The Zero and the One

by Ryan Ruby

  All my love,

  C

  Some response is necessary—but what? All that comes to mind are empty formulae. Chin up. Hang in there. I’m here for you. I type them into the message body anyway, to see how they look. They seem to drown in the white field, their meanings no match for what ought to be said. Double-click, delete. Maybe no response is better than an insufficient one, dashed off just like that. Claire really was the best of us: the most thoughtful, the least self-centred, the kindest. How could I presume to comfort her? She who was only a second away from being in Tori’s position. Carrying the heaviest burden of all? If she only knew.

  The lobby is stirring with the other guests, some of whom are waiting impatiently to use the computer, preparing themselves, I sense, to invoke the 15 Minutes Only clause handwritten by The Management on a piece of paper taped to the wall above the thick beige monitor. When I close the browser and stand up from the office chair, no fewer than four pairs of vulturine eyes dart in my direction.

  What I need is a walk. Some fresh air. To clear my mind. To think of what I’ll write to Claire. According to the map at the end of my travel guide, if I turn left and make another left at the nearest crossroads, I should find myself before long at the entrance to Central Park.

  Outside, Manhattan is fully conscious, an infernal orchestra of pheumatic drills, car horns, rowdy schoolchildren, and disputation that is well into the overture. Already the sun is out and blazing. Pearls of sweat form on my forehead; I can feel the backs of my arms slowly turning pink. The shadows of street signs and newspaper kiosks look like petrol that’s been spilled on the pavement.

  At a corner shop, I buy a coffee, a croissant wrapped in plastic, and a phone card. The man who sells them to me has dark copper skin and wears a succinct black moustache set between a bulbous nose and a row of white, straight teeth. The nearest phone box, he tells me, is just down the road. Near the door are stacks of various local tabloids, all of which lead with the story about the Texas mother whose behaviour had so outraged my taxi driver. I feel rather sorry for her. Above indignant headlines in large white letters, the lurid cover photos show a bespectacled brown-haired woman, her arms handcuffed behind her back, her chin sunk into her chest to avoid looking into the cameras that surround her, trailed by a press of police officers in light blue uniforms.

  My mother answers up the phone. Dear, is that you? Owen? Speak louder. I can hardly hear you.

  Yes, Mum, it’s me, I shout into the black receiver. I’m at a phone box. Dad told me to ring when I’d bought a phone card.

  Daddy said he got your email. He’s got quite good at it, hasn’t he?

  Is he there?

  No, dear, it’s one o’clock here. He’s at work.

  Yes, that’s right, of course. Would you tell him that that’s the best way for us to communicate whilst I’m here?

  Of course I shall, she says. There is a long pause. The funeral is tomorrow, isn’t it?

  Yes, tomorrow. Somewhere in Brooklyn. Or maybe it’s Queens.

  Is that far? Are you all right? Do you need anything?

  In what I hope is my most reassuring voice I tell her everything’s fine.

  On the telly it said that it was beastly hot in New York, she says, to fill an awkward silence with idle talk. High of thirty-three degrees! Hard to believe it could get that hot anywhere in June. Though it’s better than all the rain we’re having here, mind.

  A robotic voice interrupts to inform me that I only have twenty-five cents remaining on my phone card.

  What was that, dear? I didn’t—

  Listen, Mum, I think my time is running out. Everything’s fine here. I’ll ring you if there’s an emergency, but meantime just keep checking your—

  Three beeps. The line cuts out.

  Though I doubt she’d fancy New York, Mum would probably appreciate Central Park. Years ago, en route to my eldest cousin’s wedding in Sheffield, she insisted we stop, despite Dad’s grumbling, in Derbyshire to see Chatsworth House, the basis for Pemberley, Mr. Darcy’s estate in Pride and Prejudice, her favourite novel. But for my mother, the surprise hero of our excursion turned out not to be Jane Austen, but Capability Brown, who designed the house’s gardens.

