Zero K

- 1 -

The office belonged to a man named Silverstone. It was my father’s former office and two of the paintings he owned were still on the wall, dark with strips of dusty sunlight, both of them. I had to force myself to look at Silverstone, behind the burnished desk, while he droned his way through a global roundup that ranged from Hungary to South Africa, the forint to the rand.

Ross had made a phone call on my behalf and even as I sat here I tried to feel the kind of separation, the lingering distance that had always defined the time I spent in an office, a man with a job, a position — not an occupation exactly but a rank, a role, a title.

This job would make me the Son. Word of the interview would spread and everyone here would think of me this way. The job was not an unconditional gift. I would have to earn the right to keep it but my father’s name would haunt every step I took, every word I spoke.

Then, again, I already knew that I would turn down the offer, any offer, whatever the rank or role.

Silverstone was a broad and mostly bald man whose hands were active elements in the monologue he was delivering and I found myself imitating his gestures in abridged form, an alternative to nodding or to muttering microdecibels of assent. We could have been a teacher and his student in some rendition of the manual alphabet.

The forint got a finger twirl, the rand earned a fist.

The two paintings were the spectral remains of my father’s presence here. I thought about my last visit to the office and there was Ross standing by the window, at night, wearing sunglasses. This was before the journey he’d make with his wife and the journey home with his son, mostly bloated time since then, for me at least, two years of it, slow-going and unfocused.

Silverstone became more specific, telling me that I’d be part of a group involved in the infrastructure of water. This was a term I’d never heard before. He spoke of water stress and water conflict. He referred to maps of water risk that guided investors. There were charts, he said, detailing the intersection of capital and water technology.

The paintings on the wall were not watercolors but I decided not to point this out. No need for me to bare the shallower reaches of my disposition.

He would confer with my father and several others and then make the offer. I would wait several days, reminding myself that I needed a job badly, and then reject the offer, graciously, without further comment.

I listened to the man and occasionally spoke. I said smart things. I sounded smart to myself. But why was I here? Did I need to lie, in three dimensions, over a period of time, with hand gestures? Was I defying a persistent urge to submit to the pressures of reality? There was only one thing I knew for certain. I would do it this way because it made me more interesting. Does that sound crazy? It showed me who I was in ways I did not try to understand.

Ross was not part of my thinking here. He and I were determined not to end in willful bitterness and none of this maneuvering was directed at him. He’d probably be relieved when I turned down the offer.

All through the episode with Silverstone I saw myself seated here attending to the man’s water talk. Who was more absurd, he or I?

In the evening I would describe the man to Emma, repeat what he’d said. This is something I did well, word for word at times, and I looked forward to a late dinner in a modest restaurant on a tree-lined street between the brawling traffic of the avenues, our mood nicely guided by the infrastructure of water.

• • •

When we returned from the Convergence I announced to Ross that we were back in history now. Days have names and numbers, a discernible sequence, and there is an aggregate of past events, both immediate and long gone, that we can attempt to understand. Certain things are predictable, even within the array of departures from the common order. Elevators go up and down rather than sideways. We see the people who serve the food we eat in public establishments. We walk on paved surfaces and stand on a corner to hail a cab. Taxicabs are yellow, fire trucks red, bikes mostly blue. I’m able to return to my devices, data roaming, instant by instant, in the numbing raptures of the Web.

It turned out that my father was not interested in history or technology or hailing a cab. He let his hair grow wild and walked nearly everywhere he cared to go, which was nearly nowhere. He was slow and a little stooped and when I spoke about exercise, diet and self-responsibility, we both understood that this was just an inventory of hollow sounds.

His hands sometimes trembled. He looked at his hands, I looked at his face, seeing only an arid indifference. When I gripped his hands once to stop the shaking, he simply closed his eyes.

The job offer would come. And I would turn it down.

In his townhouse he eventually wanders down the stairs to sit in the room with the monochrome paintings. This means that my visit is over but sometimes I follow along and stand a while in the doorway, watching the man stare at something that is not in the room. He is remembering or imagining and I’m not sure if he is aware of my presence but I know that his mind is tunneling back to the dead lands where the bodies are banked and waiting.

- 2 -

I sat in a taxi with Emma and her son, Stak, all three bodies muscled into the rear seat, and the boy checked the driver’s ID and immediately began to speak to the man in an unrecognizable language.

I conferred quietly with Emma, who said he was studying Pashto, privately, in his spare time. Afghani, she said, to enlighten me further.

I muttered something about Urdu, reflexively, in self-defense, because this was the only word that came to mind under the circumstances.

We were leaning into each other, she and I, and she exaggerated the terms of our complicity, speaking from the side of her mouth for comic effect and telling me that Stak walked in circles in his room enunciating phrases in Pashto in accordance with instructions from the device clipped to his belt.

He was seated directly behind the driver and spoke into the plexiglass shield, undeterred by traffic noise and street construction. He was fourteen, foreign born, a slant tower, six-four and growing, his voice rushed and dense. The driver did not seem surprised to find himself exchanging words and phrases in his native language with a white boy. This was New York. Every living breathing genotype entered his cab at some point, day or night. And if this was an inflated notion, that was New York as well.

Two people on the TV screen in front of us were speaking remotely about bridge and tunnel traffic.

Emma asked when I’d start the new job. Two weeks from today. Which group, which division, which part of town. I told her a few things that I’d already told myself.

“Suit and tie.”

“Yes.”

“Close shave, shined shoes.”

“Yes.”

“You look forward to this.”

“Yes I do.”

“Will this transform you?”

“It will remind me that this is the man I am.”

“Down deep,” she said.

“Whatever there is of deep.”

The driver slipped into the bus lane, temporarily gaining position, advantage, dominance, and he gestured backwards to the boy as he spoke, three lights ahead all green — Pashto, Urdu, Afghani — and I told Emma that we were riding in a taxicab with a driver who enters the bus lane illegally and drives at madman speeds with one hand on the wheel while he half-looks over his shoulder and converses with a passenger in a far-flung language. What does this mean?

“Are you going to tell me that he drives this way only when he speaks this language?”

“It means this is just another day.”

She looked into the options below the screen and put her finger to the inch-square site marked OFF. Nothing happened. We were back in mainstream traffic moving slowly down Broadway and I told Emma, out of nowhere, that I wanted to stop using my credit card. I wanted to pay cash, to live a life in which it is possible to pay cash, whatever the circumstances. To live a life, I said again, examining the phrase. Then I leaned toward the screen and hit the OFF site. Nothing happened. We listened to Stak speak to the driver within the limits of his Pashto, intensely. Emma looked hard at the images on the screen. I waited for her to hit the OFF site.

She and her former husband, a man whose name she did not speak, went to Ukraine and found the boy in a facility for abandoned children. He was five or six years old and they took the risk and made the arrangements and flew him home to Denver, which would eventually share time with New York when the parents divorced and Emma came east.

These are just the barest boundaries, of course, and she took her time rounding out the story for me, over weeks, and even as her voice went weary with regret, I became absorbed in another kind of home, in what was most immediate, the touch, the half words, the blue bedsheets, Emma’s name like babytalk at two in the morning.

Horns were making sporadic noise and Stak was still talking to the driver through the closed panels. Talking, shouting, listening, pausing for the right word or phrase. I spoke to Emma about my money. Money comes to mind, I speak about it, the fading numbers, the small discrepancies that turn up on the withdrawal slips that are spat out by the automated teller machines. I go home and look at the check register and do the simple arithmetic and there’s an aberration of one dollar and twelve cents.

“A bank mistake, not your mistake.”

“Maybe it’s not even a bank mistake but something in the structure itself. Beyond the computers and grids and digital algorithms and intelligence agencies. It’s the root, the source, I’m almost serious, where things fit together or slip apart. Three dollars and sixty-seven cents.”

Traffic was stopped dead and I nudged the window switch and listened to the blowing horns approach peak volume. We were trapped in our own obsessive clamor.

“I’m talking about minor matters that define us.”

I shut the window and thought about what I might say next. Faint sounds of news and weather kept coming from the screen at Emma’s kneecaps.

“Those blanked-out eternities at the airport. Getting there, waiting there, standing shoeless in long lines. Think about it. We take off our shoes and remove our metal objects and then enter a stall and raise our arms and get body-scanned and sprayed with radiation and reduced to nakedness on a screen somewhere and then how totally helpless we are all over again as we wait on the tarmac, belted in, our plane eighteenth in line, and it’s all ordinary, it’s routine, we make ourselves forget it. That’s the thing.”

She said, “What thing?”

“What thing. Everything. It’s the things we forget about that tell us who we are.”

“Is this a philosophical statement?”

“Traffic jams are a philosophical statement. I want to take your hand and wedge it in my crotch. That’s a philosophical statement.”

Stak backed away from the partition. He sat upright and motionless, looking into vague space.

We waited.

“The man. The driver. He’s a former member of the Taliban.”

He said this evenly, maintaining his aimless look. We thought about it, Emma and I, and eventually she said, “This is true?”

“He said it, I heard it. Taliban. Involved in skirmishes, clashes, all kinds of operations.”

“What else did you talk about?”

“His family, my family.”

She did not like this. The light tone we’d evolved yielded to a silence. I imagined a pub where we might go after dropping off the kid, mobbed bodies at the bar, couples at three or four tables, spirited talk, women laughing. Taliban. How is it that so many end up here, those who flee terror and those who render it, all driving taxis.

We were in a taxi because Stak rejected the subway. The barbarian heat and stench of the platform. The standing and waiting. The crowded cars, the voice recordings, the bodies touching. Was he the species that rejected all the things we were supposed to tolerate as a way of maintaining our shaky hold on common order?

We were quiet for a time and I hit the OFF site and then Emma hit it and I hit it again. The horns diminished but traffic did not move and the noise was soon resurgent, a few warped drivers prompting others and then others and the amplified sound becoming an independent force, noise for the sake of noise, overwhelming the details of time and place.

Traffic jam, downtown, Sunday, senseless.

Stak said, “If you close your eyes, the noise becomes a sound that’s more or less normal. It doesn’t go away, it just becomes something you hear because your eyes are closed. It becomes your sound.”

“And when you open your eyes, what?” his mother said.

“The sound becomes noise again.”

Why adopt a boy that age, five or six or seven, someone you see for the first time in a city you’ve never heard of, many miles from the capital, in a country that was itself an adoptee, passed from master to master through the centuries. She’d told me that her husband had Ukrainian roots but for her part I knew it had to be something in the boy’s face, in his eyes, a need, a plea, and she felt a compassion that overwhelmed her. She saw a life bereft of expectation and it was hers to take and save, to make meaningful. But there was also, wasn’t there, a kind of split-secondness, a gamble in the form of flesh-and-blood, let’s just do it, and a brisk dismissal of all the things that could go wrong. And would this stranger in the house bring with him the long run of luck that might save their marriage?

She said that Stak counted pigeons on the rooftop across the street and never failed to report the number. Seventeen, twenty-three, a disappointing twelve.

Then, standing on the sidewalk, not a homeless man with sagging face and crayoned sign, begging, but a woman in meditative stance, body erect in long skirt and loose blouse, arms bent above her head, fingers not quite touching. Her eyes were closed and she was motionless, naturally so, with a small boy next to her. I’d seen the woman before, or different women, here and there, arms at sides or crossed at chest level, eyes always closed, and now the boy, first time, pressed trousers, white shirt, blue tie, looking a little scared, and until now I never wondered what the cause was or why there was no sign, no leaflets or tracts, only the woman, the stillness, the fixed point in the nonstop swarm. I watched her, knowing that I could not invent a single detail of the life that pulsed behind those eyes.

Traffic began to move and Stak was talking to the driver again, forehead welded to the plexiglass.

“Sometimes I tell him to shut up and eat his spinach. It took him a while,” she said, “to understand that this is a joke.”

He was here for a long weekend now and then and for ten days when the school year ended. This was all. She hadn’t told me why she and her husband split up and there must be a reason why I never asked. To honor her reticence, perhaps, or was it more essentially that we were two individuals exploring a like-mindedness, determined to keep clear of the past, defy any impulse to recite our histories. We weren’t married, we didn’t live together but we were braided tight, each person part of the other. This is how I thought of it. An intuitive link, a reciprocal, one number related to another in such a way that when multiplied together, day or night, their product is one.

“He doesn’t understand jokes and this is interesting because his father used to say the same thing about me.”

Emma was a counselor in a year-round school for children with learning disabilities and developmental problems. Emma Breslow. I liked to say the name. I liked to tell myself that I would have guessed the name, or invented it, if she hadn’t told me what it is at the wedding of mutual friends on a horse farm in Connecticut, where we first met. Would this become a nostalgic theme to return to in future years? Country roads, bluegrass pastures, bride and groom in riding boots. The idea of future years was too broad and open a topic for us to explore.

The towers grew taller here and the driver simply drove, letting Stak rehearse his Pashto. Two young women crossed at the light, heads shaved, and the man and woman on the screen spoke in faraway tones about a new surge of Arctic melt and we waited for footage of some kind, amateur video or network helicopter, but they changed the subject and I hit the OFF site and they were still there and then Emma hit it and I hit it again, calmly, and we resigned ourselves to the deadly sedative tenor of picture and sound.

Then she said, “He talks about the weather all the time. Not just today’s weather but the general phenomenon narrowed down to certain places. Why is Phoenix always hotter than Tucson even though Tucson is farther south? He does not tell me the answer. This is not something I would know, it is something he would know, and he has no intention of sharing the knowledge. He likes to recite temperatures. The numbers tell him something. Tucson one hundred and three degrees fahrenheit. He always specifies fahrenheit or celsius. He relishes both words. Phoenix one hundred and seven degrees fahrenheit. Baghdad. What is Baghdad today?

“He’s interested in climate.”

