The Zero: A Novel

by Jess Walter

  “I understand.” Eller nodded in a kind of admiration. “Well…I was at a conference there, last spring. I took March. I wanted to talk to her, outside the city. She was sensitive about my being married. She told me that’s all she’d met since she got to the city, married men. Except this one boyfriend she had briefly…Basil, I think his name was, something like that. An Arab student, real womanizer. They’d just broken up. She was bitter—looking for something different, I guess.

  “Anyway, I guess I may have…uh…led her to believe that I was separated. It was on that trip, when I took this picture, that I explained that I actually wasn’t exactly separated, technically.” He cleared his throat. “That my wife and I were still together.”

  Eller waited for a response, but Remy couldn’t muster one. “Technically,” he repeated.

  “Yes.” Eller bit his lip. “Anyway, March ran out. And I didn’t see her for several hours. She was walking around Seattle. When she came back, I could see that she had been crying. But her face was set. Very determined. March could be that way. She was one of those people who lashed out when she was hurt. And, oh boy, was she hurt.” Remy thought Eller seemed almost proud of this fact, and he had to look away. “She started by saying that she was tired of feeling like a victim in every relationship and then she just laid out everything she wanted from me: bang, bang, bang. An apartment. A cell phone. A car. Stipend. Clothes allowance. She said that if she was going to be a mistress, by God she wanted to be compensated like one.” Eller stared at a spot over Remy’s shoulder. “Honestly, Mr. Remy. That outburst was the best thing that could’ve happened. For both of us. This might sound…cold. But I’m a businessman. This is what I do. It’s what I understand. Negotiations. Arrangements. I tend to gravitate toward those things I can control. And in that way, shoot, the arrangement was…” His eyes drifted down and for the first time, he looked like a man who’d lost someone. “Perfect.”

  Something stuck in Remy’s mind, amid all these pointless details, one word: “Car? Did you say you bought her a car?”

  “I gave her a car.”

  “But she took the train to work.”

  “I needed to be somewhat discreet about the car.” Eller squirmed. “My firm…provided it, a company car. I tied it to the work she was doing for us. March parked it in the garage below her office. We used it on the weekends to go to Connecticut.”

  Just then the waiter returned with a tall, narrow box and set it on the table between them. The scotch. Eller stared at him, waiting for a question, but Remy just looked back at his scotch. Eller cleared his throat and filled the space. “About three weeks before…” he rubbed his mouth “…before she died, March suddenly said that it was over. I wasn’t happy, as you might guess. I asked if there was someone else…and when she hesitated, I knew. I asked if it was her old boyfriend, but she just said it wasn’t anyone. It was just…time, she said.”

  Remy nodded.

  “I know what you’re thinking.” Eller picked up the photograph and stared at it again. “Was I in some way…relieved that March died that day? Because I didn’t have to hold my breath every time the phone rang at home? Or look over my shoulder when I went to her apartment? I was bitter about the breakup; I won’t lie. But I cared deeply for her, Mr. Remy. I did. There were days when I thought I loved her.”

  Remy didn’t say anything.

  “I’m sure you don’t believe me.”

  “Why wouldn’t I believe you?”

  Eller straightened his neck. “I don’t care, Mr. Remy. Go ahead and mock me. March knew how I felt about her. I sleep at night. I—”

  He coughed and seemed about to break down, but quickly composed himself. “That day…I watched TV and I was sick. I tried her cell phone but I couldn’t get through. I called the apartment and the hospitals…. That night I went to the apartment. I still had my key. I just sat there thinking about her, and—” He trailed off and rubbed his jaw, looking down at the ground as if the magnitude of his actions was just making its way to him. “I gathered everything that might get back to me.” He looked up. “A magazine with my name on it. A razor and deodorant I kept in the bathroom. A bottle of wine from our cellar. I got those things…and I left.” Eller stared at the spot over Remy’s shoulder again, as if reading cue cards. Finally he looked back and met Remy’s eyes, composed and icy. “You said you were going to see her family in Kansas City?”

  “Did I?”

  “I doubt she told them anything about me, but if she did…can you tell them how genuinely sorry I am—for everything?”

  “Sure.”

  “Does any of this help?” Eller asked.

  Remy looked at the scotch. “Yes.”

