Don DeLillo - Zero K

• • •

On weekends, now and then, I stay in a guest room in my father’s townhouse, with kitchen privileges. The young man who deals with these matters, one of the corporate effigies, discusses details in the contemporary pattern of declarative sentences that slither gradually upward into questions.

• • •

Sometimes I think I go to museums just to hear the languages spoken by visitors to the galleries. Once I followed a man and woman from the limestone grave markers in fourth-century B.C. Cyprus all the way to Arms and Armor, waiting for them to resume talking to each other so I could identify the language, or try to, or make a dumb guess. The thought of approaching them to ask, politely, was outside my range.

• • •

I sit before a screen in a cubicle of frosted plexiglass marked Compliance and Ethics Officer. I’ve adapted well here, not just in terms of my day-to-day disposition but in the context of the methods I’ve developed to perform the requisite duties and conform to the indigenous language.

• • •

Beggar in wheelchair, dressed normally, clean shaven, no stained paper cup, gloved hand thrust into the street swarm.

• • •

There’s the wide-ranging dynamic of my father’s corporate career and there’s the endland of the Convergence and I tell myself that I’m not hiding inside a life that’s a reaction to this, or a retaliation for this. Then, again, I stand forever in the shadow of Ross and Artis and it’s not their resonant lives that haunt me but their manner of dying.

• • •

When I ask myself why I requested an occasional overnight visit to the townhouse, I think at once of the building where Emma lives, in this general area, or where she used to live, and I take frequent walks in the neighborhood, expecting to see nothing, learn nothing, but feeling an immanence, the way in which a painful loss yields a shadow presence, and in this case, on her street, I sense a possibility that I haven’t even tried to understand.

• • •

In my local market I never forget to check the expiration dates on bottles and cartons. I reach into the display of objects, of packaged goods, and lift an item from the last rank because that’s where the freshest sliced bread is placed, or milk, or cereal.

• • •

Women tall and taller. I look for the woman in a formal pose standing on a street corner with or without a sign in an obscure alphabet. What is there to see that I haven’t seen, what lesson is there to be learned from a still figure in the midst of crowds? In her case it may be an issue of impending threat. Individuals have always done this, haven’t they? I think of it as medieval, a foreboding of some kind. She is telling us to be ready.

• • •

Sometimes it takes an entire morning to outlive a dream, to outwake a dream. But I haven’t been able to recall a single faint instant of dreamtime since my return. Stak is the waking dream, the boy soldier looming onscreen, about to come crashing down on top of me.

• • •

I go walking, looking, and it is stalled and moaning traffic and it is foreign money soaring into the penthouse towers that outclimb the zoning laws.

• • •

I like the idea of working in school surroundings, knowing that at some point the idea will dissolve into the details. A van arrives very early Monday, already carrying two employees who live in Manhattan, and we travel to a small community in Connecticut where the college is located, a modest campus, students of middling promise. We remain until Thursday afternoon, when we are driven back to the city, and it’s interesting how we find new ways, the three of us, to talk about nothing.

• • •

The long soft life is what I feel I’m settling into and the only question is how deadly it will turn out to be.

But do I believe this or am I searching for effect, a way to balance the ease of my everydayness?

• • •

I enter the room with the monochrome paintings, recalling the final words that Ross managed to speak. Gesso on linen . I try to absolve the term of its meaning and to think of it as a fragment of some beautiful lost language, unspoken for a thousand years. The paintings in the room are oil on canvas but I tell myself that I will visit museums and galleries and search for paintings designated gesso on linen.

• • •

I walk for hours, dodging a splotch of dogshit now and then.

• • •

Emma and I, lovers upon a time. My smartphone remains at my hip because she is out there somewhere, in the digital wilderness, and the ringtone, rarely heard, is her implied voice, an instant away.

• • •

I eat sliced bread because I can make it last longer by refrigerating it, which doesn’t work with Greek or Italian or French bread. I eat thick crusty bread in restaurants, dining mostly alone by choice.

All of this matters even if it’s not supposed to matter. The bread we eat. It makes me wonder who my forebears were, but only briefly.

• • •

I know I’m supposed to resume the smoking habit. Everything that has happened drives me in that direction, theoretically. But I don’t feel reduced by my abstinence, as I did in the past. The craving is gone and maybe this is what reduces me.

• • •

There is an elegant lamp hanging from the ceiling in the guest room of the townhouse and I turn it on and turn it off and every time I do this, inescapably, I find myself thinking of the term pendant light .

• • •

On the street, going nowhere special, I check my wallet and keys, I check the zipper on my pants to make sure that it’s fastened securely from beltline to crotch or vice versa.

• • •

The relief is not commensurate with the fear. It lasts a limited time. You worry for days and then months and finally the son arrives and he is safe and you forget how you could not concentrate on another subject or situation or circumstance in all that time because now he’s here, so let’s eat dinner. Except that he’s not here, is he? He’s somewhere near a road sign reading Konstantinovka, in Ukraine, his place of birth and death.

• • •

Languages, sirens all the time, beggar in a bundled mass, man or woman, awake or asleep, alive or dead, hard to tell even when I approach and drop a dollar in the dented plastic cup.

Two blocks farther on I tell myself that I should have said something, determined something, and then I change the subject before it gets too complicated.

• • •

I sit in my cubicle in the administrative offices at the college and cross things off lists. I don’t erase the items, I click the strikethrough check box and run a line through each item on the screen that needs to be eliminated. Lines and items. Over time the lines through the items mark my progress in a readily visible way. The instant of the strikethrough is the best part, with childlike appeal.

• • •

I think of the few moments we spent looking at ourselves in the mirror, Emma and I, and it was first person plural, a blended set of images. And then my sad damning failure to tell her who I was, to narrate the histories of Madeline and Ross, and Ross and Artis, and the still-life future of father and stepmother in cryonic suspension.

I waited too long.

I’d wanted her to see me in an isolated setting, outside the forces that made me.

• • •

Then I recall the taxi driver kneeling in the gutter slime, turned toward Mecca, and I try to reconcile the firm placement of his world into the scatterlife of this one.

• • •

Sometimes I think of the room, the scant roomscape, wall, floor, door, bed, a monosyllabic image, all but abstract, and I try to see myself sitting in the chair and that’s all there is, highly detailed, this thing and that thing and the man in the chair, waiting for his escort to knock on the door.