The Zero: A Novel

by Jess Walter

  Markham pointed to the birthday picture again. “Her twenty-sixth birthday was six days before the attack. That’s when this photo was taken, her twenty-sixth birthday—six days before she supposedly died.”

  “Maybe someone else picked up the recipe after…I mean, the paper went everywhere, didn’t it?”

  Markham nodded as if he’d been expecting such an answer. “There is no dust on this recipe, Brian. None. We had it tested in the lab. Right after we made the fish. This sheet of paper had to be in a briefcase or in a purse. It was not blown out of the building. It was taken out beforehand.”

  Remy looked at the office picture again. She was even prettier in this one, shy and wide-eyed, and it occurred to Remy that she was in love with whoever took the picture.

  “Yeah, that’s what we think, too,” Markham said.

  Jesus. Was he still saying aloud what he was thinking? Remy looked up to see if he was speaking this thought too, but Markham didn’t seem to notice if he was. He put the two pictures side by side: March smiling in a restaurant, March smiling at her desk.

  “These pictures were taken with the same camera. Whoever took them is the key. A lover. Possibly illicit. We find the person who took these pictures, we’re halfway there,” Markham said. “I believe that if we find this camera, there’s a good chance we’ll find March Selios alive. And there’s a good chance we’ll find her with someone you might find interesting.”

  Remy felt slow, as if he were thinking in mud. “Who?”

  Markham reached in his briefcase and emerged with another picture, of March sitting outside at a little table on a rooftop with a handsome young Middle Eastern man, his hair and beard both at stubble length, his deep-set eyes seeming to peer through the camera.

  “This was taken on the roof of March’s apartment building. March cooked the meal and a neighbor served them and took this picture. The man is Bishir Madain,” Markham said. “Saudi ex-pat. In the United States for twelve years. Worked for an importing consortium. Romantically linked with Ms. Selios until about eighteen months ago. Mr. Madain hasn’t been seen since the morning of the attacks. We have recovered documentation—telexes, e-mails, rustic catalog order forms—that could indicate that Mr. Madain is part of a sleeper cell here. We believe he may even have had advance knowledge of the attacks that morning, and that he may have decided to alert his old girlfriend.”

  “But I still don’t see how—”

  Markham slid a two-page interview report across the table. On top was stamped the word Classified and the initials D.D. “That morning, at 7:12 A.M., soon after arriving, Ms. Selios called in a repair order for the laser printer on her floor. At 7:48, the technician arrived, as you’ll see by his interview. The technician had always found Ms. Selios to be—” Markham looked at his notes. “—smoking hot. That morning, he flirted with Ms. Selios, who was, he claims, not entirely unaware of his intentions or unimpressed by his mac-daddy game. Dude was workin’ it, when March suddenly received a telephone call. She appeared agitated by the call. The technician was removing a jammed sheet of paper from the laser printer when he looked up and saw March Selios walking toward the elevators, crying. The technician himself left a few minutes later, arriving on the main floor, and was, as far as we know, the last person to get off that floor before…” Markham mouthed the word boom, and shrugged, as if that explained it.

  Remy was surprised to hear himself asking questions. “Did anyone see her leaving the building? Or afterward? Is there any other evidence that she’s alive?”

  Markham looked pleased. “These questions are why we brought you in.”

  Remy looked down at the interview transcript. “I don’t know. I mean—couldn’t that call have been anything?” he said. “An argument with a boyfriend? Maybe she wasn’t going to the elevator. Maybe she went to the bathroom. What have you got here—a horny repairman and a recipe. And that’s supposed to prove she got advance warning?”

  Markham pointed at the close-up of March Selios’s cubicle. “Imagine the walls of a young woman’s cubicle. Covered in pictures and recipes, Cathy cartoons, and Buddhist koans. Now, let’s say she has a fight with her boyfriend, as you say, and she runs off to the bathroom. Would she really stop to strip the walls of her cubicle on her way out? Would she grab recipes and pictures? Why would it occur to her that she was not coming back?”

