The Zero: A Novel

by Jess Walter

  A few seconds later, the door to his stall flew open.

  “Hey! Do you mind?” Remy looked up and saw one of the men from the gypsy cab, a heavy guy with a crooked mustache, teardrop sunglasses, and a baseball cap that bore a single word in block letters: BUFF.

  “Have you had time to consider our offer?” the man said.

  “I just sat down,” Remy said.

  “We’re not going to interfere in your work, if that’s your concern,” the man said. “All we’re asking is that you show us a little…professional courtesy. Keep us in the loop. And, in return, the Bureau keeps you informed about what we find. Cooperation. That’s the key, am I right?”

  Remy felt strangely compliant, hunched over in a stall with his pants at his ankles, and this thick man blocking the door to the stall. “Yes,” he said. “Sure.”

  “Outstanding,” said the man in the BUFF hat. “See? We’re cooperating. Easy as that.” He put two fingers to his temple and then tipped the fingers toward Remy. “I’ll be in touch.”

  The man was gone before Remy managed to say, “That’s not necessary.”

  Remy finished his business and came out of the stall gingerly, looked around, washed his hands, had to dry them on his pants because there were no towels, and returned to the restaurant edgily, looking around for the man from the gypsy cab. He didn’t see anyone. When he got back to the table, Paul was chewing his hash. He pointed his fork at Remy, as if he’d been waiting to finish his sentence.

  “Look, Paul,” Remy said, “I’m not sure we should be talking about this stuff.”

  But Guterak couldn’t stop. “We don’t do many tours anymore. Too many people. They’re building a goddamn observation platform. Like it’s the Grand Fuggin’ Canyon. They got these apartments overlooking The Zero donated for the rescue workers, and the bosses are using ’em for parties, to bang their girlfriends and hand out drinks to celebrities. Billionaires and soap actresses. The whole thing looks different now. Every day, they take shit away and it just never comes back. Take it to Fresh Kills and squeeze it like orange juice until all the paper and blood comes out and then they go back for another truckload.” He spoke in a low groan. “They’re gonna take it all away, Bri. All of it. The paper gets filed, bits of flesh buried, and you know who gets the steel? The mob. Goddamn bosses give all the steel to the mob. Everyone gets a piece a this thing.”

  “Listen to me, Paul. You shouldn’t talk like this. Okay?” Remy scanned the restaurant for the man from the gypsy cab. “You have to be careful. You need to be quiet.”

  “Yeah,” Paul said, “that’s what this agent of mine says. He says every time I open my fuggin’ mouth I give away what we could be getting paid for. You only got one story, he says, you have to protect it. So I promised him I’d shut up.” Paul shook his head. “But sometimes I think it’s crazy we don’t talk about this shit. Sometimes I think it’s crazy that we aren’t standing up and yelling about it.”

  “Paul—” Remy began.

  “I just wanna tell ’em, ‘Leave it!’ You know? Leave the shit. Everything. The piles and mounds. What’s the fuggin’ rush? Let me and the smokers spend the rest of our lives going through it one piece at a time if we want.”

  The waitress filled their coffees.

  “Maybe you should see someone,” Remy said quietly. “A therapist.”

  “A what?”

  “A therapist. A psychiatrist. I think I might be seeing one.”

  Paul shrugged. “They got counselors and priests down there all the time, always trying to strike up conversations, staring at me like I’m a fuggin’ mental. One day I’m pissing and this guy with a ponytail comes up to me and asks me how I’m doing. I say, ‘My stream’s all right, but it looks like I could use a little more water in my diet.’

  “And this humorless fugger says, ‘No, how are you doing, friend?’ So I turn to him and say, ‘You really wanna know how I’m doing, friend?’ and he thinks he’s got a live one and he perks up. ