Zero K (3 page)

“I must have the wrong door,” I said.

He gave me a hard look.

“They're all the wrong door,” he said.

It took me a while to find my father's office.

•  •  •

Once, when they were still married, my father called my mother a fishwife. This may have been a joke but it sent me to the dictionary to look up the word. Coarse woman, a shrew. I had to look up
shrew
. A scold, a nag, from Old English for shrewmouse. I had to look up
shrewmouse
. The book sent me back to
shrew
, sense 1. A small insectivorous mammal. I had to look up
insectivorous
. The book said it meant feeding on insects, from Latin
insectus
, for insect, plus Latin
vora
, for vorous. I had to look up
vorous
.

Three or four years later I was trying to read a lengthy and intense European novel, written in the 1930s, translated from the German, and I came across the word
fishwife
. It swept me back into the marriage. But when I tried to imagine their life together, mother and father minus me, I came up with nothing, I knew nothing. Ross and Madeline alone, what did they say, what were they like, who were they? All I felt was a shattered space where my father used to be. And here was my mother, sitting across a room, a thin woman in trousers and a gray shirt. When she asked me about the book, I made a gesture of helplessness. The book was a challenge, a secondhand paperback crammed with huge and violent emotions in small crowded type on waterlogged pages. She told me to put it down and pick it up again in three years. But I wanted to read it now, I needed it now, even if I knew I'd never finish. I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books. I liked sitting on our tiny concrete balcony, reading, with a fractional view of the ring of glass and steel where my father worked, amid lower Manhattan's bridges and towers.

•  •  •

When Ross was not seated behind a desk, he was standing by a window. But there were no windows in this office.

I said, “And Artis.”

“Being examined. Soon to be medicated. She spends time, necessarily, in a medicated state. She calls it languid contentment.”

“I like that.”

He repeated the phrase. He liked it too. He was in shirtsleeves, wearing his dark glasses, nostalgically called KGBs—polarized, with swoop lenses and variable tint.

“We had a talk, she and I.”

“She told me. You'll see her again, talk again. Tomorrow,” he said.

“In the meantime. This place.”

“What about it?”

“I knew only what little you told me. I was traveling blind. First the car and driver, then the company plane, Boston to New York.”

“Super-midsize jet.”

“Two men came aboard. Then New York to London.”

“Colleagues.”

“Who said nothing to me. Not that I minded.”

“And who got off at Gatwick.”

“I thought it was Heathrow.”

“It was Gatwick,” he said.

“Then somebody came aboard and took my passport and brought it back and we were airborne again. I was alone in the cabin. I think I slept. I ate something, I slept, then we landed. I never saw the pilot. I was guessing Frankfurt. Somebody came aboard, took my passport, brought it back. I checked the stamp.”

“Zurich,” he said.

“Then three people boarded, man, two women. The older woman smiled at me. I tried to hear what they were saying.”

“They were speaking Portuguese.”

He was enjoying this, straight-faced, slumped in the chair, his remarks directed toward the ceiling.

“They talked but did not eat. I had a snack, or maybe that was later, in the next stage. We landed and they got off and somebody came aboard and led me onto the tarmac to another plane. He was a baldheaded guy about seven feet tall wearing a dark suit and a large silver medallion on a chain around his neck.”

“You were in Minsk.”

“Minsk,” I said.

“Which is in Belarus.”

“I don't think anybody stamped my passport. The plane was different from the original.”

“Rusjet charter.”

“Smaller, fewer amenities, no other passengers. Belarus,” I said.

“You flew southeast from there.”

“I was drowsy, stupefied, half-dead. I'm not sure whether the next stage was stop or nonstop. I'm not sure how many stages in the entire trip. I slept, dreamt, hallucinated.”

“What were you doing in Boston?”

“My girlfriend lives there.”

“You and your girlfriends never seem to live in the same city. Why is that?”

“It makes time more precious.”

“Very different here,” he said.

“I know. I've learned this. There is no time.”

“Or time is so overwhelming that we don't feel it pass in the same way.”

“You hide from it.”

“We defer to it,” he said.

It was my turn to slump in the chair. I wanted a cigarette. I'd stopped smoking twice and wanted to start and stop again. I envisioned it as a lifelong cycle.

“Do I ask the question or do I accept the situation passively? I want to know the rules.”

“What's the question?”

“Where are we?” I said.

He nodded slowly, examining the matter. Then he laughed.

“The nearest city of any size is across the border, called Bishkek. It's the capital of Kyrgyzstan. Then there's Almaty, bigger, more distant, in Kazakhstan. But Almaty is not the capital. It used to be the capital. The capital is now Astana, which has gold skyscrapers and indoor shopping malls where people lounge on sand beaches before plunging into wave pools. Once you know the local names and how to spell them, you'll feel less detached.”

“I won't be here that long.”

“True,” he said. “But there's a change in the estimate concerning Artis. They expect it to happen one day later.”

“I thought the timing was extremely precise.”

“You don't have to stay. She'll understand.”

“I'll stay. Of course I'll stay.”

“Even under the most detailed guidance, the body tends to influence certain decisions.”

“Is she dying naturally or is the last breath being induced?”

“You understand there's something beyond the last breath. You understand this is only the preface to something larger, to what is next.”

“It seems very businesslike.”

“It will be very gentle in fact.”

“Gentle.”

“It will be quick, safe and painless.”

“Safe,” I said.

“They need it to happen in complete synchronization with the methods they've been fine-tuning. Best suited to her body, her illness. She could live weeks longer, yes, but to what end?”

He was leaning forward now, elbows on the desk.

I said, “Why here?”