  Markham held out his palms again, then began collecting his papers. He glanced up at Remy. “Any questions before you get started?”

  Remy didn’t know where to start. “This all seems so…sketchy. Maybe it’s just me, but…” He rubbed his eyes, trying for the millionth time to clear the streaks. “I’m having a lot of trouble…connecting things.”

  Markham stared at him for a long moment and then nodded and looked like he might cry. “I know. It’s hard. I forget sometimes that you guys went through hell that day. I can’t know what that was like. None of us can. This is tough. And it never gets easier. But that’s precisely why we wanted you.” Markham reached back into his briefcase for the index card in the baggie. “Read the last line of this ‘recipe.’”

  Remy read it: Garnish with two twisted orange slices.

  Now Markham handed him another detail blowup, this one from the photo of March and Bishir Madain at dinner on her roof. On the platter between them he could clearly see what looked like a piece of fish garnished with two twisted orange slices. Then Markham cocked his eyebrows, as if he’d made another ironclad case, and took the picture back. “Look, this is going to be tough. I’m not going to kid you. But we’ve got to find March Selios. And if it turns out she is, in fact…dead…well, then everything is copacetic. Not for her, obviously…” He laughed uncomfortably. “But for the record. That’s our federally mandated charge, after all—to have a pure record. All the columns adding up. But if, in fact, she’s alive—well, then, we’ve got a problem. In fact, we’ve got a big problem.” And he closed the briefcase.

  “A FORMALITY,” said a woman in her fifties, tall and professional, staring over the rims of stylish glasses up at Remy. She sat at a wide desk, next to a rooster-haired man roughing up his nose with a wet handkerchief.

  “There are no right answers,” the man said. “Relax.”

  The woman asked, “Chronic back pain?”

  “What?” Remy asked.

  “Just to get the paperwork flowing,” the tall woman said. “A formality. We just have to check a box.”

  The man asked, “Chronic back pain?”

  Remy looked around the room. There was a poster on the wall behind him showing a cartoon man with a push broom through his head like an arrow and the caption: Industrial Accidents Are Nothing To Laugh At. Remy leaned forward. “My back is fine,” he said. “I mean, if I need anything, I guess it’s some kind of counselor. See, I’m having some trouble…focusing. There are these gaps. I lose track of things.”

  They stared at him.

  “And my eyes…my eyes are flaking apart. Macular degeneration and vitreous detachment. I see flashers and floaters.”

  A few seconds passed. Remy laughed nervously. “My son’s been telling everyone that I’m dead.”

  They stared.

  “And I…I drink a lot. Most days, I think. And…uh…” He rubbed his eyes. “I shot myself in the head. But I think that was an accident. Or…maybe a joke.”

  They stared.

  “But…you know…I’m fine.”

  They stared.

  “Well…except for the gaps, obviously.”

  After a moment, the man chewed his pen and looked down at the file, running his finger down a list of some kind. “Chronic back pain,” he said.

  “I WATCH a fair amount of television, Mr. Remy,” said the nervous woman with a silver skunk streak in her black hair. She glanced over at a set in the corner of her small apartment. Remy looked from the woman to her TV. On the screen, a man in coveralls was holding a piece of wood against a lathe. The sound was turned down. The skunk woman continued: “I haven’t turned
off my TV since it happened. I was glued to the news coverage for the first few days. I even turned the TV so I could see it from the bathroom. I ordered out every meal and just went from channel to channel, watching it from different angles, listening to the newscasters and the public officials. Then, just like that, a few days ago I saw the first thing on TV that wasn’t news coverage. It was four in the morning.” The woman took a drag from her cigarette. “It was an infomercial. For a psychic. You know, that Jamaican woman with dreadlocks who tells people what’s in their future? Everyone’s either going to find a new job or fall in love, right? No one’s going to get cancer or fall down a well shaft. No one’s going to have a day just like the day before, lonely and sad, watching TV and ordering takeout. No one’s going to be burned to death on the eightieth floor of a building. It’s all new jobs and hunky new boyfriends. I suppose there was part of me that still hadn’t given up on March coming back—but I’m watching this psychic and she’s saying she’ll read your future for fifty bucks and they’re showing these people reconciling with their mothers or falling in love or getting promotions at work and it just hit me that I was never going to see March again. And I just lost it. I yelled at this TV psychic: Okay motherfucker! Where the hell were you?”

