Zero K

- 1 -

Everybody wants to own the end of the world.

This is what my father said, standing by the contoured windows in his New York office — private wealth management, dynasty trusts, emerging markets. We were sharing a rare point in time, contemplative, and the moment was made complete by his vintage sunglasses, bringing the night indoors. I studied the art in the room, variously abstract, and began to understand that the extended silence following his remark belonged to neither one of us. I thought of his wife, the second, the archaeologist, the one whose mind and failing body would soon begin to drift, on schedule, into the void.

• • •

That moment came back to me some months later and half a world away. I sat belted into the rear seat of an armored hatchback with smoked side windows, blind both ways. The driver, partitioned, wore a soccer jersey and sweatpants with a bulge at the hip indicating a sidearm. After an hour’s ride over rough roads he brought the car to a stop and said something into his lapel device. Then he eased his head forty-five degrees in the direction of the right rear passenger seat. I took this to mean that it was time for me to unstrap myself and get out.

The ride was the last stage in a marathon journey and I walked away from the vehicle and stood a while, stunned by the heat, holding my overnight bag and feeling my body unwind. I heard the engine start up and turned to watch. The car was headed back to the private airstrip and it was the only thing moving out there, soon to be enveloped in land or sinking light or sheer horizon.

I completed my turn, a long slow scan of salt flats and stone rubble, empty except for several low structures, possibly interconnected, barely separable from the bleached landscape. There was nothing else, nowhere else. I hadn’t known the precise nature of my destination, only its remoteness. It was not hard to imagine that my father at his office window had conjured his remark from this same stark terrain and the geometric slabs that blended into it.

He was here now, they both were, father and stepmother, and I’d come to pay the briefest of visits and say an uncertain farewell.

The number of structures was hard to determine from my near vantage. Two, four, seven, nine. Or only one, a central unit with rayed attachments. I imagined it as a city to be discovered at a future time, self-contained, well-preserved, nameless, abandoned by some unknown migratory culture.

The heat made me think I was shrinking but I wanted to remain a moment and look. These were buildings in hiding, agoraphobically sealed. They were blind buildings, hushed and somber, invisibly windowed, designed to fold into themselves, I thought, when the movie reaches the point of digital collapse.

I followed a stone path to a broad portal where two men stood watching. Different soccer jerseys, same hip bulge. They stood behind a set of bollards designed to keep vehicles from entering the immediate area.

Off to the side, at the far edge of the entranceway, strangely, two other figures, in chadors, shrouded women standing motionless.

- 2 -

My father had grown a beard. This surprised me. It was slightly grayer than the hair on his head and had the effect of setting off his eyes, intensifying the gaze. Was this the beard a man grows who is eager to enter a new dimension of belief?

I said, “When does it happen?”

“We’re working on the day, the hour, the minute. Soon,” he said.

He was in his mid-to-late sixties, Ross Lockhart, broad-shouldered and agile. His dark glasses sat on the desk in front of him. I was accustomed to meeting him in offices, somewhere or other. This one was improvised, several screens, keyboards and other devices set about the room. I was aware that he’d put major sums of money into this entire operation, this endeavor, called the Convergence, and the office was a gesture of courtesy, allowing him to maintain convenient contact with his network of companies, agencies, funds, trusts, foundations, syndicates, communes and clans.

“And Artis.”

“She’s completely ready. There’s no trace of hesitation or second thoughts.”

“We’re not talking about spiritual life everlasting. This is the body.”

“The body will be frozen. Cryonic suspension,” he said.

“Then at some future time.”

“Yes. The time will come when there are ways to counteract the circumstances that led to the end. Mind and body are restored, returned to life.”

“This is not a new idea. Am I right?”

“This is not a new idea. It is an idea,” he said, “that is now approaching full realization.”

I was disoriented. This was the morning of what would be my first full day here and this was my father across the desk and none of it was familiar, not the situation or the physical environment or the bearded man himself. I’d be on my way home before I’d be able to absorb any of it.

“And you have complete confidence in this project.”

“Complete. Medically, technologically, philosophically.”

“People enroll their pets,” I said.

“Not here. Nothing here is speculative. Nothing is wishful or peripheral. Men, women. Death, life.”

His voice carried the even tone of a challenge.

“Is it possible for me to see the area where it happens?”

“Extremely doubtful,” he said.

Artis, his wife, was suffering from several disabling illnesses. I knew that multiple sclerosis was largely responsible for her deterioration. My father was here as devoted witness to her passing and then as educated observer of whatever initial methods would allow preservation of the body until the year, the decade, the day when it might safely be permitted to reawaken.

“When I got here I was met by two armed escorts. Took me through security, took me to the room, said next to nothing. That’s all I know. And the name, which sounds religious.”

“Faith-based technology. That’s what it is. Another god. Not so different, it turns out, from some of the earlier ones. Except that it’s real, it’s true, it delivers.”

“Life after death.”

“Eventually, yes.”

“The Convergence.”

“Yes.”

“There’s a meaning in mathematics.”

“There’s a meaning in biology. There’s a meaning in physiology. Let it rest,” he said.

When my mother died, at home, I was seated next to the bed and there was a friend of hers, a woman with a cane, standing in the doorway. That’s how I would picture the moment, narrowed, now and always, to the woman in the bed, the woman in the doorway, the bed itself, the metal cane.

Ross said, “Down in an area that serves as a hospice I sometimes stand among the people being prepared to undergo the process. Anticipation and awe intermingled. Far more palpable than apprehension or uncertainty. There’s a reverence, a state of astonishment. They’re together in this. Something far larger than they’d ever imagined. They feel a common mission, a destination. And I find myself trying to imagine such a place centuries back. A lodging, a shelter for travelers. For pilgrims.”

“Okay, pilgrims. We’re back to the old-time religion. Is it possible for me to visit the hospice?”

“Probably not,” he said.

He gave me a small flat disk appended to a wristband. He said it was similar to the ankle monitor that kept police agencies informed of a suspect’s whereabouts, pending trial. I’d be allowed entry to certain areas on this level and the one above, nowhere else. I could not remove the wristband without alerting security.

“Don’t be quick to draw conclusions about what you see and hear. This place was designed by serious people. Respect the idea. Respect the setting itself. Artis says we ought to regard it as a work-in-progress, an earthwork, a form of earth art, land art. Built up out of the land and sunk down into it as well. Restricted access. Defined by stillness, both human and environmental. A little tomblike as well. The earth is the guiding principle,” he said. “Return to the earth, emerge from the earth.”

• • •

I spent time walking the halls. The halls were nearly empty, three people, at intervals, and I nodded to each, receiving only a single grudging glance. The walls were shades of green. Down one broad hall, turn into another. Blank walls, no windows, doors widely spaced, all doors shut. These were doors of related colors, subdued, and I wondered if there was meaning to be found in these slivers of the spectrum. This is what I did in any new environment. I tried to inject meaning, make the place coherent or at least locate myself within the place, to confirm my uneasy presence.

At the end of the last hall there was a screen jutting from a niche in the ceiling. It began to lower, stretching wall to wall and reaching nearly to the floor. I approached slowly. At first the images were all water. There was water racing through woodlands and surging over riverbanks. There were scenes of rain beating on terraced fields, long moments of nothing but rain, then people everywhere running, others helpless in small boats bouncing over rapids. There were temples flooded, homes pitching down hillsides. I watched as water kept rising in city streets, cars and drivers going under. The size of the screen lifted the effect out of the category of TV news. Everything loomed, scenes lasted long past the usual broadcast breath. It was there in front of me, on my level, immediate and real, a woman sitting life-sized on a lopsided chair in a house collapsed in mudslide. A man, a face, underwater, staring out at me. I had to step back but also had to keep looking. It was hard not to look. Finally I glanced back down the hall waiting for someone to appear, another witness, a person who might stand next to me while the images built and clung.

There was no audio.

- 3 -

Artis was alone in the suite where she and Ross were staying. She sat in an armchair, wearing robe and slippers, and appeared to be asleep.

What do I say? How do I begin?

You look beautiful, I thought, and she did, sadly so, attenuated by illness, lean face and ash-blond hair, uncombed, pale hands folded in her lap. I used to think of her as the Second Wife and then as the Stepmother and then, again, as the Archaeologist. This last product label was not so reductive, mainly because I was finally getting to know her. I liked to imagine that she was the scientist as ascetic, living for periods in crude encampments, someone who might readily adapt to unsparing conditions of another kind.

Why did my father ask me to come here?

He wanted me to be with him when Artis died.

I sat on a cushioned bench, watching and waiting, and soon my thoughts fell away from the still figure in the chair and then there he was, there we were, Ross and I, in miniaturized mindspace.

He was a man shaped by money. He’d made an early reputation by analyzing the profit impact of natural disasters. He liked to talk to me about money. My mother said, What about sex, that’s what he needs to know. The language of money was complicated. He defined terms, drew diagrams, seemed to be living in a state of emergency, planted in the office most days for ten or twelve hours, or rushing to airports, or preparing for conferences. At home he stood before a full-length mirror reciting from memory speeches he was working on about risk appetites and offshore jurisdictions, refining his gestures and facial expressions. He had an affair with an office temp. He ran in the Boston Marathon.

What did I do? I mumbled, I shuffled, I shaved a strip of hair along the middle of my head, front to back — I was his personal antichrist.

He left when I was thirteen. I was doing my trigonometry homework when he told me. He sat across the small desk where my ever-sharpened pencils jutted from an old marmalade jar. I kept doing my homework while he spoke. I examined the formulas on the page and wrote in my notebook, over and over: sine cosine tangent.

Why did my father leave my mother?

Neither ever said.

Years later I lived in a room-and-a-half rental in upper Manhattan. One evening there was my father on TV, an obscure channel, poor reception, Ross in Geneva, sort of double-imaged, speaking French. Did I know that my father spoke French? Was I sure that this man was my father? He made a reference, in subtitles, to the ecology of unemployment. I watched standing up.

And Artis now in this barely believable place, this desert apparition, soon to be preserved, a glacial body in a massive burial chamber. And after that a future beyond imagining. Consider the words alone. Time, fate, chance, immortality. And here is my simpleminded past, my dimpled history, the moments I can’t help summoning because they’re mine, impossible not to see and feel, crawling out of every wall around me.

Ash Wednesday, once, I went to church and stood in line. I looked around at the statues, plaques and pillars, the stained glass windows, and then I went to the altar rail and knelt. The priest approached and made his mark, a splotch of holy ash thumb-printed to my forehead. Dust thou art. I was not Catholic, my parents were not Catholic. I didn’t know what we were. We were Eat and Sleep. We were Take Daddy’s Suit to the Dry Cleaner.

When he left I decided to embrace the idea of being abandoned, or semi-abandoned. My mother and I understood and trusted each other. We went to live in Queens, in a garden apartment that had no garden. This suited us both. I let the hair grow back on my aboriginal shaved head. We went for walks together. Who does this, mother and teenage son, in the United States of America? She did not lecture me, or rarely did, on my swerves out of observable normality. We ate bland food and batted a tennis ball back and forth on a public court.

But the robed priest and the small grinding action of his thumb implanting the ash. And to dust thou shalt return. I walked the streets looking for people who might look at me. I stood in front of store windows studying my reflection. I didn’t know what this was. Was this some freakified gesture of reverence? Was I playing a trick on Holy Mother Church? Or was I simply attempting to thrust myself into meaningful sight? I wanted the stain to last for days and weeks. When I got home my mother leaned back away from me as if to gain perspective. It was the briefest of appraisals. I made it a point not to grin — I had a gravedigger’s grin. She said something about the boring state of Wednesdays throughout the world. A little ash, at minimum expense, and a Wednesday, here and there, she said, becomes something to remember.

Eventually my father and I began to jostle our way through some of the tensions that had kept us at a distance and I accepted certain arrangements he made concerning my education but went nowhere near the businesses he owned.

And years later, it felt like a lifetime later, I began to know the woman who now sat before me, leaning into the light shed by a table lamp nearby.

And in another lifetime, hers, she opened her eyes and saw me sitting there.

“Jeffrey.”

“Arrived late yesterday.”

“Ross told me.”

“And it turns out to be true.”

I took her hand and held it. There seemed to be nothing more to say but we spoke for an hour. Her voice was a near whisper and so was mine, in accord with the circumstances, or the environment itself, the long hushed hallways, the sense of enclosure and isolation, a new generation of earth art, with human bodies in states of suspended animation.

“Since coming here I’ve found myself concentrating on small things, then smaller. My mind is unwinding, unspooling. I think of details buried for years. I see moments that I missed before or thought too trivial to recall. It’s my condition, of course, or my medication. It’s a sense of closing down, coming to an end.”

“Temporarily.”

“Do you have trouble believing this? Because I don’t. I’ve studied the matter,” she said.

“I know you have.”

“Skepticism of course. We need this. But at a certain point we begin to understand there’s something so much larger and more enduring.”

“Here’s a simple question. Practical, not skeptical. Why aren’t you in the hospice?”

“Ross wants me nearby. Doctors visit regularly.”

She had trouble dealing with the congested syllables in this last word and spoke more slowly from this point on.

“Or I get wheeled along corridors and into dark enclosures that move up and down in a shaft or maybe sideways or backwards. In any case I’m taken to an examining room where they watch and listen, all so silently. There’s a nurse somewhere in this suite, or nurses. We speak Mandarin, she and I, or he and I.”

“Do you think about the kind of world you’ll be returning to?”

“I think about drops of water.”

I waited.

She said, “I think about drops of water. How I used to stand in the shower and watch a drop of water edge down the inside of the sheer curtain. How I concentrated on the drop, the droplet, the orblet, and waited for it to assume new shapes as it passed across ridges and folds, with water pounding against the side of my head. I remember this from when? Twenty years ago, thirty, longer? I don’t know. What was I thinking at the time? I don’t know. Maybe I gave a certain kind of life to the drop of water. I animated it, cartooned it. I don’t know. Probably my mind was mostly blank. The water that’s smacking my head is damn cold but I don’t bother adjusting the flow. I need to watch the drop, see it begin to lengthen, to ooze. But it’s too clear and transparent to be a thing that oozes. I stand there getting smacked in the head while I tell myself there is no oozing. Ooze is mud or slime, it’s primitive life at the ocean bottom and it’s made chiefly of microscopic sea creatures.”

She spoke a kind of shadow language, pausing, thinking, trying to remember, and when she came back to this moment, this room, she had to place me, re-situate me, Jeffrey, son of, seated across from her. I was Jeff to everyone but Artis. That extra syllable, in her tender voice, made me self-aware, or aware of a second self, more agreeable and dependable, a man who walks with his shoulders squared, pure fiction.

“Sometimes in a dark room,” I said, “I will shut my eyes. I walk into the room and shut my eyes. Or, in the bedroom, I wait until I approach the lamp that sits on the bureau next to the bed. Then I shut my eyes. Is this a surrender to the dark? I don’t know what this is. Is this an accommodation? Let the dark dictate the terms of the situation? What is this? Sounds like something a weird kid does. The kid I used to be. But I do it even now. I walk into a dark room and maybe wait a moment and stand in the doorway and then shut my eyes. Am I testing myself by doubling the dark?”

We were quiet for a time.

“Things we do and then forget about,” she said.

“Except that we don’t forget. People like us.”

I liked saying that. People like us.

“One of those small divots of personality. This is what Ross says. He says that I’m a foreign country. Small things, then smaller. This has become my state of being.”

“I make my way toward the bureau in the dark bedroom and try to sense the location of the table lamp and then feel or grope for the lampshade and reach under the lampshade for the on-off thing, the knob, the switch that will turn on the light.”

“Then you open your eyes.”

“Or do I? The weird kid might keep them closed.”

“But only on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays,” she said, barely managing to make her way through the familiar strand of days.

Someone came out of a back room, a woman, gray jumpsuit, dark hair, dark face, businesslike expression. She wore latex gloves and stood in position behind Artis, looking at me.

Time to leave.

Artis said weakly, “It is only me, the body in the shower, one person enclosed in plastic watching a drop of water skate down the wet curtain. The moment is there to be forgotten. This seems the ultimate point. It’s a moment never to be thought of except when it’s in the process of unfolding. Maybe this is why it doesn’t seem peculiar. It is only me. I don’t think about it. I simply live within it and then leave it behind. But not forever. Leave it behind except for now, in this particular place, where everything I’ve ever said and done and thought about is near to hand, right here, to be gathered tightly so it doesn’t disappear when I open my eyes to the second life.”

• • •

It was called a food unit and this is what it was, a component, a module, four undersized tables and one other person, a man who wore what appeared to be a monk’s cloak. I ate and watched, using stealth glances. He cut his food and chewed it, introspectively. When he stood up to leave, I saw faded blue jeans below the cloak and tennis shoes below the jeans. The food was edible but not always nameable.

I entered my room by placing the disk on my wristband against the magnetic fixture embedded in the middle panel of the door. The room was small and featureless. It was generic to the point of being a thing with walls. The ceiling was low, the bed was bedlike, the chair was a chair. There were no windows.

In twenty-four hours, based on the clinical estimate, Artis would be dead, which meant that I would be on my way home while Ross remained for a time to determine firsthand that the series of cryonic actions was proceeding on schedule.

But I was already feeling trapped. Visitors were not permitted to leave the building and even with nowhere to go out there, among those Precambrian rocks, I felt the effects of this restriction. The room was not equipped with digital connections and my smartphone was brain-dead here. I did stretching exercises to get the blood pumping. I did sit-ups and squat-jumps. I tried to remember the dream of the previous night.

The room made me feel that I was being absorbed into the essential content of the place. I sat in the chair, eyes closed. I saw myself sitting here. I saw the complex itself from somewhere in the stratosphere, solid welded mass and variously pitched roofs, sun-struck walls.

I saw the drops of water that Artis had watched, one by one, trickling down the inside of the shower curtain.

