The Zero and the One

by Ryan Ruby

  When Zach finished reading, Dr. Inwit yielded his paper a moment of respectful silence—at least that’s how I interpreted it—before going on to question him thoroughly about his thesis. Then it was my turn to read. Next week, I thought, as I handed Zach a copy of my paper, I would make sure to read first. There was no way, I vowed, I’d ever let this bloody bastard get the better of me again.

  WE DO NOT EXPERIENCE OUR OWN DEATH.—This is well known, well remarked upon. We only experience the Other’s death; from this we infer that our death will only be experienced by the Other. Death is not so much a fact as it is a recognitive status. Immortality requires the aspirant to convince the Other that, all appearances to the contrary, he is not really dead. Immortality is thus an audacious conjurer’s trick performed in plain view of the Other which annihilates this very inference through dramatic projects of total misrecognition, the most obvious of which is Death itself.

  From the clover-shaped gate on Jamaica Avenue, a road lined with cypresses leads deep into the cemetery grounds, where it intersects a motorway, then narrows into a footpath and snakes up a hill. Manhattan is still visible in the distance, but by a trick of perspective the skyscrapers seem to have been truncated and foreshortened; their crowns appear to be resting on the peak of the hill, interspersed with the headstones and mausoleums. Before long I arrive at the address of the squat building Zach’s father, Bernard, had given me when he requested my presence at the funeral. With its square, crenellated tower and its thin window slits, it looks more like a crusader’s fortress than a mortuary chapel.

  I first met Bernard during our stay in Berlin. He was there on business, attempting to scare up some financing for the film he was co-producing. It was not going well. The details of the production were being kept under lock and key by the director, who was demanding total control over script, cast, crew, and location. With so little information to go on—all Bernard was allowed to say was that the film was an adaptation of a beloved Russian novel—it was difficult to persuade potential investors to part with their Deutschmarks. He was there for a week or so, working from dawn ’til dusk from his suite at the Adlon, on Pariser Platz, the finest hotel in the city. Though he paid for both of our flights and for our accommodation, he had little more than a few hours to give to his son and his son’s new friend. We spent them at a restaurant with a view of the two churches on Gendarmenmarkt, listening to his frustrations with the investors, who were in his estimation risk-averse, overly rule-abiding, and lacking in vision. German, in a word. All too German.

  A compact, well-built man, Bernard was bald, with a salted moustache and lines that had been permanently chiseled into his forehead by a lifetime of impatience. He spoke rapidly with the traces of a New York accent. To my eyes, he had the look of someone whose childhood had been a string of petty thefts and back-alley brawls; the sort of man whose every step up the ladder of financial success had come at the expense of someone softer, more principled, advantaged from birth; the sort of man who might play at refinement when he visited his old neighbourhood and a working-class tough at board meetings or on conference calls. Though this might have alienated me from the somewhat aristocratic affectations of his son, it only endeared the two of them to me more. To me, they represented the possibility of generational progress. My child, I remember thinking wishfully, as Bernard handed his credit card to the waiter without looking at the bill, would grow up with all the advantages Bernard had provided for his.

  Are you here for the Foedern interment? a woman asks as I walk through the doors into the foyer of the building. The name badge pinned to her white blouse identifies her as Darlene Jackson, Assistant Funeral Director. When I nod, she solemnly collects a wicker basket that had been lying on a sideboard between stacks of colourful brochures with advice on how to cope with loss and grief and a large arrangement of flowers. Please take one, she says. Inside the basket is a pile of semicircles made of black suede. I must have looked rather puzzled, because she immediately recited, They’re kippahs, also known as yarmulkes, a skullcap or head covering worn by Jewish males during prayer services.