  Remy shifted. He looked down at his palm-sized notebook. Written on the page in his handwriting was a series of fragmentary notes: the name Ann Rogers, an address on the Upper East Side, the words neighbor and family money. Remy looked around the apartment, a simple postwar studio. She was stick-thin, with long, black hair and that perfect gray stripe. She was wearing baggy pajamas. She had two cigarettes going, one pinched between her long, manicured fingers, another smoldering in the ashtray.

  Below Ann Rogers and neighbor was a short list of abbreviated questions, also in Remy’s handwriting. He looked at the first one: That morning? “That morning,” he said.

  “That morning?” Ann Rogers took a deep breath and sighed. “That morning, March and I went off to work. Like any other day. We walked to the subway station together. It was…six-thirty. We got a bagel at the World Coffee place on Lex. She had a cappuccino. I don’t drink caffeine, myself.” Ann Rogers set one cigarette down and picked up the other one.

  Remy stared at the notebook before him. Should he be writing any of this down? That Ann Rogers doesn’t like caffeine? That she has a streak in her hair? He had the sense that any detail would become important if he wrote it down, that its importance would be determined by the record he kept.

  “March and I hit it off right away, right after she moved into the building…oh…I don’t know, almost a year ago.” Ann Rogers ran her hand over her hair. “We’d meet in the hallway every day on our way to work. Sometimes we shared a cab. Or we’d walk to the subway together. We both rode downtown, although she went twice as far as me. It was amazing, really. We never said, Hey, let’s meet at this time or let’s meet at that time. It just happened. I’d step outside my apartment to get something to eat and March would be there, and she’d be going out to eat at the exact same time. It was amazing, if you think about it.”

  Remy thought about it. “I guess so.”

  Ann Rogers shrugged. “Anyway, that particular day, we caught our train, sat next to each other. We talked about the weather, our weekends, and then we got to the Union Square station and I got off. And that was it. I imagine she kept going downtown.”

  The second question read: Unusual?

  “Anything,” Remy said, “unusual about that day?”

  “Hmm. Let me see. Oh, you know what. There was this one thing. About three thousand people died. Yeah. Including my best friend. And I haven’t been able to leave my fucking apartment or turn off my fucking TV since then. But otherwise, no, I’d say it was just like every other peachy fucking day.”

  “No, I’m sorry, I…” Remy looked down. “I guess what I mean is…that morning. There was nothing unusual about that morning? Before? She didn’t say anything before…”

  “Oh, sorry. Hmm. Let me think. Oh yeah, now that you mention it, she did say that she had a bad feeling she was going to burn to death in an inferno.”

  Remy shifted in his chair. “Look, I didn’t mean to upset you, Ms. Rogers.”

  Ann Rogers stared at him. Flat.

  Remy looked back at his notes. Question three: Seeing anyone? He took a breath. “Do you know if she was seeing anyone?”

  “Seeing?”

  “Romantically.”

  “Who did she fuck? Is that what you’re asking me, Mr. Remy? Who did March fuck? Is that what you’re asking?”

  “Look, Ms. Rogers, I—”

  “You want to know who banged my neighbor?”

  “I guess…”

  “Then why don’t you just ask that, you fucking pervert?”

  “I did.”

  “No, you didn’t. You asked if she was seeing someone. I’m seeing you right now, but you’re not fucking me. Or are you? Are you fucking me, Mr. Remy? Is this as good as it gets with you?”

  “Look, I…”

  “Do you want me to tell you who she saw or who she fucked?”

  “The latter, I guess.”

  “The latter? What’s the matter with you? Say it. Say it, you piece of shit. Say, Excuse me Ms. Rogers, but who did your neighbor fuck?”

  “Who did your neighbor fuck?”

