Zero K (20 page)

“It's time to be going back,” he said. “And I want you to come with me.”

“You want a witness.”

“I want a companion.”

“I understand.”

“One person only. No one else,” he said. “I'm in the process of making arrangements.”

He would empty out his years on the long plane journey. I imagined him losing all his Lockhartness, becoming Nicholas Satterswaite. How a tired life collapses into its origins. Thousands of air miles, all those amorphous hours of day-night numbness. Are we the Satterswaites, he and I?
Desuetude
. It occurred to me that the word might be applied more surely to the son than to the father. Disuse, misuse. Wasted time as a life pursuit.

“You still believe in the idea.”

“Heart and mind,” he said.

“But isn't it an idea that no longer carries the inner conviction it used to have?”

“The idea continues to gain strength in the only place that matters.”

“Back to the numbered levels,” I said.

“We've been through all this.”

“A long time ago. Doesn't it feel that way? Two years. Feels like half a lifetime.”

“I'm making arrangements.”

“You just said that. The ass-end of civilization. We'll go, why not, you and I. Make the arrangements.”

I waited for what was coming next.

“And you'll think about the other matters.”

“I don't want a painting. I don't want what people are supposed to want. It's not that I've renounced material things. I'm not an ascetic. I live comfortably enough. But I want to keep it small.”

He said, “I need to leave clear instructions.”

“I don't chase after money. I think of money as something to count. It's something I put in my wallet and take out of my wallet. Money is numbers. You say that you need to leave clear instructions. Clear instructions sound intimidating. I like to drift into things.”

Plates and cutlery were gone and we were drinking an aged Madeira. Maybe all Madeiras are aged. The restaurant was emptying out and I liked watching them, all these people striding decisively back to their situations, their endeavors. They had to return to office suites and conference rooms and I did not. It gave me a free sense of being outside the established course of executive routine when in fact what I was out of was a job.

We did not speak, Ross and I. The waiter was at the far end of the room, a still figure framed by bunched flowers in hanging baskets, and he was waiting to be summoned for the check. I wanted to believe it was raining so we could walk out the door into the rain. In the meantime we thought about the journey ahead and we drank our fortified wine.

I watch Emma stand before the full-length mirror. She is seeing that everything is in place before she leaves for school, for the eager or somber or intractable children. Shirt and vest, tailored slacks, casual shoes. On an impulse I walk into the image and stand next to her. We look for a number of seconds, the pair of us, without comment or self-consciousness or any sign of amusement, and I understand that this is a telling moment.

Here we are, the woman smart, determined, not detached so much as measuring every occasion, including this one, brown hair swept back, a face that is not interested in being pretty, and this gives her a quality I can't quite name, a kind of undividedness. We are seeing each other as never before, two sets of eyes, the meandering man, taller, bushy-haired, narrow face, slightly recessed chin, faded jeans and so on.

He is a man on line for tickets to a ballet that a woman wants to see and he is willing to wait for hours while she tends her schoolchildren. She is the woman, rigid in her seat, watching a dancer splice the air, fingertips to toes.

Here we are, all this and more, things that normally escape the inquiring eye, a single searching look, so much to see, each of us looking at both of us, and then we shake it all off and walk down four flights into the pitch of street noise that tells us we're back among the others, in unsparing space.

•  •  •

Nearly a week went by before we spoke again, on the telephone.

“Day after tomorrow.”

“If you want me to come by.”

“I'll mention it to him. We'll see. Things have tightened up,” she said.

“What happened?”

“He doesn't want to go back to school. They resume in August. He's saying it's a waste of time. It's all dead time. There's nothing they can say that means anything to him.”

I stood by the window holding the phone and looking down at my shoes, which I'd just shined.

“Does he have some kind of alternative?”

“I've asked that question repeatedly. The boy is noncommittal. His father sounds helpless.”

I was not unhappy to hear that his father was helpless. Then, again, I felt awful knowing that Emma was apparently in the same state.

“Offhand I don't know how I can help. But I'll think about it. I'll think about myself at that age. And if he's agreeable maybe we'll repeat the cab ride to the dojo.”

“He doesn't want to go to the dojo. He's done with jujitsu. He agreed to this visit only because I insisted.”

I pictured her grimly insisting, standing straight, speaking rapidly, cellphone gripped tight. She said she'd talk to him and give me a call.

It was unnerving to hear this, that she'd give me a call. This is what I heard at the end of job interviews. There was an appointment coming up in less than an hour and I'd shined my shoes with the traditional polish, the horsehair brush and the flannel cloth, rejecting an instant shine with the all-color sponge. Then I looked at my face in the bathroom mirror, double-checking the effectiveness of the close shave I'd given myself twenty minutes earlier. I recalled something Ross had said about his right ear in the mirror being his real right ear instead of the mirror-image left ear. I had to concentrate hard to convince myself that this was not the case.

•  •  •

Things people do, ordinarily, forgettably, things that breathe just under the surface of what we acknowledge having in common. I want these gestures, these moments to have meaning, check the wallet, check the keys, something that draws us together, implicitly, lock and relock the front door, inspect the burners on the stove for dwindling blue flame or seeping gas.

These are the soporifics of normalcy, my days in middling drift.

•  •  •

I saw her again one morning, the woman in the stylized pose, this time alone, no small boy at her side. She stood on a corner near Lincoln Center and I was certain it was the same woman, eyes closed as before, arms this time down near her sides but held away from her body in a stance of sudden alarm. She was frozen in place. But maybe that's wrong. She had simply pledged herself into a mental depth, facing in toward the sidewalk and the people hurrying past. A teenage girl stopped just long enough to aim her device and take a picture. A disturbance building all around us, air thick and dark, sky ready to crack open, and I wondered if she would remain in place when the rain hit.

