The Zero and the One

by Ryan Ruby

  Instead, I sensed sudden motion. I felt the muzzle of his pistol against my chest. I looked down at it, wondering what it was doing there, and then up at him. His unblinking eyes were covered over with a depthless fanatical sheen, the brown irises as dark and empty as his pupils. I searched them, but that almost invisible residue of identity that somehow enables one thinking, intending, willing person to recognise another behind their surface was nowhere to be seen. He was absent from his eyes. Intensely absent.

  In a high-pitched tone of voice that asked Where are you? as much as it asked What are you doing? I said, “Zach?”

  “Like this,” he said. He grabbed my limp, hesitant hand and raised my pistol to his chest, so our arms formed parallel lines. I tried to pull it back, but his hand caught my elbow and held it straight. “This is how it should be done.”

  “But that’s not suicide,” I stammered. “It’s murder.”

  “Double murder,” he corrected. “It’s genius. This whole week I’ve been meditating on a problem, a problem whose solution I’ve only now, right at this very instant, discovered.” His mouth seemed to have hijacked his mind, and it moved as if his words were doing his thinking for him, pausing neither for breath nor clarity. “The problem is that suicide, intentional suicide, as I described it to you, is actually impossible. Think about it!” He was raving. Rain was dripping down his brow and cheeks and caromed off his lower lip as he spoke. “‘I kill myself’—it’s a reflexive verb. With suicide, the person who does the killing is not the same as the person who does the dying, even if those two people happen to share the same body. Suicide doubles us, cuts us in two, turns us into pure subjects and pure objects at the same time. Doubles us just like language doubles things, by transforming them into referents. Suicide is always already murder, and so, still under the sign of natural death. To do it right it would have to be intentional and accidental at the same time. This whole week I’ve been in such a state of despair, Owen, you can’t even imagine, every waking second, racking my brain, how to undo this paradox, how to solve this problem. But now I see! It’s so simple. All you have to do is double the doubling! You have to will your death without performing it, while at the same time performing it for someone else who wills it. An authentic suicide, the only authentic act there is, can only be done with a partner, through a pact like this. I knew I wasn’t wrong to take you along with me, Owen. My words will kill me, even though you pull the trigger, just as your words will kill you when I fire. We’ll turn death into an idea! And ideas never die. Ideas live forever. Owen, it’s genius! Pure genius.”

  “It’s immor—”

  “Exactly! That’s exactly it!” he cried, though I doubt he understood what I was trying to tell him. “Now, I’m going to count back from three.” He wiped the damp fringe off his brow with the back of his hand and repositioned his arm. “On zero, we fire.” He cocked his pistol. “Three…”

  My terrified eyes moved back and forth, wildly searching his, Is he really going to do this? unspoken on my dripping, trembling lips, begging him not to, the words frozen on my tongue. Moisture had entirely covered the inside of my glasses and I could no longer see his eyes, nor he mine.

  He raised his voice: “Two…”

  The rain was falling harder now, the sharp drops relentlessly striking the flat leaves of the trees and the muddy meadow, the stones of the abbey and the surface of the river. It sounded like the world and everything in it had suddenly turned into shattering glass. He really was going to do this; he was going to kill me. My thumb rolled back. I could feel the barrel of my pistol pressed against the button of his dress shirt and the inside of my forefinger slipping along the wet crescent of the trigger, as if my whole being had condensed into the line between these two points.

  “One—”

  A gentle pop. Barely audible above the rain. Opposite me, I felt his body lurch like a stalled engine. His right arm, the one holding the pistol, must have swung back as his chest absorbed the shot, because I felt a bullet whizz past my ear, off target. Letting go of my pistol, I sprang from my position and knocked him over the slope of the riverbank. He fell upside down, the back of his head hitting the ground not far from the edge of the water. My hands found his biceps and I pressed him into the mud with all my strength. The muscles of his right arm tensed as he struggled to free it from my grip, in order to turn the pistol on me, to finish what he’d started. I heard him grunt and gasp for breath, but the expression on his face was still invisible to me. All I could see was the blur of water on water, the rain now indistinguishable from my hysterical tears. I was breathing heavily through my open mouth, my chest heaving, a scream rounding the back of my bared teeth. I pressed harder. And kept pressing, long after I stopped encountering any resistance.

