The Zero

by Jess Walter

  He shrugged as if that covered it, but when no one said anything, Edgar laughed impatiently. “Look. What if I’d written a story for a class about a boy who lost his father? We’d be talking about my A paper, instead of everyone looking at me like I’m sick.” Edgar laughed again, as if this cleared it all up.

  Remy couldn’t think of a single word to say.

  Carla spoke up. “But Edgar, honey. This isn’t a story you wrote. This is something you’re allowing your classmates to believe. Your homeroom teacher said that you sit at your desk crying. She said you got out of a physics test and that you’ve stopped going to PE altogether.”

  “Yeah…”

  “Well, I guess I don’t understand.”

  Edgar shrugged as if it were the simplest thing. “If I had lost my father, would you really expect me to take a test? Or to play Frisbee golf?”

  “Well…no. I guess not.”

  “Okay,” Edgar said, as if that solved it.

  Carla shifted on the couch, so that she was facing their son. She broke out her gentle relationship voice, the one Remy recalled from the awful counseling sessions they tried before the split. “Honey, is it that you don’t get to see your father enough? Is that what this is about?”

  Edgar cocked his head.

  “That he works too much, sweetie? That he’s gone all the time.”

  “No.”

  “Is it his drinking? Are you trying to tell your father that his lifestyle is going to kill him? Is this a kind of metaphoric death you’ve created for him? Is that what you’re trying to tell us, honey?”

  Remy wondered how far this line of questioning would go. Maybe this was about the time he flirted with that waitress in front of Carla. Or maybe it was about the fact that he didn’t like her family. The way he used to drop his dirty clothes next to the bed?

  Steve leaned forward helpfully. “Is it to impress chicks, Eddie? Is that what you’re doing, ol’ buddy? Trying to get a little sympathy ass?”

  “No, Steve,” Edgar said patiently. “I’m not trying to get…ass.”

  Remy wished he could infuse his own voice with as much flatness when he spoke to Carla’s new husband, that he could speak so ironically with such an apparent lack of irony. Suddenly, his pride for his child overwhelmed him, and Remy flashed on the idea that if he actually had died, he might save Edgar this awkward questioning.

  “Well, I think we deserve an explanation,” Carla said. “That’s all.”

  The boy looked around the room for help. When Edgar was little, Remy used to find solace in the shards of himself that he saw in the boy’s in-trouble stare, in his shrugs and shifts, in the things he feared. But now Edgar was so self-assured that Remy could barely remember why his son had ever needed whatever shelter he’d once provided. Edgar was a stranger to him, an alien with long, blocky hair and sinewy arms and a clipped, hyper-intellectual way of speaking that made it seem as if he were reading.

  “Okay,” his son said. “First of all, by agreeing to talk about this, I want you to know that I’m not apologizing. This is entirely my business.” Edgar took a deep breath and stared at the carpet. “Grieving is personal.”

  “That’s fine, Edgar, honey. But what are you grieving? The divorce? Your father’s inability to commit emotionally—”

  Remy interrupted: “You know, I think we’ve covered that.”

  “I’m grieving my dead father!” Edgar was losing his patience. “I don’t know why that’s so hard to understand.”

  “But…your father isn’t dead, honey.”

  “I know that.” Edgar rubbed his temples, as if talking to these morons was more than he could bear. “Weren’t there fathers who died that day?”

  “Of course they did.”

  “And didn’t they leave children behind?”

  “Sure.”

  “And didn’t I have a father?”

  “Yes. Of course.”

  He put his arms out as if finishing a magic trick. “Then why is it so hard to believe that I could be grieving the same thing as those other children? I suppose you’d rather I behave like everyone else and grieve generally. Well, I’m sorry. I’m not built that way. General grief is a lie. What are people in Wyoming really grieving? A loss of safety? Some shattered illusion that a lifetime of purchases and television programs had meaning? The emptiness of their Palm Pilots and SUVs and baggy jeans? Look around, Mom. Generalized grief is a fleeting emotion, like lust. It’s a trend, just some weak shared moment in the culture, like the final episode of some TV show everybody watches. It’s weightless. You wake up the next day and wonder when the next disaster is scheduled.

