Zero K (16 page)

I know that I am inside something. I am somebody inside this thing I am in.

Is this my body.

Is this what makes me whatever I know and whatever I am.

I am nowhere that I can know or feel.

I will try to wait.

Everything 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 living within the grim limits of self.

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

Will I ever stop thinking. I need to know more but I also need to stop thinking.

I try to know who I am.

But am I who I was and do I know what this means.

She is first person and third person with no way to join them together.

What I need to do is stop this voice.

But then what happens. And how long am I here. And is this all the time or only the least time there is.

Is all the time still to come.

Can't I stop being who I am and become no one.

She is the residue, all that is left of an identity.

I listen to what I hear. I can only hear what is me.

I can feel time. I am all time. But I don't know what this means.

I am only what is here and now.

How much time am I here. Where is here.

I think that I can see what I am saying.

But am I who I was. And what does this mean. And did someone do something to me.

Is this the nightmare of self drawn so tight that she is trapped forever.

I try to know who I am.

But all I am is what I am saying and this is nearly nothing.

She is not able to see herself, give herself a name, estimate the time since she began to think what she is thinking.

I think I am someone. But I am only saying words.

The words never go away.

Minutes, hours, days and years. Or is everything she knows contained in one timeless second.

This is all so small. I think that I am barely here.

It is only when I say something that I know that I am here.

Do I need to wait.

Here and now. This is who I am but only this.

She tries to see words. Not the letters in the words but the words themselves.

What does it mean to touch. I can almost touch whatever is here with me.

Is this my body.

I think I am someone. What does it mean to be who I am.

All the selves an individual possesses. What is left to her but a voice in its barest sheddings.

I try to see the words. Same words all the time.

The words float past.

Am I just the words. I know that there is more.

Does she need third person. Let her live down in the soundings inside herself. Let her ask her questions to no one but herself.

But am I who I was.

On and on. Eyes closed. Woman's body in a pod.

The office belonged to a man named Silverstone. It was my father's former office and two of the paintings he owned were still on the wall, dark with strips of dusty sunlight, both of them. I had to force myself to look at Silverstone, behind the burnished desk, while he droned his way through a global roundup that ranged from Hungary to South Africa, the forint to the rand.

Ross had made a phone call on my behalf and even as I sat here I tried to feel the kind of separation, the lingering distance that had always defined the time I spent in an office, a man with a job, a position—not an occupation exactly but a rank, a role, a title.

This job would make me the Son. Word of the interview would spread and everyone here would think of me this way. The job was not an unconditional gift. I would have to earn the right to keep it but my father's name would haunt every step I took, every word I spoke.

Then, again, I already knew that I would turn down the offer, any offer, whatever the rank or role.

Silverstone was a broad and mostly bald man whose hands were active elements in the monologue he was delivering and I found myself imitating his gestures in abridged form, an alternative to nodding or to muttering microdecibels of assent. We could have been a teacher and his student in some rendition of the manual alphabet.

The forint got a finger twirl, the rand earned a fist.

The two paintings were the spectral remains of my father's presence here. I thought about my last visit to the office and there was Ross standing by the window, at night, wearing sunglasses. This was before the journey he'd make with his wife and the journey home with his son, mostly bloated time since then, for me at least, two years of it, slow-going and unfocused.

Silverstone became more specific, telling me that I'd be part of a group involved in the infrastructure of water. This was a term I'd never heard before. He spoke of water stress and water conflict. He referred to maps of water risk that guided investors. There were charts, he said, detailing the intersection of capital and water technology.

The paintings on the wall were not watercolors but I decided not to point this out. No need for me to bare the shallower reaches of my disposition.

He would confer with my father and several others and then make the offer. I would wait several days, reminding myself that I needed a job badly, and then reject the offer, graciously, without further comment.

I listened to the man and occasionally spoke. I said smart things. I sounded smart to myself. But why was I here? Did I need to lie, in three dimensions, over a period of time, with hand gestures? Was I defying a persistent urge to submit to the pressures of reality? There was only one thing I knew for certain. I would do it this way because it made me more interesting. Does that sound crazy? It showed me who I was in ways I did not try to understand.

Ross was not part of my thinking here. He and I were determined not to end in willful bitterness and none of this maneuvering was directed at him. He'd probably be relieved when I turned down the offer.

All through the episode with Silverstone I saw myself seated here attending to the man's water talk. Who was more absurd, he or I?

In the evening I would describe the man to Emma, repeat what he'd said. This is something I did well, word for word at times, and I looked forward to a late dinner in a modest restaurant on a tree-lined street between the brawling traffic of the avenues, our mood nicely guided by the infrastructure of water.

•  •  •

When we returned from the Convergence I announced to Ross that we were back in history now. Days have names and numbers, a discernible sequence, and there is an aggregate of past events, both immediate and long gone, that we can attempt to understand. Certain things are predictable, even within the array of departures from the common order. Elevators go up and down rather than sideways. We see the people who serve the food we eat in public establishments. We walk on paved surfaces and stand on a corner to hail a cab. Taxicabs are yellow, fire trucks red, bikes mostly blue. I'm able to return to my devices, data roaming, instant by instant, in the numbing raptures of the Web.

It turned out that my father was not interested in history or technology or hailing a cab. He let his hair grow wild and walked nearly everywhere he cared to go, which was nearly nowhere. He was slow and a little stooped and when I spoke about exercise, diet and self-responsibility, we both understood that this was just an inventory of hollow sounds.

