Zero K (12 page)

“There's a window in the spare room next to the bedroom.”

I said, “Never mind,” and remained on the bench.

I'd mentioned a window because I assumed there would not be a window. Maybe I wanted one more thing to work against me. Pity the trapped man.

“You thought you knew who your father was. Isn't this what you meant when you said you felt reduced by this decision?”

“I don't know what I meant.”

He told me that I hadn't done anything yet. Hadn't lived yet. All you do is pass the time, he said. He mentioned my determined drift, week to week, year to year. He wanted to know if this was threatened by what he'd just told me. Job to job, city to city.

“You're taking too much credit,” I said.

He was peering into my face.

The counter career, he said. The noncareer. Will this have to change now? He called it my little church of noncommitment.

He was getting angrier. Didn't matter what he said. Words themselves, the momentum of his voice, this was shaping the moment.

“The women you've known. Do you get interested in them according to guidelines you've entered on your smartphone? Can't last, won't last, never last.”

She stabbed him. My mother stabbed this man with a steak knife.

My turn now.

“Going with her. You're turning Artis into a mirage,” I said. “You're walking straight into a distortion of light.”

He seemed ready to spring.

I said quietly, “Will you be able to make executive decisions from cold storage? Scrutinize the links between economic growth and equity returns? Firm up the client franchise? Is China still outperforming India?”

He hit me, slammed the heel of his hand off my chest, and it hurt. The bench wobbled under my shifted weight. I got up and walked across the floor to the spare room, where I went directly to the window. Stood and looked. Spare land, skin and bones, distant ridges whose height I could not estimate without a dependable reference. Sky pale and bare, day fading in the west, if it was the west, if it was the sky.

I stepped back gradually and watched the view reduce itself within the limits of the window frame. Then I looked at the window itself, tall and narrow, top-ended by an arch. A lancet window, I thought, recalling the term, and this brought me back to myself, to a diminished perspective, something steadfast, a word with a meaning.

The bed was unmade, clothing scattered, and I understood that this was where my father slept and would sleep again, one more night, tonight, except that he would not sleep. Artis was in the adjoining room and I walked in and paused and then approached the bed. I saw that she was awake. I said nothing and simply leaned forward. Then I waited for her to recognize me.

Moving her lips, three unspoken words.

Come with us
.

It was a joke, a last loving joke, but her face showed no sign of a smile.

Ross was back to pacing, wall to wall, more slowly now. He wore his dark glasses, which meant he was now invisible, at least to me. I headed out the door. He did not remind me to be here, this room, first thing, first light.

Love for a woman, yes. But I recalled what the Stenmark twins had said in the stone room, speaking directly to the wealthy benefactors. Take the leap, they said. Live the billionaire's myth of immortality. And why not now, I thought. What else was there for Ross to acquire? Give the futurists their blood money and they will make it possible for you to live forever.

The pod would be his final shrine of entitlement.

I knocked on a door and waited. I went to the next door and knocked and waited. Then I went down the hall knocking on doors and not waiting. It occurred to me that I'd done this two or three days earlier, or maybe it was two or three years. I walked and knocked and looked back eventually to see if any doors had opened. I imagined a telephone ringing on a desk behind one of the doors, ringer on Lo. I knocked on the door and reached for the doorknob, realizing there was no doorknob. I looked for a fixture on the door that might accommodate the disk on my wristband. I went down the hall and turned the corner and checked every door, knocking first and then searching for a magnetic component. The doors were painted in various pastels. I stood back against the opposite wall, where there were no doors, and scanned the doors that faced me, ten or eleven doors, and saw that none exactly matched another. This was art that belongs to the afterlife. It was art that accompanies last things, simple, dreamlike and delirious. You're dead, it said. I went down the hall and turned the corner and knocked on the first door.

In my room I tried to think about the matter. Ross could not be the only one here who was ready to enter the chamber well before the body failed. Were these people deranged or were they in the forefront of a new consciousness? I lay on the bed and looked at the ceiling. The father-son exchange should have been more measured considering the nature of the revelation. I'd said foolish and indefensible things. In the morning I would talk to Ross and then remain at his side as he and Artis were taken down.

I slept a while and then went to the food unit. Empty, odorless, Monkless, no food in the slot, late for lunch, early for dinner, but do they observe these conventions?

I didn't want to go back to my room. Bed, chair, wall, so on, so on, so on.

Come with us
, she said.

•  •  •

Fires were burning onscreen and a fleet of air tankers hung a thick haze of chemicals over the scorched treetops.

Then a single figure walking through a town's empty streets with homes imploded by heat and flame and lawn ornaments shriveled to a crisp.

Then a satellite image of twin lines of white smoke snaking across a gray landscape.

Elsewhere now people wearing facemasks, hundreds moving at camera level, walking or being carried by others, and was this a disease, a virus, long ranks of slow-moving men and women, and is it something spread by insects or vermin and carried on airborne dust, dead-eyed individuals, in the thousands now, walking at a stricken pace that resembled forever.

Then a woman seated on the roof of her car, head in hands, flames—the fire again—moving down the foothills in the near distance.

Then grass fires sweeping across the flatlands and a herd of bison, silhouetted in bright flame, going at a gallop parallel to barbed-wire fencing and out of the frame.

There was a quick cut to enormous ocean waves approaching and then water surging over seawalls and sets of imagery merging, skillfully edited but hard to absorb, towers shaking, a bridge collapsing, a tremendous close-up view of ash and lava blasting out of an opening in the earth's crust and I wanted it to last longer, it was right here, just above me, lava, magma, molten rock, but a few seconds later a dried lakebed appeared with one bent tree trunk standing and then back to wildfires in forested land and in open country and sweeping down into town and onto highways.