“There are laboratories and tech centers in two other countries. This is the base, central command.”

“But why so isolated? Why not Switzerland? Why not a suburb of Houston?”

“This is what we want, this separation. We have what is needed. Durable energy sources and strong mechanized systems. Blast walls and fortified floors. Structural redundancy. Fire safety. Security patrols, land and air. Elaborate cyberdefense. And so on.”

Structural redundancy. He liked saying that. He opened a drawer in the desk, then held up a bottle of Irish whiskey. He pointed to a tray that held two glasses and I went across the room to get it. Back at the desk I inspected the glasses, looking for infiltrations of sand and grit.

“People in offices here. Hidden away. What are they doing?”

“They're making the future. A new idea of the future. Different from the others.”

“And it has to be here.”

“This is land traveled by nomads for thousands of years. Sheepherders in open country. It's not battered and compacted by history. History is buried here. Thirty years ago Artis worked on a dig somewhere north and east of here, near China. History in burial mounds. We're outside the limits. We're forgetting everything we knew.”

“You can forget your name in this place.”

He raised his glass and drank. The whiskey was a rare blend, triple distilled, production strictly limited. He'd given me the details years ago.

“What about the money?”

“Whose?”

“Yours. You're in big, obviously.”

“I used to think I was a serious man. The work I did, the effort and dedication. Then, later, the time I was able to devote to other matters, to art, educating myself to the ideas and traditions and innovations. Came to love it,” he said. “The work itself, a picture on a wall. Then I got started on rare books. Spent hours and days in libraries, in restricted areas, and it wasn't a need for acquisition.”

“You had access denied to others.”

“But I wasn't there to acquire. I was there to stand and look, or squat and look. To read the titles on the spines of priceless books in the caged stacks. Artis and I. You and I, once, in New York.”

I felt the smooth burn of the whiskey going down and closed my eyes for a moment, listening to Ross reciting titles he recalled from libraries in several world capitals.

“But what's more serious than money?” I said. “What's the term? Exposure. What's your exposure in this project?”

I spoke without an edge. I said these things quietly, without irony.

“Once I was educated to the significance of the idea, and the potential behind it, the enormous implications,” he said, “I made a decision that I've never second-guessed.”

“Have you ever second-guessed anything?”

“My first marriage,” he said.

I stared into my glass.

“And who was she?”

“Good question. Profound question. We had a son but other than that.”

I didn't want to look at him.

“But who was she?”

“She was essentially one thing. She was your mother.”

“Say her name.”

“Did we ever say each other's name, she and I?”

“Say her name.”

“People who are married to each other as we were, in our uncommon way, which is not so uncommon, do they ever say each other's name?”

“Just once. I need to hear you say it.”

“We had a son. We said his name.”

“Indulge me. Go ahead. Say it.”

“Do you remember what you said a minute ago? You can forget your name in this place. People lose their names in a number of ways.”

“Madeline,” I said. “My mother, Madeline.”

“Now I remember, yes.”

He smiled and settled back in an attitude of fake reminiscence, then changed expression, a well-timed maneuver, addressing me sharply.

“Think about this, what is here and who is here. Think about the end of all the petty misery you've been hoarding for years. Think beyond personal experience. Leave it back there. What's happening in this community is not just a creation of medical science. There are social theorists involved, and biologists, and futurists, and geneticists, and climatologists, and neuroscientists, and psychologists, and ethicists, if that's the right word.”

“Where are they?”

“Some are here permanently, others come and go. There are the numbered levels. All the vital minds. Global English, yes, but other languages as well. Translators when necessary, human and electronic. There are philologists designing an advanced language unique to the Convergence. Word roots, inflections, even gestures. People will learn it and speak it. A language that will enable us to express things we can't express now, see things we can't see now, see ourselves and others in ways that unite us, broaden every possibility.”

He tossed down another dram or two, then held the glass under his nose and sniffed. It was empty, for now.

“We fully expect that this site we occupy will eventually become the heart of a new metropolis, maybe an independent state, different from any we've known. This is what I mean when I call myself a serious man.”

“With serious money.”

“Yes, money.”

“Tons of it.”

“And other benefactors. Individuals, foundations, corporations, secret funding from various governments by way of their intelligence agencies. This idea is a revelation to smart people in many disciplines. They understand that now is the time. Not just the science and technology but political and even military strategies. Another way to think and live.”

He poured carefully, an amount he liked to call a fingerbreadth. His glass, then mine.

“First for Artis, of course. For the woman she is, for what she means to me. Then the leap into total acceptance. The conviction, the principle.”

Think of it this way, he told me. Think of your life span measured in years and then measured in seconds. Years, eighty years. Sounds okay by current standards. And then seconds, he said. Your life in seconds. What's the equivalent of eighty years?

He paused, maybe running the numbers. Seconds, minutes, hours, days, weeks, months, years, decades.

Seconds
, he said. Start counting. Your life in seconds. Think of the age of the earth, the geologic eras, oceans appearing and disappearing. Think of the age of the galaxy, the age of the universe. All those billions of years. And us, you and me. We live and die in a flash.

Seconds
, he said. We can measure our time in seconds.

He wore a blue dress shirt, no tie, top two buttons undone. I played with the idea that the shirt's color matched one of the hall doors of my recent experience. Maybe I was trying to undermine the discourse, a form of self-defense.

He took off his glasses and set them down. He looked tired, he looked older. I watched him drink and then pour and I waved off the thrust bottle.

I said, “If someone had told me all this, weeks ago, this place, these ideas, someone I trust completely, I guess I would have believed it. But I'm here, and it's all around me, and I have trouble believing it.”