His hands sometimes trembled. He looked at his hands, I looked at his face, seeing only an arid indifference. When I gripped his hands once to stop the shaking, he simply closed his eyes.

The job offer would come. And I would turn it down.

In his townhouse he eventually wanders down the stairs to sit in the room with the monochrome paintings. This means that my visit is over but sometimes I follow along and stand a while in the doorway, watching the man stare at something that is not in the room. He is remembering or imagining and I'm not sure if he is aware of my presence but I know that his mind is tunneling back to the dead lands where the bodies are banked and waiting.

I sat in a taxi with Emma and her son, Stak, all three bodies muscled into the rear seat, and the boy checked the driver's ID and immediately began to speak to the man in an unrecognizable language.

I conferred quietly with Emma, who said he was studying Pashto, privately, in his spare time. Afghani, she said, to enlighten me further.

I muttered something about Urdu, reflexively, in self-defense, because this was the only word that came to mind under the circumstances.

We were leaning into each other, she and I, and she exaggerated the terms of our complicity, speaking from the side of her mouth for comic effect and telling me that Stak walked in circles in his room enunciating phrases in Pashto in accordance with instructions from the device clipped to his belt.

He was seated directly behind the driver and spoke into the plexiglass shield, undeterred by traffic noise and street construction. He was fourteen, foreign born, a slant tower, six-four and growing, his voice rushed and dense. The driver did not seem surprised to find himself exchanging words and phrases in his native language with a white boy. This was New York. Every living breathing genotype entered his cab at some point, day or night. And if this was an inflated notion, that was New York as well.

Two people on the TV screen in front of us were speaking remotely about bridge and tunnel traffic.

Emma asked when I'd start the new job. Two weeks from today. Which group, which division, which part of town. I told her a few things that I'd already told myself.

“Suit and tie.”

“Yes.”

“Close shave, shined shoes.”

“Yes.”

“You look forward to this.”

“Yes I do.”

“Will this transform you?”

“It will remind me that this is the man I am.”

“Down deep,” she said.

“Whatever there is of deep.”

The driver slipped into the bus lane, temporarily gaining position, advantage, dominance, and he gestured backwards to the boy as he spoke, three lights ahead all green—Pashto, Urdu, Afghani—and I told Emma that we were riding in a taxicab with a driver who enters the bus lane illegally and drives at madman speeds with one hand on the wheel while he half-looks over his shoulder and converses with a passenger in a far-flung language. What does this mean?

“Are you going to tell me that he drives this way only when he speaks this language?”

“It means this is just another day.”

She looked into the options below the screen and put her finger to the inch-square site marked
OFF
. Nothing happened. We were back in mainstream traffic moving slowly down Broadway and I told Emma, out of nowhere, that I wanted to stop using my credit card. I wanted to pay cash, to live a life in which it is possible to pay cash, whatever the circumstances. To live a life, I said again, examining the phrase. Then I leaned toward the screen and hit the
OFF
site. Nothing happened. We listened to Stak speak to the driver within the limits of his Pashto, intensely. Emma looked hard at the images on the screen. I waited for her to hit the
OFF
site.

She and her former husband, a man whose name she did not speak, went to Ukraine and found the boy in a facility for abandoned children. He was five or six years old and they took the risk and made the arrangements and flew him home to Denver, which would eventually share time with New York when the parents divorced and Emma came east.

These are just the barest boundaries, of course, and she took her time rounding out the story for me, over weeks, and even as her voice went weary with regret, I became absorbed in another kind of home, in what was most immediate, the touch, the half words, the blue bedsheets, Emma's name like babytalk at two in the morning.

Horns were making sporadic noise and Stak was still talking to the driver through the closed panels. Talking, shouting, listening, pausing for the right word or phrase. I spoke to Emma about my money. Money comes to mind, I speak about it, the fading numbers, the small discrepancies that turn up on the withdrawal slips that are spat out by the automated teller machines. I go home and look at the check register and do the simple arithmetic and there's an aberration of one dollar and twelve cents.

“A bank mistake, not your mistake.”

“Maybe it's not even a bank mistake but something in the structure itself. Beyond the computers and grids and digital algorithms and intelligence agencies. It's the root, the source, I'm almost serious, where things fit together or slip apart. Three dollars and sixty-seven cents.”

Traffic was stopped dead and I nudged the window switch and listened to the blowing horns approach peak volume. We were trapped in our own obsessive clamor.

“I'm talking about minor matters that define us.”

I shut the window and thought about what I might say next. Faint sounds of news and weather kept coming from the screen at Emma's kneecaps.

“Those blanked-out eternities at the airport. Getting there, waiting there, standing shoeless in long lines. Think about it. We take off our shoes and remove our metal objects and then enter a stall and raise our arms and get body-scanned and sprayed with radiation and reduced to nakedness on a screen somewhere and then how totally helpless we are all over again as we wait on the tarmac, belted in, our plane eighteenth in line, and it's all ordinary, it's routine, we make ourselves forget it. That's the thing.”

She said, “What thing?”

“What thing. Everything. It's the things we forget about that tell us who we are.”

“Is this a philosophical statement?”

“Traffic jams are a philosophical statement. I want to take your hand and wedge it in my crotch. That's a philosophical statement.”