“He’s interested in numbers. High, medium, low. Place-names and numbers. Shanghai, he will say. Zero point zero one inches precipitation. Mumbai, he will say. He loves to say Mumbai. Mumbai. Yesterday, ninety-two degrees fahrenheit. Then he gives celsius. Then he checks one of his devices. Then he gives today. Then he gives tomorrow. Riyadh, he will say. He is disappointed when Riyadh loses out to another city. An emotional letdown.”

“You’re exaggerating.”

“Baghdad, he will say. One hundred and thirteen degrees fahrenheit. Riyadh. One hundred and nine degrees fahrenheit. He is making me disappear. His size, his presence in a room, he shrinks our apartment, can’t stay in one place, roams and talks, recites from memory, and his demands, his ultimatums, and the voice that issues them, with its own echo. I’m exaggerating slightly.”

The cab was edging its way through the constricted streets downtown and if Stak heard what his mother was saying he gave no sign. He was speaking English now, trying to guide the driver in and out of the board game of one way and dead end.

“I don’t know who he is, I don’t know who his friends are, I don’t know who his parents were.”

“He didn’t have parents. He had a biological mother and father.”

“I hate the phrase biological mother. It’s like science fiction. He reads science fiction, terminal amounts. That’s something I know.”

“And he leaves when?”

“Tomorrow.”

“And you will feel what when he’s gone?”

“I’ll miss him. The minute he’s out the door.”

I gave this remark a chance to settle in the air.

“Then why don’t you demand more time with him?”

“I couldn’t bear it,” she said. “And neither could he.”

The taxi stopped on a near empty street just below the pit of finance and Stak angled his body out the door and jiggled a hand behind him in an ironic farewell. We watched him enter a loft building where he would spend the next two hours in a room choked with dust and stink, learning the principles of jujitsu, a method of artful self-defense predating the current practice of judo.

The driver slid open the middle panel and Emma paid him. We walked for a time, going nowhere, streets that had a feel of abandonment, fire hydrant open to a limp stream of rusty water.

After a while she said, “He invented the Taliban story.”

Another idea for me to absorb.

“You know this?”

“He improvises now and then, inflates something, expands something, takes a story to a limit in a way that may or may not test your standards of belief. The Taliban was fiction.”

“You sensed it right away.”

“More than that. I knew it,” she said.

“Fooled me.”

“I’m not sure about his motive. I don’t think there is a motive. It’s a kind of recurring experiment. He’s testing himself and me and you and everybody. Or it’s pure instinct. Think of something, then say it. What he imagines becomes real. Not so strange really. Except I’d like to hit him with a frying pan sometimes.”

“What about his jujitsu?”

“It’s real, it’s serious, I was allowed to watch one time. His body is willing to follow a strict format if he respects the tradition. The tradition is samurai combat. Feudal warriors.”

“Fourteen years old.”

“Fourteen.”

“Never mind thirteen or fifteen. Fourteen is the final bursting forth,” I said.

“Did you burst forth?”

“I’m still waiting to burst forth.”

We fell into long silences, walking inward, step by step, and a light rain did not prompt a word or send us into cover. We walked north to the antiterror barricades on Broad Street where a tour leader spoke to his umbrella’d group about the scars on the wall caused by an anarchist’s bomb a hundred years ago. We went along empty streets and our shared stride began to feel like a heartbeat and soon became a game, a tacit challenge, the pace quickening. The sun reappeared seconds before the rain stopped and we went past an untended shish kebab cart and saw a skateboarder sailing past at the end of the street, there and gone, and we approached a woman in Arab headdress, white woman, white blouse, stained blue skirt, talking to herself and walking back and forth, barefoot, five steps east, five steps west along a sidewalk webbed with scaffolding. Then the Money Museum, the Police Museum, the old stone buildings on Pine Street and our pace increased again, no cars or people here, just the iron posts, the stunted security markers set along the street, and I knew she’d outrace me, keep an even measure, she was will-driven just walking to a mailbox with a postcard in her hand. A sound around us that we could not identify made us stop and listen, the tone, the pitch, a continuous low dull hum, inaudible until you hear it and then it’s everywhere, every step you take, coming from the empty buildings on both sides of the street, and we stood outside the locked revolving doors of Deutsche Bank listening to the systems within, the networks of interacting components. I grabbed her arm and moved her into the doorway of a shuttered storefront and we clutched and pressed and came close to outright screwing.

Then we looked at each other, still without a word, one of those looks that says who the hell are you anyway. This was her look. Women own this look. What am I doing here and who am I with, some fool who bubbles up out of nowhere. We were still in the early times and even if the romance endured it would continue to resemble the early times. We needed nothing further to discover and this is not the cold contractual reckoning it may seem. It is only who we were and how we talked and felt. We resumed our walk, casually now, seeing a barechested old man in rolled-up pajama bottoms sunbathing in a wet beach chair on a tenement fire escape. This was everything. We understood that the grain of our shared awareness, the print, the scheme, would remain stamped as in the first days and nights.

We wandered slowly back to the street where we’d started and I realized we were walking into a certain kind of mood, Emma’s, a subdued disposition that took its shape from the imminent presence of her son. We reached the loft building and when he appeared he was carrying his gear in a knotted bundle, which he would take with him to Denver. We walked north and west and I found myself imagining that the man at the wheel of the taxi we hailed would have a Ukrainian name and accent and would be glad to speak the language with Stak, giving the boy another chance to turn a stranger’s scant life into lavish fiction.

- 3 -

I keep checking the stove after turning off the burners. At night I make sure the door is locked and then go back to whatever I was doing but eventually sneak back to the door, inspect the lock, twist the door handle in order to verify, confirm, test the truth of, before going to bed. When did this begin? I walk down the street checking my wallet and then my keys. Wallet in left rear pocket, keys in right front pocket. I feel and pat the wallet from outside the pocket and sometimes stick my thumb in the pocket to touch the wallet itself. I don’t do this for the keys. It’s enough for me to make contact from outside the pocket, clutching the ring of keys within the doubled fabric of trouser pocket and handkerchief. I don’t find it necessary to wrap the keys in the handkerchief. The keys are under the handkerchief. I tell myself that this arrangement is less unsanitary than the scenario of keys wrapped in handkerchief, if and when I blow my nose.

• • •

I visited Ross in his room of monochrome paintings, where he sat thinking and I sat waiting. He had asked me to come, saying there was an idea he wanted to propose. It occurred to me that this was his isolation cell, the formal site of every enshrined memory. He closed his eyes, let his head fall forward and then, as if in prescribed order, he watched his hand begin to tremble.

When it stopped he turned my way.

“Yesterday after I washed my face I looked in the mirror, seriously and deliberately looked. And I found myself becoming disoriented,” he said, “because in a mirror left is right and right is left. But this wasn’t the case. What was supposed to be my false right ear was my true right ear.”

“That’s how it seemed.”

“That’s how it was.”

“There ought to be a discipline called the physics of illusions.”

“There is but they call it something else.”

“That was yesterday. What happened today?” I said.

He had no answer for this.

Then he said, “We had a cat for a time. I don’t think you knew this. The cat would come down here and curl on the rug and there was a certain kind of stillness, a special grace, Artis said, that the cat brought to the room. The cat became inseparable from the paintings, the cat belonged to the art. When the cat was here we spoke softly and tried not to make an abrupt or unnecessary movement. It would betray the cat. I think we were serious about this. It would betray the cat, Artis said, and she had that smile she used when she was being a character in an old English movie. It would betray the cat.”

His beard came spilling out of his face, freer and whiter than the architectural models of the past. He spent much of his time in this room, growing old. I think he came here to grow old. He told me that he was in the process of donating some of his art to institutions and giving a few smaller pieces to friends. This is why he’d asked me to come here. He knew that I admired the art on these walls, paintings variously subdued, oil on canvas, all five. Then there was the sparely furnished room itself bearing a measure of such express intent that a person might feel his presence was a violation. I was not that sensitive.

We discussed the paintings. He had learned the language, I had not, but our way of seeing was not so different, it turned out. Light, balance, color, rigor. He wanted to give me a painting. Select one, it’s yours, and possibly more than one, he said, and beyond that, there is the subject of where you want to live eventually.

I let this final remark linger. It surprised me, his belief that I might want to live here at some unspecified future time. He spoke of the possibility in a practical way, a matter of family business, but he was not thinking about the dollar value of the place. I heard a tentative note, a hint of innocent curiosity in his voice. He may have been asking me who I was.

He was leaning forward, I was sitting back.

I told him that I didn’t know how to live here. This was a handsome brownstone with a front door of carved oak, a wood-paneled interior sedately furnished. My remark was not delivered purely for effect. I would be a tourist here, bound to a temporary arrangement. It was Artis who had brought him down from his penthouse duplex with lush decor, sun-drenched gardens and sweeping views of atomic sunsets. These were the things that suited his global ego in those earlier years. You have two majestic balconies, she’d told him, one more than the Pope. Here, some of his art, all of his books, whatever he’d managed to learn, love and acquire.

I knew how to live where I was living, in an old building on the upper west side with a small sad inner courtyard in perennial shadow, a once grand lobby, a laundry room that needed flood insurance — in an apartment of traditional fittings, high ceilings, quiet neighbors, say hello to familiar faces on the elevator, stand with Emma on the hot tarred surface of the roof, at the western ledge, watching a storm come whipping across the river in our direction.

This is what I told him. But wasn’t it more complicated than that? There was a punishing cut to these remarks, a cheap rejection dredged from the past. All these levels, these spiral binds of involvement, so integral to the condition we shared.

I told him that I was touched and suggested that we both think further. But I wasn’t touched and didn’t expect to think further. I told him that the room was impressive, with or without the cat. What I didn’t tell him was that there were several photographs of Madeline in my apartment. Schoolgirl, young woman, mother with adolescent son. And how could I ever display these pictures in the hostile setting of my father’s townhouse.

• • •

Emma had studied dance for a time, years earlier, and there was something streamlined about her, face and body, the walk, the stride, even the trimmed sentences. There were occasions when I imagined that she subjected the most ordinary moments to a detailed plan. These were the idle speculations of a man whose plotless days and nights had begun to define the way the world was folding up around him.

But she kept me free of total disaffection. She was my lover. The idea alone consoled me, the word itself, lover, the beautiful musical note, the hovering letter v. How I slipped into dumb reverie, examining the word, seeing it as woman-shaped, feeling like a teenager anticipating the day when he might tell himself that he has a lover.

We went to her place, a modest apartment in a prewar building, east side, and she showed me Stak’s room, which I’d only glimpsed on earlier visits. A pair of ski poles standing in a corner, a cot with an army blanket, an enormous wall map of the Soviet Union. I was drawn to the map, searching the expanse for place-names I knew and those many I’d never encountered. This was the boy’s memory wall, Emma said, a great arc of historic conflict that stretched from Romania to Alaska. On every visit there would come a time when he simply stood and looked, matching his strong personal recollections of abandonment with the collective memory of old crimes, the famines engineered by Stalin that killed millions of Ukrainians.

He talks with his father about recent events, she said. Doesn’t have much to say to me. Putin, Putin, Putin. This is what he says.

I stood at the map and began to recite place-names aloud. I didn’t know why I was doing this. Arkhangelsk and Semipalatinsk and Sverdlovsk. Was this poetry or history or a childlike ramble across an unknown surface? I imagined Emma joining me in this recitation, stressing every syllable, both of us, her body pressed to mine, Kirensk and Svobodny, and then I imagined us in her bedroom, where we took off our shoes and lay on the bed, reciting face to face, cities, rivers, republics, each of us removing an item of clothing for each place named, my jacket for Gorki, her jeans for Kamchatka, moving slowly onward to Kharkov, Saratov, Omsk, Tomsk, and I started feeling stupid at this point but went on for a moment longer, reciting inwardly in streams of nonsense, names in the form of moans, the vast landmass shaping a mystery in which to shroud our loving night.

But we were in Stak’s room, not the bedroom, and I’d stopped reciting and stopped imagining but wasn’t ready to abandon the map. There was so much to see and feel and be ignorant of, so much to not know, and there was also Chelyabinsk, right here, where the meteor had struck, and the Convergence itself buried somewhere on the map in the old U.S.S.R., hemmed in by China, Iran, Afghanistan and so on. Is it possible that I’d been there, in the midst of such deep and searing narratives, and here it all is, decades of upheaval flattened into place-names.

This was Stak’s map, not mine, and I realized that his mother was no longer standing next to me but had wandered out of the room and back into local time and place.

• • •

The city seems flattened, everything near street level, construction scaffolds, repairwork, sirens. I look at people’s faces, make an instantaneous study, wordless, of the person inside the face, then remember to look up into the solid geometries of tall structures, the lines, angles, surfaces. I’ve become a student of crossing lights. I like to dash across the street with the red seconds on the crossing light down to 3 or 4. There is always an extra second-and-a-fraction between the time when the light turns red for pedestrians and the time when the other light turns green for traffic. This is my safety margin and I welcome the occasion, crossing a broad avenue in a determined stride, sometimes a civilized jog. It makes me feel true to the system, knowing that unnecessary risk is integral to the code of urban pathology.

• • •

It was a day for parents to visit the school where Emma taught and she invited me to come along. The children had disabilities ranging from speech disorders to emotional problems. They faced obstacles to everyday learning, how to gain basic kinds of awareness, how to comprehend, how to fix words in proper sequence, how to acquire experience, become alert, become informed, find out.

I stood against the wall in a room filled with boys and girls who sat at a long table with coloring books, games and toys. The parents milled about smiling and chatting and there was reason to smile. The kids were lively and engaged, writing stories and drawing animals, those who were able to do these things, and I looked and listened, trying to absorb a sense of the lives that were in the act of happening in this breezy tumult of small mingled voices and large hovering bodies.