I saw Artis vaguely naked, facing into the spray of water, the image of her eyes closed within the fact of my eyes closed.

I wanted to get out of the chair, walk out of the room, say goodbye to her and leave. I managed to talk myself up to a standing position and then open the door. But all I did was walk the halls.

- 4 -

I walked the halls. The doors here were painted in gradations of muted blue and I tried to name the shades. Sea, sky, butterfly, indigo. All these were wrong and I began to feel more foolish with every step I took and every door I scrutinized. I wanted to see a door open and a person emerge. I wanted to know where I was and what was happening around me. A woman came striding by, briskly, and I resisted an impulse to name her like a color, or examine her for signs of something, clues to something.

Then the idea hit me. Simple. There was nothing behind the doors. I walked and thought. I speculated. There were areas on certain floors that contained offices. Elsewhere the halls were pure design, the doors simply one element in the overarching scheme, which Ross had described in a general way. I wondered whether this was visionary art, involving colors, forms and local materials, art meant to accompany and surround the hardwired initiative, the core work of scientists, counselors, technicians and medical personnel.

I liked the idea. It fit the circumstances, it met the standards of unlikelihood, or daring dumb luck, that can mark the most compelling art. All I had to do was knock on a door. Pick a color, pick a door and knock. If no one opens the door, knock on the next door and the next. But I was wary of betraying my father’s trust in bringing me here. Then there were the hidden cameras. There would have to be surveillance of these hallways, with blank faces in hushed rooms scanning the monitors.

Three people came toward me, one of them a boy in a motorized wheelchair that resembled a toilet. He was nine or ten and watched me all the way. His upper body was tilted severely to one side but his eyes were alert and I wanted to stop and talk to him. The adults made it clear that this was not possible. They flanked the wheelchair and stared straight ahead, into authorized space, stranding me in my pause, my good intentions.

Soon I was turning a corner and going down a hall with walls painted raw umber, a thick runny pigment meant to resemble mud, I thought. There were matching doors, all doors the same. There was also a recess in the wall and a figure standing there, arms, legs, head, torso, a thing fixed in place. I saw that it was a mannequin, naked, hairless, without facial features, and it was reddish brown, maybe russet or simply rust. There were breasts, it had breasts, and I stopped to study the figure, a molded plastic version of the human body, a jointed model of a woman. I imagined placing a hand on a breast. This seemed required, particularly if you are me. The head was a near oval, arms positioned in a manner that I tried to decipher — self-defense, withdrawal, with one foot set to the rear. The figure was rooted to the floor, not enclosed in protective glass. A hand on a breast, a hand sliding up a thigh. It’s something I would have done once upon a time. Here and now, the cameras in place, the monitors, an alarm mechanism on the body itself — I was sure of this. I stood back and looked. The stillness of the figure, the empty face, the empty hallway, the figure at night, a dummy, in fear, drawing away. I moved farther back and kept on looking.

Finally I decided that I had to find out whether there was anything behind the doors. I dismissed the possible consequences. I walked down the hall, chose a door and knocked. I waited, went to the next door and knocked. Waited, went to the next door and knocked. I did this six times and told myself one more door and this time the door opened and a man stood there in suit, tie and turban. I looked at him, considering what I might say.

“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.”

“You need a good night’s sleep.”

“Bishkek. Is that it?”

“And Almaty. But at a considerable distance, both. And to the north somewhere, way up, far up, that’s where the Soviets tested their nuclear bombs.”

We thought about this.

“You have to get beyond your experience,” he said. “Beyond your limitations.”

“I need a window to look out of. That’s my limitation.”

He raised his glass and waited for me to match the gesture.

“I took you to the playground, that old ruin of a playground where we were living then. I put you on the swing and I pushed and waited and pushed,” he said. “The swing flew out, the swing came back. I put you on the seesaw. I stood on the other side of the balancing bar and pushed down slowly on my end of the plank. You went up in the air, your hands fastened to the grip. Then I raised the plank at my end and watched you drop down. Up and down. A little faster now. Up and down, up and down. I made sure you held tight to the handgrip. I said, See-saw, see-saw.”

I paused a moment and then raised my glass, waiting for whatever was next.

• • •

I stood before the screen in the long hallway. Nothing but sky at first, then an intimation of threat, treetops leaning, unnatural light. Soon, in seconds, a rotating column of wind, dirt and debris. It began to fill the frame, a staggered funnel, dark and bent, soundless, and then another, down left, in the far distance, rising from the horizon line. This was flat land, view unobstructed, the screen all tornado now, an awed silence that I thought would break into open roar.

Here was our climate enfolding us. I’d seen many tornadoes on TV news reports and waited for the footage of the rubbled storm path, the aftermath, houses in a shattered line, roofs blown off, siding in collapse.

It appeared, yes, whole streets leveled, school bus on its side, but also people coming this way, in slow motion, nearly out of the screen and into the hall, carrying what they’d salvaged, a troop of men and women, black and white, in solemn march, and the dead arrayed on ravaged floorboards in front yards. The camera lingered on the bodies. The detailwork of their violent end was hard to watch. But I watched, feeling obligated to something or someone, the victims perhaps, and thinking of myself as lone witness, sworn to the task.

Now, somewhere else, another town, another time of day, a young woman on a bicycle pedaling past, foreground, oddly comic motion, quick and jittery, one end of the screen to the other, with a mile-wide storm, a vortex, still far off, crawling up out of the seam of earth and sky, and then cut to an obese man lurching down basement steps, ultra-real, families huddled in garages, faces in the dark, and the girl on the bike again, pedaling the other way now, carefree, without urgency, a scene in an old silent movie, she is Buster Keaton in nitwit innocence, and then a reddish flash of light and the thing was right here, touching down massively, sucking up half a house, pure power, truck and barn squarely in the path.

White screen, while I stood waiting.

Total wasteland now, a sheared landscape, the image persisting, the silence as well. I stood in place for some minutes, waiting, houses gone, girl on bike gone, nothing, finished, done. The same drained screen.

I continued to wait, expecting more. I felt a whiskey belch erupting from some deep sac. There was nowhere to go and I had no idea what time it was. My watch was fixed on North American time, eastern standard.

- 5 -

I’d seen him once before, here in the food unit, the man in the monk’s cloak. He did not look up when I entered. A meal appeared in a slot near the door and I took the plate, glass and utensils to a table positioned diagonally to his, across a narrow aisle.

He had a long face and large hands, head narrowing toward the top, hair cropped to the skull, leaving sparse gray stubble. The cloak was the same one he’d been wearing last time, old and wrinkled, purplish, with gold embellishments. It had no sleeves. What emerged from the cloak were pajama sleeves, striped.

I examined the food, took a bite and decided to assume that he spoke English.

“What is this we’re eating?”

He looked over at my plate, although not at me.

“It’s called morning plov.”

I took another bite and tried to associate the taste with the name.

“Can you tell me what that is?”

“Carrots and onions, some mutton, some rice.”

“I see the rice.”

“Oshi nahor,” he said.

We ate quietly for a time.

“What do you do here?”

“I talk to the dying.”

“You reassure them.”

“What do I reassure them of?”

“The continuation. The reawakening.”

“Do you believe that?”

“Don’t you?” I said.

“I don’t think I want to. I just talk about the end. Calmly, quietly.”

“But the idea itself. The reason behind this entire venture. You don’t accept it.”

“I want to die and be finished forever. Don’t you want to die?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“What’s the point of living if we don’t die at the end of it?”

In his voice I tried to detect origins in some secluded bend of the English language, pitch and tone possibly hedged by time, tradition and other languages.

“What brought you here?”

He had to think about this.

“Maybe something someone said. I just drifted in. I was living in Tashkent during the unrest. Many hundreds dead all through the country. They boil people to death there. The medieval mind. I tend to enter countries in their periods of violent unrest. I was learning to speak Uzbek and helping educate the children of one of the provincial officials. I taught them English word by word and tried to minister to the man’s wife, who had been ill for several years. I performed the functions of a cleric.”

He took some food, chewed and swallowed. I did the same and waited for him to continue. The food was beginning to taste like what it was, now that he’d identified it for me. Mutton. Morning plov. It seemed he had nothing further to say.

“And are you a cleric?”

“I was a member of a post-evangelist group. We were radical breakaways from the world council. We had chapters in seven countries. The number kept changing. Five, seven, four, eight. We met in simple structures that we built ourselves. Mastabas. Inspired by tombs in very ancient Egypt.”

“Mastabas.”

“Flat roof, sloped walls, rectangular base.”

“You met in tombs.”

“We were fiercely awaiting the year, the day, the moment.”

“Something would happen.”

“What would it be? A meteoroid, a solid mass of stone or metal. An asteroid falling from space, two hundred kilometers in diameter. We knew the astrophysics. An object striking the earth.”

“You wanted it to happen.”

“We lusted after it. We prayed for it incessantly. It would come from out there, the great expanse of the galaxies, the infinite reach that contains every particle of matter. All the mysteries.”

“Then it happened.”

“Things fall into the ocean. Satellites falling out of orbit, space probes, space debris, pieces of space junk, man-made. Always the ocean,” he said. “Then it happened. A thing hits skimmingly.”

“Chelyabinsk,” I said.

He let the name dangle. The name itself was a justification. Such events really happen. Those who devote themselves to the occurrence of such events, whatever the scale, whatever the damage, are not dealing in make-believe.

He said, “Siberia was put there to catch these things.”

I understood that he did not see the person he was talking to. He had the drifter’s inclination to be impervious to names and faces. These were interchangeable components room to room, country to country. He did not talk so much as narrate. He traced a wavy line, his, and there was usually someone willing to be the random body that he told his stories to.

“I know there’s a hospice here. Is this where you talk to the dying?”

“They call it a hospice. They call it a safehold. I don’t know what it is. An escort takes me there every day, down in the numbered levels.”

He talked about advanced equipment, trained staff. Still, it made him think of twelfth-century Jerusalem, he said, where an order of knights cared for the pilgrims. He imagined at times that he was walking among lepers and plague victims, seeing gaunt faces from old Flemish paintings.

“I think of the bleedings, purgings and baths administered by the knights, the Templars. People from everywhere, the sick and dying, those who tend to them, those who pray for them.”

“Then you remember who and where you are.”

“I remember who I am. I am the hospitaler. Where I am, this has never mattered.”

Ross had also made a reference to pilgrims. This place may not have been intended as the new Jerusalem but people made long journeys to find a form of higher being here, or at least a scientific process that will keep their body tissue from decomposing.

“Does your room have a window?”

“I don’t want a window. What’s on the other side of a window? Pure dumb distraction.”

“But the room itself, if it’s like my room, the size of it.”

“The room is a solace, a meditation. I can raise my hand and touch the ceiling.”

“A monk’s cell, yes. And the cloak. I’m looking at the cloak you’re wearing.”

“It’s called a scapular.”

“A monk’s cloak. But so unmonklike. Aren’t such cloaks gray or brown or black or white?”

“Russian monks, Greek monks.”

“Okay.”

“Carthusian monks, Franciscan monks, Tibetan monks. Monks in Japan, monks in the Sinai desert.”

“Your cloak, this one. Where is it from?”

“I saw it draped over a chair. I still visualize the scene.”

“You took it.”

“The moment I saw it, I knew it was mine. It was predetermined.”

I could have asked a question or two. Whose chair, which room, what city, which country? But I understood that this would have been an affront to the man’s method of narration.

“What do you do when you’re not tending to people in their last hours or days?”

“This is everything I do. I talk to people, I bless them. They ask me to hold their hands, they tell me their lives. Those with strength enough left to talk or to listen.”

I watched him get to his feet, a taller man than he’d seemed at first glimpse. The cloak was knee-length and his pajama bottoms flapped as he moved toward the door. He wore high-top sneakers, black-and-white. I did not want to regard him as a comic figure. He was clearly not. I felt, in fact, reduced by his presence, his appearance, by what he said, his trail of happenstance. The cloak was a fetish, a serious one, a monk’s scapular, a shaman’s cape, carrying what he believed to be spiritual powers.

“Is this tea I’m drinking?”

“Green tea,” he said.

I waited for a word or phrase in Uzbek.

• • •

Artis said, “It was ten or twelve years ago, surgery, right eye. When it was over they gave me a protective eye shield to wear for a limited time. I sat in a chair at home wearing the shield. There was a nurse, Ross had arranged a nurse, unnecessarily. We followed all the guidelines in the instruction sheet. I slept in the chair for an hour and when I woke up I removed the shield and looked around and everything looked different. I was astonished. What was I seeing? I was seeing what is always there. The bed, the windows, the walls, the floor. But the brightness of it, the radiance. The bedspread and pillow cases, the rich color, the depths of color, something from within. Never before, ever,” she said.

Two of us, sitting as we had the day before, and I had to lean in to hear what she was saying. She let time pass before she was ready to continue.

“I’m aware that when we see something, we are getting only a measure of information, a sense, an inkling of what is really there to see. I don’t know the details or the terminology but I do know that the optic nerve is not telling the full truth. We’re seeing only intimations. The rest is our invention, our way of reconstructing what is actual, if there is any such thing, philosophically, that we can call actual. I know that research is being done here, somewhere in this complex, on future models of human vision. Experiments using robots, lab animals, who knows, people like me.”

She was looking directly at me now. She made me see myself, briefly, as the person who was standing here being looked at. Fairly tall man with thick webbed hair, prehistoric hair. This was all I could borrow from the deep probe maintained by the woman in the chair.

She replaced me now with what she’d seen that day.

“But the sight of it, the familiar room now transformed,” she said. “And the windows, what did I see? A sky of the sheerest wildest blue. I said nothing to the nurse. What would I say? And the rug, my god, Persian was only a pretty word until now. Am I exaggerating when I say there was something in the shapes and colors, the symmetry of the weave, the warmth, the blush, I don’t know what to call it. I became mesmerized by the rug and then by the window frame, white, simply white, but I had never seen white such as this and I was not taking some painkillers that might alter perception, just eyedrops four times a day. A white of enormous depth, white without contrast, I didn’t need contrast, white as it is. Am I sure I’m not overstating, inventing outright? I remember clearly what I thought. I thought, Is this the world as it truly looks? Is this the reality we haven’t learned how to see? This was not an afterthought. Is this the world that animals see? I thought of this in the first few moments, looking out the window, seeing treetops and sky. Is this the world that only animals are capable of seeing? The world that belongs to hawks, to tigers in the wild.”

She gestured throughout but only barely, a hand sifting repeatedly, sorting through the memories, the images.

“I sent the nurse home and went to bed early with the shield on my eye. This was one of the guidelines. In the morning I removed the shield and walked around the house and looked out the windows. My vision was improved but only ordinarily so. The experience was gone, the radiance in things. The nurse returned, Ross called from the airport, I followed the guidelines. It was a sunny day and I took a walk. Or the experience hadn’t drifted away and the radiance hadn’t faded — it was all simply re-suppressed. What a word. The way we see and think, what our senses will allow, this had to take precedence. What else could I expect? Am I so extraordinary? I returned to see the doctor a few days later. I tried to tell him what I’d seen. Then I looked at his face and stopped.”

She continued to speak and seemed at times to lose the pattern, the intonation. She tended to sail away from a word or syllable, eyes searching back for the sensations she was trying to describe. She was all face and hands, body gathered up within the folds of the robe.

“But that’s not the end of the story, is it?”

The question pleased her.

“No, it’s not.”

“Will it happen again?”

“Yes, exactly. This is what I think about. I will become a clinical specimen. Advances will be made through the years. Parts of the body replaced or rebuilt. Note the documentary tone. I’ve talked to people here. A reassembling, atom by atom. I have every belief that I will reawaken to a new perception of the world.”

“The world as it really is.”

“At a time that’s not necessarily so far off. And this is what I think about when I try to imagine the future. I will be reborn into a deeper and truer reality. Lines of brilliant light, every material thing in its fullness, a holy object.”

I’d led her into this song of Life Ever After and now I didn’t know how to respond. It was outside my range, all of it. Artis knew the rigors of science. She had worked in a number of countries, taught in several universities. She had observed, identified, investigated and explained many levels of human development. But holy objects, where were they? They were everywhere, of course — in museums and libraries and places of worship and in the excavated earth, in stone and mud ruins, and she’d dug them out and held them in her hands. I imagined her blowing dust from the chipped head of a tiny bronze god. But the future she’d just described was another matter, a purer aura. This was transcendence, the promise of a lyric intensity outside the measure of normal experience.

“Do you know the procedures you’ll be undergoing, the details, how they do it.”

“I know exactly.”

“Do you think about the future? What will it be like to come back? The same body, yes, or an enhanced body, but what about the mind? Is consciousness unaltered? Are you the same person? You die as someone with a certain name and with all the history and memory and mystery gathered in that person and that name. But do you wake up with all of that intact? Is it simply a long night’s sleep?”

“Ross and I have a running joke. Who will I be at the reawakening? Will my soul have left my body and migrated to another body somewhere? What’s the word I’m looking for? Or will I wake up thinking I’m a fruit bat in the Philippines? Hungry for insects.”

“And the real Artis. Where is she?”

“Drifting into the body of a baby boy. The son of local sheepherders.”

“The word is metempsychosis.”

“Thank you.”

I didn’t know what was around us in the room. All I saw was the woman in the chair.

“Day after tomorrow,” I said. “Or is it tomorrow?”

“Doesn’t matter.”

“I think it’s tomorrow. Days have no grip here.”

She closed her eyes for a moment and then looked at me as if we were meeting for the first time.

“How old are you?”

“Thirty-four.”

“You’re just starting.”

“Starting what?” I said.

Ross came in from one of the back rooms wearing a gym suit and athletic socks, a man shrouded in lost sleep. He took a chair from the rear wall and positioned it next to the armchair where Artis sat, placing his hand on hers.

