The Zero and the One by Ryan Ruby

Author:Ryan Ruby
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Fiction / Coming Of Age, Fiction / Literary, Fiction / Thrillers / Suspense
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Published: 2017-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

Vera directs our taxi to an address on Rivington Street and sits in silence until it comes time for us to pay the fare. None of the tenderness from her note this morning is apparent in her expression or her posture, but it’s unclear whether her change in mood is to do with me, whether it’s about something I said at dinner, the opera tickets, or something else entirely. When she wants me to know she’ll tell me. Until then, I’ll have to wait. Unless she never wants to tell me, I think, my lips tightening.

I follow her down a set of stairs, through an unmarked door covered in band stickers, into a cellar bar. The bearded barman doesn’t acknowledge us as we enter. In the back, two tall men in skinny jeans and t-shirts, cues in hand, are examining the distribution of billiard balls on a green table illuminated by a sickly lamp that hangs from the low ceiling. The only other customer is an old man, who stacks silver cans of beer on the corner table where he sits, walling himself in.

As soon as we are seated with our drinks, she asks: Why did he do it, Owen?

I’m taken aback. I expected the question, but neither so soon nor so directly posed. It certainly shows in the way I mumble my way through my answer, my lips moving like a glass that has been knocked over, and which all watch, paralysed, as it totters in slow motion, unsure if it will right itself or fall and break.

Maybe it was just… just as he said in his note—

I haven’t read his note. Daddy wouldn’t let me see it. All I know is that he wrote it on some typewriter.

Well… in it… in his note… he said that… suicide… was a principled act of defiance… against the natural imperative of self-preservation. A defence of the freedom of the will against our servitude to causality. An inability to ignore the fact that, percentage-wise, the difference between dying at twenty-one and dying at one hundred is nil when measured against the billions of years that passed before his life began and the billions of years that would pass when it was over.

She straightens visibly, her shoulders pinned back, as she leans away from the table. She seems offended to discover what was written in his note. Offended, but at the same time relieved.

And you believe that? You think that’s why he killed himself?

I mean, if it were me. I swallowed hard. If I were going to write a suicide note, I wouldn’t trifle with things I didn’t actually believe.

But it’s nonsense! No one kills himself for abstract principles like that. Not even my brother. Principles are things to live for, not reasons to die. And why not at one hundred rather than twenty-one? By his own lights what difference would it make? I just don’t understand. How do you sit down and write out all the reasons that there is no reason

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