(2006) The Zero

by Jess Walter

  A cell phone rang and Markham held a finger up to Remy while he took the call. “No, no problem at all. Yes. In fact, I’m here with him now.” Markham looked up and met Remy’s eyes. “I’ll ask him.” He covered the mouthpiece of his phone and asked Remy: “Is there anything else you’ll need?”

  Remy looked down at the glass. He needed this gin, but that didn’t seem to be what the boy-man was asking. He lifted the dusty glass but it slipped out of his hand and with it slipped the moment, Remy reaching for the falling glass and finding—

  TWO YANKEES, it turned out, were all that showed up to take the tour that day, much to Guterak’s apparent dismay. Remy looked back and recognized a big second-year relief pitcher and the bullpen catcher in the backseat. Looking down, he saw he was still cradling the glass that was no longer there. He hoped at least he’d gotten to drink his gin. He shook his hand and looked back at the marginal Yankees. “I guess The Boss took most of the big-name guys down,” Paul said. He was pissed. Remy recognized the players: a young reliever everyone was hoping would develop a curve and the stones to become a setup guy, and a backup catcher who’d once given The Boss’s kid some pointers on hitting. It didn’t matter to Remy which Yankees they got, but Paul was clearly angry, and seemed to wonder what it meant—if they’d fallen out of favor, somehow. He told Remy that he heard Bannerman and Dooley were taking Bruce Willis around, and that Lopez and Dunphy got the cast of Sex and the City.

  Paul was furious. “What I’d give for an hour in a car with that goddamn Sarah Jessica. Fuggin’ Carey…he knows how I feel about Sarah Jessica. It’s disrespect.”

  Remy looked around the truck. Be quiet, be quiet, be…

  “It ain’t a sexual thing, either. I think she’s got style. I like them little skirts and she wears a lot of…what would you call it…flouncy stuff.” He turned to face Remy. “I wish Stacy would wear more flouncy stuff.”

  Remy stared out the window.

  “You think Stacy’s too fat for flouncy stuff?”

  “I…I don’t know, Paul,” Remy said.

  “You think my wife’s fat?”

  “No. Of course not.”

  “Aw, I’m just fuggin’ with you, man. ’Course she’s fat. I know she’s fat. Krispy Kreme knows she’s fat. White Castle, Schwann’s, Burger King knows she’s fat.” Paul turned back to the road. “I’m just sayin’…you and me, we almost die in here and all we get are a coupla scrubs—” He looked in the rearview mirror. “No offense.”

  The pitcher shrugged. The catcher, who didn’t speak English, smiled and gave them a thumbs-up.

  Paul looked over at Remy again. He spoke more quietly. “It just pisses me off…fuggin’ Lopez takin’ Sarah Jessica around.”

  “Paul—”

  “What the fugg is he gonna show her? Here’s the building where I hid under a desk and shit my pants?”

  They drove down the West for the second time that day, the gray cloud drawing them down, passing beneath people on banisters and fire escapes, leaning out windows, cameras following them. The Yankees were staring out the windows in the backseat, quiet and respectful. Every few minutes, Paul chirped the siren to clear the traffic but Remy could tell he wasn’t into it.

  “Something else,” Paul said to the car, and Remy sensed danger and closed his eyes. “You notice how the number keeps dropping? Eight thousand. Seven thousand? Six. It’s like the swelling going down. I was thinkin’, maybe it’ll go back to zero. You know? I mean, where are the bodies? Maybe it’ll turn out that everyone was at home that day. Maybe we’ll actually gain people when this is all over.”

  As usual, no one knew how to respond to Guterak, so he just kept talking. “How would they explain that? More people than we started with? Wouldn’t that be some trick, huh?” As they approached The Zero, Paul began to fidget, the words struggling to get out. Remy could see him getting ready. Everyone who took tours had his own version of this place, names for different landmarks. Remy saw a firefighter and a welder get into it one time over whether the deep part was called The Pit or The Hole. Among the guys who took tours—and especially on The Boss’s detail and staff—it was acknowledged that Guterak’s names were the best. A few of them had even become standard: The Ribs, Cathedral, Spears, The Void, Big Peach, Dry Falls. Maybe this was Paul’s art: He couldn’t stop talking about the things that so many others had trouble talking about. Guterak always started his tours on West Street, where he and Remy had come in that day. He’d circle below to east, then north, and finally back south, and always end right across from the hole, where Remy’s car was still visible, its windows shattered, up to its axles in grit and paper. Even though they’d only gotten two Yankees and no Sarah Jessica, Remy knew that Paul would set aside his disappointment and do what he always did. Talk.

