Don DeLillo - Zero K

I conferred quietly with Emma, who said he was studying Pashto, privately, in his spare time. Afghani, she said, to enlighten me further.

I muttered something about Urdu, reflexively, in self-defense, because this was the only word that came to mind under the circumstances.

We were leaning into each other, she and I, and she exaggerated the terms of our complicity, speaking from the side of her mouth for comic effect and telling me that Stak walked in circles in his room enunciating phrases in Pashto in accordance with instructions from the device clipped to his belt.

He was seated directly behind the driver and spoke into the plexiglass shield, undeterred by traffic noise and street construction. He was fourteen, foreign born, a slant tower, six-four and growing, his voice rushed and dense. The driver did not seem surprised to find himself exchanging words and phrases in his native language with a white boy. This was New York. Every living breathing genotype entered his cab at some point, day or night. And if this was an inflated notion, that was New York as well.

Two people on the TV screen in front of us were speaking remotely about bridge and tunnel traffic.

Emma asked when I’d start the new job. Two weeks from today. Which group, which division, which part of town. I told her a few things that I’d already told myself.

“Suit and tie.”

“Yes.”

“Close shave, shined shoes.”

“Yes.”

“You look forward to this.”

“Yes I do.”

“Will this transform you?”

“It will remind me that this is the man I am.”

“Down deep,” she said.

“Whatever there is of deep.”

The driver slipped into the bus lane, temporarily gaining position, advantage, dominance, and he gestured backwards to the boy as he spoke, three lights ahead all green — Pashto, Urdu, Afghani — and I told Emma that we were riding in a taxicab with a driver who enters the bus lane illegally and drives at madman speeds with one hand on the wheel while he half-looks over his shoulder and converses with a passenger in a far-flung language. What does this mean?

“Are you going to tell me that he drives this way only when he speaks this language?”

“It means this is just another day.”

She looked into the options below the screen and put her finger to the inch-square site marked OFF. Nothing happened. We were back in mainstream traffic moving slowly down Broadway and I told Emma, out of nowhere, that I wanted to stop using my credit card. I wanted to pay cash, to live a life in which it is possible to pay cash, whatever the circumstances. To live a life, I said again, examining the phrase. Then I leaned toward the screen and hit the OFF site. Nothing happened. We listened to Stak speak to the driver within the limits of his Pashto, intensely. Emma looked hard at the images on the screen. I waited for her to hit the OFF site.

She and her former husband, a man whose name she did not speak, went to Ukraine and found the boy in a facility for abandoned children. He was five or six years old and they took the risk and made the arrangements and flew him home to Denver, which would eventually share time with New York when the parents divorced and Emma came east.

These are just the barest boundaries, of course, and she took her time rounding out the story for me, over weeks, and even as her voice went weary with regret, I became absorbed in another kind of home, in what was most immediate, the touch, the half words, the blue bedsheets, Emma’s name like babytalk at two in the morning.

Horns were making sporadic noise and Stak was still talking to the driver through the closed panels. Talking, shouting, listening, pausing for the right word or phrase. I spoke to Emma about my money. Money comes to mind, I speak about it, the fading numbers, the small discrepancies that turn up on the withdrawal slips that are spat out by the automated teller machines. I go home and look at the check register and do the simple arithmetic and there’s an aberration of one dollar and twelve cents.

“A bank mistake, not your mistake.”

“Maybe it’s not even a bank mistake but something in the structure itself. Beyond the computers and grids and digital algorithms and intelligence agencies. It’s the root, the source, I’m almost serious, where things fit together or slip apart. Three dollars and sixty-seven cents.”

Traffic was stopped dead and I nudged the window switch and listened to the blowing horns approach peak volume. We were trapped in our own obsessive clamor.

“I’m talking about minor matters that define us.”

I shut the window and thought about what I might say next. Faint sounds of news and weather kept coming from the screen at Emma’s kneecaps.

“Those blanked-out eternities at the airport. Getting there, waiting there, standing shoeless in long lines. Think about it. We take off our shoes and remove our metal objects and then enter a stall and raise our arms and get body-scanned and sprayed with radiation and reduced to nakedness on a screen somewhere and then how totally helpless we are all over again as we wait on the tarmac, belted in, our plane eighteenth in line, and it’s all ordinary, it’s routine, we make ourselves forget it. That’s the thing.”

She said, “What thing?”

“What thing. Everything. It’s the things we forget about that tell us who we are.”

“Is this a philosophical statement?”

“Traffic jams are a philosophical statement. I want to take your hand and wedge it in my crotch. That’s a philosophical statement.”

Stak backed away from the partition. He sat upright and motionless, looking into vague space.

We waited.

“The man. The driver. He’s a former member of the Taliban.”

He said this evenly, maintaining his aimless look. We thought about it, Emma and I, and eventually she said, “This is true?”

“He said it, I heard it. Taliban. Involved in skirmishes, clashes, all kinds of operations.”

“What else did you talk about?”

“His family, my family.”

She did not like this. The light tone we’d evolved yielded to a silence. I imagined a pub where we might go after dropping off the kid, mobbed bodies at the bar, couples at three or four tables, spirited talk, women laughing. Taliban. How is it that so many end up here, those who flee terror and those who render it, all driving taxis.

We were in a taxi because Stak rejected the subway. The barbarian heat and stench of the platform. The standing and waiting. The crowded cars, the voice recordings, the bodies touching. Was he the species that rejected all the things we were supposed to tolerate as a way of maintaining our shaky hold on common order?

We were quiet for a time and I hit the OFF site and then Emma hit it and I hit it again. The horns diminished but traffic did not move and the noise was soon resurgent, a few warped drivers prompting others and then others and the amplified sound becoming an independent force, noise for the sake of noise, overwhelming the details of time and place.

Traffic jam, downtown, Sunday, senseless.

Stak said, “If you close your eyes, the noise becomes a sound that’s more or less normal. It doesn’t go away, it just becomes something you hear because your eyes are closed. It becomes your sound.”

“And when you open your eyes, what?” his mother said.

“The sound becomes noise again.”

Why adopt a boy that age, five or six or seven, someone you see for the first time in a city you’ve never heard of, many miles from the capital, in a country that was itself an adoptee, passed from master to master through the centuries. She’d told me that her husband had Ukrainian roots but for her part I knew it had to be something in the boy’s face, in his eyes, a need, a plea, and she felt a compassion that overwhelmed her. She saw a life bereft of expectation and it was hers to take and save, to make meaningful. But there was also, wasn’t there, a kind of split-secondness, a gamble in the form of flesh-and-blood, let’s just do it, and a brisk dismissal of all the things that could go wrong. And would this stranger in the house bring with him the long run of luck that might save their marriage?