The Zero and the One

by Ryan Ruby

  When they register my presence, they break off their conversation. The old man looks me up and down, noticing my accent when I ask my question and the absence of a skullcap on my head.

  It means seven, the rabbi answers. The number of days prescribed by the Law for the mourning of a close relative. He reaches into his pocket and produces a black ribbon, which he pins to my wide lapel. This is called a keriah, he says. You are to rip it.

  The family returns home in the black car that was waiting for them at the gates of the cemetery, whilst the others of the mourning party hail taxis on Jamaica Avenue. It seems I alone will follow on the underground. I consider asking Zach’s aunt and uncle if I might share their taxi, but I can barely muster the strength to whisper, Pardon me, before he closes the yellow door behind them.

  At the Hemlock Street entrance, I climb the stairs and wait for the Manhattan-bound train. From the elevated platform there is an unobstructed view of outer Brooklyn. I can see warehouses and storage spaces covered in graffiti. Chain-link fencing enclosing weedy gardens in front of squat homes from whose wooden panels the paint peels in the heat. Rows of terraced houses topped by obsolete satellite dishes that double as washing-line posts. The brick smokestacks of shuttered factories. The bell towers of immense cathedrals. Tower blocks that would not be out of place in Bedminster.

  A large rat drags its slimy belly across the platform, then slips gracelessly down to the tracks to take its supper inside a discarded bag of crisps. Surviving like that, growing fat like that. With all of civilisation breathing down your back. It’s no small feat. The rat scurries away as the train rattles the track and pulls into the station. How easy it would be to jump in front of it. Nothing here to stop you. No prevention barriers like the ones they were discussing installing in the tube.

  The doors of the carriage slide open. I slip into an empty seat—this time I have a choice of them—and lean my temple against the cool metal pole, staring blankly ahead. An advert, framed by a light blue border. A woman’s crimson-nailed thumb and finger hold a white pill. The Choice Is Now In Your Hands, the caption reads. Beneath it, in smaller type, the name of the company, Planned Parenthood, and addresses for its offices in each of the five boroughs.

  An old black man whose long chin is dotted with tufts of white beard pauses in front of me. My peripheral vision has recorded his slow passage through the carriage, hunched over his cane, his free hand holding the brim of an upturned red cap. Semper Fidelis reads the inverted gold stitching on the Velcro adjustment strap, Always Faithful. He asks me what the matter is. I straighten up in the seat, suddenly conscious of my facial expression, which must have been a scowl, or a grimace, or some other mirror of my reflections.

  Nothing. Nothing at all.

  He clicks his tongue in disbelief. I seen you get on at Cypress Hills. In June in that suit? A white boy? You just come from the graveyard. Ain’t no reason to deny it, brother. Balancing his cane against his hip, he pulls a packet of tissues from his pocket. Here, he says. It’s for your face. I take the tissues from him and push one under my glasses, embarrassed to discover moisture there.

  Cheers. His simple gift elicits the truth from me. Yes, I’ve just come from a funeral. My mate Zachary. Killed himself. I am suddenly overwhelmed by the urge to tell him more. To tell him my secret. Think of it as a spiritual exercise, as Dr. Inwit would say. As parrhesia, frankness, frankness for a change. Or as a form of self-preservation, the release of a festering tension by turning it into words and expelling it from your mouth. But it’s worse than that, I continue. We had a pact, you see. A suicide pact. I raise my eyes and speak slowly to see how he reacts to what I am about to say. But I backed out at the last second.

  In his expression I do not detect any disgust, or revulsion, or even judgement. Jesus wept! is his only comment. I try to return the unused tissues to him, but he insists I keep them. You gonna be needin’ those. You’re in my prayers, brother. He taps his heart with the cap. Have a blessed day.

