Zero K (24 page)

Her accent vanished inside the opaque bubble of whatever she was saying. She left her position and walked along one side of the table, placing her hand on the shaved head of each of the heralds in turn.

“Time is multiple, time is simultaneous. This moment happens, has happened, will happen,” she said. “The language we've developed here will enable you to understand such concepts, those of you who will enter the capsules. You will be the newborns, and over time the language will be instilled.”

She turned the corner and swung around to the other end of the table.

“Signs, symbols, gestures and rules. The name of the language will be accessible only to those who speak it.”

She placed her hand on my father's head—my father or his representation, the naked icon he would soon become, a dormant in a capsule, waiting for his cyber-resurrection.

Her accent thickened now, maybe because I wanted it to.

“Technology has become a force of nature. We can't control it. It comes blowing over the planet and there's nowhere for us to hide. Except right here, of course, in this dynamic enclave, where we breathe safe air and live outside the range of the combative instincts, the blood desperation so recently detailed for us, on so many levels.”

Stenmark walked to the door.

“Ignore the manly directive,” he said to us. “It will only get you killed.”

Then he was gone. Where to, what next. Nadya looked up and away toward a corner of the room. Her arms were raised now, framing her face, and she spoke in the language of the Convergence. She had a strength of presence. But what was she saying, and to whom? She was a singular figure, self-enclosed, high-collared shirt, fitted trousers. I thought of women in other places, streets and boulevards in major cities, wind blowing, a woman's skirt lifting in the breeze, the way the wind tenses the skirt, giving shape to the legs, making the skirt dip between the legs, revealing knees and thighs. Were these my father's thoughts or mine? The skirt whipping against the legs, a wind so brisk that the woman turns sideways, facing away from the force of it, the skirt dancing up, folding between the thighs.

She was Nadya Hrabal. That was her name.

I was in the chair in my room, waiting for someone to come and take me somewhere else.

I was thinking about the free play of step-by-step and word-for-word that we experience up there, out there, walking and talking under the sky, swabbing on suntan lotion and conceiving children and watching ourselves age in the bathroom mirror, next to the toilet where we evacuate and the shower where we purify.

Now here I am, in a habitat, a controlled environment where days and nights are interchangeable, where the inhabitants speak an occult language and where I am forced to wear a wristband that contains a disk that reports my whereabouts to those who watch and listen.

Except that I wasn't wearing a wristband, was I? This visit was different. A deathwatch. The son permitted to accompany his father into the depths, beyond the allowable levels.

I slept for a time in the chair and when I woke up my mother was present in the room. Madeline or her aura. How strange, I thought, that she might find me here, now in particular, in the wake of the woeful choice that Ross has made, her husband for a time. I wanted to sink into the moment. My mother. How ill-suited these two words were to this huge cratered enclosure, where people maintained a studied blankness about their nationality, their past, their families, their names. Madeline in our living room with her avatar of personal technology, the mute button on the TV remote. Here she is, a breath, an emanation.

I used to follow her along the stately aisles of the enormous local pharmacy, a boy in his neo-pubescence, his budhood, reading the labels on boxes and tubes of medication. Sometimes I sneaked open a container to read the printed insert, eager to sample the impacted jargon of warnings, precautions, adverse reactions, contraindications.

“Time to stop mousing around,” she said.

I'd never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a man who is said to be “only human,” subject to a weakness or a vulnerability. This was a wave of sadness and loss that made me understand that I was a man expanded by grief. There were memories, everywhere, unsummoned. There were images, visions, voices and how a woman's last breath gives expression to her son's constrained humanity. Here was the neighbor with the cane, motionless, ever so, in the doorway, and here was my mother, an arm's length away, a touch away, in stillness.

Madeline using her thumbnail to gouge price stickers off the items she'd purchased, a determined act of vengeance against whatever was out there doing these things to us. Madeline standing in place, eyes closed, rolling her arms up and around, again and again, a form of relaxation. Madeline watching the traffic channel, forever it seemed, as the cars crossed the screen soundlessly, passing out of her view and back into the lives of the drivers and passengers.

My mother was ordinary in her own way, free-souled, my place of safe return.

•  •  •

The escort was a nondescript man who seemed less a human being than a life-form. He led me through the halls and then pointed to the door of the food unit and went away.

The food tasted like medicated sustenance and I was trying to think my way through it, to defeat it mentally, when the Monk walked in. I hadn't thought of the Monk in some time but hadn't forgotten him either. Was he here only when I was here? He wore a plain brown robe, full-length, and was barefoot. This made sense but I didn't know why or how. He sat at the facing table, seeing only what was in his plate.

“We've been here before, you and I, and here we are again,” I said.

I looked at him openly. I mentioned his account of the journey he'd made to the holy mountain in Tibet. Then I watched him eat, his head nearly in the plate. I mentioned our visit to the hospice, he and I—the safehold. I surprised myself by recalling that word. I spoke the word twice. He ate and then I ate but I kept watching him, long hands, condensed look. He was wearing his last meal on his robe. Did it fall off his fork or did he vomit it up?

He said, “I've outlasted my memory.”

He looked older and the sense he carried with him of nowhereness was more pronounced than ever and in fact this is where we were. Nowhere. I watched him nearly consume his fork with the food that was on it.

“But you still visit those who are waiting to die and to be taken down. Their emotional and spiritual needs. And I wonder if you speak the language. Do you speak the language being spoken here?”

“My entire body rejects it.”

This was encouraging.

“I speak only Uzbek now.”

I didn't know what to say to that. So I said, “Uzbekistan.”

