The Zero

by Jess Walter

  “See, what I’m sayin’…” Paul wrestled with his words.

  “I know…what you’re saying,” Remy said quietly. “And maybe you’re right. But there are things we can’t say now. Okay? You can’t say you’ve never been this happy. Even if you think it, you can’t say it. Everything is…there are things…we have to leave alone. We have to let ’em sit there, and don’t say anything about ’em.”

  “Like the scalp.”

  Remy rubbed his mouth and remembered it. Second day at The Zero, he’d found a section of a woman’s scalp—gray and stiff—in the debris. He hadn’t known what to do, so he put it in a bucket. They searched all afternoon near where it was found, but there were no other body parts, just a six-inch piece of a forehead and singed hairline. An EMT and an evidence tech debated for ten minutes what to do with the scalp, before they finally took it out of the bucket and put it in one of the slick body bags. Remy carried it to a reefer truck, where it sat like a frog in a sleeping bag, a slick black bump on the empty floor. At least five times a day, Paul brought up the scalp. Whose scalp did Remy think it was? Where did he think the rest of the head was? Would they simply bury the scalp? Finally, Remy said he didn’t want to talk about it anymore—didn’t want to talk about what a piece of someone’s head felt like, how light it was, how stiff and lonesome and worthless, or about how many more slick bags and meat trucks there were than they needed, how the forces at work in this thing didn’t leave big enough pieces for body bags.

  “See,” Paul continued, “you ain’t hearing me right, Bri.”

  “I’m hearing you.”

  Paul drove to the checkpoint, where two nervous-looking National Guardsmen in sunglasses and down-turned M-16s flanked a short foot cop, who stepped forward and leaned a boot on the running board of the Excursion. Paul reached into his shirt and came up with his ID tags. He held them out for the cop to read.

  “Hey, boss,” the street cop said, breaking it into two syllables: buoss. “How’s it goin’?”

  “Goddamn tough duty, you know?”

  “Fuckin’ raghead motherfuckers.”

  “Yeah. That’s right. That’s right.”

  Paul put his hand out. Remy removed the tags from his neck and put them in Paul’s hand. Paul showed Remy’s tags to the street cop, who wrote something down and then gave the tags back to Paul, who handed them back to Remy.

  The street cop patted the Excursion’s hood. “Nice truck, though.”

  “Freddies gave it.”

  The foot cop jerked his head toward the two guardsmen. “All they gib’ me was these two stupid fuckers. And I know one of these Gomers is gonna shoot me in my leg before this is over.”

  “Maybe they got rubber bullets.”

  “In a perfect world, huh? Hey, you gib’m hell in there, boss,” the cop said. He patted the hood of the Excursion again and stepped back, waving them through.

  Remy watched the street cop, watched with a certain wonder the way that word, boss, was tossed between the two men, connoting everything of value, the firm scaffolding of reverent loyalty that promised each guy below the chance to rise to heights: his own crew, driver, office, parties, and budgetary discretion and security details, a shot at being boss someday himself. Wasn’t this the ladder Remy had patiently climbed before? But now…what? Remy vaguely remembered thinking it was a corrupting and cruel system, but he had to admit…it lived for days like these.

  Guterak drove through the checkpoint, to a cascade of applause and waving flags. He chirped the siren, then touched two fingers to his forehead and pointed. “Wish I could do something for these people,” he muttered. “Anything. Mow their lawns.” Remy leaned back in his seat and tried to breathe through his mouth. The smell never left him now. It lived in the lining of his nose and the fibers of his lungs—his whole body seemed to smell, as if the odor were working through his pores, the fine gray dust: pungent, flour of the dead. Remy was surprised at the air’s ferocity down here, acrid with concrete dust and the loosed molecules of burned…burned everything. It was amazing what could burn. We forgot that, Remy thought, in our fear of fission and fusion, radiation, infection, concussion and fragmentation. We forgot fire.

  “You see Durgan’s kid on TV?”

  Please be quiet.

  “Big. I hadn’t seen his kid since we all played softball. That’s what I’m talkin’ about…seeing Durgan’s kid. I mean…honestly? Better him than me. Right? Come on. Admit it. Better his kid crying on TV than mine. Or yours. Right?”