  I’m as keen on landscape architecture as my father is, but Zach, an outspoken partisan of the unnatural, might have seen something in it. One of the aphorisms he underlined in Abendroth’s book describes a walk the philosopher took through Berlin’s Tiergarten during the last year of the war, at the height of the Allied bombing campaign. Abendroth thought parks and gardens belonged in the same conversation as novels and paintings. They are all, he writes, triumphs of artifice. The landscape artist alienates nature from itself by planting trees and flowers and lawns in picturesque patterns and designs. Nature fights back, of course, doing what it always does, growing and decaying. Gardening is the art of forcing nature to conform to our image of how it ought to look, which is a victory for consciousness, even if, as Abendroth acknowledges, the ways human beings have thought nature ought to look have usually been frivolous and sentimental.

  I find a shady spot beneath a tree and sit, swallowing my croissant more out of duty than hunger, washing down the dry pastry with the burnt coffee. Out on the lawn, a formation of men and women are floating through a series of Tai Chi postures. I watch them for a few minutes, trying to interpret the choreography. They push forward an invisible wall with their palms. Curl them around an invisible ball. Hang an invisible lantern on the air behind them. I watch until I am exhausted by the slowness of the movements, exhausted by the harmony with which they execute the postures, exhausted by their faces, tranquil and empty.

  After hours of aimless wandering up and down the endless avenues of Manhattan’s west side, I am back in the lobby, last in the queue that has formed for use of the computer. I have to write something to Claire. It’s been too long already. No doubt she’s begun to worry. Whilst I wait, I open The Zero and the One and continue from where I left off earlier in the day.

  Next to the last aphorism on page 32, Zach had written:

  Critique of Moralism

  Tragedy as critique

  of faith in moral knowledge

  i.e. faith that problems have solutions

  But Life ≠Math

  Having run out of space in the margin, he continued the thought on the bottom of the page.

  Freedom caught between

  Scylla of EM (determinism of the solvable)

  & Charybdis of T (determinism of the unsolvable)

  WITBD?

  In the context of the passage, EM clearly stood for “everyday morality” and T “tragedy,” but what of the acronym, if that’s what it was, at the end? My guess, after concentrating on the letters, wondering what they could possibly stand for, is that Zach was asking What Is To Be Done about this situation, how such an antinomy could be resolved. Introduce T into EM? was the answer he gave here, ending with a tentative question mark that a few months later would evolve into a dreadful full stop.

  When my turn to use the computer finally comes, I write a short note to Claire, forcing myself to use all the formulae, and one to my parents, repeating what I said to Mum over the phone. Then I log off. The anchorman on the telly is announcing today’s winning lottery numbers to an empty room. Standing, I begin to make my way upstairs: tomorrow will surely be a long and difficult day. But as I reach the foot of the staircase, I have an idea. What if there were a way to get into Zach’s email? I dart back to the computer, fall into the chair, type zacharyfoedern@pmb.ox.ac.uk into the long rectangle, and begin trying out passwords.

  I type: abendroth. I type: zeroandtheone. I type: zachandtori. I type: kirillov.

  Each time a message in red letters says: You could not be logged on to Oxford Nexus. Make sure that your user name and password are correct, and then try again.

  UNIVERSAL HOMELESSNESS.—Thought exiles man from being, being exiles him from his self, his self exiles him from the external world, the external wor
ld exiles him from time, and his tomorrow will exile him from his today just as surely as his today exiled him from his yesterday. Never and nowhere is man truly at home. In order to experience this all he needs to do is to return, after even a short absence, to the city of his birth.

  We didn’t officially meet until the first week of the following term. We passed each other in the quads, collecting letters at the pigeonholes, ordering books from the library and pints at the pub. In a city as small as Oxford, in a college as small as Pembroke, it is impossible not to cross paths with someone all the time—and Zach was particularly hard to miss. Still, I saw him less often than I might have done. That term, he kept mainly to the other foreign students and I kept mainly to myself.