  They both stood. Eller straightened his coat and looked at a spot on the ground. “The last time I talked to her…was two weeks before. A Sunday. She asked how I was doing. Miles…my son…had a soccer game. I told her about it, and she said, ‘I hope he has a great game.’ With no irony, either. March would’ve been a wonderful mother, if she’d ever gotten the chance.” He sighed. “Mr. Remy, if you knew that a conversation would be the last one you were going to have with someone, what would you say?”

  Remy reached for the bottle of—

  “I JUST keep thinking we forgot something,” Guterak was saying on the other end of the phone. He sounded drunk.

  “What do you mean?” Remy adjusted the phone in his own ear. He sounded drunk, too. “What did we forget?”

  “Not just us. Everyone. We just kept going on and…it’s like we all forgot to do something important. Like when you leave the stove on and go on a big trip.”

  Remy didn’t know what to say. He looked at his watch. It was three in the morning. He was alone, fully dressed, lying on the bed in a hotel room that he didn’t recognize. He was wearing the suit he wore to funerals. He reached in the pocket and pulled out a funeral announcement. There was a picture of a forest and a verse from Luke: Father, if thou art willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done. Below that was the name Donald Michael Morrone. Aw, Jesus. Not Donnie. They’d been at the academy together. Had he known about Donnie? Remy was drunk, but there was nothing around him to drink. His mouth felt velvety, warm. He edged with the phone over to the minibar and rifled through the browns.

  “What did we forget, Paul?” Remy cracked a little dark rum and drained it.

  “The people,” Paul said, as if it were obvious. “We forgot the people. I mean…where are they? It’s like they’re in a giant room somewhere, sitting, crouched against walls, and…if we just find that door and open it, they’ll all be in there, just staring at us. Thinking, What the fugg took you so long?”

  “Jesus, Paul…”

  “Sometimes I wish we’d just gone to a bar that morning and watched the whole thing on CNN. You know what I mean? I envy people who watched it on TV. They got to see the whole thing. People ask me what it was like and I honestly don’t know. Sometimes, I think the people who watched it on TV saw more than we did. It’s like, the further away you were from this thing, the more sense it made. Hell, I still feel like I have no idea what even happened. No matter how many times I tell the story, it still makes no sense to me. You know?”

  There was something important Remy wanted to say, but he felt dopey with booze and the gaps seemed to be coming so fast now. Remy gripped the side of the bed, as if to keep himself from sliding out of the moment until he could remember what he wanted to say.

  “People always ask the same question,” Guterak said. “When everyone is around, it’s all respect and bravery and what-a-fuggin’-hero and thanks for your sacrifice, but the minute someone gets me alone, or the minute they have a drink in ’em, they get this creepy look and they ask me what the bodies sounded like when they hit the sidewalk. They ever ask you that?”

  Remy couldn’t say. “What do you tell ’em?”

  “I say to clap their hands as hard as they can, so hard that it really hurts. Then they clap, and I say: No. Hard
er than that. And they clap again, and I say, No, really fuggin’ hard. And then they clap so hard their faces get all twisted up, and I say, No, really hard! And then, when their hands are red and sore, they say, ‘So that’s that what it sounded like?’ And I say, ‘No. It didn’t sound like that at all.’”

  “Paul, have you thought about getting help? Maybe take some time off?”

  “What? Take disability for my back, like you?”

  Remy couldn’t tell if Guterak was mocking him. He knew there was nothing wrong with his back, didn’t he? “I don’t think I’m on disability, Paul,” he said. “I think I’m working on something.”

  Guterak laughed. “Oh. Then I guess I can cancel your going-away party.”

  “I swear, Paul. I’m working. On some kind of case.”

  “Yeah? They put the blind guy with the bad back on some big, top-secret assignment, huh?”

  “My back is fine.”

  Paul laughed again. “What do you do on this secret assignment?”

  “I go places…Talk to people.”

  Guterak seemed to be tiring of the joke. “Yeah? Then what happens?”

  Remy put the funeral announcement back in his pocket and unfolded another piece of paper he found there. It was the flyer from the wall at Famous Ray’s, with the picture of March Selios and the phone number beneath it. Remy put it on the bedstand. “I don’t know,” he said into the phone. “I guess…the days just skip by.”

  “Yeah,” Paul said. “Well. I know that feeling.”

