The Zero and the One

by Ryan Ruby

  The offices of Nothung Verlag were hardly larger than the flat where we were staying. There was no computer on the front desk, only a large olive-coloured electric typewriter loaded with what looked to be a half-finished letter. There were the standard floor-to-ceiling bookshelves, but even I could see that some of the titles had been gathering dust there for years. No wonder they hadn’t returned Zach’s email. They probably weren’t even aware he’d sent it.

  Zach enthusiastically reached out to shake the delicate, unproffered hand of the elderly gentleman who had emerged from his office, the one on the right, to see what the bother was. “Kann ich Ihnen helfen?” he asked Zach with frigid politeness.

  “Can… I… you… help—yes, you can help me, Sir,” Zach answered, making no attempt to have the conversation in German. This did nothing to elevate the frown that was then plummeting into the old man’s jowls. “Allow me to introduce myself. I am Zachary Foedern and this… this is my esteemed colleague Owen Whiting. We are here from Oxford on behalf of the journal Theory. We sent you email correspondence regarding the work of Hans Abendroth, which, I don’t know if you are aware of this, Herr…”

  “Wilhelm von Nothung.”

  “Uh yes, I don’t know if you’re aware of this, Herr von Nothung, but there has been a wide resurgence of interest in Herr Abendroth’s work among select circles in Britain… and America too, and we… my colleague and I… were wondering if we could meet with him, with Herr Abendroth, in order to interview him, as I wrote in my email, for the… the uh, Theory.”

  Von Nothung waited for a long time before responding to make sure Zach’s avalanche of falsehoods had indeed finished falling. He spoke slowly, in perfect, if somewhat prim, English. “Ah yes. Mr. Foedern. I recall your email. Please accept my apologies, but your interview is quite simply out of the question. I hope you have not come all this way to hear me tell you this in person.”

  “No, Herr von Nothung—and please, call me Zach—we have come all this way to hear you tell us that it will be possible and to help us arrange the interview and perhaps even to translate for us, since your English is so good. We understand, and respect, yes respect, the fact that Herr Abendroth is a… doesn’t like to see many people… but if you were to tell him how many people—philosophers—of the new generation—are interested in his work, I’m sure he’d reconsider.”

  “Mr. Foedern. How shall I say this? Aside from the fact that you appear to be no more than twenty years of age and aside from the fact that you speak no German and aside from the fact that your connexion with Theory is tenuous enough for you to be unaware how deeply Niall Graves and I despise each other—the reason an interview is impossible is that Herr Doktor Hans Abendroth has just two days ago passed away. I am, in fact, preparing his obituary now. I wish, however, to thank you for your interest in his work. It is possible that I shall include a line about how, after so many years of unwarranted obscurity, Null und Eins is being rediscovered by—how did you put it?—the philosophers of the new generation.”

  And with that von Nothung showed us the door.

  Zach looked almost as cross as when he’d read the letter from his sister a few days earlier. Both times, his face clouded with sullenness. His pout twisted into a scowl as his silence condensed into outright anger. This time, at least, I had enough information to understand the cause of the sullenness: he’d narrowly missed the opportunity to meet a person with whom he felt a strong kinship, a person whose ideas had given him hours of intense pleasure, in whose aphorisms he must have found elegant formulations of his own inchoate thoughts, whose book was an achievement he believed he alone had recognised.

  What confused me, however, was the anger. At what? That Abendroth was dead? Zach seemed to take it personally, as if this death, though it was the death of a person whose existence he was unaware of only a few months before, was some sort of betrayal. He seemed to regard this physical fact of death as evidence that the universe was maliciously bent on foiling his plans and defying his will. As on the first occasion, we solved the problem the only way we knew how: through a systematic derangement of the senses.

  SAILING OFF THE EDGE OF THE EARTH.—The fantastical etchings of galleons sailing off the edge of the flat earth and toppling headlong into the void are more accurate representations our of lived experience than the spherical empirical truth in which we happen to live. Columbus’ discovery of the Americas is surely a watershed moment in the History of the Forgetting of Being.