  “So this is where we came in,” Paul said to the Yankees as they approached the West Street checkpoint. “I was on a mission in midtown for The Boss—there’s this frozen yogurt he likes—when I got the call. Brian was on his way down, so he stops and gets me and we run his car down the West just like we’re going now, smoke everywhere, and we get down here, on the south end, and we’re just standing around, watching all this shit, and bang, the second one comes in, and then we’re running around—and here’s what you didn’t get on TV, it was so far up there, it didn’t seem real, not until someone jumped, arms flapping crazy like they could change their minds, but of course, they couldn’t…and you’d watch ’em grow as they came down…hitting like fuggin’ water balloons, but deeper, you know—thumping and…and…bursting…and then Brian wanders off and I’m alone, just walking along, lookin’ at all these people and this kid firefighter, I’ll never forget his little face, some probie starin’ up at the sky and I don’t even have to look at what he was seeing because I hear this groaning noise and this pop and then it’s so quiet—eerie quiet, you know, just for a split second, not even long enough to think, Oh shit, it’s quiet—but I can tell by the look in this kid’s eyes that it’s not good, and then comes this horrible grinding and a roar, like thunder in your head, ten fuggin’ seconds of hard thunder as the floors pancake, and as soon as it starts, this firefighter does the crazy bravest thing I ever seen, he starts running toward the thing, as I start goin’ in the other direction, toward Brian’s car, and throw myself against the car and then it’s like we’re in the middle of a hurricane of shit, and this wave crashes all around us, black and thick, pushes me under Brian’s car and all the way through to the other side and I know I’m gonna get buried with all this shit that’s flying around and I can’t breathe or see and the wind is still blowing hot shit—see on my arm here, this burn came from some shit blown against me, and this cut, four stitches there—I’m crawling on my hands and knees until I bump the corner of a building and I crawl through a broken window and over people and I can’t tell if I’m inside or out—it’s all black—except the floor beneath all the dust is marble, so I think, I must be inside and it seems like I crawl forever, and then I get up and walk, and all of a sudden there’s a hundred of us, ghosts, gray and choking, and we come out of this cloud one at a time, like little fuggin’ kids waking up on Christmas morning, and no one says a word, not a single word, and we’re walking toward Battery Park, like someone threw a switch and we couldn’t speak no more. All we could do was walk. Just walk.”

  The Yankees stared.

  Paul blinked it away. “But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll cover all of that once we get inside. Any questions so far?”

  Nothing.

  Then Paul had a thought: “Oh, oh, oh! Look at Brian’s eyes.”

  Remy rubbed his temples.

  “Come on, man. Show ’em.”

  Remy turned in his seat and opened his eyes wide. Paul liked to make sure people saw the broken blood vessel in Remy’s right eye.

  “He’s got that muscular vicious disintegration. You know what that shit is?”

  The Yankees didn’t know.

  “Macular degeneration,” Remy corre
cted. “And vitreous detachment.” He’d told Guterak ten times that his eye condition had nothing to do with the burst blood vessel in his right eye, and therefore with that day, that he’d had escalating eye problems for years. But Paul insisted on making it part of the tour.

  “What it is, see, is his fuggin’ eyes are flaking off. From inside, is what that shit is. Creepy, huh? I mean this is some serious shit we went through here.”

  The relief pitcher winced. “That sucks.”

  “Yeah,” Remy said to the genial reliever, and he thought about how nice that would be: relief, a guy in the bullpen waiting to take over when you run out of gas. Go to the left-hander. Life would be much easier if we all had a coach watching us, looking for any sign of fatigue or confusion, specialists waiting just down the foul line to stride in and save our work, to salvage what we’ve done so far, make sure we don’t waste the end of a well-lived life. A good reliever might’ve saved his career, his marriage—what else? That’s all Remy wanted: someone to save him.

