Zero K (19 page)

“Talking to cabdrivers.”

“Not worth a phone call to Denver.”

“What else?”

“Altering his voice for days at a time. He has a sort of hollow voice he affects. I can't imitate it. A submerged voice, digital noise, sound units fitted together. Then there's the Pashto. He speaks Pashto to people in the street who look as though they might be native speakers. They nearly never are. Or to a supermarket clerk or a cabin attendant on a flight. The cabin attendant thinks this is the first stage in a hijacking. I witnessed this once, his father twice.”

I found myself disturbed by the fact that she talked to his father. Of course they talked, they had to talk for any number of reasons. I imagined a sturdy man with darkish complexion, he is standing in a room with photos on the wall, father and son in hunting gear. He and the boy watch TV news on an obscure cable channel, programming from eastern Europe. I needed a name for Stak's father, Emma's ex, in Denver, mile-high.

“Has he stopped making bets on car bombs?”

“His father is not completely convinced. He makes surreptitious raids on Stak's devices.”

The woman on the blanket was motionless, supremely supine, legs spread, arms spread, palms up, face up, eyes shut. Maybe she had news that the sun was due to appear, maybe she didn't want the sun, maybe she did this every day at the same time, a yielding, a discipline, a religion.

“He'll be returning in a couple of weeks. He has to appear at his jujitsu academy. His dojo,” she said. “Special event.”

Or maybe she just wanted to get out of the apartment, a resident of the building but unknown to me, middle-aged, escaping the cubical life for a few hours, same as us, same as the hundreds we would see when we walked across the park to Emma's place, the runners, idlers, softball players, the parents pushing strollers, the palpable relief of being in unmetered space for a time, a scattered crowd safe in our very scatter, people free to look at each other, to notice, admire, envy, wonder at.

Think about it, I nearly said. So many places elsewhere, crowds collecting, thousands shouting, chanting, bending to the charge of police with batons and riot shields. My mind working into things, helplessly, people dead and dying, hands bound behind them, heads split open.

We began to walk faster because she wanted to get home in time to watch a tennis match at Wimbledon, her favorite player, the Latvian woman who groaned erotically with each fierce return.

•  •  •

If I'd never known Emma, what would I see when I walk the streets going nowhere special, to the post office or the bank. I'd see what is there, wouldn't I, or what I was able to assemble from what is there. But it's different now. I see streets and people with Emma in the streets and among the people. She's not an apparition but only a feeling, a sensation. I'm not seeing what I think she would be seeing. This is my perception but she is present within it or spread throughout it. I sense her, feel her, I know that she occupies something within me that allows these moments to happen, off and on, streets and people.

•  •  •

The twenty-dollar bills emerged from the slot in the automated teller machine and I stood in the booth counting the money and turning some bills upside down and others back to front to regularize the stack. I maintained reasonably, to myself, that this procedure should have been performed by the bank. The bank should deliver the money, my money, in an orderly format, ten bills, twenty dollars each bill, all bills face forward, face up, unsmudged money, sanitary money. I counted again, head down, shoulders hunched, partitioned from people in the booths to either side of me, isolated but aware, feeling their presence left and right, my money held near my chest. It didn't seem to be me. It seemed to be someone else, a recluse who'd wandered into semi-public view, standing here and counting.

I touched the screen for the receipt and then for account activity and account summary and I wrapped the bills inside the flimsy slips of toxic paper and left the booth, the stall, receipts and money clutched in my hand. I didn't look at the people in line. No one ever looks at anyone in the ATM area. And I tried not to think about the security cameras but here I was in my mind's self-surveillance device, body crabbed tight as I removed the money from the slot, counted it, organized it and then recounted it.

But was this really so introspective, so abnormally cautious? The handling of the bills, the heightened awareness, isn't this something people do, check the wallet, check the keys, it's just another level of the commonplace.

I sit at home with transaction registers, withdrawal slips, records of account details, my outdated smartphone, my credit card statement, new balance, late payment, additional charges all spread before me on Madeline's old walnut desk and I try to determine the source of what appear to be several small persistent errors, deviations from the logic of the number concept, the pure thrust of reliable numbers that determine one's worth, even as totals diminish week by week.

•  •  •

I described the details of several job interviews to Emma, who enjoyed my accounts of the proceedings—voice imitations, sometimes verbatim, of interviewers' remarks. She understood that I was not ridiculing these men and women. This was a documentary approach to a special kind of dialogue and we both knew that the performer himself, still jobless, was the subject of the piece.

The sun was shining now and I thought of the woman spread-eagled on my roof. There are women everywhere, Emma in a director's chair a handclasp away from me and the Latvian woman and her opponent on the TV screen, sweating, groaning, swatting a tennis ball in patterns that might be subject to advanced study by behavioral scientists.

We hadn't had a serious discussion for an hour or so. I deferred to Emma at such times. She had an adopted son, a failed marriage, a job involving damaged children and I had what—access to a breezy rooftop with an interrupted view of the river.

She said, “I think you look forward to the job interviews. Shave the face, shine the shoes.”

“I'm down to one decent pair of shoes. This is not rank neglect but a kind of day-to-day carelessness.”

“Do you feel a certain affection for these decent shoes?”

“Shoes are like people. They adjust to situations.”

We watched tennis and drank beer in tall glasses that she kept on their sides in the freezer compartment of her squat refrigerator. Frosted glasses, dark lager, point, game, match, one woman flipping her racket in the air, the other woman walking out of the frame, the first woman falling backwards to the grass court in glad abandon, arms stretched wide like the woman on my roof, whoever she was.

“Define a tennis racket. This is something I might have said to myself when I was in my early teens.”

“Then you would do it,” she said.

“Or try to.”

