Zero K (18 page)

When it stopped he turned my way.

“Yesterday after I washed my face I looked in the mirror, seriously and deliberately looked. And I found myself becoming disoriented,” he said, “because in a mirror left is right and right is left. But this wasn't the case. What was supposed to be my false right ear was my true right ear.”

“That's how it seemed.”

“That's how it was.”

“There ought to be a discipline called the physics of illusions.”

“There is but they call it something else.”

“That was yesterday. What happened today?” I said.

He had no answer for this.

Then he said, “We had a cat for a time. I don't think you knew this. The cat would come down here and curl on the rug and there was a certain kind of stillness, a special grace, Artis said, that the cat brought to the room. The cat became inseparable from the paintings, the cat belonged to the art. When the cat was here we spoke softly and tried not to make an abrupt or unnecessary movement. It would betray the cat. I think we were serious about this. It would betray the cat, Artis said, and she had that smile she used when she was being a character in an old English movie. It would betray the cat.”

His beard came spilling out of his face, freer and whiter than the architectural models of the past. He spent much of his time in this room, growing old. I think he came here to grow old. He told me that he was in the process of donating some of his art to institutions and giving a few smaller pieces to friends. This is why he'd asked me to come here. He knew that I admired the art on these walls, paintings variously subdued, oil on canvas, all five. Then there was the sparely furnished room itself bearing a measure of such express intent that a person might feel his presence was a violation. I was not that sensitive.

We discussed the paintings. He had learned the language, I had not, but our way of seeing was not so different, it turned out. Light, balance, color, rigor. He wanted to give me a painting. Select one, it's yours, and possibly more than one, he said, and beyond that, there is the subject of where you want to live eventually.

I let this final remark linger. It surprised me, his belief that I might want to live here at some unspecified future time. He spoke of the possibility in a practical way, a matter of family business, but he was not thinking about the dollar value of the place. I heard a tentative note, a hint of innocent curiosity in his voice. He may have been asking me who I was.

He was leaning forward, I was sitting back.

I told him that I didn't know how to live here. This was a handsome brownstone with a front door of carved oak, a wood-paneled interior sedately furnished. My remark was not delivered purely for effect. I would be a tourist here, bound to a temporary arrangement. It was Artis who had brought him down from his penthouse duplex with lush decor, sun-drenched gardens and sweeping views of atomic sunsets. These were the things that suited his global ego in those earlier years. You have two majestic balconies, she'd told him, one more than the Pope. Here, some of his art, all of his books, whatever he'd managed to learn, love and acquire.

I knew how to live where I was living, in an old building on the upper west side with a small sad inner courtyard in perennial shadow, a once grand lobby, a laundry room that needed flood insurance—in an apartment of traditional fittings, high ceilings, quiet neighbors, say hello to familiar faces on the elevator, stand with Emma on the hot tarred surface of the roof, at the western ledge, watching a storm come whipping across the river in our direction.

This is what I told him. But wasn't it more complicated than that? There was a punishing cut to these remarks, a cheap rejection dredged from the past. All these levels, these spiral binds of involvement, so integral to the condition we shared.

I told him that I was touched and suggested that we both think further. But I wasn't touched and didn't expect to think further. I told him that the room was impressive, with or without the cat. What I didn't tell him was that there were several photographs of Madeline in my apartment. Schoolgirl, young woman, mother with adolescent son. And how could I ever display these pictures in the hostile setting of my father's townhouse.

•  •  •

Emma had studied dance for a time, years earlier, and there was something streamlined about her, face and body, the walk, the stride, even the trimmed sentences. There were occasions when I imagined that she subjected the most ordinary moments to a detailed plan. These were the idle speculations of a man whose plotless days and nights had begun to define the way the world was folding up around him.

But she kept me free of total disaffection. She was my lover. The idea alone consoled me, the word itself,
lover
, the beautiful musical note, the hovering letter
v
. How I slipped into dumb reverie, examining the word, seeing it as woman-shaped, feeling like a teenager anticipating the day when he might tell himself that he has a lover.

We went to her place, a modest apartment in a prewar building, east side, and she showed me Stak's room, which I'd only glimpsed on earlier visits. A pair of ski poles standing in a corner, a cot with an army blanket, an enormous wall map of the Soviet Union. I was drawn to the map, searching the expanse for place-names I knew and those many I'd never encountered. This was the boy's memory wall, Emma said, a great arc of historic conflict that stretched from Romania to Alaska. On every visit there would come a time when he simply stood and looked, matching his strong personal recollections of abandonment with the collective memory of old crimes, the famines engineered by Stalin that killed millions of Ukrainians.

He talks with his father about recent events, she said. Doesn't have much to say to me. Putin, Putin, Putin. This is what he says.

I stood at the map and began to recite place-names aloud. I didn't know why I was doing this. Arkhangelsk and Semipalatinsk and Sverdlovsk. Was this poetry or history or a childlike ramble across an unknown surface? I imagined Emma joining me in this recitation, stressing every syllable, both of us, her body pressed to mine, Kirensk and Svobodny, and then I imagined us in her bedroom, where we took off our shoes and lay on the bed, reciting face to face, cities, rivers, republics, each of us removing an item of clothing for each place named, my jacket for Gorki, her jeans for Kamchatka, moving slowly onward to Kharkov, Saratov, Omsk, Tomsk, and I started feeling stupid at this point but went on for a moment longer, reciting inwardly in streams of nonsense, names in the form of moans, the vast landmass shaping a mystery in which to shroud our loving night.