Emma came over and stood next to me gesturing to a girl who sat crouched over a jigsaw puzzle, a girl who feared taking a single step, here to there, minute to minute, and needed every word of support and often an encouraging nudge. Some days are better than others, Emma said, and this was the sentence that would stay with me. All these disorders had their respective acronyms but she said she did not use them. There is the boy at the end of the table who can’t produce the specific motor movements that would allow him to speak words that others might understand. Nothing is natural. Phonemes, syllables, muscle tone, action of tongue, lips, jaw, palate. The acronym is CAS, she said, but did not translate the term. It seemed to her a symptom of the condition itself.

Soon she was back among the children and her authority was clear, her self-assurance, even in its gentlest temper, talking, whispering, moving a piece on a gameboard or simply watching a child or speaking with a parent. The scene everywhere in the room was happy and active but I felt frozen to the wall. I tried to imagine the child, this one or that one, the one who could not recognize patterns and shapes or the one who could not sustain attention or follow the most basic spoken direction. Look at the boy with the picture book of ABCs and try to see him at the end of the day, on the school bus, talking to other kids or looking out the window and what does he see and how is it different from what the driver sees, or the other kids, and being met at the corner of this street and that avenue by his mother or father or older brother or sister or the family nurse or housekeeper. None of this led me into the life itself.

But why should it? How could it?

There were other children in other rooms and a few I’d seen earlier wandering the halls where a parent or teacher guided them back to one room or another. The grown-ups. Will some of these children be able to venture into adulthood, become grown-ups in outlook and attitude, able to buy a hat, cross a street. I looked at the girl who could not take a step without sensing some predetermined danger. She was not a metaphor. Light brown hair, sunlit now, a natural blush on her face, an intent look, tiny hands, six years old, I thought, Annie, I thought, or maybe Katie, and I decided to leave before she was done playing the game in front of her, parents’ day over, children free to move to the next activity.

Play a game, make a list, draw a dog, tell a story, take a step.

Some days are better than others.

- 4 -

It was time finally and I called Silverstone and turned down the job. He said he understood. I wanted to say, No you don’t, not everything, not the part that makes me interesting.

I’d been following the promising leads all along and had no choice but to keep at it, wondering now and then if I’d become obsolete. In the street, on a bus, within the touchscreen storm, I could see myself moving autonomically into middle age, an involuntary man, guided by the actions of his nervous system.

I said something about the job to Emma. Wasn’t what I wanted, didn’t meet my needs. She said even less in return. This was not surprising. She took things as they came, not passively or uncaringly but in the spirit of an intervening space. Him and her, here to there. This did not apply to Stak. Her son was what we talked about in one of our rooftop intervals, cloudy day, our customary place at the western ledge, and we watched a barge being towed downriver, inch by inch, discontinuously, with a few tall structures fragmenting our view.

“This is what he does now. Online wagering sites. He bets on plane crashes, real ones, various odds posted depending on the airline, the country, the time frame, other factors. He bets on drone strikes. Where, when, how many dead.”

“He told you this?”

“Terrorist attacks. Visit the site, examine the conditions, enter a bet. Which country, which group, numbers of dead. Always the time frame. Has to happen within a certain number of days, weeks, months, other variables.”

“He told you this?”

“His father told me this. His father ordered him to stop. Assassinations of public figures ranging from heads of state to insurgent leaders and other categories. Odds depend on the individual’s rank and country. Other available wagers, quite a few of them. Apparently a thriving site.”

“I don’t know how thriving. These things don’t happen often.”

“They happen. The people who place the bets expect them to happen, wait for them to happen.”

“The bet makes the event more likely. I understand that. Ordinary people sitting at home.”

“A force that changes history,” she said.

“That’s my line,” I said.

Were we beginning to enjoy this? I glanced toward the other end of the roof to see a woman in sandals, shorts and a halter-top dragging a blanket to a spot where she seemed to expect the sun to touch down. I looked into the heavy cloud cover, then back to the woman.

“Do you talk to his father often?”

“We talk when necessary. The boy makes it necessary now and then. There are other habits, things he does.”

“Talking to cabdrivers.”

“Not worth a phone call to Denver.”

“What else?”

“Altering his voice for days at a time. He has a sort of hollow voice he affects. I can’t imitate it. A submerged voice, digital noise, sound units fitted together. Then there’s the Pashto. He speaks Pashto to people in the street who look as though they might be native speakers. They nearly never are. Or to a supermarket clerk or a cabin attendant on a flight. The cabin attendant thinks this is the first stage in a hijacking. I witnessed this once, his father twice.”

I found myself disturbed by the fact that she talked to his father. Of course they talked, they had to talk for any number of reasons. I imagined a sturdy man with darkish complexion, he is standing in a room with photos on the wall, father and son in hunting gear. He and the boy watch TV news on an obscure cable channel, programming from eastern Europe. I needed a name for Stak’s father, Emma’s ex, in Denver, mile-high.

“Has he stopped making bets on car bombs?”

“His father is not completely convinced. He makes surreptitious raids on Stak’s devices.”

The woman on the blanket was motionless, supremely supine, legs spread, arms spread, palms up, face up, eyes shut. Maybe she had news that the sun was due to appear, maybe she didn’t want the sun, maybe she did this every day at the same time, a yielding, a discipline, a religion.

“He’ll be returning in a couple of weeks. He has to appear at his jujitsu academy. His dojo,” she said. “Special event.”

Or maybe she just wanted to get out of the apartment, a resident of the building but unknown to me, middle-aged, escaping the cubical life for a few hours, same as us, same as the hundreds we would see when we walked across the park to Emma’s place, the runners, idlers, softball players, the parents pushing strollers, the palpable relief of being in unmetered space for a time, a scattered crowd safe in our very scatter, people free to look at each other, to notice, admire, envy, wonder at.

Think about it, I nearly said. So many places elsewhere, crowds collecting, thousands shouting, chanting, bending to the charge of police with batons and riot shields. My mind working into things, helplessly, people dead and dying, hands bound behind them, heads split open.

We began to walk faster because she wanted to get home in time to watch a tennis match at Wimbledon, her favorite player, the Latvian woman who groaned erotically with each fierce return.

• • •

If I’d never known Emma, what would I see when I walk the streets going nowhere special, to the post office or the bank. I’d see what is there, wouldn’t I, or what I was able to assemble from what is there. But it’s different now. I see streets and people with Emma in the streets and among the people. She’s not an apparition but only a feeling, a sensation. I’m not seeing what I think she would be seeing. This is my perception but she is present within it or spread throughout it. I sense her, feel her, I know that she occupies something within me that allows these moments to happen, off and on, streets and people.

• • •

The twenty-dollar bills emerged from the slot in the automated teller machine and I stood in the booth counting the money and turning some bills upside down and others back to front to regularize the stack. I maintained reasonably, to myself, that this procedure should have been performed by the bank. The bank should deliver the money, my money, in an orderly format, ten bills, twenty dollars each bill, all bills face forward, face up, unsmudged money, sanitary money. I counted again, head down, shoulders hunched, partitioned from people in the booths to either side of me, isolated but aware, feeling their presence left and right, my money held near my chest. It didn’t seem to be me. It seemed to be someone else, a recluse who’d wandered into semi-public view, standing here and counting.

I touched the screen for the receipt and then for account activity and account summary and I wrapped the bills inside the flimsy slips of toxic paper and left the booth, the stall, receipts and money clutched in my hand. I didn’t look at the people in line. No one ever looks at anyone in the ATM area. And I tried not to think about the security cameras but here I was in my mind’s self-surveillance device, body crabbed tight as I removed the money from the slot, counted it, organized it and then recounted it.

But was this really so introspective, so abnormally cautious? The handling of the bills, the heightened awareness, isn’t this something people do, check the wallet, check the keys, it’s just another level of the commonplace.

I sit at home with transaction registers, withdrawal slips, records of account details, my outdated smartphone, my credit card statement, new balance, late payment, additional charges all spread before me on Madeline’s old walnut desk and I try to determine the source of what appear to be several small persistent errors, deviations from the logic of the number concept, the pure thrust of reliable numbers that determine one’s worth, even as totals diminish week by week.

• • •

I described the details of several job interviews to Emma, who enjoyed my accounts of the proceedings — voice imitations, sometimes verbatim, of interviewers’ remarks. She understood that I was not ridiculing these men and women. This was a documentary approach to a special kind of dialogue and we both knew that the performer himself, still jobless, was the subject of the piece.

The sun was shining now and I thought of the woman spread-eagled on my roof. There are women everywhere, Emma in a director’s chair a handclasp away from me and the Latvian woman and her opponent on the TV screen, sweating, groaning, swatting a tennis ball in patterns that might be subject to advanced study by behavioral scientists.

We hadn’t had a serious discussion for an hour or so. I deferred to Emma at such times. She had an adopted son, a failed marriage, a job involving damaged children and I had what — access to a breezy rooftop with an interrupted view of the river.

She said, “I think you look forward to the job interviews. Shave the face, shine the shoes.”

“I’m down to one decent pair of shoes. This is not rank neglect but a kind of day-to-day carelessness.”

“Do you feel a certain affection for these decent shoes?”

“Shoes are like people. They adjust to situations.”

We watched tennis and drank beer in tall glasses that she kept on their sides in the freezer compartment of her squat refrigerator. Frosted glasses, dark lager, point, game, match, one woman flipping her racket in the air, the other woman walking out of the frame, the first woman falling backwards to the grass court in glad abandon, arms stretched wide like the woman on my roof, whoever she was.

“Define a tennis racket. This is something I might have said to myself when I was in my early teens.”

“Then you would do it,” she said.

“Or try to.”

“Tennis racket.”

“Early teens.”

I told her that I used to stand in a dark room, eyes shut, mind immersed in the situation. I told her that I still do it, although rarely, and that I never know that I’m about to do it. Just stand in the dark. The lamp sits on the bureau next to the bed. There I am, eyes shut. Sort of Staklike.

She said, “It sounds like a kind of formal meditation.”

“I don’t know.”

“Maybe you’re trying to empty the mind.”

“You haven’t done it yourself.”

“Who, me, no.”

“I’m shutting my eyes against the dark.”

“And you’re wondering who you are.”

“Maybe in a blank way, if that’s possible.”

“What’s the difference between eyes closed in a lighted room and eyes closed in a dark room?”

“All the difference in the world.”

“I’m trying not to say something funny.”

She said this in an even tone, with a serious face.

Know the moment, feel the gliding hand, gather all the forgettable fragments, fresh towels on the racks, nice new bar of soap, clean sheets on the bed, her bed, our blue sheets. This was all I needed to take me day to day and I tried to think of these days and nights as the hushed countermand, ours, to the widespread belief that the future, everybody’s, will be worse than the past.

• • •

One of my father’s people called with the details. Time, place, manner of dress. This was lunch — but why. I didn’t need lunch in a midtown temple of cuisine art where jackets are required and the food and flower arrangements are said to be exquisite and the staff more competent than pallbearers at a state funeral. It was the weekend and my dress shirts were at the laundry being readied for the next wave of interviews. I had to wear a used and reused shirt, first spitting on my finger to wash the inside of the collar.

I’m always the first to arrive, I always get there first. I chose to wait at the table and when Ross showed up I was struck by the sight of him. The vested gray suit and bright tie set off his wildman beard and halting stride and I wasn’t sure whether he resembled an impressive ruin or a famous stage actor currently living the role that defines his long career.

He slid inchingly into our velvet banquette.

“You didn’t want the job. Turned it down.”

“It wasn’t right. I’m talking to an important person in an investment strategy group. It’s a definite possibility.”

“People out of work. You were offered a job in a strong company.”

“Set of companies. But I was not dismissive. I considered every aspect.”

“Nobody cares that you’re my son. There are sons and daughters everywhere, in solid positions, doing productive work.”

“Okay.”

“You make too much of it. Father and son. You would have become your own man in a matter of days.”

“Okay.”

“People out of work,” he said again, reasonably.

We talked and ordered and I kept looking into his face, thinking of a certain word. I think of words that lead me into dense realities, clarifying a situation or a circumstance, at least in theory. Here was Ross, eyes tired and shoulders hunched, right hand trembling slightly, and the word was desuetude. The word had a stylish quality suited to the environment. But what did it mean? A state of inaction, I thought, maybe a lost energy. I was looking at Ross Lockhart, handsomely outfitted but minus the relentlessness and craft that had shaped the man.

“Last time I was here about five years ago I talked Artis into coming along. Her health was not yet approaching drastic decline. I don’t recall all that much. But there was one point, one interval. It’s very clear. One particular moment. She looked at a woman being led past us to a nearby table. She waited for the woman to be seated and looked a while longer. Then she said, ‘If she were wearing any more makeup she would burst into flames.’ ”

I laughed at that and noted how the memory remained alive in his eyes. He was seeing Artis across the table, across the years, a kind of waveform, barely discernible. The wine arrived and he managed to look at the label and then to perform the ceremonial swirl and taste but he hadn’t sniffed the cork and did not indicate approval of the wine. He was still remembering. The waiter took a while to decide that it was permissible to pour. I watched all this, innocently, as an adolescent might.

I said, “They’re called Selected Assets Inc.”

“Who’s that?”

“The people I’m talking to.”

“Buy yourself another shirt. That may help them make up their mind,” he said.

When does a man become his father? I was nowhere near the time but it occurred to me that it could happen one day while I sat staring at a wall, all my defenses assimilated into the matching moment.

Food arrived and he began to eat at once while I looked and thought. Then I told him a story that made him pause.

I told him how his wife, the first, my mother, had died, at home, in her bed, unable to talk or listen or to see me sitting there. I’d never told him this and I didn’t know why I was telling him now, the hours I’d spent at her bedside, Madeline, with the neighbor in the doorway leaning on her cane. I found myself going into some detail, recalling whatever I could, speaking softly, describing the scene. The neighbor, the cane, the bed, the bedspread. I described the bedspread. I mentioned the old oak bureau with carved wings for handles. He would remember that. I think I wanted him to be touched. I wanted him to see the last hours as they happened. There was no dark motive. I wanted us to be joined in this. And how curious it was to be speaking about it here, amid the tiptoe waiters and the stalks of white amaryllis set along the walls, funereally, and the single white orchid in the small vase at the center of our table. There was no bitter theme running through these remarks. The scene itself, in Madeline’s room, would not permit it. The table, the lamp, the bed, the woman in the bed, the cane with the splayed legs.