  I don’t know how long I held him there, but when I let go, wiped and replaced my glasses, he was still alive, barely alive. I saw his cheekbones rise, his eyebrows arch. His lips parted. Then they expanded into his cheeks, revealing red teeth. He tried to say something, to tell me something, of that I’m certain. But his last words, whatever they were meant to be, were lost in a gurgle of blood.

  A WARNING TO THE CHILDREN OF THE SUN, EARTH, AND MOON.—Nothingness added to Being is not oneness, but duality. But as nothingness is chronologically primary to Being, Being has never been the One. Only nothingness is oneness, wholeness, harmony, and totality. Being is the name for the operation that irreparably divides the Zero in Two. Our desire to recover our lost wholeness is the desire for death.

  How to tell you this, Vera says softly, with downcast eyes, shaking her head in slow dismay, as she reflects on the difficulty of putting into words all the thoughts she must have been gathering during the long, dense silence that followed my confession of the role I played in Zach’s death. I just don’t know how to begin, she tells me. No, that’s not right. I know how. How is only a matter of willpower, of forcing the words out, even if they’re not the right words. Where to begin, I mean, at what point to begin, how far back should I go, that’s what I don’t know. When, then, and not how. It’s a different question. When asks: At what point in the past did you become the person who made the choices you made. When asks: What was the moment you could no longer make another choice and still be the person you are, whether you wanted to be this person or not, whether you’re happy with the results of the choices you ended up making, unless this is too narrow a way of looking at it, because our lives may be like trees with billions of forking branches, but they are themselves a branching off, a branching off from a tree which is larger than us and grew before us—our choices are inherited from the choices that others have made, who in turn inherited their choices from others. To tell you what I am, what I have become, I have to look back toward the trunk of the tree from the tip of a branch that will no longer branch off, from the moment that whispered to me, You are This and This you will be forever, and while I can give a precise time to that moment, to get there, working backwards, wherever I end up beginning will not be far back enough.

  These pearls, I could begin with these pearls. They are more than one hundred years old. They belonged to my great-grandmother, who passed them on to my grandmother, who passed them on to my mother, who passed them on to me. Four generations, four generations of women, passing on these pearls. Twice they were given as wedding presents, but one of the things I’ve never understood is why you’d give a bride a string of black pearls as a wedding present, it’s perverse, ominous even, the kind of gift that is indistinguishable from a curse. What I do know is that the pearls were one of the things, one of the very few things, my grandmother took with her when she fled Europe before the war. What I also know is that unlike my grandmother and unlike her own mother, Mommy only received them when Oma died, when I was a young girl, seven years old. I don’t remember my grandmother well, not just because she died when I was so young, but also because she and my mother had a very frosty relationship, they were almost estranged, and we didn’t see Oma often. It had somet
hing to do with my mother’s marriage I’ve come to believe, she didn’t approve of my father, he wasn’t good enough for my mother she probably thought, Oma was a real snob, from what I’ve gathered. I’m certain that if Mommy had a sister, instead of two brothers, Oma would have given them to this sister for her wedding, or at least left them to this sister in her will when she died. In fact, I’ve overheard that she willed them to my aunt, my mother’s eldest brother’s wife, but my aunt knew the history of the pearls, how they’d been passed on from daughter to daughter, and thought it would be wrong to accept them, and immediately returned them, I overheard, to their rightful owner. I believe Mommy wore them for the first time at Oma’s funeral and now that I know what I know, I believe it would have been better if Mommy had buried her with them. But I didn’t know then what I know now, so as a child I associated the pearls with my mother rather than with my grandmother, with my future rather than with my past, to me they were a symbol of what it meant to be a grown-up, to be a woman. Because my mother didn’t receive them for her wedding, she didn’t wait for my wedding to give them to me, a tradition had been broken, or at least half-broken, because she passed them on to me anyway, I suppose, thus carrying it on in some respect. She gave them to me when I graduated high school. It was as if she was telling me, You’re a grown-up now. You’re a woman now. I was supposed to pass them on to my own daughter when the time came, whenever that occasion was, I would know, my mother told me. I felt like so much trust had been placed in me. So much responsibility whenever I wore them. And so I wore them rarely, on special occasions, for fear of losing them, or damaging them. Before Zach’s funeral, the last time I put them on was on New Year’s Eve, the day that turned out to contain the moment that whispered to me, You are This and This you will be forever. The moment that said to me, What you are is a Monster.

