The Zero and the One

by Ryan Ruby

  I flick the switch: Vera’s room. Original crown moulding and a ceiling fan. Cream-and-yellow-striped wallpaper. Paisley-pattern bedspread. Diaphanous violet curtains. A cork noticeboard covered in photographs. Bracelets and necklaces that double as decorations hanging from the knobs screwed into the walls. Pairs of shoes stacked neatly on a rack behind the bed. A normal room, all in all. A room that acts the age of its occupant, with a feminine—that is to say human—element lacking from both the frigid sleekness of her parents’ home and the deliberate chaos of Zach’s rooms in Staircase XVI.

  I hang my suit jacket over the back of her desk chair and begin to loosen my striped college tie. But I stop as soon as I notice, on the surface of the desk, next to the translucent-blue computer shaped like a virtual reality helmet, a bundle of letters tied together with a red ribbon. The envelopes, opened with a paperknife, all bear Royal Mail stamps and return addresses in familiar handwriting. I slide the topmost envelope out of the bundle, wondering which of these contains Zach’s description of me, the one by which Vera claimed to recognise me, and open it, only to discover that it is written in the same invented alphabet as the letter Zach showed me in Berlin. I return it to its place and finish undressing. My trousers are creased and the inside of my collar is stained with a brown rim of sweat. From my rucksack, I grab the first t-shirt I feel and make my way to join the gathering upstairs.

  Before I pass through the door, I pause to look at the photographs on the noticeboard. There are several of Zach and Vera together.

  There is one of them as children, walking down the strand on a cold, grey day. They are wearing shorts and sandals and windcheaters. Coming over the water a strong wind has blown their hair across their faces. Zach himself has shoulder-length hair, which makes him look like his sister’s younger sister. I pull the drawing pin. The caption on the back reads Z&V The Lido 1989.

  Another shows them in close-up, in cap and gown, standing outside the gates of The Gansevoort School. Vera smiles broadly at the camera, whose flash has given her red pupils. She is wearing the same necklace—a black pearl necklace. Meanwhile, Zach, whose slightly plump face is sparsely covered with an early attempt at a beard, looks beyond the frame, bored by all the pomp and circumstance. Caption: Z&V Graduation Day 1999.

  A third, of the two of them, sitting on manicured grass, their backs resting against the base of a bronze casting of Rodin’s Thinker. In the background, neoclassical architecture. Zach is wearing jeans ripped at the knee. He is raising a cigarette to his smirking lips. Vera has turned to look at him, her hand on his arm in a way that suggests she has just gently slapped him for making a light joke at her expense.

  Finally, a horizontal shot of them on the sofa in the living room of this very flat. The lower right corner of the frame has been obscured by Zach’s arm, which has reached out to its greatest length to snap the photo. His face, in profile, looks alertly ahead. Vera is resting on his chest. Her hair is long. A few black curls have fallen over her shoulder. She is wearing a cocktail dress. And again, the pearls.

  I retrieve the object from my jacket pocket, hold it up to the light from the desk lamp, and notice, for the first time, the hole, barely a pinprick, that passes through the centre. I look again at the photograph. The date stamp in the corner reads December 30, 2000. I pull the drawing pin. There is no caption.

  On the roof is a sizeable crowd, everyone in various stages of undress. A garage rock track, its singer disparaging the intelligence of the New York Police Department, is playing on the portable stereo someone has placed on the brick ledge.

  When Katie sees me come up the fire escape, she breaks off her conversation with Jake and Marissa and joins me. Good, she says. You found the beer. She takes me by the arm and leads me on a long, slow tour of the perimeter of the roof. Surprises me by asking, straight off, how Vera is doing. With Katie it seems that there is no such thing as a stranger or a secret, no thought too private to share.

  I don’t know if I can say. I quite literally just met her.

  But you were there. You saw how she was.

  Well, after the funeral I thought to myself that it was remarkable how well she was handling herself. She ate a little. Spoke with people. She absolutely insisted I come here, after all.