We sat thinking and after a time one of us took a bite of food and a sip of wine and then the other did too. Everywhere in the room a vibrant tide of conversation, something I hadn’t noticed until now.

“Where was I when this happened?”

“You were on the cover of Newsweek.”

I watched him try to make sense of this and then explained that I’d seen the magazine with my father on the cover just before learning that my mother was in critical condition.

He leaned farther down toward the table, the back of his hand propping his chin.

“Do you know why we’re here?”

“You said you were last here with Artis.”

“And she is forever part of what we are here to discuss.”

“It seems too soon.”

“It’s all I think about,” he said.

All he thinks about. Artis in the chamber. I think about her also, now and then, shaved and naked, standing and waiting. Does she know she’s waiting? ls she wait-listed? Or is she simply dead and gone, beyond the smallest tremor of self-awareness?

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

“You want a witness.”

“I want a companion.”

“I understand.”

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

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

“You still believe in the idea.”

“Heart and mind,” he said.

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

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

“Back to the numbered levels,” I said.

“We’ve been through all this.”

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

“I’m making arrangements.”

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

I waited for what was coming next.

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

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

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

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

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

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

- 5 -

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

“Day after tomorrow.”

“If you want me to come by.”

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

“What happened?”

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

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

“Does he have some kind of alternative?”

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

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

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

I approached, careful not to get too close.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

• • •

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

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

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

“What’s the point?”

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

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

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

“You’re done with school.”

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

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

“Meaningless.”

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

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

“How do you do that?”

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

“With a few exceptions.”

“Very few,” he said.

There was nothing he cared to add.

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

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

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

“ ‘God is, but he does not exist.’ ”

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

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

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

A buoyancy in his voice, the self-approbation of a fourteen-year-old, and who could blame him. We were getting along pretty well, he and I. Maybe it was the broccoli. His mother sat next to him, saying nothing, looking at nothing, listening to us, yes, warily, not knowing what it was that the boy might say next.

I insisted on paying for lunch and Emma yielded, accepting my role as troop leader. The gallery occupied the entire third floor of an old loft building. We trekked up the stairs single-file and there was something about the cramped passage, the weak lighting, the stairs themselves and the walls themselves that made me think we’d been transformed into black-and-white, drained of skin pigment and the color values of our clothing.

The room was long and wide with plank floorboards and chipped and dented walls. The old bicycle belonging to the attendant was propped against the far wall next to her folding chair, no sign of the woman herself. But here was the rock itself, braced on a solid metal slab about three inches high. There were strips of white tape on the floor that marked visitor limits. Get close but don’t touch. Emma and I paused, half a room away, setting the rock in noble perspective. Stak wasted no time, striding directly to the object, which was taller than he was, and finding everything he needed to look at, all the irregularities of surface, the projections and indentations that belong to a rock, a boulder in this case, general shape somewhat rounded, maybe six feet across at its broadest point.

We approached slowly, she and I, quietly, but was it out of churchlike respect for the rock sculpture, the natural artwork, or were we simply observing the joined form of object and observer — the elusive boy who rarely attaches himself to something solid. Of course he reached across the taped border and managed to touch the rock, barely, and I felt his mother heed an inner pause, a caution, waiting for an alarm to start wailing. But the rock simply sat there.

We stood to either side of him and I allowed myself a minute or two with the rock.

Then I said, “Okay, go ahead.”

“What?”

“Define rock.”

I was thinking of myself at his age, determined to find the more or less precise meaning of a word, to draw other words out of the designated word in order to locate the core. This was always a struggle and the current instance was no different, a chunk of material that belongs to nature, shaped by forces such as erosion, flowing water, blowing sand, falling rain.

The definition needed to be concise, authoritative.

Stak yawned outstandingly, then leaned away from the rock, appraising it, measuring the thing from a certain distance, its physical parameters, solid surface, its crags, snags, spurs and pits, and he walked around it, noting the whole unhoned expanse.

“It’s hard, it’s rock hard, it’s petrified, it has major mineral content or it’s all mineral with the long-dead remains of plants and animals fossilized inside it.”

He spoke some more, arms drawn to his chest, hands mixing the fragments of his remarks, phrase by phrase. He was alone with the rock, a thing requiring a single syllable to give it outline and form.

“Officially let’s say a rock is a large hard mass of mineral substance lying on the ground or embedded in the soil.”

I was impressed. We kept looking at it, three of us, with traffic blasting by outside.

Stak talked to the rock. He told it that we were looking at it. He referred to us as three members of the species H. sapiens. He said that the rock would outlive us all, probably outlive the species itself. He went on for a while and then addressed no one in particular, saying there are three kinds of rock. He named them before I could attempt to recall the names and he spoke about petrology and geology and marble and calcite, and his mother and I listened while the boy grew taller. The attendant walked in then. I preferred to think of her as the curator, same woman, same feathered hat, a T-shirt and sandals, baggy denims fitted with bicycle clips. She carried a small paper bag, said nothing, went to her chair and took a sandwich out of the bag.

We watched her openly, in silence. The huge gallery area, nearly bare, and the one prominent object on display lent a significance to the simplest movement, man or woman, dog or cat. After a pause I asked Stak about another kind of nature, the weather, and he said he was no longer involved with the weather. He said the weather was long gone. He said that some things become de-necessitated.

His mother spoke then, at last, in a tense whisper.

“Of course you’re involved. The temperature, celsius and fahrenheit, and the cities, one hundred and four degrees, one hundred and eight degrees. India, China, Saudi Arabia. What happened to make you say you’re not involved? Of course you’re involved. Where did it all go?”

Her voice sounded lost and on this day everything about her suggested a lost time. Her son about to return to his father and then what happens, where’s the future if he doesn’t go back to school, what lies waiting? A son or daughter who travels at a wayward angle must seem a penalty the parent must bear — but for what crime?

I reminded myself that I needed a name for Stak’s father.

Before we left, the boy called across the room to the curator, asking her how they got the rock into the building. She was in the process of lifting the curved end of one slice of her bread in order to inspect the interior of the sandwich. She said they made a hole in the wall and hoisted the thing from a flatbed truck equipped with a crane. I’d thought of asking the same question the first time I was here but decided it was interesting to imagine the thing always here, undocumented.

Rocks are, but they do not exist.

On our way down the dim stairway I quoted the remark again and Stak and I tried to figure out what it means. It was a subject that blended well with our black-and-white descent.

• • •

I listen to classical music on the radio. I read the kind of challenging novel, often European, sometimes with a nameless narrator, always in translation, that I tried to read when I was an adolescent. Music and books, simply there, the walls, the floor, the furniture, the slight misalignment of two pictures that hang on the living room wall. I leave objects as they are. I look and let them be. I study every physical minute.

• • •

Two days later she showed up unannounced, never happened before, and she’d never been so clumsy and rushed, not slipping out of her jeans but fighting her way out, needing to rid herself of the seething sort of tensions that accompany any matter involving her son.

“He embraced me and left. I don’t know what scared me more, the leave-taking or the embrace. This is the first time totally that he volunteered an embrace.”

It appeared that she was undressing just to undress. I stood at the foot of the bed, shirt on, pants on, shoes and socks, and she kept undressing and kept talking.

“Who is this kid? Did I ever see him before? Here he is, there he goes. Embraced me and left. Goes where? He’s not my son, never was.”

“He was, he is. Every inch the boy you took out of the orphanage. Those missing years. His years,” I said. “You knew the moment you first saw him that he carried something you could never claim as your rightful due, except legally.”

“Orphanage. Sounds like a word out of the sixteenth century. The orphan boy becomes a prince.”

“A prince regent.”

“A princeling,” she said.

I laughed, she did not. All the command she’d demonstrated with the children in the schoolroom, there and elsewhere, the woman in the mirror knowing who she is and what she wants, all undermined by the boy’s brief visit, and here was the urgency of her need to break free, a flail of limbs on my messy bed.

I would see her less often after this, call and wait for a return call, longer hours at her job, and she was quieter now, early dinner and then home, alone, rarely a word about her son except to say that he had given up his Pashto, stopped learning, stopped speaking except when there was a practical matter that needed to be addressed. Her remarks were delivered in an evenness of tone, from a sheltered distance.

I decided to go running. I wore a sweatshirt, jeans and sneakers and went running in the park, around the reservoir, rain or shine. There is a smartphone that has an app that counts the steps a person takes. I did my own count, day by day, stride for stride, into the tens of thousands.

- 6 -

The woman swiveled away from her desktop screen and looked at me for the first time. She was a recruiter and the job in question was listed as compliance and ethics officer for a college in western Connecticut. I repeated the term to myself periodically as we spoke, omitting western Connecticut, which was a three-dimensional entity. Hills, trees, lakes, people.

She said I’d be responsible for interpreting the school charter to determine regulatory requirements in the context of state and federal laws. I said fine. She said something about supervision, coordination and oversight. I said okay. She waited for questions but I didn’t have a question. She threw in the term bilateral mandate and I told her that she resembled an actress whose name I didn’t know, someone appearing in a recent revival of a play I hadn’t seen. But I’d read about it, I said, and I’d looked at the photographs. The recruiter smiled faintly, her face becoming real in the amplified company of the actress. She understood that my remark was not an attempt to ingratiate myself. I was simply being self-distracted.

We spoke in a friendly way about theater and it was clear from this point on that she wanted to dissuade me from considering the position, not because I was underqualified or overeager but because I didn’t belong there, in that environment. Compliance and ethics officer. She didn’t realize that everything she’d reported about the position, in the authorized terminology of job listings, was suited to my preferences and central to my past experience.

• • •

People here and there, hands out, standing man with paper cup, woman crouched above her vomit in seasick colors, woman seated on blanket, body rocking, voice chanting, and I see this all the time and always pause to give them something and what I feel is that I don’t know how to imagine the lives behind the momentary contact, the dollar contact, and what I tell myself is that I am obliged to look at them.

Taxis, trucks and buses. The noise persists even when traffic is stopped. I hear this from my rooftop, heat beating into my head. This is the noise that hangs in the air, nonstop, whatever time of day or night, if you know how to listen.

I didn’t use my credit card for eight straight days. What’s the point, what’s the message. Cash leaves no trace, whatever that means.

The phone rings, recorded message from a state agency concerning massive disruptions of service. The voice does not say massive but this is how I interpret the message.

I check the stove after turning off the burners and then make sure the door is locked by unlocking it and then relocking it.

I look out the window at the streetlights and wait for someone to walk by, casting a long shadow in an old movie.

I feel a challenge to be equal to whatever is forthcoming. There is Ross and his need to confront the future. There is Emma and the tender revisions of our love.

The phone rings again, the same recorded message. I spend about two seconds wondering what kind of services will be disrupted. Then I try to think about all the phones of every type bearing this message, people in the millions, but no one will remember to mention it to anyone else because what we all know is not worth sharing.

• • •

Breslow was Emma’s surname, not her husband’s. I knew this much and I’d more or less settled on a first name for the man. Volodymyr. He was born in this country but I decided what’s the point of giving him a name if it’s not Ukrainian. Then I realized how wasteful this was, thinking this way, at this time, wasteful, shallow, callous, inappropriate.

Invented names belong to the strafed landscape of the desert, except for my father’s and mine.

I wandered through the townhouse until I found him, at the kitchen table, eating a grilled cheese sandwich. Someone nearby was running a vacuum cleaner. He raised a hand in greeting and I asked how he was doing.

“I no longer take my classic morning crap after breakfast. Everything’s slower and dumber.”

“Should I be packing?”

“Pack light. I’m packing light,” he said.

He was not trying to be funny.

“Is there a date? I’m interested to know because there’s a job offer pending.”

“Want something to eat? What kind of offer?”

“Compliance and ethics officer. Four days a week.”

“Say it again.”

“I’ll have long weekends free,” I said.

Ross had become a blue-denim’d man. He wore the pants every day, same pair, a casual blue shirt, gray running shoes without socks. I had a sandwich and a beer and the vacuuming gradually diminished and I tried to imagine the man’s days and nights without the woman. All his privileges and comforts, drained of meaning now. Money. Has it been money, my father’s money, that determines the way I think and live? Whether I accept what he offers or turn him down cold, is this what overwhelms everything else?

“When will I know?”

“Matter of days. You’ll be contacted,” he said.

“How?”

“However they do these things. I’m simply going away. I haven’t been active professionally for some time and I’m simply going away.”

“But there are people who know the purpose of the journey. Trusted associates.”

“They know certain things. They know I have a son,” he said. “And they know that I’m going away.”

We went back to saying nothing much and I waited for his hands to start shaking but he sat behind his beard and told me a long story about the time he’d explored the upper tiers of the East Room at the Morgan Library, after regular hours, memorizing the titles on the spines of priceless volumes arrayed just beneath the lavishly muraled ceiling, and I decided not to mention the fact that I’d been with him at the time.

• • •

There was a woman on the subway platform, across the tracks. She stood at the wall, in wide trousers and a light sweater, eyes closed, and who does this, on a subway platform, people milling, trains coming and going. I watched her and when my train came I did not board and waited for the tracks to be clear again and resumed watching her, a woman seeming to draw ever inward, so I chose to believe. I wanted her to be the woman I’d seen before, twice, standing on a sidewalk, motionless, eyes closed. The platform began to get crowded and I had to change position to see her. I wondered if she was involved in some kind of cultural tong war, part of a faction in exile working out an interpretation of their role, their mission. This would be the point of the sign, if there was a sign, a message directed to other factions, partisans of another theory, another conviction.

