#Zero

by Neil McCormick

  Freeman almost made sense. ‘So what have they got you in here for?’ I asked.

  ‘Vagrancy and drunkenness,’ said Freeman. ‘It don’t matter. I can get out any time I like.’

  ‘How do you do that?’ I said. ‘Just concentrate and make the walls disappear?’

  ‘Don’t be foolish, boy. I call my lawyer.’

  ‘Well, call him for me, will you, Freeman,’ I said. ‘I could use a good lawyer.’

  ‘How d’you know my name?’ snarled Freeman.

  ‘I just overheard—’ I tried to explain.

  ‘Are you a spy?’ he demanded. ‘You working for Sheriff Thugman and President Mugman? Trying to get me to tell you my secrets? I will not wear the Devil’s suit, I will not drink the Devil’s soup, neither do I wear the Devil’s boots, I will have nothing to do with the Devil youth. Damn you to the seven pits of hell, I send you to the Phantom Zone for seven years of seven evils, seven times seven is seventy-seven, you shall shake in an earthquake like you never shake before. You are just a figment of my imagination. Fuck you. Fuck you.’ He was shrieking now, rattling something against the bars of his cage. I shrank back to the rear wall. ‘I’m on to you, Sheriff Thugman!’ screamed Freeman. ‘Get your stooge monkey boy out of here. I know you’re watching. You got cameras in the ceiling. You can’t fool the all-seeing eye …’

  It appeared he was right about the cameras, because Seymour came running down the stairs. ‘Calm down now, Freeman, step back from the bars,’ the pimply deputy ordered, while Freeman wailed and clattered. ‘You go acting all crazy, the sheriff’s gonna stop letting me bring you in here. You get sectioned, you’ll go back to the county home. You don’t want that, do you? Just back off, now, sit back down on the bed, that’s right …’

  ‘I am not talking to you,’ said Freeman, albeit in a much calmer voice.

  ‘Well, why not?’ asked Seymour. Stupid question. I could have told him the answer to that.

  ‘Because you don’t exist,’ said Freeman.

  Rita had followed Seymour down to the basement. She hovered shyly in front of my cell, a mobile phone in one hand. ‘Can I take your picture, Zero?’ she asked. ‘Do you mind? I am such a fan.’

  ‘I don’t think that’s a good idea, Rita,’ said Seymour.

  ‘I ain’t interested in what you think, Seymour,’ said Rita.

  ‘You don’t exist,’ Freeman reminded him.

  ‘Sure,’ I said, peeling away from the wall. ‘Take my picture. Do you want to be in it with me?’

  ‘That would be real nice,’ blushed Rita. ‘I can’t open the cell though.’

  ‘Just lean up against the bars,’ I suggested.

  ‘I do not think that this is a good idea,’ repeated Seymour, firmly.

  ‘Don’t be silly, Seymour,’ sniffed Rita, handing him the phone. ‘Here, take our picture.’

  ‘The sheriff might …’ Seymour half protested.

  Rita leaned against the bars on her side, and I leaned against them on mine, and our faces almost came together. ‘What the sheriff don’t know ain’t gonna hurt him,’ said Rita. ‘All he’s interested in is the reward. You think he’s gonna share that with us?’ Seymour pressed the button. A flash went off.

  ‘No pictures!’ yelled Freeman.

  ‘Oh, I wasn’t ready, Seymour!’ complained Rita. ‘Take another one.’

  I put a hand through the bars, and wrapped it around Rita’s large waist.

  ‘Say cheese,’ said Seymour. The flash went off again.

  ‘No pictures!’ yelled Freeman.

  ‘Do you want to get a picture, Seymour?’ I asked.

  ‘Ah, I better not,’ he answered, reluctantly. ‘It’s upsetting the other prisoner.’

  ‘C’mon, Freeman won’t mind one more. It’s all an illusion anyway,’ I insisted. So Seymour posed at the bars and Rita took a photo. Then we got one of all three of us, with Seymour holding the cameraphone at arm’s length. Freeman called, ‘No pictures!’ every time the flash went off but with decreasing conviction. ‘Can I see them?’ I requested, when the photo session concluded. Rita handed me the mobile, and I turned it over in my palm. ‘Nice phone,’ I observed. ‘And you get a signal down here?’

  ‘I get a signal anywhere with that phone. Right in the middle of the desert sometimes. Up a mountain, even.’

