The Zero and the One

by Ryan Ruby

  We’d seen each other less and less, of course, since I’d gone on to the lower sixth and Dad had got him a job at the factory, the same one he’d made me take as a character-building exercise that summer, and which I vacated when I returned to school. We hadn’t spoken once since I went up to Oxford, but seeing him now I felt for the first time in my young life the fondness of recollection known as nostalgia.

  I waved to get his attention. He was standing on the other side of the curved bar, with one arm around the shoulder of a chubby, green-haired bird, whose ears, from the top to the lobe, were silvered with rings.

  “Simmsy! How the hell have you been keeping?”

  “Um, yeah. Right as rain, fanks. Ow long’ve thee been ohm, then?”

  There was an awkward silence. In Simmsy’s question, I detected a reproach. “Two weeks,” I admitted. He was right. I should have phoned. The girl with him was glowering at me. “Well,” I said, in an attempt to change the subject. “Aren’t you going to introduce us?”

  “E eve,” she said flatly. “Coupla times now, mind.”

  “Christ, Peg. Is that you? I hardly recognised you. Didn’t you used to have blue—”

  “Orange,” she corrected me.

  “Lissen, Owen,” Simmsy said, collecting the pair of pint glasses the bartender had placed before him. “Some peepaw upstairs is wayten on dese. Wish yer dad a Happy New Year fer me, won’t thee?”

  As I watched them leave, I saw how naïve I’d been. There was no denying it: things had changed. My accent was becoming different, as were my interests and, perhaps most importantly, my future prospects. I couldn’t just come back home on holiday and pretend to be his mate again. But nor had I been accepted by my fellow students at Oxford, who looked at me and saw the likes of John Simms. For them I would be forever marked by my so-called background. I found myself between two lives. Two camps. Two worlds. And to be in between is to be nowhere at all.

  I didn’t stay to hear the band count down the New Year. By midnight, I was at home, in bed, with an open book and the bottle of sparkling wine my parents hadn’t finished. The first year of the twenty-first century was ending, not with a bang, but with a whimper. As might have been foreseen.

  A few days later, I received an email from each of my Hilary Term tutors. On the email from my tutor for the Plato paper, the other address was: zacharyfoedern@pmb.ox.ac.uk. This, I recall, I noted with ambivalence. My initial impression of Zach, intriguing though I found him, was not entirely favourable. From what I’d seen of the way he’d treated Richard, Gregory, and even Mr. Stroop, he struck me as domineering and arrogant, qualities that would make him difficult to work with.

  At an Internet café I printed out the list of reading I’d be responsible for in the coming term. The thick stack of pages, which I fanned with my thumb before the eyes of my parents, was enough to convince them of the necessity of my immediate return to college. Dad drove me to the bus station before work, at six in the morning. There he handed me a cheque. Compared to what I’d seen spew out of the wallets of my new classmates, it wasn’t much, but as he’d never before given me a present without some occasion or purpose, the gesture was worth far more to me than the number he’d written there. “I’m giving you this because you’ve demonstrated your ability to live frugally,” he said, implying that I had somehow earned the gift, perhaps in order to cover up his embarrassment at what we both understood was uncharacteristically sentimental behaviour. He cleared his throat. “Don’t spend it all at the pub.”

  I nodded silently. Two hours later I woke up in Gloucester Green.

  IN THE BELLY OF THE HOUR GLASS.—Beneath each of us shifts the sand of a desert vaster than the Sahara, the desert of our past, over whose dry dunes memory can only skim, blowing temporary patterns of recollection and reinterpretation across the surface of a noumenal landscape wherein the ever-changing is indistinguishable from the eternally-the-same.

  My second-best suit is a charcoal-grey double-breasted with peaked lapels, made in a Pakistani sweatshop for an off-brand designer, in a style and cut that have not been in fashion since my father was my age. The jacket was always ill-fitting, foreshortening my arms and widening my chest and shoulders all out of proportion. On top of that, it travelled poorly. The shirt and trousers wrinkled in my luggage and one of the jacket’s side vents is visibly creased. Worst of all, it isn’t black.