I liked this idea, it made total sense, and I imagined myself leaving the platform, hurrying up the steps and across the street and down the other set of steps and through the turnstile to the other platform to ask her about this, her group, her sect.

But this was a different woman and there was no sign. Of course I’d known this from the start. There was nothing left for me to do but wait for her train to enter the station, people leaving, people boarding. I wanted to be sure she would not be standing there, she would not remain behind, hands folded at her waist, eyes closed, on an empty platform.

• • •

I called and left messages and found myself one day standing across the street from her building, Emma’s. A man walked by, dusty boots, a set of keys on a ring dangling from his belt. I checked my keys. Then I crossed the street, entered the lobby and pressed her bell. The inner door was locked of course. I waited and pressed again. I thought of walking to her school and asking someone if I might see Emma Breslow. I spoke the full name inwardly.

Her cellphone was no longer functioning. This was a plunge into prehistory. What was the first thing I would say to her when we spoke, finally?

Compliance and ethics officer.

Then what?

A college in western Connecticut. Not far from the horse farm where we met. You’ll come to visit. We’ll ride a horse.

I didn’t go to her school. I took a long walk on crowded streets and saw four young women with shaved heads. They were a group, they were friends, not flouncing along like runway models dressed for world-weary collapse. Tourists, I thought, northern Europe, and I made a tepid attempt to read meaning into their appearance. But sometimes the street spills over me, too much to absorb, and I have to stop thinking and keep walking.

I called the school and someone said she was on brief leave.

The job was set, start in two weeks, well before the school year begins, time to accompany Ross, time to return, to adjust, and I didn’t know how I felt about going back there, the Convergence, that crack in the earth. Here, in the settled measure of days and weeks, there were no arguments to make, no alternatives to propose. I’d accepted the situation, my father’s. But I needed to talk to Emma beforehand, tell her everything, finally, father, mother, stepmother, the name change, the numbered levels, all the blood facts that follow me to bed at night.

She called that night, late, speaking in a voice that was all urgency, heavy pressure bearing upon her, word after word. Stak had disappeared. It happened five days ago. She was in Denver now with the boy’s father. She’d been there since day two. The police had issued a missing person report. There was a search unit working on the case. They’d confiscated his computer and other devices. The parents were in touch with a private investigator.

Two of them, mother and father, the shared anguish, the mystery of a son who decides to vanish. His father was certain that the boy hadn’t been taken and detained by others. There had been signs of some kind of activity beyond Stak’s customary stray behavior. That was all. What else could there be? She was exhausted. I spoke briefly, saying what I had to, and asked how I might reach her. She said she’d call again and was gone.

I stood in the bedroom and felt defeated. It was a cheap and selfish feeling, a bitterness of spirit. Rain was hitting the window and I lifted it open and let the cool air enter. Then I looked in the mirror over the bureau and simulated a suicide by gunshot to the head. I did it three more times, working on different faces.

- 7 -

There was a sandstorm wavering across the landscape and the airstrip was unapproachable for a time. Our small plane circled the complex while we waited for a chance to land. From this height the structure itself was a model of shape and form, a wilderness vision, all lines and angles and jutted wings, set securely nowhere.

Ross was in the seat in front of me speaking French with a woman across the narrow aisle. The plane had five seats, we were the only passengers. He and I had been traveling for many hours stretching to days, spending a night in an embassy or consulate somewhere, and I had the feeling that he was drawing things out, not delaying his arrival for the sake of living one more day but simply placing things in perspective.

What things?

Mind and memory, I guess. His decision. Our father-and-son encounter, three-plus decades, all dips and swerves.

This is what long journeys are for. To see what’s back behind you, lengthen the view, find the patterns, know the people, consider the significance of one matter or another and then curse yourself or bless yourself or tell yourself, in my father’s situation, that you’ll have a chance to do it all over again, with variations.

He wore a safari jacket and blue jeans.

The woman had been in her seat when Ross and I boarded this last aircraft. She would be his guide, leading him through the final hours. I listened to them, on and off, caught a phrase here and there, all about procedures and schedules, the detailwork of another day at the office. She may have been in her mid-thirties, wearing a version of the green two-piece garment associated with hospital staff, and her name was Dahlia.

The plane circled lower and the complex appeared to float up out of the earth. All around it the immense fever burn of ash and rock. The sandstorm was out there, more visibly now, dust rising in great dark swelling waves, only upright, rollers breaking vertically, a mile high, two miles, I had no idea, trying to work miles into kilometers, then trying to think of the word, in Arabic, that refers to such phenomena. This is what I do to defend myself against some spectacle of nature. Think of a word.

Haboob, I thought.

When the storm roar reached us and the wind began to bounce the aircraft around, we felt a tangible danger. The woman said something and I asked Ross to interpret.

“The complications of awe,” he said.

It sounded French, even in English, and I repeated the phrase and so did he and the plane banked away from the advancing rampart and I began to wonder whether this was a preview in trembling depth of an image I might encounter on one of the screens in one of the empty halls where I would soon be walking.

• • •

I wasn’t sure whether this was the same room I’d occupied before. Maybe it just looked the same. But I felt different, being here. It was just a room now. I didn’t need to study the room and to analyze the plain fact of my presence within it. I set my overnight bag on the bed and did some stretching exercises and squat-jumps in an attempt to shake the long journey from body memory. The room was not an occasion for my theories or abstractions. I did not identify with the room.

• • •

Dahlia may have been from this area but I understood that origins were not the point here and that categories in general were not intended to be narrowed or even named.

She took us along a broad corridor where there was an object secured to a granite base. It was a human figure, male, nude, not set within a pod or fashioned from bronze or marble or terra-cotta. I tried to determine the medium, a body posed simply, not a Greek river god or Roman charioteer. One man, headless — he had no head.

She turned to face us, walking backwards, speaking piecemeal French, and Ross translated, wearily.

“This is not a silicone-and-fiberglass replica. Real flesh, human tissue, human being. Body preserved for a limited time by cryoprotectants applied to the skin.”

I said, “He has no head.”

She said, “What?”

My father said nothing.

There were several other figures, some female, and the bodies were clearly on display, as in a museum corridor, all without heads. I assumed that the brains were in chilled storage and that the headless motif was a reference to preclassical statuary dug up from ruins.

I thought of the Stenmarks. I hadn’t forgotten the twins. This was their idea of postmortem decor and it occurred to me that there was a prediction implied in this exhibit. Human bodies, saturated with advanced preservatives, serving as mainstays in the art markets of the future. Stunted monoliths of once-living flesh placed in the showrooms of auction houses or set in the windows of an elite antiquarian shop along the stylish stretch of Madison Avenue. Or a headless man and woman occupying a corner of a grand suite in the London penthouse owned by a Russian oligarch.

My father’s capsule next to Artis was ready. I tried not to think of the mannequins I’d seen on the earlier visit. I wanted to be free of references and relationships. The sight of the bodies confirmed that we were back, Ross and I, and that was enough.

Dahlia led us along an empty hall with doors and walls in matching colors. When we turned the corner there was a surprise, a room with door ajar, and I approached and looked inside. Plain chair, table with several implements evenly spread, small man in a white smock seated on a bench at the far wall.

Seemed ominous to me, a miniature room, bare walls, low ceiling, bench and chair, but it was the setting for nothing more than a haircut and shave. The barber put Ross in the chair and worked quickly, using a thinning scissors and a silent clipper. He and the guide exchanged brief remarks in a language I could not identify. And here was my father’s face emerging from the dense hair. The hair was a nest for the face. The shaved face was a sad story, eyes blank, flesh caved beneath the stark cheekbones, jaw turned to mush. Am I seeing too much? The compressed space lends itself to overstatement. Hair shed everywhere, head showing small ruts and lesions. Then the eyebrows, gone so quick I missed the moment.

We had to pause, those around the chair, when my father’s hand began to tremble. We stood and watched. We did not move. We maintained a silence that was oddly reverent.

When the shaking stopped, the guide and the barber spoke again, incomprehensibly, and it occurred to me that this was the language I’d been told about, first by Ross and then by the man in the artificial garden, Ben-Ezra, who spoke of a developing language system far more expressive and precise than any of the world’s existing forms of discourse.

The barber used traditional razor and foam to finish working the indentations around the mouth and jaw and I listened to Dahlia speak in choppy syllablelike units that were interspersed at times with long-drawn breathless episodes of humdrum monotone. There was a slant of the upper body. There was a thing she did with her left hand.

The barber in halting English told me that the body hair would be removed closer to the time. Then they helped Ross out of the chair and he looked ready. A terrible thought but this is what I saw, a man with nothing left to him but the clothing he wore.

• • •

I walked the halls, a revisitation, each turn of a corner unfurling some hint of memory. Doors and walls. One long hallway sky-dyed, faint vapor trails in hazy grays traced along the upper wall and an edge of the ceiling. I stopped a while to think about something. When did I ever stop in order to think? Time seemed suspended until someone walked by. What sort of someone? I was thinking about the remarks my father had once made concerning the human life span, the time we spend alive, minute to literal minute, birth to death. A period so brief, he said, that we might measure it in seconds. And I wanted to do just that, calculate his life in the context of the interval known as a second, one sixtieth of a minute. What would this tell me? It would be a marker, the last number in an ordered sequence to set alongside the willful tide of his days and nights, who he was and what he’d said and done and undone. A form of memorial emblem maybe, a thing to whisper to him in the final flash of his awareness. But then there was the fact that I didn’t know how old he was, how many years, months and days I might convert to a pre-eminent number of seconds.

I decided not to be troubled by this. He had walked out the door, rejecting his wife and son while the kid was doing his homework. Sine cosine tangent. These were the mystical words I would associate with the episode from that point on. The moment freed me of any responsibility concerning his particular numbers, date of birth included.

I resumed walking the halls. I was here only provisionally, step by step, assuming the duties of the man, my age and shape, who’d been here before. Then I saw the screen, lower edge, a broad strip, wall to wall, visible beneath the ceiling niche. This was a welcome sight. The serial force of images would overwhelm my sense of floating in time. I needed the outside world, whatever the impact.

I walked to a point within five meters of the place where the screen would lower to the floor. I stood and waited, wondering what sort of event would jump out at me. Event, phenomenon, revelation. Nothing happened. I counted silently to one hundred and the screen remained where it was. I did it again, murmuring the numbers, pausing after each series of ten, and the screen did not lower. I shut my eyes and waited a while longer.

People standing with eyes shut. Was I part of an epidemic of closed eyes?

The emptiness, the hush of the long hall, the painted doors and walls, the knowledge that I was a lone figure, motionless, stranded in a setting that seemed designed for such circumstances — this was beginning to resemble a children’s story.

I open my eyes. Nothing happens. A boy’s adventures in the void.

• • •

I had a clear recollection of the stone room with the huge jeweled skull, the megaskull, adorning one wall. The setting was different this time. A man wearing a dust mask led Ross and me into a location, or a situation, that I recognized as the veer. One of many, I assumed, and there was a moment, a nonmoment, in which time was suspended as we slipped down to one of the numbered levels. Then we followed the man to a boardroom where four others were seated, two on each side of a long table, men and women, all baldheaded and barefaced, wearing loose white garments.

This is what Ross was wearing. He was relatively alert, prompted by a mild stimulant. The guide directed us to facing chairs and then left the room. We tried not to study each other, six of us, and no one had a word to say.

These were individuals self-chosen for the role but immersed nevertheless in the final hours of the one life each had known. I’d welcomed anything that Artis had to say in this situation. These were strangers, this was my father, and a thoughtful silence was a distinct blessing. All the mad fixations submerged for a time.

It was not a long wait. Three men, two women entered, middle-aged, fully dressed, clearly visitors here. They took seats at the far margins of the table. I understood that they were benefactors, private individuals or possibly envoys, one or two of them, from some agency or institute or cabal, as Ross had once explained. Here he was, a benefactor himself, and now a lost shorn figure without a suit or tie or personal database.

Another brief moment, another silence, then the next entrance. Tall somber woman, turtleneck and tight pants, hair bunched afro-style, trace of gray.

I registered these things, I said the words to myself, identified the kind of face and body and apparel. If I failed to do this, would the individual disappear?

She stood at one end of the table, hands on hips, elbows flaring, and she appeared to be speaking into the table itself.

“Sometimes history is single lives in momentary touch.”

She let us think about this. I could almost believe that I was meant to raise my hand and give an example.

“We don’t need examples,” she said, “but here’s one anyway. Painfully simplistic. A scientist doing obscure research in a lost corner of a laboratory somewhere. Living on beans and rice. Unable to complete a theory, a formula, a synthesis. Half delirious. Then he attends a conference halfway around the world and shares a lunch and a few ideas with another scientist who has come from a different direction.”

We waited.

“What’s the result? The result is a new way for us to understand our place in the galaxy.”

We waited some more.

“Or what else?” she said. “Or a man with a gun walks out of a crowd toward the leader of a major nation and nothing is ever quite the same.”

She looked into the table, thinking.

“Your situation, those few of you on the verge of the journey toward rebirth. You are completely outside the narrative of what we refer to as history. There are no horizons here. We are pledged to an inwardness, a deep probing focus on who and where we are.”

She looked at them, one by one, my father and the other four.

“You are about to become, each of you, a single life in touch only with yourself.”

Did she make it sound forbidding?

“Others, far greater in number, have come here in failing health in order to die and be prepared for the chamber. You are to be postmarked Zero K. You are the heralds, choosing to enter the portal prematurely. The portal. Not a grand entranceway or flimsy website but a complex of ideas and aspirations and hard-earned realities.”

I needed a name for her. I hadn’t named anyone on this visit. A name would add dimension to the lithe body, suggest a place of origin, help me identify the circumstances that had brought her here.

