Don DeLillo: Zero K

“If our planet remains a self-sustaining environment, how nice for everyone and how bloody unlikely,” she said. “Either way, the subterrane is where the advanced model realizes itself. This is not submission to a set of difficult circumstances. This is simply where the human endeavor has found what it needs. We’re living and breathing in a future context, doing it here and now.”

I looked across the table at Ross. He was elsewhere, not dreamily adrift but thinking hard, thinking back, trying to see something or understand something.

Maybe I was recalling the same tense moment, two of us in a room and the words spoken by the father.

I’m going with her , he said.

Now, two years later, he was finding his way toward these words.

“That world, the one above,” she said, “is being lost to the systems. To the transparent networks that slowly occlude the flow of all those aspects of nature and character that distinguish humans from elevator buttons and doorbells.”

I wanted to think about this. That slowly occlude the flow . But she kept on talking, looking up from the tabletop to study us in our collective aspect, the earthlings and the shaved otherworlders.

“Those of you who will return to the surface. Haven’t you felt it? The loss of autonomy. The sense of being virtualized. The devices you use, the ones you carry everywhere, room to room, minute to minute, inescapably. Do you ever feel unfleshed? All the coded impulses you depend on to guide you. All the sensors in the room that are watching you, listening to you, tracking your habits, measuring your capabilities. All the linked data designed to incorporate you into the megadata. Is there something that makes you uneasy? Do you think about the technovirus, all systems down, global implosion? Or is it more personal? Do you feel steeped in some horrific digital panic that’s everywhere and nowhere?”

She needed a name that started with the letter Z .

“Here of course we refine our methods constantly. We are putting our science into the wonder of reanimation. There is no slinking trivia. No drift of applications.”

A clipped voice, authoritative, slightly accented, and the tension in her body, the stretched energy. I could call her Zina. Or Zara. The way the capital letter Z dominates a word or name.

The door opened and a man entered. Bruised jeans and a pullover shirt, long pigtail dangling. This was new, the plaited hair, but the man was easily recognizable as one of the Stenmark twins. Which one, and did it matter?

The woman remained at one end of the table, the man took up a position at the other end, informally, with no hint of staged choreography. They did not acknowledge each other.

He made a linked gesture, face and hand, indicating that we have to begin somewhere so let’s just see what happens.

“Saint Augustine. Let me tell you what he said. Goes like this.”

He paused and closed his eyes, giving the impression that his words belonged to darkness, coming to us out of the centuries.

“ ‘And never can a man be more disastrously in death than when death itself shall be deathless.’ ”

I thought what .

It took him a while to open his eyes. Then he stared over Zara’s head into the far wall.

He said, “I won’t attempt to set this remark within the meditation on Latin grammar that inspired it. I simply place it before you as a challenge. Something to think about. Something to engage you in your body pod.”

The same deadpan Stenmark. But he had clearly aged, face drawn tighter, hands veined a deep blue. I’d given the twins a total of four first names but could not unscramble them now.

“Terror and war, everywhere now, sweeping the surface of our planet,” he said. “And what does it all amount to? A grotesque kind of nostalgia. The primitive weapons, the man in the rickshaw wearing a bomb vest. Not a man necessarily, could be a boy or girl or woman. Say the word. Jinriksha . Still hand-pulled in certain towns and cities. The small two-wheeled carriage. The small homemade explosive. And on the battlefield, assault rifles of earlier times, old Soviet weapons, old battered tanks. All these attacks and battles and massacres embedded in a twisted reminiscence. The skirmishes in the mud, the holy wars, the bombed-out buildings, entire cities reduced to hundreds of rubbled streets. Hand-to-hand combat that takes us back in time. No petrol, no food or water. Men in jungle packs. Crush the innocent, burn the huts and poison the wells. Relive the history of the bloodline.”

Head slanted, hands in pockets.

“And the post-urban terrorist, having abandoned his adopted city or country, what does he contribute? Websites that transmit atavistic horrors. Beheadings out of dreadful folklore. And the fierce interdictions, the centuries’ old doctrinal disputes, kill those who belong to the other caliphate. Everywhere, enemies who share histories and memories. It is the patchwork sweep of a world war, unnamed as such. Or am I crazy? Or am I a babbling fool? Lost wars in remote terrain. Storm the village, kill the men, rape the women, abduct the children. Hundreds dead but guess what — no film or photographs, so what’s the point, where’s the reaction. And warriorship in brighter light. We see it all the time. Scenes of burning tanks and trucks, soldiers or militiamen in dark hoods standing amid the crushed barbed wire witnessing a conflagration while they pound on a scorched bathtub with hammers and rifle butts and car jacks to send an ancestral drumbeat into the night.”

He appeared to be in a state of near seizure, body shaking now, hands whirling.

He said, “What is war? Why talk about war? Our concerns here are wider and deeper. We live every minute in the embrace of our shared belief, the vision of undying mind and body. But their wars have become inescapable. Isn’t war the only ripple on the dim surface of human affairs? Or am I brainsick? Isn’t there a deficiency out there, a shallow spirit that guides the collective will?”

He said, “Who are they without their wars? These events have become insistent clusters that touch and spread and bring us all into range of a monodrama far larger, worldwide, than we’ve ever witnessed.”

Zara was watching him now and I was watching her. They were clinging to the surface, weren’t they, both of them? Earth in all its meanings, third planet from the sun, realm of mortal existence, every definition in between. I didn’t want to forget that she needed a surname. I owed her this. Isn’t that why I was here, to subvert the dance of transcendence with my tricks and games?

“People on bicycles, the only means of transport for noncombatants in the war zone except for walking, limping or crawling. Running is reserved for the warring factions and for the news photographers who cover the scene, as in earlier world wars. Is there a longing for hand-to-hand, for crush his skull and smoke a cigarette. Car bombings at sacred sites. Rocket launchings by the hundreds. Families living in stinking basements, no lights, no heat. Outside, men are tearing down the bronze statue of the former national hero. A hallowed act, rooted in remembrance, in re-experience. Men in camouflage uniforms spattered with mud. Men in bullet-scarred jeeps. The rebels, the volunteers, the insurgents, the separatists, the activists, the militants, the dissidents. And those who return home to bleak memories and deep depression. A man in a room, where death shall be deathless.”

He was deadpan again, faceless, body rocking slightly. Where is his brother? And what is this man’s relationship with Zara, although maybe she is Nadya. He has a wife back home, I’d already established this, the brothers married to sisters. I wanted to hear the lively tilt of the twins in their merged commentary. Was the missing twin a sleek nanobody crusted in ice in a lonely pod? Were all pods the same height? And here is Nadya, who stands at the other end of the table. Are they mismatched lovers or total strangers?