Zero K: A Novel by DeLillo Don

Author:DeLillo, Don [DeLillo, Don]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
Publisher: Scribner
Published: 2016-05-02T16:00:00+00:00

- 10 -

I need to come at this in the simplest way.

He sits staring into the wall, a man unreachably apart. He is already locked in retrospection, seeing Artis, I thought, in drifting images, something he can’t control, flaring memories, apparitions, all set in motion by the fact of his decision.

He will not be going with her.

It was pounding him down, everything, the stone weight of a lifetime, everything he’d ever said and done brought to this moment. Here he is, wan and slack, hair mussed, tie unknotted, hands loosely folded at his crotch. I stand nearby, not knowing how to stand, how to adjust to the occasion, but determined to watch him openly. His eyes are empty of any plea he might make for understanding. How things change overnight, and what was hard and fast becomes some limp witness to a man’s wavering heart, and where the man had spoken forcefully the day before, striding wall to wall, he now sits slumped, thinking of the woman he has abandoned.

He’d told me his decision in the barest words. It was a sound straight from nature, unprocessed, without expressive affect. He didn’t have to tell me that Artis had already been taken down. It was in his voice. There was just the room, the chair, the man in the chair. There was the awkward watchful son. There were the two escorts flanking the doorway.

I waited for someone to make the first move. Then I did, shifting slightly into a more or less formal mourner’s pose, conscious that I’d been wearing the same stale shirt and pants since my arrival here, with underwear and socks I’d scrubbed at dawn, using hand sanitizer.

Soon Ross got out of the chair and moved toward the door and I followed closely, neither of us speaking, my hand in contact with his elbow, not guiding or supporting but only offering the comfort of touch.

Is a man of epic wealth allowed to be broken by grief?

• • •

The escorts were women, one holstered, the younger not. They led us to a space that became an abstract thing, a theoretical occurrence. I don’t know how else to put it. An idea of motion that was also a change of position or place. This was not the first such experience I’d had here, four of us this time observing a silence that felt reverent. I wasn’t sure whether this was due to the sad circumstances or to the nature of the conveyance, the feel of angled descent, the feel of being detached from our sensory apparatus, coasting in a way that was mental more than physical.

I decided to test the setting, to say something, anything.

“What’s it called, this thing we’re in?”

I was pretty sure I’d spoken but could not determine whether my words had produced a sound. I looked at the escorts.

Then Ross said, “It’s called the veer.”

“The veer,” I said.

I put a hand on his shoulder, pressed down, gripped hard, letting him know that I was here, we were both here.

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