(2006) The Zero

by Jess Walter

  HE WAITED as the old man was helped off the bus, which bore lettering on its side reading Englewood Senior Services. The driver, who had a shelf of long hair in back, nodded and spoke to the man in his loud senior citizen voice. “How’d you do today, Mr. Addich? You win all that money?”

  “I always win all the money,” the old man said. He was small and impeccably dressed, in a suit without a tie. He clung to a black day planner as big as a motel room Bible. “I’m a winner!”

  “What about them old ladies? You hittin’ any of those ladies, Mr. Addich?”

  “I would never hit a lady. Unless she hit me first.” The old man winked.

  This made the driver laugh as he got back on the bus. The doors closed, the bus began to pull away, and Mr. Addich made his way toward his son’s suburban house.

  “Mr. Addich?” Remy climbed out of his car and hurried across the street. “Excuse me. Are you Gerald Addich?”

  The old man turned slowly and looked at Remy without recognition. “Yes. Who are you?” The old man was all ears, two big handles divided by a spit of gray curly hair that lapped onto his forehead. His mouth was a pinched hole. He spoke with a gravelly third-generation Irish borough accent. “What can I do for you?”

  Remy walked up to the man. “Do you know me?”

  He took a moment. “I don’t believe so, no. But if I had to guess I’d say you look like a cop.”

  “I’m the guy who found your planner downtown,” Remy said.

  “Oh, thank you,” he said. “That was nice of you to return it. I’d be lost without this thing.” He turned back toward his house.

  “Your son said you weren’t downtown that day…”

  The old man turned back and cocked his head, as if he didn’t understand.

  “So I was wondering how it got down there.”

  The old man said nothing.

  “See,” Remy said and he tried to laugh nonchalantly, “the funny thing is that your day planner had a meeting listed on that day…with me, or a meeting with someone with my name.”

  Addich looked down at the planner in his hands. “What’s your name?”

  “Remy. Brian Remy.”

  “I’ve never heard of you,” the man said. “So I don’t know how I could have had a meeting with you—”

  “Could I just look in there?” Remy asked, pointing to the planner.

  “In here?” Mr. Addich held up his day planner.

  Just then, the door opened and Tony Addich came out, in suit pants, a white tank top and socks. “Come on, Dad. It’s almost dinnertime. We’re having salmon.”

  “I’m sorry, I have to go,” Gerald Addich said to Remy. “We’re having fish.” He stared at Remy for a moment before moving toward the house.

  Tony Addich came out and helped the old man up the sidewalk. “Leave him alone,” he said over his shoulder, through gritted teeth. “He can’t help you.”

  REMY STOOD on the second floor of what appeared to be an old warehouse, in front of a heavy door, a kind of roughed metal, brushed and polished until it gleamed like a rocket. He looked around, then opened the door and stepped in the entryway of a huge loft apartment, unfurnished and mostly unfinished: exposed bricks and beams, joists and pipes hanging above stained wood floors, the whole thing feeling cold and exposed, lacking the civility and cover provided by basic drywall and carpet. “Hello?” he called out. “Anyone here?”

  “In here,” came a man’s voice. Remy made his way through a long narrow living room, rough brick on the opposite wall and two big windows at the far end of the room. A small kitchen was on the right, with an angled slate counter lined with corrugated aluminum and a metal hood resting above a gas stove and oven. A young couple was standing next to the stairs, the man in faded jeans and a ski cap, the woman in form-fitting black pants. They both had the kind of windswept blond hair that made Remy think of places in Colorado he’d never actually seen.

  “—not that I think holding out for a six-burner is worth losing this place,” the woman was saying. Then she and her husband both looked up at Remy.

  “Oh, hey,” the windswept man said. “She’s up there.”

  “Up there?” Remy asked, looking at the open staircase.

  “Yeah, man,” he said, “she was showing us this apartment and she got a phone call about something and she just lost it, man.”

  “She didn’t seem right even before that,” the woman said to her husband.

  “She was fine,” the man snapped, as if they’d been arguing the point. “But after the phone call she seemed really…spooked.”