  The Foederns’ flat looks like a page ripped from a design magazine. Quite possibly it’s been featured in a few. You enter through a private lift that opens directly onto a small receiving room, where a coat rack has been placed perpendicular to a long buffet table. Then, from the entryway, there is unbroken space to the kitchen, the dining room, and the sitting room, each of which can be partitioned by translucent honeycombed doors that slide along tracks in the floor and the ceiling. The furniture is sleek and spare. The fridge and stovetop in the kitchen would serve the needs of a small restaurant. The walls are sparsely covered with abstract paintings and the tables with small sculptures. In the sitting room, there is a wide glass coffee table, half-occupied by a stack of artist monographs, exhibition guides, and catalogues from Sotheby’s and Christie’s, and half-occupied by a chessboard whose pieces are all abstract shapes. At the far end, floor-to-ceiling windows look out onto the zigzagging fire escapes of the luxury flats over the road.

  My parents’ home, with its hotchpotch of furniture, its thick carpet, its decades-old couches, its collections of trinkets and family photographs, none too embarrassing to display, may be, by contrast, exceedingly common, but it does have the merit of making you feel welcome. Whereas this house is antiseptic and cold, a showroom rather than a dwelling. Beneath the renovations the Foederns have made, it’s not difficult to imagine how this space would have appeared a century ago, when it would have been a factory floor, where women in high-necked dresses seated ten to a workbench would have fed strip after strip of fabric beneath the needles of their sewing machines.

  Passing idly through the house, I overhear bits of conversation, chitchat mostly. Though a tad strained. A tad hushed. Given the circumstances.

  … Personally? Mark Green. But whatever happens I’m glad we’re finally going to see the back of Giuliani…

  … went for a cool million at the auction…

  … implied it wasn’t an accident…

  … got his kid a job as an Equity Research Analyst at Cantor Fitzgerald…

  Zach’s mother has retired to the master bedroom, or somewhere else out of sight. Bernard is sitting on the sofa, a woman on either side of him, each of whom is taking her turn to speak to him with concern. We briefly make eye contact and acknowledge each other with a nod, but as I approach to pass on my condolences, the two women stand and, taking him by either elbow, escort him back to the kitchen.

  In the far corner of the room, Vera seems to have wept herself into what, judging from her posture, is a presentable exhaustion. Leaning against a bookshelf near the windows, she listens with half an ear to a white-haired man tell her stories about herself she would have been too young to remember. She frowns, looks aslant, and takes a sip from her cup.

  … No, not the maid. The SAT tutor. The divorce is going to be very expensive…

  … but he had everything. And so much to look forward to. I just don’t understand, Joan. I don’t think I’ll ever understand…

  … Look, when you drown your five children and claim Jesus made you do it, there’s nothing to plead but insanity. Non compos mentis, as the saying goes…

  … Down Under the Manhattan Bridge Overpass. Yeah, Brooklyn. No, I’m not joking. That’s where the future of the market is…

  Looking for somewhere to stand, where it won’t be obvious that I’m the only person who knows no one here, my attention is drawn to the painting hanging over the fireplace on the wall opposite the now empty sofa. Standing before it, I adopt the pose Zach took standing before the bookshelves in the offices of Theory. I tilt my head up, roll my shoulders, and cross my arms behind my back, each hand resting on the wrist of the other. An awkward posture that at the same time feels quite natural: the language of the body also has its etymologies, its microhistories, its subtle genealogies.

  The painting is large, almost three metres in length and two metres tall. Acrylic paint on unprimed canvas. No other frame than the wooden one on which it was stretched. The bottom of the canvas is encrusted
with thick smudges of brown, green, and grey, suggesting a landscape churned by months of storm, protruding from the surface like barnacles from the hull of a ship. Above, a layer of black had been lacquered on as evenly as the rough texture of the canvas would allow. Using the nub of his brush like a pen, the painter had calligraphed wisps of cream up and down the black field. In the centre, two coagulates of black and vermillion, one horizontal and one vertical, poured straight from the paint can, mixing in places before they finally dried, emerge from the miasma. They are figurative, almost human, these two shapes. How we might appear to ourselves if all our frivolous and sentimental illusions about nature had been suddenly and violently stripped away. Next to the two figures, a sharp edge had hastily put a pair of long, diagonal slashes.

  Behind my shoulder, a voice matter-of-factly, almost accusatorily states my name. Although I’ve never heard this voice before, it’s immediately clear exactly to whom it belongs.

