The Zero and the One

by Ryan Ruby

  It’s difficult to picture Bernard on the couch, going on about his feelings. Though as he listens approvingly to his daughter, it seems possible that they all have therapists. Perhaps in the Foedern family, therapy was the sort of thing one simply did—on the weekend, after tennis. Everyone was seeing a therapist, it seemed. Vera and me. And now Tori as well.

  Did Zach? Can’t imagine him approving of it, given the bent of his personal philosophy. I know he saw something romantic, even heroic, in mental illness. He regarded psychiatry as a coercive attempt to homogenize unique ways of thinking and being. Above all, he frowned on the new reliance on pharmaceuticals, for their use implied that the mind was just an organic machine that could be predictably manipulated with the proper chemical inputs. But if he disapproved of psychiatry, mightn’t it have come from experience?

  I lay down my fork on what will remain an uneaten bed of noodles and take the fortune cookie Rebecca passes me. I crack it open, leaving the peach-coloured shards on the paper plate. We each take a turn reading our fortune aloud.

  Thorough preparation makes its own luck, Rebecca begins.

  Then Bernard: The only thing we know for sure about future developments is that they will develop.

  A great mystery will be revealed to you, says Vera.

  I read: Faithless is he who quits when the road darkens.

  Afterwards, there is a moment of silence. But it’s not long before it’s my turn to talk. It’s not long before the question I’ve been expecting, the question I was invited to answer, is finally asked. Dropping her mostly full paper plate into the bin in the kitchen, Rebecca says, as though the thought has just occurred to her: Tell me, Owen, how did you meet our son?

  I didn’t tell them everything, obviously. Not about my feelings of loneliness during the term before I met him. Nor about the black eye he got at The Cowley Arms. Victoria or Claire. His experiments in petty theft. How much we drank or the drugs we did. The whore we fucked. I didn’t tell them, it goes without saying, about our pact. My aim was to cast Zach in a flattering light rather than to illuminate his character. And parental pride, I think, was satisfied by my account. Bernard and Rebecca visibly swelled at the idealised portrait that resulted when I brushed over certain truths, left others vague, and subtracted yet others in their entirety from the composition.

  Only Vera sensed my omissions and was not content to let them remain. Unlike Rebecca, who interrupted me from time to time with anecdotes that drew continuities between the boy I described and the one she raised, Vera listened to my stories with raised eyebrows. After I recited Zach’s speech about voting, for example, she said she happened to know he filled out an absentee ballot and voted for Gore and was as outraged and disgusted by the result of the election as everybody else was. I could tell she was waiting until we were on our own so she could question me further. So she could hear the parts of the story I wasn’t willing to speak of in front of her parents.

  On our way out the door, Rebecca brings her a small envelope, containing, I gather from their hushed conversation, tickets to some kind of performance. Daddy and I aren’t in the mood to go tomorrow night, she tells her daughter, but it’s the last performance of the season and it would be a shame to let the tickets go to waste. Besides, it couldn’t hurt. Maybe it will help you two take your mind off things.

  But I’m not in the mood to go either! Vera protests.

  Rebecca turns to me. Do you like the opera, Owen?

  Vera casts a sharp glance in my direction. Once again I’ve found myself the arbiter in a disagreement between her and her mother. Once again, I’m not sure with whom it would be more polite to side. Where my loyalties are meant to lie.

  I don’t know. I’ve never been to the opera, I answer her, as tentatively as possible. Mum often listened to Radio 3, so in my house there was always a Bach cantata or a Beethoven symphony decorously competing with whichever Sex Pistols or Disorder track was blasting from my stereo upstairs. But I could count the performances of classical music I’d seen on one hand. They were all at the Sheldonian, all during Michaelmas Term, when I could think of nothing better to do after a day of studying than to find new ways to improve myself. Honestly, it would be a treat to see what the opera was like.

  Would you like to go? Vera asks.

  I shrug, doing my best to feign indifference. Why not?

