Don DeLillo - Zero K

She continued to speak and seemed at times to lose the pattern, the intonation. She tended to sail away from a word or syllable, eyes searching back for the sensations she was trying to describe. She was all face and hands, body gathered up within the folds of the robe.

“But that’s not the end of the story, is it?”

The question pleased her.

“No, it’s not.”

“Will it happen again?”

“Yes, exactly. This is what I think about. I will become a clinical specimen. Advances will be made through the years. Parts of the body replaced or rebuilt. Note the documentary tone. I’ve talked to people here. A reassembling, atom by atom. I have every belief that I will reawaken to a new perception of the world.”

“The world as it really is.”

“At a time that’s not necessarily so far off. And this is what I think about when I try to imagine the future. I will be reborn into a deeper and truer reality. Lines of brilliant light, every material thing in its fullness, a holy object.”

I’d led her into this song of Life Ever After and now I didn’t know how to respond. It was outside my range, all of it. Artis knew the rigors of science. She had worked in a number of countries, taught in several universities. She had observed, identified, investigated and explained many levels of human development. But holy objects, where were they? They were everywhere, of course — in museums and libraries and places of worship and in the excavated earth, in stone and mud ruins, and she’d dug them out and held them in her hands. I imagined her blowing dust from the chipped head of a tiny bronze god. But the future she’d just described was another matter, a purer aura. This was transcendence, the promise of a lyric intensity outside the measure of normal experience.

“Do you know the procedures you’ll be undergoing, the details, how they do it.”

“I know exactly.”

“Do you think about the future? What will it be like to come back? The same body, yes, or an enhanced body, but what about the mind? Is consciousness unaltered? Are you the same person? You die as someone with a certain name and with all the history and memory and mystery gathered in that person and that name. But do you wake up with all of that intact? Is it simply a long night’s sleep?”

“Ross and I have a running joke. Who will I be at the reawakening? Will my soul have left my body and migrated to another body somewhere? What’s the word I’m looking for? Or will I wake up thinking I’m a fruit bat in the Philippines? Hungry for insects.”

“And the real Artis. Where is she?”

“Drifting into the body of a baby boy. The son of local sheepherders.”

“The word is metempsychosis .”

“Thank you.”

I didn’t know what was around us in the room. All I saw was the woman in the chair.

“Day after tomorrow,” I said. “Or is it tomorrow?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“I think it’s tomorrow. Days have no grip here.”

She closed her eyes for a moment and then looked at me as if we were meeting for the first time.

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-four.”

“You’re just starting.”

“Starting what?” I said.

Ross came in from one of the back rooms wearing a gym suit and athletic socks, a man shrouded in lost sleep. He took a chair from the rear wall and positioned it next to the armchair where Artis sat, placing his hand on hers.

“Back then,” I said to him, “you used to jog in an outfit like that.”

“Back then.”

“Maybe not such a designer item.”

“Back then I used to smoke a pack and a half a day.”

“Was the jogging supposed to counteract the smoking?”

“It was supposed to counteract everything.”

Three of us. I realized we hadn’t been in the same room for many months. We three. Now, unimaginably, we are here, another kind of convergence, the day before they come and take her. This is how I thought of it. They would come and take her. They would arrive with a gurney that had a reclining back, allowing her to sit up. They would have capsules, vials and syringes. They would fit her with a half-mask respirator.

Ross said, “Artis and I jogged. Didn’t we? We used to run along the Hudson River down to Battery Park and back. We ran in Lisbon, remember, six a.m., up that steep street to the chapel and the view. We ran in the Pantanal. In Brazil,” he said for my benefit, “on that high path that put us practically in the jungle.”

I thought of the bed and the cane. My mother in bed, at the end, and the woman in the doorway, her friend and neighbor, ever nameless, leaning on a cane, a quad cane, a metal cane with four little splayed legs.

Ross talking, recalling things, near to babbling now. Animals and birds they’d seen close-range, and he named them, and plant species, and he named them, and the view from their plane at low altitude swinging over the Mato Grosso.

They would come and take her. They would wheel her into an elevator and take her down to one of the so-called numbered levels. She would die, chemically prompted, in a subzero vault, in a highly precise medical procedure guided by mass delusion, by superstition and arrogance and self-deception.

I felt a surge of anger. I hadn’t known until now the depth of my objections to what was happening here, a response obscurely coiled within the rhythms of my father’s voice in his desperate reminiscence.

Someone appeared holding a tray, a man with teapot, cups, saucers. He placed the tray on a folding table by my father’s chair.

Either way she dies, I thought. At home, in bed, husband and stepson and friends at her side. Or here, in this regimental outpost, where everything happens somewhere else.

The tea brought a pause to the room. We sat quietly until the man was gone. Ross licked his finger and touched the pot. Then he poured, intently, trying hard not to spill.

The tea made me angry all over again. The cups and saucers. The careful pouring.

Artis said, “This place, all of it, seems transitional to me. Filled with people coming and going. Then the others, those who are leaving in one sense, as I am, but staying in another sense, as I am. Staying and waiting. The only thing that’s not ephemeral is the art. It’s not made for an audience. It’s made simply to be here. It’s here, it’s fixed, it’s part of the foundation, set in stone. The painted walls, the simulated doors, the movie screens in the halls. Other installations elsewhere.”

“The mannequin,” I said.

Ross leaned toward me.

“The mannequin. Where?”

“I don’t know where. The woman in the hallway. The woman gesturing, sort of fearfully. The rust-colored woman. Naked woman.”

“Where else?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“You’ve seen no other mannequins? No other figures, naked or otherwise?”

“None, absolutely.”

“When you arrived,” he said. “What did you see?”

“The land, the sky, the buildings. The car driving off.”

“What else?”

“I think I told you. Two men at the entrance waiting to escort me. I didn’t see them until I approached. Then a security check, thorough.”

“What else?”

I thought about what else. I also wondered why we were having this idle talk under these dire circumstances. Is this what happens in the midst of terminal matters? We retreat into neutral space.

“You saw something else, off to the side, maybe fifty meters away, before you entered the building.”

“What did I see?”

“Two women,” he said. “In long hooded garments.”

“Two women in chadors. Of course. Just standing there in the heat and dust.”

“The first glimpse of art,” he said.

“Never occurred to me.”