Don DeLillo - Zero K

• • •

The restoration, the scaffolding, the building facade hidden behind great white sweeps of protective sheathing. The bearded man who stands beneath the scaffold shouting at everyone who walks past and it’s not words or phrases we hear but sheer sound, part of the noise of taxis, trucks and buses except that it issues from a human.

• • •

I think of Artis in the capsule and try to imagine, against my firm belief, that she is able to experience a minimal consciousness. I think of her in a state of virgin solitude. No stimulus, no human activity to incite response, barest trace of memory. Then I try to imagine an inner monologue, hers, self-generated, possibly nonstop, the open prose of a third-person voice that is also her voice, a form of chant in a single low tone.

• • •

On public elevators I direct a blind gaze precisely nowhere, knowing that I’m in a sealed box alone with others and that none of us is willing to offer a face open to inspection.

• • •

I’m standing at a bus stop when Emma calls. She tells me what happened to Stak, using the least number of words. She tells me that she has quit her job at the school and given up her apartment here and will stay with the boy’s father and I can’t remember whether they were divorced or separated, not that it matters. The bus comes and goes and we talk a while longer, quietly, in the manner of near strangers, and then we assure each other that we’ll talk again.

I don’t tell her that I saw it happen.

This was a crosstown bus, west to east, a man and woman seated near the driver, a woman and boy at the rear of the bus. I found my place, midway, looking nowhere in particular, mind blank or nearly so, until I began to notice a glow, a tide of light.

Seconds later the streets were charged with the day’s dying light and the bus seemed the carrier of this radiant moment. I looked at the shimmer on the back of my hands. I looked and then listened, startled by a human wail, and I swerved from my position to see the boy on his feet, facing the rear window. We were in midtown, with a clear view west, and he was pointing and wailing at the flaring sun, which was balanced with uncanny precision between rows of high-rise buildings. It was a striking thing to see, in our urban huddle, the power of it, the great round ruddy mass, and I knew that there was a natural phenomenon, here in Manhattan, once or twice a year, in which the sun’s rays align with the local street grid.

I didn’t know what this event was called but I was seeing it now and so was the boy, whose urgent cries were suited to the occasion, and the boy himself, thick-bodied, an oversized head, swallowed up in the vision.

Then there is Ross, once again, in his office, the lurking image of my father telling me that everybody wants to own the end of the world.

Is this what the boy was seeing? I left my seat and went to stand nearby. His hands were curled at his chest, half fists, soft and trembling. His mother sat quietly, watching with him. The boy bounced slightly in accord with the cries and they were unceasing and also exhilarating, they were prelinguistic grunts. I hated to think that he was impaired in some way, macrocephalic, mentally deficient, but these howls of awe were far more suitable than words.

The full solar disk, bleeding into the streets, lighting up the towers to either side of us, and I told myself that the boy was not seeing the sky collapse upon us but was finding the purest astonishment in the intimate touch of earth and sun.

I went back to my seat and faced forward. I didn’t need heaven’s light. I had the boy’s cries of wonder.

© Joyce Ravid

Don DeLillo is the author of fifteen previous novels, one story collection and three stage plays. His novels include White Noise, Libra, Underworld and Falling Man , and he has won many honors in this country and abroad, most recently the National Book Foundation’s Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters.

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