  We say our goodbyes and step into the lift. On our way down I ask Vera which opera we’ll be seeing tomorrow evening.

  You know, I didn’t even think to ask, she says, opening the envelope. Ahhh. Now I understand.

  Understand what?

  Why they didn’t want to go. She flips one of the tickets between her thumb and forefinger so I can read what is printed on the other side: Richard Wagner, Die Walküre.

  I nod silently.

  Vera directs our taxi to an address on Rivington Street and sits in silence until it comes time for us to pay the fare. None of the tenderness from her note this morning is apparent in her expression or her posture, but it’s unclear whether her change in mood is to do with me, whether it’s about something I said at dinner, the opera tickets, or something else entirely. When she wants me to know she’ll tell me. Until then, I’ll have to wait. Unless she never wants to tell me, I think, my lips tightening.

  I follow her down a set of stairs, through an unmarked door covered in band stickers, into a cellar bar. The bearded barman doesn’t acknowledge us as we enter. In the back, two tall men in skinny jeans and t-shirts, cues in hand, are examining the distribution of billiard balls on a green table illuminated by a sickly lamp that hangs from the low ceiling. The only other customer is an old man, who stacks silver cans of beer on the corner table where he sits, walling himself in.

  As soon as we are seated with our drinks, she asks: Why did he do it, Owen?

  I’m taken aback. I expected the question, but neither so soon nor so directly posed. It certainly shows in the way I mumble my way through my answer, my lips moving like a glass that has been knocked over, and which all watch, paralysed, as it totters in slow motion, unsure if it will right itself or fall and break.

  Maybe it was just… just as he said in his note—

  I haven’t read his note. Daddy wouldn’t let me see it. All I know is that he wrote it on some typewriter.

  Well… in it… in his note… he said that… suicide… was a principled act of defiance… against the natural imperative of self-preservation. A defence of the freedom of the will against our servitude to causality. An inability to ignore the fact that, percentage-wise, the difference between dying at twenty-one and dying at one hundred is nil when measured against the billions of years that passed before his life began and the billions of years that would pass when it was over.

  She straightens visibly, her shoulders pinned back, as she leans away from the table. She seems offended to discover what was written in his note. Offended, but at the same time relieved.

  And you believe that? You think that’s why he killed himself?

  I mean, if it were me. I swallowed hard. If I were going to write a suicide note, I wouldn’t trifle with things I didn’t actually believe.

  But it’s nonsense! No one kills himself for abstract principles like that. Not even my brother. Principles are things to live for, not reasons to die. And why not at one hundred rather than twenty-one? By his own lights what difference would it make? I just don’t understand. How do you sit down and write out all the reasons that there is no reason to live? On a typewriter for God’s sake! I mean, did he write a rough draft and edit it for spelling and grammar too?

  Vera looks at me expectantly, waiting for me to answer. In fact, he did write a rough draft. Or rather, we wrote it together. Taking turns at the typewriter. Just as we had done when we wrote the sonnet in Berlin. And he did edit it. For spelling at least. There were to be no extraneous English u’s in his note to me, nor any American zeds in my note to him. Vera’s intuition is chilling. I take a cigarette from the open packet on the tab
le and give her the answer I rehearsed last night with Katie. I try to remember whether it was he or I who actually added to the note the argument I just recited to Vera. Me, I think. Though in all fairness I was only regurgitating his ideas.

  He talked of suicide quite often, I tell her. In the very same terms he wrote in his letter, but I always thought he was only being theoretical. I even admired him for it. For his willingness to consider anything. But I never thought, I never thought he was being serious.

  To entertain an idea without endorsing it. The mark of an educated man. Thus spake the Stagirite. What about entertaining and endorsing? Bravery or folly? Can one know except in retrospect? Discuss. You have ninety minutes.

