Free Zero K by Don DeLillo Page A

then another, wordless once again, both of us, and I expected in minutes to be seeing Ross in his office or suite.
    We came to a door and the escort stood and waited. I looked at her and then at the door and we both waited. I realized there was something I wanted, a cigarette. This was a recidivistic need, to grab the semi-crushed pack in my breast pocket, light up quickly, inhale slowly.
    I looked at the escort again and understood finally what was happening here. This was my door, the door to my room. I went ahead and opened it and the woman did not leave. I thought of the moment in the stone room when Ross had swiveled on his bench and turned to look at me with a certain expression on his face, a knowingness, father to son, man to man, and in retrospect I realized that he was referring to the situation he’d arranged for me, this situation.
    I sat on the bed and watched her undress.
    I watched her unravel the ribbon from her hair, slowly, and the hair fall about her shoulders.
    I leaned over and took one of her felt slippers in my hand as she eased her foot out of it.
    I watched the long dress float down her body to the floor.
    I stood and moved into her, smearing her into the wall, imagining an imprint, a body mark that would take days to melt away.
    In bed I wanted to hear her speak to me in her language, Uzbek, Kazakh, whatever it was, but I understood that this was an intimacy not suited to the occasion.
    I thought of nothing for a time, all hands and body.
    Then stillness, and the cigarette to think about again, the one I’d wanted when we were standing outside the door.
    I listened to us breathe and found myself imagining the landscape that enclosed us, planing it down, making it abstract, the tender edges of our centeredness.
    I watched her dress, slowly, and decided not to give her a name. She blended better, nameless, with the room.

- 7 -
    Ross Lockhart is a fake name. My mother mentioned this casually one day when I was nineteen or twenty. Ross told her that he’d taken this action right after he got out of college. He’d been thinking about it for years, first in a spirit of fantasy, then with determination, building a list of names that he inspected critically, with a certain detachment, each deletion bringing him closer to self-realization.
    This was the term Madeline used, self-realization , speaking in her mild documentary voice as she sat watching TV without the sound.
    It was a challenge, he told her. It was an incentive, an inducement. It would motivate him to work harder, think more clearly, begin to see himself differently. In time he would become the man he’d only glimpsed when Ross Lockhart was a series of alphabetic strokes on a sheet of paper.
    I was standing behind my mother while she spoke. I held a take-out turkey sandwich in one hand, a glass of ginger ale in the other, and the recollection is shaped by the way I stood there thinking and chewing, each bite of the sandwich becoming more deliberate as I concentrated intently on what Madeline was telling me.
    I was coming to know the man better now, second by second, word by word, and myself as well. Here was the explanation for the way I walked, talked and tied my shoes. And how interesting it was, in the mere fragments of Madeline’s brief narrative, that so many things became so readily apparent. This was the decoding of my baffled adolescence. I was someone I was not supposed to be.
    Why hadn’t she told me sooner? I waited for her to shrug off the question but she showed no sign of having heard it. All she did was take her eyes off the TV screen long enough to tell me, over her shoulder, what his real name was.
    He was born Nicholas Satterswaite. I stared at the far wall and thought about this. I spoke the name inaudibly, moving my lips, over and over. Here was the man laid out before me, balls and all. This was my authentic father, a man who chose to abandon his generational history, all the lives up to mine that