Don DeLillo - Zero K

“He told you this?”

“Terrorist attacks. Visit the site, examine the conditions, enter a bet. Which country, which group, numbers of dead. Always the time frame. Has to happen within a certain number of days, weeks, months, other variables.”

“He told you this?”

“His father told me this. His father ordered him to stop. Assassinations of public figures ranging from heads of state to insurgent leaders and other categories. Odds depend on the individual’s rank and country. Other available wagers, quite a few of them. Apparently a thriving site.”

“I don’t know how thriving. These things don’t happen often.”

“They happen. The people who place the bets expect them to happen, wait for them to happen.”

“The bet makes the event more likely. I understand that. Ordinary people sitting at home.”

“A force that changes history,” she said.

“That’s my line,” I said.

Were we beginning to enjoy this? I glanced toward the other end of the roof to see a woman in sandals, shorts and a halter-top dragging a blanket to a spot where she seemed to expect the sun to touch down. I looked into the heavy cloud cover, then back to the woman.

“Do you talk to his father often?”

“We talk when necessary. The boy makes it necessary now and then. There are other habits, things he does.”

“Talking to cabdrivers.”

“Not worth a phone call to Denver.”

“What else?”

“Altering his voice for days at a time. He has a sort of hollow voice he affects. I can’t imitate it. A submerged voice, digital noise, sound units fitted together. Then there’s the Pashto. He speaks Pashto to people in the street who look as though they might be native speakers. They nearly never are. Or to a supermarket clerk or a cabin attendant on a flight. The cabin attendant thinks this is the first stage in a hijacking. I witnessed this once, his father twice.”

I found myself disturbed by the fact that she talked to his father. Of course they talked, they had to talk for any number of reasons. I imagined a sturdy man with darkish complexion, he is standing in a room with photos on the wall, father and son in hunting gear. He and the boy watch TV news on an obscure cable channel, programming from eastern Europe. I needed a name for Stak’s father, Emma’s ex, in Denver, mile-high.

“Has he stopped making bets on car bombs?”

“His father is not completely convinced. He makes surreptitious raids on Stak’s devices.”

The woman on the blanket was motionless, supremely supine, legs spread, arms spread, palms up, face up, eyes shut. Maybe she had news that the sun was due to appear, maybe she didn’t want the sun, maybe she did this every day at the same time, a yielding, a discipline, a religion.

“He’ll be returning in a couple of weeks. He has to appear at his jujitsu academy. His dojo,” she said. “Special event.”

Or maybe she just wanted to get out of the apartment, a resident of the building but unknown to me, middle-aged, escaping the cubical life for a few hours, same as us, same as the hundreds we would see when we walked across the park to Emma’s place, the runners, idlers, softball players, the parents pushing strollers, the palpable relief of being in unmetered space for a time, a scattered crowd safe in our very scatter, people free to look at each other, to notice, admire, envy, wonder at.

Think about it, I nearly said. So many places elsewhere, crowds collecting, thousands shouting, chanting, bending to the charge of police with batons and riot shields. My mind working into things, helplessly, people dead and dying, hands bound behind them, heads split open.

We began to walk faster because she wanted to get home in time to watch a tennis match at Wimbledon, her favorite player, the Latvian woman who groaned erotically with each fierce return.

• • •

If I’d never known Emma, what would I see when I walk the streets going nowhere special, to the post office or the bank. I’d see what is there, wouldn’t I, or what I was able to assemble from what is there. But it’s different now. I see streets and people with Emma in the streets and among the people. She’s not an apparition but only a feeling, a sensation. I’m not seeing what I think she would be seeing. This is my perception but she is present within it or spread throughout it. I sense her, feel her, I know that she occupies something within me that allows these moments to happen, off and on, streets and people.

• • •

The twenty-dollar bills emerged from the slot in the automated teller machine and I stood in the booth counting the money and turning some bills upside down and others back to front to regularize the stack. I maintained reasonably, to myself, that this procedure should have been performed by the bank. The bank should deliver the money, my money, in an orderly format, ten bills, twenty dollars each bill, all bills face forward, face up, unsmudged money, sanitary money. I counted again, head down, shoulders hunched, partitioned from people in the booths to either side of me, isolated but aware, feeling their presence left and right, my money held near my chest. It didn’t seem to be me. It seemed to be someone else, a recluse who’d wandered into semi-public view, standing here and counting.

I touched the screen for the receipt and then for account activity and account summary and I wrapped the bills inside the flimsy slips of toxic paper and left the booth, the stall, receipts and money clutched in my hand. I didn’t look at the people in line. No one ever looks at anyone in the ATM area. And I tried not to think about the security cameras but here I was in my mind’s self-surveillance device, body crabbed tight as I removed the money from the slot, counted it, organized it and then recounted it.

But was this really so introspective, so abnormally cautious? The handling of the bills, the heightened awareness, isn’t this something people do, check the wallet, check the keys, it’s just another level of the commonplace.

I sit at home with transaction registers, withdrawal slips, records of account details, my outdated smartphone, my credit card statement, new balance, late payment, additional charges all spread before me on Madeline’s old walnut desk and I try to determine the source of what appear to be several small persistent errors, deviations from the logic of the number concept, the pure thrust of reliable numbers that determine one’s worth, even as totals diminish week by week.

• • •

I described the details of several job interviews to Emma, who enjoyed my accounts of the proceedings — voice imitations, sometimes verbatim, of interviewers’ remarks. She understood that I was not ridiculing these men and women. This was a documentary approach to a special kind of dialogue and we both knew that the performer himself, still jobless, was the subject of the piece.

The sun was shining now and I thought of the woman spread-eagled on my roof. There are women everywhere, Emma in a director’s chair a handclasp away from me and the Latvian woman and her opponent on the TV screen, sweating, groaning, swatting a tennis ball in patterns that might be subject to advanced study by behavioral scientists.

We hadn’t had a serious discussion for an hour or so. I deferred to Emma at such times. She had an adopted son, a failed marriage, a job involving damaged children and I had what — access to a breezy rooftop with an interrupted view of the river.

She said, “I think you look forward to the job interviews. Shave the face, shine the shoes.”

“I’m down to one decent pair of shoes. This is not rank neglect but a kind of day-to-day carelessness.”

“Do you feel a certain affection for these decent shoes?”