Zero K (14 page)

He sits staring into the wall, a man unreachably apart. He is already locked in retrospection, seeing Artis, I thought, in drifting images, something he can't control, flaring memories, apparitions, all set in motion by the fact of his decision.

He will not be going with her.

It was pounding him down, everything, the stone weight of a lifetime, everything he'd ever said and done brought to this moment. Here he is, wan and slack, hair mussed, tie unknotted, hands loosely folded at his crotch. I stand nearby, not knowing how to stand, how to adjust to the occasion, but determined to watch him openly. His eyes are empty of any plea he might make for understanding. How things change overnight, and what was hard and fast becomes some limp witness to a man's wavering heart, and where the man had spoken forcefully the day before, striding wall to wall, he now sits slumped, thinking of the woman he has abandoned.

He'd told me his decision in the barest words. It was a sound straight from nature, unprocessed, without expressive affect. He didn't have to tell me that Artis had already been taken down. It was in his voice. There was just the room, the chair, the man in the chair. There was the awkward watchful son. There were the two escorts flanking the doorway.

I waited for someone to make the first move. Then I did, shifting slightly into a more or less formal mourner's pose, conscious that I'd been wearing the same stale shirt and pants since my arrival here, with underwear and socks I'd scrubbed at dawn, using hand sanitizer.

Soon Ross got out of the chair and moved toward the door and I followed closely, neither of us speaking, my hand in contact with his elbow, not guiding or supporting but only offering the comfort of touch.

Is a man of epic wealth allowed to be broken by grief?

•  •  •

The escorts were women, one holstered, the younger not. They led us to a space that became an abstract thing, a theoretical occurrence. I don't know how else to put it. An idea of motion that was also a change of position or place. This was not the first such experience I'd had here, four of us this time observing a silence that felt reverent. I wasn't sure whether this was due to the sad circumstances or to the nature of the conveyance, the feel of angled descent, the feel of being detached from our sensory apparatus, coasting in a way that was mental more than physical.

I decided to test the setting, to say something, anything.

“What's it called, this thing we're in?”

I was pretty sure I'd spoken but could not determine whether my words had produced a sound. I looked at the escorts.

Then Ross said, “It's called the veer.”

“The veer,” I said.

I put a hand on his shoulder, pressed down, gripped hard, letting him know that I was here, we were both here.

“The veer,” I said again.

I was always repeating things here, I was verifying, trying to establish secure placement. Artis was down there somewhere, at veer's end, counting drops of water on a shower curtain.

•  •  •

I stood watching through a narrow glass panel, eye-high. This was my role here, to watch whatever they put in front of me. The team in Zero K was preparing Artis for cryopreservation, doctors and others dressed variously, some in motion, others scanning monitors, adjusting equipment.

Artis was somewhere in their midst, sheeted, on a table. She was visible only momentarily, in fragments, mid-body, lower legs, never a clear view of the face. The team worked over and around her. I didn't know whether to regard the physical form they were working on as “the body.” Maybe she was still alive. Maybe this was the moment, the second, in which she was being chemically induced to expire.

The other thing I didn't know was what constituted the end. When does the person become the body? There were levels of surrender, I thought. The body withdraws from one function and then possibly another, or possibly not—heart, nervous system, brain, different parts of the brain down into the mechanism of individual cells. It occurred to me that there was more than one official definition, none characterized by unanimous assent. They made it up as the occasion required. Doctors, lawyers, theologians, philosophers, professors of ethics, judges and juries.

It also occurred to me that my mind was wandering.

Think of Ross on the table if he'd so decided, healthy man in systemic collapse. He was in the anteroom, waiting out the time. I was the sole willing witness, and now her face, a touching glimpse, Artis, team members swinging past in their caps, scrubs, masks, surgical gowns, tunic tops, lab coats.

Then the viewing slot went blank.

•  •  •

A guide with dreadlocks led us to a site, saying nothing, letting us absorb what we were seeing.

