Don Delillo: Zero K

Half the world is redoing its kitchens, the other half is starving.


“The thinness of contemporary life. I can poke my finger through it.”


Those blanked-out eternities at the airport. Getting there, waiting there, standing shoeless in long lines. Think about it. We take off our shoes and remove our metal objects and then enter a stall and raise our arms and get body-scanned and sprayed with radiation and reduced to nakedness on a screen somewhere and then how totally helpless we are all over again as we wait on the tarmac, belted in, our plane eighteenth in line, and it’s all ordinary, it’s routine, we make ourselves forget it. That’s the thing.”

She said, “What thing?”

“What thing. Everything. It’s the things we forget about that tell us who we are.”


“I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was, the son who spites his father by reading such books.”


“Is it very different at home, or on the street, or waiting at the gate to board a flight? I maintain myself on the puppet drug of personal technology. Every touch of a button brings the neural rush of finding something I never knew and never needed to know until it appears at my anxious fingertips, where it remains for a shaky second before disappearing forever.”


“Isn’t death a blessing? Doesn’t it define the value of our lives, minute to minute, year to year?”


“What’s the point of living if we don’t die at the end of it?”


“This is what long journeys are for. To see what’s back behind you, lengthen the view, find the patterns, know the people, consider the significance of one matter or another and then curse yourself or bless yourself or tell yourself, in my father’s situation, that you’ll have a chance to do it all over again, with variations.”


“I feel artificially myself. I'm someone who's supposed to be me.”


Sometimes it takes an entire morning to outlive a dream, to outwake a dream.


It's the things we forget about that tell us who we are.


“How do we stand with others when the things that separate us are imposed at birth, when the separation haunts us and follows us day and night?”


Ordinary moments make the life. This is what she knew to be trustworthy and this is what I learned, eventually, from those years we spent together. No leaps or falls. I inhale the little drizzly details of the past and know who I am. What I failed to know before is clearer now, filtered up through time, an experience belonging to no one else, not remotely, no one, anyone, ever. I watch her use the roller to remove lint from her cloth coat. Define coat, I tell myself. Define time, define space.


But I wanted to read it now, I needed it now, even if I knew I’d never finish. I liked reading books that nearly killed me, books that helped tell me who I was.


The self. What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others?


"Rocks are, but they do not exist."


After a pause I said, “I came across this statement when I was in college and forgot it until very recently. ‘Man alone exists. Rocks are, but they do not exist. Trees are, but they do not exist. Horses are, but they do not exist.’ 


“It is only me, the body in the shower, one person enclosed in plastic watching a drop of water skate down the wet curtain. The moment is there to be forgotten. This seems the ultimate point. It is a moment never to be thought of except when it is in the process of unfolding.”


“...Take the leap, they said. Live the billionaire's myth of immortality. And why not now, I thought. What else was there for Ross to acquire? Give the futurists their blood money and they will make it possible for you to live forever.
The pod would be his final shrine of entitlement.”


“Catastrophe is our bedtime story.”


“It makes me feel true to the system, knowing that unnecessary risk is integral to the code of urban pathology. •”


“What is the self? Everything you are, without others, without friends or strangers or lovers or children or streets to walk or food to eat or mirrors in which to see yourself. But are you anyone without others?”