  Jewish. It had never occurred to me that Zach might be a Jew. I’d heard Zach refer to himself as a devout atheist and a secular freethinker, but never as a Jew. These things aren’t incompatible, I suppose. Look at Marx and Freud. Maybe he hadn’t considered himself a Jew and that’s why he never mentioned it. Still, he never mentioned it. Wasn’t there something in that? Though he frequently presented himself as a proponent of radical openness and total honesty, as a person willing to discuss any subject, no matter how sensitive or taboo, he could also be closed off about things like that. About family things. Childhood things. Things that touched, as they say, too close to home.

  I place the skullcap back into the basket. Had it been anyone else’s funeral, I might have worn it, out of the same respect for a foreign culture that obliges a person, say, to take off his shoes when entering a Japanese home. But my uncovered head would be a tribute to the memory of Zachary Foedern, who refused to stand for Latin Grace.

  The small chapel is only half full. On either side of the carpeted aisle are rows and rows of empty pews. I would have expected a much larger gathering, a room crowded to capacity with people who had come to pay their respects to a person whose life had touched theirs as deeply as it had touched mine. The mourners are all dressed in black, but somehow they give the impression that this was what they usually wore, that the clothes they put on today would be taken out of the wardrobe again the next time they had to attend an opening at an art gallery or spend a night at the opera. Almost no one here is under thirty. Where were all of Zach’s friends from Gansevoort and Columbia? What Gregory Glass had told me—could it really have been true?

  In the front row, Bernard sits silently, rigidly, paralysed by grief and by the sense, which I was coming to share with him, that what we were witnessing was completely unreal. His right arm is wrapped tightly around his wife, who has buried her face in his chest, no longer able to watch.

  Leaning on his left shoulder, then, must be Zach’s sister, Vera.

  Of Vera all I can see is the back of her neck, framed between a ragged line of black hair and a black necklace, her quaking shoulders, encased in black cotton, and the fistful of tissues she presses to her nose and mouth. The openness with which she expresses her sorrow is in pointed contrast not only to the anodyne eulogy being delivered uncomfortably over her sobs, but also to the stoicism I am desperately attempting to perform in the back pew. My fingernails are dug into my palms, my teeth are clenched, and every cell in my body is conspiring to forbid my eyes a single tear for fear of what else I might let out if I allowed myself to cry.

  For there, in front of the family, is the coffin. A simple, closed pinewood box, flanked on either side by flowers. Far too small and fragile a thing to contain a personality as outsized as Zach’s. Suddenly, an idea takes hold of me. An insane, ludicrous conviction is drawn like a satellite into the orbit of my brain. Zach’s not in that bloody box, I think. No one is! He’s faked it! Faked his own death! It’d be just like him, after all. The sort of grotesque prank he’d be likely to pull. Wildly, I look around the chapel to see where he’s hidden himself, from what perch he’s been listening to the eulogies, with what impish grin he’s been taking in the proceedings. I want to dash down the aisle, rip the lid off the coffin, topple the empty box from its dais, and shout at the stunned mourners, See! He’s not really dead!

  But then, who knew better than I did how dead Zach really was? None of the eulogists is going to allude to the circumstances of his death, of course, whether out of ignorance or out of politeness. The present speaker, a woman with a long braid of yellow hair running the length of her back, whom the rabbi introduces as Hilde Gwynn, Zach’s English teacher at Gansevoort, lists his academic accomplishments and speculates about who he might have become had he lived. (She does not say: Had he chosen to live.) Remembering his frequent contributions to classroom discussions and the lively ca
st of mind that revealed itself in his papers, she said he would have made a fine lawyer or a brilliant professor. Indeed, I thought, whilst she spoke, offended by the rather conventional life she had imagined for him, so different to the one I would have wished for, he might have had a wife and family, served his country, been a leader in his community. All outcomes as likely as not, if things were otherwise than they are. Which they never will be.

  I wonder what would happen if I were to take my turn behind the podium and read his note—our note. Somehow I doubt anyone here would understand it. The way Zach died will always be unfathomable to these people, impossible to tally with the person they thought they knew. A person who had so much talent, so much promise, who’d been given every advantage, and had willingly thrown it all away. The simple fact of his death refuted all their hopes for his future. It showed that he had considered their reasons for living and found them wanting. This was the very thought that had to be passed over in silence, if only to put to rest the worry that they were mourning a perfect stranger. Or worse, that he may have been right.