  They eased up to the checkpoint, third on line.

  “What are those?” the pitcher asked.

  “Those?” Paul looked out his window. “Reefers. Refrigerated meat trucks.”

  “For…”

  “Bodies.”

  “Jesus, are they…”

  “The trucks? Nah, they’re empty.” He leaned back conspiratorially between the seats. “Look, don’t tell no one, but the truth is…we can’t find the people. Little pieces. A body here and there. But mostly the people are…” Paul held up his fingers and rustled them like a field of wheat. Then he began driving again.

  They pulled up to the checkpoint and a street cop stepped forward. “Hey, boss. How’s it goin’?”

  “Goddamn tough duty, you know?” Guterak said.

  Remy wondered, wasn’t I just here? Didn’t I just hear this conversation? Were the gaps moving him backward now? Skipping like a record? Maybe he’d get to go back and drink that gin, or find out what the guy in the ghost bar had wanted. He felt a vibration, put his hand on his waist and found the pager again.

  “Fuckin’ raghead motherfuckers,” the street cop was saying.

  “Yeah. That’s right. That’s right.”

  REMY’S EX-WIFE Carla lived out past Jericho with her new husband Steve in a grand new house—four bedrooms, three dormers, two baths, something called a great room, and a lovely brick façade—and that’s where Remy found himself, sitting on the couch, drinking weak coffee from the good china. About six months before the divorce, Carla had declared that she needed to start living my life or else go crazy, and the next day she’d opened the big oak cabinet and begun using their good wedding china for every meal; that morning, Remy came downstairs to find little Edgar eating Cap’n Crunch in a shallow, hand-painted bone bowl. Six months later, Remy and Carla were separated.

  Steve pried his lips from the rim of a Bud Light. “Personally? I don’t see that it matters who we bomb, long as we do it while we still got the upper hand. Line ’em up. Clean house. But I don’t need to tell you that, right?”

  “No. You don’t.” Remy looked up at a triptych of school portraits above the mantle: brilliant Edgar at six, at ten, and now at sixteen, long black hair parted on the side and swooped in a spit over the front of his lineless forehead. He was wearing a rugby shirt and sticking his bottom lip out in this latest picture, not defiant, but like someone contemplating the workings of the camera. He didn’t look much like Remy anymore, not like when he was little, when Remy would look at Edgar and fight the urge to feel for the pieces that had been taken from him to make the boy.

  “See, we’re never going to have a better excuse,” Steve continued. “I’d use the Times as my guide. Go to the UN and say, ‘Let’s make a deal. If your country shows up on the front page of the Times for anything other than a travel feature, you’re toast.’ We should’ve had the Stealth bombers in the air before the smoke cleared.”

  “The smoke hasn’t cleared,” Remy said quietly.

  “My point exactly!” Steve swallowed a big mouthful and pointed the neck of the beer bottle at Remy. “See? You know what I’m talkin’ about. Don’t waste time separating guilty from innocent. Let them sort it through later.”

  Remy cleared his throat—start living my life or else go crazy—and leaned forward. “Steve? Do you think you could tell me what I’m doing here?”

  “That’s exactly what I mean!” Steve sat back on the couch. “If we ain’t gonna make the assholes pay…what are any of us doin’ here?”

  “I mean…could you tell me where Carla is?”

  “Well…I think she agrees with me on this, but you know how women are, Brian. A little squishy when it comes to actually pulling the trigger.”

  “I mean where she is physically, Steve. And Edgar?”

  Steve laughed. “That’s good. You’re so funny, man. I tell people that. You’re hilarious. I tell people, if I was Carla, I might’ve stayed with you. You’re a hell of a lot funnier than me. You could even make an argument that you’re better looking, although, classically, I’d probably be considered more handsome. And younger. Obviously. And I make more money.” He waved his hand around the house. “I’m taller…more of a man’s man, probably, athletically…although you, being a former cop and all, could probably kick my ass if you wanted…at least back in the day…are you losing weight?”

  “I’m not sure.”