  “But real grief…oh, God.” He cocked his head and stared at his mother. “Real grief weighs on you like you can’t imagine. The death of a father…is the most profound thing I’ve ever experienced.” Edgar’s eyes seemed to be tearing up. “It’s hard to get out of bed. And you want me to take a test? Play softball? Are you kidding? There are times when I can barely breathe. I can’t…get over it. And I don’t want to. The only way to comprehend something like this is to go through it. Otherwise, it’s just a number. Three thousand? Four thousand? How do you grieve a number?”

  His voice was a whisper. “So…yes…I have chosen to focus my grief on one individual. On the death of my father.” He shrugged and looked down at the carpet. “And you know, frankly, I guess I expected a little more support from you.”

  “I…” Carla looked from Steve to Remy and back. “I…”

  Remy squeezed his eyes as tight as they would go, and then opened them again. Still here. Except for Steve, who apparently sensed that the potential for humor had faded, and backed carefully out of the room.

  Edgar wasn’t finished. “Ask yourself this: what separates me from some kid whose father actually died that day?”

  “The fact that I’m alive?” Remy asked. Even to him, his voice sounded like it was coming from another room.

  “Fair enough,” Edgar said, without meeting Remy’s eyes. “Okay, now let’s take that kid, the one who actually lost his father, but is somehow coping by getting consolation from his girlfriend or from drinking or from writing poems. Are you going to tell him he isn’t grieving enough? Are you gonna tell some poor kid doing his best that he should feel worse about the death of his father?”

  “No…” Carla shook her head. “No. Of course not.”

  “Then don’t tell me I shouldn’t be devastated by the death of my father just because he isn’t dead! I mean…Goddamn it, Mom. All things considered, I think I’m doing pretty well…. Do you know there are kids out there getting high every day? Kids selling drugs. Is that what you want me to do?”

  “No, of course not.” Carla started crying; this had always been her deepest fear for her child, that he would use drugs. “We don’t want that. Do we, Brian?”

  Remy just stared straight ahead. Honestly, he’d rather have Edgar smoke a little weed and acknowledge that Remy was alive, but he knew better than to say so.

  “I’m sorry, honey,” Carla said. “I’m sorry we got divorced and I’m sorry about your father.”

  “Thank you.” Edgar straightened the black armband. “Thank you. That means a lot to me. It really does.”

  They all stared at their shoes for a moment, and then Carla held out her hands. Edgar stood, walked over, and melted into his mother’s arms. They cried together. Remy watched them from across the room and found he could imagine another life in which he’d never met either of them. Carla looked up at Remy then and wiped her eyes. “Well, Brian. I suppose this is as good a time as any to tell him your news.”

  “I suppose,” Remy said.

  Carla put her hands on Edgar’s cheeks. “Honey, your father has got a new assignment at work. And he’s going to be gone a lot. In fact, he’s taking a trip very soon. I know this is a bad time, with you so upset over his death, but he’ll be back. He promises. Don’t you, Brian?”

  “Yes,” Remy said. “I promise.”

  Edgar l
ooked up at his father, and Remy worked to place those eyes, and then it hit him. When Edgar was a little boy, you couldn’t get him out of the tub. He’d spend hours in there, lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling, Carla always adding more hot water, his fingers and toes like raisins, and when you went in to ask if he were ready, he’d look up with those pleading, impatient eyes, as if you were too stupid to comprehend the seriousness of Edgar’s work in the bath. Remy loved seeing those eyes again, staring at him from his mother’s embrace, across the room. In fact, the moment was so nice he didn’t have the heart to ask Carla where he was going.

