The Zero and the One

by Ryan Ruby

  How foolish it was to turn off the subtitles after all. I consider asking one of the ushers for a programme so I can read the synopsis of the first act, to see what she found so disturbing in it, but by the time we are through the auditorium doors she has already broken away from the crowd, in a furious rush to the exit, and it is too late.

  Whilst the curtain is opening on the second act of the opera, we find ourselves seated instead at a booth at a diner down the road, mutely sipping from grey plastic glasses of ice water. The waiter takes our orders and we surrender the long, laminated menus to him.

  Without them, there is nothing we can use to hide our faces from each other. I look away, my gaze falling, at first, on the backs of the old men seated on the high round stools, who slump over the counter, thick sandwiches in their frail hands, and then on the small screen above the cashier’s till, which is playing the evening news. A bespectacled grey-bearded journalist is interviewing a man in army fatigues with five stars on his collar and a black beret on his bullet-shaped head. Beneath BREAKING NEWS the name strap says, CENTCOM: MIDEAST FORCES UPGRADED TO THREATCON DELTA. The interview concludes. The journalist thanks the general, turns back to the camera. Up next, the closed captioning reads. The state of Texas may seek the death penalty in the case of the Houston mother accused of killing her children. We’ll be joined by her lawyer and the reporter who’s been covering the crime. And this week the Supreme Court ruled on two hot-button issues: affirmative action and political fund-raising. We’ll have live analysis from our senior Washington correspondent. When we return.

  I have an idea, Vera says finally. Let’s pretend we’ve just met. That we’ve been fixed up on a blind date.

  How does that work? I ask. My only other blind date was the outing organised for me by Zach. In a way, though, isn’t that what this is as well?

  I don’t know. I guess we ask each other questions? Find out about each other to see if we’re… companionable?

  Shall I go first?

  If you like.

  Would you have consented to go on a date with me if I wasn’t a friend of your brother’s?

  Owen, please. Just give it a try.

  The waiter returns with our orders. He places a hamburger and a pint in front of me, a glass of white wine and a bowl of fruit in front of Vera.

  All right, then. Where were we? Your name is Vera Foedern. We are on a blind date. All right. With a parodistically eager and friendly tone of voice I tell her it’s a pleasure to meet her. Then I ask her the first banal question that comes to mind.

  I’m a New Yorker, she answers. Born and bred. I grew up downtown, in Tribeca.

  You’ve lived your whole life here, have you? Are there other places you’d consider living?

  Berlin? LA maybe? New York is the only place I can envision living long term, though. After New York, where is there, as the saying goes. Still, I’m not sure if I’d want to raise my kids here. Kids who were raised in New York do everything at such a young age. They become jaded. World-weary. They learn pretty quickly that there’s nothing new under the sun. And that makes it hard for them to feel excited about anything. Or impressed by anything. Even if a New Yorker was impressed by something, there’s no way she’d be caught dead admitting it.

  You still live with your parents then?

  No, but not too far from them either. I see them pretty often, but I have my own life. Here, if you live a mile from someone, that’s far enough away that you have to make a conscious effort to see them.

  What do they do? For a living, your parents.

  My father used to be in real estate and now he’s a film producer. My mother runs a gallery. Contemporary art. Chelsea.

  I can tell she’s become irritated that what was meant to be a conversation has turned into something more like an interview. Pointedly, I ask if she has any siblings. Rather than giving me the nasty look the question deserves, she pauses to consider it for a moment. A yes-or-no question to which either answer would be false. With downcast eyes, she shakes her head.

  An only child, then. Just like me. Do you believe what they say about only children? That they’re spoilt?

  I haven’t given it much thought. I suppose they are—we are—but then, people like us are all spoiled, whether we have siblings or not.

  Like us?

  You know. Rich parents, nannies, prep schools, SAT tutors, Ivy League schools, trust funds, six-figure salaries straight out of college, wedding announcements in the Times, that sort of thing.

  I see.