  And then there’s my brother, the other thing, you might say, I inherited from my mother. I could begin with him too. My beginning is his beginning, after all, his beginning is my beginning, we were born to the same forking branch, not two persons but one person, as I was telling you the other night, the I that is we and the we that is I, as he liked to say, something more than my other half, something less than my double. It can’t be said that we didn’t have our differences, however much we tried to ignore them, however badly we wanted to erase them. Differences we inherited. Differences that are older than us and proved to be greater than us, stronger than us. What I know now is that it was our differences, and our attempts to ignore them at first, and then our attempts to erase them, that made us the monster that we are, or that we were, in any case, the monster that we became. We were too close to each other and at the same time too far from each other. Zach must have known what these pearls meant to me, and now I wonder if he saw in them some manifestation of that difference, my distance from him, a distance we were born with, a small crack that grew wider with every passing year, the more adult we became. Do I need to tell you, in any case, what difference I’m talking about? Perhaps you already know, perhaps you’ve already begun to understand. I will tell you anyway. Because if no one has the courage to make the implicit explicit it stays implicit forever. It disappears. It gets ignored and erased. The difference I’m talking about is the oldest difference, the founding difference, the original difference, the difference between male and female, between women and men, sexual difference, the difference that makes and unmakes us all. I don’t remember the moment I realized what sex was, though I know it was before Mommy and Daddy finally sat Zach and me down and explained it to us. Dr. Stein, whom I haven’t told any of this, or at least not the main thing, observed that my sexuality, and thus Zach’s sexuality, didn’t develop normally. It was delayed, she says, inflected is the term she uses. Our parents, she told me, didn’t differentiate us strongly enough or soon enough, perhaps they too saw us as merely one person in two bodies, even if our bodies, not knowing or caring who we thought we were or what we thought we wanted, did what all bodies naturally do, they went their own ways, changed, differentiated themselves, and in so doing, became complementary. Zach and I shared a room for what I now understand is an inappropriately long time, until the summer before our freshman year of high school, when Mommy and Daddy said enough is enough, though by then, yes, it was too late. In our room, there used to be two beds, but for us it was something of a formality, the second bed. Until we were finally separated we shared that too, at first because we didn’t know any better, and then because I had nightmares when we tried to sleep alone, nightmares that Zach, by some miracle, was able to describe to me, to recount in their entirety, as if he’d had them too. He would wrap his arm around me and stroke my hair and whisper my dreams into my ear until I fell asleep. But when you share a bed with someone at that age, when you add physical proximity to mental and emotional proximity, you discover things about your body, things you forever associate with the person who discovered them with you. Zach’s first wet dream happened on my thigh. Later, when I had my first period, I showed him the blood. Like all children, we heard things about sex at school, picked up information from our classmates with older siblings, inferred things from the films we saw, from the paintings we saw, images we saw before we were ready to see them, but which, given what our parents do for a living, were everywhere around us growing up. We had the images before we knew what words to give to them, which, of course, is the exact opposite experience from the one most children have, our classmates had to give us the names for the images our parents carelessly left out before us. Our classmates, it should be said, treated us differently, differently from them, I mean, precisely because we refused to acknowledge our own difference. At the age when boys and girls naturally split themselves up, share different lunch tables, play different games at recess, during what Dr. Stein would call our latency period, we did not split up, we went everywhere together. Zach sat out sports with me at the girls’ table, and I never went to sleepovers because obviously Zach was never invited to them. For many years we were isolated by our classmates, from our classmates, like untouchables, as if they had some intuition, already at that age, about the monster we would become. We weren’t even known by separate names, as Zach and Vera, they called us the Foedern Twins, except by our teachers, of course, we were always referred to collectively, and our classmates’ opposition to our being together simply drove us closer together, threw us back on ourselves. Perhaps you are wondering why our parents didn’t intervene. They did. But it was too late, as I was saying. I lied to you the other night, or I didn’t tell you the whole story, just as until now you have been lying to me, withholding the whole story from me. The reason we were separated that summer, the reason I was kept here in the city and Zach was sent up to New Hampshire, was that one evening Mommy caught us kissing each other. Just practicing was how we tried to explain ourselves to her, under the guise of one of those childhood games we were at that point already too old to be playing. We got the talk, the talk that every normal American child gets at some point, Daddy and Mommy made explicit to us what we already sensed implicitly, they explained what sex was, and told us what every normal child is told, Sex is a healthy and beautiful and meaningful activity and When we were old enough we could have safe, consensual sex with anyone we wanted to—except each other. Zach was sent home early from camp that summer, that much of what I told you was true, but when he came back, all of his things, including the bed we never used, had been moved to a different room. Mommy and Daddy’s excuse was that the room was no longer large enough for both of us and our things, and that’s how we spent high school: under the same roof, in exile from each other.

