Zero K (15 page)

Instead I wondered if I was looking at the controlled future, men and women being subordinated, willingly or not, to some form of centralized command. Mannequined lives. Was this a facile idea? I thought about local matters, the disk on my wristband that tells them, in theory, where I am at all times. I thought about my room, small and tight but embodying an odd totalness. Other things here, the halls, the veers, the fabricated garden, the food units, the unidentifiable food, or when does utilitarian become totalitarian.

Was there a hollowness in these notions? Maybe they were nothing more than an indication of my eagerness to get home. Do I remember where I live? Do I still have a job? Can I still bum a cigarette from a girlfriend after a movie?

The guide had told us about brains preserved in insulated vessels. Now she added that heads, entire heads with brains intact, were sometimes removed from the bodies and stored separately. One day in decades to come the head will be grafted to a healthy nanobody.

And would all the revivified lives be identical, trimmed tight by the process itself? Die a human, be reborn an isometric drone.

I nudged my father and said quietly, “Do they ever get a hard-on, dead men in pods? Jolted by some malfunction, a shift in temperature levels that creates a kind of
zing
running through the body and causing their dicks to spring up, all the men at once, in all the pods.”

“Ask the guide,” he said.

I gave him a backhand tap on the arm and we got up and followed the woman down a corridor that tapered to the degree that we had to proceed, finally, single-file. Sound began to pale, our footsteps fading, the brush-touch of our bodies against the confining walls.

There is one thing more, something interesting, the guide had said.

We stood in the entranceway of a large white room. The walls did not have the same rough surface I'd seen elsewhere. This was hard smooth rock and Ross put his hand to the wall and said that it was fine-grained white marble. He knew this, I did not. The room was stone cold and, at first, in every direction, it was all the same, nothing but walls, floor and ceiling. I spread my arms in a dumb dramatic gesture to render the size of the grand space but restrained myself from trying to estimate length, width and height.

I moved forward, briefly, and Ross followed. I looked past him to the guide, waiting for her to say something, give us some clue to the nature of the site. Was it a site or just an idea for a site? My father and I studied the room together. I tried to imagine what I was seeing even as I saw it. What made the experience so elusive? A large room, a couple of men standing and looking. A woman at the entrance, dead still. An art gallery, I thought, with nothing in it. The gallery is the art, the space itself, the walls and floor. Or an enormous marble tomb, a mass gravesite emptied of bodies or waiting for bodies. No ornamental cornice or frieze, just flat walls of shiny white marble.

I looked at Ross, who was staring past me toward a far corner of the room. It took me a moment, everything here took me a moment. Then I saw what he saw, a figure seated on the floor near the junction of the two walls. Small human figure, motionless, seeping gradually into my level of awareness. I had to tell myself that I was not somewhere else trying to visualize what I was actually seeing, here and now, in solid form.

My father walked in that direction, hesitantly, and I followed, walking and pausing. The seated figure was a girl, barefoot, legs crossed. She wore loose white pants and a white knee-length blouse. One arm was raised and bent toward the body at neck level. The other arm was waist-high at a matching angle.

We stopped walking, Ross and I. We were still some distance from the figure but it seemed an intrusion, a violation, to move any closer. Hair trimmed in a mannish cut, head bowed slightly, feet positioned with bottoms turned upward.

Was I sure that it was not a boy?

Her eyes were closed. I knew that her eyes were closed even if this was not evident from where we stood. Her youth was not necessarily evident but I felt free to believe that she was young. She had to be young. And she had no nationality. She had to be nationless.

A chill white silence everywhere in the room. Did I fold my arms across my chest to contain my response to the beauty of the scene, or was I just cold?

We backed away then, slightly, simultaneously. Even if I knew the reason for her presence and her pose, it would defy all meaning. Meaning was exhausted in the figure itself, the sight itself.

“Artis would know how to interpret this,” Ross said.

“And I would ask her whether it's a boy or girl.”

“And she would say what's the difference.”

The fact of life, one small body with beating heart in this soaring mausoleum, and she would be here long after we were gone, day and night, I knew this, a space conceived and designed for a figure in stillness.

Before we left the area I turned to take one last look and, yes, she was there, in empty method, a living breathing artform, boy or girl, seated in pajamalike garments, offering nothing more for me to think or imagine. The guide led us down a long hall that was not bordered by doors and Ross began to speak to me now, a faraway voice, close to the trembling bend.

“People getting older become more fond of objects. I think this is true. Particular things. A leather-bound book, a piece of furniture, a photograph, a painting, the frame that holds the painting. These things make the past seem permanent. A baseball signed by a famous player, long dead. A simple coffee mug. Things we trust. They tell an important story. A person's life, all those who entered and left, there's a depth, a richness. We used to sit in a certain room, often, the room with the monochrome paintings. She and I. The room in the townhouse with those five paintings and the tickets we saved and framed, like a couple of teenage tourists, two tickets to a bullfight in Madrid. She was already in poor condition. We didn't say much. Just sat there remembering.”

There were long pauses between sentences and his tone was near to a murmur, or an underbreath, and I listened hard and waited.

Then I said, “What is the fond object in your case?”

“I don't know yet. Maybe I'll never know.”

“Not the paintings.”

“Too many. Too much.”

“The tickets. Two small slips of paper.”

“Sol y sombra. Plaza de Toros Las Ventas,” he said. “We were seated in an area that's sometimes in the sun, sometimes in the shade. Open area. Sol y sombra.”

He wasn't finished, a man propelled into obsessive reflection. He talked, I listened, his voice more halting, the subject more elusive. Did I want to stare at the guide and try to think of us together in a room, my room, she and I, the guide, the escort, or just visualize her alone, nowhere, a woman stepping out of her shoes. I felt an erotic wistfulness but could not shape it.

