The Zero: A Novel

by Jess Walter

  “Thanks,” Remy said.

  Mr. Selios’s face was tracked with tears. He wiped at them like they were mosquitoes he could kill. “She always went to work early, because she was working on things in Europe and the Middle East, other time zones. She called when she knew we had left for the restaurant. I think sometimes that she wanted to talk to us, but she didn’t want us to talk to her. We weren’t allowed to ask questions about her personal life.”

  “The phone call was at six fifty-eight—?”

  “Yes,” he said, “seven, that morning…” He covered his mouth.

  Six fifty-eight in the city that morning. Forty minutes before. Just minutes after the technician said she got the call that agitated her. Minutes before she left her desk.

  March Selios’s mother, tall and pretty, with a broad face and silver-streaked black hair, came into the room with a cup of coffee. The woman Remy had heard crying in the kitchen. She’d tried to compose herself but her eyes were red and swollen. “Here you are.” She set the coffee down on the table in front of him, which was covered with photo albums, school yearbooks, and letters.

  “Thank you,” Remy said.

  He picked up the coffee, and just then the wife fell into her husband’s arms.

  They held each other, and the woman’s shoulders shuddered as she cried. Her husband cried too, but forced himself to do it silently. Remy was caught in the room because they were in the doorway and he was on the loveseat.

  “Excuse us a moment,” Mr. Selios managed to say.

  “Of course,” Remy said. “Take your time.”

  They left the room and Remy rubbed his eyes. He put the notebook back in his pocket and looked around the room. Then he picked up one of the photo albums. There was a family picture: the parents, March, a young boy and another girl, an older sister who looked like a thinner, lighter version of March, pretty and dark-haired and familiar. Had he interviewed the sister and forgotten her? Or was it just that she looked like March? He flipped through the pages and came to the older sister’s wedding pictures. March was the maid of honor; the young brother, who shared their dark hair and eyebrows, was a groomsman. He looked at the young bride again.

  March…

  Remy’s throat went dry. April?

  He stared at the picture. It could be, although he couldn’t recall her face just now, only the back of her head, the girl he had—April? April Kraft.

  He stood and looked around the room. There were pictures of the two sisters everywhere, but none of the back of her head…senior pictures in front of fanned chairs and phony grottos, candid photos of the two girls in footed pajamas at Christmas. March. April. Was that when they were born? Some new immigrant’s trick to make them sound American? And what was the brother’s name—June? Remy sat back down and rubbed his temples. Had he slept with March Selios’s sister because he’d wanted to, or because he’d wanted information? Was he genuinely interested in her, or…he didn’t want to consider the alternative. His throat felt salty and dry.

  Mr. Selios came back into the room. “You must excuse my wife. This has aged her twenty years, Mr. Remy. A horrible time for our family.”

  “Yes.” Remy pretended to concentrate on his notebook. “Your other daughter…”

  “April…this has been hardest on her, I would assume, losing both of them.”

  Remy’s head fell back against the couch.

  “Unfortunately, April and I…” Mr. Selios frowned. “We don’t really talk. We haven’t for years. She was the first to leave and I said some things…I thought this might make her realize…but she still won’t talk to me. She didn’t even come home for March’s funeral.” Mr. Selios shrugged. “Maybe it was just too much, losing March and Derek the same day.”

  “Derek…her husband?”

  “Yes,” he said. “They were separated when it happened. He worked in the same building as March. He was a contract lawyer for another firm.”

  “Derek…Kraft?”

  “That’s right.”

  “How did they meet?”

  Mr. Selios didn’t seem to find it odd that Remy had changed the subject to his other daughter. “March introduced them. Her company used Derek’s firm for some contracts and she thought he and April would hit it off, I guess.” Mr. Selios sighed. “I was furious. I believed Derek was a pushy man with women. Frankly, I did not approve when they married. He was older and too…fast. Everything was so fast with him. You have to understand, I did not want my daughters moving to the city, especially April. I was not as worried about March. Even though she was the younger, she always seemed more…solid. But I have always worried about April. I didn’t like her selling real estate. She is not a salesperson. She has the mind of a poet, too sensitive and…aware. Too trusting.”

  Remy’s teeth felt like sandpaper.