  DEATH’S LOOKING GLASS.—Nothing is the silvering on the back of the glass we call Being. Without nothingness, nothing would appear to matter. Eternal life is an insult to those who live well.

  I woke up naked in an empty bed with a crushing hangover. A typical late winter sky, dull and grey as an oyster shell, hung like a Rothko in the window frame. Eyes half-closed, I drew the curtains and retreated to the rippled sheets, where, for close to an hour, dehydration, nausea, and headache pitched me back and forth between waking and sleep, without allowing me to drop definitively into either. With an immense effort, I finally righted myself and groped my way round the foot of the bed in search of the clothes Claire had helped me out of only hours before.

  The girls were standing near the stove. Claire had wrapped herself in a knee-length robe and Tori wore a camisole and sweatpants bearing the crest and motto of her college on the hip. They leant over their mugs, giggling about something I could not, from the ringing in my ears, quite hear. On the stove eggs and rashers were cooking. When they saw me enter, they went silent. Alarmed, I ran a hand over my face in case there was something embarrassing on it. “What?” I asked. “What is it?”

  “And a good morning to you, Mr. Whiting. Claire and I were just saying. Not only do two exceptionally fit and clever women invite you up to their rooms and allow you to stay the night, but on top of that, they cook you breakfast when you wake up. You must be the luckiest lads on the planet. What have you to say for yourself?”

  At that moment Zach emerged from the other bedroom, sparing me from the need to come up with a witty response. In defiance of gravity, his hair shot off his scalp in all directions, as if he had spent the evening between a pair of electrodes rather than the two halves of a pillow. He also seemed to be having a rough morning.

  “For the love of God!” he bellowed. He cupped the side of his head with his hand. “A beer! A beer! Hair of the dog!” He reached his arms round Tori, kissed her like he’d been waking up next to her for years, and whispered into her ear, “Please.”

  “They’re in the fridge,” Claire said.

  “Get me one as well, yeah?”

  “Owen was much more gracious, I thought,” Tori told her friend, who raised her eyebrows and frowned facetiously, to inform us that it remained to be seen. What I had to say for myself, finally, was that it was astonishing how Tori and Claire, who had as much to drink as Zach or I, had not only awoken before us and prepared breakfast, but were capable of banter.

  Zach wasn’t daunted though. He touched me familiarly on the cheek as he handed me a can of beer from the fridge. “That’s because Owen has all the social graces I have come here to learn, isn’t that right, dear?” He sat down at the place Tori was setting for him and took a bite of toast. He chewed, slowly at first, his brow furrowed. He examined the surface of the bread with disbelief, then horror. “I don’t mean to be rude, ladies. This is a lovely breakfast and all. But I believe some algae has gotten on my toast.”

  The three of us broke into laughter. “It’s Marmite, Zach.”

  On our way back to college, the numbers of our new acquaintances stored on the mobiles in our pockets, we said little, each absorbed in his own thoughts. Although the sky remained resolutely dour, my headache began to clear, and with its departure, small sensory details—the burnt umber plumage of the eagle painted on a circular pub sign, the shimmering streaks of red neon left on the wet road by passing motorists, the smell of lamb cooking on a vertical spit inside a kebab van, the crisp double-ding of a bicycle bell, the rich drone of the hurdy-gurdy being cranked on Cornmarket—impressed themselves on my attention with extraordinary vividness. Matching Zach stride for stride, I inhaled and exhaled deeply to watch the dense grey mist escape from my mouth, taking each visible breath for a wondrous sign of freshly kindled inner warmth.

  This, I knew, was thanks to Claire. However scarcely peopled my social life had been until now, it was a teeming metropolis compared to my romantic life.

  Distance was what adolescence had taught me about desire. The distance between my desires and their realisation. The distance between the person I was and the person I’d need to become in order to realise those desires. Therefore: love at a distance. I defended myself against the pain of failure by making failure inevitable, nursing undeclared attachments to the fittest and most unavailable girls in the sixth form.