Then long views of wooded hillsides being swallowed in rolling smoke and a crew of firefighters in helmets and backpacks vanishing up a mountain trail and reappearing in a forest of splintered pines and bared bronze earth.

Then, up close, screen about to burst with flames that jump a stream and appear to spring into the camera and out toward the hallway where I stand watching.

•  •  •

I walked randomly for a time, seeing a woman open a door and enter whatever kind of space was situated there. I followed a work crew for fifty meters before I detoured into a corridor and went down a long ramp toward a door that had a doorknob. I hesitated, mind blank, and then turned the knob and pushed open the door and walked into earth, air and sky.

Here was a walled garden, trees, shrubs, flowering plants. I stood and looked. The heat was less severe than it had been on the day I'd arrived. This is what I needed, away from the rooms, the halls, the units—a place outside where I might think calmly about what I would see and hear and feel in the scene to come, at first light, when Artis and Ross were taken down. I walked for half a minute along a winding stone path before I realized, dumbly, that this was not a desert oasis but a proper English garden with trimmed hedges, shade trees, wild roses climbing a trellis. Something even stranger then, tree bark, blades of grass, every sort of flower—all seemingly coated or enameled, bearing a faint glaze. None of this was natural, all of it unruffled by the breeze that swept across the garden.

Trees and plants were labeled and I read some of the Latin names, which only deepened the mystery or the paradox or the ruse, whatever it was. It was the Stenmark twins, that's what it was.
Carpinus betulus fastigiata
, a pyramidal tree, green foliage, narrow trunk that felt clean and smooth to the touch, some kind of plastic or fiberglass, museum quality, and I kept checking labels, could not seem to stop, fragments of Latin sideswiping and intermingling,
Helianthus decapetalus
, tapered leaves, whorl of bright yellow petals, then a bench in the shadow of a tall oak and a still figure seated there, apparently human, in a loose gray shirt, gray trousers and silver skullcap. He turned my way and nodded, a gesture of permission, and I approached slowly. He was a man of considerable age, lean, with buttery brown skin, a pointed face and slender hands, neck tendons like bridge cables.

“You're the son,” he said.

“I guess so, yes.”

“I wonder how you managed to avoid the usual safeguards, making your way here.”

“I think my disk malfunctioned. My wrist ornament.”

“Magically,” he said. “And there's a breeze this evening. Also magical.”

He invited me to share the bench, which resembled a foreshortened church pew. His name was Ben-Ezra and he liked to come out here, he said, and think about the time, many years away, when he would return to the garden and sit on the same bench, reborn, and think about the time when he used to sit here, usually alone, and imagine that very moment.

“Same trees, same ivy.”

“So I expect,” he said.

“Or something completely different.”

“What is here now is what is completely different. This is the lunar afterlife of the planet. Fabricated materials, a survival garden. It has its particular link to a life that is no longer in transit.”

“Doesn't the garden also suggest a kind of mockery? Or is it a kind of nostalgia?”

“Much too soon for you to shake free of the conventions that you've brought here with you.”

“And Ross, what about him?”

“Ross was quick to gain a secure understanding.”

“And now here I am, faced with the death of a woman I admire and the rashly premature death of the man she loves, who happens to be my father. And what am I doing? I'm sitting on a bench in an English garden in the middle of a desert waste.”

“We have not encouraged his plan.”

“But you will allow him to do it. You will allow your team to do it.”

“People who spend time here find out eventually who they are. Not through consultation with others but through self-examination, self-revelation. A tract of lost land, a sense of wilderness that is overwhelming. These rooms and halls, a stillness, a state of waiting. Aren't all of us here waiting for something to happen? Something elsewhere that will further define our purpose here. And something far more intimate as well. Waiting to enter the chamber, waiting to learn what we will confront there. A few of those waiting are fairly healthy, yes, very few, but they've chosen to surrender what is left of their current lives to discover a radical level of self-renewal.”

“Ross has always been a master of life expectancy,” I said. “Then, here, now, in the past three or four days, I'm seeing the man disintegrate.”

“Another state of waiting. Waiting to decide finally. He has the rest of this day and a long sleepless night in which to think more deeply into the matter. And if he needs more time, this will be arranged.”

“But in simple human terms, the man believes that he can't live without the woman.”

“Then you are the one to tell him that what remains is worth a change of mind and heart.”

“What is it that remains? Investment strategies?”

“The son remains.”

“That won't work,” I said.

“The son and what he might do to keep the father intact in the big bad world.”

His voice had a slight lilt that he tended to accompany with a sway of index and middle fingers. I confronted the impulse to guess the man's background or to invent it. The name Ben-Ezra was itself an invention, so I decided. The name suited the man, suggesting a composite of biblical and futuristic themes, and here we were in his post-apocalyptic garden. I was sorry he'd told me his name, sorry he'd named himself before I could do it for him.

He wasn't done with fathers and sons.

“Allow the man the dignity of his choice. Forget his money. He has a life outside the limits of your experience. Grant him the right to his sorrow.”

“His sorrow, yes. His choice, no. And the fact that this is allowable here, this is part of the program.”

“Here and elsewhere, years to come, not uncommon.”

We sat for a time without speaking. He wore dark slippers with tiny bright markings on each instep. I began to ask questions about the Convergence. He gave no direct responses but remarked along the way that the community was still growing, positions to be filled, construction projects to be initiated, subsurface. The airstrip, however, would remain a simple component, without expansion or modernization.

He said, “Isolation is not a drawback to those who understand that isolation is the point.”

I tried to imagine him in ordinary surroundings, in the rear seat of a car moving slowly through crowded streets or at the head of a dinner table in his home on a hilltop above the crowded streets, but the idea carried no conviction. I could see him nowhere but here, on this bench, in the context of an immense emptiness outside the garden walls. He was indigenous. Isolation was the point.