“It will not be total darkness and utter silence. You know this. You’ve been instructed. First you will undergo the biomedical redaction, only a few hours from now. The brain-edit. In time you will re-encounter yourself. Memory, identity, self, on another level. This is the main thrust of our nanotechnology. Are you legally dead, or illegally so, or neither of these? Do you care? You will have a phantom life within the braincase. Floating thought. A passive sort of mental grasp. Ping ping ping. Like a newborn machine.”

She took a walk around the table, addressing us from the other end. Never mind giving her a name, I thought. That was last time. I wanted this visit to be over. The determined father in his uterine tube. The aging son in his routine pursuits. The return of Emma Breslow. The position of compliance and ethics officer. Check the wallet, check the keys. The walls, the floor, the furniture.

“If our planet remains a self-sustaining environment, how nice for everyone and how bloody unlikely,” she said. “Either way, the subterrane is where the advanced model realizes itself. This is not submission to a set of difficult circumstances. This is simply where the human endeavor has found what it needs. We’re living and breathing in a future context, doing it here and now.”

I looked across the table at Ross. He was elsewhere, not dreamily adrift but thinking hard, thinking back, trying to see something or understand something.

Maybe I was recalling the same tense moment, two of us in a room and the words spoken by the father.

I’m going with her, he said.

Now, two years later, he was finding his way toward these words.

“That world, the one above,” she said, “is being lost to the systems. To the transparent networks that slowly occlude the flow of all those aspects of nature and character that distinguish humans from elevator buttons and doorbells.”

I wanted to think about this. That slowly occlude the flow. But she kept on talking, looking up from the tabletop to study us in our collective aspect, the earthlings and the shaved otherworlders.

“Those of you who will return to the surface. Haven’t you felt it? The loss of autonomy. The sense of being virtualized. The devices you use, the ones you carry everywhere, room to room, minute to minute, inescapably. Do you ever feel unfleshed? All the coded impulses you depend on to guide you. All the sensors in the room that are watching you, listening to you, tracking your habits, measuring your capabilities. All the linked data designed to incorporate you into the megadata. Is there something that makes you uneasy? Do you think about the technovirus, all systems down, global implosion? Or is it more personal? Do you feel steeped in some horrific digital panic that’s everywhere and nowhere?”

She needed a name that started with the letter Z.

“Here of course we refine our methods constantly. We are putting our science into the wonder of reanimation. There is no slinking trivia. No drift of applications.”

A clipped voice, authoritative, slightly accented, and the tension in her body, the stretched energy. I could call her Zina. Or Zara. The way the capital letter Z dominates a word or name.

The door opened and a man entered. Bruised jeans and a pullover shirt, long pigtail dangling. This was new, the plaited hair, but the man was easily recognizable as one of the Stenmark twins. Which one, and did it matter?

The woman remained at one end of the table, the man took up a position at the other end, informally, with no hint of staged choreography. They did not acknowledge each other.

He made a linked gesture, face and hand, indicating that we have to begin somewhere so let’s just see what happens.

“Saint Augustine. Let me tell you what he said. Goes like this.”

He paused and closed his eyes, giving the impression that his words belonged to darkness, coming to us out of the centuries.

“ ‘And never can a man be more disastrously in death than when death itself shall be deathless.’ ”

I thought what.

It took him a while to open his eyes. Then he stared over Zara’s head into the far wall.

He said, “I won’t attempt to set this remark within the meditation on Latin grammar that inspired it. I simply place it before you as a challenge. Something to think about. Something to engage you in your body pod.”

The same deadpan Stenmark. But he had clearly aged, face drawn tighter, hands veined a deep blue. I’d given the twins a total of four first names but could not unscramble them now.

“Terror and war, everywhere now, sweeping the surface of our planet,” he said. “And what does it all amount to? A grotesque kind of nostalgia. The primitive weapons, the man in the rickshaw wearing a bomb vest. Not a man necessarily, could be a boy or girl or woman. Say the word. Jinriksha. Still hand-pulled in certain towns and cities. The small two-wheeled carriage. The small homemade explosive. And on the battlefield, assault rifles of earlier times, old Soviet weapons, old battered tanks. All these attacks and battles and massacres embedded in a twisted reminiscence. The skirmishes in the mud, the holy wars, the bombed-out buildings, entire cities reduced to hundreds of rubbled streets. Hand-to-hand combat that takes us back in time. No petrol, no food or water. Men in jungle packs. Crush the innocent, burn the huts and poison the wells. Relive the history of the bloodline.”

Head slanted, hands in pockets.

“And the post-urban terrorist, having abandoned his adopted city or country, what does he contribute? Websites that transmit atavistic horrors. Beheadings out of dreadful folklore. And the fierce interdictions, the centuries’ old doctrinal disputes, kill those who belong to the other caliphate. Everywhere, enemies who share histories and memories. It is the patchwork sweep of a world war, unnamed as such. Or am I crazy? Or am I a babbling fool? Lost wars in remote terrain. Storm the village, kill the men, rape the women, abduct the children. Hundreds dead but guess what — no film or photographs, so what’s the point, where’s the reaction. And warriorship in brighter light. We see it all the time. Scenes of burning tanks and trucks, soldiers or militiamen in dark hoods standing amid the crushed barbed wire witnessing a conflagration while they pound on a scorched bathtub with hammers and rifle butts and car jacks to send an ancestral drumbeat into the night.”

He appeared to be in a state of near seizure, body shaking now, hands whirling.

He said, “What is war? Why talk about war? Our concerns here are wider and deeper. We live every minute in the embrace of our shared belief, the vision of undying mind and body. But their wars have become inescapable. Isn’t war the only ripple on the dim surface of human affairs? Or am I brainsick? Isn’t there a deficiency out there, a shallow spirit that guides the collective will?”

He said, “Who are they without their wars? These events have become insistent clusters that touch and spread and bring us all into range of a monodrama far larger, worldwide, than we’ve ever witnessed.”

Zara was watching him now and I was watching her. They were clinging to the surface, weren’t they, both of them? Earth in all its meanings, third planet from the sun, realm of mortal existence, every definition in between. I didn’t want to forget that she needed a surname. I owed her this. Isn’t that why I was here, to subvert the dance of transcendence with my tricks and games?

“People on bicycles, the only means of transport for noncombatants in the war zone except for walking, limping or crawling. Running is reserved for the warring factions and for the news photographers who cover the scene, as in earlier world wars. Is there a longing for hand-to-hand, for crush his skull and smoke a cigarette. Car bombings at sacred sites. Rocket launchings by the hundreds. Families living in stinking basements, no lights, no heat. Outside, men are tearing down the bronze statue of the former national hero. A hallowed act, rooted in remembrance, in re-experience. Men in camouflage uniforms spattered with mud. Men in bullet-scarred jeeps. The rebels, the volunteers, the insurgents, the separatists, the activists, the militants, the dissidents. And those who return home to bleak memories and deep depression. A man in a room, where death shall be deathless.”

He was deadpan again, faceless, body rocking slightly. Where is his brother? And what is this man’s relationship with Zara, although maybe she is Nadya. He has a wife back home, I’d already established this, the brothers married to sisters. I wanted to hear the lively tilt of the twins in their merged commentary. Was the missing twin a sleek nanobody crusted in ice in a lonely pod? Were all pods the same height? And here is Nadya, who stands at the other end of the table. Are they mismatched lovers or total strangers?

Stenmark said, “Apocalypse is inherent in the structure of time and long-range climate and cosmic upheaval. But are we seeing the signs of a self-willed inferno? And are we counting the days before advanced nations, or not so advanced, begin to deploy the most hellish weapons? Isn’t it inevitable? All the secret nestings in various parts of the world. Will planned aggressions be nullified by cyberattack? Will the bombs and missiles reach their targets? Are we safe here in our subterrane? And whatever the megatonnage, how will the shock register continent to continent, the blow to world consciousness? How post-Hiroshima and post-Nagasaki? Back to the old shattered cities, to primeval ruin one hundred thousand times more devastating than before. I think of the dead and half-dead and badly injured, nostalgically placed on rickshaws to be pulled across the crushed landscape. Or am I lost in the hazy memory of old film footage?”

I sneaked a look at the bald woman across the table, seated next to Ross. Anticipation, a near joy visible in her face. It didn’t matter what the speaker had to say. She was eager to slip out of this life into timeless repose, leaving behind all the shaky complications of body, mind and personal circumstance.

Stenmark appeared to be finished. Hands folded at his midsection, head lowered. In this prayer stance he said something to his colleague. He was speaking the resident language, the unique system of the Convergence, a set of voice sounds and gestures that made me think of dolphins communicating in mid-ocean. She responded with an extended remark that included some head-bobbing, possibly comic in other circumstances but not here, not with Nadya doing the bobbing.

Her accent vanished inside the opaque bubble of whatever she was saying. She left her position and walked along one side of the table, placing her hand on the shaved head of each of the heralds in turn.

“Time is multiple, time is simultaneous. This moment happens, has happened, will happen,” she said. “The language we’ve developed here will enable you to understand such concepts, those of you who will enter the capsules. You will be the newborns, and over time the language will be instilled.”

She turned the corner and swung around to the other end of the table.

“Signs, symbols, gestures and rules. The name of the language will be accessible only to those who speak it.”

She placed her hand on my father’s head — my father or his representation, the naked icon he would soon become, a dormant in a capsule, waiting for his cyber-resurrection.

Her accent thickened now, maybe because I wanted it to.

“Technology has become a force of nature. We can’t control it. It comes blowing over the planet and there’s nowhere for us to hide. Except right here, of course, in this dynamic enclave, where we breathe safe air and live outside the range of the combative instincts, the blood desperation so recently detailed for us, on so many levels.”

Stenmark walked to the door.

“Ignore the manly directive,” he said to us. “It will only get you killed.”

Then he was gone. Where to, what next. Nadya looked up and away toward a corner of the room. Her arms were raised now, framing her face, and she spoke in the language of the Convergence. She had a strength of presence. But what was she saying, and to whom? She was a singular figure, self-enclosed, high-collared shirt, fitted trousers. I thought of women in other places, streets and boulevards in major cities, wind blowing, a woman’s skirt lifting in the breeze, the way the wind tenses the skirt, giving shape to the legs, making the skirt dip between the legs, revealing knees and thighs. Were these my father’s thoughts or mine? The skirt whipping against the legs, a wind so brisk that the woman turns sideways, facing away from the force of it, the skirt dancing up, folding between the thighs.

She was Nadya Hrabal. That was her name.

- 8 -

I was in the chair in my room, waiting for someone to come and take me somewhere else.

I was thinking about the free play of step-by-step and word-for-word that we experience up there, out there, walking and talking under the sky, swabbing on suntan lotion and conceiving children and watching ourselves age in the bathroom mirror, next to the toilet where we evacuate and the shower where we purify.

Now here I am, in a habitat, a controlled environment where days and nights are interchangeable, where the inhabitants speak an occult language and where I am forced to wear a wristband that contains a disk that reports my whereabouts to those who watch and listen.

Except that I wasn’t wearing a wristband, was I? This visit was different. A deathwatch. The son permitted to accompany his father into the depths, beyond the allowable levels.

I slept for a time in the chair and when I woke up my mother was present in the room. Madeline or her aura. How strange, I thought, that she might find me here, now in particular, in the wake of the woeful choice that Ross has made, her husband for a time. I wanted to sink into the moment. My mother. How ill-suited these two words were to this huge cratered enclosure, where people maintained a studied blankness about their nationality, their past, their families, their names. Madeline in our living room with her avatar of personal technology, the mute button on the TV remote. Here she is, a breath, an emanation.

I used to follow her along the stately aisles of the enormous local pharmacy, a boy in his neo-pubescence, his budhood, reading the labels on boxes and tubes of medication. Sometimes I sneaked open a container to read the printed insert, eager to sample the impacted jargon of warnings, precautions, adverse reactions, contraindications.

“Time to stop mousing around,” she said.

I’d never felt more human than I did when my mother lay in bed, dying. This was not the frailty of a man who is said to be “only human,” subject to a weakness or a vulnerability. This was a wave of sadness and loss that made me understand that I was a man expanded by grief. There were memories, everywhere, unsummoned. There were images, visions, voices and how a woman’s last breath gives expression to her son’s constrained humanity. Here was the neighbor with the cane, motionless, ever so, in the doorway, and here was my mother, an arm’s length away, a touch away, in stillness.

Madeline using her thumbnail to gouge price stickers off the items she’d purchased, a determined act of vengeance against whatever was out there doing these things to us. Madeline standing in place, eyes closed, rolling her arms up and around, again and again, a form of relaxation. Madeline watching the traffic channel, forever it seemed, as the cars crossed the screen soundlessly, passing out of her view and back into the lives of the drivers and passengers.

My mother was ordinary in her own way, free-souled, my place of safe return.

• • •

The escort was a nondescript man who seemed less a human being than a life-form. He led me through the halls and then pointed to the door of the food unit and went away.

The food tasted like medicated sustenance and I was trying to think my way through it, to defeat it mentally, when the Monk walked in. I hadn’t thought of the Monk in some time but hadn’t forgotten him either. Was he here only when I was here? He wore a plain brown robe, full-length, and was barefoot. This made sense but I didn’t know why or how. He sat at the facing table, seeing only what was in his plate.

“We’ve been here before, you and I, and here we are again,” I said.

I looked at him openly. I mentioned his account of the journey he’d made to the holy mountain in Tibet. Then I watched him eat, his head nearly in the plate. I mentioned our visit to the hospice, he and I — the safehold. I surprised myself by recalling that word. I spoke the word twice. He ate and then I ate but I kept watching him, long hands, condensed look. He was wearing his last meal on his robe. Did it fall off his fork or did he vomit it up?

He said, “I’ve outlasted my memory.”

He looked older and the sense he carried with him of nowhereness was more pronounced than ever and in fact this is where we were. Nowhere. I watched him nearly consume his fork with the food that was on it.