  AT NIGHT, The Zero was lit like a stage. Or a surgery. It was quiet—not exactly peaceful, but a person could think. The work seemed less showy to Remy, the loss more personal, less produced than during the day, when everyone posed for photographers and TV cameras, when grief and anger became competitive sports. At night people were left alone with their emptiness. The bucket brigades mostly gave up their symbolic place and the pails sat in huge piles, while a skeleton crew worked quietly, without the frantic edge of the daytime workers. Generators chugged and machines ground away and men hid in the long shadows behind the spotlights. Remy liked the night better. It felt…appropriate. For another thing, in the darkness there were fewer streaks and floaters. The world behaved, stood still.

  Near him, three firefighters sat on the edges of collapsed wall, eating their lunches from metal buckets, respirators hung around their necks, legs dangling, like kids fishing from a dock. Forty feet away, a masked construction worker sat on his yellow iron horse, its massive jaws pointed down, waiting for permission to nibble at the pile. Below them ran the soft grinding hum of idling trucks and heavy equipment and portable generators, the hushed conversations of engineers and welders. At Remy’s feet, someone had made a pile of popped rivets; it looked like a marble collection. Was this an official pile with some purpose, Remy wondered, or the obsession of someone who didn’t know what else to do down here? There were so many people standing around, dying to do something. Anything. Had he made this pile himself? He didn’t think so, but the rivets made him uneasy and he felt the urge to leave. He drifted and found himself on a side street, staring at a line of scorched, mashed cars, picked up and stacked four deep, bumpers and side mirrors snapped off, bits of burned rubber clinging to the rims of the wheels.

  Remy walked the bent edge of the city, everyday things suddenly as mysterious and suggestive as archaeological artifacts. Coffee cups. Parking meter heads. Edgar had written a paper once about Pompeii, and Remy kept thinking about the pictures he downloaded, the plaster casts of victims covering their faces, plates and tureens and sandals, the sudden artifacts of lives frozen by shit luck. Then something else in the street caught Remy’s attention, gray and familiar, until it focused under his eyes: an airline seat belt. Debris from the planes went in specially marked bins, so Remy picked up the belt and carried it over, dropped it in with engine parts and seat cushions. Nearby, beneath a tarp, dog handlers were feeding two panting German shepherds, while a third curled up and napped against a twisted I beam. The dogs watched Remy, sniffed the air, decided he wasn’t a corpse yet, and put their heads down together. Remy took a wide berth in case they changed their minds. Across West Street he found himself inside WF II, cold, dark, and empty, the face of the building scarred and scorched, the marble lobby coated with light gray soot and strewn with broken glass and paper, along with detritus from the firefighters—tables and foldout chairs, mattresses, water bottles, and ladders. His flashlight hit something in the middle of the room: a shoe. He walked over, bent to look at it, picked it up: Size eleven. Loafer. He tried to think of a scenario in which its owner was alive, but his imagination failed him. He flipped the tassel, turned it over, and set it back where he’d found it. Some things you just left where you found them; the fact that other people had walked past the same things somehow ritualized it.

  Remy sauntered up the grand stairs, past banks of paper pushed to the sides like snow on a well-traveled stoop. Presumably, the Docs just hadn’t cleared this paper yet, although Remy thought he remembered hearing something about hidden cameras positioned to try to catch rescue workers and equivocators looking through documents. On the second floor he made his way down a narrow hallway that looked out on The Zero. The hall was lined with grit and more paper, pushed into more snowbanks along either side so people could pass. A line of windows facing The Zero was blasted open; black fangs hung from the frames. Through the jagged opening Remy stared down on the well-lit pile. At the edges, the rubble was dark, a black tangle of shadowed forms, but the center was spotlighted bright; it was like coming across a high school football game in the middle of a bomb crater. American flags hung everywhere, from cranes and earthmovers, pinned to crumbling walls and across the hoods of crushed cars. On a tall section of iron lattice, a welder’s spark dripped light onto the ground. A guy in all black inched slowly along an I beam, down into a burned black steel crevasse until only his shoulders and head were visible, and then nothing. Guys crouched everywhere, resting or thinking. Herds of construction workers and firefighters moved along the street, their hooded and masked heads pointed down. They sniffed the air, and one another, and kept moving.

