Zero K by Don DeLillo Read Free Book Online Page A

want to be curious, amused, indifferent, superior? Just walking past a bathroom, a woman’s stocking draped over the towel rack, pill bottles on the windowsill, some open, some capsized, a child’s slipper in the bathtub. It made me want to run and hide, partly from my own fastidiousness. The bedrooms with unmade beds, somebody’s socks on the floor, the old woman in nightclothes, barefoot, an entire life gathered up in a chair by the bed, hunched frame and muttering face. Who are these people, minute to minute and year after year? It made me want to go home and stay there.
    I thought that I would eventually build a life in opposition to my father’s career in global finance. We talked about this, Madeline and I, half seriously. Would I write poetry, live in a basement room, study philosophy, become a professor of transfinite mathematics at an obscure college in west-central somewhere.
    Then there was Ross, buying the work of young artists, encouraging them to use the studio he’d built on his property in Maine. Figurative, abstract, conceptual, post-minimal, these were unheralded men and women needing space, time and funding. I tried to convince myself that Ross was using them to smother my response to his bloated portfolio.
    In the end I followed the course that suited me. Cross-stream pricing consultant. Implementation analyst—clustered and nonclustered environments. These jobs were swallowed up by the words that described them. The job title was the job. The job looked back at me from the monitors on the desk where I absorbed my situation in full command of the fact that this was where I belonged.
    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.
    My mother had a roller that picked up lint. I don’t know why this fascinated me. I used to watch her guide the device over the back of her cloth coat. I tried to define the word roller without sneaking a look in the dictionary. I sat and thought, forgot to keep thinking, then started over, scribbling words on a pad, feeling dumber, on and off, into the night and the following day.
    A rotating cylindrical device that collects bits of fiber sticking to the surface of a garment.
    There was something satisfying and hard-won about this even if I made it a point not to check the dictionary definition. The roller itself seemed an eighteenth-century tool, something to wash horses with. I’d been doing this for a while, attempting to define a word for an object or even a concept. Define loyalty , define truth . I had to stop before it killed me.
    The ecology of unemployment, Ross said on TV, in French, with subtitles. I tried to think about this. But I was afraid of the conclusion I might draw, that the expression was not pretentious jargon, that the expression made sense, opening out into a cogent argument concerning important issues.
    When I found an apartment in Manhattan, and found a job, and then looked for another job, I spent whole weekends walking, sometimes with a girlfriend. There was one so tall and thin she was foldable. She lived on First Avenue and First Street and I didn’t know whether her name was spelled Gale or Gail and I decided to wait a while before asking, thinking of her as one spelling one day, the other spelling the next day, and trying to determine whether it made a difference in the way I thought of her, looked at her, talked to her and touched her.
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    The room in the long empty hall. The chair, the bed, the bare walls, the low ceiling. Sitting in the room and then wandering the halls I could feel myself lapsing into my smallest self, all the vainglorious ideas around me shrunk