  The day my parents dropped me off in front of the Porter’s Lodge, they each took me aside to dispense a few pearls of parental wisdom. My mother told me whom I knew was more important than what I knew. She encouraged me to overcome my native shyness in order to befriend people who might one day prove useful to me. Despite wincing when I first heard it, during Fresher’s Week I made a sincere effort to follow her advice, only to discover how little I had in common with my classmates. We couldn’t swop stories about the exotic locales we’d visited on our Gap Years because I’d gone straight to uni; we couldn’t compare notes about the cultures of our respective public schools because I hadn’t attended one; we couldn’t debate which was the best neighbourhood in London because my knowledge of the capital was little better than that of a tourist; we couldn’t bond over our shared loyalty to this or that football club because I didn’t follow the Premier League.

  So we talked about the weather and did the one thing we all knew how to do: get pissed. I watched stupendous bar bills turn into group song and shoving matches and urine and vomit well before the pubs closed their doors at eleven. One day, I thought, standing outside the toilet of a dodgy dance club, waiting for one of my new acquaintances to finish retching, one of these tossers is going to get himself elected to Parliament.

  My father’s counsel had been more to the point: best not to indulge in any vices I couldn’t afford.

  It was just like them to give me contradictory advice.

  For a brief period of time, I sought out the sort of company neither of them would have approved of. If I’d had no luck making friends at college, I would surely better my chances amongst like-minded individuals whom I’d select myself from one of Oxford’s many student groups. On Cornmarket, a militant of the Revolutionary Worker Student Alliance sold me a copy of the broadsheet Permanent Revolution and informed me of the state of the many struggles for liberation from imperialism and class domination taking place around the globe. It was the first time I’d heard phrases like surplus value and determinate negation and international flow of capital and mode of production—which I’d encountered reading the books by Marx and Lenin I checked out from the Central Library and hid from my father’s censorious gaze when I ought to have been revising for my A-levels—spoken aloud.

  The militant, Arjun Patel, of Balliol College, invited me to the Alliance’s next meeting, which was held every Thursday in the basement of a Presbyterian church near the University Parks. I attended two of them, and the drinks that followed, mostly keeping silent whilst the same four or five students debated the tactics of forming a provisional affinity groupuscule with the Oxford Socialist Workers’ Union, from which they’d splintered last term. I volunteered to sell Permanent Revolution with Arjun, put up flyers in pubs and bookshops around the city centre, and joined a march protesting top-up fees and one in solidarity with the Al-Aqsa Intifada.

  But before the third meeting, I was taken aside by Mary Chapman, a Wadham College third year with a dagger’s swipe of dyed-red hair, a stud gleaming atop her nostril, and a keffiyeh around her neck, who informed me in BBC English that it would be best if I stopped coming. “You see, some of the comrades… not me, mind… but some of the comrades,” she attempted to explain, “believe you’re with the filth. And as we may or may not be planning a major action at the moment… some of the comrades reckoned that… that it would be for the best if you were not around… whilst it’s being discussed.”

  I wondered whether it was my native shyness or my still-untamed accent that had aroused their suspicion; either way, I was too offended by the accusation to protest my innocence. I walked back to college in a huff, my lip upturned, my fists buried in my pockets, making speeches that were alternately piqued (the theme being: none of these people is worth my friendship!) and self-pitying (the theme being: why then don’t they think I am worth being their friend?) under my breath. The glow of anticipation that had suffused the days between my acceptance to Oxford and matriculation—the sense that I was on the verge of great adventures, love affairs, making lasting connexions with kindred spirits—had already begun to slip away. The future that now stretched before me looked lone, level, and deserted. What had been the point, I wondered, of coming here in the first place?

  For the rest of Michaelmas I shuffled between lecture, library, hall, my tutors’ rooms, and my own. Invitations charitably offered to bops and clubs and pub quizzes were at first refused, then no longer forthcoming. I requisitioned from my savings five quid a day for drinks at The Bear, where I sat alone, my eyes searching the cases of regimental neckwear for the tie of my grandfather’s battalion or scanning the pages of a novel. Once or twice a week, I went without my two pints of porter and took myself instead to concerts at the Sheldonian or movies at the Pheonix Picturehouse in Jericho. My studiousness earned me words of praise and concern from my tutors, who predicted that if I carried on like this, I was sure to graduate with a double first and a head of grey hair.