  A few years before, Simmsy’s elder sister had kindly instructed me in the elements of kissing, but I was only able to put her lessons into practice a few times, because no one had told me what movements my mouth was meant to make to get my lips into that position. The charming and seductive form my words took as my imagination sauntered up to a solitary bird sipping an alcopop across a dark room at The Chatterton or at a party Simmsy had dragged me to vanished as soon as they threatened to become speech. The only ones I managed to pull were the ones who crossed the room themselves. In one case, I learnt later, the reason she had done so was to make her bloke jealous. In another, it was because she was so stoned that she confused me with someone else.

  With Claire, that distance was finally erased. I felt a surge of gratitude for Zach as we parted ways in the Porter’s Lodge. He had promised me an experience worth remembering and he had kept his promise.

  The next day, after our tute, we had a late breakfast in the Covered Market and proceeded to stop by The Bear for an early round. Independently we had both come to the conclusion that The Bear was our favourite pub. For Zach, because it was said to be the oldest in Oxford; for me, because it was within walking distance of Pembroke. (As for the college bar: it was too close to college for my taste. You could never have a quiet pint there without being interrupted by Rugby Drinks or Football Drinks or Crew Drinks. These were so raucous that Len, the ancient stately barman, wisely placed plastic tubs on the floor next to the benches, so an athlete shooting the boot or being pennied into oblivion wouldn’t be required to leave the table should he or she suddenly need to vomit.)

  So named because it had been used as a bear pit as early as the thirteenth century, the pub occupied the bottom floor of a squat white inn, tucked away in a little alley between Christ Church and the High. It was a cramped, low-ceilinged affair, with wood panelling and a collection of clipped neckties from sports clubs, universities, and military regiments from round the world. When he’d paid for our pints, I invited Zach to join me at my regular table and pointed out the buff, claret, and black diagonal stripes of my grandfather’s battalion in the glass case on the wall.

  From the leather satchel he produced a traveller’s chess set and asked if I played. “Sort of,” I said. My father had taught me all the moves and a bit of basic strategy, but I was certainly still a novice. Zach unfastened the little clip on the side of the set and removed the two kings. He hid one in each palm and extended his fists to me. I tapped the top of his right fist, which opened to reveal the white king. When the pieces were set up, I moved the king’s pawn two spaces, the standard opening.

  I had expected Zach’s paper to contain a refutation of Socr
ates’ four proofs for the immortality of the soul. Instead, it focused exclusively on an early section of the Phaedo, in which Socrates remarks to Cebes that a philosopher will be willing to die but should never take his own life. Zach found this disingenuous. Hadn’t Socrates said that death was freedom from the body? What, then, did it matter if suicide was a form of vandalism? The body was a prison, not a temple. And anyhow, at the end of the dialogue, Socrates’ actions spoke louder than his words. What caught my attention, though, was how vehemently he argued with Dr. Inwit about his interpretation, a marked contrast from their more collegial exchanges in the previous weeks. We traded knights. I decided to ask him about it.

  “Things got a tad heated back there, wouldn’t you say?”

  “You mean with Dr. Inwit?” He took a sip of his stout and reflected. “I guess so.”

  “I thought it was rather odd. It was only a paper, mind.”

  “See, that’s where you’re wrong,” he said with a smile. “It wasn’t only a paper. I happen to believe what I was saying.” He moved his bishop. “Check.”

  “You honestly think suicide isn’t a form of weakness or cowardice?” I asked, moving my pawn up one space to defend my king. I took the cigarette he offered me. I hadn’t yet figured out how to inhale properly, but I liked the way I looked holding it in my fingers and the way I imagined I looked as the smoke unfurled from my lips.

  He castled on the queen’s side. Surely, next turn he would move the rook in order to put pressure on my pawn. I’d have to find some way to defend against that. I moved my remaining knight back from the centre of the board to protect the piece.

  “On the contrary,” he said. “When done for the right reasons, there is no more courageous act. The problem,” he thought, “is that we continue to regard escaping from pain as the paradigmatic rationale for suicide.” He was dismissive of those who’d ended their lives to achieve respite from some excruciating, long-endured mental or physical illness. He was equally critical of those who had given in to an acute whim of momentary despair, such as when their stock portfolio or their lover had been unfaithful to them.