But we were in Stak's room, not the bedroom, and I'd stopped reciting and stopped imagining but wasn't ready to abandon the map. There was so much to see and feel and be ignorant of, so much to not know, and there was also Chelyabinsk, right here, where the meteor had struck, and the Convergence itself buried somewhere on the map in the old U.S.S.R., hemmed in by China, Iran, Afghanistan and so on. Is it possible that I'd been there, in the midst of such deep and searing narratives, and here it all is, decades of upheaval flattened into place-names.

This was Stak's map, not mine, and I realized that his mother was no longer standing next to me but had wandered out of the room and back into local time and place.

•  •  •

The city seems flattened, everything near street level, construction scaffolds, repairwork, sirens. I look at people's faces, make an instantaneous study, wordless, of the person inside the face, then remember to look up into the solid geometries of tall structures, the lines, angles, surfaces. I've become a student of crossing lights. I like to dash across the street with the red seconds on the crossing light down to 3 or 4. There is always an extra second-and-a-fraction between the time when the light turns red for pedestrians and the time when the other light turns green for traffic. This is my safety margin and I welcome the occasion, crossing a broad avenue in a determined stride, sometimes a civilized jog. It makes me feel true to the system, knowing that unnecessary risk is integral to the code of urban pathology.

•  •  •

It was a day for parents to visit the school where Emma taught and she invited me to come along. The children had disabilities ranging from speech disorders to emotional problems. They faced obstacles to everyday learning, how to gain basic kinds of awareness, how to comprehend, how to fix words in proper sequence, how to acquire experience, become alert, become informed, find out.

I stood against the wall in a room filled with boys and girls who sat at a long table with coloring books, games and toys. The parents milled about smiling and chatting and there was reason to smile. The kids were lively and engaged, writing stories and drawing animals, those who were able to do these things, and I looked and listened, trying to absorb a sense of the lives that were in the act of happening in this breezy tumult of small mingled voices and large hovering bodies.

Emma came over and stood next to me gesturing to a girl who sat crouched over a jigsaw puzzle, a girl who feared taking a single step, here to there, minute to minute, and needed every word of support and often an encouraging nudge. Some days are better than others, Emma said, and this was the sentence that would stay with me. All these disorders had their respective acronyms but she said she did not use them. There is the boy at the end of the table who can't produce the specific motor movements that would allow him to speak words that others might understand. Nothing is natural. Phonemes, syllables, muscle tone, action of tongue, lips, jaw, palate. The acronym is CAS, she said, but did not translate the term. It seemed to her a symptom of the condition itself.

Soon she was back among the children and her authority was clear, her self-assurance, even in its gentlest temper, talking, whispering, moving a piece on a gameboard or simply watching a child or speaking with a parent. The scene everywhere in the room was happy and active but I felt frozen to the wall. I tried to imagine the child, this one or that one, the one who could not recognize patterns and shapes or the one who could not sustain attention or follow the most basic spoken direction. Look at the boy with the picture book of ABCs and try to see him at the end of the day, on the school bus, talking to other kids or looking out the window and what does he see and how is it different from what the driver sees, or the other kids, and being met at the corner of this street and that avenue by his mother or father or older brother or sister or the family nurse or housekeeper. None of this led me into the life itself.

But why should it? How could it?

There were other children in other rooms and a few I'd seen earlier wandering the halls where a parent or teacher guided them back to one room or another. The grown-ups. Will some of these children be able to venture into adulthood, become grown-ups in outlook and attitude, able to buy a hat, cross a street. I looked at the girl who could not take a step without sensing some predetermined danger. She was not a metaphor. Light brown hair, sunlit now, a natural blush on her face, an intent look, tiny hands, six years old, I thought, Annie, I thought, or maybe Katie, and I decided to leave before she was done playing the game in front of her, parents' day over, children free to move to the next activity.

Play a game, make a list, draw a dog, tell a story, take a step.

Some days are better than others.

It was time finally and I called Silverstone and turned down the job. He said he understood. I wanted to say, No you don't, not everything, not the part that makes me interesting.

I'd been following the promising leads all along and had no choice but to keep at it, wondering now and then if I'd become obsolete. In the street, on a bus, within the touchscreen storm, I could see myself moving autonomically into middle age, an involuntary man, guided by the actions of his nervous system.

I said something about the job to Emma. Wasn't what I wanted, didn't meet my needs. She said even less in return. This was not surprising. She took things as they came, not passively or uncaringly but in the spirit of an intervening space. Him and her, here to there. This did not apply to Stak. Her son was what we talked about in one of our rooftop intervals, cloudy day, our customary place at the western ledge, and we watched a barge being towed downriver, inch by inch, discontinuously, with a few tall structures fragmenting our view.

“This is what he does now. Online wagering sites. He bets on plane crashes, real ones, various odds posted depending on the airline, the country, the time frame, other factors. He bets on drone strikes. Where, when, how many dead.”

“He told you this?”

“Terrorist attacks. Visit the site, examine the conditions, enter a bet. Which country, which group, numbers of dead. Always the time frame. Has to happen within a certain number of days, weeks, months, other variables.”

“He told you this?”

“His father told me this. His father ordered him to stop. Assassinations of public figures ranging from heads of state to insurgent leaders and other categories. Odds depend on the individual's rank and country. Other available wagers, quite a few of them. Apparently a thriving site.”

“I don't know how thriving. These things don't happen often.”

“They happen. The people who place the bets expect them to happen, wait for them to happen.”

“The bet makes the event more likely. I understand that. Ordinary people sitting at home.”

“A force that changes history,” she said.

“That's my line,” I said.

Were we beginning to enjoy this? I glanced toward the other end of the roof to see a woman in sandals, shorts and a halter-top dragging a blanket to a spot where she seemed to expect the sun to touch down. I looked into the heavy cloud cover, then back to the woman.

“Do you talk to his father often?”

“We talk when necessary. The boy makes it necessary now and then. There are other habits, things he does.”