  Remy was tired. He wandered the hallway, wondering if there were someplace he might catch a nap. He came to a clothing store, a little boutique—the clothes so tiny, the little jeans like children’s knickers, scraps of fabric with straps, all of it covered in that same dust, a circular rack of once-colorful sweaters, arms twice as long as the torsos, everything the same shade of gray now. He freed a price tag from a crust of sprinkler-pasted dust. Ninety-two dollars—not ninety or ninety-five, ninety-two. Remy tried to picture the store that morning: a woman considering the price tag, trying to decide whether she should pay that much for a sweater. Ninety-two. The number bothered him, its concrete arbitrariness. Did the woman let the tag fall, hurry out of the store? Or did she buy one of these sweaters, already anticipating winter? Normally, she would never have given a second thought to where she bought that sweater, but now it would always connect with that day; now that sweater was the most important piece of clothing in her life. Or maybe she bought one of these sweaters the day before and wore it to the office, thinking the guy in HR would finally notice her. And she was wearing a sweater just like this one as she huddled in the smoke-choked stairwell with a bunch of strangers and stragglers, the brave and unlucky in the same narrow space when it began, the thunder of the world clapping down to nothing.

  Remy let the sweater fall and backed out of the store. He continued down the hall to the lobby of an accounting firm. He ran his hand along a dusty leather couch. A door off the lobby opened onto a small workout room: three universal gyms, a stair stepper and two exercise bikes, gray bottles of water abandoned in the cup holders. There was a TV up in the corner; Remy could imagine the accountants taking their lunches in here, eyes tracking the ticker on CNBC while secretaries moved past in tight skirts and cross trainers, clutching yoga mats…

  He stepped out into the hall, where another jagged window overlooked The Zero. On the floor in front of him a mound of paper and debris was raked into a pile. Remy reached in and pulled out a day planner, about the size of a motel Bible. He dusted it off. Engraved on the cover in gold was a name—G. ADDICH—and a phone number and address. Remy flipped through the pages. Each page recorded a single day—appointments on the top of the page, notes from the meetings on the bottom. This Addich had meetings every day—so many meetings. There had to be a thousand of them. What could a person possibly do at these meetings? The notes on the bottoms of the pages were cryptic—mostly numbers. Most of the meetings seemed to be held in restaurants or coffee shops. Maybe he was a restaurant supplier, Remy thought. He flipped through the days, approaching the end nervously.

  When he arrived at that day, he found only two meetings scheduled, one at four o’clock in the afternoon and the other one in the morning, recorded in small block letters: “R
emy: Windows—9 A.M. Early.”

  Remy shivered. He held the day planner at arm’s length, blinked, and read it again. Of course it couldn’t be him. Another Remy. He’d never heard of anyone named Addich. Of course Remy wasn’t a common name, but there were certainly others. It was just a coincidence, he thought—a strange one, but that’s what coincidences were, strange. And yet, some voice in his head was dubious: That day? My name?

  He looked back down at the planner. The word Early was underlined. How early had G. Addich arrived? Too early and he or she would have been pulverized, this planner blasted out the window, across the street and into this building. And what about the other Remy? Maybe he could check the list of the missing, see if anyone with his name had died.

  And then Remy heard raised voices. Someone yelling from the street below. At first he thought they were yelling at him, and he dropped the day planner guiltily. But then he realized the voices were coming from outside and he picked up the black book and stuffed it in his coat. He jogged back down the flotsam-lined hall toward the marble stairs, toward the yelling.

  On West Street, a handful of cops in masks and riot gear were holding off three firefighters who had come down drunk from the Heights and gotten into it with one of the construction crews. A crowd had gathered. The young firefighters were wearing jeans and T-shirts, even though it was cold outside; their roped veins strained at the skin, ready to burst. They all had facial hair—various mustaches and wispy goatees—and opaque, boozy eyes. A red-faced construction supervisor, his ventilator pulled down around his neck, stood behind the cops, pointing with a blunt finger, demanding that the smokers be arrested, but the night commanding officer had interceded and was suggesting that they just be driven home.