  The rabbi invites Zach’s uncle to the podium to deliver the next eulogy. In the story the uncle tells, by contrast, I do recognise the friend I knew. Ten or eleven years previously, Vera and Zach spent the summer at the cabin in New Hampshire he and his wife owned. Zach would go roaming through the woods in the company of the family’s two dogs until night fell. But when it was time for supper, he never remembered to leave his muddy shoes outside. His room was always a shambles and his bed never once was made.

  That’s pretty typical for a ten-year-old, the uncle admits. But the funniest thing was that he had an argument for it. When his aunt attempted to get him to clean up after himself Zach said, What’s the point? It’s just going to get dirty again.

  Here, finally, was the child the father of the man. Zach’s slovenliness did not go unjustified without reference to some higher principle. When he told me his reasons for dismissing his scout, something unprecedented in the history of Oxford, one would have thought he was discussing the futile labours of Sisyphus rather than the simple, quotidian tasks of hoovering the carpet, tidying the bed, emptying the bin, and scrubbing the sink. Unlike the rest of us, he spent the year in filthy rooms. But for him, this was nothing so much as a tacit acknowledgment of inescapable mortality.

  The mourners march slowly behind the coffin, following it up to the gravesite at the top of the hill. It is almost noon and nearly all of them are wearing sunglasses. At the gravesite, Bernard pulls a rock from his trousers pocket and places it on a headstone. Mrs Foedern takes a few flowers from the bouquet she is holding and hands them to Vera, who leaves them at the base. They observe a moment of silence before walking slowly, arm in arm, to the edge of the gaping hole less than a metre away. The names carved into the stone are Meyer and Rita Foedern.

  As the coffin is lowered, a Hebrew prayer is said. A spade is passed from hand to hand. The community will bury its dead. When the spade is handed to me I want to protest: I won’t throw dirt on my friend! But hadn’t I already? Hadn’t I pressed his body into the muddy bank of the river? Unlike those present, I shall not only suffer his loss, but also the image of his death. An image I’ll never see the end of. An image I’ll never be able to unsee. An image I’ll always carry with me, his life forever imprinted on my own, his death also mine in some way. To stand here at his gravesite, shovelling dirt on his grave: Doesn’t that make me a murderer somehow? Yes, a murderer. For not stopping him. For going along with his plans. Rather than saying, when he first told me of them, That’s the daftest thing I’ve ever heard. For lacking the courage to tell him no. Until it was too late. People are responsible not only for what they do, but what they fail to prevent. I hadn’t felt the shot, but I felt the report. I feel it still.

  For dust thou art, I hear the rabbi say, and to dust ye shall return.

  Death and Birth, Nothingness and Being, the Zero and the One. The same things, as the title of our poem had it, only different.

  ON THE MEETING OF TWO MONADS.—The biographical explanation for so absurd an idea as pre-established harmony should be sought in Leibniz’s particular susceptibility to the vice of friendship.

  On Saturday of third week, Hilary Term, I awoke to the sound of the frenetic peppering of knuckles on my door. It was only half nine, but already I’d fallen asleep in my chair, a novel upside down on my chest. I stretched and yawned, but made no attempt to answer the door. It was not that I thought I’d only dreamt the sound; it was that I was certain the knocking wasn’t intended for me. Barring my scout, who always gave a single, polite warning rap before she entered my rooms every morning, no one had intentionally knocked on my door in months.

  Probably it was Martin Montcrift, the boyfriend or lover or whatever of Susanne Knottsby, whose rooms were next to mine. Martin had already bothered me twice that term, pissed crosseyed, confusing my door for hers. The knocking grew louder, more urgent. Finally, I lay the book face down on my bedside table and lifted myself from my chair to once again direct Martin to the proper door. On behalf of my ability to fall back asleep I gave an audible sigh. The walls in my staircase were very old. And very thin.