  HIS PANT leg was caught on something sharp. It was dark and he had to feel with his hand along the wall of a narrow, paved tunnel, until he found the cuff of his jeans, snagged on a jagged section of pipe. He yanked it away, banging his elbow on the wall of the tunnel, and then continued crawling toward the light. He was wearing a respirator; the sound of his own breathing echoed in his ears. His hands were chalky with wet dust. There was a sound somewhere like a dentist’s drill. Two other men were crawling down this narrow tunnel ahead of him, the soles of the closest man’s hiking shoes twenty feet ahead. He followed the shoes toward a leaking yellow light, which bobbed ahead in a larger space, until, one by one, the two men ahead of him fell through an opening into a short white cave, or—no, he recognized it, even in its current state…a subterranean parking garage, the Orange level, apparently.

  Remy pulled himself to the mouth of the tunnel and stared out. Along one wall the concrete pillars had been snapped and the roof had caved in, gunmetal Benzes and black BMWs crushed and blanketed in a fine coat of dust. Some of the car doors were open, as if people had gone through them and simply left the doors open. A CD wallet lay open on the floor next to one of the cars, and Remy imagined a rescue worker looking for something to listen to on the way down. The garage floor was wet, the dust piled where rivulets had run along construction seams and the newer cracks produced by the collapse above. Strings of utility lights had been laid like holiday garland along the remaining standing pillars, their bare bulbs illuminating the dank underground and lighting the dust particles like firebugs, dread shadows thrown in every direction.

  Remy spilled out of the opening onto the concrete floor. The two men ahead of him were already standing and brushing themselves off, the beams from their flashlights creating plumes of dust and light. One of the men was Markham, the Documentation guy who had assigned him to find March Selios. The other man was someone Remy had never seen before, an older guy in coveralls and a utility jacket. This older man removed his respirator, and so Remy and Markham did the same. Markham’s smooth face screwed up in a sneeze.

  Remy’s first breath was choked with dust. The Zero smell was even stronger down here, and he couldn’t help wondering if, as they moved down, they weren’t nearing some hot wet core of the thing—and he imagined a river of smell, perhaps guarded by a robed ferryman or a cabbie sitting on a beaded chair. Markham pulled blueprints from his back pocket and walked over to the hood of a Mercedes coupe, its front end pristine except for the dust, its trunk bashed by falling concrete. Markham spread the prints out, pulled a flashlight from his pocket, flicked it on, and put it in his mouth between his teeth.

  When Remy didn’t budge, Markham had to pull the flashlight out of his mouth and beckon him over. “Brian. Please. We don’t have much time.”

  Remy edged over. Markham put the flashlight back in his mouth and pressed down on the creased blueprint. It showed the levels of this underground parking garage, both from above and in relief, its ducts and staircases and elevator shafts, its relation to the commuter train tubes. The other man, who wore gray coveralls, pointed with a drafting pencil at a long slender line on the page, and then at the collapsed parking structure in front of them. “Okay. We’re here.” He pointed to a spot on the blueprint. “On the northeast corner. There were six basement levels down here, filling up most of the entire sixteen acres—parking, shopping, public transportation, air condition, elevators and other machinery—like a honeycomb. About sixty percent of all that was destroyed.”

  He ran his pencil along a tunnel. “This part of the garage where you say this woman’s car might have been parked is here. Like I told you…it’s blocked, if not entirely collapsed. We might be able to follow this PVC cluster to the PATH tunnel, assuming the line is still there. And passable. But this is the way to the place you fellas want to go, and as you can see it’s blocked off. If we go this way—” He dragged his pencil across the print. “We’re going to hit the fire. This direction, we run into water. And all of this area is probably contaminated by Freon.”

  “Well, that’s a hell of a choice,” Markham said, as his flashlight fell to the ground, the light frantically testing the walls for escape before hiding beneath a crushed Lexus sedan. “Fire or flood or poison. Burn or drown or choke on your own vomit. I guess I’d take drowning, you know, if I had to pick. How about you, Brian? You seem like a burn guy…like you’d want to go out in as much glory as possible.”

  Remy picked the flashlight off the ground, extinguished its light, and handed it back to Markham.

  The guy in coveralls talked to Remy as if he were in charge. “Like I told you up above, this is as far as we can go. Maybe after they get the fire down here controlled and pump out some of the lower levels. But even then, I doubt it.” The guy gestured toward the crushed cars. “You could try the lowest level, B-6, and then try to move up, but like I say, that’s seventy feet below the surface, and in this section it’s either on fire or under water. We could go north, but then you got the potential of gas from them old Freon tanks.”

