Don DeLillo - Zero K

Stenmark said, “Apocalypse is inherent in the structure of time and long-range climate and cosmic upheaval. But are we seeing the signs of a self-willed inferno? And are we counting the days before advanced nations, or not so advanced, begin to deploy the most hellish weapons? Isn’t it inevitable? All the secret nestings in various parts of the world. Will planned aggressions be nullified by cyberattack? Will the bombs and missiles reach their targets? Are we safe here in our subterrane? And whatever the megatonnage, how will the shock register continent to continent, the blow to world consciousness? How post-Hiroshima and post-Nagasaki? Back to the old shattered cities, to primeval ruin one hundred thousand times more devastating than before. I think of the dead and half-dead and badly injured, nostalgically placed on rickshaws to be pulled across the crushed landscape. Or am I lost in the hazy memory of old film footage?”

I sneaked a look at the bald woman across the table, seated next to Ross. Anticipation, a near joy visible in her face. It didn’t matter what the speaker had to say. She was eager to slip out of this life into timeless repose, leaving behind all the shaky complications of body, mind and personal circumstance.

Stenmark appeared to be finished. Hands folded at his midsection, head lowered. In this prayer stance he said something to his colleague. He was speaking the resident language, the unique system of the Convergence, a set of voice sounds and gestures that made me think of dolphins communicating in mid-ocean. She responded with an extended remark that included some head-bobbing, possibly comic in other circumstances but not here, not with Nadya doing the bobbing.

Her accent vanished inside the opaque bubble of whatever she was saying. She left her position and walked along one side of the table, placing her hand on the shaved head of each of the heralds in turn.

“Time is multiple, time is simultaneous. This moment happens, has happened, will happen,” she said. “The language we’ve developed here will enable you to understand such concepts, those of you who will enter the capsules. You will be the newborns, and over time the language will be instilled.”

She turned the corner and swung around to the other end of the table.

“Signs, symbols, gestures and rules. The name of the language will be accessible only to those who speak it.”

She placed her hand on my father’s head — my father or his representation, the naked icon he would soon become, a dormant in a capsule, waiting for his cyber-resurrection.

Her accent thickened now, maybe because I wanted it to.

“Technology has become a force of nature. We can’t control it. It comes blowing over the planet and there’s nowhere for us to hide. Except right here, of course, in this dynamic enclave, where we breathe safe air and live outside the range of the combative instincts, the blood desperation so recently detailed for us, on so many levels.”

Stenmark walked to the door.

“Ignore the manly directive,” he said to us. “It will only get you killed.”

Then he was gone. Where to, what next. Nadya looked up and away toward a corner of the room. Her arms were raised now, framing her face, and she spoke in the language of the Convergence. She had a strength of presence. But what was she saying, and to whom? She was a singular figure, self-enclosed, high-collared shirt, fitted trousers. I thought of women in other places, streets and boulevards in major cities, wind blowing, a woman’s skirt lifting in the breeze, the way the wind tenses the skirt, giving shape to the legs, making the skirt dip between the legs, revealing knees and thighs. Were these my father’s thoughts or mine? The skirt whipping against the legs, a wind so brisk that the woman turns sideways, facing away from the force of it, the skirt dancing up, folding between the thighs.

She was Nadya Hrabal. That was her name.

I was in the chair in my room, waiting for someone to come and take me somewhere else.

I was thinking about the free play of step-by-step and word-for-word that we experience up there, out there, walking and talking under the sky, swabbing on suntan lotion and conceiving children and watching ourselves age in the bathroom mirror, next to the toilet where we evacuate and the shower where we purify.

Now here I am, in a habitat, a controlled environment where days and nights are interchangeable, where the inhabitants speak an occult language and where I am forced to wear a wristband that contains a disk that reports my whereabouts to those who watch and listen.

Except that I wasn’t wearing a wristband, was I? This visit was different. A deathwatch. The son permitted to accompany his father into the depths, beyond the allowable levels.

I slept for a time in the chair and when I woke up my mother was present in the room. Madeline or her aura. How strange, I thought, that she might find me here, now in particular, in the wake of the woeful choice that Ross has made, her husband for a time. I wanted to sink into the moment. My mother. How ill-suited these two words were to this huge cratered enclosure, where people maintained a studied blankness about their nationality, their past, their families, their names. Madeline in our living room with her avatar of personal technology, the mute button on the TV remote. Here she is, a breath, an emanation.

I used to follow her along the stately aisles of the enormous local pharmacy, a boy in his neo-pubescence, his budhood, reading the labels on boxes and tubes of medication. Sometimes I sneaked open a container to read the printed insert, eager to sample the impacted jargon of warnings, precautions, adverse reactions, contraindications.

“Time to stop mousing around,” she said.

I’d never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a man who is said to be “only human,” subject to a weakness or a vulnerability. This was a wave of sadness and loss that made me understand that I was a man expanded by grief. There were memories, everywhere, unsummoned. There were images, visions, voices and how a woman’s last breath gives expression to her son’s constrained humanity. Here was the neighbor with the cane, motionless, ever so, in the doorway, and here was my mother, an arm’s length away, a touch away, in stillness.

Madeline using her thumbnail to gouge price stickers off the items she’d purchased, a determined act of vengeance against whatever was out there doing these things to us. Madeline standing in place, eyes closed, rolling her arms up and around, again and again, a form of relaxation. Madeline watching the traffic channel, forever it seemed, as the cars crossed the screen soundlessly, passing out of her view and back into the lives of the drivers and passengers.

My mother was ordinary in her own way, free-souled, my place of safe return.

• • •

The escort was a nondescript man who seemed less a human being than a life-form. He led me through the halls and then pointed to the door of the food unit and went away.

The food tasted like medicated sustenance and I was trying to think my way through it, to defeat it mentally, when the Monk walked in. I hadn’t thought of the Monk in some time but hadn’t forgotten him either. Was he here only when I was here? He wore a plain brown robe, full-length, and was barefoot. This made sense but I didn’t know why or how. He sat at the facing table, seeing only what was in his plate.

“We’ve been here before, you and I, and here we are again,” I said.

I looked at him openly. I mentioned his account of the journey he’d made to the holy mountain in Tibet. Then I watched him eat, his head nearly in the plate. I mentioned our visit to the hospice, he and I — the safehold. I surprised myself by recalling that word. I spoke the word twice. He ate and then I ate but I kept watching him, long hands, condensed look. He was wearing his last meal on his robe. Did it fall off his fork or did he vomit it up?