  “She locked herself in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out,” the woman said.

  “We didn’t know what to do,” said the husband. “We told her through the door that we were going to call the agency, and that’s when she said she was going to call someone else instead. I’m assuming that was you?”

  “I assume so,” Remy said. He started up the staircase, which was lined with cast iron poles topped with what looked like bowling pins. Remy stepped closer and looked upstairs, where he saw a mural painted on the ceiling, a kind of sunspot, dark in the center with yellow drips of flame leading away.

  “Excuse me,” said the man. Remy turned and looked down at him, leaning on the railing in the kitchen. “Listen, we’re kind of…we’re worried about losing this place. If she’s okay, do you think you could tell her that we want to move on it before someone else gets it?”

  “Okay,” Remy said.

  He walked up the stairs and found her in the bathroom, sitting in the dark against the counter, still holding her cell phone. “April?” Remy turned on the light. He stared at the phone in her hand, wondering if Nicole had called her and said something. His stomach felt tight, as if it were folding up on itself.

  “You think, at first,” she said, distantly, “that it’s a kind of penance you’re being forced to pay. You think that after you’ve suffered long enough, that the people you’ve lost can just…come back.” April’s eyes drifted down. “But they don’t. They never come back. That’s the trick. They die all over again for you, every few months.”

  Remy removed his coat and tried to put it over her shoulders but she held up her hand.

  “I dream about them…sometimes. I keep expecting them to say something profound or comforting. But they’re too busy to talk. They’re running around, late for things, and they won’t even meet my eyes. And I think…what’s the rush? You’re dead. Where could you possibly have to be?”

  She looked up and met his eyes. “There’s something I probably should have told you. The reason I don’t like to talk about Derek. Do you remember the night we met at the bar and I told you all about him?”

  Remy nodded, even though he didn’t.

  “I said that when he died, I hadn’t spoken to him in four months…” she trailed off. “Well…that wasn’t entirely true. I don’t know why I lied about it…I guess I wanted you—or maybe me—to believe that I totally was over him.”

  April rubbed her mouth and stared at a fixed point above Remy’s head. “Right at the end of summer, he called…he said he missed me. He wanted to get back together. So we talked about it…all through August and the first week of September. And then, one night…” She trailed off.

  “You slept together,” Remy said.

  She nodded.

  “You were still married,” Remy, said and he shrugged as if it were no big deal, which it shouldn’t have been, and yet he could feel a tug in his chest, like he was snagged on a fishing line. He thought of Nicole again and stared at the floor.

  “A couple of nights later he spent the night again.” She cleared her throat. “And it was…nice. The next morning…The next morning was that morning…”

  She looked at him pleadingly, hoping he wouldn’t need any more information, and he didn’t. It seemed to him sometimes that that was the last morning; every day now started at noon.

  “He left for work. I was lying in bed, thinking about him, and about us gettin
g back together, and I saw that he’d left his cell phone on the bedstand. The light was blinking. There was a message. I wasn’t going to listen, but I was curious about whether he’d changed the password on his phone. Of course…he didn’t, the big idiot.” She smiled. “So I listened.”

  Remy remembered the meeting with the lawyer. “It was the other woman,” he said. “The one from his office?”

  “Yes.” April nodded.

  Outside the room, Remy could hear someone climbing the stairs. Then he heard the Colorado guy’s voice: “Excuse me?”

  “Just a second,” Remy said to April. He went out into the hallway and saw the man’s head, just peaking at the midpoint of the stairs.

  “Sorry,” the guy said, “but my wife is really freaked that we’re going to lose this place. Do you think you could tell your girlfriend that we’re going to call someone else from her office about it?”

  “Sure,” Remy said. “Go ahead.”

  When he returned to the bathroom, April was staring out the window. After a moment, the cell phone slipped from her hand and clattered to the floor. April stared at it as if she’d never seen one before.