  During those years we tried to differentiate ourselves, or rather I did, I tried to separate myself from him, I was always more obedient than he was, more conventional. Other people’s opinions, whether they were our parents’ opinions, or our classmates’ opinions, or Dr. Stein’s opinions, mattered much more to me than they did to him. I always felt them more strongly, they weighed on me more
heavily, a weight around my neck I always found harder to endure, unless it was because I didn’t resent them like he did, or perhaps because I didn’t feel that it was my duty to ignore them or erase them, let alone contradict or rebel against them. Zach made it difficult for me, those four years, sensing my confusion and my ambivalence. A person with certainty and conviction will always overwhelm a person who is pulled in multiple directions, whose desires are many and therefore contradictory and therefore must be negotiated, single-mindedness always triumphs over vacillation, to vacillate is to be vulnerable, even if it is, in the end, also what it means to be moral. But I’m forced to remind myself that he would not have seen things that way. However crazy this might sound to someone who is used to regarding themselves as one person rather than two people, a person who identifies another person entirely with himself will regard her vacillation as his own, maybe Zach was trying, just as much as I was, to root out an inconsistency within himself. But I only understood this later, when I had the feeling myself, the feeling of jealousy, I mean. As I tried to bring other people, other boys, into my life, his love for me took a negative turn, expressed itself in hostility, through various forms of emotional sabotage and blackmail. At first he tried to scare off the boys who were interested in me, by spreading rumors about me, or humiliating my dates when I invited them to dinner, defending himself later, when we would fight about it, by saying this one was too stupid for me, or that one was uncultured, or another was clearly using me to meet Mommy or Daddy in order, the implication was, to get summer internships or college recommendations, which is actually not as outlandish as it sounds, given the shameless ambition of most of the students at Gansevoort, especially the ones who, at sixteen or seventeen, already thought of themselves as artists. You would think that this interference, this attack on my autonomy, would have inspired some resistance in me, and in fact it did, I resented it deeply at first. When I was sixteen and seventeen, I dated a boy who, when I look back on it, really was not for me, Zach was right about him in fact, but I dated this boy for over a year just to show Zach I wouldn’t be intimidated or coerced. This boy was nothing more than my pawn, and now that I use this metaphor, I realize how foolish it was to do this, because Zach, as you know, was a ranked chess player who knew better than anyone how and when to force a sacrifice. This boy, then, this innocent bystander, was nothing more than my pawn, and a piece of his broken heart probably has my name still written on it, poor thing, because one of the awful things I’ve learned is that we never recover from the loss of our first love. I professed to love this boy, and he believed me, but really I didn’t even see him for who he was, as an autonomous person, a person who stood in no relation to Zach. Zach stopped speaking to me, that was his first strategy, how childish it was, to give someone the silent treatment like that, but then we were children, we have always been children, perhaps we never stopped being children. Nevertheless, I found it agonizing, indescribably painful, it gave me the first taste of his absence, my first insight to what he himself was feeling, the cruelty I was inflicting upon him, even if, as I rationalized it then, it was actually he who was inflicting this punishment on us both. But I did not bend under this pressure, not yet knowing that