  A breeze passes through the open window, blowing the thin curtains back into the room, encouraging one to hope that the hot spell has finally broken. My rucksack, there in the corner. My suit jacket, hanging on the chair. The top of the envelope peeks out of the book that is still in the jacket pocket where I left it. On the pillow next to mine is a baby-blue envelope with my initials on it. The note inside is written on personalised stationery. Across the top, the letters of her name rise slightly from the cardstock. I run my fingers over them.

  VERA FOEDERN

  O—

  Thank you for your kindness last night. You were a dear to be of comfort to me when I needed it. I wanted to wake you up and tell you this, but you looked like you needed your sleep. Going uptown today. Appointment with my therapist. Then I’ll be at school, getting ready for next semester, doing my best to pretend that life goes on. Maybe if I fake it, it’ll start to happen. Sounds like something Z would say, come to think of it. Talked to Mommy this morning. She says you should come to dinner tonight. Nothing fancy. Just Chinese takeout. 6:30?

  —V

  I read it twice over. Very slowly. In the script I notice a difference between brother and sister. His letters were compactly cloistered. Then they exploded (in the case of l’s or h’s) well above or sank (in the case of p’s or y’s) well below his otherwise miraculously straight lines. Hers, on the other hand, have a feature I’ve never seen before in anyone else’s handwriting: sizeable lacunae between the letters that require more than one stroke—splitting, for example, the lowercase d in dear into a c and an l and the lowercase h in Chinese into an l and a backwards r. The V of her signature is composed of two obliques that barely manage to meet at the point. The lines float across the cardstock like fish in a small aquarium.

  The living room is empty. The light in Katie’s room is out. I have the place to myself. Collecting my clothes for the day, I head to the shower. On the shower curtain, a map of the world. I point to an unmarked spot due west of London, beneath the chin of the boar’s head of Wales, and trace an invisible line across the clear plastic Atlantic, landing on the dot that reads New York. This far. I’ve come this far.

  Under the hot stream. Eyes closed. Water cascading off my nose and lips and chin. The taste of Claire’s mouth. My prick stirs. Signs of life. Finally. I put my hand to it. Claire’s small nipples in my teeth. Her soft calves wrapped around my waist. The way she breathes oh God oh God before she comes. My hand shuttles back and forth. The weight of Vera’s breast on my chest last night. Didn’t get a stiff one then, thank Christ. And if I had? What if I had tried to slip off her knickers? Would she have let me? Let me lift her hips. Let me peel them off. Roll between her thighs? Shuttling back and forth, faster. Letting me inside, wet like saliva, my tongue running the length of her neck, my fingers pushing between her teeth into her mouth. Shuttling back and forth. Saying my name. Slowly. My name.

  I return to Vera’s room wearing new skin, all the filth and sweat rubbed out. Wearing only a towel, I sit at her computer. Claire must have already written. A small circle with the mouse. A click on the icon of the web browser on the screen. In place of a homepage, what appears is Vera’s inbox. The sight of the email addresses and subject headings causes the same stab of embarrassment one feels when one opens the door to an unlocked public toilet and discovers it’s occupied. My first instinct is to log her out (as one would immediately apologise and shut the toilet door again). But as I bring the cursor arrow to the upper right hand of the page, two considerations prev
ent me from clicking x. First: logging off now would only inform Vera that I’d used her computer and seen the contents of her inbox. Second: here before me must be some of the information I was looking for two days ago when I tried to guess the password to Zach’s email account. Surely he’d written something to her in the days leading up to his death. Something he hadn’t told me. Just as he hadn’t told me he would be including a pearl in his letter. I dip my hand into the pocket of the jacket that is hanging on the back of the chair. Still there.

  With my right hand, I scroll down, vowing not to look at anything except what was on the first page. But in a collection of emails, read and unread, dating back three months, there are none from her brother. I type his name into the search box at the top of the page. The only emails in which it appears are those from their parents and short messages informing people of the date and time of the funeral. The most recent exchange between them was sometime in late December. Surely something more than Zach’s aversion to email would have to be responsible for such a long drought. I rifle again through the letters on the desk. The last is also postmarked in December. The letter Bernard delivered to Zach in Berlin had upset him—that much was clear. This might explain why there were no emails after April, but not why there were none between December and April. Unless she’s erased them all from her account.