  “What size pants you wear?”

  “I don’t know…thirty-two.”

  “What about the length?”

  Remy looked down. “Thirty-three?”

  “Thirty-two, thirty-three? No shit?” Steve stood up and lifted his shirt, patted a wide stomach. “I’m a thirty-five, thirty-four now. That’s when it starts getting messed up for guys, when our waists get bigger than our inseams. No shit, right?”

  Remy took a drink of coffee and closed his eyes, wondering if he could induce a gap, open his eyes and find himself somewhere else. He watched the marionettes dance behind his lids for a while, tracking their drift across the vitreous. When Remy opened his eyes, Steve was still there, watching him intently.

  Remy heard footsteps on the stairs and nearly cried out in relief as Carla came up the stairs, lips drawn tight, followed closely by the loping Edgar. Carla wore thin, tight, low-waisted teenager jeans, a big, wide-necked T-shirt, and tennis shoes. The older she got, it seemed, the younger her clothes became. They sat on the couch next to Steve, across from Remy.

  “Sorry,” Carla said. “He was in the middle of a video game.”

  Edgar wore a black armband over his gray T-shirt. He smiled patiently at his mother. “It’s not a video game.” He looked up at Remy. “It’s called Empire. It’s a communal computer experience…like an alternate world. It’s character-driven and action-reaction oriented. Just like the real world.”

  Yes, Remy thought, the real world is action-reaction oriented. He needed to remember that.

  Carla smiled. “More coffee, Brian?”

  “No,” Remy said. “Thanks, though.”

  “So…would you like to start?” she asked.

  “Uh…why don’t you,” Remy said.

  Irritation broke on Carla’s face. As if she’d grown hot, Steve removed his arm from her shoulder. “I’m gonna get another beer.” He winked at Remy. “Let you-all talk.”

  Carla took a breath. “Well…apparently…this is another important issue your father would like me to handle…so, Edgar…it has come to our attention…” She looked at Remy again, as if to see if this were the right way to start.

  Remy nodded. He felt sick. What had come to their attention? Drugs? A pregnant girl? Honestly, he’d prefer drugs. He wasn’t ready to be a grandfather, to be responsible for another person. Suddenly, he felt guilty for not worrying more about the boy. Edgar had been only nine when Remy realized that his son was smarter than he, and from that moment they had started growing apart, as if Edgar had reached his father’s height and had begun growing out, in dir
ections that Remy couldn’t comprehend. And, honestly, Remy had simply stopped worrying about him then. There didn’t seem to be anything more Remy could do to help him. And now…whatever this was, he hoped it wasn’t permanent. He hoped this problem was something manageable. An F. Or a messy room.

  But surely he wouldn’t have been summoned to Jericho for a messy room.

  “It has come to our attention that…well…” Carla searched for the words: “Brian, are you sure you don’t want to do this? It really has more to do with you.”

  “Uh…no. I think it’d be better coming from you.”

  Carla turned back to Edgar. She took a breath, looked once more at Remy and then back at their son. “Edgar. Honey. Your physics teacher called yesterday…and…said…” She seemed to hit a dead end, and tried reshaping her point into a question. “Apparently you’ve been telling everyone at school that your father died the other day, in the…well…in the events of the other day?”

  Edgar nodded as if his mother had just proposed a math problem. “Mmm,” he said. “Ri-i-ight. I had a feeling that’s what this was about.”

  Remy slumped forward with a mixture of relief and something a few miles south of relief.

  “Well…you do realize…your father isn’t dead. He’s right here.”

  Edgar looked up at his dad, brushed the hair out of his eyes, and nodded again. “Ri-i-ight.”

  Carla looked over at Remy for help. He offered none. But Steve had come back into the room with another beer, and he leaned on the arm of the couch and jumped in. “Edgar, why would you go around telling people that your old man was dead?”

  “Well.” Edgar took a deep breath. “Let me start by saying that I appreciate your concern.” He smiled warmly at Remy. “Obviously, I know my father’s not dead. I’m not delusional, and I certainly don’t wish he were dead.” He cocked his head. “I haven’t told anyone that he’s dead. I simply haven’t corrected that impression.”