Zero K by Don DeLillo Page A

the work. I tried at times, made an effort but failed. I was technically unsteeped but also ever-intentioned, seeing myself in the chair reading a book even as I sat in the chair watching a movie on TV with French or German subtitles.
    Later, living elsewhere, I visited Madeline fairly often and began to notice that when we ate a meal together she used paper napkins instead of cloth because, understandably, it was only her, just another solitary meal, or only her and me, which came to the same thing, except that after she set out a plate, fork and knife next to the paper napkin she avoided using the napkin, paper or not, keeping it unsmudged, using a facial tissue sticking out of a nearby box, Kleenex Ultra Soft, ultra doux , to wipe her mouth or fingers, or walking over to the roll of paper towels in the rack above the kitchen sink and tearing off a segment of a single towel and wiping her mouth on it and then folding the segment over the smudged part and bringing it to the table to use again, leaving the paper napkin untouched.
    The limp was my faith, my version of flexing muscles or jumping hurdles. After the early days of its separateness, the limp began to feel natural. At school the kids mainly smirked or mimicked. A girl threw a snowball at me but I interpreted this as a playful gesture and responded accordingly, clutching my groin and wagging my tongue. The limp was something to cling to, a circular way to recognize myself, step by step, as the person who was doing this. Define person , I tell myself. Define human , define animal .
    Madeline went to the theater occasionally with a man named Rick Linville, who was short, friendly and beefy. It was clear to me that there was no romance. Aisle seats, that’s what there was. My mother did not like to be hemmed in and required a seat on the aisle. She did not dress for the theater. She stayed plain, always, face, hands, hair, while I tried to find a name for her friend that was suited to his height, weight and personality. Rick Linville was a skinny name. She listened to my alternatives. First names first. Lester, Chester, Karl-Heinz. Toby, Moby. I was reading from a list I’d made at school. Morton, Norton, Rory, Roland. She looked at me and listened.
    Names. Fake names. When I learned the truth about my father’s name, I was on holiday break from a large midwestern college where all the shirts, sweaters, jeans, shorts and skirts of all the students parading from one place to another tended to blend on sunny football Saturdays into a single swath of florid purple-and-gold as we filled the stadium and bounced in our seats and waited to be tracked by the TV cameras so we could rise and wave and yell and after twenty minutes of this I began to regard the plastic smile on my face as a form of self-inflicted wound.
    I didn’t think of the untouched paper napkin as a marginal matter. This was the unseeable texture of a life except that I was seeing it. This is who she was. And as I came to know who she was, seeing it with each visit, my sense of attentiveness deepened. I tended to overinterpret what I saw, yes, but I saw it often and could not help thinking that these small moments were far more telling than they might appear to be, although I wasn’t sure what they told, the paper napkin, the utensils in the cabinet drawer, the way she removes the clean spoon from the drain basket and makes it a point not to place it in the cabinet drawer on top of all the other clean spoons of the same size but beneath the others in order to maintain a chronology, a proper sequence. Most-recently-used spoons, forks and knives at the bottom, next-to-be-used at the top. Utensils in the middle would work their way to the top as those at the top were used and then cleaned and dried and placed at the bottom.
    I wanted to read Gombrowicz in Polish. I didn’t know a word of Polish. I only knew the writer’s name and kept repeating it silently and otherwise. Witold