  Vera leans forward abruptly, her elbows on the table, her hands thrown in the air in a gesture of exasperated incredulity. I know! she exclaims. The whole thing was just so theatrical, wasn’t it? Such a production. Shooting himself in the chest like that. In white tie, with a flower in the buttonhole of his tuxedo. Dressed for a wedding. A wedding! Near some rocks in the forest. It doesn’t make any sense. If it wasn’t my brother, the person I love more than anyone else in the world, if I was just reading about the story in a newspaper, I’d have called the whole thing mannered. Baroque even. I might have laughed, awful as that sounds.

  I frown. Her reaction to the rationale for and the so-called theatrics of her brother’s death is not what I expected. That she was furious with him went without saying. Fury must be a gross understatement for what she feels. Perhaps she was even resentful that his suicide note, which should have gone to her or her parents, had been addressed to me. She didn’t know he’d left one of her pearls in the envelope after all. I thought she might nevertheless show some sympathy for what he was trying to do and the way he had done it. Instead she was openly dismissive of both. If twins, as is sometimes said, are connected by an invisible string, it was becoming clear to me that, whilst he lived, the connexion between Zach and Vera was like a balloon string: Zach’s end was tied to the rising rubber oval, whereas Vera’s was in the little fist whose firm grip was the only thing preventing the balloon from floating off into the clouds where it would inevitably pop.

  I swirl the melting ice round the bottom of my glass. Why do you think he did it, then?

  I think he did it because he was disappointed in love, she tells me, sliding the pearls along the necklace.

  I raise my eyes. Level my gaze at her. There is no irony in the tone of her voice. Nor does her expression underline the statement in any way, in order to emphasise its significance. She is not giving me what Russian novelists call a meaningful look. Everything about what she says and the way she says it suggests that she is making a candid statement about what she genuinely believes. But that? Could she possibly believe that?

  Vera, with all due respect… I know you understand your brother far better than I do. You think I admire him uncritically, and even idolise him too much—no, it’s fine, you needn’t deny it—but what you have just said cannot possibly be true. Whenever he spoke to me about suicide, he always said it had to be disinterested—not motivated by any emotion whatsoever. Not by despair. Or fear. Or the desire to escape from suffering—physical or emotional. And when he gave an example of emotional suffering, it was always having a broken heart. It’s probably a good idea not to treat his suicide note as holy writ, but what he wrote there can’t be discounted either. And the only time the word love appears is to anticipate one of the reasons people will misunderstand his death. Besides, in the time I knew him at least, he wasn’t at all disappointed in love. Sure, things weren’t always perfect between him and Tori. But on the whole they were going very well, right up to the day of his—

  What? she hisses. He never told me about any Tori.

  I’m as shocked to learn that Vera doesn’t know who Tori is as she is to find out about her. If Zach had told her about me, wouldn’t he also have mentioned her? I think of Vera’s inbox. The letters on her desk. There had been none from Zach since December. Was it possible that he’d spoken to her of me before we’d ever met?

  Victoria Harwood, I say, my voice faltering. Vera is glaring at me, waiting expectantly for me to clarify what I had said. She and Zach. Went on a few. Were in a. Were seeing each other. A bit.

  Listen. Vera collects herself and begins to stand up. I’ve just noticed our drinks are empty. You’re going to get the next round. And when I come back you can tell me all about Zach and this, this girl. Okay? Okay. I’ll have the same thing as last time.

  Leaning on their cues, the billiard players pause to watch her as she passes. The door to the toilet closes behind her and they turn back to their game. I don’t even ask her to remind me what she had last time. Haven’t got to. She drinks Plymouth martinis: dirty, dry, and stirred.

  ET IN ARCADIA EGO.—It’s a terrible thing, at any age, to be able to point to some period of your past and say, Those were the best days of my life. For it means that when you divide what is to come by what has already been, the remainder will be the same decimal repeating repeating repeating to infinity. Happy are those who realise this in the final seconds before the completion of a long life. Happier still are those to whom it never occurs. But how few can say this of themselves! For everyone else, those who realise it too soon, whether they are in the first act of their lives or the final one, there are only different methods of tending to one’s wounds. Some dedicate what remains of their lives to regaining the lost time. Others consecrate themselves as shrines to its memory. Still others draw a line over the repeating decimal and put themselves to sleep. Happiness, when ill timed, can maim a life just as thoroughly as sorrow.