“Back then,” I said to him, “you used to jog in an outfit like that.”

“Back then.”

“Maybe not such a designer item.”

“Back then I used to smoke a pack and a half a day.”

“Was the jogging supposed to counteract the smoking?”

“It was supposed to counteract everything.”

Three of us. I realized we hadn’t been in the same room for many months. We three. Now, unimaginably, we are here, another kind of convergence, the day before they come and take her. This is how I thought of it. They would come and take her. They would arrive with a gurney that had a reclining back, allowing her to sit up. They would have capsules, vials and syringes. They would fit her with a half-mask respirator.

Ross said, “Artis and I jogged. Didn’t we? We used to run along the Hudson River down to Battery Park and back. We ran in Lisbon, remember, six a.m., up that steep street to the chapel and the view. We ran in the Pantanal. In Brazil,” he said for my benefit, “on that high path that put us practically in the jungle.”

I thought of the bed and the cane. My mother in bed, at the end, and the woman in the doorway, her friend and neighbor, ever nameless, leaning on a cane, a quad cane, a metal cane with four little splayed legs.

Ross talking, recalling things, near to babbling now. Animals and birds they’d seen close-range, and he named them, and plant species, and he named them, and the view from their plane at low altitude swinging over the Mato Grosso.

They would come and take her. They would wheel her into an elevator and take her down to one of the so-called numbered levels. She would die, chemically prompted, in a subzero vault, in a highly precise medical procedure guided by mass delusion, by superstition and arrogance and self-deception.

I felt a surge of anger. I hadn’t known until now the depth of my objections to what was happening here, a response obscurely coiled within the rhythms of my father’s voice in his desperate reminiscence.

Someone appeared holding a tray, a man with teapot, cups, saucers. He placed the tray on a folding table by my father’s chair.

Either way she dies, I thought. At home, in bed, husband and stepson and friends at her side. Or here, in this regimental outpost, where everything happens somewhere else.

The tea brought a pause to the room. We sat quietly until the man was gone. Ross licked his finger and touched the pot. Then he poured, intently, trying hard not to spill.

The tea made me angry all over again. The cups and saucers. The careful pouring.

Artis said, “This place, all of it, seems transitional to me. Filled with people coming and going. Then the others, those who are leaving in one sense, as I am, but staying in another sense, as I am. Staying and waiting. The only thing that’s not ephemeral is the art. It’s not made for an audience. It’s made simply to be here. It’s here, it’s fixed, it’s part of the foundation, set in stone. The painted walls, the simulated doors, the movie screens in the halls. Other installations elsewhere.”

“The mannequin,” I said.

Ross leaned toward me.

“The mannequin. Where?”

“I don’t know where. The woman in the hallway. The woman gesturing, sort of fearfully. The rust-colored woman. Naked woman.”

“Where else?” he said.

“I don’t know.”

“You’ve seen no other mannequins? No other figures, naked or otherwise?”

“None, absolutely.”

“When you arrived,” he said. “What did you see?”

“The land, the sky, the buildings. The car driving off.”

“What else?”

“I think I told you. Two men at the entrance waiting to escort me. I didn’t see them until I approached. Then a security check, thorough.”

“What else?”

I thought about what else. I also wondered why we were having this idle talk under these dire circumstances. Is this what happens in the midst of terminal matters? We retreat into neutral space.

“You saw something else, off to the side, maybe fifty meters away, before you entered the building.”

“What did I see?”

“Two women,” he said. “In long hooded garments.”

“Two women in chadors. Of course. Just standing there in the heat and dust.”

“The first glimpse of art,” he said.

“Never occurred to me.”

“Standing absolutely still,” he said.

“Mannequins,” Artis said.

“To be seen or not seen. Doesn’t matter,” he said.

“I never imagined they weren’t real people. I knew the word. Chadors. Or burqas. Or whatever the other names. This was all I needed to know.”

I reached forward and took a teacup from Ross and handed it to Artis. We three. Someone had trimmed and combed her hair, clipping it close to the temples. This seemed almost a rule of order, accentuating the drawn face and stranding the eyes in their dilated state. But I was looking too closely. I was trying to see what she was feeling, in spirit more than body and in the wisping hesitations between words.

She said, “I feel artificially myself. I’m someone who’s supposed to be me.”

I thought about this.

She said, “My voice is different. I hear it when I speak in a way that’s not natural. It’s my voice but it doesn’t seem to be coming from me.”

“Medication,” Ross said. “That’s all it is.”

“It seems to be coming from outside me. Not all the time but sometimes. It’s like I’m twins, joined at the hip, and my sister is speaking. But that’s not it at all.”

“Medication,” he said.

“Things come to mind that probably happened. I know at a certain age we remember things that never took place. This is different. These things happened but they feel mistakenly induced. Is that what I want to say? An electronic signal gone wrong.”

I’m someone who’s supposed to be me.

This was a sentence to be analyzed by students of logic or ontology. We waited for her to continue. She spoke in serial fragments now, with stops or rests, and I found myself lowering my head in a sort of prayerful concentration.

“I’m so eager. I can’t tell you. To do this thing. Enter another dimension. And then return. For ever more. A word I say to myself. Again and again. So beautiful. For ever more. Say it. And say it. And say it.”

The way she cradled her teacup, an heirloom that needed protecting, and to hold it awkwardly or set it down carelessly would betray generational memories.

Ross sitting here in his green-and-white gym suit with possibly matching jockstrap.

“Forevermore,” he said.

It was my turn now and I managed to whisper the word. Then her hands began to shake and I put my cup down and reached for her cup and handed it to my father.

• • •

I was afraid of other people’s houses. After school sometimes a friend might talk me into going to his house or apartment to do our homework together. It was a shock, the way people lived, other people, those who weren’t me. I didn’t know how to respond, the clinging intimacy of it, kitchen slop, pan handles jutting from the sink. Did I want to be curious, amused, indifferent, superior? Just walking past a bathroom, a woman’s stocking draped over the towel rack, pill bottles on the windowsill, some open, some capsized, a child’s slipper in the bathtub. It made me want to run and hide, partly from my own fastidiousness. The bedrooms with unmade beds, somebody’s socks on the floor, the old woman in nightclothes, barefoot, an entire life gathered up in a chair by the bed, hunched frame and muttering face. Who are these people, minute to minute and year after year? It made me want to go home and stay there.

I thought that I would eventually build a life in opposition to my father’s career in global finance. We talked about this, Madeline and I, half seriously. Would I write poetry, live in a basement room, study philosophy, become a professor of transfinite mathematics at an obscure college in west-central somewhere.

Then there was Ross, buying the work of young artists, encouraging them to use the studio he’d built on his property in Maine. Figurative, abstract, conceptual, post-minimal, these were unheralded men and women needing space, time and funding. I tried to convince myself that Ross was using them to smother my response to his bloated portfolio.

In the end I followed the course that suited me. Cross-stream pricing consultant. Implementation analyst — clustered and nonclustered environments. These jobs were swallowed up by the words that described them. The job title was the job. The job looked back at me from the monitors on the desk where I absorbed my situation in full command of the fact that this was where I belonged.

Is it very different at home, or on the street, or waiting at the gate to board a flight? I maintain myself on the puppet drug of personal technology. Every touch of a button brings the neural rush of finding something I never knew and never needed to know until it appears at my anxious fingertips, where it remains for a shaky second before disappearing forever.

My mother had a roller that picked up lint. I don’t know why this fascinated me. I used to watch her guide the device over the back of her cloth coat. I tried to define the word roller without sneaking a look in the dictionary. I sat and thought, forgot to keep thinking, then started over, scribbling words on a pad, feeling dumber, on and off, into the night and the following day.

A rotating cylindrical device that collects bits of fiber sticking to the surface of a garment.

There was something satisfying and hard-won about this even if I made it a point not to check the dictionary definition. The roller itself seemed an eighteenth-century tool, something to wash horses with. I’d been doing this for a while, attempting to define a word for an object or even a concept. Define loyalty, define truth. I had to stop before it killed me.

The ecology of unemployment, Ross said on TV, in French, with subtitles. I tried to think about this. But I was afraid of the conclusion I might draw, that the expression was not pretentious jargon, that the expression made sense, opening out into a cogent argument concerning important issues.

When I found an apartment in Manhattan, and found a job, and then looked for another job, I spent whole weekends walking, sometimes with a girlfriend. There was one so tall and thin she was foldable. She lived on First Avenue and First Street and I didn’t know whether her name was spelled Gale or Gail and I decided to wait a while before asking, thinking of her as one spelling one day, the other spelling the next day, and trying to determine whether it made a difference in the way I thought of her, looked at her, talked to her and touched her.

• • •

The room in the long empty hall. The chair, the bed, the bare walls, the low ceiling. Sitting in the room and then wandering the halls I could feel myself lapsing into my smallest self, all the vainglorious ideas around me shrunk into personal reverie because what am I in this place but someone in need of self-defense.

• • •

The smell of other people’s houses. There was the kid who posed for me in his mother’s hat and gloves, although it could have been worse. The kid who said that he and his sister had to take turns swabbing lotion on their father’s toenails to control some hideous creeping fungus. He thought this was funny. Why didn’t I laugh? He kept repeating the word fungus while we sat at the kitchen table to do our homework together. A half slice of withered toast slumped in a saucer still damp with spilled coffee. Sine cosine tangent. Fungus fungus fungus.

It was the most interesting idea of my life up to now, Gale or Gail, even if it yielded nothing in the way of insight into the spelling of a woman’s name and its effect on the glide of a man’s hand over the woman’s body.

Systems administrator at a networking site. Human resource planner — global mobility. The drift, job to job, sometimes city to city, was integral to the man I was. I was outside the subject, almost always, whatever the subject was. The idea was to test myself, tentatively. These were mind challenges without a negative subtext. Nothing at stake. Solutions research manager — simulation models.

Madeline, in a rare instance of judgment, leaned across the table in the museum cafeteria where we’d met for lunch.

The vivid boy, she whispered. The shapeless man.

The Monk had said that he could get out of the chair and raise a hand and touch the ceiling. In my room I tried to do this and managed, on tiptoes. The moment I sat down I felt a shiver of anonymity.

Then there I am on the subway with Paula from Twin Falls, Idaho, eager tourist and manager of a steakhouse, and there is the man at the other end of the car, addressing the riders, hardship and loss, always a jarring moment, the man who works his way through the train, car to car, jobless, homeless, here to tell his story, paper cup in hand. The eyes of every rider are resolutely blank but we see him, of course, veteran riders, experts in covert looks, as he manages a steady passage through the car despite the train’s seismic waves and shakes. Then there is Paula, who watches him openly, who studies him in an analytical way, violating the code. This is rush hour and we are standing, she and I, and I give her a hockey hip check, which she ignores. The subway is the man’s total environment, or nearly so, all the way out to Rockaway and up into the Bronx, and he carries with him a claim on our sympathies, even a certain authority that we regard with wary respect, aside from the fact that we would like him to disappear. I put a couple of dollars into his paper cup, hip-checking Paula again, this time for fun, and the man heaves open the door between cars and now I’m the one who’s getting a few of the shady glances earlier sent his way.

I walk into the bedroom. There’s no wall switch in the room. The lamp sits on the bureau next to the bed. The room is dark. I shut my eyes. Are there other people who shut their eyes in a dark room? Is this a meaningless quirk? Or am I behaving in a way that has a psychological basis, with a name and a history? Here is my mind, there is my brain. I stand a while and think about this.

Ross dragging me along to the Morgan Library to read the spines of fifteenth-century books. He stood gazing at the jeweled cover of the Lindau Gospels in a display case. He arranged access to the second and third tiers, the balconies, after hours, up the hidden staircase, two of us crouching and whispering along the inlaid walnut bookshelves. A Gutenberg Bible, then another, century after century, elegant grillwork crisscrossing the shelves.

That was my father. Who was my mother?

She was Madeline Siebert, originally from a small town in southern Arizona. A cactus on a postage stamp, she called it.

She drapes her coat on a hanger whose hooked upper part she twists so that it fits over the top of the open closet door. Then she runs the roller over the back of the coat. It’s satisfying for me to watch this, maybe because I can imagine Madeline taking commonplace pleasure in the simple act of draping her coat on a hanger, strategically arranging the coat on a closet door and then removing the accumulated lint with a roller.

Define lint, I tell myself. Define hanger. Then I try to do it. These occasions stick and hold, among other bent relics of adolescence.

I returned to the library a few times, regular hours, main floor, tapestry over the mantelpiece, but did not tell my father.

- 6 -

There were three men seated cross-legged on mats with nothing but sky behind them. They wore loose-fitting garments, unmatched, and sat with heads bowed, two of them, the other looking straight ahead. Each man held a container at his side, a squat bottle or can. Two of them had candles in simple holders within reach. After a moment they began, in sequence, left to right, seemingly unplanned, to take up the bottles and pour the liquid on chest, arms and legs. Then two of them, eyes closed, advanced to head and face, pouring slowly. The third man, in the middle, put the bottle to his mouth and drank. I watched his face contort, mouth opening reflexively to allow the fumes to escape. Kerosene or gasoline or lamp oil. He emptied the remaining contents on his head and set the bottle down. They all set the bottles down. The first two men held the lighted candles to their shirtfronts and trouser legs and the third man took a book of matches from his breast pocket and finally, after several failed attempts, managed to strike a flame.

I stepped back from the screen. My face was still twisted in response to the third man’s reaction when the kerosene passed through his gullet and entered his system. The burning men, mouths open, swayed above me. I stepped farther back. They were formless, soundless, screaming.

I turned and walked down the hall. The images were everywhere around me, those awful seconds, the distress I felt when the man kept striking the match without getting a flame. I wanted him to light the match. It would be unbearable for him, one blackened match-head after another, to sit between his comrades while they burned.

There was someone standing at the end of the hall, a woman, watching me. Here I was, a lost tourist, unnoticed to this point, a man in retreat from a video screen. The images were still near and pressing but the woman was not looking past me. The screen could have been blank or showing a bare field on a gray day. When I drew near she gestured, faintly, head tilted left, and we turned into a narrow corridor that ended at right angles to another long hall.

She was small, older than I, forties, in a long dress and pink slippers. I said nothing about the burnings. I would respect the format, say nothing, be ready for anything. We walked step for step along the hall. I glanced at the clinging dress in floral design and the woman’s dark hair wound tight in a ribboned swirl. She was not a mannequin and this was not a film but I had to wonder whether this interval had any more spread and breadth than just another sequestered moment, bordered by closed doors.

We entered a passageway that dead-ended in what appeared to be a solid surface. My escort recited a series of brief words and this activated a viewing slot in the surface ahead. I took a long step forward and found myself, at an elevated position, staring through the slot at the far wall of a long narrow room.

An oversized human skull was mounted on a pedestal jutting from the wall. The skull was cracked in places, stained with age, a lurid coppery bronze, a drained gray. The eyeholes were rimmed with jewels and the jagged teeth painted silver.

Then there was the room itself, austere, with rock-hewn walls and floor. A man and woman were seated at an oak table with scarred surface. No nameplates, no documents littering the table. They were talking, not necessarily to each other, and facing them were nine people in natural scatter on wooden benches, their backs to me.

I knew the escort would be gone but I corrupted the moment by looking back, like an ordinary person, to check. She was gone, yes, and there was a sliding door about five paces behind me in the process of closing.

The woman at the table was speaking about great human spectacles, the white-clad faithful in Mecca, the hadj, mass devotion, millions, year after year, and Hindus gathered on the banks of the Ganges, millions, tens of millions, a festival of immortality.

She looked frail in a long loose tunic and headscarf, speaking softly and precisely, and I tried to determine the geography of her gracefully accented English, her cinnamon skin.

“Think of the Pope appearing on the balcony above Saint Peter’s Square. Enormous numbers of people assembled to be blessed,” she said, “to be reassured. The Pope is here to bless their future, to reassure them of the spirit life ahead, beyond the last breath.”

I tried to imagine myself among the countless clenched bodies brought together in awed wonder but could not sustain the notion.

“What we have here is small, painstaking and private. One by one, now and then, people enter the chamber. In an average day, how many? There is no average day. And there is no posturing here. No warping of the body in remorse, submission, obedience, worship. We do not kiss rings or slippers. There are no prayer rugs.”

She sat crouched, one hand grasping the other, each considered phrase an emblem of her dedication, so I chose to think.

“But is there a link to older beliefs and practices? Are we a radical technology that simply renews and extends those swarming traditions of everlasting life?”

Someone on the benches turned and looked my way. It was my father, giving me a slow and knowing nod. Here they are, he seemed to be saying, two of the people whose ideas and theories determine the shape of this endeavor. The vital minds, as he’d described them earlier. And the others, they had to be benefactors, as Ross was, the support mechanism, the money people, seated in this stone room, on backless benches, here to learn something about the philosophical heart of the Convergence.

The man began to speak. There was a tone, a ripple somewhere nearby, and his words, in one of the languages of Central Europe, became a smooth digital genderless English.

“This is the future, this remoteness, this sunken dimension. Solid but also elusive in a way. A set of coordinates mapped from space. And one of our objectives is to establish a consciousness that blends with the environment.”

He was short and round, high forehead, frizzed hair. He was a blinker, he kept blinking. Talking was an effort and he cranked his hand in rotary motions as he spoke.

“Do we see ourselves living outside time, outside history?”

The woman brought us back to earth.

“Hopes and dreams of the future often fail to account for the complexity, the reality of life as it exists on this planet. We understand that. The hungry, the homeless, the besieged, the warring factions and religions and sects and nations. The crushed economies. The wild surges of weather. Can we be impervious to terrorism? Can we ward off threats of cyberattack? Will we be able to remain truly self-sufficient here?”

The speakers seemed to be directing their remarks somewhere beyond the assembled group. I assumed that there were recording devices, sound and image, outside my range of vision, and that this discussion was intended primarily for the archives.