Ross asked a question now and then. He had combed his hair, knotted his tie and adjusted the trim of his suit jacket. The voice was not quite his but he was talking, trying to place himself in the midst of things.

We stood in the aisle above a small sloped gallery and looked at three human figures in a plain space so deftly lit that the outer margins dissolved in shadow. These were individuals in clear casings, in body pods, and they were naked, one man, two women, shaved heads, all three.

Tableau vivant, I thought, except that the actors were dead and their costumes were super-insulated plastic tubes.

The guide told us that these people were among those who had chosen to be taken early. Perhaps they had five or ten years remaining, or twenty, or more. They'd been stripped of their essential organs, which were being preserved separately, brains included, in insulated vessels called organ pods.

“They seem at peace,” Ross said.

The bodies were not formally posed. Eyes were open in glazed wonder, arms loosely at sides, knees naturally knobbed and furrowed, no hair anywhere.

“They're just standing and waiting,” he said. “All the time in the world.”

He was thinking of Artis, what else, wondering what she was feeling, if anything, and which stage she had reached in the body-cooling process.

Vitrification, cryopreservation, nanotechnology.

Cherish the language, I thought. Let the language reflect the search for ever more obscure methods, down into subatomic levels.

The guide spoke with an accent I took to be Russian. She wore sleek jeans and a long fringed shirt and I tried to convince myself that she was posed in a manner identical to that of the bodies. This was not true but it took me a while to abandon the idea.

Ross kept looking. These were lives in abeyance. Or the empty framework of lives beyond retrieval. And the man himself, my father. I wondered how his change-of-mind would affect his honorary status here, the thrust of executive command. I knew what I was feeling, a sympathy bled white by disappointment. The man had backed down.

He spoke to the guide without taking his eyes off the figures standing before us.

“What do you call them?”

“We are told to call them heralds.”

“Makes sense,” he said.

“Showing the way, making the path.”

“Being early, being first,” he said.

“They do not wait.”

“They do it before they have to do it.”

“Heralds,” she said.

“They look serene.”

Thinking of Artis, seeing her, determined to go with her. But he had backed down. The idea of joining her had been driven by some deranged tide of love. But once sworn to the act, he needed to be true to it. The full swing of life and career, man at the center of money's magnetic field. Okay, I'm making too much of his reputation and material worth. But this is a component of the outsized life. Too much engenders too much.

He took a seat in the last row and after a while I joined him. Then I looked at the bodies.

There was the question of who they were, everything that had gone before, the inexpressibly dense experience of a man or woman alive on the earth. Here, they were laboratory life-forms shaved naked in pods and drawn together as one unit whatever the means of canning and curing. And they were located in a space that was anonymous, no where or when, a tactic that matched every aspect of my experience here.

The guide explained the meaning of the term Zero K. This was rote narration, with plotted stops and restarts, and it concerned a unit of temperature called absolute zero, which is minus two hundred and seventy-three point one five degrees celsius. A physicist named Kelvin was mentioned, he was the K in the term. The most interesting thing the guide had to say was the fact that the temperature employed in cryostorage does not actually approach zero K.

The term, then, was pure drama, another stray trace of the Stenmark twins.

“We'll leave together. We'll pack and leave,” Ross said.

“I've been packed since I arrived.”

“Good.”

“There's nothing to pack.”

“Good. We'll leave together,” he said again.

These were the commonplace words, the sounds he needed to make in order to restore a sense of function. I had a feeling there was more to come, possibly not so reassuring to either one of us.

“I told myself finally, dead of night, that I had a responsibility to keep living. Suffer the loss, live and suffer and hope it gets easier—not easier but so deeply embedded, the loss, the absence, that I can carry it. To go with her would have been the wrong kind of surrender. I had no right. It was an abuse of privilege. What did you say to me when we argued?”

“I don't know.”

