Don DeLillo’s Zero K – Do Billionaires Die Too?

The Reluctant Son has headed off to college and we were talking about a philosophy course he is taking.  This class is filled with books about death, Plato’s Apology, Phaedo, and Euthyphro were the leadoff hitters, and a book I had not heard of – a novel by Don Delillo – Zero K followed.  My son was in the midst of reading it and said that he didn’t really enjoy reading it, but that he thought it was a profound book, and he wondered if I might read it too so that we could talk about it.  Is there better chum he might have put in the water?  Not for this guy!

So, having read it, as we discussed it, I was curious about his experience of knowing that he was going to die.  I let him know that I first experienced the sense that I was mortal on a visceral level during Freshman year in college, when I was confronted by some of the same readings from Plato – and a bunch of deaths in the Iliad and the Odyssey.  I wonder if I also became viscerally aware of my own mortality in the context of being away from home for an extended period for the first time as well.  In any case, that was my moment and I wondered if this was his.

“Dad,” he said, “I first had that experience when I was seven or eight.”  He said there were multiple occasions where he – generally in the evening – perhaps right before going to sleep – realized that he would not always be here.  He said it wasn’t so much a thought as a realization and that it was deeply and profoundly unsettling – though it wasn’t particularly anxiety provoking or worrisome – it was just a realization that this is how it is.  He went on to say that he would reflect on these moments the next day and realize – again not very verbally but deeply – that this was indeed what he had been aware of and that he was still aware of it and he was unsettled by it.

“Wow,” I thought – and probably said.  I was somewhat puzzled that this had never come up before between us.  He said he didn’t feel any need to talk about it at the time – and it was the case, in a very fundamental way, that neither his mother nor I could have changed things.  And, despite being unsettled, he was not overwhelmed by the idea – just aware of it.  Not exactly sad, but different as a result of having had it.  He was certain that, as they say, death, like taxes, is a sure thing.

We talked a little bit about this.  These thoughts occurred before a series of significant losses of two grandfathers and a number of favorite great-uncles.  It occurred after his mother and I divorced, which certainly introduced ideas about endings into his life.  But there wasn’t, at least as far as he could recall, a proximal stimulus for the thought.  Unlike Plato, who argues in the readings he is doing that the soul is immortal – and that the philosopher, whose life has been devoted to attending to the soul, prepares himself for his soul and body to part ways at death, the reluctant son was just beginning to go to church and didn’t have a strong sense of religious or spiritual immortality.

In Zero K, death as an issue descends upon the narrator’s father – the billionaire in the story – in the wake of the billionaire’s second wife contracting a terminal disease.  He married this woman after leaving the narrator and his mother without much of a thought or look backward and while amassing what would be his considerable fortune by writing programs that predict the stock market.  The book opens with the narrator arriving at a facility that is located precisely and approximately in the middle of nowhere at a large institution that is largely underground to participate in this woman’s (she is hardly a stepmother, though she is a lovely person and the son has more affection for her than he has for his father) preparation to be preserved at a very low temperature (not quite zero K, but that is the reference for the title) until such time as her condition can be repaired, at which point she will be awakened and returned to health.

This set of circumstances, over the arc of the book, precipitates an existential crisis on the part of the father who seeks to determine whether he should be “preserved” even though he is in adequate health and does not “need” to be preserved until such time as a cure is available.  The son is drawn into this in a variety of ways and meanwhile, life goes on.  The son takes up with a girlfriend and her son who is adopted from the Ukraine.  His girlfriend’s adopted son gets drawn into the Ukrainian conflict – and meanwhile our protagonist is drawn more deeply into his life.  He, and we, almost forget the odd and dreamlike experience of being at the Convergence – the name of the preservation facility that feels like a Kafka created space.  When he returns to the Convergence a second time at his father’s behest, it becomes even more dreamlike, with all kinds of manikins and bodies in various poses, but also, at times just jumbled together.  These images seem to underscore the contrast with Plato’s idea of immortality being a quality of the soul – this culture is interested in the preservation of the body.

The reluctant son let me know that the novel was taught in an interesting way.  The professor encouraged his students to pick a sentence – either one they found important or even one at random – and to read it.  The class would then discuss it.  His experience was that each sentence served as a spring board to a new and interesting way to put the book together.  I don’t think that would work for just any work, but this one, a dense but still wonderful read, seems almost constructed for such an approach.  There are feints and changes in direction.  This is a meditation on death – and on the technological promise that seems to be just over the horizon – at least for billionaires (and partially being currently funded by living breathing billionaires) that the lives of our bodies can be extended and, perhaps, those bodies can be preserved for later use.  Will we wake up with a new language installed in our brains?  Will our brains and other organs be preserved outside of our bodies – as the Egyptians did it?  Will we travel to the next life on an elevator that travels not up or down or sideways but at an angle more and more deeply into the earth?  To offer an overall interpretation to a work like this that is simultaneously deep, complex and so readable seems impossible.

The reluctant son and I talked about his dislike of the narrator.  There were quirks that the narrator engaged in – naming people that he didn’t know – that put the reluctant son off.  To me, they were aspects of his character that both made him human – they were ways that in a story told from the first person I could connect with him and live through his eyes – and that made him particular – other – I think in the way the reluctant son experienced him as not just other but difficultly other – peculiar in an off putting way.

I’m not sure that I helped him navigate this story (hopefully the philosophy professor did) any more usefully than I have helped the reader of this post do that.  Dealing with the finality of death is difficult enough – but what if we could live forever?  Would we want to?  One of the answers that is buried in this book – buried with the billionaire’s second wife – is the idea that life is worth living when we are living with people that we love.  The billionaire did not love his first wife – and this complicates things, I believe, for the son.  The ways in which I loved – and failed to love my own son’s mother – have certainly complicated things for him.  I think a theme is that in this world which DeLillo is depicting – one that, like my family, has deep schisms in it, there is still the possibility of love – of loving others and of loving life – even in its temporally constrained original version – the one where we don’t have to wonder if we will awaken in a future where we will be different but one in which we know that the world that we know here and now will, in fact, cease to exist.

Perhaps the sense of a circumscribed life as a place that creates a space in which joy can be experienced will help my son and the class deal with another meditation on death that is headed their way – Freud’s Future of an Illusion.  In this book, Freud maintains that Plato’s (and the Christian Church’s) belief in an afterlife is a defense against the realization that my son had at a very tender age – that we will one day die.  The uncertainty that we have with an afterlife – it is unclear in Zero K that the technology currently exists to awaken those who have been preserved – or whether we are hoping that this, too, will be invented in the future, without knowing that this will happen, is still, as of this writing, one of the great mysteries of life.  The question is how we go on living without knowing how the story will turn out – how we move from that realization that we will one day cease to be in this current incarnation – and the entire universe as we know it will be wiped out.  How, then, do we embrace that universe while it is accessible to us?  What of it do we value and how do we celebrate it?

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