  “I wanted April to have a man with his feet on the ground, not this slick lawyer, this man who was so fast. So I refused to pay for the wedding and—” Mr. Selios cleared his throat. “April was angry and said that she had never expected me to pay for the wedding. I told her she was disgracing my family.” He covered his mouth, but composed himself. “Are you married, Mr. Remy?”

  “Divorced.”

  “Do you have daughters?”

  “A son.”…who believes I’m dead, he almost added.

  Mr. Selios nodded and looked up at the picture of his own son. “Sons are the devil’s payback, yes?”

  “Your son…”

  “Augustus. Gus.”

  “Yes,” Remy said. “Where is he now?”

  “He’s in…” He paused, as if it were too difficult to admit.

  Prison? Remy wondered. A cult?

  “Entertainment,” Mr. Selios said. “He lives in Los Angeles.”

  “Oh. I’m sorry.”

  Mr. Selios shrugged. “Yes,” he said. “But girls. Ah, girls.” The old man’s eyes reddened beneath black lashes. “I suppose I was a rash and difficult father to them, Mr. Remy. Even though March still talked to me, she would never think of telling me about her life. Both girls believed that I was…disapproving. Old fashioned. And I suppose that I was. I wanted for them…what women have wanted for centuries. That’s all. Marriage and children…I wanted for them to work in the family restaurant, to stay here in Kansas City. Where I could protect them.” His head bowed forward. “When March was eight, she used to have nightmares. Every night…a dream that she was falling. She would brace and scream and I would run to her bed and hold her and tell her it was okay. Does that sound like a bad father, Mr. Remy? Does that sound like a hard man, a disapproving man?”

  “No.”

  Mr. Selios looked up and wiped at his mouth. “I am desperate to know what happened to her that day. I watch on the TV as long as I can but I always have to turn away. I imagine her curled up beneath a desk, crying…or tumbling…like when she was little. Every time they show one of those poor people falling…” Tears rose and migrated into the stubble on his round cheeks and his voice caught. “I just want to know what happened. Maybe it would be too hard to know, but maybe there would be some…peace.” His voice shattered and he spoke with wavering force, as if pushing each word through a mask. “As it is…Mr. Remy, I can’t forgive myself for not being there.”

  “There was nothing you could have done,” Remy said gently.

  “I could have caught her,” he cried. “I would have.”

  Remy let Mr. Selios compose himself and then he stood. “Thank you for your time, sir.” He looked down at the wedding picture in the open album. As he put his coat on, he looked down at a mug shot he’d paper-clipped to his notebook: Bishir Madain. “Do you know this man?”

  Mr. Selios looked at the photo. “No. What is his name?”

  Remy shrugged. “Bishir Madain. He knew your daughter.”

  Mr. Selios stared at the picture. “I never heard of him.” He sighed. “But as I say, she did not share such details with me.”

  “Okay.” Remy started to put the picture back but M
r. Selios reached out and stopped his hand. He stared at the picture and tears pearled in his eyes again.

  Finally he let go of the picture and wiped at his eyes.

  “Can I ask one more question,” Remy said. “You said April was estranged from her husband when he—”

  “Yes,” Mr. Selios said. “For a few months, I think.”

  “Do you know what happened between them?”

  “All I know is what March told me…that Derek wasn’t right for her.”

  “Was she…was April sad?”

  “Please.” The man’s face drained of color. “He was her husband, Mr. Remy.”

  “Of course. I’m sorry.” Remy handed the cup to Mr. Selios and backed out of the room.

  THE SOUND of whiskey was what he craved sometimes. Tip a half-full bottle, like this twelve-year-old Jameson, and the bubbles made a tinny gurgle as they ran up the neck into the bigger part of the bottle. And the gurgle got deeper with each tip. He made the sound over and over and the warmth ran through his chest and into his armpits.

  It was a shitty little hotel room: two double beds across from a TV on a swivel. The HBO movies for the month were on a card on the nightstand. Someone was watching porn in a room next door, or below; he could hear thumping and synthesized music and metronomic grunting. Remy made the whiskey sound again, got a little less warmth this time, and made his way to the door. It opened outside onto the second floor of a motor hotel, horseshoed around a parking lot with trucks and motor homes and a couple of square sedans. The streaks and floaters were mild out here. It was night but there was a full moon, and Remy could see across the parking lot to a long fallow field that seemed to stretch forever.