  In another window, I check my own inbox, and finding nothing there from Claire, I log out. Unless I somehow manage to crack their sibling code, what I’m looking for, whatever it is, I won’t find without Vera’s help. Meantime, it’s late. I should get on with my day.

  Half six at the Foederns’. Gives me five hours to kill. What to do? In New York City? With five hours? Anything. But not everything. One week in New York is beginning to strike me as totally inadequate. Oxford, around for a millennium, can be mastered in a month. New York, not half as old, would take a lifetime. The situation of the tourist in New York is not unalike that of the ass in Buridan’s fable. Placed between two equidistant bales of hay, the donkey dies of indecision and hunger. The moral: not to act is an action nonetheless. One must choose, even if that choice is arbitrary. Even if you have to leave it to chance. As Dr. Inwit did when he flipped the coin to see who would read first.

  I start flipping through the pages of my travel guide at random.

  Page 91: Museum Mile—Metropolitan Museum of Art, Guggenheim, Whitney Museum, Jewish Museum

  Page 64: West Village—Macdougal Street, Washington Square Park, NYU

  Page 109: Harlem and Morningside Heights—125th Street, Apollo Theater, Columbia University, Cathedral of St. John the Divine

  Page 37: Twin Towers—Windows on the World restaurant, Top of the World observation deck. Says here that on a clear day you can see the curvature of the earth. The legendary photograph of Philippe Petit on his tightrope. Take train to: Cortlandt Street, Fulton Street, Chambers Street, Park Place, World Trade Center. No direct lines from Delancey station, though. Five hours to kill. How long would it take to walk?

  From one hundred and ten storeys up, the vault of the heavens loses some of its grandeur as a metaphor. It now appears no farther than the vaulted ceilings of actual cathedrals. The scatter of white clouds is now no more remote than the capitals that separate the columns from the ribs. The clouds lack the serenity and indifference they seem to possess when you view them from the ground. They appear just as confused as we are. Less unfettered than unmoored, they have no better idea of where to go or how to get there than we do.

  The Stoics, I read in one of Dr. Inwit’s books, used to recommend imagining how the world would appear from the perspective of the heavens. From that vantage, they thought, all human problems and anxieties would be seen as they really are. Minimal. Unimportant. Easily forgotten. Needlessly suffered. Dr. Inwit calls this spiritual exercise The View From Nowhere. Aside from the windows of an aeroplane, this must be as close to a literal view from nowhere as a person can get. Ironic, then, that it should be found directly above Manhattan, New York, USA. The very heart of somewhere.

  Buffeted by the wind, I walk to the edge of the deck. I thread my fingers through the netting, the suicide prevention netting, and look down. At the roofs and buildings. At their aerials, spires, water towers. At all the ant pedestrians and all the vehicular beetles. At their frantic scurrying in all directions on the street below.

  There is a flaw in the exercise, I think. Something neglected in its design. When I look down I do experience my problems as the Stoics said I would. But when I look out I’m only reminded of them. When I look out I see: the curvature of the earth. A faint, almost clear arc in the field of blue. Like a scar from a knife that long ago sliced open the tissue of the firmament.

  At an Internet café on Water Street, I buy a half hour, find myself a terminal in the corner to see if Claire has written to me yet.

  FROM: clairecaldwell@st-annes.ox.ac.uk

  TO: owenwhiting@pmb.ox.ac.uk

  SUBJECT: Re: “Arrived Safe and Sound”

  I can’t tell you how relieved I was to see your name in my inbox this morning. I was so worried that something had happened to you. I went through all the possibilities. It’s fine that you hadn’t anything to say. I completely understand. It’s getting harder and harder to find words for what is happening to us these days. All you needed to tell me was what you told me, that you were all right and that you loved me.