  ‘Do you mind if I make a call?’ I asked as sweetly as I could.

  Seymour protested half-heartedly but Rita said it couldn’t do any harm, the sheriff had already been in touch with my manager. Beasley was on his way from New York with the reward and the media had been alerted and would be swooping in from Dallas and Austin and all points of the compass at any time. It was only fair to let me call my lawyer.

  Except, as I sat down on the bed in the cell, I realised I didn’t have a lawyer to call. I didn’t know anybody’s number. I always had other people to do my calling for me. I racked my brain but all I could shake loose were the digits of two phone numbers. One was our old home phone from Kilrock but my brother Paddy lived in his hotel now and I’d bought my old man a new house I’d never even set foot in. The other number locked in my head was even less use. It was also from Kilrock, in the days before everything turned to gold and shit. Almost robotically, I stabbed it out, punching in the Irish code.

  ‘Is that an international call?’ fluttered Rita, sounding mildly alarmed.

  ‘I’ll pay you back,’ I said.

  ‘He’s only got four dollars,’ sniggered Seymour.

  I could hear tones ringing far across the Atlantic. Ringing and ringing, back into my past.

  ‘Hello?’ said a voice I recognised straight away.

  ‘Mrs Haley,’ I said.

  ‘Who’s that?’

  ‘Pedro.’

  ‘Oh my word,’ said Eileen’s mother. ‘Pedro! Where are you, child? Are you back? Everyone has been so worried about you. Your poor father …’

  ‘Have you seen him, Mrs Haley?’

  ‘Well, we don’t … we’re not really … we don’t exactly frequent the same establishments,’ she said. What she meant was that she went to church and he went to the pub. ‘But I saw him on the Late Late Show, and he was telling yer man how worried he was about you. He looked very upset.’

  I found it hard to imagine my father worrying about me. I was used to upsetting him, for sure, usually resulting in strings of invective and a clip round the ear. But he never seemed to worry about me when I was there, so why should he care if I went missing? ‘Listen, Mrs Haley, I’m sorry for calling you. It was the only number I could remember. Look, could you find my father, and tell him I’m all right, and I’ll be in touch soon. Could you do that for me?’

  ‘Of course I can, child,’ said Mrs Haley.

  ‘Tell him I want to see him. Tell him … tell him …’ But I couldn’t tell him I loved him. Those were words never spoken between us.

  ‘Are you all right, Pedro?’

  ‘I’ve been better,’ I said, tears welling. ‘How’s Eileen?’

  ‘Well, I can’t … you know, she doesn’t live with us any more. She moved … to Dublin.’

  ‘I think about her a lot. I’d like to see her sometime.’

  ‘I’m not sure that would be a good idea, Pedro,’ she sounded sympathetic but defensive. Who could blame her? I had broken her daughter’s heart. ‘Things are different now. Her life has changed, she has other … I just don’t think it would be a good idea.’

  She has other what, I wondered, with a stab of jealousy. Other people in her life? Another man? She could be married, for all I knew, fat and happy with the children she had always wanted. Maybe she was a nun, having renounced men altogether. I preferred that idea. ‘I just want to tell her—’

  ‘What in damnation is going on here?’ yelled the sheriff.

  ‘What was that, Pedro? I didn’t catch that. It’s not a very good reception. Where are you calling from?’

  ‘Jail,’ I said.

  ‘Oh my word,’ said Mrs Haley.


  The cell door banged noisily open.

  ‘I wanted to tell her …’

  The sheriff snatched the phone from my hand.

  ‘… I’m sorry,’ I said.

  ‘Hello?’ I heard Mrs Haley call out. Then the sheriff cut the call off.

  ‘Jesus Christ Almighty!’ bellowed the sheriff. ‘I leave you alone with the prisoner for ten minutes and he’s making fucking phone calls from his cell!’ Flustered and angry, he demanded to know who I had called. Only when he was satisfied that the mysterious Mrs Haley was not a member of the legal profession did he settle down. ‘Listen, kid, you’ll be out of here this afternoon,’ he said. ‘Your manager is on his way. He was very relieved to hear from me, I can tell you, very appreciative. He’s been worried about you. I mean, Jesus, you’ve had the whole country on a fucking wild goose chase. What were you thinking? You can’t just go running off like that!’

  ‘Why not?’ I said.

  He didn’t answer, just backed out, locking the cell door.

