The Zero and the One

by Ryan Ruby

  Otherwise we’ll never be happy, she repeats, in an exhausted voice. My God, Owen. I guess he found a way to make sure of that, in the end.

  THE CRIMINAL AND HIS AUDIENCE.—Not only is every great crime a secret confession, but the most exquisite pleasure of committing a crime ultimately lies in getting caught. Only a true ascetic would deny himself this pleasure by actually getting away with it.

  Between the moment Zach closed his eyes for the last time and the moment I arrived at Claire’s door, I flailed through decision after decision I wished I could take back. Each mistake made the one that followed it that much more inevitable, that much more irrevocable. I thought I was covering up for myself. Really, I was burying myself alive.

  I wiped the pistol clean with my jacket sleeve and tossed it and the spent casing into the dark green water, but no sooner had they disappeared beneath the surface of the river than I wished I’d taken them straight to the police. As soon as I’d knocked at the Bevington Road, shivering and drenched, my trousers muddied and splodges of blood dotting my cheek and chin, my shirt and bowtie, I wished I’d first returned to college to clean myself up and change into a new set of clothes. And when Claire opened the door, looked at me with astonishment, and exclaimed, “You look frightful! What on earth happened to you?” I wished—at the very moment I was opening my mouth to lie to her—that I’d simply told the truth.

  “You won’t believe me when I tell you,” was what I said. I dragged the toe of my right shoe down the heel of my left, peeling it off. Then, bending my leg to my knee like a stork, I removed it with a clumsy hop. I left the shoes on the doormat, rolled the hems of my trousers to my calves, and waited in the hallway whilst Claire went to fetch me a towel. On the table in the kitchen were four empty plates and four empty wineglasses. The warm smell of supper diffused through the flat. Bottles of wine and liquor were lined up on the kitchen counter.

  “Well then?” asked Claire when she returned.

  I took the towel from her and carefully dabbed my wet hair, doing my best, without the aid of a mirror, to avoid getting anything that might be taken for blood on the white cotton. She was looking at me expectantly. “I’ve been trashed,” I told her, praying the nervousness in my voice would be taken for irritation and the involuntary chattering of my teeth attributed to the fact that I was sopping wet.

  “You must be joking.” Her fingers flew to her lips to cover a reflexive burst of surprised laughter.

  “I wish I were. By accident, no less. It happened just now, as I was walking by St. John’s, on my way here. Whoever it was must have confused me with one of his mates. The bloke who did it looked rather contrite, actually. Offered to pay my dry cleaning bill. God knows what awful mix of shite was in that bloody bin. I don’t want to, that’s for certain. What?” Claire was leaning forward, her hand on her heaving chest. She was taking heavy breaths. “It doesn’t smell, does it?”

  Tori appeared in the hallway, upset to see I’d arrived alone. She looked at me and then at Claire. “What’s so funny?” Claire pointed at me, no longer able to contain her mirth, and repeated, through a loud chuckle, the explanation I’d given for my dishevelled state. But Tori barely acknowledged that her friend had spoken. She looked at my wet hair and filthy suit with total indifference, unless it was with disgust, and asked me pointedly where Zach was.

  “I was just about to ask you that. I saw him as I was leaving college. He told me he had to run a few errands and that he wouldn’t be able to collect me from the Exam Schools. I assumed we’d all meet here.” Tori’s arms were folded. She stared at me with discomfiting, flattened eyes, to let me know that she suspected I was not telling the whole truth. “Why don’t you text him then?” I said, more defensively than I’d intended, wondering, utterly unnerved, what exactly she thought I could be covering up.

  “I have,” she snapped back, offended by the suggestion that she couldn’t think to do that herself. “We both have. Several times.”

  They watched me fish out my mobile. With a lump in my throat I typed where r u and pressed send. I didn’t know whether Zach had taken his mobile with him, whether it was not a drowned bit of electronics short-circuiting in the river. Somehow I doubted it. He wasn’t the sort to die with a phone or even a wallet on his person, whereas it never occurred to me to leave mine behind. At that moment, his mobile was probably on his desk, the screen turning orange, buzzing once, going silent again. I should have texted him sooner than this. The coroner would be able to establish a time of death and I would be in need of alibis. Another blunder.

  I tried to reassure Tori. “I’m sure he’ll be here soon.” I could feel the face I’d put on my face beginning to disintegrate. The trembling that had taken control of my jaw was spreading to the rest of my body. I desperately wanted to be alone. “Meantime, I’m a bit of a mess, as you can see. Supper won’t have gone cold by the time I’ve had a shower, I hope.”

  “Frankly, I’ve lost my appetite,” Tori said, looking as though she were also losing control of an emotion she was desperate to keep hidden from us. “Take the roast out of the oven in fifteen minutes and serve yourselves if you like. If Zach miraculously appears, tell him he can’t sleep here tonight, I don’t care how many times he apologises.” We watched her return to her room in a huff, heard the door lock behind her. Before I disappeared into the shower, I asked Claire if we should be worried.