  Katie lets go of my arm and places her palm over her heart, relieved. Oh, I’m so glad to hear you say that. You’re absolutely right. She’s an incredibly strong woman. I mean I know she’s just devastated—and the worst is still to come. Anger and resentment and guilt and loss. Loss she’ll be dealing with for the rest of her life. But if there’s anyone, anyone, who can bounce back from a thing like this, it’s Vera. I’m really sorry I never got to meet Zach. Vera and I really only got to know each other when we became roommates, and by then he was already in England. He stayed here for Winter Break, but I was back home in LA. She takes a sip of her beer and holds the cold bottle to her flushed red cheek. Vera talked about him all the time, she continues. He sounded like just the most amazing person—

  I interrupt her to ask if she has any siblings.

  Only child, she says, warily, as if she didn’t quite see how my question related to what she’d been talking about.

  As am I. Vera said something to me after the funeral. She said that I shouldn’t pretend that she was suffering any more than I was just because she was his sister. But I wonder if that’s really true. That bond must be deeper than any friendship could ever be.

  I guess Vera’s an only child now too. She’ll need us to show her how to cope with that… Her voice trails off, unsure if the first word that comes to mind is the one she really means. She looks away. With that loneliness…

  We’ve made our way to the other side of the roof, hidden from the rest of the party by a water tower. Folding our arms on the roof ledge, we find ourselves eye level with a familiar series of gargoyles embedded in the cornice of the block of flats over the road. See no evil. Hear no evil. Speak no evil. I take a pull from the bottle, place it on the ledge, and turn my back on them.

  And what about you, Owen? How are you doing?

  It’s a question I’d rather not answer. I know she means well, but the way she asks, with its presumption of complicity, sounds to my ears more like an invitation to gossip that an invitation to unburden my soul, which, anyway, is not something that’s going to happen.

  Vera told me Zach addressed his… letter… to you. And that you were the one who had to deal with the police. I can’t imagine what that must be like.

  My lips part. Katie’s eyes are wide open, brimming with sympathy. She nods silently. With understanding. Prompting me to speak.

  I feel… I feel all the same things you mentioned, I say. Anger and resentment and guilt. Confusion as well. Everything he ever said about suicide keeps coming back to me, like warning signs I failed to notice or take seriously enough. I blame myself. I do. For not seeing the signs. For not acting when I could. It’s taking a toll on me. I’m having trouble keeping food down. When I sleep, I have nightmares. I’m knackered. Exhausted.

  Suddenly I begin to feel dizzy, on the verge of blacking out. I place my palm to my forehead to stabilise myself. It’s time for this conversation to come to an end. I’ve already said enough as it is, even though everything I’ve said has been half-truths.

  In fact, would you mind terribly if I went downstairs again? I think I ought to lie down.

  My God, yes. You must be so tired! With the flight and the time difference and the funeral and—this is your first time in New York, isn’t it? New York is enough to run anybody into the ground. Not to mention all those other things.

  Thank you, Katie. You’ve been very kind.

  In Vera’s room I disassemble all the pillows on the bed, trying to remember the arrangement so I can replace them in the morning. It’s too hot to sleep beneath the sheets. Somehow I feel I’m fouling up the quilt just by lying on it. For half an hour, I watch the red lights on Vera’s alarm clock change. Adding five. Sweating. Trying to tip my clammy
fatigue into unconsciousness with boredom. Just after three o’clock, I hear noises in the living room. The sounds of laughter. The click of bottles falling in the rubbish bin. The slamming of the door. Katie’s voice saying, Goodbye, No problem at all, Call me, I’m free all next week.

  Then, silence. I sweat. I watch the clock. The door to the room cracks open. I come to my senses and sit up. Is it morning already? No. It’s only four. Somehow I feel I shouldn’t be here. In Vera’s bed.

  It’s me, Vera says. It’s okay. It’s just me.

  I’m so sorry—I didn’t mean to—I thought you were staying—

  Really, Owen, it’s fine.

  I can go to the sofa—so you can have your bed to—

  I begin to stand, but before I can, she puts her fingers on my shoulders. It’s alright. Stay. Please stay. I want you to.

