Don DeLillo - Zero K

She said that Stak counted pigeons on the rooftop across the street and never failed to report the number. Seventeen, twenty-three, a disappointing twelve.

Then, standing on the sidewalk, not a homeless man with sagging face and crayoned sign, begging, but a woman in meditative stance, body erect in long skirt and loose blouse, arms bent above her head, fingers not quite touching. Her eyes were closed and she was motionless, naturally so, with a small boy next to her. I’d seen the woman before, or different women, here and there, arms at sides or crossed at chest level, eyes always closed, and now the boy, first time, pressed trousers, white shirt, blue tie, looking a little scared, and until now I never wondered what the cause was or why there was no sign, no leaflets or tracts, only the woman, the stillness, the fixed point in the nonstop swarm. I watched her, knowing that I could not invent a single detail of the life that pulsed behind those eyes.

Traffic began to move and Stak was talking to the driver again, forehead welded to the plexiglass.

“Sometimes I tell him to shut up and eat his spinach. It took him a while,” she said, “to understand that this is a joke.”

He was here for a long weekend now and then and for ten days when the school year ended. This was all. She hadn’t told me why she and her husband split up and there must be a reason why I never asked. To honor her reticence, perhaps, or was it more essentially that we were two individuals exploring a like-mindedness, determined to keep clear of the past, defy any impulse to recite our histories. We weren’t married, we didn’t live together but we were braided tight, each person part of the other. This is how I thought of it. An intuitive link, a reciprocal, one number related to another in such a way that when multiplied together, day or night, their product is one.

“He doesn’t understand jokes and this is interesting because his father used to say the same thing about me.”

Emma was a counselor in a year-round school for children with learning disabilities and developmental problems. Emma Breslow. I liked to say the name. I liked to tell myself that I would have guessed the name, or invented it, if she hadn’t told me what it is at the wedding of mutual friends on a horse farm in Connecticut, where we first met. Would this become a nostalgic theme to return to in future years? Country roads, bluegrass pastures, bride and groom in riding boots. The idea of future years was too broad and open a topic for us to explore.

The towers grew taller here and the driver simply drove, letting Stak rehearse his Pashto. Two young women crossed at the light, heads shaved, and the man and woman on the screen spoke in faraway tones about a new surge of Arctic melt and we waited for footage of some kind, amateur video or network helicopter, but they changed the subject and I hit the OFF site and they were still there and then Emma hit it and I hit it again, calmly, and we resigned ourselves to the deadly sedative tenor of picture and sound.

Then she said, “He talks about the weather all the time. Not just today’s weather but the general phenomenon narrowed down to certain places. Why is Phoenix always hotter than Tucson even though Tucson is farther south? He does not tell me the answer. This is not something I would know, it is something he would know, and he has no intention of sharing the knowledge. He likes to recite temperatures. The numbers tell him something. Tucson one hundred and three degrees fahrenheit. He always specifies fahrenheit or celsius. He relishes both words. Phoenix one hundred and seven degrees fahrenheit. Baghdad. What is Baghdad today?

“He’s interested in climate.”

“He’s interested in numbers. High, medium, low. Place-names and numbers. Shanghai, he will say. Zero point zero one inches precipitation. Mumbai, he will say. He loves to say Mumbai. Mumbai. Yesterday, ninety-two degrees fahrenheit. Then he gives celsius. Then he checks one of his devices. Then he gives today. Then he gives tomorrow. Riyadh, he will say. He is disappointed when Riyadh loses out to another city. An emotional letdown.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“Baghdad, he will say. One hundred and thirteen degrees fahrenheit. Riyadh. One hundred and nine degrees fahrenheit. He is making me disappear. His size, his presence in a room, he shrinks our apartment, can’t stay in one place, roams and talks, recites from memory, and his demands, his ultimatums, and the voice that issues them, with its own echo. I’m exaggerating slightly.”

The cab was edging its way through the constricted streets downtown and if Stak heard what his mother was saying he gave no sign. He was speaking English now, trying to guide the driver in and out of the board game of one way and dead end.

“I don’t know who he is, I don’t know who his friends are, I don’t know who his parents were.”

“He didn’t have parents. He had a biological mother and father.”

“I hate the phrase biological mother . It’s like science fiction. He reads science fiction, terminal amounts. That’s something I know.”

“And he leaves when?”

“Tomorrow.”

“And you will feel what when he’s gone?”

“I’ll miss him. The minute he’s out the door.”

I gave this remark a chance to settle in the air.

“Then why don’t you demand more time with him?”

“I couldn’t bear it,” she said. “And neither could he.”

The taxi stopped on a near empty street just below the pit of finance and Stak angled his body out the door and jiggled a hand behind him in an ironic farewell. We watched him enter a loft building where he would spend the next two hours in a room choked with dust and stink, learning the principles of jujitsu, a method of artful self-defense predating the current practice of judo.

The driver slid open the middle panel and Emma paid him. We walked for a time, going nowhere, streets that had a feel of abandonment, fire hydrant open to a limp stream of rusty water.

After a while she said, “He invented the Taliban story.”

Another idea for me to absorb.

“You know this?”

“He improvises now and then, inflates something, expands something, takes a story to a limit in a way that may or may not test your standards of belief. The Taliban was fiction.”

“You sensed it right away.”

“More than that. I knew it,” she said.

“Fooled me.”

“I’m not sure about his motive. I don’t think there is a motive. It’s a kind of recurring experiment. He’s testing himself and me and you and everybody. Or it’s pure instinct. Think of something, then say it. What he imagines becomes real. Not so strange really. Except I’d like to hit him with a frying pan sometimes.”

“What about his jujitsu?”

“It’s real, it’s serious, I was allowed to watch one time. His body is willing to follow a strict format if he respects the tradition. The tradition is samurai combat. Feudal warriors.”

“Fourteen years old.”

“Fourteen.”

“Never mind thirteen or fifteen. Fourteen is the final bursting forth,” I said.

“Did you burst forth?”

“I’m still waiting to burst forth.”

We fell into long silences, walking inward, step by step, and a light rain did not prompt a word or send us into cover. We walked north to the antiterror barricades on Broad Street where a tour leader spoke to his umbrella’d group about the scars on the wall caused by an anarchist’s bomb a hundred years ago. We went along empty streets and our shared stride began to feel like a heartbeat and soon became a game, a tacit challenge, the pace quickening. The sun reappeared seconds before the rain stopped and we went past an untended shish kebab cart and saw a skateboarder sailing past at the end of the street, there and gone, and we approached a woman in Arab headdress, white woman, white blouse, stained blue skirt, talking to herself and walking back and forth, barefoot, five steps east, five steps west along a sidewalk webbed with scaffolding. Then the Money Museum, the Police Museum, the old stone buildings on Pine Street and our pace increased again, no cars or people here, just the iron posts, the stunted security markers set along the street, and I knew she’d outrace me, keep an even measure, she was will-driven just walking to a mailbox with a postcard in her hand. A sound around us that we could not identify made us stop and listen, the tone, the pitch, a continuous low dull hum, inaudible until you hear it and then it’s everywhere, every step you take, coming from the empty buildings on both sides of the street, and we stood outside the locked revolving doors of Deutsche Bank listening to the systems within, the networks of interacting components. I grabbed her arm and moved her into the doorway of a shuttered storefront and we clutched and pressed and came close to outright screwing.