  ‘Am I under arrest?’ I asked.

  ‘Let’s just say your legal status is unresolved pending investigation by my department.’

  ‘Bullshit!’ growled Freeman.

  ‘That’s enough outta you, Tally!’ snapped the sheriff. ‘Any more backchat and I’m gonna call a doctor in here and get you hospitalised.’

  ‘Tell it to my lawyer,’ growled Freeman.

  ‘I don’t see no lawyer here,’ retorted the sheriff. ‘Where is he, Freeman?’

  ‘You gonna deny me my civil rights, Sheriff Salt?’ demanded Freeman.

  ‘How can I deny you something that don’t exist?’ teased the sheriff. ‘It’s all in the mind, Freeman, ain’t that what you tell everyone? All in the mind.’

  ‘Well, I want to call a lawyer,’ I blurted out.

  ‘You had your call, kid,’ smirked the sheriff. ‘I’m sure your girlfriend’s ma will get back to you when she’s taken her bar exams.’ And with that, we were left alone in our cells again.

  ‘So, is that fucker your illusion, or mine?’ I mused aloud.

  ‘We co-create reality, good and bad, black and white, yin and yang,’ said Freeman, apparently judging my question worthy of serious consideration. ‘Opposites co-create each other. Who is Superman without Lex Luthor? See? It is – good and evil turned around, each one is part of the other – that is creation. Where there is no opposing energy there can be no creation. Your enemy is your ally. It’s the mystery of karma.’

  Beasley was on his way and I didn’t have the strength or patience to follow Freeman’s mystic convolutions. Life was complicated enough without tying it up in karmic knots. I mean, if there was one thing that sounded worse than dying permanently, it was surely coming back to repeat the same mistakes. ‘Whatever you say, Freeman,’ I sighed. ‘Either way, he’s a fucking Nazi prick.’

  ‘You can see!’ Freeman laughed. ‘Good brain, perfect brain to make perfect rain, perfect lightning and perfect thunder, perfect hailstone, perfect bloodstone and perfect fire and perfect prayer. To be sane is to be insane.’

  ‘Jesus, Freeman, you are doing my head in.’

  ‘I apologise. Do you wish for me to contact my lawyer?’

  ‘How are you gonna do that, Freeman?’ I asked.

  ‘There is always a way. I’ve been here before.’

  I wasn’t sure what kind of lawyer would have this lunatic for a client but I didn’t exactly have too many other options. ‘Sure, Freeman, I’d appreciate it. Tell him you’ve got a guy called Zero in the cell next to you. He’ll probably think you’re crazy.’

  ‘Oh, he thinks I’m crazy anyway,’ said Freeman.

  I laid back on the rancid bunk and studied the graffiti. Blow jobs were promised, or threatened. Jesus loved me so much it hurt, apparently. Some jailhouse philosopher proposed that death was not the end, to which a later inhabitant of the cell had appended the thought that it was just the beginning of something worse. And there was a phone number, underneath which was scrawled Homer Pax could spring Judas from hell. Which was an impressive endorsement, only slightly undermined by the amendment yeah but he told Jesus to plea bargain and see where that got him. Still, some last vestige of preposterous hope fluttered when I heard a muffled conversation from the cell next door: ‘Homer? You hearing me? It’s Freeman, damn right. They got me locked up again… I been here all night, goddammit, but, you know, it’s somewhere to sleep and they gimme breakfast… I’m talking to you now, ain’t I? Sheriff Salt refused me my civil rights, point blank, said they was a figment of my imagination … I have my ways and means, you know … You hear of a dude called Nothing?’

  ‘Zero!’ I shouted.

  ‘Zero, sorry, Zero the hero, the man without fear-o, Zero, Nothing, Naught …’

  ‘Just tell him Zero is in the cell next door and he needs a lawyer!’ I yelled.

  ‘They dragged this dude Zero in here, got locked up against his will, and he’s in bad need of yo’ help!’ said Freeman. ‘I’m figuring I could use a little bit of assistance at this point myself. What d’you say, Homer?’

  A long period of silence followed, broken only by occasional grunts from my jail mate.

  ‘So what’s he say?’ I pleaded with a needy desperation that surprised me.

  ‘He’s on his way,’ announced Freeman.

  ‘You serious?’

  ‘I am always serious!’ said Freeman.