  Only later, replaying the incident again and again in my memory, did I understand that the white lines on his arms were scars—and that they were too straight to have got there by accident. But I never plucked up the courage to ask him about them. Though our eyes would sometimes meet and share what seemed to me a silent complicity, furtive looks that could have only alluded to a single source, Zach and I would never again speak of that night.

  The day after our return to Oxford was a clement aberration in the cruellest month: twenty-one degrees, a crisp blue sky, sunbeams visible through the clouds, a warm soft breeze, and not a single sign of precipitation on the horizon. No one could say how long this glorious preview of May’s coming attractions would play before the rainy April regular feature overtook the screen of sky, so we decided to make the most of it and spend our day out of doors.

  Tori filled a picnic basket, Claire bought Pimm’s and champagne, and together we made our way down to the Magdalen Bridge Boathouse to show our American friend a classic Oxford afternoon. After I gave an (expurgated) account of our holiday in Berlin, we heard stories of what the girls had got up to in London. From the sound of things, they’d had a perfectly fine time without us. They spent it mostly in the company of Tori’s friends, drinking and dancing just as we had. Claire persuaded Tori to accompany her to a performance of Sarah Kane’s Blasted at the Royal Court Theatre. In exchange, she spent a few hours with her friend making phone calls and delivering leaflets for Labour. That day, Tori had pinned a white-and-red button that read THE WORK GOES ON to the summer dress she was wearing, the one she bought in Shoreditch on the day we went to the launch party.

  All Oxford had come out to enjoy the fine weather. Cyclists sped by on their way to Port Meadow or the University Parks. Outside every restaurant people were queuing up, not minding having to wait before they were seated. The students who were not enjoying the day sunning on the quads of their colleges poured out of the arched wooden doorways, headed for any pub with a back garden. We strolled down the bustling High, hurrying only to pass the Porter’s Lodge at Magdalen, so Zach and I wouldn’t accidentally run into Dr. Inwit, who might have wondered why we were hiring punts rather than completing our revisions.

  It took Zach and me a few minutes to learn how to properly navigate the boats. There were a number of comical false starts. I wedged our punt in the a
rches of Magdalen Bridge and Zach bumped the bow of another and almost went toppling into the water. But little by little we became accustomed to using the spruce poles as rudders and allowing them to simply slide through our hands as we touched off against the shallow riverbed.

  Before long, we were making our way. Zach and Tori’s punt took the lead as we floated by the Botanic Garden and down the eastern edge of Christ Church Meadow. Ours followed leisurely behind. At the bend where the Cherwell becomes the Isis, Tori pointed to a pair of willows shading the bank. “There,” she said. “That looks like the perfect spot, doesn’t it?” I moved my pole to the left of the till and let the bow drift until it touched ground. Zach and I pulled the punts ashore to prevent them from drifting. Then, like the belle époque gentlemen we were pretending to be, we bent our wrists to offer our palms to assist the ladies up the bank.

  From the picnic basket, Tori took a wool blanket to spread on the slope. Claire handed the two bottles of champagne to Zach and me. “Let’s see if we can fire the corks across the river,” he said, crumpling the gold foil into a ball and unscrewing the wire cage. The sound of popping was followed by a rush of fizz. Zach’s cork almost made it to the other side. Mine made a graceful arc before it plopped in the river. We poured the champagne into the line of flutes Claire set up next to the blanket. She topped them off with a splash of Pimm’s and garnished the cocktail with slices of cucumber and sprigs of mint.

  We raised our glasses:

  “Cheers!” “To love!” “To youth!” “To beauty!”