The Zero: A Novel

by Jess Walter

  “I’ll take ’em.” Remy stepped from the shadows.

  It took the night boss a few seconds to see him. “What are you doing here?”

  Remy paused a moment. “I could ask you the same thing,” he finally said.

  That seemed to work. Without another thought, the young firefighters started trudging along behind him, down the West toward his car. One of the firefighters went to sleep as soon as they got in. The other two sat staring out opposite windows. They were so young that for a moment Remy flashed on a night years earlier—driving Edgar and two of his friends home after a movie. Only…no, that wasn’t right. He breathed into one of his hands, and was strangely comforted by The Zero smell. He skirted the lights and midtown, cutting west until he found an avenue that flowed beneath him, a black stream centered with gold lines, faster and faster, yellow cabs parting and then closing in his wake, and he flicked on the siren’s false cheer—whoop whoop whoop whoo—and decided to ignore the traffic lights, his car nearly coming off its axles at the cross streets. He pushed the speedometer to ninety-two, same as the sweater—just to see—swerved to miss something that turned out to be a flasher inside his eye crossing against the glare of a streetlight, and finally eased off the gas. The tanked firefighters were nonplussed, their mouths half-open.

  “Like the way you drive,” one of them said.

  “Thanks.”

  He volunteered to drive each of them home, but the smokers wanted to go back to their firehouse for breakfast, so Remy let them out there. He wanted to ask them something, anything, but they climbed out of his car without a word, stretched, and walked toward the red station house decorated with cards and bouquets, the steps littered with picnic baskets, the walls covered with the smiling dead. They looked so small. Remy watched them go inside and, for just a moment, he envied the smokers their brotherhood, their warm house.

  WORD CAME sometime before lunch: The Boss wanted to see Remy tomorrow. He and Guterak were at Fresh Kills, taking two state senators on a tour of the massive salvage, recovery, and remains operation at the old landfill when Paul asked if Remy was nervous about the meeting.

  “I don’t know,” Remy answered honestly.

  “Well, you probably should be,” Paul said through his paper mask. Was he nervous? Remy tried to remember. Sometimes the gaps were like this: He was unaware that any time was unaccounted for except some bit of information that he didn’t recall getting—how he knew The Boss wanted to see him, how he inferred that it was serious business, whether he knew anything more about the meeting. There was a gap where that knowledge should have been. A phone call? That was the obvious answer, but Remy couldn’t remember any call. He hadn’t even replaced his phone. It was somewhere among all those window blinds and rebar. Had the message come over the pager he’d been wearing? Or maybe The Boss had called Paul to arrange the meeting. Paul certainly seemed more nervous about it than he was. But why would Paul be the go-between?

  These were the most common gaps that Remy had been suffering, holes not so much in his memory but in the string of events, the causes of certain effects. He found himself wet but didn’t remember rain. He felt full but couldn’t recall eating. It wasn’t important, he supposed, how he came to know that The Boss wanted to see him, except that he should be able to remember whether it was a phone call or someone telling him. Instead, it was as if he’d always known that he had a three o’clock meeting tomorrow afternoon, a one-on-one, and that Paul was nervous about it.

  “Remember, wait for the questions, think hard about them, and then answer slowly.” The paper surgical mask muffled Guterak’s voice.

  “Okay,” Remy said through his own mask.

  Paul turned back. They stood on the pavement at the edge of the rolling landfill, a moonscape of busted concrete and scorched steel. Pockets of methane gurgled and belched from beneath the debris—the city’s history in garbage: Andy Warhol’s coffee filters, Ethel Merman’s dress shields, Mickey Mantle’s chaw. Every gust out here seemed to stink in some new, groundbreaking way, and now there were these new hills of debris. Above the mounds seagulls broke and rolled and caught the wind, rising on waves of dust. The fine dust was everywhere, drifting and reddening the sun, which seemed higher out here, as if even the heavens were repelled by the smell.