  Instead it was Zach. He flew across the threshold without waiting to be invited in, as if he had been expecting me to be expecting him. All I saw was the flash of a figure in a camel overcoat and a red scarf passing into the room. I didn’t realise it was him until he was already sitting in my chair, legs crossed, excitedly twitching his foot, touching his fingers together, talking away:

  “So this is what the rooms in the Old Quad look like. Much nicer than the ones in Staircase XVI, which, I assure you, are positively institutional, what with the neon light and the carpet from the 60s and the sink and those goddamned metal shelves sticking out of the wall. I bang my head on them every time I try to brush my teeth. And you can’t even open the window without letting in a whole Luftwaffe of flying insects—”

  “I was just going to put on the kettle,” I said calmly, hoping to bring Zach to whatever point he had come to make. As this was the first time he’d visited my rooms or shown any interest in me outside of our tutorial, I was suspicious of his motives for being here. I suppressed another yawn. “Fancy a cup of tea?”

  “Tea? No, we don’t have time for tea.”

  “We?”

  “Nope. No time. You see, I’ve dropped by to ask you a favor. Which is not to say this isn’t a social call. But it’s also something of an emergency. For a place as small as Pembroke, you’re a hard man to find. Richard wouldn’t tell me where you lived—out of spite, of course. So I had to go rushing around trying to find someone who knew you. Finally, I managed to track down what’s-his-name, you know you know, the president of the JCR—”

  “Martin Mont—”

  “Yes, him. Martin Montcrift. He told me where you lived. Said he only knew because it’s next door to the girl he’s been, how would you say it, shagging.”

  “Listen, Zach. This wouldn’t have anything to do with the paper that’s due Monday for Dr. Inwit?”

  “Paper? What? I finished my paper hours ago. This is what I’m trying to tell you. Hear me out for a second, alright?”

  Earlier in the day, he had been putting the conclusion on his paper for Dr. Inwit in the Lower Reading Room of the Radcliffe Camera, when he’d locked eyes, not just once, but three times, with the student sitting opposite him. “A girl,” he said, blatantly relishing each feature as he recalled it, “with long waves of blonde hair, limpid blue eyes, bow-shaped lips and…” Here he placed a hand on his chest and allowed his rather purple description to fade away into an ellipsis. Distracted from study, he ripped a page from his book, wrote her a note, folded it in two, and slid it across the table. He produced the paper from the pocket of his overcoat and handed it to me. I opened the fold and saw

  PERENNIAL CLASSICS

  PLATO

  PHAEDO

  Translated by

  BENJAMIN JOWETT

 
With an Introduction and Notes by

  DR. MARCUS INWIT

  MAGDALEN COLLEGE, UNIVERSITY OF OXFORD

  I saw this done in a movie once. When are you free? I’d like to take you out for a drink.

  Funny you should ask. I’m free tonight, as it so happens. Do you know Freud?

  The psychoanalyst? Or the bar in Jericho?

  Is that an attempt at wit?

  Of course, the bar in Jericho. 10 o’clock?

  10 it is. But be warned. I’m bringing a friend in case you’re not as charming in person as you are on paper.

  Fair enough. I will also bring a friend, so yours isn’t bored when I find myself lost in conversation with you. Tell me what you’ll be wearing so I’ll be able to recognize you in a crowded bar.

  If you can’t recognise me by the eyes you’ve been staring into for the past half hour, you don’t deserve to find me in a crowded bar.

  THE PLEROMA PRESS

  London—New York—Sydney

  “And that’s where I come in,” I said flatly, when I finished reading. I pictured the scene to myself: Zach flirting well into the morning with his blonde-haired, blue-eyed Venus, whilst I struggled to exchange more than a sentence or two with her homely friend, counting the minutes until I could get back to exactly where I was.