  Remy stared out the window.

  “But here’s Durgan…dead as an eight-track, never get to see his kid again. And that could have been me, right? Except that, instead a bein’ dead, I ain’t even injured…or bankrupt. Or outta work. I got overtime comin’ out my ass. I got backstage passes to Springsteen, right? Durgan’s in pieces out there somewhere and I can’t even get anyone to let me pay for a fuggin’ cuppa coffee no more. All because I was standin’ here and he was standin’ there. See? I’m just sayin’—”

  “I know,” Remy interrupted. “Please. Paul.” Remy took off his cap and rubbed the stitches on the side of his head.

  Guterak looked over. “Hey, you got your hair cut.”

  “Yeah.” Remy put the cap back on.

  “What made you do that?”

  “I shot myself in the head last night.”

  “Well.” Paul drove quietly for a moment, staring straight ahead. “It looks good.”

  THE ZERO was humming. A raccoon-eyed firefighter had heard something, most likely the shriek of shifting steel, and was convinced that someone was calling his name. Rescue workers in respirators and surgical masks scuttled around the southwest corner of the pile, putting their heads in crevices, rappelling down cracks, furrowing between beams. Remy had watched as the ground began to shift beneath them, but even as they managed to pull away one husk of steel they just found more, turtles all the way down, bent steel shells as deep as anyone could imagine, and below that, seams of liquid fire, which they dug toward frantically, in the hopes of purifying some rage.

  “Ants on a fuggin’ hill,” Paul said as they walked, too loudly, always too loudly, and Remy grabbed his partner by the wrist. It was as if Paul had lost whatever filter used to separate his mind from his mouth. He said whatever came into his head now.

  “No, don’t you think?” Paul asked. “Don’t we all look like ants out here?” Remy couldn’t remember if Guterak had always been this way or if his Touretic insensitivity was new. He turned to Paul to tell him to be quiet, but just then the soot-eyed firefighter held his hand up and the bucket brigades froze in place, eyes on the smoking fissures, everyone stone quiet, like some children’s game, desperate to hear over the generators and construction equipment and the low buzz of conversation. The firefighter was staring at them—no, right through them. Goddamn.

  “You know what? I can barely stand to look at these fuggin’ smokers now,” Paul said at his elbow. “I used to hate those lousy, pampered mopes. You know? Bravest, my ass. The old ones are lazy fat fuggs and the young ones spend all day working out—”

  “Paul—” Remy began but his partner just kept talking.

  “And they get all that tail. For what? Let’s see one of those lazy-ass work-two-days-a-week assholes foot a beat on the Deuce, right? Let’s see one of those steroid-suckin’ probies make a buy in some hooch in the Heights.

  “But I can’t begrudge ’em now. Sons-of-bitches just walked right in. You know? I mean, damn. They can get all the blow jobs, all the cooked meals. Fuggers walked right in. Half of ’em off duty, and they walked in. I can’t say I would’ve—”

  “Shut the fuck up!” The poor smoker was still running around the edge of the pile, yelling at people who were already staring blankly at him, until he was the only one making any noise. “Please, shut the fuck up! Why can’t everybody just be quiet? Why can’t everyone shut up?”

  Paul and Remy drifted back a block. They were supposed to meet Assistant Chief Carey at the s
outhern entrance of the vast stadium of debris, beneath B-Trust, what Guterak called “the holster,” its face pierced by a steel javelin, just to the south of The Place That Stunk. Everyone knew that it stunk especially bad here, and everyone knew what the smell had to be, but no one could find the exact source. An elevator bank? A stairwell? A fire rig? A few years ago, when he was still married, Remy had kicked his kid’s jack-o’-lantern underneath his porch and this was how it smelled in the spring. It drove people crazy, smelling that at the south end of The Zero, and not being able to find the thing that was deteriorating. And now that the smell was getting weaker, the fact of it was even worse, like they were losing whoever was down there. He’d see guys wrinkle their noses, raising their faces to the sky, as if they just needed to try harder. And that was another thing you couldn’t talk about. While the slick bags sat piled on sidewalks and the meat trucks sat empty and you took apart the piles one goddamned bucket at a time, like taking pebbles from a mountain, you knew what was happening below, you could smell what was happening, the quickening decay and dissolution, like paper burning in air.