  “Of course not. Let’s celebrate you for a change. It’s going to be a Distinction, isn’t it? All right all right, I’ll touch wood, but there’s no need to be so modest. Go shower. And scrub yourself well. I want a perfectly clean pair of lips to kiss. I’ll bring you your spare clothes.”

  When I walked back through the arched doorway of college the next morning—having divested myself, along the way, of my gown and dinner jacket, my shirt and bowtie, and the contents of my stomach, in that order—the Porter’s Lodge was bustling with activity. The parents of classmates whose names I’d never learned were proudly helping their bleary-eyed, tousle-haired children load suitcases, stereos, books, and computer monitors into the boots of vehicles parked in Pembroke Square and up Beef Lane. I squatted to retrieve the post from my pidge, which was on the lowest row. I stood up again, pretending to be examining the envelopes and flyers, watching out of the corner of my eye to see whether the Head Porter was paying any attention to me. As soon as Richard’s back was turned, I nicked the envelope on which I’d written Zachary Foedern from his pidge.

  Back in my rooms, I lay the post on my desk, took my letter to Zach from the top of the pile, and hid it in the inner pocket of my grey suit jacket. I collected the other envelope, the one that said Owen Whiting in Zach’s handwriting, from the bottom, where I’d slipped it. It was only then I noticed something was different about it. I held it flat and studied the shape of the envelope. The paper rose slightly in the centre. I turned it lengthwise. The bulge fell to the edge of the white rectangle. With my thumb, I opened it and poured the unexpected object, a black sphere, no more than two millimetres in diameter, into my palm. I stared at it, my perplexity crowding out all other thoughts, until, some time later, the sudden blinking of my eyes awoke me from my trance. “Concentrate,” I said out loud. “You need to concentrate.” Right then, the object was not a mystery I’d time to solve, so it went into the jacket pocket as well, to be dealt with later. I breathed deeply and unfolded the letter without rereading it—I could barely stand to look at it—astonished to discover how much a single piece of paper could weigh. Arriving at the Porter’s Lodge in a state of evident distress, I informed Richard of an urgent matter that should be brought to the immediate attention of the Master.

  Richard accompanied me to Staircase XVI with his large metal circle of keys. I told him I’d gone there as soon as I read the note, but had heard no response to my knocking. Richard pounded on Zach’s door with the side of his fist, shouting his name. He twisted the handle and, to our surprise, the door gave way, opening into an empty room. Next to Zach’s mobile an
d his wallet, which had been left on the desk, as I had suspected they would be, were his keys. Richard rushed back to the Porter’s Lodge and lifted the black telephone. A few hours later, I was standing in the Master’s rooms, in the presence of the Master, the College Nurse, and two officers of the Thames Valley Police.

  Like most working-class Englishmen, I have a bred-in-the-bone dislike for the working-class Englishmen who work for the constabulary, but these two I found specially loathsome. Inspector Giles Thompson was a series of wobbly circles stacked precariously atop one other. His speech was dull and damp, as if his thick tongue were coated in mayonnaise, every other sentence punctuated by the reverberating smack of his fleshy inner cheeks. His partner, Detective Constable Eric Leyland, was equally unpleasant to behold, a lanky squiggle of skull and bones with a pair of recessed eyes and a dramatic overbite. He loomed over Thompson’s shoulder, pen and notepad permanently to hand, repeating aloud his boss’s every word as he committed it to paper.

  Doubtlessly they felt the same about me, who’d gone up to Oxford on scholarship, forgotten his station, put on airs, perhaps even turned a tad fairy in the meantime. Had he even noticed it, the Master, who’d spent his life in the company of the wealthy and the titled, would probably not have understood the look the officers and I exchanged when he introduced us, a mutually accusatory glare whose meaning could be summed up in a single word: traitor.

  The Master, mindful of the potential scandal or lawsuit that might arise from a student’s suicide, proposed that I make first contact with Zach’s parents, rather than the college or the police, since I at least had met his father before. This, the College Nurse agreed, would help to lighten his inevitable shock. But their pleas were overridden by Inspector Thompson (“No that won’t do, wouldn’t be proper at all,” echoed Leyland), who rang the number Zach had written on his registration form, the one to be phoned in the event of an emergency. Thompson waited, listened, replaced the receiver. “It went straight to the answering machine,” he told us. “Someone called Vera Foedern. The lad’s mum, in all likelihood.” “His sister,” I corrected, with an ill-concealed look of reproach. I took out my wallet and handed him the business card Bernard had given me in Berlin, wondering why Zach had chosen to list Vera rather than one of his parents as his emergency contact.