I also assumed that my presence was meant to be known only to father and son and to the escort with the swirled hair.

They were talking about the end, everybody’s end. The woman was looking down now, speaking into the rough wood of the table. I imagined that she was a person who fasted periodically, days without food, sips of water only. I imagined that she’d spent early time in Britain and the U.S., enveloped in her studies, learning how to withdraw, how to conceal herself.

“We are at the mercy of our star,” she said.

The sun is an unknown entity. They spoke of solar storms, flares and superflares, coronal mass ejections. The man tried to find adequate metaphors. He cranked his hand in odd synchrony with his references to earth orbit. I watched the woman, bowed down, silent for a time in the setting of billions of years, our vulnerable earth, the comets, asteroids, random strikes, the past extinctions, the current loss of species.

“Catastrophe is our bedtime story.”

Blinking man beginning to enjoy himself, I thought.

“To some extent we are here in this location to design a response to whatever eventual calamity may strike the planet. Are we simulating the end in order to study it, possibly to survive it? Are we adjusting the future, moving it into our immediate time frame? At some point in the future, death will become unacceptable even as the life of the planet becomes more fragile.”

I saw him at home, head of the table, family dinner, overfurnished room in an old movie. He was a professor, I thought, who’d abandoned the university to pursue the challenge of ideas in this sunken dimension as he’d called it.

“Catastrophe is built into the early brain.”

I decided to give him a name. I would give them names, both of them, just for the hell of it, and to stay involved, expand the tenuous role of the concealed man, the surreptitious witness.

“It’s an escape from our personal mortality. Catastrophe. It overwhelms what is weak and fearful in our bodies and minds. We face the end but not alone. We lose ourselves in the core of the storm.”

I listened carefully to what he was saying. Nicely translated but I didn’t believe a word of it. It was a kind of wishful poetry. It didn’t apply to real people, real fear. Or was I being small-minded, too limited in perspective?

“We are here to learn the power of solitude. We are here to reconsider everything about life’s end. And we will emerge in cyberhuman form into a universe that will speak to us in a very different way.”

I thought of several names and rejected them. Then I came up with Szabo. I didn’t know if this name was a product of his country of origin but it didn’t matter. There were no countries of origin here. I liked the name. It suited his bulging body. Miklos Szabo. It had an earthy savor that contrasted nicely with the programmed voice in translation.

I studied the woman as she spoke. She spoke to no one. She spoke into free space. She needed one name only. No family name, no family, no strong involvements, no hobbies, no particular place she was obliged to return to, no reason not to be here.

The headscarf was her flag of independence.

“Solitude, yes. Think of being alone and frozen in the crypt, the capsule. Will new technologies allow the brain to function at the level of identity? This is what you may have to confront. The conscious mind. Solitude in extremis. Alone. Think of the word itself. Middle English. All one. You cast off the person. The person is the mask, the created character in the medley of dramas that constitute your life. The mask drops away and the person becomes you in its truest meaning. All one. The self. What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others?”

Artis has spoken about being artificially herself. Was this the character, the half fiction who would soon be transformed, or reduced, or intensified, becoming pure self, suspended in ice? I didn’t want to think about it. I wanted to think about a name for the woman.

She spoke, with pauses, about the nature of time. What happens to the idea of continuum — past, present, future — in the cryonic chamber? Will you understand days, years and minutes? Will this faculty diminish and die? How human are you without your sense of time? More human than ever? Or do you become fetal, an unborn thing?

She looked at Miklos Szabo, the Old World professor, and I imagined him in a three-piece suit, someone from the 1930s, a renowned philosopher having an illicit romance with a woman named Magda.

“Time is too difficult,” he said.

This made me smile. I stood hunched at the viewing slot, which was situated just below eye level, and found myself looking again at the skull across the room, an artifact of the region and possible object of plunder and the last thing I might have expected to find in this environment of scientific approaches to life’s end. It was about five times the size of an ordinary human skull and it wore a headpiece, which I hadn’t fully registered earlier. This was an imposing skullcap in the shape of many tiny birds, set flat to the skull, a golden flock, wingtips connected.

It looked real, the cranium of a giant, blunt in its deathliness, disconcerting in its craftwork, its silvery grin, a folk art too sardonic to be affecting. I imagined the room empty of people and furniture, rock-walled, stone-cold, and maybe the skull seemed right at home.

Two men entered the room, tall and fair-skinned, twins, in old workpants and matching gray T-shirts. They stood one to either side of the table and spoke without introduction, each yielding to the other in flawless transition.

“This is the first split second of the first cosmic year. We are becoming citizens of the universe.”

“There are questions of course.”

“Once we master life extension and approach the possibility of becoming ever renewable, what happens to our energies, our aspirations?”

“The social institutions we’ve built.”

“Are we designing a future culture of lethargy and self-indulgence?”

“Isn’t death a blessing? Doesn’t it define the value of our lives, minute to minute, year to year?”

“Many other questions.”

“Isn’t it sufficient to live a little longer through advanced technology? Do we need to go on and on and on?”

“Why subvert innovative science with sloppy human excess?”

“Does literal immortality compress our enduring artforms and cultural wonders into nothingness?”

“What will poets write about?”

“What happens to history? What happens to money? What happens to God?”

“Many other questions.”

“Aren’t we easing the way toward uncontrollable levels of population, environmental stress?”

“Too many living bodies, too little space.”

“Won’t we become a planet of the old and stooped, tens of billions with toothless grins?”

“What about those who die? The others. There will always be others. Why should some keep living while others die?”

“Half the world is redoing its kitchens, the other half is starving.”

“Do we want to believe that every condition afflicting the mind and body will be curable in the context of our boundless longevity?”

“Many other questions.”

“The defining element of life is that it ends.”

“Nature wants to kill us off in order to return to its untouched and uncorrupted form.”

“What good are we if we live forever?”

“What ultimate truth will we confront?”

“Isn’t the sting of our eventual dying what makes us precious to the people in our lives?”

“Many other questions.”

“What does it mean to die?”

“Where are the dead?”

“When do you stop being who you are?”

“Many other questions.”

“What happens to war?”

“Will this development mark the end of war or a new level of widespread conflict?”

“With individual death no longer inevitable, what will happen to the lurking idea of nuclear destruction?”

“Will all traditional limits begin to disappear?”

“Will the missiles talk themselves out of the launchers?”

“Does technology have a death wish?”

“Many other questions.”

“But we reject these questions. They miss the point of our endeavor. We want to stretch the boundaries of what it means to be human — stretch and then surpass. We want to do whatever we are capable of doing in order to alter human thought and bend the energies of civilization.”

They spoke in this manner for a time. They weren’t scientists or social theorists. What were they? They were adventurers of a kind that I could not quite identify.

“We have remade this wasteland, this secluded desert shit-hole, in order to separate ourselves from reasonableness, from this burden of what is called responsible thinking.”

“Here, today, in this room, we are speaking into the future, to those who may judge us as brave or quaint or foolish.”

“Consider two possibilities.”

“We wanted to rewrite the future, all our futures, and ended with a single empty page.”

“Or — we were among those few who altered all life on the planet, for all time to come.”

I named them the Stenmark twins. They were the Stenmark twins. Jan and Lars, or Nils and Sven.

“The dormants in their capsules, their pods. Those now and those to come.”

“Are they actually dead? Can we call them dead?”

“Death is a cultural artifact, not a strict determination of what is humanly inevitable.”

“And are they who they were before they entered the chamber?”

“We will colonize their bodies with nanobots.”

“Refresh their organs, regenerate their systems.”

“Embryonic stem cells.”

“Enzymes, proteins, nucleotides.”

“They will be subjects for us to study, toys for us to play with.”

Sven leaned toward his audience, carrying this last phrase with him, and there was a ripple of amused response from the benefactors.

“Nano-units implanted in the suitable receptors of the brain. Russian novels, the films of Bergman, Kubrick, Kurosawa, Tarkovsky. Classic works of art. Children reciting nursery rhymes in many languages. The propositions of Wittgenstein, an audiotext of logic and philosophy. Family photographs and videos, the pornography of your choice. In the capsule you dream of old lovers and listen to Bach, to Billie Holiday. You study the intertwined structures of music and mathematics. You reread the plays of Ibsen, revisit the rivers and streams of sentences in Hemingway.”

I looked again at the woman in the headscarf, unnamed still. She would not be real until I gave her a name. She was sitting upright now, hands resting on the table, eyes closed. She was in a state of meditation. This is what I wanted to believe. Had she listened to a single word spoken by the Stenmarks? Her mind was empty of words, mantras, sacred syllables.

I called her Arjuna, then I called her Arjhana. These were pretty names but they weren’t right. Here I was, in a sealed compartment, inventing names, noting accents, improvising histories and nationalities. These were shallow responses to an environment that required abandonment of such distinctions. I needed to discipline myself, be equal to the situation. But when was I ever equal to the situation? What I needed to do was what I was doing.

I listened to the Stenmarks.

“In time a religion of death will emerge in response to our prolonged lives.”

“Bring back death.”

“Bands of death rebels will set out to kill people at random. Men and women slouching through the countryside, using crude weapons to kill those they encounter.”

“Voracious bloodbaths with ceremonial aspects.”

“Pray over the bodies, chant over the bodies, do unspeakably intimate things to the bodies.”

“Then burn the bodies and smear the ashes on your own bodies.”

“Or pray over the bodies, chant over the bodies, eat the edible flesh of the bodies. Burn what remains.”

“In one form or another, people return to their death-haunted roots in order to reaffirm the pattern of extinction.”

“Death is a tough habit to break.”

Nils gestured, fist raised, thumb jutting backwards over his shoulder. He was indicating the skull on the wall. And I understood at once, intuitively, that the big raw bony object was their creation and that these two men, bland in appearance, demonologists in spirit, were the individuals responsible for the look and touch and temperament of the entire complex. This was their design, all of it, the tone and flow, the half-sunken structure itself and everything inside it.

All Stenmark.

This was their aesthetic of seclusion and concealment, all the elements that I found so eerie and disembodying. The empty halls, the color patterns, the office doors that did or did not open into an office. The mazelike moments, time suspended, content blunted, the lack of explanation. I thought of the movie screens that appeared and vanished, the silent films, the mannequin with no face. I thought of my room, the uncanny plainness of it, the nowhereness, conceived and designed as such, and the rooms like it, maybe five hundred or a thousand, and the idea made me feel again that I was dwindling into indistinctness. And the dead, or maybe dead, or whatever they were, the cryogenic dead, upright in their capsules. This was art in itself, nowhere else but here.

The brothers altered their method of address, speaking not to the recording devices but directly to the nine men and women in the audience.

“We spent six years here, without a break, immersed in our work. Then a journey home, brief but fulfilling, and back and forth ever since.”

“When the time comes.”

“There is a certain inevitability in these words.”

“When the time comes, we’ll depart finally from our secure northern home to this desert place. Old and frail, limping and shuffling, to approach the final reckoning.”

“What will we find here? A promise more assured than the ineffable hereafters of the world’s organized religions.”

“Do we need a promise? Why not just die? Because we’re human and we cling. In this case not to religious tradition but to the science of present and future.”

They were speaking quietly and intimately, with a deeper reciprocity than in the earlier exchanges and not a trace of self-display. The audience was stilled, completely fixed.

“Ready to die does not mean willing to disappear. Body and mind may tell us that it is time to leave the world behind. But we will clutch and grasp and scratch nevertheless.”

“Two stand-up comics.”

“Encased in vitreous matter, refashioned cell by cell, waiting for the time.”

“When the time comes, we’ll return. Who will we be, what will we find? The world itself, decades away, think of it, or sooner, or later. Not so easy to imagine what will be out there, better or worse or so completely altered we will be too astonished to judge.”

They spoke about ecosystems of the future planet, theorizing — a renewed environment, a ravaged environment — and then Lars held up both hands to signal a respite. It took a moment for the audience to absorb the transition but soon the room settled into silence, the Stenmarks’ silence. The brothers themselves stared dead ahead, empty-eyed.

The Stenmarks were in their early fifties, this is where I placed them, so thin-skinned and pale that branching blue veins were visible on the backs of their hands, even from where I stood. I decided that they were street anarchists of an earlier era, quietly dedicated to plotting local outrages or larger insurrections, all shaped by their artistic skills, and then I found myself wondering if they were married. Yes, to sisters. I saw them walking in a wooded area, all four, the brothers ahead, then the sisters ahead, a family custom, a game, the distance between the couples coolly measured and carefully maintained. In my half-mad imagining it would be five meters. I made it a point to measure in meters, not in feet or yards.

Lars dropped his arms, the pause ended, the twins resumed speaking.

“Some of you may be back here as well. To witness the passage of loved ones. And of course you’ve begun to consider what such a passage might be like for yourselves, one day, each of you, when the time comes.”

“We understand that some of the things we’ve been saying here today may act as disincentives. This is okay. This is the simple truth of our perspective. But do this. Think of money and immortality.”

“Here you are, collected, convened. Isn’t this what you’ve been waiting for? A way to claim the myth for yourselves. Life everlasting belongs to those of breathtaking wealth.”

“Kings, queens, emperors, pharaohs.”

“It’s no longer a teasing whisper you hear in your sleep. This is real. You can think beyond the godlike touch of fingertip billions. Take the existential leap. Rewrite the sad grim grieving playscript of death in the usual manner.”

This was not a sales pitch. I didn’t know what this was, a challenge, a taunt, a thrust at the vanity of the moneyed elect or simply an attempt to tell them what they’ve always wanted to hear even if they didn’t know it.

“Isn’t the pod familiar to us from our time in the womb? And when we return, at what age will we find ourselves? Our choice, your choice. Just fill in the blanks on the application form.”

I was tired of all this dying and stood away from the viewing slot. But there was no escaping the sound of voices, the brothers reciting a series of Swedish or Norwegian words and then another series of Norwegian or Danish words and then again a series, a list, a litany of German words. I understood a few but not others, not most, nearly none, I realized, as the recitation went on, words in most cases beginning with the syllables welt, wort or tod. This was art that haunts a room, the sonic art of monotone, of incantation, and my response to their voices and all the grave and soaring themes of the afternoon was to drop into a crouch and execute a series of squat-jumps. I jumped and squatted, squatted and jumped, arms thrust upward, five, ten, fifteen times, and then again, down and up, sheer release, and I counted aloud in muttered grunts.

Soon I developed a parallel image of myself as an arboreal ape flinging long hairy arms over its head, hopping and barking in self-defense, building muscles, burning fat.

At some point I became aware that someone else was addressing the audience. It was Miklos, whose surname I’d forgotten — the blinking man in neutered translation speaking now on the subject of being and nonbeing. I kept squatting and jumping.

When I returned to the slot the Stenmark twins were gone, Miklos was still speaking and the woman in the headscarf was positioned as before, seated upright in the chair, hands flat on the table. Her eyes were still closed, everything the same except that now, as I watched, I knew her name. She was Artis. Who else would she be but Artis? That was her name.

• • •

I stood in the locked compartment waiting for the sliding door to open. I knew it was wrong to think of it as a sliding door. There had to be an advanced term in use here, a technical word or phrase, but I resisted the implied challenge to consider possibilities.

The escort was waiting when the door slid open. We went along a corridor and then another, wordless once again, both of us, and I expected in minutes to be seeing Ross in his office or suite.

We came to a door and the escort stood and waited. I looked at her and then at the door and we both waited. I realized there was something I wanted, a cigarette. This was a recidivistic need, to grab the semi-crushed pack in my breast pocket, light up quickly, inhale slowly.

I looked at the escort again and understood finally what was happening here. This was my door, the door to my room. I went ahead and opened it and the woman did not leave. I thought of the moment in the stone room when Ross had swiveled on his bench and turned to look at me with a certain expression on his face, a knowingness, father to son, man to man, and in retrospect I realized that he was referring to the situation he’d arranged for me, this situation.

I sat on the bed and watched her undress.

I watched her unravel the ribbon from her hair, slowly, and the hair fall about her shoulders.

I leaned over and took one of her felt slippers in my hand as she eased her foot out of it.

I watched the long dress float down her body to the floor.

I stood and moved into her, smearing her into the wall, imagining an imprint, a body mark that would take days to melt away.

In bed I wanted to hear her speak to me in her language, Uzbek, Kazakh, whatever it was, but I understood that this was an intimacy not suited to the occasion.

I thought of nothing for a time, all hands and body.

Then stillness, and the cigarette to think about again, the one I’d wanted when we were standing outside the door.

I listened to us breathe and found myself imagining the landscape that enclosed us, planing it down, making it abstract, the tender edges of our centeredness.

I watched her dress, slowly, and decided not to give her a name. She blended better, nameless, with the room.

- 7 -

Ross Lockhart is a fake name. My mother mentioned this casually one day when I was nineteen or twenty. Ross told her that he’d taken this action right after he got out of college. He’d been thinking about it for years, first in a spirit of fantasy, then with determination, building a list of names that he inspected critically, with a certain detachment, each deletion bringing him closer to self-realization.

This was the term Madeline used, self-realization, speaking in her mild documentary voice as she sat watching TV without the sound.

It was a challenge, he told her. It was an incentive, an inducement. It would motivate him to work harder, think more clearly, begin to see himself differently. In time he would become the man he’d only glimpsed when Ross Lockhart was a series of alphabetic strokes on a sheet of paper.

I was standing behind my mother while she spoke. I held a take-out turkey sandwich in one hand, a glass of ginger ale in the other, and the recollection is shaped by the way I stood there thinking and chewing, each bite of the sandwich becoming more deliberate as I concentrated intently on what Madeline was telling me.

I was coming to know the man better now, second by second, word by word, and myself as well. Here was the explanation for the way I walked, talked and tied my shoes. And how interesting it was, in the mere fragments of Madeline’s brief narrative, that so many things became so readily apparent. This was the decoding of my baffled adolescence. I was someone I was not supposed to be.