  And to that I respond: I love you. But I can’t pretend I’m fine or that things are fine. Things are worse. I’m no longer in Greenwich. The only way to put this is to simply tell you what’s happened. Tori has been hospitalised. I found her in the tub this morning with all her clothes on, unconscious, next to an empty bottle of her mother’s sleeping pills. We rushed her to the emergency room to have her stomach pumped. She survived, thank God, but now she’s been relocated to Bethlehem Hospital where she’s under observation. I considered not telling you this, but it would be better that you know, rather than discovering it when you get back.

  I don’t know when she’ll be let out, but I plan to visit her as soon as I’m allowed. It probably won’t be until you’re back home. If you are feeling up to it we can go together. It won’t be easy, but we need to stand by each other and support one another. God, that seems like ages from now, even though it’s only a few days away. It seems anything can happen between now and then. I’m praying—yes, literally praying—that nothing does. What I wouldn’t do for a week of nothing happening.

  Keep writing to me, short notes if you must, just so I know not to worry about you. (Not that I won’t anyway.)

  All my love,

  C

  The letters on the screen begin to blur. Alone. I’ve left Claire there alone. To deal with the mess I’ve made. With the repercussions of my actions. Of my failures to act. I picture Tori’s body in the white tub. Her limp arm dangling over the side. The empty orange bottle. Claire screaming when she opens the door.

  A scream. Long, loud, and violent. Sound waves rippling across the Atlantic. Into my ears. Did Zach’s body make ripples when it slid down the bank, into the river? If so, I didn’t see them. By that point, I was already fleeing the scene, trying to cross Port Meadow as fast as I could to get to the safety of Claire’s door. But they are becoming visible now. Now I can see them everywhere. Zach’s death is a virus. A contagion. His madness is infecting everything he touched. Moving outward. One ripple at a time.

  MALE FRIENDSHIP.—The shortest distance between the hearts of two men is the body of a woman.

  Many hours and several bars later, we were stumbling through the middle of Mitte when Zach asked me if I’d ever been with a whore. At first, I wasn’t sure I’d heard him rightly.

  “You know. A prostitute, a hooker, a sex worker, a painted lady, a streetwalker, a working girl, a woman of the night.”

  Within a few steps I saw the reason for his abrupt shift in subject. With his perfect vision—he called it his fighter pilot vision—he could see distant things clearly, things that, b
ehind my glasses, I only perceived as indistinct smudges. Up ahead, dotting Oranienburger Straße, staggered at a distance of a few metres each, were women. Standing. Waiting. Serving.

  “Me neither,” he continued when I said nothing. “And I don’t think I want to die without knowing what it’s like to pay for sex. Maybe it’s thrilling, Maybe it’s depressing. Maybe it’s just totally unremarkable. But it would be too bad never to find out. I’m just drunk enough to want to. What do you think?”

  “I think you’re taking the piss.” To show him I meant it, I laughed a little. A forced laugh, awkward and uneasy.

  “I assure you I’m not. Are you in?”

  From the way he looked at me I could tell his question was purely rhetorical. The first objection that came to mind was: what would Claire think?—and Tori? But no sooner had it come than it was followed by what would be his obvious rebuttal. To have a thought about it, they’d have to know about it, and so they’d think nothing, since we would never tell them. Zach was always asking me if I was in for something, if I was up for something, if I was down for something. And I was always indecisive, always dragging my feet, before I eventually went along with his plans. Considering how generous he always was with me and how he went out of his way to include me in everything he did, it was bound to try his patience at some point. After all, if it weren’t for him, I’d never have met Claire in the first place; I’d be back in my rooms in Oxford, alone, reading.

  “How does it work?” I asked.

  “No idea!” he confessed. “We ask one of them what’s on the menu? Ha!” He spoke quickly and animatedly, incapable of hiding his excitement that I’d agreed to do this with him. “Tell you what. Run down to that club on the bottom floor of Tacheles and get us a pair of condoms from the machine in the bathroom. Just in case she doesn’t provide them herself. While you’re doing that I’ll find out how much it costs. Any special requests?”