  Remy watched the senators in their work boots pause and shake hands with two space-suited techs who had been using rakes and pitchforks on eight-foot stacks of rubble in a corner of the debris field. Remy hated the way they’d imported the air out here on barges of concrete and rebar. It was not as sharp as at The Zero, and there was the underlying smell of methane to compete with, but the dust rose, and the smell found you, and Remy could imagine that one day everything in the world would be reduced to such a fine dust—replacing even the air, so that you not only smelled it but tasted it, and felt it too, on your skin, in your mouth, deep to your bones like a chill, that the whole world would swim in dust—finer and finer until there was nothing but an absence of substance and meaning.

  At the waterfront, gulls rose on updrafts of methane and stink, and swooped down among the cranes unloading beams and bars from barges onto dump trucks overseen by thick guys in sweatsuits and gold bracelets, all the connected guys waiting for their piece. Crushed debris dripped from the cranes and barges, and trucks paraded endlessly up to the landfill and spread their loads out on rolling hills, where it looked like a fleet of plane crashes, all of it raked and sorted by crews of twelve, under close invisible supervision by rumored officials from the Office of Liberty and Recovery. The piles themselves were hard for Remy to comprehend: tangled steel and rebar and concrete dust, and no matter how long you searched the gray mass you never saw anything normal, a telephone or a computer or a floor lamp. These things were just…gone, he supposed, liquidized into dust and endless tons of bits, indistinguishable pieces of rubble to be sifted in big construction-site shakers. Every so often he saw a truck head off to a series of big temporary buildings nearby, carrying loads of hastily stacked paper and organic material, jigsawed bits of people.

  “They found a chin yesterday,” Paul said. “Some mismatched fingers, part of a foot…got a whole head the day before. That’s the biggest piece so far, at least out here.”

  “Paul—”

  “A head,” Paul repeated. “Can you imagine, Bri? Look at my head. Can you imagine it just…showing up? Or your head. How did we miss that? Can you imagine your head bein’ out here, buried under all this, fuggin’ steel on top and shit on the bottom? What kind of look would you have on your face, do you think?”

  Remy shifted uncomfortably.

  One of the state senators, the fat one, his suit pants tucked into his work boots, was coming toward them. He had been struggling all morning, beet-faced and breathless. Twice he had started crying and his eyes and nose were lined with gray. He walked over to Paul and Remy and removed his surgical mask, red-eyed and nauseous. It was clear he’d been vomiting. “This is very difficult for me.”

  “Yeah,” Guterak said. “We really feel for you.”

  “I didn’t expect everything to be so…”

  “Raw,” Guterak said.

  “Yes,” the senator said.

  “You see the chin?”

  “No,” the senator said.

  “Got a head yesterday. Biggest single chunk I’ve seen.”

  “Really?” The senator looked around, uncomfortable.

  “Still, there aren’t enough pieces,” Guterak said, “for how many are still missing. Not even close.”

  The senator nodded and looked back at the space-suited workers. “I feel like they want me to say something,” he said. “Like I should know what to say. But I don’t have any idea.”

  “Tell them they’re doing a good job,” Paul said.

  The state senator nodded, took several breaths, wiped his brow, and said, “Thanks.” He pulled his mask back up. Remy and Guterak watched him walk away, trip on a tangle of something, fall forward, and recoil when his hands hit th
e debris. He got back up and picked his way over the piles of steel and rubble.

  “Go fugg yourself, fat boy,” Guterak said quietly, almost gently, when the senator was gone.

  Afterward, they drove back in silence. At the bridge Remy looked back, beyond the exhausted senators, the island receding behind them. At the toll plaza, Paul pressed his E-Z Pass against the window. Somewhere, accounts were tabulated, identities recorded, order inferred, and they passed easily over to the other side.

  “These things can read your thoughts now, when you come over the bridge,” Paul told the senators, although Remy had the feeling Paul was talking to him. “It’s new. Top secret. Very hush-hush. They just started it.”

  The senators exchanged a glance.

  “It doesn’t work very well, yet. Staffing is tough, from what I hear…All those fuggin’ thoughts of all those people crossing in and out of the city. You can’t keep up with it, all the shitty things that people think. They got six big rooms with agents sitting on wires, watching what people think as they drive on and off the island. Got translators and psychiatrists and charts and espresso machines, but it’s still too much. The burnout alone…they can’t keep up. Every day they fall further behind.”

  “Paul,” Remy said.