  Still carrying the bottle he walked along the second-floor railing, down carpeted steps and into the parking lot. The freeway ran behind the motel, and this horseshoe faced away from it, into the flattened field. Remy crossed the parking lot and stood on the edge of the field. Behind him, the hotel was alone against the sky, like a ship run aground. A few trucks rumbled by on the freeway, but before him there was only the lavender sky and the burning hole made by a full moon. A bank of gray-white clouds was on the horizon, a perfect straight line at eye level, like the floor of a stage. The colors ran from black through purple to a bruised red to this gray-white line. Remy had never seen anything like it, and yet there was nothing to it. It was just a set of parallel lines: the line of the prairie and the line of the horizon and the line of the clouds, nothing but lines and the hot pit of a moon, nothing but lines and the flecks in his eyes and the sound of bubbles gurgling through the neck of a bottle.

  When he opened his eyes, a man was standing next to him in the parking lot. He was someone Remy thought he recognized, although he couldn’t be sure. The man was in his sixties, Middle Eastern, with small, round glasses and a beautiful gray wool coat. He had short gray hair and several days of whiskers on his cheeks. The whiskers and the coat were so mismatched that Remy had trouble imagining them on the same man. They stood at the edge of the field, side by side, staring at the sunset.

  “So many countries in this one country,” the man said, “nations spilling out into nations, bordered by mountain ranges and great rivers. I sometimes think that people here used to believe that when one country disappointed them, they could simply move west and find another one. But then you ran out of room.”

  Remy considered the man again. He wore jeans, dirty at the knees, and a black T-shirt, and over it, bizarrely, that beautiful wool coat. He looked so familiar. “I know you,” Remy said.

  “Do you?” The man looked full at Remy.

  “Don’t I know you?” Remy asked.

  “How could I possibly answer that? I suppose I could answer whether I know you, but it would be presumptuous of me to say who you know.”

  Remy couldn’t think of anything to say. And even that seemed familiar. “Maybe you can just tell me if I’m east or west of Kansas City.”

  The man nodded. “Yes. You are.”

  Remy took another drink and considered the man again. And then it hit him. “No. Wait. I remember. In the city. In front of Ray’s. You handed me an envelope.”

  “No,” the man said. “I did not.”

  “Yes, you did.”

  “What was in the envelope?” the man asked.

  “I…I don’t know.”

  “So you’re telling me that I handed you an envelope. But you can’t tell me what was in this envelope? This is not a very convincing story.”

  “No, I guess not.” Remy stared out at the horizon again.

  “You seem troubled.”

  “Yeah. I am.” Remy laughed. “I can’t keep track of anything anymore. I slip in and out of my own life.”

  “Sure,” the man said.

  “I find myself in these situations. I don’t know how I got there, or what I’m doing. I don’t know what’s going to happen until after it happens. I do things that I don’t understand and I wish I hadn’t done them.”

  “Maybe that’s what life is like for everyone,” the man said.

  Remy took a long swig of whiskey. “Is it?”

  “I don’t know. But what makes you think you’re so special?”

  Remy considered the man again. “And you’re sure I didn’t see you in the city?”

  “How can I possibly know what you have seen or not seen? How can I know what exists in the frames of your eyes? There are millions of people in that city. Am I to tell you that I have never been one of them? That I have never passed before your eyes? How can I possibly say what you’ve seen? No man has access to another man’s vision.”

  “I’m going crazy,” Remy said.

  The man looked at the horizon again. He tapped the bottle in Remy’s hand. “They say this makes a man crazy.”

  “Who says that?”

  “I don’t know. The wise. The sober. People who say things.”

  Remy handed the man the bottle. “I almost killed myself once.” He was surprised to hear himself confiding in the man.

  The old man took a swig. “When?”

  “Recently.” Remy touched the stubble on the side of his head.

  “How?” The man took another drink, then handed the bottle back.

  “Shot myself in the head.” After a moment, Remy laughed. “Isn’t it odd that I just told you I tried to kill myself and you asked when and how, but notwhy?”