  I’m sure it’s basically the same idea in England.

  Basically. But I wouldn’t know, really. My father works at the Somerdale Factory.

  Vera looks at me, as if for the first time. Your father works in a factory?

  For Cadbury’s. They make those chocolate-covered cream eggs for Easter, I tell her, making a C-shape with my forefinger and thumb to indicate the approximate size of the sweet. Surely they sell them here. At any rate, he’s the assistant foreman in charge of wrappers. My mum’s a court reporter. Neither of them went to uni, so that makes me the first in my family.

  She says, genuinely: They must be very proud of you.

  Must be, I mumble. The direction our conversation has taken makes me uncomfortable. Suddenly I’ve become an exotic creature. One that needs to be studied anew. One perhaps deserving of her pity. I try to redirect it: And you? You are?

  A student. Vera senses that she’s touched a sore spot and looks hurt by my unwillingness to be more forthcoming. A junior at Columbia. An Art History and Visual Arts double major, she says, reciting facts off her CV in a bored, dull voice. Next year I’ll be writing my senior thesis, entitled, “Performing Pain: Representations of the Body in Chris Burden’s Shoot and Marina Abramović’s Rhythm 0”—listen, you know what, you’re right, this is pretty tiresome.

  Perhaps I’m asking the wrong questions. What’s the meaning of life?

  She snorts derisively and rolls her eyes. You’re really asking whether I think life has any meaning? You’re strange, do you know that?

  I can’t think of a more important question. Recently someone told me that the purpose of human life was to reduce as much suffering as possible so that people could achieve personal fulfillment and happiness.

  Whoever said that was being naïve. Humans are just random collections of atoms that evolved to operate under the illusion that they control their destinies and thus, with a little hard work and a positive attitude, can achieve equally illusory things like fulfillment and happiness. I used to think that love, being in love, the perfect communion with another person, was the meaning of life. But I was wrong. Now I know that life doesn’t have any meaning at all.

  I give off a defeated sigh. The bright yellow, pale green, and peach wedges of fruit in the clear bowl in front of Vera have remained untouched, drowning in their own juices. I make one final effort at conversation. Why don’t you tell me something you’ve never told anyone before?

  I just did, she says.

  The waiter returns to take our plates. Vera orders another glass of white wine and, since I’ve done so poorly, it is agreed that she ought to take the lead. She shares her brother’s curiosity, but her natural tendency, I can’t help but notice, is to earnestness rather than irony. She had been made visibly uncomfortable when she told me something I already knew, or when she felt the need to refrain from saying too much, or when she said something we both knew was untrue for the sake of the pretence we were trying to keep up, the pretence that our conversation hadn’t been arranged by her brother’s death.

  For my part, not long after I began, I overcame my initial resistance and allowed myself to get carried away. I spoke with the unleashed enthusiasm of a person who has returned home from many years abroad, back to a place where my language was understood, my customs shared, my name known—even though in each case the opposite was true. Each of her follow-up questions, each murmur of understanding, each sympathetic nod said to me, I recognise you. You exist. Y
ou are not merely a dream of yourself.

  Even with Zach and Claire I’d never been so forthright. With Zach, my place in our conversations was more sparring partner than confidant, a meeting of two minds I’d interpreted as a meeting of two hearts. As for Claire: she and I were satellites, only visible to each other because we were reflecting someone else’s sunlight. With Claire, I never felt the same thrill of direct exposure, of total nakedness, that I do now, finally summoning up the courage to tell Vera what my life was like before I went up to Oxford.

  By the time the bill arrives, it feels as though a corner has been turned. She accepts my offer to pay, unlike at the bar last night, where she insisted on paying for her own drinks. It is a pleasure to pay, even though (specially because?) three tenners are all that is left in my wallet. Thirty dollars to last me between now and the time I board the aeroplane tomorrow night. I feel, not for the first time today, the imminence of my departure. What would happen if I were to miss my flight? What if I simply failed to show up at the airport? I could disappear. Drop out. Wipe my slate clean. Start anew. Here in America. That’s what it was made for, wasn’t it?