We stood in the veer, gliding out of Zero K, out of the numbered levels. I thought of prime numbers. I thought, Define a prime. The veer was an environment, I thought, suited to rigorous thinking. I was always good at math. I felt sure of myself when I dealt with numbers. Numbers were the language of science. And now I needed to find the precise and perpetual and more or less mandatory wording that would constitute the definition of a prime. But why did I need to do this? The guide stood with eyes closed, thinking in Russian. My father was in a waking state of mindlapse, in retreat from his pain. I thought, Prime number. A positive integer not divisible. But what was the rest of it? What else about primes? What else about integers?

•  •  •

I walked the halls toward the room, eager to grab my bag and meet my father and head home. This was the one energy left to me, the expectation of return. Sidewalks, streets, green light, red light, metered seconds to get to the other side alive.

But I had to pause now, stop and look, because the screen in the ceiling began to lower and a series of images filled the width of the hallway.

People running, crowds of running men and women, they're closely packed and showing desperation, dozens, then hundreds, workpants, T-shirts, sweatshirts, shouldering each other, elbowing, looking dead ahead, the camera positioned slightly above, an angled shot, no cuts, tilts, pans. I back away instinctively. There's no soundtrack but it's almost possible to hear the mass pulse of breath and pounding feet. They're running on a surface barely visible beneath their crowded bodies. I see tennis shoes, ankle boots, sandals, there's a barefoot woman, a man in sneakers with undone laces flapping.

They keep on coming, trying to escape some dreadful spectacle or rumbling threat. I'm watching closely and trying to think into the action onscreen, the uniformity of it, the orderly deployment and steady pace that underlie the urgent scene. It begins to occur to me that I may be seeing the same running cluster repeatedly, shot and reshot, two dozen runners made to resemble several hundred, a flawless sleight of editing.

Here they come, mouths open, arms pumping, headbands, visors, camouflage caps, no seeming slowdown, and then something further comes to mind. Is it possible that this is not factual documentation rendered in a selective manner but something radically apart? It's a digital weave, every fragment manipulated and enhanced, all of it designed, edited, redesigned. Why hadn't this occurred to me before, in earlier screenings, the monsoon rains, the tornadoes? These were visual fictions, the wildfires and burning monks, digital bits, digital code, all of it computer-generated, none of it real.

I watched until the images faded and the screen began to lift, soundlessly, and I'd gone only a short way along the hall when there was a noise, hard to identify and rapidly getting louder. I went a few more paces and had to stop, the noise nearly upon me, and then they came wheeling around the corner charging in my direction, the running men and women, images bodied out, spilled from the screen. I hurried to the only safety there was, the nearest wall, back flattened, arms spread, the runners bearing down, nine or ten abreast, blasting past, wild-eyed. I could see their sweat and smell their stink and they kept on coming, all looking directly ahead.

Be calm. See what's here. Think about it clearly.

A local ritual upheld, a marathon of sacred awe, some obscure tradition adhered to for a hundred years. This was all the time I had for theories. They approached and went past and I looked at the faces and then at the bodies and saw the man with flapping laces and tried to see the barefoot woman. How many runners, who were they, why were they being filmed, are they still being filmed? I watched them come and go and then, in the thinning lines, with the last runners approaching, what I saw was a pair of tall blondish men and I leaned forward for a better look as they went by, shoulder to shoulder, and it was the Stenmark twins, unmistakably, Lars and Nils, or Jan and Sven.

They were drenching me, out-thinking me, these several days, this extreme sublifetime. What was it beyond a concentrated lesson in bewilderment?

It was their game, their mob, and they were a sweating panting part of it. The Stenmarks. I kept to the wall, watching them blow past and go racing down the long hall. When the runners were gone I remained in position, wallbound for a moment more. Was I surprised to learn that I was the only witness to whatever it was I'd just seen?

An empty hall.

The fact is I did not expect to see others. It had never occurred to me that there were others in the hall. It was uncommon in my experience that there were such others, with several brief exceptions. I stood away from the wall now, mind and body buzzing and the hallway seeming to tremble with the muffled thrust of the runners.

On the way back to my room I realized that I was limping.

But am I who I was.

I think I am someone. There is someone here and I feel it in me or with me.

But where is here and how long am I here and am I only what is here.

She knows these words. She is all words but she doesn't know how to get out of words into being someone, being the person who knows the words.

Time. I feel it in me everywhere. But I don't know what it is.

The only time I know is what I feel. It is all now. But I don't know what this means.

I hear words that are saying things to me again and again. Same words all the time going away and coming back.

But am I who I was.

She is trying to understand what has happened to her and where she is and what it means to be who she is.

What is it that I am waiting for.

Am I only here and now. What happened to me that did this.

She is first person and third person both.

The only here is where I am. But where is here. And why just here and nowhere else.

What I don't know is right here with me but how do I make myself know it.

Am I someone or is it just the words themselves that make me think I'm someone.

Why can't I know more. Why just this and nothing else. Or do I need to wait.

She is able to say what she feels and she is also the person who stands outside the feelings.

Are the words themselves all there is. Am I just the words.

This is the feeling I have that the words want to tell me things but I don't know how to listen.

I listen to what I hear.

I only hear what is me. I am made of words.

Does it keep going on like this.

Where am I. What is a place. I know the feeling of somewhere but I don't know where it is.

What I understand comes from nowhere. I don't know what I understand until I say it.

I am trying to become someone.

The involutions, the mind drift.

I almost know some things. I think I am going to know things but then it does not happen.

I feel something outside me that belongs to me.

Where is my body. Do I know what this is. I only know the word and I know it out of nowhere.