The Zero and the One

by Ryan Ruby

  “That’s where you come in.”

  “Well, Simmias,” I said, quoting the text whose title page he’d appropriated for his flirtation. “Do you think it befits a philosophical man to be keen on the so-called pleasures of, for example, food and drink… and sex… and the other services to the body? Do you think he values them highly, or does he disdain them, except in so far as he’s absolutely compelled to share in them?”

  “That depends, my dear Socrates, on whether it is possible to release the soul from its connection with the body, which is in turn contingent on whether the soul is immortal, the four proofs you offer in favor of which are all thoroughly risible. Now,” he said, standing up. “Let me help you into your overcoat and your smart shoes and all of your other bodily adornments—”

  “What about Gregory Glass? You lot are mates, right? Why not ask him?”

  Zach looked disgusted. “Greg? Please. I can’t spend the evening getting into infantile debates about trivial matters of American politics. It will put our dates to sleep and me on edge. I’ve come to you because you’re the right man for the mission.”

  “I’m sorry to disappoint you, Zach. It’s just that I have so much work to do.”

  “Bullshit.”

  He didn’t try the usual mode of persuasion, the one that had been tried on me before, the one that was most likely to make me dig in my heels. He didn’t tell me that he had just as much work if not more than I had and he was going out anyway, a rhetorical strategy I have always regarded as an attempt to make someone feel guilty based on a false equivalence between the work habits of two different people.

  Instead, he picked up the book I had been reading and said, “I see you’re in the middle of Against Nature, which, unless you’ve been lying to me, isn’t on the list for any of the papers you’re reading this term. From this, one can infer that you’ve already finished your assignments. I happen to know that you never go out, unless it’s to the library. Martin whatever-his-name-was said as much. Now, I know you’re not straightedge or a recovering alcoholic, because I’ve seen you at The Bear. I’ve watched you. You get a table by yourself, drink two pints of Guinness, and go back to college, where there’s nothing to do but schoolwork and reading. All of this I suppose is commendable compared to the other students here, whose only reading this term has been of the labels on the taps at the pub. But think of it, Owen. At some point in the near future you’re going to look up from your reading and realize that your only experience of life is made out of paper. Now, you’re smart, you know this how? Because you’re reading a book about a man who shuts himself in and reads books. But the difference between you and Des Esseintes is that he’s an old man remembering a life he’s wasted, whereas you’re a young man wasting his life in such a way that when you’re old you’ll have nothing to remember. I can only assume that the reason you don’t go out is because you can’t afford to. Well, not to worry. Since you’re doing me a favor, it’s only fair that drinks should be on me.”

  As I sat in stunned silence at this astonishing bit of presumption, the sound of caterwauling breached the walls. This time, Martin—or someone else quite possibly—had found his way through Susanne’s door without any help from me.

  “C’mon,” he said. Mission Accomplished was written all over his face. “Just imagine how little work you’re going to get done if this ridiculous opera continues all night.”

  Once I had accepted that the evening had placed itself out of my control, that what happened would happen, and that I should just sit back and watch it happen, I was swept up in Zach’s expansive mood. On the way to Freud’s, he walked quickly, with purpose, slicing through the oncoming crowds without breaking stride, firing observations at me at the same volume and speed regardless of whether I was by his side or if I had fallen a few steps behind because, unlike him, I’d politely allowed someone to pass. Neither the stride nor the speech was impatient, exactly. He didn’t move or speak with the look of someone who was late for an engagement, although, as it turns out, he was. It was clear that this was his normal pace, which I now understand is the speed anyone must keep to escape trampling when walking in New York.