Again I noted that there was no indication of her cause, her mission. She stood in open space, an unexplained presence. I wanted to see a small table with leaflets or a poster in a foreign language. I wanted a language in a non-Roman alphabet. Give me something to go on. There was a quality, a tone, the cast of her features that suggested she was from another culture. I wanted a sign in Mandarin, Greek, Arabic, Cyrillic, a plea from a woman who belongs to a group or a faction that is somehow threatened by forces here or abroad.

Foreign, yes, but I assumed she spoke English. I told myself that I could see it in her face, a kind of transnational bearing, an adaptation.

If this were a man, I thought, would I stop and watch?

I had to keep watching. Others glanced, two kids took pictures, a man wearing an apron hurried past, street pace quickened by the threat of weather.

I approached, careful not to get too close.

I said, “I wonder if I might ask a question.”

No response, face the same, arms stiff, regimental.

I said, “Up to now, I haven't tried to guess what your purpose is, your cause. And if there was a poster, I can't help thinking it might convey a message of protest.”

I took a step back, for effect, although she could not see me. I don't think I expected a response. The idea that she might open her eyes and look at me. The possibility of a few words. Then I realized that I'd started by saying I would ask a question and I hadn't done this.

I said, “And the boy in the white shirt and blue tie. Last time, downtown somewhere, there was a boy with you. Where is the boy?”

We remained in place. People maneuvering for position, traditional taxi panic, and it wasn't even raining yet. A sign in Mandarin, Cantonese, a few words in Hindi. I needed a specific challenge to help me counteract the random nature of the encounter. A woman. Did it have to be a woman? Would anyone pause to look if a man stood here in an identical posture? I tried to imagine a man with a sign in Phoenician, circa one thousand B.C. Why was I doing this to myself? Because the mind keeps working, uncontrollably. I moved closer again and faced her directly, mainly to discourage those who wanted to take her picture. The man wearing an apron came back this way, pushing a series of interlocked shopping carts, four carts, empty. The woman with eyes ever closed, she fixed things in place, stopped traffic for me, allowed me to see clearly what was here.

Had I made a mistake, talking to her? It was intrusive and stupid. I'd betrayed something in my register of cautious behavior and I'd violated the woman's will toward a decisive silence.

I stood there for twenty minutes, waiting to see how she would react to the rain. I wanted to stay longer, would have stayed longer, felt guilty about leaving, but the rain did not come and I had to set out for my next appointment.

Didn't Artis tell me once that she spoke Mandarin?

•  •  •

We found a nearly empty restaurant not far from the gallery. Stak ordered broccoli, nothing with it. Good for the bones, he said. He had a long face and stand-up hair and wore a jogging suit that zippered up the back.

Emma told him to finish the story he'd started telling us in the taxi.

“Okay so I began to wonder where Oaxaca is. I guessed it's in Uruguay or Paraguay, mainly Paraguay, even though I was ninety percent sure it's in Mexico because of the Toltecs and the Aztecs.”

“What's the point?”

“I used to need to know things at once. Now I think about them. Oaxaca. What do you have? You have
o a
and then
x a
and then
c a
. Wa há ca. I denied myself knowledge about the population of Oaxaca or the ethnic breakdown or even for sure what language they speak, which could be Spanish or some Indian language mixed with Spanish. And I situated the place somewhere where it doesn't belong.”

I'd told Emma about the art gallery and the lone object on display and she told Stak and he agreed to take a look. An accomplishment in itself.

It was clear that I was the go-between, recruited to ease the tension between them, and I found myself headed directly into the sensitive subject itself.

“You're done with school.”

“We're done with each other. We don't need each other. Day to day is one more wasted day.”

“Maybe I know the feeling, or remember it. Teachers, subjects, fellow students.”

“Meaningless.”

“Meaningless,” I said. “But other kinds of school, less formal, with independent research, time to explore a subject thoroughly. I know you've been through all this.”

“I've been through all this. It's all a bunch of faces. I ignore faces.”

“How do you do that?”

“We learn to see the differences among the ten million faces that pass through our visual field every year. Right? I unlearned this a long time ago, in childhood, in my orphanage, in self-defense. Let the faces pass through the vision box and out the back of your head. See them all like one big blurry thing.”

“With a few exceptions.”

“Very few,” he said.

There was nothing he cared to add.

I looked at him intently and said in the most deliberate voice I could manage, “ ‘Rocks are, but they do not exist.' ”

After a pause I said, “I came across this statement when I was in college and forgot it until very recently. ‘Man alone exists. Rocks are, but they do not exist. Trees are, but they do not exist. Horses are, but they do not exist.' ”

He was listening, head bent, eyes narrowed. His shoulders squirmed a little, fitting themselves to the idea.
Rocks are
. We were here to see a rock. The object on exhibit was officially designated an interior rock sculpture. It was a large rock, one rock. I told Stak that this is what raised the statement from the far corners of my undergraduate mind.

“ ‘God is, but he does not exist.' ”

What I did not tell him was that these ideas belong to Martin Heidegger. I hadn't known until fairly recently that this was a philosopher who'd maintained a firm fellowship with Nazi principles and ideologies. History everywhere, in black notebooks, and even the most innocent words,
tree
,
horse
,
rock
, gone dark in the process. Stak had his own twisted history to think about, mass starvation of his forebears. Let him imagine an uncorrupted rock.

The show had been installed a couple of decades earlier, still running, ever running, same rock, and I'd visited three times in recent years, always the lone witness except for the attendant, the guardian, a late-middle-aged woman seated at the far end of the gallery wearing a black Navajo hat with a feather in the band.

Stak said, “I used to throw rocks at fences. There was nowhere else to throw a rock except at people and I had to stop doing people or they'd put me in detention and feed me fertilizer twice a day.”