“But you still visit those who are waiting to die and to be taken down. Their emotional and spiritual needs. And I wonder if you speak the language. Do you speak the language being spoken here?”

“My entire body rejects it.”

This was encouraging.

“I speak only Uzbek now.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. So I said, “Uzbekistan.”

He was finished eating, the plate scraped clean, and I wanted to say something before he left the unit. Anything at all. Tell him my name. He was the Monk, who was I? But I had to pause. For a long bare moment I could not think of my name. He stood, pushed back the chair and took a step toward the door. A moment between being no one and someone.

Then I said, “My name is Jeffrey Lockhart.”

This was not a remark he could assimilate.

So I said, “What do you do when you’re not eating or sleeping or talking to people about their spiritual well-being?”

“I walk the halls,” he said.

• • •

Back to the room, to the shaved space.

All the zones, the sectors, the divisions that I hadn’t seen. Computer centers, commissaries, shelters for attacks or natural disasters, the central command area. Were there recreational facilities? Libraries, movies, chess tournaments, soccer matches? How many numbers in the numbered levels?

• • •

He was naked on a slab, not a hair on his body. It was hard to connect the life and times of my father to this remote semblance. Had I ever thought of the human body and what a spectacle it is, the elemental force of it, my father’s body, stripped of everything that might mark it as an individual life. It was a thing fallen into anonymity, all the normal responses dimming now. I did not turn away. I felt obliged to look. I wanted to be contemplative. And at some far point in my wired mind, I may have known a kind of weak redress, the satisfaction of the wronged boy.

He was alive, hovering at some level of anesthetic calm, and he said something, or maybe something was said, a word or two seeming to rise out of the body spontaneously.

A woman in a smock and surgical mask stood on the other side of Ross. I looked at her, more or less for approval, and then leaned toward the body.

“Gesso on linen.”

I think this is what I heard, then other slurred fragments that were not comprehensible. The sunken face and body. The man’s depressed dick. The rest of him simply limbs, projecting parts.

I nodded at the sound of the words and exchanged a brief look with the woman and then nodded again. I knew only that gesso was a term used in art, a surface or medium. Gesso on linen.

I was allowed a moment alone, which I spent staring into space, and then others came to prepare Ross for his long slow sabbatical in the capsule.

• • •

I was led to a room in which all four walls were covered with a continuous painted image of the room itself. There were only three pieces of furniture, two chairs and a low table, all depicted from several angles. I remained standing, turning my head and then my body to scan the mural. The fact of four plane surfaces being a likeness of themselves as well as background for three objects of spatial extent struck me as a subject worthy of some deep method of inquiry, phenomenology maybe, but I wasn’t equal to the challenge.

A woman eventually entered, smallish, brisk in a suede jacket and knit trousers. She had eyes that seemed to stream light and this is what made me realize that she was the woman in the surgical mask who’d stood across from me during the crude viewing of the body.

She said, “You prefer to stand.”

“Yes.”

She considered this, then took a seat at the table. There was a silence. No one entered with tea and cookies on a tray.

She said, “There were many discussions, Ross and Artis and I. We are born without choosing to be. Should we have to die in the same manner? The resources he placed at our disposal were of crucial importance.”

What else did I see? She wore a scarf that was striking in design and I decided that she was fifty-five years old, of local origin, more or less, and a figure of some authority.

“After Artis entered the chamber I spent time with your father in New York and in Maine. He was more generous than ever. Although a man transformed. Of course you know this. Reduced to near shreds by the loss. Isn’t it a human glory to refuse to accept a certain fate? What is it that we want here? Only life. Let it happen. Give us breath.”

I understood that she was speaking to me out of respect for my father. He had asked, she was complying.

“We have language to guide us out of dire times. We are able to think and speak about what can conceivably happen in time to come. Why not follow our words bodily into the future tense? If we tell ourselves forthrightly that consciousness will persist, that cryopreservatives will continue to nourish the body, it is the first awakening toward the blessed state. We are here to make it happen, not simply to will it, or crawl toward it, but to place the endeavor in full dimension.”

Her fingers vibrated when she spoke. I was slightly wary. Here was a woman coiled in thought, instant by instant, determined to make things happen.

“I’m done with theories and arguments,” I said. “Ross and I, we talked and shouted our way through all the levels.”

“He said that you never called him Dad. I said, How un-American. He tried to laugh but could not quite manage.”

In my bland shirt and pants I could imagine myself drifting into the wall painting and going unnoticed, a dusky figure in a corner of the room.

“Human life is an accidental fusion of tiny particles of organic matter floating in the cosmic dust. Life continuance is less accidental. It utilizes what we’ve learned in the thousands of years of our humanity. Not so random, not so chancy, but not unnatural.”

“Tell me about your scarf,” I said.

“Goat cashmere from Inner Mongolia.”

It was increasingly clear that she was a significant member of this undertaking. If the Stenmark twins were the creative core, the jokester visionaries, did this woman generate the income, set the direction? Was she one of the individuals who originated the idea of the Convergence, setting it in this harsh geography, beyond the limits of believability and law. A financier, a philosopher, a scientist who has broadened her role here. What was her particular experience? I would not inquire. And I would not ask her name or create one for her. This was my version of progress. Time to go home.

But she said there was one final site that Ross wanted me to visit. She led me to a veer, she and I with two escorts, and we went farther into the numbered levels than I’d gone before. How did I know this? I felt it, bone-deep, although no evidence of lapsed time or ostensible distance was apparent.

I was taken to an alcove and fitted with a breathing apparatus and a protective suit that resembled spacewear. It was not cumbersome and it allowed me to immerse myself in the unreal state of the occasion.

The woman said, “It’s only natural that we’ve endured some setbacks, a few stalled plans, an occasional mishap. There have been instances of hopes frustrated.”

She was looking out at me from her respirator.

“There are measures in effect that will maintain your father’s support although not at previous levels. There’s a foundation and an administrator and a number of inhibiting limits and safeguards and time factors.”

“You have support from other directions.”

“Of course, always. But what Ross did for us was a turning point. His unwavering faith, his worldwide resources.”

“You’ve had defections perhaps.”

“His willingness to be a participant in the most telling manner.”

We were led slowly along a narrow passageway.

On one wall there was a cracked clay tablet set horizontally and bearing a tightly compressed line of numbers, letters, square roots, cube roots, plus and minus signs, and there were parentheses, infinities and other symbols with an equal sign in the midst of it all, an indication of logical or mathematical equality.

I didn’t know what the equation was meant to signify and I had no intention of asking. Then I thought of the Convergence, the name itself, the word itself. Two distinct forces approaching a point of intersection. The merger, breath to breath, of end and beginning. Could the equation on the plaque be a scientific expression of what happens to a single human body when the forces of death and life join?

“Where is he now?”

“He’s in the process of cooldown. Or soon will be,” she said. “You are the son. Of course he made me to understand that you have reservations about this concept, this location as well. Skepticism is a virtue on certain occasions, although often a shallow one. But he never characterized you as a man with a closed mind.”

I wasn’t only his son, I was the son, the survivor, the heir apparent.

We encountered access tubes and airlocks and entered the cryostorage section. We were without escorts now and we went along a walkway that was slightly elevated. Soon an open area came into view and seconds later I saw what was in it.

There were rows of human bodies in gleaming pods and I had to stop walking to absorb what I was seeing. There were lines, files, long columns of naked men and women in frozen suspension. She waited for me and we approached slowly, at a height that provided clear perspective.

All pods faced in the same direction, dozens, then hundreds, and our path took us through the middle of these structured ranks. The bodies were arranged across an enormous floor space, people of various skin color, uniformly positioned, eyes closed, arms crossed on chest, legs pressed tight, no sign of excess flesh.

I recalled the three body pods that Ross and I had looked at on my earlier visit. Those were humans entrapped, enfeebled, individual lives stranded in some border region of a wishful future.

Here, there were no lives to think about or imagine. This was pure spectacle, a single entity, the bodies regal in their cryonic bearing. It was a form of visionary art, it was body art with broad implications.

The only life that came to mind belonged to Artis. I thought of Artis in her fieldwork, the time of mud trenches and crawl spaces, the objects dug up, earth-crusted tools and weapons, incised limestone fragments. And was there something nearly prehistoric about the artifacts ranged before me now? Archaeology for a future age.

I waited for the woman with the Mongolian scarf to tell me that here was a civilization designed to be reborn one day long after the catastrophic collapse of everything on the surface. But we walked and paused and walked again, in silence.

If this is what my father wanted me to see, then it was my corresponding duty to feel a twinge of awe and gratitude. And I did. Here was science awash in irrepressible fantasy. I could not stifle my admiration.

I thought finally of lavishly choreographed dance routines from Hollywood musicals of many decades past, dancers synchronized in the manner of a marching army. Here, there were no cuts or dissolves or soundtracks, no motion at all, but I kept on looking.

In time I followed the woman along a corridor that had murals of ravaged landscapes, on and on, scenes meant to be prophetic, a doubled landscape, each wall repeating the facing wall — disfigured hills, valleys and meadows. I looked left and right and left again, testing one wall against the other. The paintings had a kind of spiderwork finesse, a delicacy that intensified the ruin.

We came finally to an arched doorway that led into a small narrow room, stone-walled, in faint light. She gestured and I entered and after several steps forward I had to stop.

At the far wall there were two streamlined casings, taller than those I’d just seen. One was empty, the other held the body of a woman. There was nothing else in the room. I did not approach for a closer look. It seemed required of me to maintain an intervening space.

The woman was Artis. Who else would it be? But it took a while before I was able to absorb the image, the reality, attach her name to it, let the moment seep into me. I took a few steps forward, finally, noting that her body stance did not match the pose of all the others in their pods.

Her body seemed lit from within. She stood erect, on her toes, shaved head tilted upward, eyes closed, breasts firm. It was an idealized human, encased, but it was also Artis. Her arms were at her sides, fingers cusped at thighs, legs parted slightly.

It was a beautiful sight. It was the human body as a model of creation. I believed this. It was a body in this instance that would not age. And it was Artis, here, alone, who carried the themes of this entire complex into some measure of respect.

I thought to share my feelings, if only by look or gesture, a simple nod of the head, but when I turned to find the woman who’d led me here, she was gone.

The empty capsule would belong to Ross of course. His body shape would be restored, face toned, his brain (in local lore) geared to function at some damped level of identity. How could this man and woman have known, years ago, that they would reside in such an environment, on this subplanet, in this isolated room, naked and absolute, more or less immortal.

I looked for a time, then turned to find an escort standing in the doorway, younger person, genderless.

But I wasn’t ready to leave. I remained, eyes closed, thinking, remembering. Artis and her story of counting drops of water on a shower curtain. Here, the things to count, internally, will be endless. Forevermore. Her word. The savor of that word. I opened my eyes and looked a while longer, the son, the stepson, the privileged witness.

Artis belonged here, Ross did not.

• • •

I followed the escort into the veer and then out along a series of halls where there was a closed door every twenty meters or so. We came to an intersection and the escort pointed down an empty hallway. It was all simple sentences, subject, predicate, object, things narrowing down, and I was alone now, my body shrinking into the long expanse.

Then a wrinkle, a crease in the smooth surface, and I saw the screen at the end of the hall just as it began to lower, and here I am again, waiting for something to happen.

The first figures appeared even before the screen had fully unfurled.

Troops in black-and-white come striding out of the mist.

It’s a formidable image, undercut nearly at once by the crushed body of a soldier in camouflage gear sprawled in the front seat of a wrecked vehicle.

Stray dogs roaming the streets of an abandoned urban district. A minaret visible at the edge of the screen.

Troops in snowfall, crouched together, ten men spooning some slop from wooden bowls.

An aerial shot of white military trucks passing through a barren landscape. Maybe a drone image, I thought. Trying to sound informed, if only to myself.

I realized there was a soundtrack. Faint noises, engines revving, remote gunfire, voices barely audible.

Two armed men seated in the bed of a pickup truck, each with a cigarette dangling from his mouth.

Men in robes and headscarves throwing stones at a target that remains offscreen.

Half a dozen troops poised within a ruined battlement, looking over the parapet, rifle butts protruding from the wall notches, and one soldier wears a comic-strip facemask, brightly colored, long pink face with green eyebrows, rouged cheeks and a leering red mouth. Everything else is black-and-white.

I did not have to ask myself what the purpose was, the meaning behind all this, the mindset. It was Stenmark. It was here because. The visual equivalent, more or less, of his address to the group in the boardroom.

The boardroom. When was that? Who exactly was in the group? Stenmark’s world war. The man passionate, trembling at times.

Men in black walking single-file, each with a long sword, sunup, ritual murder, black head to foot, a chill discipline marking their stride.

Soldiers asleep in a bunker, stacks of sandbags.

Exodus: masses of people carrying whatever possessions they can manage, clothing, floor lamps, carpets, dogs. Flames rising across the screen behind them.

It takes me a while to notice that the soundtrack has become pure sound. A prolonged signal that rejects any trace of expressive intent.

Riot police tossing stun grenades at people retreating across a broad promenade.

Two elderly people on bicycles in devastated terrain. In time they ride alongside a column of tanks in a snowy field, a single limp body visible in a ditch.

Bodies: slaughtered men in a jungle clearing, vultures stepping among the corpses.

It was awful and I watched. I began to think of others watching, other screens, other halls, level after level throughout the entire complex.

Children outside a minivan, waiting to enter, black smoke hanging still in the distance, one child looking back that way, the others turned toward the camera, faces blank.

Hand-to-hand, six or seven men with knives and bayonets, some in camo jackets, concentrated bloodletting, up close, a tall man staggered, ready to fall, the others thrusting into the instant of stop-action.

Another drone image, ruined town, ghost town, small figures scavenging among the rubble.

A soldier’s unshaved face, the raw warrior breed, black knit cap, cigarette jutting from his mouth.