  “Aw, I’m just fuggin’ with the senators,” Guterak said. “They know I’m screwin’ around, right, fellas? Right?” He smiled at them in the rearview mirror so long that Remy had to fight the urge to grab the wheel. Finally, Paul looked back at the road. “Just fuggin’ with ’em.”

  They dropped the senators off at their hotel in midtown. But Paul didn’t drive right away. He turned in the driver’s seat to face Remy. “Listen,” he said. “This meeting with The Boss tomorrow. Be careful. Think of it like a session with IA, or with Psych on a shooting review. You with me? And Jesus, Bri, don’t say anything about me. For God’s sake. If he doesn’t ask about me, don’t volunteer a fuggin’ word about it. And if he asks how I’m doin’, you just say fine. Nothin’ else. I don’t want no problems. Tell ’em you haven’t seen any weird behavior, no mention of nightmares, nothing like that.” Paul took a moment to reconsider this, like chewing the last bite of sandwich. He raised a finger. “Unless…you know…they think it’s weird that I’m not having nightmares. Then tell ’em I’m totally fugged up…can’t sleep…cryin’ all the time. And Jesus, that shit I was sayin’ the other day?”

  “About the Nextels?” Remy asked.

  “The Nextels? No. Fugg the phones, Brian. I mean that shit about bein’ happy. About this bein’ a good time? The funerals and all that? You gotta forget that shit, okay?”

  “Okay,” Remy said.

  “Okay?”

  “Yeah. Okay.”

  “I mean…I was just talkin’ out my asshole there. I just wanted a be funny. Don’t mean shit, what I said. I don’t even know what I was talkin’ about.” He squinted like he’d eaten something sour and waved his hand at the world.

  “It’s okay,” Remy said. “I’ve already forgotten it.”

  “But it’s not that I’m unhappy. If they want to know that.”

  “Sure.”

  “I’m just fine. Fine. But not happy. At least not unreasonably.” Paul chewed his thumbnail and looked over his shoulder, then started driving.

  Traffic lurched and halted, the cabs pulsing like blood cells. Guterak was too distracted to blow the siren. A white passenger van pulled up beside them and the passengers pressed their faces against the windows, waving and giving them the thumbs-up, but Paul had lost his feel for even this and he drove in silence, without acknowledging the waves from the vehicle next door.

  Remy closed his eyes and watched the wallpaper peeling down his lids, strips of fiber drifting down in the jelly. Soup ofhis own…Sometimes it was calming. He opened his eyes and saw Guterak chewing his thumbnail as he pushed the Excursion through muddy traffic.

  “Relax,” Remy said. “I’m sure this has nothing to do with you, Paul. There’s nothing to worry about.”

  “Yeah.” Guterak nodded uneasily and glanced out the window, at the people lining the street, desperately cheering the cars going into The Zero. He pulled the E-Z Pass clip off his visor and tossed it in back. “Still.”

  They pulled up to the entry point on the West and the same cop stepped forward.

  “Hey, boss. How’s it goin’?”

  “Goddamn tough duty, you know?”

  “Fuckin’ raghead motherfuckers.”

  “Yeah. That’s right. That’s right.”

  Remy fell back in his seat and smelled—

  SMOKE WAFTED across forests of dusted steel. “Hey. You okay?” The guy in front of Remy lowered his ventilator. His cheeks were pink beneath the mask; above it, his eyes were banded with soot. He was wearing heavy coveralls and thick gloves, the kind a welder might wear, and holding out a yellow five-gallon bucket for Brian to take.

  “Oh. Sorry.” Remy looked away from the cloud and took the bucket by the handle—light, this one, just a few twisted pieces of aluminum, maybe ductwork, gray and bent—and passed it back to the pair of hands behind him, connected to an ancient firefighter, struggling to keep up. The buckets kept coming, each one a game of name that piece. You watched the guy’s shoulders in front of you to see if he strained with the bucket before you grabbed for it; the ridge of Remy’s gloves were worn at the pads on his palms. He squeezed his blistered hands.