  “Good morning, Madam,” said Inspector Thompson to the person who answered the phone. “My name is Inspector Giles Thompson, Thames Valley Police. Is Bernard Foedern available to speak by any chance? I understand, Madam. Regrettably it’s a matter of some urgency. Correct. Concerning his son. Yes, I’ll hold.” He pressed the receiver to his chest and told us what we might have already inferred, that Mr. Foedern’s secretary had answered, and was now gathering Bernard from a meeting. “Yes, Mr. Foedern. Good morning. My name is…” Though I ought to have been paying careful attention to what the Inspector was saying—for me a great deal depended on the minutest discrepancies between what he knew and what he thought he knew—my mind began to wander. I had not been in the Master’s rooms before. On the mahogany-panelled walls were portraits of the previous occupants, dating back to the college’s founding in the early seventeenth century. Above Stuart ruffles, Regency cravats, Victorian ascots, and wide post-war neckties, pairs of brown and blue circles were staring down imperious noses and tightly pressed lips at me, as though they were underwhelmed by the sort of student now attending the college to which they had dedicated their lives.

  Someone was saying my name. With an oblivious look, I turned toward the sound. The Inspector was extending the telephone. “Mr. Whiting? Says he’d like to speak to you, Mr. Whiting.”

  “Yes, Bernard. Hello.” My voice shook; I was about to tell the worst lie I’d ever told. Tears were welling up in my eyes, tears which, because I could not hold them back, I hoped would be interpreted by the police officers as an admission of fear for the fate of my friend, rather than an unconscious confession that I already knew what it was. “I’m afraid so. Yes, I’m afraid so. The signature did look like Zach’s. But we don’t know anything for certain yet. I can’t tell you how sorry I am to have to be telling you all this. I hope it all turns out to be nothing and you’ll forgive me for having given you such an awful scare. Yes, Bernard. To you as well.”

  I nearly dropped the phone into the Master’s outstretched hand and had to be escorted out of his rooms beneath the umbrella of the College Nurse. Trinity Term had concluded, but two new examinations had been scheduled for me: one with a representative from Counselling Services and one with Inspector Thompson and Constable Leyland, to whom I’d give my official statement.

  From that moment on, events began to pile up with incredible speed. The next afternoon, whilst I sat, balancing a large clipboard on my lap, filling out a form for the NHS in the waiting room of a dreary office on Worcester Street, a tourist placed a call to the St. Aldate’s Police Station to report the discovery of the body of a dead boy, washed up along the bank of the Isis, a few metres downstream from Godstow Abbey. The police, arriving at the scene, found the pistol.

  Bernard caught the first flight to Heathrow, and within twenty-four hours was making a positive identification at the coroners’.

  ON VIOLENCE.—Moderns regard violence as something internal to human beings: they often speak of the violence that originates in mankind, as if violence were a series of actions a man might perform, or—were he less ignorant, irrational, or superstitious—might as well not perform. This is why moderns are always surprised by sudden outbreaks of violence; it is why they ultimately cannot understand the phenomenon, even as our scientific and technological achievements multiply it exponentially. The ancients, however, knew better. Violence does not exist in man; man exists in violence. Man is merely a vessel for violence, the site where it occurs, the name given by violence itself to the instrument that enacts it. When the man in man is stripped away, he returns to his source and becomes his God.

  So it was true what she’d said. What she’d said at the bar. Because he was disappointed in love. In love with his sister. At the bar she was talking about herself. The thought of suicide was not what freed him from moral inhibition, as he’d claimed when he proposed the pact to me; nor was his body the collateral he’d staked on his freedom, as he had led me to believe. It was his knowledge that nothing he’d do would be regarded as a greater transgression than the one he’d already committed. Compared to the taboo he’d broken, what we’d done together was merely a string of moral misdemeanours and dangerous semi-illegalities. Compared to incest, what was taking drugs, nicking typewriters, picking bar fights, lying to friends and strangers, or hiring a prostitute? What, indeed, was suicide? People did that every day.

  When she first told me how they cut each other, it occurred to me that in some ways it was like our pact, a dress rehearsal for what he proposed to do in Port Meadow. Now it’s clear that our pact was a repetition of one that had already come to pass. When I finally understood that the object he’d placed in his suicide note was one of her pearls, it occurred to me that he was trying to smuggle some message to her from beyond the grave, a message he didn’t imagine I would live to discover, let alone transmit. Now it’s clear that the suicide note itself, of which I was merely an unwitting co-author, was addressed to her from beginning to end. He was telling her that what they had failed to do with love, he and I would do with death. All this time I’ve been looking at our pact from the wrong end of the telescope. I was nothing more than one of those sacrificeable pawns she had described, one of those little expendable pieces, which, once you understood how they moved, could easily be pushed around the board, pressed into the service of a game that was being played out behind my back and over my head. His last words were meant to be a name. A long vowel sound followed by a short vowel sound. Not Owen. Not Tori. Vera.