  “Why?”

  “Well.” Remy stared at the ground, cast purple by the dye of the fading sun. “I don’t really know. At first I thought it was an accident. Or a joke. But I’m starting to think—” He looked at the man, then back down at the bottle in his hand. “—that I was afraid of what I might do if I didn’t.”

  “Yes,” the man said quietly. They watched the sunset together. Then, after a moment, the man reached in his coat and handed Remy another manila envelope. And then he walked away, across the parking lot, to a four-door sedan, which he climbed in without looking back.

  Remy knew that if he waited long enough, he wouldn’t have to open the envelope, that whatever was going to happen would happen. This thought should have been freeing. It probably didn’t even matter if he threw the envelope away. But he found himself curious and so he opened it. There was a name, Assan al-Hafar—he knew that name, too, Assan—and an address for an apartment in a building on something called Treasure Island. Remy looked up, but the man’s car was gone, and the next thought he had was—

  SLIDING, CLUTCHING, hands and toes clenched, hail streaking behind his eyelids, Remy woke in a gasp of stale air, claustrophobic, strapped in, his face pressed against a cold round window.

  He looked around. He was on a dark jet, everyone around him sleeping. He was in a window seat, alone in his row, sitting in coach toward the front of the plane. He sat up and looked around. It was a light load, but all of the passengers seemed to be asleep, curled up on tiny white pillows or holding small gray airline blankets like toddlers with stuffed animals. No one stirred. Remy had heard stories of flights
in which the ventilation system failed and everyone passed out and the plane crashed. Honestly, he wouldn’t mind; just going back to sleep. He checked his watch. 2:12. Dark outside, so 2:12 A.M. What time zone? Did it matter? Had he set his watch in Kansas City? Or was it on East Coast time?

  He frisked himself and finally found a boarding pass, folded and stuffed in his pants pocket. Miami. He was going to Miami. On the back of the boarding pass he’d written “Markham” and a cell phone number. He stared at the number for a while, then wadded the paper and stuffed it in the pocket in front of his seat.

  A pretty Korean-American flight attendant came by with a cup of coffee and sat in the aisle seat in his row. “I didn’t know if I was supposed to wake you…if you guys are supposed to sleep or not,” she whispered. “But you looked so tired, I didn’t have the heart to disturb you.”

  Remy took the coffee. He wondered: what guys?

  The flight attendant squeezed his arm.

  “Thanks,” Remy said. “You know…I don’t think I’m supposed to fly. My eyes.”

  She laughed politely, as if this had been a misfired joke. Then she stood up and walked away, bent over as if walking beneath a helicopter. When the flight attendant was gone, he patted himself and found a plastic case inside his breast pocket. He pulled it out and wasn’t entirely shocked to find a badge with his picture, and beneath it, the letters NTSA, and the words Air Marshal. He put his badge back in his jacket, leaned back in his seat and looked out the window.

  REMY HATED the ocean’s smell, and the way it burrowed, not only into your nose, but your mouth and your ears, in your whole head. It was like the smell at The Zero in that way, overpowering and everywhere. You took it home with you, and once you smelled it again, it seemed to never have left you. Remy closed his eyes and felt the lurch of the boat as they churned through a rough patch of chop, the shore a narrowing band behind them. The sun was setting back there, too, and he felt a cool blast of sea wind that told him they were chugging toward night. He had the sense of the heat pouring off his skin, as if he’d been warm all day and now was about to get cold. He was in the open-air cabin of a cruiser about thirty feet long, sitting across from Markham, who wore a ridiculous nautical windbreaker and a jaunty cap, both with a gold anchor stitched onto them. He was sniffing at the air like an old captain who’d been away from the sea for years. The only other person on this boat was the man piloting it, a thin Hispanic man, pinch-shouldered, in black jacket and jeans, the smoke from a thick cigar drifting off him like morning fog. Next to the wheel a computerized screen showed their position on a topographical map, and the pilot kept checking it, until finally he turned and gave a toothy smile. “That’s it! International waters, my friends!” he yelled. “Tres Cubanos, por favor!” He reached beneath his seat and came up with three fat cigars, two of which he offered his passengers.