  From the first three weeks of our tute, from the papers I had heard him read, it was evident that Zach was clever. But it was heartening to discover that, at least as far as our tastes were concerned, we had a great deal in common. Of course, as I would soon learn, we didn’t come down on the same side of all the controversies, but we agreed which controversies were the important ones. This left us enough common ground for friendly argument and perpetual conversation. Taste is often dismissed as a superficial foundation for a friendship, fitting only for the young. That two people enjoy similar things, the argument goes, is not a reliable indicator of a fundamental compatibility of disposition. To me, though, our shared interests implied shared experiences and shared opinions about the value of those experiences. Such commonality was not impossible, but it seemed exceedingly rare, all the more so considering he and I had been born thousands of kilometres away from each other, in different countries, in unalike cities, to different families. I had long imagined such friendships existed (hadn’t I read about them?), but until that night the person for one of my own had eluded me.

  The particular subject of our conversation that night was, I’ll never forget, Walt Whitman. Zach didn’t like him, he told me, as we made a left onto Little Clarendon Street, a quaint line of boutiques and restaurants between St. Giles’ and Walton Street, illuminated at night by strings of Chinese lanterns. This puzzled me. All Americans, I thought, liked Walt Whitman. That’s why I had mentioned him in the first place. The freedom that pulsated through his ecstatic exclamations, the chaotic diversity of the worlds he catalogued with them, the potential for unlimited self-invention that echoed in his every barbaric yawlp represented to me what was so attractive about Zach’s native land, where no one had the misfortune of being saddled at birth, as we were in England, with a thousand-year accretion of what was considered good and proper. As I came to know him better, these were the very qualities Zach seemed to exemplify in his own words and actions. They were precisely what I liked about him. Zach, however, found Whitman’s earnestness particularly grating. “Only Russians have earned the right to use that many exclamation marks,” he remarked pithily. Which American poets did he prefer, then? “Ezra Pound and T. S. Eliot,” he told me, much to my surprise. Those two were as un-American as you could possibly be, elitist and pessimistic and inaccessible. Both had turned their backs on their country, the one to embrace Italian fascism, the other to become a classicist, a royalist, and an Anglo-Catholic. Still, I couldn’t begrudge him his choices. The Waste Land and The Pisan Cantos were both books that had places of honour on my shelves.

  With its Ionic portico and columns, supporting an unadorned pediment made of Cotswold stone, the Freud café could have been a Roman temple. The entrance of the door was painted light blue, above which the name of the bar had been painted in gold, substituting the Latin V for the English U. Really, it was a deconsecrated church. Besides the name, this is what Zach said he liked about it. As his argument to Gregory at Formal Hall had made clear, he didn’t quite care when the last priest would be hung in the entrails of the last boss, but he longed for the day when every church would be converted into a bar, or at least a cinema. Houses of dissolution and spectacle, in his view, were the only suitable futures for the former offices of illusion.

  When we arrived, the two girls were waiting for us at a circular table at the end of the room, near what had once been the apse, but was now being used as a stage. A jazz quartet had just finished its set and was in the process of packing up its instruments, whilst the next act, a DJ, was setting up his turntable and records. I was half expecting them not to be there. Despite the note Zach had showed me, his story was indeed too much like a scene from a film to be believed. It may well have been an elaborate pretext for something else, though what exactly I couldn’t say.

  My excitement
had dampened as I followed him through the door to the bar and watched him scan the room on his tiptoes. It was restored again when he said “Aha!” and walked in the direction of their table, with the confidence of a man who knows that provoking doubt in his audience is necessary for his conjuring tricks to be taken for genuine magic.

  “But you’re American!” Victoria exclaimed when he introduced himself. His hyperbole aside, she looked more or less as Zach described her. Her friend, Claire, was also a pleasant surprise. She had dark eyes and a wide, welcoming smile that was enhanced rather than impaired by the fumble of teeth it disclosed. She wore her auburn hair in a bob and her long, oval-shaped face possessed the sort of feminine beauty usually found in young boys.

  So Zach had gone for a stroll in Bodley’s garden and picked himself a pair of English roses.

  “Please don’t hold it against me,” he replied. “I assure you it wasn’t my fault. As compensation, I’ve brought along Owen Whiting, an honest-to-God Englishman, who will be my translator for the evening.”