  Not a very fitting tribute to Zach, who was always so smartly turned out. His clothes always fit him perfectly. There were, I remember, several suits, including a dinner jacket, a grey flannel three-piece, and even a tweed blazer with brown elbow patches. An equal diversity of flamboyantly patterned French-cuffed shirts occupied his wardrobe, when he bothered to hang them up, that is. The dinner jacket he wore quite frequently too, even when the occasion called for less formal attire—yet another of his eccentricities. I wonder if he’d always preferred to err on the side of the overdressed, or if this was only an affectation he’d developed since his arrival in England. One often got the sense that he regarded his days at Oxford as a long series of costume parties, where he was not so much studying as playing the part of an Oxford student.

  Nothing to be done about it, though. The only other suit I own is now hanging somewhere in the back room of the dry cleaner’s not far from Claire and Tori’s flat. I took it there in a state of panic to have the mud washed off it. The bloodstained wingtip and white bowtie I wrapped in a plastic bag, which I stuffed into one of the black-and-gold bins on Cornmarket. Then, overwhelmed by nausea, I veered into The Cellar to vomit. The suit has probably been cleaned by now, but I doubt I’ll ever go back to collect it. I never want to see it again.

  I slip my passport into the breast pocket only to be reminded that something is already there. The envelope with Zach’s name on it. Had I really brought it with me? I’ve not looked at it since I recovered it from his pidge as soon as I stepped foot in college and brought the other envelope, the one with my name on it, to the attention of the Head Porter, who in turn gave it to the police. Here, in my hands, the last evidence of my participation in our pact. I bring it to the rubbish bin, ready to begin tearing. Any rational person with the most minimal instinct for self-preservation would have destroyed it ten times over by now. Yet I can’t bring myself to do it. Save for this black pearl, his copy of The Zero and the One, and my memories of our time together, it’s all I have left of him.

  I roll the object between my thumb and forefinger. He had placed it, without telling me he was going to do so, in the envelope along with his letter to me, an envelope I was never meant to open. What in God’s name were you trying to say with this, Zach?

  To arrive at the cemetery, I’m to take the 2 or 3 train at Central Park North, transfer to the J at Fulton Street station, and exit at Cypress Hills station. In order not to think about what will be waiting for me there, I find myself a seat somewhere in the crowded carriage and do my best to pay attention to The Zero and the One. But the subject of the next aphorism Zach had annotated does little to distract me. It concerns the death of Socrates in the Phaedo, a dialogue we had studied together. Abendroth takes issue with Nietzsche’s famous interpretation of the passage. According to Abendroth, Socrates did not believe that death was a cure for the disease of life, as Nietzsche says, but rather that there really is no answer to the question of whether there was life after death. Socrates’ last words were not really Crito, I owe a cock to Asclepius; will you remember to pay the debt? but rather the active and ironic silence with which he answers Crito’s final question—The debt shall be paid; is there anything else? Plato’s narration reads, There was no answer to this question. Abendroth thinks both Crito’s question and Plato’s narration are double entendres.

  I close my eyes. Once again, Zach’s face, after I pulled the trigger. His eyes expanded a millimetre and began to glaze. Then they flattened into a squint. I saw his cheekbones rise, his eyebrows arch. Meaningfully it seems to me now. But what meaning? Regret? Repentance? Or even shock at
my betrayal? Was he trying to recall the eloquent phrase he had prepared to deliver before his plans went awry?

  He tried to tell me, I think.

  I crop the image in my mind, zooming in on his mouth. Concentrating on the movement of his lips. Attempting to read on them the phrase he was trying to utter, the last words that were lost, not to an active and ironic silence, but in a gurgle of blood. His lips opened slightly, of that much I’m certain. But now I seem to remember that, just before they parted, they expanded into his cheeks, revealing a brief glimpse of red teeth. The uncompleted phrase must have begun with two syllables. A long vowel sound. Followed by a short one.