  ‘You’re a fucking godsend, Freeman,’ I gushed. If the lawyer could get here before Beasley, maybe there was hope, just a glimmer of a chance that I could keep on running. That’s all I wanted. The chance to run.

  ‘There is no God,’ Freeman berated me. ‘How many times I gotta repeat myself? Jehovah, Allah, Muhammad, Buddha, The Prophet, Tarzan, Superman, Spiderman, whatever you wanna call him, they’s all just manifestations of the consciousness. Ain’t you been paying attention?’

  ‘I’m sorry,’ I said, still excited. ‘How the fuck did you get hold of your lawyer? Have you got a mobile stashed in there?’

  ‘Don’t be a fool,’ said Freeman. ‘You are better than that.’

  ‘Then how?’

  ‘Telepathy,’ said Freeman. ‘Consciousness connects everyone. You gotta learn to ride the interstellar radio …’

  My mind tuned out somewhere around there. They were coming for me now. Beasley would be on a private plane, thinking private thoughts, looking down on terra firma like lord of all he surveyed, flexing and unflexing his fingers, considering his moves. Flavia Sharpe would be there with her minions, sipping an in-flight drink, tapping on her phone, spinning angles in her mind. Helicopters would be racing ahead from Dallas and Austin, packed with camera crews and news reporters, dashing to be first to the scene. How close were they now? Local stringers would be in cars on the highway, pedal to the metal, punching in satnav coordinates for a small town in Texas. The knot was tightening. The word was on the wire, flashing at warp speed down cables buried beneath the Atlantic and Pacific, bouncing off satellites, instantly relaying my exact coordinates to anyone on the planet with access to a television, radio, phone or computer. I was probably the only interested party who couldn’t tell you exactly where the fuck I was, and that was fine by me. I did not want any of it any more. I just wanted to be left alone. I wanted to be forgotten. I wanted to be un-famous.

  Voices echoed through the basement, sounding like a party of people descending to the cells. Freeman yelled, ‘I do not cast pearls before swine because swine do not know what pearls are!’ This was it, I thought. Showtime. But still I couldn’t stir.

  ‘Release my clients immediately or I am gonna bury your sorry ass under so many lawsuits you’re gonna be running your campaign for re-election from the bankruptcy courts,’ a voice rang out.

  ‘Homer!’ yelled Freeman. ‘I knew you wouldn’t let us down!’

  17

  Things turned around so fast, I thought they were going to present me with the keys to the jailhouse and lock up Sheriff Salt instead. Homer Pax was
a lumpy, shapeless man in a cream suit, hands fluttering theatrically as he verbally bombarded the cowering sheriff in a high, camp voice, accusing him of state-sponsored kidnapping, police brutality and all manner of corruption, mismanagement and dereliction of duty for personal gain, citing chapter and verse of legal precedent in a bamboozling monologue, while Freeman banged the bars and howled with delight.

  Still the sheriff clung forlornly to the keys. ‘Don’t you think we should await the arrival of the boy’s manager? We can all sit down together in my office and sort this out in a civilised fashion, Homer, what do you say? This young man’s disappearance has been a cause of great concern to many people—’

  ‘People don’t disappear,’ countered Homer. ‘Clearly my client is not invisible.’

  ‘He went missing!’

  ‘He may have been missed, Sheriff, but as long as he knew where he was, then he was not missing. A consenting adult going for a walk without telling anyone where he’s going does not, as yet, constitute an offence in any state in this free country …’

  Salt sulked in his office while Freeman Tally and I signed for our belongings. Shoelaces, a belt, a watch and four dollars were all I had in the world but Freeman was another matter. Standing six foot four in red moonboots, grey beard separating into wiry horns, he solemnly dressed himself in the regalia of a thrift-store witch doctor, his tattered coat held together with so many safety pins, badges, CDs and old coins, he looked like an advertising hoarding for the madhouse. In a final flourish, he placed a pair of novelty store X-ray glasses on the bridge of his nose with the exultation: ‘Now I can see! What once was inside is now out. Freeman is a free man! Tally ho!’

  It was all too much for Reverend Salt. ‘You gonna let a pansy lawyer and this mad old coot walk our meal ticket right out of here, boy?’ he snapped.

  ‘I would strongly suggest you refrain from casting aspersions against my clients,’ murmured Homer.

  ‘There’s a million-dollar reward!’ yelled the Reverend.

  ‘Shut up, Pa,’ snarled the sheriff.