  She took a deep breath. “The lawyer called,” she said quietly. “While I was showing this place. He got my settlement. Six hundred twenty thousand.” Her body seemed to hang from her spine like a robe on a hook. “I guess that’s what you get for a slightly used, cheating husband these days. Six-twenty. I guess that’s fair.” She looked down. “I should’ve asked, just for comparison, what a sister was worth.” But the joke was flat, and she covered her mouth with her fist and spit a kind of self-loathing laughter.

  He began to move toward her, but bent and picked up her phone instead.

  “I’m sorry, Brian,” she said. “But the worst part has always been how much I miss him. I don’t want to…but I do.”

  “I know,” Remy said, and he handed her the—

  BAR IN an Upper West Side restaurant, where he sat alone, staring through a full glass of whiskey, caramel colored and distorting everything in the room. Behind him, couples sat in red-tucked booths beneath beaded floor lamps; it was a jointy and comfortable place and Remy felt at ease here. He looked out the window. It was dark outside, that surprising early winter darkness that descended like a drawn blind. He looked back at the small glass of amber liquid on the bar in front of him, lifted it, hesitated, then brought it to his lips and downed it. So warm. He wondered if April was meeting him tonight. He pulled out his phone and thought about calling her and realized that he couldn’t come up with her number.

  “That’s a fane whiskey, boyo.” The bartender spoke with an affected Irish accent, but Remy didn’t mind because it was, indeed, a fane whiskey. “D’ya know what you want to ate, than?”

  Remy put his phone away and picked up the menu. Sure enough, there it was. He could take comfort in that, at least. “I’ll have the wasabi duck marinated in red wine.”

  “Have way goat that?” The bartender took the menu and opened it. “Aye, thar ’tis. Moost be new, eh?” The bartender took the menu and snapped it against his leg. He winked, and slid another whiskey in front of Remy, who drained it.

  “Excuse me. Mr. Remy?” There was a man at his shoulder, wearing the white shirt of a chef, buttoned at his shoulder.

  “Yes?” He looked up, wondering for a moment how the chef knew his name.

  “Brian Remy?”

  “Yes. That’s me.”

  “I have been instructed to tell you—” the man looked around the restaurant before bowing even closer. “This is reather embarrassing.” He stared hard into Remy’s eyes: “There is no wasabi marinated duck.” When Remy didn’t answer, he said, “Do you understand?”

  “I think so,” Remy said, pulling away from him. “Can I get something else?”

  “You do understand what I’m saying?” the chef asked.

  “There’s no duck.”

  “Actually—” The man shuffled his feet nervously. “It’s beginning to look like there never was any wasabi marinated duck.” He tried to laugh this off, as if it had all been a funny misunderstanding, but his laugh was edgy and raw.

  “O-o-okay,” Remy said. “Can I get…a steak, maybe?”

  “Of course,” the man said, relieved. “Is that the course you’d like us to take?”

  “I…I guess so. Yeah.”

  “Excellent,” the chef said. “What kind?”

  “I don’t know,” Remy said. “A ribeye?”

  The man’s eyebrows shot up. “A ribeye!”

  “Yeah…I think so.”

  “I’ll tell them,” the chef said. He slipped Remy a matchbook and spun to walk away. Remy looked at the matchbook. He opened it. Written on the lip of the matchbook was one word: WALK.

  Remy reached in his pocket, found the bottle of pills from his psychiatrist, and fumbled with the lid. Finally he got two out and swallowed them with a long drink of lemon water as he read the matchbook again.

  “How did you want that?” The man was at his shoulder again.

  Remy jumped. “What?”

  “The ribeye, sir? How do you want it?”

  “I don’t know.” Remy looked around for help. “Medium…” he said, but when the waiter looked concerned, he added, “…rare? Medium rare?”

  “Excellent.” The chef bowed. “I will let them know.”

  His steak arrived one whiskey later, steaming on a plate of potatoes, with a quiver of asparagus. The meat was lightly marbled and his steak knife glided through it. He jabbed it with his fork and it bled profusely, and he put it in his mouth. It was incredible, the best thing he’d ever eaten. The meat had a blue cheese glaze and the blood and cheese gave his plate a purplish tint. There were garlic mashed potatoes, too, and they turned purple from the blood, and the asparagus spears, too, the whole plate swimming in dark blood. Remy couldn’t believe how much this steak bled and how good it was, and his eyes rolled back in his head as he ate. Another whiskey came, and it, too, was better than he could ever recall a whiskey being.