  They declared themselves charmed to meet us and mock-imperiously sent us to the bar with their drink orders so they could, in Victoria’s words, whisper their first impressions to each other.

  At the bar, waiting for service, we did the same. He tapped a cigarette out of a blue pack and offered me one, only to finally remember, after several such offers, that I didn’t smoke.

  “No, I’ll take one,” I said. I desperately needed something to do with my hands. He lit it for me and I puffed without inhaling, so as not to cough in front of him, letting the smoke rest for a moment against the back of my teeth before dozing it from my mouth with the blade of my tongue.

  “Well?”

  “Not bad, Zach. I was worried that my, uh, date was going to be a bit of, well, a bit of a minger.”

  “Me too!” he said, with a laugh. He put a hand on my shoulder and smiled affectionately. “I’m very glad you decided to—Ah yes, barkeep. We’ll have two Stolichnaya and tonics, each with a twist, and one Plymouth martini, dirty, dry, and stirred.” He turned back to me. “What are you having?”

  “Double whisky, please. On the rocks.”

  “What brand of whiskey? It’s important to specify, otherwise they’ll just give you the well. Jameson’s? Are you sure? And a double Jameson’s on the rocks, please.”

  The toast, proposed by Victoria, was to chance meetings and new friendships. It was to be the first of many that evening. At some point each of us took a turn to raise a glass and praise something of equal abstraction and ideality. The precise subjects of these subsequent toasts, however, have been forever lost to my memory thanks to the drinks that accompanied them.

  We learnt that Claire and Victoria were in their second year at St. Anne’s College. Claire was reading English and French and Victoria was a PPEist like Zach and me. They met during Fresher’s Week the year before, on the dance floor of Filth, when a timely intervention from Claire had saved Victoria from the unwanted attentions of a townie. The two had been friends ever since. They now shared rooms in one of St. Anne’s brick flats on the Bevington Road, a few minutes away from the bar.

  I expected Zach to dominate the conversation. As I’d seen at hall or in our tutorials or earlier in my rooms, he was certainly capable of it. He could easily unleash an avalanche of words, spoken at a volume and a speed with which it was difficult to compete. But that night, he merely directed it, preserving the flow of conversation with a series of well-placed questions and observations, calculated to allow each of us to humbly display our best features and place us at an ease that would enable us to share confidences normally reserved for friendships of much longer standing. Once or twice, after making some particularly witty remark, he’d immediately turn the conversation over to me, giving the two girls the impression that we knew each other better than we in fact did. The impression, in turn, rubbed off on me.

  When, for example, Claire told us she was taking the paper in Nineteenth-Century French Literature, he said, “God, earlier tonight I had the hardest time convincing Owen to come out. He was just too absorbed in this book he was reading. What was the name of it?” he asked me, though he knew very well what it was called.

  “Against Nature. À Rebours,” I answered, irritated at first by this conversational gambit. But Claire, on cue, exclaimed, “I love Huysmans! Have you read Là-Bas?”

  And so the conversation split in two again, just as he’d intended. Claire and I discussed decadents and symbolists at a perpetually rising pitch of enthusiasm, whilst Zach whispered to Victoria about things I suddenly found myself too engrossed by Claire to eavesdrop on. Every so often, when our eyes met for long enough to make the subtext of our words apparent to us both, I’d look over at Zach and Victoria, ostensibly to check in on them, only to discover that they were talking with hushed animation, their faces only a few inches apart.

  Only once, sometime between the third and fourth round of drinks, did he usurp the conversation. The DJ had put on a record he liked. When he heard the opening notes of the song, he straightened visibly.

  “Oh! I’m terribly sorry,” he said. “But whenever I hear this song I have to dance.”

  The song was a pop number from the last decade, the sort of song I assumed he would have considered as naff as I did. But Claire and Victoria shot up to join the others who were beginning to congregate in front of the DJ booth. I hesitated, making a gesture to Zach to indicate that I would just stay and watch.