  I would have preferred to stay on at college to study for Collections during the holiday, but our rooms were being used to house interviewees, and anyway, my parents insisted on having their only child at home for Christmas. My father picked me up from the bus station and drove me back to our back-to-back on Ruby Street, where I passed an interminable five weeks.

  It had occurred to me to wonder how my parents were getting on in my absence, but my mother’s weekly phone calls detailed no significant alterations to their usual routines. Mum kept busy with her book group, her gardening, and her work at court. Dad came home from Somerdale and installed himself with a lager in front of the telly to watch the pundits dissect Tony Blair’s political future in the wake of the failure of the Millennium Dome. Politics in the age of New Labour hardly made for interesting television, I thought, but as a member of the loyal opposition my father wouldn’t miss a single argument.

  “What a fiasco,” he said to me when I joined him on the couch a few days after Christmas. “The Tories shall be back in power come June. Mark my words.”

  It was his way of making conversation. He would say something calculated to offend me; normally I would rise to the bait, arguing the point with him, sometimes for hours, until I got so frustrated that I would walk off in a rage, slamming my bedroom door behind me. Dad would calmly return to doing whatever he was doing before the debate started, usually watching the news, satisfied that he had, for a little while at least, made some connexion with his son.

  This time, however, I merely shrugged and said nothing. As a young man of the Old Left, I knew I was meant to condemn Third Way centrism as a smokescreen for venal neoliberalism. But the politics of the Vicar of St. Albion—like the man himself—struck me not as evil, but as inconsequential and rather banal.

  Only once did my parents ask me what I’d been studying, probably just to get me to say something, anything at all. I would have preferred to have read Philosophy and French, but they thought it important for me to learn something useful, like Medicine or Law or Economics. So we split the difference and I wrote down L0V0, the course code for Philosophy, Politics, and Economics, on my application.

  Selecting a topic at random, I explained Gini coefficients and Lorenz curves to them, with no attempt whatsoever to make my words comprehensible to th
e layman. When I came to the end of my little lecture, my mother, who had been nodding blankly, turned to my father and said, “Well, then.” They never brought up my studies again.

  Nights I would take the bus into town, to see whichever band—the louder, the better—was playing a set at The Chatterton. Two storeys of former warehouse near the harbour, The Chatterton was where I had spent the part of the last few years not devoted to sleeping and studying doing permanent damage to my hearing and my liver. The venue had opened its dingy doors a few years before I was born, quickly establishing itself as a fixture of the local punk scene. The Cortinas and The Zeros had been regulars there, as had Disorder and The Undead. Even The Clash had played the club on their Out of Control Tour, shortly before they broke up. I once saw Mark E. Smith play a set there and nearly died from awe.

  The club was now in decline, but it had enough history that performing there was considered a rite of passage for every upcoming punk and hardcore outfit in Southwest England and Wales. The rest of my peers may have preferred the Carling Academy and The Thekla, where they could dance to house and trip hop, but I remained faithful to the power chords on offer at The Chatterton.

  On New Year’s Eve, after a quiet dinner at home, I stood far from the stage on the second floor, drinking whisky, surveying the dance floor. I watched three punks collide like quarks in a particle accelerator until the sound of distortion and feedback flattened into a high-pitched and hollow ringing. Just like not-so-old times.

  In the lull between the first two acts, I went downstairs to get another drink and recognised, at the bar, someone I knew. John Simms, my childhood friend. Simmsy, as everyone called him, lived nearby, in Ashton Vale. Between the ages of thirteen and sixteen we spent a great deal of time in his attic room poring through his elder brother’s record collection, drinking cans of lager, and professing our common alienation from the rest of our schoolmates, which we documented with an EP’s worth of songs, whose lyrics I wrote to the accompaniment of Simmsy’s fierce strumming. The songs were all about the glories of doing drugs and stealing from shops and evading the filth and dying young—all of which, needless to say, I’d then had no actual experience.