  And when he was done, Remy put on his overcoat and began walking, across glaring traffic, down blocks with empty stoops, bags of garbage out for collection, across another street and into the park. It was a pleasant surprise, finding himself in the park, cutting across its northwest corner, and he was well into the park when he suddenly stopped and wondered why he didn’t have his car, or why he didn’t take a cab. What was he going to do, walk home forty blocks? Still, it was nice: a great steak, some whiskey and a walk through the park, especially this corner, his favorite part of the park—less traffic here, buildings that lurked over the tree line. He turned and began walking again, and had the warm feeling of being at the end of something, of being cradled by these warm buildings, by civilization. As the sidewalk curled past a dark stand of trees, Remy noticed that two streetlights here were burned out. He slowed. There was someone waiting in the shadows.

  “Do you want to know what I find interesting?” asked a familiar voice.

  Remy came closer and saw that it was the old Middle Eastern man in the long wool coat. He was leaning against a shadowed tree. Remy couldn’t quite make out his face, but it was him, he was sure. “The way people here mock a religion that promises virgins waiting for martyrs in the world after this one. Your own culture would seem to indicate that there is nothing more profound than sex, nothing more humbling or graceful or suggestive of the mystery of creation. And yet the idea of virgins in paradise somehow seems to draw your greatest scorn. Do you honestly imagine yours is a sexless heaven? What kind of paradise is it that has harps and angels but no orgasms?”

  Remy took a step back.

  “What’s the matter? You seem disappointed to see me.”

  “I was kind of hoping you were a hallucination.” Remy reached in his pocket and emerged with the bottle of pills again. He popped the cap and two capsules spilled into his hand. He swallowed them. “My psychiatrist told me you didn’t exist.”

  “That’s not surpr
ising.” The man smiled warmly and spoke in a soft, mellifluous voice, like a professor giving a lecture. “You’re always convincing yourselves that the world isn’t what it is, that no one’s reality matters except your own. That’s why you make such poor victims. You can’t truly know suffering if you know nothing about rage. And you can’t feel genuine rage if you won’t acknowledge loss.

  “That’s what happens when a nation becomes a public relations firm. You forget the truth. Everything is the Alamo. You claim victory in every loss, life in every death. Declare war when there is no war, and when you are at war, pretend you aren’t. The rest of the world wails and vows revenge and buries its dead and you turn on the television. Go to the cinema.”

  The man moved away from the tree, so that his legs—and the bottom of that heavy wool coat—were bathed in light from the nearest street lamp. “Entertainment is the singular thing you produce now. And it is just another propaganda, the most insidious, greatest propaganda ever devised, and this is your only export now—your coffee and tobacco, your gunpowder and your wheat. And while people elsewhere die questioning the propaganda of tyrants and royals, you crave yours. You demand the propaganda of distraction and triviality, and it has become your religion, your national faith. In this faith you are grave and backward fundamentalists, not so different from the grave and backward fundamentalists you presume to battle. If they are barbarians knocking at the gates with stories of beautiful virgins in the afterlife, then aren’t you barbarians too, wrapping the world in cables full of happy-ever-after stories of fleshy blondes and animated fish and talking cars?”

  Remy closed his eyes. Streaks and floaters swam against the current behind his lids, tiny birds rising endlessly against the stream. “You’re going to give me something again, aren’t you?” Remy asked. “A manila envelope or something?” He opened his eyes.

  “No. I’m not,” the man said.

  And then he took a manila envelope from his coat and handed it to Remy. “And I think you have something for me?”

  “I do?” Remy shifted the manila envelope to his other hand and felt in his pocket. Behind the bottle of pills he felt a thick envelope, half as big as a brick. How had he not noticed it before? Did someone in the restaurant give it to him? He pulled them both out. He handed the thick envelope to the man, who opened it and began counting bills.