…the dramatic climb of the Dow and the speed of the internet summoned us all to live permanently in the future, in the utopian glow of cyber- capital, because there is no memory there and this is where markets are uncontrolled and investment potential has no limit. Writing about the impacts of the Twin Tower attacks in the near aftermath of 11 September 2001, DeLillo described modern life within the late twentieth century as inhabiting a kind of amnesia: While the sales pitch in this scene is viewed from a distance by the main characters of Zero K, and also by us as readers, the sentiment and tone of the speech resonates with the author’s recurring interest in the dynamics between high tech capital and historic memory. Philosophical wonderment threatens to veer into banality. His characters regularly deliver pensive, rhetorical questions to themselves, each other and the reader, often undercut with a dark comic tone.

Can we be impervious to terrorism? Can we ward off threats of cyberattack? Will we be able to remain truly self-sufficient here?’ The hungry, the homeless, the besieged, the warring factions and religions and sects and nations. ‘Hopes and dreams of the future often fail to account for the complexity, the reality of life as it exists on this planet.

As the speaker stokes the egoistic dreams of the audience, another speaker, a woman ‘frail in a long loose tunic and headscarf’, interjects: Their mortal remains will be reconstructed through the use of nano-technology in some undefined future. The cryonics facility offers patrons the service of freezing their bodies. Fantasies of immortality, of transcending time and history, are dangled in front of the financial elites by company tech-gurus. The small crowd is made up of uber-rich futurists, all eagerly listening to the promises made by the speaker. In a bare room ‘austere, with rock-hewn walls and floor,’ deep inside an isolated cryonics facility in south Kazakhstan, a ‘short and round’ man with ‘high forehead, frizzed hair’ addresses a gathering of benefactors: ‘Do we see ourselves living outside time, outside history?’ Within an oeuvre famed for its meditations on the cultural anxieties surrounding death, an early scene in Don DeLillo’s latest novel, Zero K, is remarkable for its contemporary take on a familiar subject.

Zero k by don delillo