  The bucket brigades started up again: only six today, and the bosses were trying to get even these to stop, so they could bring in more heavy machinery to get at the rubble. The machines tested the edges of the pile, nosing their way in, sampling the surrounding buildings, yanking twisted I beams like horses grazing at deep-rooted grass. Eventually, the smokers and cops and hard hats would have to give way to the machines—they all knew this—and the order would be forever reversed, people pushed to the edge, snacking at the corners while the machines ate to their fill from the center.

  “Fuckers took your sweet time.” Ass Chief Carey strode over to Remy and Guterak, wearing a hard hat and one of the new satin jackets. The jackets made them look like a slow-pitch softball team. “I was trying to call you on the Nextels.”

  Paul shrugged. “I gave my Nextel to Kubiak two days ago. He said we was getting new this week.”

  The Ass Chief’s eyes bugged. “You gave your Nextel to Kubiak?”

  “I thought we was getting new, boss.”

  “What? You didn’t get new walkies?”

  “No!”

  “And you gave yours away?”

  “Come on, Chief. Why you bustin’ my balls here? I…fuggin’ told you.”

  The Ass Chief wrinkled his long forehead, all the way to the hard hat perched on his black brush-cut hair. He turned to Remy. “That true? You didn’t get new Nextels?”

  “I don’t know,” Remy said.

  Carey turned and snapped his own walkie-talkie out. “Pirello! Where the fuck you at, you piece of shit? Where the fuck are my Nextels? My guys got no radios.”

  Ass Chief Carey stalked off, shouting into his hand, and Remy turned back to the pile. Water was being pumped from three angles, from ladder trucks on the fringe of the massive smoldering jungle, while fire raged in its roots and hot shoots jutted from the pile. Up close, you didn’t really get any better idea what the smoking leaves and vines were made of, except a few things like window blinds. Everywhere, window blinds. How many window blinds could there be? A billion? Everywhere Remy looked he saw hoary window blinds, hung over bent beams like casual summer wash. He longed for the cool comfort of raw numbers. What percentage of the pile was steel? What percentage window blinds?

  And paper. What percentage paper? Much of the paper had made a dramatic escape; that’s what Remy recalled, watching the paper flushed into space, a flock of birds hovering over everything, and then leafing down on the city. That would help, somehow, knowing what percentage of the pile was paper. And people. Most of the pile was steel and concrete and window blinds and you became grateful for these because they mostly stayed put. You could figure out how much steel and how many window blinds; you could account. It was a simple math problem. But the people were different. And the paper. The people and the paper burned up or flew away or ran off, and after it happened, they were considerably less than they had been in the beginning; they were bellowsed and blown, and they scattered like seeded dandelions in a windstorm.

  This seemed to upset everyone, not just him, and he supposed this explained the new agency, the Office of Liberty and Recovery, with its two independent bureaus: the Remains Recovery Department, the R&Rs—former military coroners, forensic specialists, top medical and EMS people—and the even more secretive Documentation Department, the Double-D’s, the Docs, comprised mainly of retired military intelligence officers and some handpicked librarians and accountants rumored to have Special Forces training. The very difficulty of the Docs’ job was what made it so essential, as The Boss had testified before Congress and later on the morning talks and prime-time panels, his words adopted by the administration and repeated every few minutes on cable news: There is nothing so important as recovering the record of our commerce, the proof of our place in the world, of the resilience of our economy, of our jobs, of our lives. If we do not make a fundamental accounting of what was lost, if we do not gather up the paper and put it all back, then the forces aligned against us have already won. They’ve. Already. Won.