  Suddenly I feel warm sunlight on my eyelids. We are above ground again, crossing into Brooklyn over one of the bridges. It’s a spectacular view. Standing up, I press my hands to the windows of the train doors and feel the magic for the first time, that breathless combination of awe, wonder, and sublimity people convey when they attempt to capture in words the Babelian hubris of downtown Manhattan. To my right are alpine ridges of blue glass and grey steel culminating, at the far end, in the white, quadrangular peaks of the Twin Towers. Shooting out from the side of the island are two more bridges, two arches suspended over the silver river, each lifted at two points like the hem of an evening gown whose wearer must elegantly ford a puddle. Through the shimmering warp of their steel cables, I can just make out the Statue of Liberty, no larger, from my vantage, than a chess piece presented to my eye by the palm of the harbour.

  Manhattan, like Oxford: a city of dreaming spires.

  The train suddenly banks around a curve, throwing me off balance. I do a ridiculous dance down the aisle until I am finally able to stabilise myself against one of the metal poles that runs from the floor to the ceiling of the carriage. Several faces turn contemptuously in my direction, their wordless scowls telling me I don’t belong, that here I am out of place.

  It’s not long, however, before they resume their indifferent expressions. Now that no one is looking at me, I search for a new seat. There is one at the end of the carriage, but I discover, as soon as I approach, that it is being occupied by a polystyrene box, opened at the hinge to reveal a pile of small white and grey bones.

  SYMPTOMS OF THE DISEASE PHILOSOPHY.—Philosophy does not begin in wonder. It begins in anxiety, with the disquieting suspicion that things are not how they should be and are not what they seem.

  My tutor for the Plato paper was Dr. Marcus Inwit, fellow of Magdalen College. When I returned from holiday, I did some research, and learnt that his interpretation of ancient philosophy, as a guide to the art of living rooted in the cultural and political institutions of fifth-century Athens, had revolutionised the field, no small feat for a discipline that was more than two thousand years old. His argument that ancient philosophy was a series of what he termed, after Ignatius of Loyola, spiritual exercises, had had a decisive influence on Michel Foucault’s “Greek Turn” in the three volumes of his History of Sexuality. Like most English academics, Dr. Inwit was positively indifferent to continental philosophy, but it was undoubtedly because of Foucault that his tutorial was in such high demand. To have been randomly assigned to it as a first year was an incredible stroke of good luck, sure to excite awe and envy from the many DPhil candidates who packed out his lectures and clamoured for his attention during the long Q and As that followed.

  Having taken extra care to finish my first paper early, I spent the last Sunday before the first week of Hilary Term reading his monograph on Heraclitus’ aphorism Nature loves to hide, only to oversleep my alarm. I might have bicycled to make up the time, but in the morning it was pouring icy rain. I found myself at the Porter’s Lodge completely drenched and with only a few minutes to spare, which time I then wasted trying to find Dr. Inwit’s rooms in that large, labyrinthine, unfamiliar college. It wasn’t clear which of the lawns was the Deer Park I had been instructed to keep to my left, and, starting to panic, I looked round to find someone I could ask for help. At that moment, there was only one other person in the quad, a student in a superbly cut black suit, a coffee-brown leather satchel hanging from his shoulder. He was waiting at the entrance to one of the staircases, standing beneath a wood-handled brolly, exhaling smoke, a dark purple crescent beneath his eye.

  He recognised me before I recognised him.

  “I’m glad it’s you,” Zach said, holding out the umbrella to me, which I accepted, and a cigarette, which I declined. “Last term I had one of these double tutorials with a kid named Christopher Pomeroy. Know him? Why would you? A second year. Dumb as a brick. I even tried to get a one-on-one with Dr. Inwit, but the Dean of Visiting Students said it was impossible. That’s what he said: impossible. But now that I see it’s you, it’s a different story entirely.”

  I didn’t respond to his observation about the intelligence of his former tutorial partner, whom I knew only by reputation, as a member of Pembroke’s vaunted boat club. Nor did I enquire how he had formed his judgement of mine. Presumably it was from the book he’d seen me reading that night at Formal Hall. Instead, after a long pause, I asked him how he’d got that shiner.

  “I insulted the sister of one of the drunker patrons of The Cowley Arms.”

  “What on earth for?” I cried, a question that could equally have been asked of his presence in that pub. It was unheard of that a posh Yank like Zach should have wandered so far east of the city centre.