A cleric in rapid stride, Orthodox priest, canonical garments, his cape, his cassock, people marching behind him, others joining, folding into the picture, fists raised.

Facedown corpse on a potholed road, bomb debris everywhere.

The halls are jammed with people watching the screens. All of them thinking my thoughts.

Another comic-strip facemask, a cartoon facemask, a soldier among others, formed up, rifle held across upper body, his white face, purple nose, red lips curled in a sardonic sneer.

A woman in a chador, seen from the rear, stepping out of a car and walking head-down into a crowded square where a few people notice and watch and then begin to scatter, camera pulling back, then the blast, purely visual, seeming to rip the screen apart and shred the air around us. All those watching.

Mourners at graveside, some with automatic weapons strapped over their shoulders, the same black smoke seen earlier, a long way off, not climbing or spreading but utterly, eerily still, resembling a painted backdrop.

A small child with a funny hat squatting bare-ass to crap in the snow.

Then there is a pause and the steady keening noise of the soundtrack fades away. The screen fills with a numb gray sky and the camera slowly levels and the first impressive image is repeated.

Troops come striding out of the mist.

But this time the shot is prolonged and the men keep coming and there are wounded among them, limping figures, bloodied faces, a few men helmeted, most wearing black knit caps.

Sound resumes, realistic now, explosions somewhere, aircraft flying low, and the men begin to advance more warily, weapons held tight to bodies. They move past a mound of burning tires into city streets, buildings collapsed, wreckage everywhere. I watch them walking over shattered stonework and there are isolated shouts soon overwhelmed by the concentrated discharge of weapons.

It looks and sounds like traditional war, men in arms, and I recall the warped nostalgia that Stenmark had talked about, all the world wars embedded in these images, a soldier with a cigarette in his mouth, a soldier asleep in his bunker, a bearded soldier with a bandaged head.

Sounds of local gunfire and the men take cover, searching out the source, firing back, and the soundtrack flows into the action, loud, close, voices calling, and I have to step back from the screen even as the camera becomes more intimately involved, creeping along the terrain for close-ups of men’s faces, young and not so young, fingers gripping triggers, bodies edged against the frame of a ruined structure. It’s quick and clear and magnified, a sense of something impending, and all I’m able to do is watch and listen, a sudden clutter of sound and image, the camera sways and jitters and then finds a man standing in the hulk of a wrecked car, rifle sweeping the area. He fires several times, upper body flinching in rhythm. He ducks down and waits. We all wait. The camera scans the area and it is empty debris and light rain and then the single figure is back in sight, kneeling on the driver’s seat and firing once out of the shattered side window. Periods of near silence and the camera remains angled on the crouched man, who wears a headband, no helmet, and then the firing resumes from various quarters and the picture jumps and the man is hit. This is what I think I see. The camera loses him and catches only traces of muddled background. The noise becomes intense, rapid firing, a voice repeating the same word, and then he is back, wandering out into the open, without his rifle, camera steadying, and he is hit again and goes to his knees and I’m reciting these words to myself as I watch. He is hit again and goes to his knees and there is a distinct image of the figure, khaki field jacket, jeans and boots, spiky hair, he is three times life size, here, above me, shot and bleeding, stain spreading across his chest, young man, eyes shut, surpassingly real.

It was Emma’s son. It was Stak.

He topples forward and the camera spins away and that’s who it was, the son, the boy. Battle tanks approaching now and I need to see him again because even though there is no doubt, it happened too fast, it was not enough. A dozen tanks in lazy array rolling over sandbag barriers and I stand here waiting. Why would they show it again? But I have to wait, I need to see it. The tanks move along a road that bears a sign with Cyrillic and Roman characters. Konstantinovka. There is a crude drawing of a skull above the name.

Stak in Ukraine, a self-defense group, a volunteer battalion. What else could it be? I keep looking and waiting. Did the recruiters know his age or even his name? He’s a native son come home. Birth name, acquired name, nickname. All I know is Stak and maybe this is all there is to know, the kid who became a country of one.

I have to stay until the screen goes dark. I have to wait and see. And if they send an escort for me, the escort will have to wait. And if Stak doesn’t reappear, then let the picture fade, the sound die, the screen roll up, the entire hall go dark. The other halls empty out, an orderly flow of people, but this hall goes dark and I stand here with my eyes shut. All the times I’ve done this before, stand in a dark room, motionless, eyes shut, weird kid and grown man, was I making my way toward a space such as this, long cold empty hall, doors and walls in matching colors, dead silence, shadow streaming toward me.

Once the dark is total, I will simply stand and wait, trying hard to think of nothing.

- 9 -

I see a taxi parked three or four feet from the sidewalk and then a man in the gutter on his knees, shoes off, set behind him, and he is bowing, head to the pavement, and it takes me a moment to understand that he is the driver of the taxi and that the direction is Mecca, he is bowing toward Mecca.

• • •

On weekends, now and then, I stay in a guest room in my father’s townhouse, with kitchen privileges. The young man who deals with these matters, one of the corporate effigies, discusses details in the contemporary pattern of declarative sentences that slither gradually upward into questions.

• • •

Sometimes I think I go to museums just to hear the languages spoken by visitors to the galleries. Once I followed a man and woman from the limestone grave markers in fourth-century B.C. Cyprus all the way to Arms and Armor, waiting for them to resume talking to each other so I could identify the language, or try to, or make a dumb guess. The thought of approaching them to ask, politely, was outside my range.

• • •

I sit before a screen in a cubicle of frosted plexiglass marked Compliance and Ethics Officer. I’ve adapted well here, not just in terms of my day-to-day disposition but in the context of the methods I’ve developed to perform the requisite duties and conform to the indigenous language.

• • •

Beggar in wheelchair, dressed normally, clean shaven, no stained paper cup, gloved hand thrust into the street swarm.

• • •

There’s the wide-ranging dynamic of my father’s corporate career and there’s the endland of the Convergence and I tell myself that I’m not hiding inside a life that’s a reaction to this, or a retaliation for this. Then, again, I stand forever in the shadow of Ross and Artis and it’s not their resonant lives that haunt me but their manner of dying.

• • •

When I ask myself why I requested an occasional overnight visit to the townhouse, I think at once of the building where Emma lives, in this general area, or where she used to live, and I take frequent walks in the neighborhood, expecting to see nothing, learn nothing, but feeling an immanence, the way in which a painful loss yields a shadow presence, and in this case, on her street, I sense a possibility that I haven’t even tried to understand.

• • •

In my local market I never forget to check the expiration dates on bottles and cartons. I reach into the display of objects, of packaged goods, and lift an item from the last rank because that’s where the freshest sliced bread is placed, or milk, or cereal.

• • •

Women tall and taller. I look for the woman in a formal pose standing on a street corner with or without a sign in an obscure alphabet. What is there to see that I haven’t seen, what lesson is there to be learned from a still figure in the midst of crowds? In her case it may be an issue of impending threat. Individuals have always done this, haven’t they? I think of it as medieval, a foreboding of some kind. She is telling us to be ready.

• • •

Sometimes it takes an entire morning to outlive a dream, to outwake a dream. But I haven’t been able to recall a single faint instant of dreamtime since my return. Stak is the waking dream, the boy soldier looming onscreen, about to come crashing down on top of me.

• • •

I go walking, looking, and it is stalled and moaning traffic and it is foreign money soaring into the penthouse towers that outclimb the zoning laws.

• • •

I like the idea of working in school surroundings, knowing that at some point the idea will dissolve into the details. A van arrives very early Monday, already carrying two employees who live in Manhattan, and we travel to a small community in Connecticut where the college is located, a modest campus, students of middling promise. We remain until Thursday afternoon, when we are driven back to the city, and it’s interesting how we find new ways, the three of us, to talk about nothing.

• • •

The long soft life is what I feel I’m settling into and the only question is how deadly it will turn out to be.

But do I believe this or am I searching for effect, a way to balance the ease of my everydayness?

• • •

I enter the room with the monochrome paintings, recalling the final words that Ross managed to speak. Gesso on linen. I try to absolve the term of its meaning and to think of it as a fragment of some beautiful lost language, unspoken for a thousand years. The paintings in the room are oil on canvas but I tell myself that I will visit museums and galleries and search for paintings designated gesso on linen.

• • •

I walk for hours, dodging a splotch of dogshit now and then.

• • •

Emma and I, lovers upon a time. My smartphone remains at my hip because she is out there somewhere, in the digital wilderness, and the ringtone, rarely heard, is her implied voice, an instant away.

• • •

I eat sliced bread because I can make it last longer by refrigerating it, which doesn’t work with Greek or Italian or French bread. I eat thick crusty bread in restaurants, dining mostly alone by choice.

All of this matters even if it’s not supposed to matter. The bread we eat. It makes me wonder who my forebears were, but only briefly.

• • •

I know I’m supposed to resume the smoking habit. Everything that has happened drives me in that direction, theoretically. But I don’t feel reduced by my abstinence, as I did in the past. The craving is gone and maybe this is what reduces me.

• • •

There is an elegant lamp hanging from the ceiling in the guest room of the townhouse and I turn it on and turn it off and every time I do this, inescapably, I find myself thinking of the term pendant light.

• • •

On the street, going nowhere special, I check my wallet and keys, I check the zipper on my pants to make sure that it’s fastened securely from beltline to crotch or vice versa.

• • •

The relief is not commensurate with the fear. It lasts a limited time. You worry for days and then months and finally the son arrives and he is safe and you forget how you could not concentrate on another subject or situation or circumstance in all that time because now he’s here, so let’s eat dinner. Except that he’s not here, is he? He’s somewhere near a road sign reading Konstantinovka, in Ukraine, his place of birth and death.

• • •

Languages, sirens all the time, beggar in a bundled mass, man or woman, awake or asleep, alive or dead, hard to tell even when I approach and drop a dollar in the dented plastic cup.

Two blocks farther on I tell myself that I should have said something, determined something, and then I change the subject before it gets too complicated.

• • •

I sit in my cubicle in the administrative offices at the college and cross things off lists. I don’t erase the items, I click the strikethrough check box and run a line through each item on the screen that needs to be eliminated. Lines and items. Over time the lines through the items mark my progress in a readily visible way. The instant of the strikethrough is the best part, with childlike appeal.

• • •

I think of the few moments we spent looking at ourselves in the mirror, Emma and I, and it was first person plural, a blended set of images. And then my sad damning failure to tell her who I was, to narrate the histories of Madeline and Ross, and Ross and Artis, and the still-life future of father and stepmother in cryonic suspension.

I waited too long.

I’d wanted her to see me in an isolated setting, outside the forces that made me.

• • •

Then I recall the taxi driver kneeling in the gutter slime, turned toward Mecca, and I try to reconcile the firm placement of his world into the scatterlife of this one.

• • •

Sometimes I think of the room, the scant roomscape, wall, floor, door, bed, a monosyllabic image, all but abstract, and I try to see myself sitting in the chair and that’s all there is, highly detailed, this thing and that thing and the man in the chair, waiting for his escort to knock on the door.

• • •

The restoration, the scaffolding, the building facade hidden behind great white sweeps of protective sheathing. The bearded man who stands beneath the scaffold shouting at everyone who walks past and it’s not words or phrases we hear but sheer sound, part of the noise of taxis, trucks and buses except that it issues from a human.

• • •

I think of Artis in the capsule and try to imagine, against my firm belief, that she is able to experience a minimal consciousness. I think of her in a state of virgin solitude. No stimulus, no human activity to incite response, barest trace of memory. Then I try to imagine an inner monologue, hers, self-generated, possibly nonstop, the open prose of a third-person voice that is also her voice, a form of chant in a single low tone.

• • •

On public elevators I direct a blind gaze precisely nowhere, knowing that I’m in a sealed box alone with others and that none of us is willing to offer a face open to inspection.

• • •

I’m standing at a bus stop when Emma calls. She tells me what happened to Stak, using the least number of words. She tells me that she has quit her job at the school and given up her apartment here and will stay with the boy’s father and I can’t remember whether they were divorced or separated, not that it matters. The bus comes and goes and we talk a while longer, quietly, in the manner of near strangers, and then we assure each other that we’ll talk again.

I don’t tell her that I saw it happen.

- 10 -

This was a crosstown bus, west to east, a man and woman seated near the driver, a woman and boy at the rear of the bus. I found my place, midway, looking nowhere in particular, mind blank or nearly so, until I began to notice a glow, a tide of light.

Seconds later the streets were charged with the day’s dying light and the bus seemed the carrier of this radiant moment. I looked at the shimmer on the back of my hands. I looked and then listened, startled by a human wail, and I swerved from my position to see the boy on his feet, facing the rear window. We were in midtown, with a clear view west, and he was pointing and wailing at the flaring sun, which was balanced with uncanny precision between rows of high-rise buildings. It was a striking thing to see, in our urban huddle, the power of it, the great round ruddy mass, and I knew that there was a natural phenomenon, here in Manhattan, once or twice a year, in which the sun’s rays align with the local street grid.

I didn’t know what this event was called but I was seeing it now and so was the boy, whose urgent cries were suited to the occasion, and the boy himself, thick-bodied, an oversized head, swallowed up in the vision.

Then there is Ross, once again, in his office, the lurking image of my father telling me that everybody wants to own the end of the world.

Is this what the boy was seeing? I left my seat and went to stand nearby. His hands were curled at his chest, half fists, soft and trembling. His mother sat quietly, watching with him. The boy bounced slightly in accord with the cries and they were unceasing and also exhilarating, they were prelinguistic grunts. I hated to think that he was impaired in some way, macrocephalic, mentally deficient, but these howls of awe were far more suitable than words.

The full solar disk, bleeding into the streets, lighting up the towers to either side of us, and I told myself that the boy was not seeing the sky collapse upon us but was finding the purest astonishment in the intimate touch of earth and sun.

I went back to my seat and faced forward. I didn’t need heaven’s light. I had the boy’s cries of wonder.