Why hadn’t she told me sooner? I waited for her to shrug off the question but she showed no sign of having heard it. All she did was take her eyes off the TV screen long enough to tell me, over her shoulder, what his real name was.

He was born Nicholas Satterswaite. I stared at the far wall and thought about this. I spoke the name inaudibly, moving my lips, over and over. Here was the man laid out before me, balls and all. This was my authentic father, a man who chose to abandon his generational history, all the lives up to mine that were folded into the letters of this name.

When he looks in the mirror he sees a simulated man.

Madeline went back to her TV and I chewed my food and counted the letters. Twenty letters in the full name, twelve in the surname. These numbers told me nothing — what could they tell me? But I needed to get inside the name, work it, wedge myself into it. With the name Satterswaite, who would I have been and what would I have become? I was still, then, at nineteen, in the process of becoming.

I understood the lure of an invented name, people emerging from shadow selves into iridescent fictions. But this was my father’s design, not mine. The name Lockhart was all wrong for me. Too tight, too clenched. The solid and decisive Lockhart, the firm closure of Lockhart. The name excluded me. All I could do was peer into it from outside. This is how I understood the matter, standing behind my mother, reminding myself that she did not take the name Lockhart when she married the man.

I wondered what would have happened if I’d learned the truth sooner. Jeffrey Satterswaite. It’s possible that I would have been able to stop mumbling, gain weight, add muscle, eat raw clams and get girls to look at me in a spirit of serious appraisal.

But did I really care about origins? It was hard to believe that I would ever make an attempt to explore the genealogy of Satterswaite, to locate the people and places embedded in the name. Did I want to be part of an extended family, somebody’s grandson, nephew, cousin?

Madeline and I were each what the other needed. We were singly met. I looked at the TV screen and asked her what there was about the name Nicholas Satterswaite that made him eager to abandon it. The indistinctness of it, she said. The forgettability. The variations in spelling and maybe even pronunciation. From an isolated American viewpoint, the name comes from nowhere and goes nowhere. And then, in contrast, the Anglo-Saxon ancestry of the name. The responsibility this implies. The way his father used the name as a point of reference against which the boy was measured.

But what about the name Lockhart? What is the ancestry? What is the responsibility? She didn’t know, I didn’t know. Did Ross know?

Onscreen there was a traffic report with live coverage of cars on an expressway, shot from above. This was the traffic channel, twenty-four hours a day, and after a while, with the sound off and the cars coming into view and passing out of view, never-endingly, the scene floated out of its shallow reality. She watched, I watched, and the scene became apparitional. I stared at the traffic and counted off eight cars and then twelve more, the letters in the real name, first and last, totaling twenty. I kept doing this, eight cars, then twelve. I spelled the name aloud, expecting a possible correction from Madeline. But why would she know or care how the name was spelled?

This is what emerges from that day, maybe that entire year, the way I watched the cars and counted the letters and chewed the sandwich, maple-glazed turkey breast on rye bread from the deli down the street, with never enough mustard.

• • •

I’d slept well in body-warmed sheets and wasn’t sure whether the meal in front of me was breakfast or lunch. The food itself contained no clue. Why did this make sense? Because the Stenmark Brothers had designed the food units. I imagined their plan. Hundreds of units sized progressively, four tables, sixteen tables, one hundred and fifty-six tables, each unit painstakingly utilitarian, the plates and utensils, the tables and chairs, the food itself, all of it in the spirit of a well-disciplined dream.

I ate slowly, trying to taste the food. I thought of Artis. This is the day when they come and take her. But how do I think about what will happen once her heart stops beating? How does Ross think about it? I wasn’t sure what I wanted to believe, that his trust in the process was genuine or that he’d devised this strength of conviction over time to drown out doubt. Doesn’t the fact of imminent death encourage the deepest self-delusion? Artis in the chair sipping tea, the shaky voice and hands, body narrowed to a memory.

The Monk walked in then, nearly startling me, and the small room seemed to gather itself about him. He wore a hooded sweatshirt under the cloak, the hood flopped down behind his neck. Plate, glass and utensils appeared in the slot and he took these to the table. I let him settle into the chair and position the plate.

“I’ve been hoping to see you again. I have a question.”

He paused, not anticipating the question but only wondering if that intrusive noise was a human voice, someone speaking to him.

I waited until he began to eat.

“The screens,” I said. “They appear in the halls and disappear into the ceiling. Last screen, last film, a self-immolation. Have you seen it? I thought they were monks. Were they monks? I thought they were kneeling on prayer mats. Three men. Awful to see. Have you seen it?”

“I don’t look at the screens. The screens are a distraction. But there are monks, yes, in Tibet, in China, in India, setting themselves aflame.”

“In protest,” I said.

This remark was too obvious to provoke further comment from the man. I think I expected some credit for raising the subject and for having witnessed the terrible moment itself onscreen, men dying for a cause.

Then he said, “Monks and former monks and nuns and others.”

“One of them drank kerosene or gasoline.”

“They sit in lotus position or run through the streets. A burning man running through the streets. If I saw such a thing, firsthand, I would run with him. And if he ran screaming, I would scream with him. And when he collapsed, I would collapse.”

The sweatshirt was black, sleeves protruding from the cloak. He placed his fork on the plate and sat back. I stopped eating and waited. He could have been sitting in a weary café in a lost corner of some large city, an eccentric figure of the type who is left alone by others, a man often seen but nearly never spoken to. What’s his name? Does he have a name? Does he know his name? Why does he dress that way? Where does he live? A man warily regarded by those few who’ve heard him deliver a monologue on one or another subject. Deep voice, unslurred, interior, and remarks too scattered to warrant a sensible response.

But the Monk wasn’t that man, was he? The Monk had a role here. He spoke to men and women who’d been placed in a shelter, a safehold, people in the last days or hours of the only life they’d ever known, and he had no illusions about the sweeping promise of a second life.

He looked at me and I knew what he saw. He saw the figure of a man hunched sort of sideways in a chair. The look told me nothing more than that. The food I was chewing told me it could conceivably be meat.

“I needed to do something, do more than pledge to run alongside, do more than say something or wear a certain garment. How do we stand with others when the things that separate us are imposed at birth, when the separation haunts us and follows us day and night?”

His voice began to carry a storytelling tone, a sense of recitation, self-remembrance.

“I decided to make a journey to the sacred mountain in the Tibetan Himalayas. A great white icy pyramid. I learned all the names of the mountain in all the languages. I studied all the histories and mythologies. It took many days of hard travel just to reach the area, well over a week, finally, the last day on foot. Masses of people arriving at the base of the mountain. People crowded into open trucks with bundled possessions hanging from the sides and people tumbling out and milling about and looking up. There’s the summit washed in ice and snow. The center of the universe. People with yaks to carry supplies and tents. Tents pitched everywhere. Prayer flags draped everywhere. Men with prayer wheels, men in woolen face masks and old ponchos. All of us here to make the circumambulation of the high rim at five thousand meters. I was determined to follow the trail in the most demanding manner. Take one step and then fall to the ground in body-length prostration. Rise to my feet, take one step, then fall to the ground in body-length prostration. It would take days and then weeks, they told me, for someone not raised and trained in the age-old practice. Thousands of pilgrims every year for two thousand years, walking and crawling beneath the summit. Blizzards in June. Death in the elements. Take one step, then fall to the ground in body-length prostration.”

He spoke about levels of devotional stillness, states of meditation and enlightenment, the fragile nature of their rituals. Buddhists, Hindus, Jains. He wasn’t looking at me now. He looked at the wall, spoke to the wall. I sat with fork in hand, suspended between the plate and my mouth. He spoke about abstinence, continence and tantric bliss and I looked at the meatlike specimen at the end of my fork. This was animal flesh that I would chew and swallow.

“I had no guide. I had a yak to carry my tent. Thick brown hairy thing. I kept looking at it. All brown and shaggy, a thousand years old. A yak. I sought advice on whether I should make the trek in clockwise or counterclockwise fashion. There are codes of conduct. The distance would be fifty-two kilometers. Uneven terrain, altitude sickness, snow and fierce wind. Take one step and fall to the ground in body-length prostration. I carried bread, cheese and water. I ascended the main path. I saw no Westerners, there were no Westerners. Men wrapped in horse blankets, men in long robes, men with little wooden shoes fitted to their hands, clogs fitted to their hands to protect against the pebbles and stones as they crawled. Reach the level of circumambulation. Follow the rocky trail. One step or stride and fall to the ground. Body-length prostration. I stood outside my tent and watched them walk and crawl. It was methodical work. They were not showing fervor and holy emotion. They were simply determined, faces and bodies, doing what they’d come here to do, and I watched. There were others standing and resting, others talking, and I watched. I intended to do this, fall to my knees, stretch full-length on the ground, make a mark in the snow with my fingers, speak several meaningless words, inch ahead to the mark made by my fingers, rise to my feet, take a breath, take a step, then fall to my knees again. Parts of my body would lose all feeling in the cold and cutting wind. Those who aspire to total emptiness. Those with foreheads forever cut and bruised from bending to the earth, from kneeling and bowing down and striking the earth. I intended to do this, take a step, fall to my knees, bow to the earth, inch ahead to the mark made by my fingers, speak several nonwords for every step I take.”

He kept reminding himself what he’d hoped to do and the repetition was beginning to sound stressed. Could the words reframe the memories? He stopped speaking but kept remembering. I could see him outside his tent, tall man, bareheaded, shrouded in layers of castoff clothing. I knew I wasn’t meant to ask whether he’d managed to crawl for an hour or a week. But I responded to the act itself, the principle of it, the man’s intentions, so far outside my own fragmented visions, a thing for others, blunt and punishing and filled with steep traditions and simple reverence.

In time he resumed eating and so did I. It occurred to me that my sensitivity to the meat on my fork was completely phony. I didn’t feel guilty, even if it was yak meat. I chewed and swallowed. I was beginning to understand that every act I engaged in had to be articulated at some level, had to be performed with the words intact. I could not chew and swallow without thinking of chew and swallow. Could I blame the Stenmark twins? Maybe I could blame the room, my room, the introspective box.

He looked at me again.

“The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it.”

Then he looked past me and stood with glass in hand and took a last swallow before returning the glass to the table and walking toward the door. I glanced over my shoulder to see a man in the doorway wearing a soccer jersey and sweatpants. The Monk followed him out and I pushed away my table and followed them both.

Pure impulse allows the body to do the thinking. The Monk was aware of my action but said nothing. At the end of the second long hall the escort turned and saw me and he and the Monk exchanged remarks in what I took to be one of the Turkic languages of the region. Then the escort gestured for me to lift my arm waist-high and he took a small pointed instrument from a narrow pocket in his trousers and touched it to the disk on my wristband. I took this to mean that I could now gain admission to areas previously restricted.

We three entered an enclosure and as the access door slid shut behind us I became faintly aware of motion that may have been horizontal, a whispered glide at a speed that I could not estimate. Time seemed also beyond my ability to measure. There was a sense of temporal blur and it could have been seconds or possibly minutes before we were inserted into a vertical shaft, proceeding downward, so I imagined, into the numbered levels. The effect was a free-floating sensation, nearly out-of-body, and if the two others spoke I didn’t hear them.

A paneled door opened and we walked down a passageway into a large low shadowed space. It was almost librarylike, with rows of partitioned cubicles or stalls similar to carrels for private study. The Monk paused here, then reached back over his shoulder for the black hood, the sweatshirt hood, fitting it snugly over his head. I decided to interpret this as a ceremonial moment.

I followed him down several steps into the array of carrels and saw that they held patients rather than students, people seated or strapped upright, others lying face up and utterly still, eyes opened, eyes closed, and empty carrels as well, a fair number. This was the Monk’s workplace, the hospice, and I went where he went, along a network of aisles, with carrels on either side. I could make out the texture of the nearest wall, coarse-grained, in neutral colors, bands of black and gray swabbed on, intermixed, and the scant lighting and low ceiling and huddled men and women, the general dimensions of the area, and I could not find a category, something Stenmarklike to attach to the setting.

I looked at the patients in their chairs or beds, which were neither chairs nor beds. They were a kind of padded stool or soft bench and it wasn’t easy to tell which individuals were asleep, which were tranquilized, which under the influence of anesthesia at one or another level. At times, here and there, an individual looked completely and full-bloodedly aware.

The Monk stopped at the end of the aisle we were in and turned toward me just as I turned the other way to check on the presence of our escort, who was not there.

“We’re waiting,” he said.

“Yes, I understand.”

What did I understand? That I was feeling hemmed in, close to being trapped, and I asked the Monk about his prevailing frame of mind, the disposition he experienced when he was here.

“I don’t have a disposition.”

I asked him about the stalls, the carrels.

“I call them cribs.”

I asked him what we were waiting for.

“Here they come,” he said.

There were five individuals in dark smocks, two with shaved heads, moving along the aisles in our general direction. They were attendants or orderlies or paramedics or escorts. They stopped at a nearby carrel, two of them checking devices on the headboard, one of them speaking to the patient. Three of the individuals then led the departure, single-file, and the two bald orderlies pushed the wheeled carrel along behind them. I thought of the other patients and tried to imagine the tense anticipation they felt, their turns coming, as they watched this odd troop proceed along the aisle and into shadow.

When I turned toward the Monk he was already engaged with the person in a nearby carrel. It was a woman, seated, and he spoke to her quietly in what I took to be a rambling sort of Anglo-Russian, leaning close, his hands folded over hers. The words were an effort for him to summon but the woman’s head bobbed in response and I knew it was time for me to leave the man to his task.

The Monk in his old rutted cloak, his scapular.

I wandered for a while, expecting to be stopped. I thought I might talk to someone among the bodies-in-waiting. No sign of attendants giving massages or monitoring heart rates and no sound of therapeutic music. I began to think I’d blundered my way into a half-empty warehouse of bodies, barely an eye blinking or a finger twitching.

I realized I was shivering. It was only a slight tremble but it made me look around and then up and down, dumbly, seeing the same neutral tones in all directions, states of gray, modest and somber, in-between, the ceiling lower here, the lighting dimmer, and maybe it was a bomb shelter that the Stenmarks had in mind.

I walked along the aisles glancing at the few patients in this sector. I thought the word itself was all wrong. But what were they if they weren’t patients? Then I thought of the words that Ross had used in his description of the prevailing tone here. Reverence and awe. Is this what I was seeing? I saw eyes, hands, hair, skin tone, facial configuration. Races and nations. And not patients but subjects, submissive and unstirring. I stood before a sedated woman wearing eye shadow. I did not see peace, comfort and dignity, only a person under the authority of others.

I stopped alongside a robust man seated in his carrel. He wore a knit shirt and resembled a fellow on a golf course plunked down in his cart. I stood in front of him and asked how he was feeling.

He said, “Who are you?”

I told him I was a visitor eager to be educated. I said he looked pretty healthy. I said I was curious about the time he’d spent here and how much longer it would be before he was taken wherever they would take him.

He said, “Who are you?”

I said, “Don’t you feel the chill, the damp air, the tight space?”

He said, “I’m looking right through you.”

Then I saw the boy. I knew at once that it was the same kid I’d seen in a motorized wheelchair in one of the hallways, accompanied by two hollow-bodied escorts. Here, he was seated in a carrel, shiny and very still, positioned almost sculpturelike, contrapposto, head and shoulders twisted one way, hips and legs the other.

I didn’t know what to say. I said my name. I spoke to him softly, careful not to crowd him. I asked him how old he was and where he was from.

Head turned left, eyes swiveling up and to the right, where I was standing. He seemed to be thinking his way into my presence here, possibly even remembering our momentary encounter. Then he began to speak, or to produce what sounded like random noise, a series of indistinct sounds that were not mumbled or stuttered but only, somehow, broken. He was expressing his thoughts but I wasn’t able to detect a trace of any known language, or a nuance of meaning, and he showed no awareness that he could not be understood.

He was motionless except for his mouth and eyes and I moved to a point where he did not have to stretch his range of vision. I did not speak again but only stood and listened. And I did not try to guess his country of origin, or who had brought him here, or when he would be taken to the chamber.

The only thing I did was take his hand and wonder how much time remained to him. In his physical impairment, the nonalignment of upper and lower body, in this awful twistedness I found myself thinking of the new technologies that would one day be applied to his body and brain, allowing him to return to the world as a runner, a jumper, a public speaker.

How could I fail to consider the idea, even in my deep skepticism?

I don’t know how long I remained. When he stopped speaking, abruptly, and dropped into immediate sleep, I lifted my hand from his and went looking for the Monk.

I made my way through the sector and was relieved to see the Monk standing and gesturing above someone’s carrel and it occurred to me that I might give him a name, as I’d done with the speakers in the stone room. But a name, in his case a fictitious birth name, would be dead weight. He was the Monk and he was addressing the subjects, one by one, in their carrels, their cribs.

I thought of the boy. I realized it was the boy that I should have named. It would not have helped me interpret his speech, the sounds that bounced out of him, but I would have perceived something as I listened, a fragment of identity, a tiny shaping element to ease the questions that whirled about him.

I stood near the Monk and tried to listen to what he said to those he approached. At one point, in Spanish, he told an elderly woman that she was blessed to be lying here, in peace, and to be thinking about her mother, who had been spread-bodied, in pain, to give birth to her. I was able to understand this but not everything he said to everyone until he told a middle-aged man, in English, that the place where he would reside, in a preserved state, was very deep in the earth — deeper still than this cloistered hall. Possibly even safe from world’s end. The Monk spoke enthusiastically about world’s end.

The Monk in his sweatshirt hood, his cowl.

We walked together toward the passageway where we’d entered and I asked him several questions about the procedures here.