  On the trip back to the Lower East Side, a sequence of fantasies passes through my imagination as swiftly as our train passes through the stations of its route.

  Me: waking up next to Vera, kissing her tenderly, cooking her breakfast, sending her off to the library to do research on her thesis.

  Me: helping to move paintings at Rebecca’s gallery.

  Me: accompanying Bernard to the set.

  Me: writing Zach’s story on the typewriter, raising more of him from the dead with each keystroke.

  Me: one of the Foederns, an only child no more.

  But as I begin to follow her through the door into her room, she stops me.

  Listen, Owen, she says. Maybe it would be better if you slept on the couch tonight.

  She waits for me to tell her that I understand, that I completely understand, and when I say nothing, because I am speechless, she says good night and kisses me on the cheek. The door closes softly in my face. I hear the lock turn inside and stare at the door, dumbfounded, until finally I resign myself to spending the night here. Where I spent the whole afternoon. Waiting. For her.

  FREEDOM TO, FREEDOM FROM, FREEDOM FOR.—The use people make of their freedom is the best argument against allowing them to have any.

  That week, I retreated to my rooms, pleading revisions as my excuse. Zach gave me a sceptical glance, but said nothing. Not only so as not to contradict me in front of Tori and Claire, but probably also because he simply didn’t believe me. He told me he would collect me from the Exam Schools (he did not add: on our way to Godstow Abbey), but it hardly seemed possible that a person would choose to spend his last days on earth studying for a test.

  Yet that is exactly what I did. I had my reasons, though I wasn’t about to share them with him.

  I needed to take my mind off what we’d discussed, first of all. Rather than spending the week brooding and second-guessing and wondering if he really meant to go through with it, or if this was merely another of his elaborate jokes, I’d distract myself with intense concentration. The second involved one of those small points of personal honour that sometimes confound the behaviour of even the most rational people. If I was going to die, I thought, I certainly wasn’t going to do it without scoring the Distinction my tutors predicted I would. The last, I’m sorry to say, resulted from a certain lack of imagination on my part. Rather than making each moment more precious, as Zach had said, the thought of impending death had the effect of equalising them all. One way to pass the time was as good as any other, it seemed to me. Why not just sit for Prelims as was expected of me?

  For months, my rooms had been nothing more than the place where I changed clothes and stored books on my way between tutorials and the Bevington Road. The curtains were open, letting in the afternoon light through the thick glass windowpanes. They had been tied back in loose knots and hung neatly on either side of the desk, on which my scout had stacked the books that needed to be returned to the library. (On top was the copy of Against Nature I’d finished in February, and which was by now long overdue.) The creases of my sheets were sharp. The undented pillow was placed on a folded blanket at the foot of the bed. My scout had even cleaned my teacups and left them upside down next to the kettle she had thoughtfully unplugged. I ran the tips of my fingers along my desk, the bedside table, the surface of the shelves, the spines of the books. I rubbed them together. Not a speck of dust anywhere. The place had been cleansed of me.

  During the day, I worked myself to exhaustion, rereading every essay I had written since October. I pored over hundreds of pages of notes I’d taken at lectures and answered the sample exam questions posted on the PPE website. When it seemed like I might exhaust my study materials, I began to read aloud the passages from the Dialogues I would likely be called on to discuss during that portion of the exam, repeating Socrates’ words until I could recite them by heart. I left college only to visit the kebab van in Pembroke Square, and only when my empty stomach could no longer be ignored.

  But distraction was only taking me so far. In the college library, returning the overdue books, I ventured, for the first time that year, over to the room containing the history stacks. On one of the shelves labelled “England,” I found a History of Oxfordshire from the Stone Age to the Second World War, pulled down the red cloth volume devoted to Wolvercote, and read the entry on Godstow twice over, attempting—and failing—to understand why Zach had thought a nunnery, of all places, would be the perfect backdrop for the scene he’d envisioned.

