Now: Zero

Now: Zero, is a fictional short story by British author J. G. Ballard, released in 1959. It is featured in The Complete Short Stories of J. G. Ballard: Volume 1.

Plot Summary

Now: Zero is told from a first-person perspective of a office milquetoast who works for a insurance company. He discovers he can kill people by writing about them, or their deaths. He starts to eliminate his enemies by the act of writing. He discovers this by digging out an old notebook out of his closet. The day after he, in a fit of sudden rage, writes down the name and fantasized death of his boss at the office, in a diary kind of style. He writes this desired vision as if it happened the day after he writes. His notebook entry about his boss had read that, "Shortly after 2 o'clock the next afternoon, spying from his usual position on the 7th floor stairwell for any employees returning late from lunch, Rankin suddenly lost his balance, toppled over the rail and fell to his death in the entrance hall bellow." his boss dies at the time and in the manner specified in the notebook.

Stunned by this, He determines that there are several conditions, or rules, under which the notebook operates. The first rule is that the manner of death must be feasible. He starts to think that whatever the "militarists" of the country say about the ever-present threat of nuclear attack, it is not feasible for every inhabitant of a disliked neighboring town to suddenly drop dead at noon.

The second rule is that only the events surrounding a death can be controlled by the notebook. He cannot, change the weather, or effect the stock market. However, it doesn't seem to occur to him th he can accomplish many more things besides death by including those things as a condition of death.

Suddenly, back at work the former deputy had become the head of the department. Angry at this, he writes again trying to see if it would work. He writes about his second boss being involved in a traffic accident right in front of the building.

Once the narrator has begun to wonder whether perhaps it was his writing it down that caused, or at least predicted, the death of his old boss and the promoted head, he reaches for a newspaper and writes down the name of a criminal who was recently excused from the death penalty. The criminal dies the next day. Still, the narrator is naturally suspicious and still isn't completely satisfied. He has his department's deputy head commit suicide in the third floor men's room, second stall from the door, during working hours.

As written so, it happens. The company's employees are driven into shock from another coincidental death that happened three times in a row. All aimed for the head of the company. The company gives the rest of the department's traumatized employees the day off. The narrator finally begins to believe he can kill people with his notebook. He decides that he can easily rise in the company by killing everyone ahead of him, starting with half the current Board of Directors. After he starts to think about ruling the world, from higher thoughts.

The result of this purge is not the narrator's ascension, but the company's liquidation. However, The narrator learns a valuable lesson from this event, that he'd been thinking much too small. It's at this point that he starts experimenting with the deaths of airline passengers. The planes fly directly over his house, disturbing his sleep, and other large groups of people, for example the aforementioned attempted murder of every inhabitant of Stetchford.

At a certain point the narrator begins to question what this great power is and why it has come to him. He concludes that he is merely the instrument of God, or Fate, "Sometimes it seemed to me that the brief entries I made were cross-sections through the narrative of some vast book of the dead existing in another dimension...instantly drawing from the eternal banks of death a final statement of account on to some victim within the tangible world around me."

To conclude the story, the narrator is, however, essentially a coward. It starts to look like, at the point of the story, that the police are on to him. When he concludes, from the reactions of the people around him, that use of the notebook has caused him to be surrounded by an aura which is perceptible to others, he decides that he must burn it, and give up the power forever. It started to then seem to him that the idea was a waste to 'just let the power disappear like that'. He decides to have his story published. He includes a huge twist. The catch was if that anyone who reads it all the way to the end will die horribly.

Similar Conceptions and Adaptations