people who do not bend under a small amount of pressure break more easily under a greater amount of pressure. You can guess, I’m sure, what I’m talking about, what pressure I’m referring to, Zach did what anyone in his position would do, I see that clearly now, what an obvious counterattack it was, he started dating a girl, a girl I particularly hated too, a girl who was my opposite in every way, he chose the girl who would most humiliate me and degrade me, he brought her home with him, to teach me what jealousy was, to show me how jealousy felt, to make me admit that I was jealous of him, to make me realize that the pain of jealousy is the deepest expression of attachment and love. One day he brought her home with him and he made sure that I knew it, that I knew it was her, he took her into his room and locked the door behind him. I should have left the house right then and there, but I had an exam the next morning, it was finals week, I remember, senior year, a few weeks before our graduation, a few weeks before I would receive the pearls from Mommy. In all honesty, I was incapable of leaving, as soon as I tried to stand my knees buckled under me, I was paralyzed by the thought that Zach was in our house with someone else, a thought that, no matter how I tried, I could not banish from my mind, even trying to banish it from my mind only reminded me of it, even trying to convince myself that what was happening was not happening only reminded me that it was in fact happening. I dragged myself down the hallway because I couldn’t stand up and walk, I crawled to his door, that’s when I found out it was locked, I pressed my ear to the door and listened to them, she was very loud, on purpose maybe, maybe she knew why Zach had brought her there, maybe Zach was a pawn in a game of her own, a game whose goal may have been to hurt me, or to hurt someone else, that was possible, I knew, because it was a game I had played myself, and why should we expect other people to be better intentioned or more considerate than we are. I listened outside his door while she moaned and whimpered, while she shouted obscenities and told Zach what to do to her, that I didn’t even have to imagine for myself. I was collapsed and curled up on the floor outside our bedroom, tears were running down my face, snot was running from my nose, my throat gagged on each breath, a sudden need to vomit prevented me from speaking, from shouting, from begging them to stop. I dug my fingernails into my arm, to get some relief, I needed relief. But when this did not make the noises stop, when it did not make her obscene narrating stop, I pressed the fingers of my other hand between my legs, to get relief, I needed relief so badly, I held my hand there, pathetic and weak, imagining myself in her place. That was when I began to understand what I was feeling, when I was able to give a name to the pain I was feeling, the name of the pain was jealousy, and at that moment, the pain was so strong it overwhelmed the other feeling, my feeling of shame, my feeling of intense self-disgust. And I understood, even if I didn’t admit it to myself until later, until the next morning, when I promised Zach I would no longer see other people if he promised me not to see other people, when, essentially, I gave in to him, though you could also say I was giving in to myself, or simply giving in, then and only then, as he held me in his arms and ran his hands through my hair and whispered into my ear, comforting me as he had comforted me when I had my childhood nightmares, only then did I understand that whatever feelings I had for him as a child, when I didn’t know how disgusting those feelings were, when I was innocent of any shame, were feelings I had not grown out of. It was as if the nightmares I had as a child had now moved across the border into my waking life, where there was only one person who knew how to make them disappear, only one person capable of giving me the relief I needed.