“This is the safehold, the waiting place. They’re waiting to die. Everyone here dies here,” he said. “There is no arrangement to import the dead in shipping containers, one by one, from various parts of the world, and then place them in the chamber. The dead do not sign up beforehand and then die and then get sent here with all the means of preservation intact. They die here. They come here to die. This is their operational role.”

This is all he had to say. When we entered the enclosure from which we’d be delivered to our level, there was no sign of our escort and the Monk showed no interest in waiting for him to appear. In our soft ascent I began to understand what this meant, that there was no one, at least for now, who might return the disk on my wristband to its restrictive function.

I said nothing, the Monk said nothing.

When I walked into my room I looked at whatever there was to see and touch and then I spoke the word for each thing. There was a bottle of hand sanitizer in the pygmy bathroom that hadn’t been there before and this messed up my immersion in the plain words for the familiar objects. I looked in the mirror over the sink and said my name aloud. Then I went looking for my father.

- 8 -

Ross wasn’t in the office he’d been using. Nothing was in the office. Desk and chairs gone, computer equipment, wall charts, standing tray with glasses gone, whiskey bottle gone. This was briefly unsettling but then not so strange. The time was near for Artis to be taken down and for Ross to be returning to the world he’d made.

I went to the suite expecting to see Artis in her chair, in robe and slippers, hands folded in lap. What would I say to her and how would she look, thinner, paler, and would she be unable to speak to me or to see me sitting there facing her?

But it was my father in the chair. I had to pause to assemble the information, Ross barefoot in a T-shirt and designer jeans. He didn’t look at me when I entered but simply noted a figure wandering into his line of vision, another presence in the room. I sat on the bench nearby, facing him as I’d faced her, only, now, feeling regret over the fact that I’d missed seeing her one last time.

“I thought you’d let me know.”

“It hasn’t happened.”

“Again. Hasn’t happened again. Where is she?”

“In the bedroom.”

“And it will happen tomorrow. Is that what you’re going to tell me.”

I got up and walked over to the bedroom door and opened it and there she was, in bed, under the covers, eyes opened. Her hands rested above the blanket and I approached slowly and took one hand and held it and then waited.

She said, “Jeffrey.”

“Yes, it’s him, it’s me.”

“Make up your mind,” she whispered.

I smiled and said that in her presence I tended to be him rather than me. But this is all there was. Her eyes closed and I waited for a time before releasing her hand and leaving the room.

Ross was walking wall to wall, hands in pockets, not appearing to be deep in thought so much as following the conditioning routine of an innovative fitness system.

“Yes, it will happen tomorrow,” he said casually.

“This is not some game that the doctors are playing with Artis.”

“Or that I’m playing with you.”

“Tomorrow.”

“You’ll be alerted early. Be here, this room, first thing, first light.”

He kept pacing and I sat watching.

“Is she really at the point where this has to be done now? I know she’s ready for it, eager to test the future. But she thinks, she speaks.”

“Tremors, spasms, migraines, lesions on the brain, nervous system in collapse.”

“Sense of humor intact.”

“There’s nothing left for her on this level. She believes that and so do I.”

I kept watching him. A new fitness system that stressed the viability of bare feet and hands-in-pockets. I asked him, simply, how many times he’d been here, to the complex, to look and to listen.

“Five times counting this visit. Twice before with Artis. The experience tightened my idea of myself. I let certain preoccupations fall away. I shrugged them off. I began to think more inwardly.”

“And Artis.”

“And Artis, the one who made me understand how the scope and intensity of such an enterprise can become part of someone’s daily life, minute to minute. Wherever I was, wherever I went, or just eating a meal, or trying to get to sleep, this was in my mind, in my skin. People like to say of unique occurrences, implausible situations — people say that no one could make this up. But someone made this up, all of it, and here we are.”

“Maybe I’m too limited in vision. Inadequate to the experience. All I seem to be doing is relating what I’ve seen and heard in these few days to what I already know. There’s a chain of reverse associations. The cryonic pod, the tube, the capsule, the toll booth, the phone booth, the ticket booth, the shower stall, the sentry box.”

He said, “You’re forgetting the outhouse.”

He took his hands out of his pockets and walked faster for a number of minutes and then stopped and stood against the far wall taking exaggerated breaths, loud and deep. He came back to the chair and spoke quietly now.

“I’ll tell you what’s unsettling.”

“I’m listening.”

“Men are supposed to die first. Shouldn’t the man die first? Don’t you have this kind of sixth sense? We feel it within us. We die, they live on. Isn’t this the natural order?”

“There’s another way to look at it,” I said. “The women die, leaving the men free to kill each other.”

He seemed to enjoy the remark.

“Obliging women. Deferring to the needs of their men. Ever-accommodating, self-sacrificing, loving and supporting. Madeline. That was her name, wasn’t it? Your mother?”

I waited, uneasily.

“Do you know that she stabbed me once? No, you don’t know this. She never told you. Why would she? She stabbed me in the shoulder with a steak knife. I was at the table eating the steak and she came up behind me and stabbed me in the shoulder. Not a four-star-restaurant steak knife with macho overtones but it hurt like hell anyway. It also made me bleed all over a new shirt. That’s all. Nothing more. I didn’t go to the emergency room, I went to the bathroom, ours, and doctored it pretty well. I didn’t call the cops either. Just a family disagreement although I don’t recall now what the disagreement was. Getting rid of a nice new shirt, that’s what I recall. Maybe she stabbed me because she hated the shirt. Maybe she was getting even with the shirt by stabbing me. These are things in a marriage. Nobody knows what’s in the marriage next door. It’s tough enough figuring out what’s in your own marriage. Where were you at the time? I don’t know, you were beddy-bye, or at summer camp, or walking the dog. Didn’t we have a dog for two weeks? Anyway I made it a point to throw away the steak knife because I didn’t think it would be a suitable utensil for us to use again even if we’d all gathered together and devised scrubbing methods that would render the thing blood-free and germ-free and memory-free. Even if we’d all agreed on the most fastidious methods. You and I and Madeline.”

There was something I hadn’t realized until now. Ross had shaved his beard.

“That night we slept in the same bed, as usual, she and I, and said little or nothing, also as usual.”

His tone of voice in this final remark was softer, somewhat haunted. I wanted to believe that he’d reached another tier of reminiscence, deeper and not so bleak and suggesting an element of regret and loss, and maybe a share of the blame.

He went back to the wall and began to pace, arms swinging faster and higher, breath coming in regulated bursts. I didn’t know what to do, or say, or where to go. These were his four walls, not mine, and I began to think of the mindless hours, time zones home, the steady murmur of return.

• • •

When I was fourteen I developed a limp. I didn’t care if it looked fake. I practiced at home, walking haltingly room to room, tried not to revert to normal stride after I rose from a chair or got out of bed. It was a limp set between quotation marks and I wasn’t sure whether it was intended to make me visible to others or just to myself.

I used to look at an old photograph of my mother, Madeline in a pleated dress, age fifteen, and I’d feel sad. But she wasn’t ill, she hadn’t died.

When she was at work I’d take a phone message for her and write down the information, making certain to tell her when she came home. Then I waited for her to return the call. Actively watched and waited. I reminded her once and then again that the lady from the dry cleaner had called and she looked at me with a certain expression, the one that said I am looking at you this way because there is no point wasting words when you can recognize the look and know that it says what should not need to be said. It made me nervous, not the look but the phone call waiting to be returned. Why isn’t she calling back. What is she doing that’s so important that she can’t call back. Time is passing, the sun is setting, the person is waiting, I am waiting.

I wanted to be bookish and failed. I wanted to steep myself in European literature. There I was in our modest garden apartment, in a nondescript part of Queens, steeping myself in European literature. The word steep was the whole point. Once I decided to steep myself, there was no need to read the work. I tried at times, made an effort but failed. I was technically unsteeped but also ever-intentioned, seeing myself in the chair reading a book even as I sat in the chair watching a movie on TV with French or German subtitles.

Later, living elsewhere, I visited Madeline fairly often and began to notice that when we ate a meal together she used paper napkins instead of cloth because, understandably, it was only her, just another solitary meal, or only her and me, which came to the same thing, except that after she set out a plate, fork and knife next to the paper napkin she avoided using the napkin, paper or not, keeping it unsmudged, using a facial tissue sticking out of a nearby box, Kleenex Ultra Soft, ultra doux, to wipe her mouth or fingers, or walking over to the roll of paper towels in the rack above the kitchen sink and tearing off a segment of a single towel and wiping her mouth on it and then folding the segment over the smudged part and bringing it to the table to use again, leaving the paper napkin untouched.

The limp was my faith, my version of flexing muscles or jumping hurdles. After the early days of its separateness, the limp began to feel natural. At school the kids mainly smirked or mimicked. A girl threw a snowball at me but I interpreted this as a playful gesture and responded accordingly, clutching my groin and wagging my tongue. The limp was something to cling to, a circular way to recognize myself, step by step, as the person who was doing this. Define person, I tell myself. Define human, define animal.

Madeline went to the theater occasionally with a man named Rick Linville, who was short, friendly and beefy. It was clear to me that there was no romance. Aisle seats, that’s what there was. My mother did not like to be hemmed in and required a seat on the aisle. She did not dress for the theater. She stayed plain, always, face, hands, hair, while I tried to find a name for her friend that was suited to his height, weight and personality. Rick Linville was a skinny name. She listened to my alternatives. First names first. Lester, Chester, Karl-Heinz. Toby, Moby. I was reading from a list I’d made at school. Morton, Norton, Rory, Roland. She looked at me and listened.

Names. Fake names. When I learned the truth about my father’s name, I was on holiday break from a large midwestern college where all the shirts, sweaters, jeans, shorts and skirts of all the students parading from one place to another tended to blend on sunny football Saturdays into a single swath of florid purple-and-gold as we filled the stadium and bounced in our seats and waited to be tracked by the TV cameras so we could rise and wave and yell and after twenty minutes of this I began to regard the plastic smile on my face as a form of self-inflicted wound.

I didn’t think of the untouched paper napkin as a marginal matter. This was the unseeable texture of a life except that I was seeing it. This is who she was. And as I came to know who she was, seeing it with each visit, my sense of attentiveness deepened. I tended to overinterpret what I saw, yes, but I saw it often and could not help thinking that these small moments were far more telling than they might appear to be, although I wasn’t sure what they told, the paper napkin, the utensils in the cabinet drawer, the way she removes the clean spoon from the drain basket and makes it a point not to place it in the cabinet drawer on top of all the other clean spoons of the same size but beneath the others in order to maintain a chronology, a proper sequence. Most-recently-used spoons, forks and knives at the bottom, next-to-be-used at the top. Utensils in the middle would work their way to the top as those at the top were used and then cleaned and dried and placed at the bottom.

I wanted to read Gombrowicz in Polish. I didn’t know a word of Polish. I only knew the writer’s name and kept repeating it silently and otherwise. Witold Gombrowicz. I wanted to read him in the original. The phrase appealed to me. Read him in the original. Madeline and I at dinner, there we are, some kind of muggy stew in cereal bowls, I’m fourteen or fifteen and keep repeating the name softly, Gombrowicz, Witold Gombrowicz, seeing it spelled out in my head and saying it, first name and last — how could you not love it — until my mother elevates her gaze from the bowl and delivers a steely whisper, Enough.

She was adept at knowing what time it was. No wristwatch, no clock in view. I might test her, without warning, when we were taking a walk, she and I, block by block, and she was always able to report the time within a three- or four-minute margin of variation. This was Madeline. She watched the traffic channel with accompanying weather reports. She stared at the newspaper but not necessarily at the news. She watched a bird land on the rail of the small balcony that jutted from the living room and she kept watching, motionless, the bird also watching whatever it was watching, still, sunlit, alert, prepared to flee. She hated the small orange day-glo price stickers on grocery cartons, medicine bottles and tubes of body lotion, a sticker on a peach, unforgivably, and I’d watch her dig her thumbnail under the sticker to remove it, get it out of her sight, but more than that, to adhere to a principle, and sometimes it took minutes before she was able to pry the thing loose, calmly, in fragments, and then roll it in her fingers and toss it in the trash can under the kitchen sink. She and the bird and the way I stood and watched, a sparrow, sometimes a goldfinch, knowing if I moved my hand the bird would fly off the rail and the fact of knowing this, the possibility of my intercession, made me wonder if my mother would even notice that the bird was gone, but all I did was stiffen my posture, invisibly, and wait for something to happen.

I’d take a phone message from her friend Rick Linville and tell her he’d called and then wait for her to call back. Your theater friend Rick, I’d say, and then recite his phone number, once, twice, three times, out of spite, watching her put the groceries away, methodically, like the forensic preservation of someone’s war-torn remains.

She cooked sparse meals for us and drank wine rarely — and never, to my knowledge, hard liquor. Sometimes she let me prepare a meal while she issued casual instructions from the kitchen table, where she sat doing work she’d brought home from the office. These were the simple timelines that shaped the day and deepened her presence. I wanted to believe that she was my mother far more compellingly than my father was my father. But he was gone so there was no point matching them up.

She wanted the paper napkin untouched. She was substituting paper for cloth and then judging the paper to be indistinguishable from cloth. I told myself there would eventually be a lineage, a scheme of direct descent — cloth napkins, paper napkins, paper towels, facial tissues, sneeze tissues, toilet tissues, then down into the garbage for scraps of reusable plastic packaging minus the day-glo price stickers, which she’d already removed and crumpled.

There was another man whose name she would not tell me. She saw him on Fridays only, twice a month maybe, or only once, and never in my presence, and I imagined a married man, a wanted man, a man with a past, a foreigner in a belted raincoat with straps on the shoulders. This was a cover-up for the uneasiness I felt. I stopped asking questions about the man and then the Fridays ended and I felt better and started asking questions again. I asked whether he wore a belted raincoat with straps on the shoulders. It’s called a trench coat, she said, and there was something final in her voice so I decided to terminate the man in the crash of a small plane off the coast of Sri Lanka, formerly Ceylon, body unrecovered.

Certain words seemed to be located in the air ahead of me, within arm’s reach. Bessarabian, penetralia, pellucid, falafel. I saw myself in these words. I saw myself in the limp, in the way I refined and nurtured it. But I killed the limp whenever my father showed up to take me to the Museum of Natural History. This was the estranged husbands’ native terrain and there we were, fathers and sons, wandering among the dinosaurs and the bones of human predecessors.

She gave me a wristwatch and on my way home from school I kept checking the minute hand, regarding it as a geographical marker, a sort of circumnavigation device indicating certain places I might be approaching somewhere in the northern or southern hemisphere depending on where the minute hand was when I started walking, possibly Cape Town to Tierra del Fuego to Easter Island and then maybe to Tonga. I wasn’t sure whether Tonga was on the semicircular route but the name of the place qualified it for inclusion, along with the name Captain Cook, who sighted Tonga or visited Tonga or sailed back to Britain with a Tongan on board.

When the marriage died, my mother began working full-time. Same office, same boss, a lawyer who specialized in real estate. She’d studied Portuguese in her two years of college and this was useful because a number of the firm’s clients were Brazilians interested in buying apartments in Manhattan, often for investment purposes. Eventually she began to handle the details of transactions among the seller’s attorney, the mortgage firm and the managing agent. People buying, selling, investing. Father, mother, money.

I understood years later that the strands of attachment could be put into words. My mother was the loving source, the reliable presence, a firm balance between me and my little felonies of self-perception. She did not press me to be more social or to spend more time on homework. She did not forbid me to watch the sex channel. She said that it was time for me to resume a normal stride. She said that the limp is a heartless perversion of true infirmity. She told me that the pale crescent at the base of the fingernail is called the lunula, the loon-ya-la. She told me that the indentation in skin between the nose and the upper lip is called the philtrum. In the ancient Chinese art of face-reading, the philtrum represents such-and-such. She could not remember exactly what.

I decided that the man she saw on Fridays was probably Brazilian. He was more interesting to me than Rick Linville, who had a name and a shape, but there was always the implicit subject of how the Friday evenings ended, what they said and did together, in English and Portuguese, which I needed to keep nameless and shapeless, and then there was her silence concerning the man himself, and maybe it wasn’t even a man. That’s the other thing I found myself confronting. Maybe it wasn’t even a man. Things that come to mind, out of nowhere or everywhere, who knows, who cares, so what. I took a walk around the corner and watched the senior citizens play tennis on the asphalt court.

Then came the day and year when I glanced at a magazine on a newsstand in an airport somewhere and there was Ross Lockhart on the cover of Newsweek with two other godheads of world finance. He wore a pinstriped suit and restyled hair and I called Madeline so I could refer to his serial killer’s sideburns. Her neighbor picked up the phone, the woman with the metal cane, the quad cane, and she told me that my mother had suffered a stroke and that I must come home at once.

In memory the actors are locked in position, unlifelike. Me in a chair with a book or magazine, my mother watching TV without the sound.

Ordinary moments make the life. This is what she knew to be trustworthy and this is what I learned, eventually, from those years we spent together. No leaps or falls. I inhale the little drizzly details of the past and know who I am. What I failed to know before is clearer now, filtered up through time, an experience belonging to no one else, not remotely, no one, anyone, ever. I watch her use the roller to remove lint from her cloth coat. Define coat, I tell myself. Define time, define space.

• • •

“You shaved your beard. Took me a few minutes to notice. I was just getting adjusted to the beard.”

“There are things I’ve been thinking about.”

“Okay.”

“Things I’ve been struggling with for some time,” he said. “Then it became clear. I understood that there’s something I have to do. It’s the only answer.”

“Okay.”

Ross in the armchair, Jeff on the cushioned bench, two tense men in conversation, and Artis in the bedroom waiting to die.

He said, “I’m going with her.”

Did I know what he meant, instantly, reading it in his face, and then did I pretend to be confused?

“You’re going with her.”

It was necessary for me to repeat those words. Going with her. At some level I understood that my role was to think and speak along conventional lines.

