Don DeLillo - Zero K

We approached slowly, she and I, quietly, but was it out of churchlike respect for the rock sculpture, the natural artwork, or were we simply observing the joined form of object and observer — the elusive boy who rarely attaches himself to something solid. Of course he reached across the taped border and managed to touch the rock, barely, and I felt his mother heed an inner pause, a caution, waiting for an alarm to start wailing. But the rock simply sat there.

We stood to either side of him and I allowed myself a minute or two with the rock.

Then I said, “Okay, go ahead.”

“What?”

“Define rock .”

I was thinking of myself at his age, determined to find the more or less precise meaning of a word, to draw other words out of the designated word in order to locate the core. This was always a struggle and the current instance was no different, a chunk of material that belongs to nature, shaped by forces such as erosion, flowing water, blowing sand, falling rain.

The definition needed to be concise, authoritative.

Stak yawned outstandingly, then leaned away from the rock, appraising it, measuring the thing from a certain distance, its physical parameters, solid surface, its crags, snags, spurs and pits, and he walked around it, noting the whole unhoned expanse.

“It’s hard, it’s rock hard, it’s petrified, it has major mineral content or it’s all mineral with the long-dead remains of plants and animals fossilized inside it.”

He spoke some more, arms drawn to his chest, hands mixing the fragments of his remarks, phrase by phrase. He was alone with the rock, a thing requiring a single syllable to give it outline and form.

“Officially let’s say a rock is a large hard mass of mineral substance lying on the ground or embedded in the soil.”

I was impressed. We kept looking at it, three of us, with traffic blasting by outside.

Stak talked to the rock. He told it that we were looking at it. He referred to us as three members of the species H. sapiens . He said that the rock would outlive us all, probably outlive the species itself. He went on for a while and then addressed no one in particular, saying there are three kinds of rock. He named them before I could attempt to recall the names and he spoke about petrology and geology and marble and calcite, and his mother and I listened while the boy grew taller. The attendant walked in then. I preferred to think of her as the curator, same woman, same feathered hat, a T-shirt and sandals, baggy denims fitted with bicycle clips. She carried a small paper bag, said nothing, went to her chair and took a sandwich out of the bag.

We watched her openly, in silence. The huge gallery area, nearly bare, and the one prominent object on display lent a significance to the simplest movement, man or woman, dog or cat. After a pause I asked Stak about another kind of nature, the weather, and he said he was no longer involved with the weather. He said the weather was long gone. He said that some things become de-necessitated.

His mother spoke then, at last, in a tense whisper.

“Of course you’re involved. The temperature, celsius and fahrenheit, and the cities, one hundred and four degrees, one hundred and eight degrees. India, China, Saudi Arabia. What happened to make you say you’re not involved? Of course you’re involved. Where did it all go?”

Her voice sounded lost and on this day everything about her suggested a lost time. Her son about to return to his father and then what happens, where’s the future if he doesn’t go back to school, what lies waiting? A son or daughter who travels at a wayward angle must seem a penalty the parent must bear — but for what crime?

I reminded myself that I needed a name for Stak’s father.

Before we left, the boy called across the room to the curator, asking her how they got the rock into the building. She was in the process of lifting the curved end of one slice of her bread in order to inspect the interior of the sandwich. She said they made a hole in the wall and hoisted the thing from a flatbed truck equipped with a crane. I’d thought of asking the same question the first time I was here but decided it was interesting to imagine the thing always here, undocumented.

Rocks are, but they do not exist .

On our way down the dim stairway I quoted the remark again and Stak and I tried to figure out what it means. It was a subject that blended well with our black-and-white descent.

• • •

I listen to classical music on the radio. I read the kind of challenging novel, often European, sometimes with a nameless narrator, always in translation, that I tried to read when I was an adolescent. Music and books, simply there, the walls, the floor, the furniture, the slight misalignment of two pictures that hang on the living room wall. I leave objects as they are. I look and let them be. I study every physical minute.

• • •

Two days later she showed up unannounced, never happened before, and she’d never been so clumsy and rushed, not slipping out of her jeans but fighting her way out, needing to rid herself of the seething sort of tensions that accompany any matter involving her son.

“He embraced me and left. I don’t know what scared me more, the leave-taking or the embrace. This is the first time totally that he volunteered an embrace.”

It appeared that she was undressing just to undress. I stood at the foot of the bed, shirt on, pants on, shoes and socks, and she kept undressing and kept talking.

“Who is this kid? Did I ever see him before? Here he is, there he goes. Embraced me and left. Goes where? He’s not my son, never was.”

“He was, he is. Every inch the boy you took out of the orphanage. Those missing years. His years,” I said. “You knew the moment you first saw him that he carried something you could never claim as your rightful due, except legally.”

“Orphanage. Sounds like a word out of the sixteenth century. The orphan boy becomes a prince.”

“A prince regent.”

“A princeling,” she said.

I laughed, she did not. All the command she’d demonstrated with the children in the schoolroom, there and elsewhere, the woman in the mirror knowing who she is and what she wants, all undermined by the boy’s brief visit, and here was the urgency of her need to break free, a flail of limbs on my messy bed.

I would see her less often after this, call and wait for a return call, longer hours at her job, and she was quieter now, early dinner and then home, alone, rarely a word about her son except to say that he had given up his Pashto, stopped learning, stopped speaking except when there was a practical matter that needed to be addressed. Her remarks were delivered in an evenness of tone, from a sheltered distance.

I decided to go running. I wore a sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers and went running in the park, around the reservoir, rain or shine. There is a smartphone that has an app that counts the steps a person takes. I did my own count, day by day, stride for stride, into the tens of thousands.

The woman swiveled away from her desktop screen and looked at me for the first time. She was a recruiter and the job in question was listed as compliance and ethics officer for a college in western Connecticut. I repeated the term to myself periodically as we spoke, omitting western Connecticut, which was a three-dimensional entity. Hills, trees, lakes, people.

She said I’d be responsible for interpreting the school charter to determine regulatory requirements in the context of state and federal laws. I said fine. She said something about supervision, coordination and oversight. I said okay. She waited for questions but I didn’t have a question. She threw in the term bilateral mandate and I told her that she resembled an actress whose name I didn’t know, someone appearing in a recent revival of a play I hadn’t seen. But I’d read about it, I said, and I’d looked at the photographs. The recruiter smiled faintly, her face becoming real in the amplified company of the actress. She understood that my remark was not an attempt to ingratiate myself. I was simply being self-distracted.