  Markham looked at Remy seriously. “What do you think?”

  “What do you think?” Remy asked.

  The guy in coveralls interrupted: “Look, I appreciate how important this is. I want you to know that if there was any way we could do this, I would…Because I think you fellas are the most important people down here, far as I’m concerned. I mean, I heard them talking about all them documents on TV. But this is a needle in a…haystack.” He looked around. “A really scary haystack.”

  Remy looked around the garage. The collapsed corner troubled him. What was above that? How far up did the rubble go? To the pile? The Spires? Against another wall, a stream of black water minded its own business, flowing through the ruined garage into a fissure in the wall. Where did that water come from? Where was it going? And why was it black? These seemed like the real questions they should be asking.

  Markham put his hands out. “Okay, Brian. You’ve gotta call the ball on this one. What do you want to do? Go back or follow the sewer line?”

  “I don’t…” Remy surprised himself by laughing. “I can’t say.”

  The guy in coveralls glanced at Markham, who sighed with disapproval. He took Remy by the elbow and pulled him aside. His voice was low. “What’s the matter with you today, Brian?”

  Remy heard himself laugh again, maniacally. He said, under his breath, “I don’t have the slightest clue what we’re doing down here.”

 
; Markham stared at him for a moment. Then he nodded. “Yeah, you’re probably right. Hell, even if we got to the floor where her firm kept their cars…” Markham walked over and folded up the blueprint.

  “Were we looking for March’s car?” Remy asked.

  “Yeah, when you put it that way, it does seem crazy.” Markham turned to their guide. “Brian thinks we should just turn back.”

  The guy in coveralls sighed. “Thank you.” He looked over his shoulder, headlights of ruined cars peeking out from collapsed roof. “I don’t like it down here.”

  Markham watched Remy for a moment, his face noncommittal. “Don’t worry about it, Brian. It was a long shot anyway. You made the right call.”

  Markham and the guy in coveralls put on their respirators and moved back to the opening they’d crawled through. Remy looked around once more at the dusted windshields, which stared at him inscrutably. Then he put on his mask and followed the two men back into—

  “MIDNIGHT SATURDAY I’m jacked up on some waitress, half-to bangin’ the ass off her when my fuckin’ pager goes off nine-one-one and I’m thinkin’ Oh shit, my wife found out I ain’t workin’ this weekend, right, but when I check the page, who do you think it is? Brian fu-u-uckin’ Remy, that’s who.” McIntyre gulped a breath as the guys barked laughter and Remy took the moment to glance around. About half the old detail was here, six of The Boss’s guys and five guys from the PC’s office—where Remy had been assigned for six months—twelve guys including Remy and Guterak, who sat at his right, laughing so hard he lacked the breath to say anything inappropriate.

  “Right? Right? So Remy’s got body that night—and I don’t have to tell you which boss we were assigned to then, ’cept to say that poor Remy’s sleepin’ in one of the Town Cars outside some skank’s apartment in Alphabet City while the boss drills for soil samples, right—” The guys all laughed knowingly. “And that’s when the fuckin’ boss comes down barefoot with his pants undone, in a T-shirt—remember that? Remember, Bri?—stupid fat fuck, too goddam furious to use the phone, he wants to get in someone’s face because he’s gone and picked another whore with a tool, right? He’s out of his fuckin’ mind, wants every transvestite hooker off the fuckin’ street. That night! And this jackass is so in love with his own power and with his phony fuckin’ statistical results, he really thinks this can be done, right? Like it’s just a fuckin’ number on a graph—eight hundred or something. ‘So great,’ I tell Remy, ‘call patrol.’ But genius here—” McIntyre pointed at Remy “—says the boss wants us to do it. And I’m like, ‘He wants us to do this?’ And Remy says, ‘Yeah. He wants us to do this. Right now.’ And I’m literally half in this fuckin’ waitress, on the upstroke, right? And I’m on the phone and I’m like, ‘Right now, Brian?’ And he says, ‘Right now, Billy.’ And I’m like, ‘All of ’em, Brian? All the whores?’ and this unflappable motherfucker here, this asshole thinks for a second, then says, ‘Well…I guess all of ’em with dicks, Billy.’”