“You said if I went with her, it would reduce you. My over-dominance, the thing you can't escape. Even loving her too much, even choosing to die too soon. It would have been the kind of surrender in which I gain control instead of relinquishing it.”

I studied body color. Woman, man, woman. The range was narrow but is it possible to be precise about skin color in any situation? Yellow brown black white, all wrong except as convenient labels. Did I want to resort to nuances of tone, to amber, umber, lunar? When I was fourteen I would have died trying.

“In the end what did I do? I tried to face it,” he said. “And this meant I had to tell her. I sat next to the bed in the dim room. Did she understand what I was saying? Did she hear me at all? I wasn't sure. Did she forgive me? I kept asking her to forgive me. Then I rambled, on and on. Did I need a response? Did I fear a response?
Forgive me
.
Wait for me
.
I will join you soon
. On and on, whispering. I thought maybe she can hear me if I whisper.”

“She may have been alive but she was beyond any kind of contact.”

“Then I just sat there until they came to take her down.”

Some sag here and there, completely normal, in chest, breasts and bellies. Look long enough and even the shaved heads of the women begin to seem consistent with the primal chill of nature. This was a function of the pods, I thought, the detailed rigor of scientific method, humans stripped of adornment, spliced back to fetushood.

The guide said there was something else we might find interesting to look at.

How many days now, how many interesting things to look at? The screens, the catacombs, the skull on the wall in the stone room. They were drenching me in last things. I thought about these two words. This is eschatology, isn't it? Not just the damped echo of a life that slides away but words with all-encompassing impact, beyond appeals to reason.
Last Things
. I told myself to stop.

Ross lowered his head, closed his eyes.

Thinking of Artis. I imagined him at home, sitting in his study with a whiskey in hand, hearing himself breathe. The time he'd visited her on a dig somewhere at desert's edge outside a Bedouin village. I try to see what he sees but can only imagine her in another desert, this one, in whole-body suspension, eyes closed, head shaved, a sliver of mind still intact. He has to believe this—memories ingrained in brain tissue.

Departure time soon. Armored car waiting, smoked windows, driver with sidearm. An overtone of protection that makes me feel small, weak and threatened.

But was it simply love that made him want to join her? Maybe I preferred to think that he was driven by a dark yearning, a need to be deprived of what he is and what he possesses, stripped of everything, hollowed out, organs stored, body propped alongside others in a colony of pods. It is the same undercurrent of self-repudiation that made him change his name, only deeper and stronger. A dark yearning, I liked that. But what was my point? Why did I want to imagine such a thing about my father? Because this place is drenching me in bad blood. And because this is the song-and-dance version of what happens to self-made men. They unmake themselves.

When he joins her, in three years or thirteen, will nanotechnologists steer their ages downward? And on being revived, whenever that is, the first moment of their earthly afterlife, will Artis be twenty-five years old, twenty-seven, Ross thirty or thirty-one? Think of the soulful reunion. Let's have a baby. And where will I be, how old and begrudging and piss-stained, how spooked to be embracing my spirited young father and newborn half-brother, who has my withered finger gripped in his tiny trembling hand.

Nanobots—a child's word.

I kept looking straight ahead, looking and thinking. The fact that these individuals, these heralds, had chosen to be rendered dead well before their time. The fact that their bodies had been emptied of indispensable organs. The fact of containment, alignment, bodies set in assigned positions. Woman man woman. It occurred to me that these were humans as mannequins. I allowed myself to think of them as brainless objects playing out a reversal of the spectacle I'd encountered earlier—the mannequins hunched in their burial chamber, in hoods and robes. And now this freeze-frame of naked humans in pods.

The guide told us again that there was another area of possible interest.

I wanted to see beauty in these stilled figures, an imposing design not of clockwork bodies but of the simple human structure and its extensions, inward and out, each individual implacably unique in touch, taste and spirit. There they stand, not trying to tell us something but suggesting nonetheless the mingled astonishments of our lives, here, on earth.