  In the darkness, I hear two heels drop, and then a zip. The rustle of fabric. A dull snap. A shadow, whose form is illuminated only by the faint glow of the clock, crawls into the bed and rests a cheek on my chest. I can feel her breast heavy on my stomach. She wraps an arm around me, curled up. Her knees touching my thighs. Touch. More than the other senses, more than even speech, it’s touch that connects us to other people. When you go without it for long enough, you feel like you no longer have a body, that you are floating through the world, immaterial as a ghost, a conduit for sense impressions, with no weight or gravity or solidness, little more than a block of ice that has become aware of its own numbness. After I threw the pistol into the river, right after, muddy bloody suit and all, I went straight to Claire, not only because I needed an alibi, but because I needed to be touched. To prove to myself that I still existed.

  Curled up against my body, Vera begins to shake and sob. I just couldn’t, Owen. I just couldn’t stay there. I tried to be strong, I tried to be, but I just couldn’t I couldn’t. Her breathing grows louder and faster until from the back of her throat, she coughs a shriek. She makes a fist and begins to pound my chest, asking with each contact, Why?

  Shhh… Shhh… As she beats it out of her system, trembling, each blow more emphatic but less forceful than the last, I curl her close to me. Stroking her hair. Her arm. In one of the sweeps, my fingers pass over the skin of her bicep. Vera, shhhh. It’s all right, Vera. I feel two ridges. Perfectly straight. Embossed into her skin. It’s all right. Just to be certain, I pass my palm over them again, inconspicuously as possible, so she doesn’t notice that I’ve noticed what I’ve noticed. Two scars. It’s all right. Two perfectly straight scars—but on her left arm.

  I’d noticed an identical pattern, in the same location, on Zach’s right arm, the night we hired that prostitute in Berlin.

  IDOLATRY.—Idolatry is above all a matter of space: the idolatrous object is the one that is both infinitely close and infinitely far away.

  In Berlin, the days seemed to turn themselves inside out. We sang the sun, but only in its flight, rising to greet the pink-grey dusk and retiring red-eyed when it came out again to light the way for men and women in business attire, also red-eyed, with whom we exchanged mutually uncomprehending stares on the tram every morning. Like two species of vampire sizing each other up, Zach quipped.

  We heard the last calls of Club der Visionäre and White Trash Fast Food and Café Zapata and Tresor and half a dozen others whose names are now nothing more to me than a blur of umlauts and neuter articles and hard consonants. We put Zach’s theories on dancing to the test, with great success, practicing our indifference to ridicule to the sound of techno and house (things I wouldn’t have been caught dead doing back home), usually under the inspiration of the little psychoactive Fizzers Niall Graves introduced us to, which could be had for a fiver under table after table in club after club to be chased with pilsner and vodka and energy drinks.

  If we’d extended ourselves too far the previous evening, we would spend our recuperation wandering through the strange flat on Schönhauser Allee that Bernard rented for our stay. We would peek under white sheets to examine the absent owner’s furniture, or we’d pluck an unmarked video at random from the hundreds that had been stacked in the drawing room and watch whatever it contained. (I remember: Fassbinder’s adaptation of Despair, Looney Tunes dubbed in German, a grainy recording of the 1990 World Cup Championship Match.) Or we dictated poetry to one another, which we typed up on the black machine I discovered hidden beneath some cleaning supplies in the pantry, posting the results to the addresses of various literary magazines in London.

  Certain lines of those poems return to me now, ghostly tremors in my fingertips and faint images in my brain. I remember how they felt to type as much as how they were laid out on the page or how they resonated in my ear. They return to me in lines and stanzas, in snatches and fragments, like the damaged papyri on which the fragmented wisdom of Heraclitus or Sappho is preserved today.

  “Eadem, Sed Aliter” is the only one I remember in full. Zach came up with the subject, I think. I decided on the title. We wrote it together, trading places at the typewriter. He would dictate two lines, then I the two following. The sonnet, I daresay, gives a good indication of our general mood:

  Even at our most modern moment,

  Blinded by migraines, rotting with syphilis,

  Vomiting, trembling, raving, delirious,

  Bludgeoned by nightmares, dependent

  Upon a betrayer’s kindness—even then, weak

  Of hand, he lifted our pen to sign “Dionysus”

  Beneath his letters to posterity. Alas,

  It seems there is no escaping the Greeks.