  Later, as I waited in the queue to order my supper, I wondered what he was doing at that very moment. How he was spending the gift of extreme freedom the thought of his impending death had given him. Which manners and social niceties he was then flouting. Whereas I had clearly opted for asceticism, Zach, I guessed, would probably have chosen decadence. I bit into my kebab and imagined him sitting opposite Tori at the restaurant of the Randolph Hotel, circling burgundy liquid around the bottom of a crystal glass, dipping his nose inside, then frowning mischievously as he removed it from his lips and ordered a nonplussed waiter to return to the cellar to find him yet another bottle of wine.

  As soon as I fell asleep I found myself at the mercy of my unconscious. More than once I relived our hour with Nadya. From the moment Zach saw the prostitutes on Oranienburger Straße to the moment I pushed him into the back seat of the taxi, the dream was as vivid as an experience and as realistic as a memory. I shouted the address of the house where we were staying just as I had then. But in the dream, the driver turned round and said, to my horror, “You meant to say Ruby Street, didn’t you?” It was my father. “Time to come home now, Owen.” Zach laughed his cold, cruel laugh and my eyes flew open. Outside my window, the sky was turning pink and orange.

  Later that afternoon, I phoned Claire in a state of near panic, unable to stand the thought of spending another night alone. During the past few months, my body had grown accustomed to sharing a bed with her. The cycles of our shifting positions—her head in the hollow where my chest met my left shoulder, her arm around my waist; my stomach snug against the small of her back, my hand clamped to her breast; my cheek on her shoulder, my leg, bent at the knee, extended across her torso—I now associated with the rhythm of sleep itself. Without her there, my narrow bed seemed infinitely vast. Each time my limbs, performing their regular motions without their regular partners, brushed up unexpectedly against empty space, it felt as though I had missed a step and was on the verge of falling headlong down a flight of stairs.

  Claire met me at the Porter’s Lodge, where Richard registered overnight visitors, a takeaway bag hanging from one wrist, the handle of her brolly hanging from the other, and a familiar expression—caring, yet concerned—on her face.

  Other than the two teacups, I kept no crockery in my rooms, so we scooped the curry she’d brought straight from the polystyrene boxes
with plastic forks, sitting opposite each other on the floor. She told me how she’d spent her week, but when she began to describe the most recent row between Zach and Tori, I stopped her. “Let’s talk about something else.” I ripped a piece of naan in two and handed her the other half. “If you wouldn’t mind.” So we talked about us instead, about our future together, beginning with the summer holiday, in that tone of voice in which the concreteness of a plan soon becomes indistinguishable from the exaggerations of a fantasy. We spoke of spending it abroad, of getting a small flat together in a large city on the continent, somewhere that could be reached otherwise than by aeroplane. Amsterdam, Paris, Barcelona, Venice, Prague: as we reeled off their names, the thought that I’d only ever know them through films and photographs, novels and postcards, mediated entirely by the experience of others, struck me as immeasurably sad.

  On the morning of the exam, I put my gown over my jacket with the solemnity of a soldier whose furlough has finally, and all too quickly, come to an end. Claire helped me with the bowtie, twisting the white cotton halves into perfect loops as she had done for her father, she explained, on so many Sunday mornings. As I made my way to the door, she stopped me. “Before you go,” she said, “I have a present for you.” She unfastened the clasps of her handbag and took out a white carnation, which she slid into the buttonhole of my lapel. “There.” She rested her hand on my chest and raised her lips to mine. “Now, take no prisoners.”

  The walk from my door to the Porter’s Lodge was fewer than fifty steps long, and I walked each one slowly, whispering to myself, Don’t look, don’t look, for God’s sake Owen, Do Not Look. The wooden shelves of the pigeonholes were now to my right. I could sense them hovering at the border of my field of vision. Don’t look, I repeated, as I did just that, and saw the very thing I hoped I would not see.