  “To tell you the truth, I don’t remember. She may have cut in front of me in line. Or I may have remarked on something stupid she said, or maybe she remarked on something stupid I said, and it escalated from there. It’s all a blur. I guess two nights ago I was also one of the drunker patrons of The Cowley Arms.”

  Zach dropped his cigarette into one of the urn-shaped planters that flanked the entrance to the staircase. The cigarette extinguished with a hiss as it pierced the pea-green skin that had formed on the layer of brown water. We watched it float there for a moment, in silence. “Well, it’s time,” he said finally. “Let’s go up.”

  From the thick frames of his spectacles to the brown patches on the elbows of his blazer, Dr. Inwit looked every bit the Oxford don. He had a full head of silver hair and mangled, tobacco-stained teeth. For all that, he was also a tall, robust-looking man, who was said to have been an excellent batsman in his day. He greeted us warmly and asked us how we took our tea.

  Inwit’s rooms smelled of pipe smoke and dust. Books were scattered everywhere, according to an organisational principle no doubt apparent only to the eye of their owner. On the door hung a framed poster from a 1989 conference on the Pre-Socratics at Freie Universität in Berlin, and on the walls were reproductions of various famous paintings, mostly Old Masters, including Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer by Rembrandt, Bacchus and Ariadne by Titian, and Holbein’s Ambassadors. There were two large windows above the lumpy sofa on which we’d taken our seats, but on a day like this, when sunlight was scarce, his two green desk lamps did little to enliven the rather gloomy atmosphere.

  We stretched out our hands to receive the plain white cups of tea, each balanced precariously on a saucer. Dr. Inwit sat in his wing-backed armchair and began to load his pipe.

  “Now,” he said, taking a puff. “I trust you’ve both received your reading lists and assignments from me over the holiday and have prepared a paper on the Symposium. Which of you fancies reading first?”

  Zach and I looked at each other and with a string of overly deferential babbling invited the other to have the honour. Dr. Inwit interrupted us with bemused resignation and took a silver coin from his trousers pocket.

  “This happens every term. Why I bother asking, I no longer know. A formality, I suppose. Mr. Foedern, you’ll be heads.” He showed us the side of the coin with the profile of the Queen. “And Mr. Whiting, tails,” he said, showing us the side with the lion and the unicorn. We watched it spin through the air and fall into his broad palm. He flipped it onto the back of his hand. “Heads. That means you, Mr. Foedern.�
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  Zach passed a copy of his paper to me and to Dr. Inwit, who waved it off, explaining that he preferred to listen. Zach notched his cigarette in the ashtray, took a sip from his tea, and began to explain the troubling implications of Alcibiades’ description of Socrates as atopos in the prelude to his speech in the Symposium for Plato’s characterisation of the philosopher and his conception of justice in the Republic.

  “Often translated as bizarre or strange,” he read, “the word literally means without place or out of place. When Paul and the Evangelists use the term centuries later, people or actions that are described as atopos are considered not fitting, wicked, and even harmful. All of which would perfectly describe Alcibiades himself, Socrates’ most famous pupil—after Plato, of course—one of the youths whom the philosopher could be accused of corrupting. Especially,” he added parenthetically, “when we compare Alcibiades’ description of their relationship with the sexual mores of the time.” With the help of a concordance, Zach had tracked down the appearance of the term in the other dialogues and found that in the Republic, the word was used to describe the sophists, whom Socrates considered out of place as educators. “If Plato’s definition of social justice—doing one’s job and not meddling in anyone else’s—can be construed as everyone occupying his rightful place in the polis,” he continued, “then, I will argue, it is precisely Socrates—philosopher and sophist, gadfly and busybody—who is out of place in the ideal city he himself constructs.”

  At this point, I too stopped following along on the copy he’d printed out for me. I could feel my eyes slowly and involuntarily expanding with an amazement that quickly modulated into competitiveness and an admiration that quickly became nervousness. My cheeks, I’m sure, were bright red. The argument I had made in my own paper, about the concept of identity presented in the myth Aristophanes tells about the origins of love, which I had spent the whole week perfecting, and of which I was, until that moment, quite proud, sounded mundane and amateur by comparison.