Zero K Read Online Free PDF Page B

chapters in seven countries. The number kept changing. Five, seven, four, eight. We met in simple structures that we built ourselves. Mastabas. Inspired by tombs in very ancient Egypt.”
    â€œMastabas.”
    â€œFlat roof, sloped walls, rectangular base.”
    â€œYou met in tombs.”
    â€œWe were fiercely awaiting the year, the day, the moment.”
    â€œSomething would happen.”
    â€œWhat would it be? A meteoroid, a solid mass of stone or metal. An asteroid falling from space, two hundred kilometers in diameter. We knew the astrophysics. An object striking the earth.”
    â€œYou wanted it to happen.”
    â€œWe lusted after it. We prayed for it incessantly. It would come from out there, the great expanse of the galaxies, the infinite reach that contains every particle of matter. All the mysteries.”
    â€œThen it happened.”
    â€œThings fall into the ocean. Satellites falling out of orbit, space probes, space debris, pieces of space junk, man-made. Always the ocean,” he said. “Then it happened. A thing hits skimmingly.”
    â€œChelyabinsk,” I said.
    He let the name dangle. The name itself was a justification. Such events really happen. Those who devote themselves to the occurrence of such events, whatever the scale, whatever the damage, are not dealing in make-believe.
    He said, “Siberia was put there to catch these things.”
    I understood that he did not see the person he was talking to. He had the drifter’s inclination to be impervious to names and faces. These were interchangeable components room to room, country to country. He did not talk so much as narrate. He traced a wavy line, his, and there was usually someone willing to be the random body that he told his stories to.
    â€œI know there’s a hospice here. Is this where you talk to the dying?”
    â€œThey call it a hospice. They call it a safehold. I don’t know what it is. An escort takes me there every day, down in the numbered levels.”
    He talked about advanced equipment, trained staff. Still, it made him think of twelfth-century Jerusalem, he said, where an order of knights cared for the pilgrims. He imagined at times that he was walking among lepers and plague victims, seeing gaunt faces from old Flemish paintings.
    â€œI think of the bleedings, purgings and baths administered by the knights, the Templars. People from everywhere, the sick and dying, those who tend to them, those who pray for them.”
    â€œThen you remember who and where you are.”
    â€œI remember who I am. I am the hospitaler. Where I am, this has never mattered.”
    Ross had also made a reference to pilgrims. This place may not have been intended as the new Jerusalem but people made long journeys to find a form of higher being here, or at least a scientific process that will keep their body tissue from decomposing.
    â€œDoes your room have a window?”
    â€œI don’t want a window. What’s on the other side of a window? Pure dumb distraction.”
    â€œBut the room itself, if it’s like my room, the size of it.”
    â€œThe room is a solace, a meditation. I can raise my hand and touch the ceiling.”
    â€œA monk’s cell, yes. And the cloak. I’m looking at the cloak you’re wearing.”
    â€œIt’s called a scapular.”
    â€œA monk’s cloak. But so unmonklike. Aren’t such cloaks gray or brown or black or white?”
    â€œRussian monks, Greek monks.”
    â€œOkay.”
    â€œCarthusian monks, Franciscan monks, Tibetan monks. Monks in Japan, monks in the Sinai desert.”
    â€œYour cloak, this one. Where is it from?”
    â€œI saw it draped over a chair. I still visualize the scene.”
    â€œYou took it.”
    â€œThe moment I saw it, I knew it was mine. It was predetermined.”
    I could have asked a question or two. Whose chair, which room, what city, which country? But I understood that this