  More heavy pails passed, and then the buckets stopped and Remy took a minute to look around. There were tents everywhere now; he wondered when they’d arrived, some new team every few minutes, search and rescue from Ohio, Missouri, Maine, new volunteers seemed to spring from the cracks and crevices, people asking if he wanted energy bars or bottled water or socks. There were so many socks. Had there been a call for socks? Did he need socks?

  In line, the guys edged forward and peered around one another like kids waiting for recess, trying to see why the buckets had stopped. Their boots crackled on the surface of the debris, tiny shifts like the warm pack on a deep snowfall. Remy stepped around the snaking line of men to see what was ahead. And, as was happening to him more and more, even though he didn’t exactly remember, he knew: the buckets only stopped for one reason. As if on cue, in place of a bucket, a question slowly made its way back.

  “Cops? Any cops? Any cops on this line?”

  Remy stepped out of line and raised his hand. He made his way carefully over the shards, each step tentative and sharp, bent steel and aluminum giving beneath his feet. As he passed the others on line, they nodded or touched him on the back. It was hot. Remy’s breath buzzed in his mask. It was a strange feeling—humbling and horrifying—to be called forward. At the front, the line took a sharp turn upward and dropped into a steaming crevasse. Halfway down, a burly ironworker had made a ledge for himself on a blackened piece of steel. He removed his ventilator and held up a bucket for Remy to see. There was something gray in there, curled and flat, and at first Remy saw a snake in the process of swallowing a rat, but then he realized what he was looking at. It was a holster. A dust-covered belt and flashlight holster. A cop’s belt and holster.

  “We haven’t found anything else yet,” the ironworker said. “But we thought…someone should…I don’t know…do you want to take it?”

  Remy bent over the lip of the void and reached out for—

  THE BOSS was wrapping up his daily meeting in a conference room at the Javits, getting everyone ready for the next round of press conferences. He was wearing slacks, a PD polo shirt, and a satin jacket, although he changed his outfit five or six times a day. Every morning the sub-bosses had their chiefs of staff check in with The Boss’s chief of staff to see what the succession of outfits would be. They all kept at least one dust-covered jacket handy; it magically inoculated them from any second-guessing.

  The Boss anchored a U-shaped table covered with odd blue bunting—as if there had been a retirement party or an anniversary—and lined with the other bosses, he at the point of the table
like the star on a spur. Sub-bosses flanked him, falling away in importance: his capo de capi, the blackguard police boss, then the droopy-eyed fire boss, sanitation and housing and emergency services, tourism and legal services, and a couple of bosses Remy had never even seen. Remy remembered meetings he’d attended as the police liaison to the city counsel’s office. Their role was to present numbers to The Boss every month, and for each meeting they made up the figures a few minutes beforehand, arbitrarily increasing the numbers The Boss liked to see bigger (attorney caseload) and subtracting from the ones he liked to see smaller (claims against the city). The Boss liked to have everyone in his field of vision in these meetings, so that he could look from one to another without moving his head.

  Remy looked down. He was still covered in dust, wearing work boots and coveralls, and a few people wrinkled their noses and stared at him. He edged along the wall with the sub-bosses, the capos de regime and chiefs of staff, the outer ringlet of ringers, comers and clingers, made men, drivers and ass-sniffers who sat behind the commissioners and directors and handed them briefing sheets and hankies, took notes, covered for them, and occasionally turned away to talk on cell phones, to set up lunch with mistresses and cronies. Behind The Boss, at the head of the table, was a map of the city, covered with pins, and a more detailed map of The Zero. The ceiling was low and white and it flattened the room. TV lights were set up in the corners; the light coming from them seemed like a liquid, filling the squat room.

  They were getting the daily roundup, the list of casualties, and the room was suitably quiet and tense as an aide read off, one by one, the names of those gone and those barely holding on: perishable retail down sixteen; nonperishable down forty-four; advance ticket sales down fifty-nine; door sales down eighty-one; restaurant and hotel down fifty-two. The Boss shook his head at the carnage: shops failing to make lease payments, some of his favorite restaurants threatened. He struck that look, concerned but resolute, and rubbed his temples throughout the recitation of numbers. “No,” he said. “No, no, no.” A film crew was capturing the meeting for posterity, or for something, and he was careful to give them time to set up the next shot before he continued.