Don DeLillo - Zero K

She called that night, late, speaking in a voice that was all urgency, heavy pressure bearing upon her, word after word. Stak had disappeared. It happened five days ago. She was in Denver now with the boy’s father. She’d been there since day two. The police had issued a missing person report. There was a search unit working on the case. They’d confiscated his computer and other devices. The parents were in touch with a private investigator.

Two of them, mother and father, the shared anguish, the mystery of a son who decides to vanish. His father was certain that the boy hadn’t been taken and detained by others. There had been signs of some kind of activity beyond Stak’s customary stray behavior. That was all. What else could there be? She was exhausted. I spoke briefly, saying what I had to, and asked how I might reach her. She said she’d call again and was gone.

I stood in the bedroom and felt defeated. It was a cheap and selfish feeling, a bitterness of spirit. Rain was hitting the window and I lifted it open and let the cool air enter. Then I looked in the mirror over the bureau and simulated a suicide by gunshot to the head. I did it three more times, working on different faces.

There was a sandstorm wavering across the landscape and the airstrip was unapproachable for a time. Our small plane circled the complex while we waited for a chance to land. From this height the structure itself was a model of shape and form, a wilderness vision, all lines and angles and jutted wings, set securely nowhere.

Ross was in the seat in front of me speaking French with a woman across the narrow aisle. The plane had five seats, we were the only passengers. He and I had been traveling for many hours stretching to days, spending a night in an embassy or consulate somewhere, and I had the feeling that he was drawing things out, not delaying his arrival for the sake of living one more day but simply placing things in perspective.

What things?

Mind and memory, I guess. His decision. Our father-and-son encounter, three-plus decades, all dips and swerves.

This is what long journeys are for. To see what’s back behind you, lengthen the view, find the patterns, know the people, consider the significance of one matter or another and then curse yourself or bless yourself or tell yourself, in my father’s situation, that you’ll have a chance to do it all over again, with variations.

He wore a safari jacket and blue jeans.

The woman had been in her seat when Ross and I boarded this last aircraft. She would be his guide, leading him through the final hours. I listened to them, on and off, caught a phrase here and there, all about procedures and schedules, the detailwork of another day at the office. She may have been in her mid-thirties, wearing a version of the green two-piece garment associated with hospital staff, and her name was Dahlia.

The plane circled lower and the complex appeared to float up out of the earth. All around it the immense fever burn of ash and rock. The sandstorm was out there, more visibly now, dust rising in great dark swelling waves, only upright, rollers breaking vertically, a mile high, two miles, I had no idea, trying to work miles into kilometers, then trying to think of the word, in Arabic, that refers to such phenomena. This is what I do to defend myself against some spectacle of nature. Think of a word.

Haboob , I thought.

When the storm roar reached us and the wind began to bounce the aircraft around, we felt a tangible danger. The woman said something and I asked Ross to interpret.

“The complications of awe,” he said.

It sounded French, even in English, and I repeated the phrase and so did he and the plane banked away from the advancing rampart and I began to wonder whether this was a preview in trembling depth of an image I might encounter on one of the screens in one of the empty halls where I would soon be walking.

• • •

I wasn’t sure whether this was the same room I’d occupied before. Maybe it just looked the same. But I felt different, being here. It was just a room now. I didn’t need to study the room and to analyze the plain fact of my presence within it. I set my overnight bag on the bed and did some stretching exercises and squat-jumps in an attempt to shake the long journey from body memory. The room was not an occasion for my theories or abstractions. I did not identify with the room.

• • •

Dahlia may have been from this area but I understood that origins were not the point here and that categories in general were not intended to be narrowed or even named.

She took us along a broad corridor where there was an object secured to a granite base. It was a human figure, male, nude, not set within a pod or fashioned from bronze or marble or terra-cotta. I tried to determine the medium, a body posed simply, not a Greek river god or Roman charioteer. One man, headless — he had no head.

She turned to face us, walking backwards, speaking piecemeal French, and Ross translated, wearily.

“This is not a silicone-and-fiberglass replica. Real flesh, human tissue, human being. Body preserved for a limited time by cryoprotectants applied to the skin.”

I said, “He has no head.”

She said, “What?”

My father said nothing.

There were several other figures, some female, and the bodies were clearly on display, as in a museum corridor, all without heads. I assumed that the brains were in chilled storage and that the headless motif was a reference to preclassical statuary dug up from ruins.

I thought of the Stenmarks. I hadn’t forgotten the twins. This was their idea of postmortem decor and it occurred to me that there was a prediction implied in this exhibit. Human bodies, saturated with advanced preservatives, serving as mainstays in the art markets of the future. Stunted monoliths of once-living flesh placed in the showrooms of auction houses or set in the windows of an elite antiquarian shop along the stylish stretch of Madison Avenue. Or a headless man and woman occupying a corner of a grand suite in the London penthouse owned by a Russian oligarch.

My father’s capsule next to Artis was ready. I tried not to think of the mannequins I’d seen on the earlier visit. I wanted to be free of references and relationships. The sight of the bodies confirmed that we were back, Ross and I, and that was enough.

Dahlia led us along an empty hall with doors and walls in matching colors. When we turned the corner there was a surprise, a room with door ajar, and I approached and looked inside. Plain chair, table with several implements evenly spread, small man in a white smock seated on a bench at the far wall.

Seemed ominous to me, a miniature room, bare walls, low ceiling, bench and chair, but it was the setting for nothing more than a haircut and shave. The barber put Ross in the chair and worked quickly, using a thinning scissors and a silent clipper. He and the guide exchanged brief remarks in a language I could not identify. And here was my father’s face emerging from the dense hair. The hair was a nest for the face. The shaved face was a sad story, eyes blank, flesh caved beneath the stark cheekbones, jaw turned to mush. Am I seeing too much? The compressed space lends itself to overstatement. Hair shed everywhere, head showing small ruts and lesions. Then the eyebrows, gone so quick I missed the moment.

We had to pause, those around the chair, when my father’s hand began to tremble. We stood and watched. We did not move. We maintained a silence that was oddly reverent.

When the shaking stopped, the guide and the barber spoke again, incomprehensibly, and it occurred to me that this was the language I’d been told about, first by Ross and then by the man in the artificial garden, Ben-Ezra, who spoke of a developing language system far more expressive and precise than any of the world’s existing forms of discourse.