  “Oh my God! None of your business, you fucking pervert.”

  Remy felt dizzy. “Look, I don’t know how this has gotten so—”

  “What makes you think I would even know that? We were neighbors. I can tell you she didn’t fuck me. Does that help? You want a full list of all the people who haven’t fucked me? Is that what you want? Because I’ll get some paper and get started.”

  Remy cleared his throat. “Look, we got off on the wrong foot or something. There’s no reason—”

  “No reason to what? No reason to be upset? What…are you asleep? Are you out of your fucking mind? Have you seen what’s happening out there?”

  Remy tried to soldier on. He looked at the next question: That night. “That night…did you hear or see anything…anyone in her apartment?”

  “Fuck fuck fuck! Screw hump dick lay! Fuck fuck fuck! There. Are you happy, Mr. Remy? Does that turn you on, you freak?”

  Next question: Bishir.

  “Did you know a man named Bishir Madain?”

  She waved him off like an insect. “Fuck fuck fuck! She didn’t come home! Fuck fuck fuck! Are you happy, pervert? Fuck fuck fuck!”

  Remy closed his notebook. “Maybe we’ll try this some other time, Ms. Rogers.”

  She stared at him for a few seconds, and then turned back to the TV. She reached for her remote control and the sound came up, the guy in coveralls: “…abrasive substances will work, although traditional sandpaper is still…”

  Remy started for the door, but paused. “Why did she live all the way up here?”

  Ann Rogers jerked her thumb across the remote control, barely able to contain her disgust. “What do you want from me? Are you trying to get me to confess or something?”

  “No,” Remy said, “I was just wondering…” What was he wondering? “March worked in the financial district—”

  “Yes. You know she did. That’s why she died, you fuckhead pervert scumbag.”

  Remy ignored her. “And she lived all the way up here? In this building? On a paralegal’s salary? That doesn’t make any sense. She could have found the same space over the river for a third the price. Where’d she get the money for this?”

  Ann Rogers seemed calm, suddenly. Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t think I like what you’re implying,” she said.

  Remy held his hands out. “What am I implying?”

  “Aren’t you implying something?”

  “Honestly,” Remy said, “I have no idea.”

  Ann Rogers reached for the remote control, cocked her arm and threw it at—

  THE GUY standing in the doorway was in his late thirties, the fat settling between knees and s
houlders, a week’s growth coming in gray. Expensive haircut. He wore black slacks and a black T-shirt. He was barefoot. “Yes?”

  Remy removed his hand from the doorbell and looked around. It was a nice house, two stories, blue-gray, with a square patch of new sod in front and a kid’s bike leaning against the Lexus in the driveway. He looked down the block. Every house was the same, as far as he could see, like dominoes, each one with an American flag tipped from the porch.

  “Can I help you?” asked the guy.

  “…I don’t know.” Remy’s badge was in the hand he’d used to ring the bell, so he showed it to the man, hoping one of them would know how to proceed. “Um, I’m sorry, but…do you…where am I?”

  The guy just stared. “Englewood Cliffs.”

  “Oh. Right.”

  “What can I do for you?”

  Remy looked down. In his other hand was the planner he’d found at The Zero. G. Addich’s day planner. Ah. “What’s your name?”

  The guy pulled back just a bit. “Tony Addich. Why?”

  “Oh. I found this.” Remy held out the thick black book. “I’m glad you’re all right. I didn’t know if you—”

  Addich stared at the planner as if it were a ghost.

  “It looked like there were a lot of meetings in there,” Remy said.

  The man didn’t say anything.

  Remy tried to appear nonchalant, as if they were sharing a laugh waiting for the subway. “It’s funny. When I found this, I thought to myself…what did we do at all those meetings? I used to have a lot of meetings, and now…I have no idea what we talked about.” He tried to laugh this off, just two guys talking about how important things can suddenly become trivial, but the whole thing came out shallow and raw.

  The man just stared at the planner. “That’s my father’s,” he said. “Gerald Addich. How did you get it?”

  “Oh, Jesus,” said Remy. “Is your father—”