Don DeLillo - Zero K

We spoke in a friendly way about theater and it was clear from this point on that she wanted to dissuade me from considering the position, not because I was underqualified or overeager but because I didn’t belong there, in that environment. Compliance and ethics officer. She didn’t realize that everything she’d reported about the position, in the authorized terminology of job listings, was suited to my preferences and central to my past experience.

• • •

People here and there, hands out, standing man with paper cup, woman crouched above her vomit in seasick colors, woman seated on blanket, body rocking, voice chanting, and I see this all the time and always pause to give them something and what I feel is that I don’t know how to imagine the lives behind the momentary contact, the dollar contact, and what I tell myself is that I am obliged to look at them.

Taxis, trucks and buses. The noise persists even when traffic is stopped. I hear this from my rooftop, heat beating into my head. This is the noise that hangs in the air, nonstop, whatever time of day or night, if you know how to listen.

I didn’t use my credit card for eight straight days. What’s the point, what’s the message. Cash leaves no trace, whatever that means.

The phone rings, recorded message from a state agency concerning massive disruptions of service. The voice does not say massive but this is how I interpret the message.

I check the stove after turning off the burners and then make sure the door is locked by unlocking it and then relocking it.

I look out the window at the streetlights and wait for someone to walk by, casting a long shadow in an old movie.

I feel a challenge to be equal to whatever is forthcoming. There is Ross and his need to confront the future. There is Emma and the tender revisions of our love.

The phone rings again, the same recorded message. I spend about two seconds wondering what kind of services will be disrupted. Then I try to think about all the phones of every type bearing this message, people in the millions, but no one will remember to mention it to anyone else because what we all know is not worth sharing.

• • •

Breslow was Emma’s surname, not her husband’s. I knew this much and I’d more or less settled on a first name for the man. Volodymyr. He was born in this country but I decided what’s the point of giving him a name if it’s not Ukrainian. Then I realized how wasteful this was, thinking this way, at this time, wasteful, shallow, callous, inappropriate.

Invented names belong to the strafed landscape of the desert, except for my father’s and mine.

I wandered through the townhouse until I found him, at the kitchen table, eating a grilled cheese sandwich. Someone nearby was running a vacuum cleaner. He raised a hand in greeting and I asked how he was doing.

“I no longer take my classic morning crap after breakfast. Everything’s slower and dumber.”

“Should I be packing?”

“Pack light. I’m packing light,” he said.

He was not trying to be funny.

“Is there a date? I’m interested to know because there’s a job offer pending.”

“Want something to eat? What kind of offer?”

“Compliance and ethics officer. Four days a week.”

“Say it again.”

“I’ll have long weekends free,” I said.

Ross had become a blue-denim’d man. He wore the pants every day, same pair, a casual blue shirt, gray running shoes without socks. I had a sandwich and a beer and the vacuuming gradually diminished and I tried to imagine the man’s days and nights without the woman. All his privileges and comforts, drained of meaning now. Money. Has it been money, my father’s money, that determines the way I think and live? Whether I accept what he offers or turn him down cold, is this what overwhelms everything else?

“When will I know?”

“Matter of days. You’ll be contacted,” he said.

“How?”

“However they do these things. I’m simply going away. I haven’t been active professionally for some time and I’m simply going away.”

“But there are people who know the purpose of the journey. Trusted associates.”

“They know certain things. They know I have a son,” he said. “And they know that I’m going away.”

We went back to saying nothing much and I waited for his hands to start shaking but he sat behind his beard and told me a long story about the time he’d explored the upper tiers of the East Room at the Morgan Library, after regular hours, memorizing the titles on the spines of priceless volumes arrayed just beneath the lavishly muraled ceiling, and I decided not to mention the fact that I’d been with him at the time.

• • •

There was a woman on the subway platform, across the tracks. She stood at the wall, in wide trousers and a light sweater, eyes closed, and who does this, on a subway platform, people milling, trains coming and going. I watched her and when my train came I did not board and waited for the tracks to be clear again and resumed watching her, a woman seeming to draw ever inward, so I chose to believe. I wanted her to be the woman I’d seen before, twice, standing on a sidewalk, motionless, eyes closed. The platform began to get crowded and I had to change position to see her. I wondered if she was involved in some kind of cultural tong war, part of a faction in exile working out an interpretation of their role, their mission. This would be the point of the sign, if there was a sign, a message directed to other factions, partisans of another theory, another conviction.

I liked this idea, it made total sense, and I imagined myself leaving the platform, hurrying up the steps and across the street and down the other set of steps and through the turnstile to the other platform to ask her about this, her group, her sect.

But this was a different woman and there was no sign. Of course I’d known this from the start. There was nothing left for me to do but wait for her train to enter the station, people leaving, people boarding. I wanted to be sure she would not be standing there, she would not remain behind, hands folded at her waist, eyes closed, on an empty platform.

• • •

I called and left messages and found myself one day standing across the street from her building, Emma’s. A man walked by, dusty boots, a set of keys on a ring dangling from his belt. I checked my keys. Then I crossed the street, entered the lobby and pressed her bell. The inner door was locked of course. I waited and pressed again. I thought of walking to her school and asking someone if I might see Emma Breslow. I spoke the full name inwardly.

Her cellphone was no longer functioning. This was a plunge into prehistory. What was the first thing I would say to her when we spoke, finally?

Compliance and ethics officer.

Then what?

A college in western Connecticut. Not far from the horse farm where we met. You’ll come to visit. We’ll ride a horse.

I didn’t go to her school. I took a long walk on crowded streets and saw four young women with shaved heads. They were a group, they were friends, not flouncing along like runway models dressed for world-weary collapse. Tourists, I thought, northern Europe, and I made a tepid attempt to read meaning into their appearance. But sometimes the street spills over me, too much to absorb, and I have to stop thinking and keep walking.

I called the school and someone said she was on brief leave.

The job was set, start in two weeks, well before the school year begins, time to accompany Ross, time to return, to adjust, and I didn’t know how I felt about going back there, the Convergence, that crack in the earth. Here, in the settled measure of days and weeks, there were no arguments to make, no alternatives to propose. I’d accepted the situation, my father’s. But I needed to talk to Emma beforehand, tell her everything, finally, father, mother, stepmother, the name change, the numbered levels, all the blood facts that follow me to bed at night.