He was finished eating, the plate scraped clean, and I wanted to say something before he left the unit. Anything at all. Tell him my name. He was the Monk, who was I? But I had to pause. For a long bare moment I could not think of my name. He stood, pushed back the chair and took a step toward the door. A moment between being no one and someone.

Then I said, “My name is Jeffrey Lockhart.”

This was not a remark he could assimilate.

So I said, “What do you do when you're not eating or sleeping or talking to people about their spiritual well-being?”

“I walk the halls,” he said.

•  •  •

Back to the room, to the shaved space.

All the zones, the sectors, the divisions that I hadn't seen. Computer centers, commissaries, shelters for attacks or natural disasters, the central command area. Were there recreational facilities? Libraries, movies, chess tournaments, soccer matches? How many numbers in the numbered levels?

•  •  •

He was naked on a slab, not a hair on his body. It was hard to connect the life and times of my father to this remote semblance. Had I ever thought of the human body and what a spectacle it is, the elemental force of it, my father's body, stripped of everything that might mark it as an individual life. It was a thing fallen into anonymity, all the normal responses dimming now. I did not turn away. I felt obliged to look. I wanted to be contemplative. And at some far point in my wired mind, I may have known a kind of weak redress, the satisfaction of the wronged boy.

He was alive, hovering at some level of anesthetic calm, and he said something, or maybe something was said, a word or two seeming to rise out of the body spontaneously.

A woman in a smock and surgical mask stood on the other side of Ross. I looked at her, more or less for approval, and then leaned toward the body.

“
Gesso on linen
.”

I think this is what I heard, then other slurred fragments that were not comprehensible. The sunken face and body. The man's depressed dick. The rest of him simply limbs, projecting parts.

I nodded at the sound of the words and exchanged a brief look with the woman and then nodded again. I knew only that
gesso
was a term used in art, a surface or medium. Gesso on linen.

I was allowed a moment alone, which I spent staring into space, and then others came to prepare Ross for his long slow sabbatical in the capsule.

•  •  •

I was led to a room in which all four walls were covered with a continuous painted image of the room itself. There were only three pieces of furniture, two chairs and a low table, all depicted from several angles. I remained standing, turning my head and then my body to scan the mural. The fact of four plane surfaces being a likeness of themselves as well as background for three objects of spatial extent struck me as a subject worthy of some deep method of inquiry, phenomenology maybe, but I wasn't equal to the challenge.

A woman eventually entered, smallish, brisk in a suede jacket and knit trousers. She had eyes that seemed to stream light and this is what made me realize that she was the woman in the surgical mask who'd stood across from me during the crude viewing of the body.

She said, “You prefer to stand.”

“Yes.”

She considered this, then took a seat at the table. There was a silence. No one entered with tea and cookies on a tray.

She said, “There were many discussions, Ross and Artis and I. We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? The resources he placed at our disposal were of crucial importance.”

What else did I see? She wore a scarf that was striking in design and I decided that she was fifty-five years old, of local origin, more or less, and a figure of some authority.

“After Artis entered the chamber I spent time with your father in New York and in Maine. He was more generous than ever. Although a man transformed. Of course you know this. Reduced to near shreds by the loss. Isn't it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate? What is it that we want here? Only life. Let it happen. Give us breath.”

I understood that she was speaking to me out of respect for my father. He had asked, she was complying.

“We have language to guide us out of dire times. We are able to think and speak about what can conceivably happen in time to come. Why not follow our words bodily into the future tense? If we tell ourselves forthrightly that consciousness will persist, that cryopreservatives will continue to nourish the body, it is the first awakening toward the blessed state. We are here to make it happen, not simply to will it, or crawl toward it, but to place the endeavor in full dimension.”

Her fingers vibrated when she spoke. I was slightly wary. Here was a woman coiled in thought, instant by instant, determined to make things happen.

“I'm done with theories and arguments,” I said. “Ross and I, we talked and shouted our way through all the levels.”

“He said that you never called him Dad. I said, How un-American. He tried to laugh but could not quite manage.”

In my bland shirt and pants I could imagine myself drifting into the wall painting and going unnoticed, a dusky figure in a corner of the room.

“Human life is an accidental fusion of tiny particles of organic matter floating in the cosmic dust. Life continuance is less accidental. It utilizes what we've learned in the thousands of years of our humanity. Not so random, not so chancy, but not unnatural.”

“Tell me about your scarf,” I said.

“Goat cashmere from Inner Mongolia.”

It was increasingly clear that she was a significant member of this undertaking. If the Stenmark twins were the creative core, the jokester visionaries, did this woman generate the income, set the direction? Was she one of the individuals who originated the idea of the Convergence, setting it in this harsh geography, beyond the limits of believability and law. A financier, a philosopher, a scientist who has broadened her role here. What was her particular experience? I would not inquire. And I would not ask her name or create one for her. This was my version of progress. Time to go home.

But she said there was one final site that Ross wanted me to visit. She led me to a veer, she and I with two escorts, and we went farther into the numbered levels than I'd gone before. How did I know this? I felt it, bone-deep, although no evidence of lapsed time or ostensible distance was apparent.

I was taken to an alcove and fitted with a breathing apparatus and a protective suit that resembled spacewear. It was not cumbersome and it allowed me to immerse myself in the unreal state of the occasion.

The woman said, “It's only natural that we've endured some setbacks, a few stalled plans, an occasional mishap. There have been instances of hopes frustrated.”

She was looking out at me from her respirator.

“There are measures in effect that will maintain your father's support although not at previous levels. There's a foundation and an administrator and a number of inhibiting limits and safeguards and time factors.”

“You have support from other directions.”