“Tennis racket.”

“Early teens.”

I told her that I used to stand in a dark room, eyes shut, mind immersed in the situation. I told her that I still do it, although rarely, and that I never know that I'm about to do it. Just stand in the dark. The lamp sits on the bureau next to the bed. There I am, eyes shut. Sort of Staklike.

She said, “It sounds like a kind of formal meditation.”

“I don't know.”

“Maybe you're trying to empty the mind.”

“You haven't done it yourself.”

“Who, me, no.”

“I'm shutting my eyes against the dark.”

“And you're wondering who you are.”

“Maybe in a blank way, if that's possible.”

“What's the difference between eyes closed in a lighted room and eyes closed in a dark room?”

“All the difference in the world.”

“I'm trying not to say something funny.”

She said this in an even tone, with a serious face.

Know the moment, feel the gliding hand, gather all the forgettable fragments, fresh towels on the racks, nice new bar of soap, clean sheets on the bed, her bed, our blue sheets. This was all I needed to take me day to day and I tried to think of these days and nights as the hushed countermand, ours, to the widespread belief that the future, everybody's, will be worse than the past.

•  •  •

One of my father's people called with the details. Time, place, manner of dress. This was lunch—but why. I didn't need lunch in a midtown temple of cuisine art where jackets are required and the food and flower arrangements are said to be exquisite and the staff more competent than pallbearers at a state funeral. It was the weekend and my dress shirts were at the laundry being readied for the next wave of interviews. I had to wear a used and reused shirt, first spitting on my finger to wash the inside of the collar.

I'm always the first to arrive, I always get there first. I chose to wait at the table and when Ross showed up I was struck by the sight of him. The vested gray suit and bright tie set off his wildman beard and halting stride and I wasn't sure whether he resembled an impressive ruin or a famous stage actor currently living the role that defines his long career.

He slid inchingly into our velvet banquette.

“You didn't want the job. Turned it down.”

“It wasn't right. I'm talking to an important person in an investment strategy group. It's a definite possibility.”

“People out of work. You were offered a job in a strong company.”

“Set of companies. But I was not dismissive. I considered every aspect.”

“Nobody cares that you're my son. There are sons and daughters everywhere, in solid positions, doing productive work.”

“Okay.”

“You make too much of it. Father and son. You would have become your own man in a matter of days.”

“Okay.”

“People out of work,” he said again, reasonably.

We talked and ordered and I kept looking into his face, thinking of a certain word. I think of words that lead me into dense realities, clarifying a situation or a circumstance, at least in theory. Here was Ross, eyes tired and shoulders hunched, right hand trembling slightly, and the word was
desuetude
. The word had a stylish quality suited to the environment. But what did it mean? A state of inaction, I thought, maybe a lost energy. I was looking at Ross Lockhart, handsomely outfitted but minus the relentlessness and craft that had shaped the man.

“Last time I was here about five years ago I talked Artis into coming along. Her health was not yet approaching drastic decline. I don't recall all that much. But there was one point, one interval. It's very clear. One particular moment. She looked at a woman being led past us to a nearby table. She waited for the woman to be seated and looked a while longer. Then she said, ‘If she were wearing any more makeup she would burst into flames.' ”

I laughed at that and noted how the memory remained alive in his eyes. He was seeing Artis across the table, across the years, a kind of waveform, barely discernible. The wine arrived and he managed to look at the label and then to perform the ceremonial swirl and taste but he hadn't sniffed the cork and did not indicate approval of the wine. He was still remembering. The waiter took a while to decide that it was permissible to pour. I watched all this, innocently, as an adolescent might.

I said, “They're called Selected Assets Inc.”

“Who's that?”

“The people I'm talking to.”

“Buy yourself another shirt. That may help them make up their mind,” he said.

When does a man become his father? I was nowhere near the time but it occurred to me that it could happen one day while I sat staring at a wall, all my defenses assimilated into the matching moment.

Food arrived and he began to eat at once while I looked and thought. Then I told him a story that made him pause.

I told him how his wife, the first, my mother, had died, at home, in her bed, unable to talk or listen or to see me sitting there. I'd never told him this and I didn't know why I was telling him now, the hours I'd spent at her bedside, Madeline, with the neighbor in the doorway leaning on her cane. I found myself going into some detail, recalling whatever I could, speaking softly, describing the scene. The neighbor, the cane, the bed, the bedspread. I described the bedspread. I mentioned the old oak bureau with carved wings for handles. He would remember that. I think I wanted him to be touched. I wanted him to see the last hours as they happened. There was no dark motive. I wanted us to be joined in this. And how curious it was to be speaking about it here, amid the tiptoe waiters and the stalks of white amaryllis set along the walls, funereally, and the single white orchid in the small vase at the center of our table. There was no bitter theme running through these remarks. The scene itself, in Madeline's room, would not permit it. The table, the lamp, the bed, the woman in the bed, the cane with the splayed legs.

We sat thinking and after a time one of us took a bite of food and a sip of wine and then the other did too. Everywhere in the room a vibrant tide of conversation, something I hadn't noticed until now.

“Where was I when this happened?”

“You were on the cover of
Newsweek
.”

I watched him try to make sense of this and then explained that I'd seen the magazine with my father on the cover just before learning that my mother was in critical condition.

He leaned farther down toward the table, the back of his hand propping his chin.

“Do you know why we're here?”

“You said you were last here with Artis.”

“And she is forever part of what we are here to discuss.”

“It seems too soon.”

“It's all I think about,” he said.

All he thinks about. Artis in the chamber. I think about her also, now and then, shaved and naked, standing and waiting. Does she know she's waiting? ls she wait-listed? Or is she simply dead and gone, beyond the smallest tremor of self-awareness?