. I began to ask questions about the Convergence. He gave no direct responses but remarked along the way that the community was still growing, positions to be filled, construction projects to be initiated, subsurface. The airstrip, however, would remain a simple component, without expansion or modernization.

He said, “Isolation is not a drawback to those who understand that isolation is the point.”

I tried to imagine him in ordinary surroundings, in the rear seat of a car moving slowly through crowded streets or at the head of a dinner table in his home on a hilltop above the crowded streets, but the idea carried no conviction. I could see him nowhere but here, on this bench, in the context of an immense emptiness outside the garden walls. He was indigenous. Isolation was the point.

“We understand that the idea of life extension will generate methods that attempt to improve upon the freezing of human bodies. To re-engineer the aging process, to reverse the biochemistry of progressive diseases. We fully expect to be in the forefront of any genuine innovation. Our tech centers in Europe are examining strategies for change. Ideas adaptable to our format. We’re getting ahead of ourselves. This is where we want to be.”

Did such a man have a family? Did he brush his teeth, see a dentist when he had a toothache? Could I even try to imagine his life? Someone else’s life. Not even a minute. Even a minute is unimaginable. Physical, mental, spiritual. Not even the merest second. Too much is pledged into his compact frame.

I told myself to calm down.

He said, “How fragile we are. Isn’t it true? Everyone everywhere on this earth.”

I listened to him speak about the hundreds of millions of people into the future billions who are struggling to find something to eat not once or twice a day but all day every day. He spoke in detail about food systems, weather systems, the loss of forests, the spread of drought, the massive die-offs of birds and ocean life, the levels of carbon dioxide, the lack of drinking water, the waves of virus that envelop broad geographies.

These elements of planetary woe were a natural component of the thinking here but there was no trace of rote recitation. He knew about these matters, he’d studied them, witnessed some aspects of them, dreamt about them. And he spoke in a subdued tone that carried an eloquence I could not help admiring.

Then there was biological warfare with its variant forms of mass extinction. Toxins, agents, replicating entities. And the refugees everywhere, victims of war in great numbers, living in makeshift shelters, unable to return to their crushed cities and towns, dying at sea when their rescue vessels capsize.

He was looking at me, probing for something.

“Don’t you see and feel these things more acutely than you used to? The perils and warnings? Something gathering, no matter how safe you may feel in your wearable technology. All the voice commands and hyper-connections that allow you to become disembodied.”

I told him that what was gathering could well be a kind of psychological pandemic. The fearful perception that tends toward wishfulness. Something people want and need from time to time, purely atmospheric.

I liked that. Purely atmospheric.

He looked at me even more searchingly now, either considering the remark too witless to address or interpreting what I said as a gesture toward social convention, obligatory under the circumstances.

“Atmospheric, yes. One minute, calm prevails. Then there’s a light in the sky and a sonic boom and a shock wave — and a Russian city enters a compressed reality that would be mystifying if it weren’t so abruptly real. This is nature’s thrust, its command over our efforts, our foresight, every ingenuity we can summon to protect ourselves. The meteor. Chelyabinsk.”

He smiled at me.

“Say it. Go ahead. Chelyabinsk,” he said. “Not so very far from here. Quite near in fact, if anything can be called near in this part of the world. People rush from room to room collecting valuable documents. They prepare to go somewhere that’s safe. They put their cats and dogs in carriers.”

He stopped and thought.

“We reverse the text here, we read the news backwards. From death to life,” he said. “Our devices enter the body dynamically and become the refurbished parts and pathways we need in order to live again.”

“Is the desert where miracles happen? Are we here to repeat the ancient pieties and superstitions?”