Don DeLillo - Zero K

It amused him to hear that I was not inclined to yield.

“Such a quaint response to ideas that attempt to confront a decimated future. Try to understand. This is all happening in the future. This future, this instant. If you can’t absorb this idea, best go home now.”

I wondered whether Ross had asked this man to speak to me, enlighten me, expertly, reassuringly. Was I interested in what he had to say? I found myself thinking of the dire night ahead and the morning to come.

“We share a feeling here, a perception. We think of ourselves as transrational. The location itself, the structure itself, the science that bends all previous belief. The testing of human viability.”

He paused here to remove a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and blow his nose, unconditionally, with follow-up swipes and blots, and this made me feel better. Real life, body functions. I waited for him to finish what he was saying.

“Those of us who are here don’t belong anywhere else. We’ve fallen out of history. We’ve abandoned who we were and where we were in order to be here.”

He inspected the handkerchief and folded it carefully. It took him a moment to ease the small square into his pocket.

“And where is here?” he said. “Untapped reserves of rare minerals and the rolling thunder of oil money and repressive states and human rights violations and bribable officials. Minimal contact. Detachment. Disinfestation.”

I wanted to interpret the marks imprinted on his slippers. These might be a clue to the man’s cultural lineage. I got nowhere with this, feeling the breeze begin to stiffen and hearing the voice once more.

“The site is fixed. We are not in a zone susceptible to earthquakes or to minor swarms but there are seismic countermeasures in every detail of the structure, with every conceivable safeguard against systems failure. Artis will be safe, and Ross if he chooses to accompany her. The site is fixed, we are fixed.”

Ben-Ezra. I needed to think about his real name, his birth name. I needed a form of self-defense, a way to creep insidiously into his life. I’d want to give him a cane to complete the picture, a walking stick, rock maple, man on the bench, both hands resting on the curved handle, shaft perpendicular to the ground, blunt end between his feet.

“Those who eventually emerge from the capsules will be ahistorical humans. They will be free of the flatlines of the past, the attenuated minute and hour.”

“And they will speak a new language, according to Ross.”

“A language isolate, beyond all affiliation with other languages,” he said. “To be taught to some, implanted in others, those already in cryopreservation.”

A system that will offer new meanings, entire new levels of perception.

It will expand our reality, deepen the reach of our intellect.

It will remake us, he said.

We will know ourselves as never before, blood, brain and skin.

We will approximate the logic and beauty of pure mathematics in everyday speech.

No similes, metaphors, analogies.

A language that will not shrink from whatever forms of objective truth we have never before experienced.

He talked, I listened, the subject beginning to approach new magnitudes.

The universe, what it was, what it is, where it is going.

The expanding, accelerating, infinitely evolving universe, so filled with life, with worlds upon never-ending worlds, he said.

The universe, the multiverse, so many cosmic infinities that the idea of repeatability becomes unavoidable.

The idea of two individuals sitting on a bench in a desert garden having the conversation we are having, you and I, word for word, except that they are different individuals, in a different garden, millions of light-years from here — this is an inescapable fact.

Was this the case of an old man getting carried away or was it the younger man’s attempt to resist slick ironies that mattered?

Either way I began to think of him as a crackpot sage.

“It’s only human to want to know more, and then more, and then more,” I said. “But it’s also true that what we don’t know is what makes us human. And there’s no end to not knowing.”

“Go on.”

“And no end to not living forever.”

“Go on,” he said.

“If someone or something has no beginning, then I can believe that he, she or it has no end. But if you’re born or hatched or sprouted, then your days are already numbered.”

He thought for a moment.

“ ‘It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man to tell him that he is at the end of his nature, or that there is no further state to come.’ ”

I waited.

“Seventeenth century,” he said. “Sir Thomas Browne.”

I waited some more. But that was all. Seventeenth century. He left it up to me to reckon our progress since then.

True wind blowing now, garden unstirred, the eerie stillness of flowers, grass and leaves that resist the perceptible rush of air. But the scene is not blandly static. There is tone and color, shimmer everywhere, sun beginning to sink, trees alight in the span of waning day.

“You sit alone in a quiet room at home and you listen carefully. What is it you hear? Not traffic in the street, not voices or rain or someone’s radio,” he said. “You hear something but what? It’s not room tone or ambient sound. It’s something that may change as your listening deepens, second after second, and the sound is growing louder now — not louder but somehow wider, sustaining itself, encircling itself. What is it? The mind, the life itself, your life? Or is it the world, not the material mass, land and sea, but what inhabits the world, the flood of human existence. The world hum. Do you hear it, yourself, ever?”

I could not invent a name for him. I could not imagine him as a younger man. He was born old. He has lived his life on this bench. He is a permanent part of the bench, Ben-Ezra, slippers, skullcap, long spidery fingers, a body at rest in a spun-glass garden.

• • •

I left him there and began to wander out past the flowerbeds, on a dirt path now, pushing through a gated part of the garden wall into deeper stands of counterfeit trees. Then something stopped me cold, a figure standing in scant light, nearly inseparable from the trees, face and body scorched brown, arms crossed on chest, fists clenched, and even when I knew that I was staring at a mannequin, I remained in place, rooted as the figure itself.

It scared me, a thing without features, naked, sexless, no longer a dummy dress-form but a sentinel, posing forbiddingly. This was different from the mannequin I’d seen in an empty hallway. There was a tension in this encounter and I walked on warily and saw several others, half hidden in the trees. I didn’t look at them so much as watch them, scrutinize them nervously. Their stillness seemed willed. They stood with arms crossed or arms at sides or arms thrust forward, one of them armless, one of them headless, strong dumbstruck objects that belonged here, painted in dark washes.

In a small clearing there was a structure jutting upward at a slant from ground level, a rooflike projection above an entranceway. I walked down eight or nine steps into a vaulted interior, a crypt, dimly lit, dank, all cracked gray stone, with recesses in the walls where bodies were placed, half bodies, mannequins as preserved corpses, head to waist in shabby hooded garments, each to its niche.

I stood there and tried to absorb what I was seeing. I searched for the word. There was a word I wanted, not crypt or grotto , and in the meantime all I could do was look intently and try to accumulate the details. These mannequins had features, all worn down, eroded, eyes, nose, mouth, ruined faces every one, ash gray, and shriveled hands, barely intact. There were roughly twenty such figures and a few that were full-bodied, standing, in old gray shredded robes, heads bowed. I walked along, bodies on both sides of me, and the sight was overwhelming, and the place itself, the word itself — the word was catacomb .