  Now more than a century since, modernity

  Chews quietly on the asphodel;

  The dynamite has exploded, but still the spell

  Remains unbroken. Our history

  Is tail-swallowing Ourobouros, whose billion

  Scales are fashioned from the bodies of men.

  Circumstance may have been the actual reason Zach and I spent our holiday there (his father was going to be there; his father was going to foot the bill), but Zach was travelling on business of his own. What business? None of the city’s famous museums or important historical sites made it onto our itinerary. We spent a month there without ever seeing the inside of the Pergamon or the Staatsoper or the Reichstag. We paid no respectful pilgrimage to Sachsenhausen, nor did we walk by Lindenstraße to see how the construction of Daniel Libeskind’s Jewish Museum was coming along. We didn’t even see the stretch of famous graffiti on the Berlin Wall, though it was only a short tram ride from our flat. Had we not gone to visit Bernard at the Adlon we would have been the only tourists in history to visit the capital of Germany without seeing the Brandenburg Gate.

  No, for Zach, the only true point of interest in the whole bloody town was to be found at 13 Richard-Wagner-Straße, where the offices of Nothung Verlag, Hans Abendroth’s publisher, were located.

  From the Translator’s Introduction to The Zero and the One, Zach would have learnt that his new idol was born to an affluent family of civil servants and booksellers in Frankfurt in 1909. His uncle Hermann was a famous conductor, heading orchestras in both England and the USSR, though he later joined the Nazi Party and conducted Die Meistersinger at the Bayreuth Festival in 1944. Against the wishes of his parents, who hoped he would go into law, Hans studied classical philology at the University of Freiburg and wrote his Habilitationsschrift (“Allegorien der Seele vom Phaidon zur Hymne der Perle”) under the supervision of Martin Heidegger. In 1935, he relocated to Berlin, where he worked as a researcher at the Prussian Academy of Sciences, as a part of the team tasked with translating the Akhmim Codex, a fifth-century Gnostic manuscript, from Coptic into German. He taught at the University of Berlin until 1949, retiring shortly thereafter to begin work on Null und Eins, his magnum opus, which would be published, to little notice, a few years later. It was thanks to Lacan’s interest in the book and to a deft translation by Pierre Klossowski that Null und Eins became a touchstone for a generation of French philosophers and psyc
hoanalysts. By then, however, Abendroth himself published only sporadically and never appeared in public. As of the publication date of the English edition, 1972, he was said to be living in a state of reclusion somewhere in Charlottenburg, West Berlin.

  The week before our departure Zach had spent furiously gathering as much supplementary information about Abendroth as he could, not that there was much to be found. The house that had published his copy had long since gone out of business and the translator, Bettina Müller, was killed in a car crash in 1981. No one at Nothung Verlag returned Zach’s emails requesting, “as research assistants of the internationally renowned philosopher, Dr. Marcus Inwit, of Magdalen College, Oxford,” an interview “to be printed in the upcoming issue of Theory,” which Niall Graves was surely as little aware as Dr. Inwit was of being used as a reference. When we arrived in Berlin, we passed an entire afternoon at the Staatsbibliothek looking for some news of his existence. We found none. But the absence of an obituary gave Zach hope that, though he would be quite old, Abendroth was still alive and capable of being called on. What Zach hoped to do once he found him—given the rudimentary state of his German and the philosopher’s reclusiveness—no one could say. I think he supposed, as all Americans do, that Abendroth would be happy to converse with him in English.

  As there was no doorbell at 13 Richard-Wagner-Straße and Berlin’s door locks didn’t seem to yield as willingly to bobby pins as London’s, we waited for almost an hour for someone to come in or out of the building. We were finally able to enter on the black-and-yellow tails of a postman, whose red and round face, as he watched us sneak past, was frozen in that comical mixture of suspicion (this is not meant to be happening!) and disbelief (hang on, is this really happening?) one rarely witnesses outside silent cinema. We quickly made our way up to the third floor and knocked on the door next to the bronze plaque with the name and address of the publishing house. The door was opened slightly by a brittle old woman, the receptionist I assumed, and we sped through before it could be shut on us again.