“You mean being with her when they take her down and do what they have to do. You want to monitor the proceedings.”

“Going with her, joining her, sharing it, side by side.”

There was a long wait for one of us to resume speaking. The simple fact of these words, the immense force gathering behind them, turning me inside out.

“I know what you’re saying. But the questions I’m supposed to ask don’t seem to be coming.”

“I’ve been thinking about this for some time.”

“You already said that.”

“I don’t want to lead the life I’ll be leading without her.”

“Isn’t this what everyone feels when someone close, someone intimately attached, is about to die?”

“I can only be the man I am.”

That was nice, with a tinge of helplessness.

Another long silence, Ross looking into space. He is going with her. It denied everything he’d ever said and done. It made a comic strip of his life, or of mine. Was this a bid for redemption, some kind of spiritual deliverance after all the acquisitions, all the wealth he’d managed for others and accumulated for himself, the master market strategist, owner of art collections and island retreats and super-midsize jets. Or was he suffering a brief spell of madness with long-range consequences?

What else?

Could it simply be love? All those unconditional words. Had he earned them, man with a fake name, half husband, missing father. I told myself to stop the rant, the spinning inner grievance. A man of his resources choosing to be a frozen specimen in a capsule in a storage facility twenty years before his natural time.

“Aren’t you the man who lectured me on the shortness of the human life span? Our lives measured in seconds. And now you cut it even shorter, by choice.”

“I’m ending one version of my life to enter another and far more permanent version.”

“In the current version, you have regular health checks, I assume. Of course you do. And what do the doctors say? Is there one doctor, a little gimpy man with bad breath? Did he tell you there’s something potentially serious going on in your body?”

He waved away the idea.

“He sent you for tests, then more tests. Lungs, brain, pancreas.”

He looked at me and said, “One dies, the other has to die. It happens, doesn’t it?”

“You’re a healthy man.”

“Yes.”

“And you’re going with her.”

“Yes.”

I wasn’t finished looking for low motives.

“Tell me this. Have you committed crimes?”

“Crimes.”

“Enormous frauds. Doesn’t this happen all the time in your line of work? Investors get swindled. What else? Enormous sums of money get transferred illegally. What else? I don’t know. But these are reasons, right, for a man to disappear.”

“Stop babbling like a fucking idiot.”

“Stop babbling, okay. But one more idiotic question. Aren’t you supposed to die before they do the freezing?”

“There’s a special unit. Zero K. It’s predicated on the subject’s willingness to make a certain kind of transition to the next level.”

“In other words they help you die. But in this case, your case, the individual is nowhere near the end.”

“One dies, the other has to die.”

Again, silence.

“I’m having a completely unreal experience. I’m looking at you and trying to understand that you’re my father. Is that right? The man I’m looking at is my father.”

“This is unreal to you.”

“The man who is telling me these things is my father. Is that right? And he says he is going with her. ‘I am going with her.’ Is that right?”

“Your father, yes. And you’re my son.”

“No, no. I’m not ready for that. You’re getting ahead of me. I’m doing my best to recognize the fact that you’re my father. I’m not ready to be your son.”

“Maybe you ought to think about it.”

“Give me time. In time I may be able to think about it.”

I had a sense of being outside myself, aware of what I was saying but not saying it so much as simply hearing it.

“Do yourself a favor,” he said. “Listen to what I have to say.”

“I think you’ve been brainwashed. You’re a victim of these surroundings. You’re a member of a cult. Don’t you see it? Simple old-fashioned fanaticism. One question. Where is the charismatic leader?”

“I’ve made provisions for you.”

“Do you understand how this reduces me?”

“The future will be secure. Your choice to accept or reject. You’ll leave here tomorrow knowing this. A car will pick you up at noon. The flight arrangements are made.”

“I’m shamed by this, totally diminished.”

“You’ll be met along the way by a colleague of mine who will provide all the details, all the documents you may need, a secure file, to help you decide what it is you want to do from this day on.”

“My choice.”

“Accept, reject.”

I tried to laugh.

“Is there a time limit?”

“All the time you need. Weeks, months, years.”

He was still looking at me. This is the man who was walking barefoot, wall to wall, arms swinging, ten minutes ago. It made sense now. The prisoner pacing his cell, thinking last thoughts, having second thoughts, wondering if there’s a toilet in the special unit.

“And Artis has known this for how long?”

“When I knew it, she knew it. Once I was certain, I told her.”

“And she said what?”

“Try to understand that she and I share a life. The decision I made only deepens the bond. She said nothing. She simply looked at me in a way I can’t begin to describe. We want to be together.”

I had nothing to say to this. Other subjects eluded me as well except for one detail.

“Those in authority here. They will carry out your wishes.”

“We don’t need to get into that.”

“They will do this for you. Because it’s you. Simple injection, serious criminal act.”

“Let it go,” he said.

“And in return, what? You’ve framed wills and trusts and testaments granting them certain resources and holdings well beyond what you’ve already given them.”

“Finished?”

“Is it outright murder? Is it a form of assisted suicide that’s horribly premature? Or is it a metaphysical crime that needs to be analyzed by philosophers?”

He said, “Enough.”

“Die a while, then live forever.”

I didn’t know what else to say, what to do, where to go. Three, four, five days, however long I’d been here — time compressed, time drawn tight, overlapping time, dayless, nightless, many doors, no windows. I understood of course that this place was located at the far margins of plausibility. He’d said so himself. No one could make this up, he’d said. This was the point, their point, in three dimensions. A literal landmark of implausibility.

“I need a window to look out of. I need to know there’s something out there, out beyond these doors and walls.”

“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.

- 9 -

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.

“We understand that the idea of life extension will generate methods that attempt to improve upon the freezing of human bodies. To re-engineer the aging process, to reverse the biochemistry of progressive diseases. We fully expect to be in the forefront of any genuine innovation. Our tech centers in Europe are examining strategies for change. Ideas adaptable to our format. We’re getting ahead of ourselves. This is where we want to be.”

Did such a man have a family? Did he brush his teeth, see a dentist when he had a toothache? Could I even try to imagine his life? Someone else’s life. Not even a minute. Even a minute is unimaginable. Physical, mental, spiritual. Not even the merest second. Too much is pledged into his compact frame.

I told myself to calm down.

He said, “How fragile we are. Isn’t it true? Everyone everywhere on this earth.”

I listened to him speak about the hundreds of millions of people into the future billions who are struggling to find something to eat not once or twice a day but all day every day. He spoke in detail about food systems, weather systems, the loss of forests, the spread of drought, the massive die-offs of birds and ocean life, the levels of carbon dioxide, the lack of drinking water, the waves of virus that envelop broad geographies.

These elements of planetary woe were a natural component of the thinking here but there was no trace of rote recitation. He knew about these matters, he’d studied them, witnessed some aspects of them, dreamt about them. And he spoke in a subdued tone that carried an eloquence I could not help admiring.

Then there was biological warfare with its variant forms of mass extinction. Toxins, agents, replicating entities. And the refugees everywhere, victims of war in great numbers, living in makeshift shelters, unable to return to their crushed cities and towns, dying at sea when their rescue vessels capsize.

He was looking at me, probing for something.

“Don’t you see and feel these things more acutely than you used to? The perils and warnings? Something gathering, no matter how safe you may feel in your wearable technology. All the voice commands and hyper-connections that allow you to become disembodied.”

I told him that what was gathering could well be a kind of psychological pandemic. The fearful perception that tends toward wishfulness. Something people want and need from time to time, purely atmospheric.

I liked that. Purely atmospheric.

He looked at me even more searchingly now, either considering the remark too witless to address or interpreting what I said as a gesture toward social convention, obligatory under the circumstances.

“Atmospheric, yes. One minute, calm prevails. Then there’s a light in the sky and a sonic boom and a shock wave — and a Russian city enters a compressed reality that would be mystifying if it weren’t so abruptly real. This is nature’s thrust, its command over our efforts, our foresight, every ingenuity we can summon to protect ourselves. The meteor. Chelyabinsk.”

He smiled at me.

“Say it. Go ahead. Chelyabinsk,” he said. “Not so very far from here. Quite near in fact, if anything can be called near in this part of the world. People rush from room to room collecting valuable documents. They prepare to go somewhere that’s safe. They put their cats and dogs in carriers.”

He stopped and thought.

“We reverse the text here, we read the news backwards. From death to life,” he said. “Our devices enter the body dynamically and become the refurbished parts and pathways we need in order to live again.”

“Is the desert where miracles happen? Are we here to repeat the ancient pieties and superstitions?”

It amused him to hear that I was not inclined to yield.

“Such a quaint response to ideas that attempt to confront a decimated future. Try to understand. This is all happening in the future. This future, this instant. If you can’t absorb this idea, best go home now.”

I wondered whether Ross had asked this man to speak to me, enlighten me, expertly, reassuringly. Was I interested in what he had to say? I found myself thinking of the dire night ahead and the morning to come.

“We share a feeling here, a perception. We think of ourselves as transrational. The location itself, the structure itself, the science that bends all previous belief. The testing of human viability.”

He paused here to remove a handkerchief from his trouser pocket and blow his nose, unconditionally, with follow-up swipes and blots, and this made me feel better. Real life, body functions. I waited for him to finish what he was saying.

“Those of us who are here don’t belong anywhere else. We’ve fallen out of history. We’ve abandoned who we were and where we were in order to be here.”

He inspected the handkerchief and folded it carefully. It took him a moment to ease the small square into his pocket.

“And where is here?” he said. “Untapped reserves of rare minerals and the rolling thunder of oil money and repressive states and human rights violations and bribable officials. Minimal contact. Detachment. Disinfestation.”

I wanted to interpret the marks imprinted on his slippers. These might be a clue to the man’s cultural lineage. I got nowhere with this, feeling the breeze begin to stiffen and hearing the voice once more.

“The site is fixed. We are not in a zone susceptible to earthquakes or to minor swarms but there are seismic countermeasures in every detail of the structure, with every conceivable safeguard against systems failure. Artis will be safe, and Ross if he chooses to accompany her. The site is fixed, we are fixed.”

Ben-Ezra. I needed to think about his real name, his birth name. I needed a form of self-defense, a way to creep insidiously into his life. I’d want to give him a cane to complete the picture, a walking stick, rock maple, man on the bench, both hands resting on the curved handle, shaft perpendicular to the ground, blunt end between his feet.

“Those who eventually emerge from the capsules will be ahistorical humans. They will be free of the flatlines of the past, the attenuated minute and hour.”

“And they will speak a new language, according to Ross.”

“A language isolate, beyond all affiliation with other languages,” he said. “To be taught to some, implanted in others, those already in cryopreservation.”

A system that will offer new meanings, entire new levels of perception.

It will expand our reality, deepen the reach of our intellect.

It will remake us, he said.

We will know ourselves as never before, blood, brain and skin.

We will approximate the logic and beauty of pure mathematics in everyday speech.

No similes, metaphors, analogies.

A language that will not shrink from whatever forms of objective truth we have never before experienced.

He talked, I listened, the subject beginning to approach new magnitudes.

The universe, what it was, what it is, where it is going.

The expanding, accelerating, infinitely evolving universe, so filled with life, with worlds upon never-ending worlds, he said.

The universe, the multiverse, so many cosmic infinities that the idea of repeatability becomes unavoidable.

The idea of two individuals sitting on a bench in a desert garden having the conversation we are having, you and I, word for word, except that they are different individuals, in a different garden, millions of light-years from here — this is an inescapable fact.

Was this the case of an old man getting carried away or was it the younger man’s attempt to resist slick ironies that mattered?

Either way I began to think of him as a crackpot sage.

“It’s only human to want to know more, and then more, and then more,” I said. “But it’s also true that what we don’t know is what makes us human. And there’s no end to not knowing.”

“Go on.”

“And no end to not living forever.”

“Go on,” he said.

“If someone or something has no beginning, then I can believe that he, she or it has no end. But if you’re born or hatched or sprouted, then your days are already numbered.”

He thought for a moment.

“ ‘It is the heaviest stone that melancholy can throw at a man to tell him that he is at the end of his nature, or that there is no further state to come.’ ”

I waited.

“Seventeenth century,” he said. “Sir Thomas Browne.”

I waited some more. But that was all. Seventeenth century. He left it up to me to reckon our progress since then.

True wind blowing now, garden unstirred, the eerie stillness of flowers, grass and leaves that resist the perceptible rush of air. But the scene is not blandly static. There is tone and color, shimmer everywhere, sun beginning to sink, trees alight in the span of waning day.

“You sit alone in a quiet room at home and you listen carefully. What is it you hear? Not traffic in the street, not voices or rain or someone’s radio,” he said. “You hear something but what? It’s not room tone or ambient sound. It’s something that may change as your listening deepens, second after second, and the sound is growing louder now — not louder but somehow wider, sustaining itself, encircling itself. What is it? The mind, the life itself, your life? Or is it the world, not the material mass, land and sea, but what inhabits the world, the flood of human existence. The world hum. Do you hear it, yourself, ever?”

I could not invent a name for him. I could not imagine him as a younger man. He was born old. He has lived his life on this bench. He is a permanent part of the bench, Ben-Ezra, slippers, skullcap, long spidery fingers, a body at rest in a spun-glass garden.

• • •

I left him there and began to wander out past the flowerbeds, on a dirt path now, pushing through a gated part of the garden wall into deeper stands of counterfeit trees. Then something stopped me cold, a figure standing in scant light, nearly inseparable from the trees, face and body scorched brown, arms crossed on chest, fists clenched, and even when I knew that I was staring at a mannequin, I remained in place, rooted as the figure itself.

It scared me, a thing without features, naked, sexless, no longer a dummy dress-form but a sentinel, posing forbiddingly. This was different from the mannequin I’d seen in an empty hallway. There was a tension in this encounter and I walked on warily and saw several others, half hidden in the trees. I didn’t look at them so much as watch them, scrutinize them nervously. Their stillness seemed willed. They stood with arms crossed or arms at sides or arms thrust forward, one of them armless, one of them headless, strong dumbstruck objects that belonged here, painted in dark washes.

In a small clearing there was a structure jutting upward at a slant from ground level, a rooflike projection above an entranceway. I walked down eight or nine steps into a vaulted interior, a crypt, dimly lit, dank, all cracked gray stone, with recesses in the walls where bodies were placed, half bodies, mannequins as preserved corpses, head to waist in shabby hooded garments, each to its niche.

I stood there and tried to absorb what I was seeing. I searched for the word. There was a word I wanted, not crypt or grotto, and in the meantime all I could do was look intently and try to accumulate the details. These mannequins had features, all worn down, eroded, eyes, nose, mouth, ruined faces every one, ash gray, and shriveled hands, barely intact. There were roughly twenty such figures and a few that were full-bodied, standing, in old gray shredded robes, heads bowed. I walked along, bodies on both sides of me, and the sight was overwhelming, and the place itself, the word itself — the word was catacomb.

These figures, these desert saints, mummified, desiccated in their underground burial chamber, the claustrophobic power of the scene, the faint stink of rot. I was breathless for a moment. Could I avoid interpreting the figures as an ancestral version of the upright men and women in their cryonic capsules, actual humans on the verge of immortality? I didn’t want interpretation. I wanted to see and feel what was here, even if I was unequal to the experience as it folded over me.

How could it be that mannequins had this effect, deeper even than the sight of embalmed human beings centuries old in a church or monastery? I’d never been to such a site, to a charnel house in Italy or France, but I could not imagine a stronger response. What was I seeing in this hole in the ground? Not sculpted marble or a delicate strip of pinewood hand-carved with a chisel and highlighted in gold leaf. These were pieces of plastic, synthetic compounds draped in dead men’s hoods and robes, and they brought a faint yearning to the scene, the illusion of humanoid aspiration. But I was interpreting again, wasn’t I? Feeling hungry and weak and so scraped raw by the day’s events that I expected statues to speak.

Farther along, beyond the two rows of bodies, there was a floating white light and I needed to put a hand to my face when I drew near, deflecting the glare. Here were figures submerged in a pit, mannequins in convoluted mass, naked, arms jutting, heads horribly twisted, bare skulls, an entanglement of tumbled forms with jointed limbs and bodies, neutered humans, men and women stripped of identity, faces blank except for one unpigmented figure, albino, staring at me, pink eyes flashing.

• • •

In the food unit I put my face nearly into the plate and chewed the last few bites of dinner. All the food units throughout the complex, one person in each, stacked in my mind. I went to my room, turned on the light and sat in the chair thinking. It felt as though I’d done this a thousand times, same room every time, same person in the chair. I found myself listening. I tried to empty my mind and simply listen. I wanted to hear what Ben-Ezra had described, the oceanic sound of people living and thinking and talking, billions, everywhere, waiting for trains, marching to war, licking food off their fingers. Or simply being who they are.

The world hum.

- 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.

“The veer,” I said again.

I was always repeating things here, I was verifying, trying to establish secure placement. Artis was down there somewhere, at veer’s end, counting drops of water on a shower curtain.

• • •

I stood watching through a narrow glass panel, eye-high. This was my role here, to watch whatever they put in front of me. The team in Zero K was preparing Artis for cryopreservation, doctors and others dressed variously, some in motion, others scanning monitors, adjusting equipment.

Artis was somewhere in their midst, sheeted, on a table. She was visible only momentarily, in fragments, mid-body, lower legs, never a clear view of the face. The team worked over and around her. I didn’t know whether to regard the physical form they were working on as “the body.” Maybe she was still alive. Maybe this was the moment, the second, in which she was being chemically induced to expire.

The other thing I didn’t know was what constituted the end. When does the person become the body? There were levels of surrender, I thought. The body withdraws from one function and then possibly another, or possibly not — heart, nervous system, brain, different parts of the brain down into the mechanism of individual cells. It occurred to me that there was more than one official definition, none characterized by unanimous assent. They made it up as the occasion required. Doctors, lawyers, theologians, philosophers, professors of ethics, judges and juries.