  “Owen!” He was practically tugging at my sleeve. “It will be fun! Don’t you trust me yet?”

  “It’s just… I look ridiculous when I dance.”

  “Of course you do! Every white man looks ridiculous when he dances.”

  “What’s the trick then?”

  “The trick?” He laughed. “The trick is not to mind that you look ridiculous. Not to give a fuck. To dance for yourself and not for other people.”

  “But I’ve not got any rhythm.”

  He grabbed me by the shoulders. “It’s the music that has the rhythm. You just have to have the music, okay? And that’s easy. Having rhythm isn’t physical, it’s psychological,” he said, impatiently prodding his temple with his index finger. “You have to submit to it. Allow yourself to be possessed by it. Once you do that, you’ll realize you’re having too good a time to care about how you look. C’mon c’mon, they’re already playing the first chorus!”

  It was as he said. He flailed and gyrated like a complete fool and no one seemed to mind. He displaced the energy around him so that, by the time the second chorus was played, some of his motions were being adopted by me and then by the others on the dance floor. Lesson learnt: you can get away with anything, no matter how daft, if you can do it without flinching.

  We stayed on the dance floor for one song, then another, and then another, until our sweat-darkened fringe stuck to our foreheads and our breathing grew heavy, pausing in the transitions between the songs to take quick, regenerating sips from our glasses. At first there were four of us dancing around each other, twisting and spinning at a distance. But as the music continued, Victoria permitted Zach and Claire permitted me to put a hand on her waist, and then to dance closer, thigh to thigh, tessellating until we were two.

  For the first time since coming to Oxford, I had a good time on a Saturday night. A minor achievement, it’s true, but before it happened it seemed like an impossible hurdle, a hurdle so tall that it discouraged all jumping. We stayed at Freud’s until the lights came on at half one, then we slipped into the damp, cool February morning. We walked down the centre of the empty streets, laughing and smoking and talking loudly, until we reached the door of their flat on the Bevington Road.

  Victoria was quite drunk but she said she was not yet ready to finish having such a lovely time. Zach hesitated at first in front of the open door, as though he was about to politely excuse himself and return to college alone. With one foot already on the staircase, I looked back at him in panic. Surely this was what th
e whole night had been leading up to, after all. Surely this was why he’d convinced me to leave my rooms. He couldn’t have brought me this far only to leave me now. “Be a dear and close the door behind you, Zach!” Victoria called from the top of the stairs. He looked up at the voice, then down at his shoes for a moment, before finally relenting. He patted me reassuringly on the back and together we charged up to the top of the staircase, where the girls were waiting for us. We stayed for another drink and didn’t leave until late the next afternoon, he without his red scarf and I without my virginity.

  THIRTY PIECES OF SILVER.—Any doctrine that posits the hatred of physical life will be incapable of dealing rationally with the problem of suicide. Socrates’ argument in the Phaedo, that suicide is a form of vandalism against the gift of the gods, is hardly satisfying. Why should a pious man be grateful for his corporeality, when this is precisely what separates him from the gods in the first place? Christianity’s problem is particularly acute. After all, if the Nazarene is the Son of God, with prophetic powers, the Christian object of worship is nothing other than—a suicide. (And here he resembles no one so much as Judas Iscariot, his double and accomplice.)

  After the service the rabbi directs the mourners to the family home to begin sitting shiva. The rabbi is a young man, clean-shaven, with slightly reddish hair. He wears a pair of wire-rimmed spectacles, which gives him the look of a precocious scholar. As the mourning party begins to disperse, I approach to ask him what the word means. He is standing near the grave, speaking with a slightly hunched man with a long grey beard and a stern expression on his face.

  What you are saying is true, I overhear the rabbi say. But remember King Saul on Mount Gilboa and the Masada martyrs. After speaking with the family, I concluded that this was a case of Anus keSha-ul, death under stress and compulsion, and that Zachary was entitled to forgiveness and full burial rites.