  Staring at the massive ribs, the shattered steel exoskeleton in pieces as far as he could see, smoldering bones draped with gray, like a thousand whales beached and bleached, rotting in open air, it was hard for Remy to imagine that they hadn’t won. But the thought ebbed away as he stepped over thick bands of electrical cord and fire hoses and made his way to the pit, which was the hardest place for him, because it was the same endless, shapeless debris as the pile, but concave. Sunlight sparked off the helmets of rescue workers as they dropped down into voids, drawn by the enigmatic pull of gravity; one after another, like strings of pearls, they went in one hole and came out another. Those holes, he thought, were made by something beyond even fire, by a force that could push a half mile of vertical steel and life into a banked pit fifty feet deep. Maybe, he thought, there are gray holes.

  Remy squinted his eyes, trying to make himself comfortable with the view, imagining a high mountain lake surrounded by acres of smoldering iron forest, the smoke not smoke, but warm autumn fog, a floating memory of some misted morning at camp when he was a boy. It was familiar, not like an actual place he’d seen before, but like a postcard committed to memory, a sharp pit of regret that he couldn’t quite locate. He told himself it didn’t mean he was deadened; a person could grow used to anything.

  It occurred to him then that he had kept a pretty good line on this day so far. He hadn’t lost track of it, and in this he felt a small measure of pride. Maybe he was getting better. Maybe the gaps were going away, the crack in his mind—or wherever it was—was sealing itself. Maybe his thoughts were coagulating. And that’s when something on his waist vibrated. Remy took it off his belt and stared at it, not sure when he’d gotten a pager. He pressed the button on top and a single word appeared on the little screen: “NOW.”

  Remy stared at the pager. Now? Now what? Something about the message chilled him and he backed away from Guterak, who was watching the bucket brigade intently. Remy stuffed the pager in his pocket and moved south, edging down the street toward a familiar storefront—his favorite ghost bar, windows broken and jagged, dust covering everything. He pushed open the busted door and stepped in.

  Just inside was a small round table waiting for a busboy who would never come: two martini glasses, one still holding a gray olive, a highball glass with a stir stick. The chairs that went with this table were dumped, as if its owners had leapt up and run off. Remy had come here the second day and noticed three bills beneath one of the gray martini glasses. Every day he expected someone to take that tip, but the rescue workers only added to it—for luck maybe, or more likely, irony—until a flower of twenty or thirty singles fanned out beneath the dusty glass. Steal the booze; leave a tip. Remy pulled a dollar from his own wallet, lifted the glass, and slid the money beneath it. He patted the table. Now…what to have? Behind the bar, the top-shelf bottles were gone; the guys had begun going down-sh
elf to the well booze: empty Canadian Mist and Gilbey’s and the like, although there was still a bit of Bookers. Decent gin, just what he wanted. Cool, clear, unambiguous. Remy looked beneath the counter for a clean glass. Beautiful ghost bar.

  When he looked up, a slender man in a dark suit was standing in the doorway, holding a briefcase. He was younger than Remy, but about the same height, with a short, military haircut. But his exact age was hard to determine because he had the youngest face Remy had ever seen on an adult, as if a ten-year-old’s head had been grafted onto the body of an adult lawyer. He wore a name tag (“Markham”) tucked into his lapel pocket, the way Feds did it, but if he was a Freddie, the tag didn’t identify which agency. Markham smiled and set his briefcase on the bar, sliding a dusty highball aside. Remy thought about pretending he was just a bartender, a holdover who hadn’t fled that day. He thought about offering this baby-faced Markham a drink, and for a moment he flashed on what a nice life that would be, the simple transaction of warm comfort for cold money, glass clinked on a counter, the long pour, a bar rag to clean off the dust, and what else could you possibly need? What ghost bartender ever had gaps in his memory, or woke with a gunshot to his head? What ghost bartender ever lost track of days, or had to convince his partner to stop talking? What ghost bartender ever suffered temporal streaks and floaters?

  “I see why you wanted to meet here,” the baby-faced man said. “Appropriate.”

  Remy didn’t know what to say. Had he wanted to meet there?

  “I should begin by saying that we’re all thrilled,” the man said, “to get someone with your experience to help us”—he smiled slyly and thoughtfully—“expand our responsibilities. Obviously, we don’t have the institutional history of other investigative agencies.” The man leaned forward. “To tell the truth, we’re all eager to show the bureau and the agency that we’re not just some kind of clerical service. And, if I may add a personal note, may I say that I’m looking forward to—”