It also occurred to me that my mind was wandering.

Think of Ross on the table if he’d so decided, healthy man in systemic collapse. He was in the anteroom, waiting out the time. I was the sole willing witness, and now her face, a touching glimpse, Artis, team members swinging past in their caps, scrubs, masks, surgical gowns, tunic tops, lab coats.

Then the viewing slot went blank.

• • •

A guide with dreadlocks led us to a site, saying nothing, letting us absorb what we were seeing.

Ross asked a question now and then. He had combed his hair, knotted his tie and adjusted the trim of his suit jacket. The voice was not quite his but he was talking, trying to place himself in the midst of things.

We stood in the aisle above a small sloped gallery and looked at three human figures in a plain space so deftly lit that the outer margins dissolved in shadow. These were individuals in clear casings, in body pods, and they were naked, one man, two women, shaved heads, all three.

Tableau vivant, I thought, except that the actors were dead and their costumes were super-insulated plastic tubes.

The guide told us that these people were among those who had chosen to be taken early. Perhaps they had five or ten years remaining, or twenty, or more. They’d been stripped of their essential organs, which were being preserved separately, brains included, in insulated vessels called organ pods.

“They seem at peace,” Ross said.

The bodies were not formally posed. Eyes were open in glazed wonder, arms loosely at sides, knees naturally knobbed and furrowed, no hair anywhere.

“They’re just standing and waiting,” he said. “All the time in the world.”

He was thinking of Artis, what else, wondering what she was feeling, if anything, and which stage she had reached in the body-cooling process.

Vitrification, cryopreservation, nanotechnology.

Cherish the language, I thought. Let the language reflect the search for ever more obscure methods, down into subatomic levels.

The guide spoke with an accent I took to be Russian. She wore sleek jeans and a long fringed shirt and I tried to convince myself that she was posed in a manner identical to that of the bodies. This was not true but it took me a while to abandon the idea.

Ross kept looking. These were lives in abeyance. Or the empty framework of lives beyond retrieval. And the man himself, my father. I wondered how his change-of-mind would affect his honorary status here, the thrust of executive command. I knew what I was feeling, a sympathy bled white by disappointment. The man had backed down.

He spoke to the guide without taking his eyes off the figures standing before us.

“What do you call them?”

“We are told to call them heralds.”

“Makes sense,” he said.

“Showing the way, making the path.”

“Being early, being first,” he said.

“They do not wait.”

“They do it before they have to do it.”

“Heralds,” she said.

“They look serene.”

Thinking of Artis, seeing her, determined to go with her. But he had backed down. The idea of joining her had been driven by some deranged tide of love. But once sworn to the act, he needed to be true to it. The full swing of life and career, man at the center of money’s magnetic field. Okay, I’m making too much of his reputation and material worth. But this is a component of the outsized life. Too much engenders too much.

He took a seat in the last row and after a while I joined him. Then I looked at the bodies.

There was the question of who they were, everything that had gone before, the inexpressibly dense experience of a man or woman alive on the earth. Here, they were laboratory life-forms shaved naked in pods and drawn together as one unit whatever the means of canning and curing. And they were located in a space that was anonymous, no where or when, a tactic that matched every aspect of my experience here.

The guide explained the meaning of the term Zero K. This was rote narration, with plotted stops and restarts, and it concerned a unit of temperature called absolute zero, which is minus two hundred and seventy-three point one five degrees celsius. A physicist named Kelvin was mentioned, he was the K in the term. The most interesting thing the guide had to say was the fact that the temperature employed in cryostorage does not actually approach zero K.

The term, then, was pure drama, another stray trace of the Stenmark twins.

“We’ll leave together. We’ll pack and leave,” Ross said.

“I’ve been packed since I arrived.”

“Good.”

“There’s nothing to pack.”

“Good. We’ll leave together,” he said again.

These were the commonplace words, the sounds he needed to make in order to restore a sense of function. I had a feeling there was more to come, possibly not so reassuring to either one of us.

“I told myself finally, dead of night, that I had a responsibility to keep living. Suffer the loss, live and suffer and hope it gets easier — not easier but so deeply embedded, the loss, the absence, that I can carry it. To go with her would have been the wrong kind of surrender. I had no right. It was an abuse of privilege. What did you say to me when we argued?”

“I don’t know.”

“You said if I went with her, it would reduce you. My over-dominance, the thing you can’t escape. Even loving her too much, even choosing to die too soon. It would have been the kind of surrender in which I gain control instead of relinquishing it.”

I studied body color. Woman, man, woman. The range was narrow but is it possible to be precise about skin color in any situation? Yellow brown black white, all wrong except as convenient labels. Did I want to resort to nuances of tone, to amber, umber, lunar? When I was fourteen I would have died trying.

“In the end what did I do? I tried to face it,” he said. “And this meant I had to tell her. I sat next to the bed in the dim room. Did she understand what I was saying? Did she hear me at all? I wasn’t sure. Did she forgive me? I kept asking her to forgive me. Then I rambled, on and on. Did I need a response? Did I fear a response? Forgive me. Wait for me. I will join you soon. On and on, whispering. I thought maybe she can hear me if I whisper.”

“She may have been alive but she was beyond any kind of contact.”

“Then I just sat there until they came to take her down.”

Some sag here and there, completely normal, in chest, breasts and bellies. Look long enough and even the shaved heads of the women begin to seem consistent with the primal chill of nature. This was a function of the pods, I thought, the detailed rigor of scientific method, humans stripped of adornment, spliced back to fetushood.

The guide said there was something else we might find interesting to look at.

How many days now, how many interesting things to look at? The screens, the catacombs, the skull on the wall in the stone room. They were drenching me in last things. I thought about these two words. This is eschatology, isn’t it? Not just the damped echo of a life that slides away but words with all-encompassing impact, beyond appeals to reason. Last Things. I told myself to stop.

Ross lowered his head, closed his eyes.

Thinking of Artis. I imagined him at home, sitting in his study with a whiskey in hand, hearing himself breathe. The time he’d visited her on a dig somewhere at desert’s edge outside a Bedouin village. I try to see what he sees but can only imagine her in another desert, this one, in whole-body suspension, eyes closed, head shaved, a sliver of mind still intact. He has to believe this — memories ingrained in brain tissue.

Departure time soon. Armored car waiting, smoked windows, driver with sidearm. An overtone of protection that makes me feel small, weak and threatened.

But was it simply love that made him want to join her? Maybe I preferred to think that he was driven by a dark yearning, a need to be deprived of what he is and what he possesses, stripped of everything, hollowed out, organs stored, body propped alongside others in a colony of pods. It is the same undercurrent of self-repudiation that made him change his name, only deeper and stronger. A dark yearning, I liked that. But what was my point? Why did I want to imagine such a thing about my father? Because this place is drenching me in bad blood. And because this is the song-and-dance version of what happens to self-made men. They unmake themselves.

When he joins her, in three years or thirteen, will nanotechnologists steer their ages downward? And on being revived, whenever that is, the first moment of their earthly afterlife, will Artis be twenty-five years old, twenty-seven, Ross thirty or thirty-one? Think of the soulful reunion. Let’s have a baby. And where will I be, how old and begrudging and piss-stained, how spooked to be embracing my spirited young father and newborn half-brother, who has my withered finger gripped in his tiny trembling hand.

Nanobots — a child’s word.

I kept looking straight ahead, looking and thinking. The fact that these individuals, these heralds, had chosen to be rendered dead well before their time. The fact that their bodies had been emptied of indispensable organs. The fact of containment, alignment, bodies set in assigned positions. Woman man woman. It occurred to me that these were humans as mannequins. I allowed myself to think of them as brainless objects playing out a reversal of the spectacle I’d encountered earlier — the mannequins hunched in their burial chamber, in hoods and robes. And now this freeze-frame of naked humans in pods.

The guide told us again that there was another area of possible interest.

I wanted to see beauty in these stilled figures, an imposing design not of clockwork bodies but of the simple human structure and its extensions, inward and out, each individual implacably unique in touch, taste and spirit. There they stand, not trying to tell us something but suggesting nonetheless the mingled astonishments of our lives, here, on earth.

Instead I wondered if I was looking at the controlled future, men and women being subordinated, willingly or not, to some form of centralized command. Mannequined lives. Was this a facile idea? I thought about local matters, the disk on my wristband that tells them, in theory, where I am at all times. I thought about my room, small and tight but embodying an odd totalness. Other things here, the halls, the veers, the fabricated garden, the food units, the unidentifiable food, or when does utilitarian become totalitarian.

Was there a hollowness in these notions? Maybe they were nothing more than an indication of my eagerness to get home. Do I remember where I live? Do I still have a job? Can I still bum a cigarette from a girlfriend after a movie?

The guide had told us about brains preserved in insulated vessels. Now she added that heads, entire heads with brains intact, were sometimes removed from the bodies and stored separately. One day in decades to come the head will be grafted to a healthy nanobody.

And would all the revivified lives be identical, trimmed tight by the process itself? Die a human, be reborn an isometric drone.

I nudged my father and said quietly, “Do they ever get a hard-on, dead men in pods? Jolted by some malfunction, a shift in temperature levels that creates a kind of zing running through the body and causing their dicks to spring up, all the men at once, in all the pods.”

“Ask the guide,” he said.

I gave him a backhand tap on the arm and we got up and followed the woman down a corridor that tapered to the degree that we had to proceed, finally, single-file. Sound began to pale, our footsteps fading, the brush-touch of our bodies against the confining walls.

There is one thing more, something interesting, the guide had said.

We stood in the entranceway of a large white room. The walls did not have the same rough surface I’d seen elsewhere. This was hard smooth rock and Ross put his hand to the wall and said that it was fine-grained white marble. He knew this, I did not. The room was stone cold and, at first, in every direction, it was all the same, nothing but walls, floor and ceiling. I spread my arms in a dumb dramatic gesture to render the size of the grand space but restrained myself from trying to estimate length, width and height.

I moved forward, briefly, and Ross followed. I looked past him to the guide, waiting for her to say something, give us some clue to the nature of the site. Was it a site or just an idea for a site? My father and I studied the room together. I tried to imagine what I was seeing even as I saw it. What made the experience so elusive? A large room, a couple of men standing and looking. A woman at the entrance, dead still. An art gallery, I thought, with nothing in it. The gallery is the art, the space itself, the walls and floor. Or an enormous marble tomb, a mass gravesite emptied of bodies or waiting for bodies. No ornamental cornice or frieze, just flat walls of shiny white marble.

I looked at Ross, who was staring past me toward a far corner of the room. It took me a moment, everything here took me a moment. Then I saw what he saw, a figure seated on the floor near the junction of the two walls. Small human figure, motionless, seeping gradually into my level of awareness. I had to tell myself that I was not somewhere else trying to visualize what I was actually seeing, here and now, in solid form.

My father walked in that direction, hesitantly, and I followed, walking and pausing. The seated figure was a girl, barefoot, legs crossed. She wore loose white pants and a white knee-length blouse. One arm was raised and bent toward the body at neck level. The other arm was waist-high at a matching angle.

We stopped walking, Ross and I. We were still some distance from the figure but it seemed an intrusion, a violation, to move any closer. Hair trimmed in a mannish cut, head bowed slightly, feet positioned with bottoms turned upward.

Was I sure that it was not a boy?

Her eyes were closed. I knew that her eyes were closed even if this was not evident from where we stood. Her youth was not necessarily evident but I felt free to believe that she was young. She had to be young. And she had no nationality. She had to be nationless.

A chill white silence everywhere in the room. Did I fold my arms across my chest to contain my response to the beauty of the scene, or was I just cold?

We backed away then, slightly, simultaneously. Even if I knew the reason for her presence and her pose, it would defy all meaning. Meaning was exhausted in the figure itself, the sight itself.

“Artis would know how to interpret this,” Ross said.

“And I would ask her whether it’s a boy or girl.”

“And she would say what’s the difference.”

The fact of life, one small body with beating heart in this soaring mausoleum, and she would be here long after we were gone, day and night, I knew this, a space conceived and designed for a figure in stillness.

Before we left the area I turned to take one last look and, yes, she was there, in empty method, a living breathing artform, boy or girl, seated in pajamalike garments, offering nothing more for me to think or imagine. The guide led us down a long hall that was not bordered by doors and Ross began to speak to me now, a faraway voice, close to the trembling bend.

“People getting older become more fond of objects. I think this is true. Particular things. A leather-bound book, a piece of furniture, a photograph, a painting, the frame that holds the painting. These things make the past seem permanent. A baseball signed by a famous player, long dead. A simple coffee mug. Things we trust. They tell an important story. A person’s life, all those who entered and left, there’s a depth, a richness. We used to sit in a certain room, often, the room with the monochrome paintings. She and I. The room in the townhouse with those five paintings and the tickets we saved and framed, like a couple of teenage tourists, two tickets to a bullfight in Madrid. She was already in poor condition. We didn’t say much. Just sat there remembering.”

There were long pauses between sentences and his tone was near to a murmur, or an underbreath, and I listened hard and waited.

Then I said, “What is the fond object in your case?”

“I don’t know yet. Maybe I’ll never know.”

“Not the paintings.”

“Too many. Too much.”

“The tickets. Two small slips of paper.”

“Sol y sombra. Plaza de Toros Las Ventas,” he said. “We were seated in an area that’s sometimes in the sun, sometimes in the shade. Open area. Sol y sombra.”

He wasn’t finished, a man propelled into obsessive reflection. He talked, I listened, his voice more halting, the subject more elusive. Did I want to stare at the guide and try to think of us together in a room, my room, she and I, the guide, the escort, or just visualize her alone, nowhere, a woman stepping out of her shoes. I felt an erotic wistfulness but could not shape it.

We stood in the veer, gliding out of Zero K, out of the numbered levels. I thought of prime numbers. I thought, Define a prime. The veer was an environment, I thought, suited to rigorous thinking. I was always good at math. I felt sure of myself when I dealt with numbers. Numbers were the language of science. And now I needed to find the precise and perpetual and more or less mandatory wording that would constitute the definition of a prime. But why did I need to do this? The guide stood with eyes closed, thinking in Russian. My father was in a waking state of mindlapse, in retreat from his pain. I thought, Prime number. A positive integer not divisible. But what was the rest of it? What else about primes? What else about integers?

• • •

I walked the halls toward the room, eager to grab my bag and meet my father and head home. This was the one energy left to me, the expectation of return. Sidewalks, streets, green light, red light, metered seconds to get to the other side alive.

But I had to pause now, stop and look, because the screen in the ceiling began to lower and a series of images filled the width of the hallway.

People running, crowds of running men and women, they’re closely packed and showing desperation, dozens, then hundreds, workpants, T-shirts, sweatshirts, shouldering each other, elbowing, looking dead ahead, the camera positioned slightly above, an angled shot, no cuts, tilts, pans. I back away instinctively. There’s no soundtrack but it’s almost possible to hear the mass pulse of breath and pounding feet. They’re running on a surface barely visible beneath their crowded bodies. I see tennis shoes, ankle boots, sandals, there’s a barefoot woman, a man in sneakers with undone laces flapping.

They keep on coming, trying to escape some dreadful spectacle or rumbling threat. I’m watching closely and trying to think into the action onscreen, the uniformity of it, the orderly deployment and steady pace that underlie the urgent scene. It begins to occur to me that I may be seeing the same running cluster repeatedly, shot and reshot, two dozen runners made to resemble several hundred, a flawless sleight of editing.

Here they come, mouths open, arms pumping, headbands, visors, camouflage caps, no seeming slowdown, and then something further comes to mind. Is it possible that this is not factual documentation rendered in a selective manner but something radically apart? It’s a digital weave, every fragment manipulated and enhanced, all of it designed, edited, redesigned. Why hadn’t this occurred to me before, in earlier screenings, the monsoon rains, the tornadoes? These were visual fictions, the wildfires and burning monks, digital bits, digital code, all of it computer-generated, none of it real.

I watched until the images faded and the screen began to lift, soundlessly, and I’d gone only a short way along the hall when there was a noise, hard to identify and rapidly getting louder. I went a few more paces and had to stop, the noise nearly upon me, and then they came wheeling around the corner charging in my direction, the running men and women, images bodied out, spilled from the screen. I hurried to the only safety there was, the nearest wall, back flattened, arms spread, the runners bearing down, nine or ten abreast, blasting past, wild-eyed. I could see their sweat and smell their stink and they kept on coming, all looking directly ahead.

Be calm. See what’s here. Think about it clearly.

A local ritual upheld, a marathon of sacred awe, some obscure tradition adhered to for a hundred years. This was all the time I had for theories. They approached and went past and I looked at the faces and then at the bodies and saw the man with flapping laces and tried to see the barefoot woman. How many runners, who were they, why were they being filmed, are they still being filmed? I watched them come and go and then, in the thinning lines, with the last runners approaching, what I saw was a pair of tall blondish men and I leaned forward for a better look as they went by, shoulder to shoulder, and it was the Stenmark twins, unmistakably, Lars and Nils, or Jan and Sven.

They were drenching me, out-thinking me, these several days, this extreme sublifetime. What was it beyond a concentrated lesson in bewilderment?

It was their game, their mob, and they were a sweating panting part of it. The Stenmarks. I kept to the wall, watching them blow past and go racing down the long hall. When the runners were gone I remained in position, wallbound for a moment more. Was I surprised to learn that I was the only witness to whatever it was I’d just seen?

An empty hall.

The fact is I did not expect to see others. It had never occurred to me that there were others in the hall. It was uncommon in my experience that there were such others, with several brief exceptions. I stood away from the wall now, mind and body buzzing and the hallway seeming to tremble with the muffled thrust of the runners.

On the way back to my room I realized that I was limping.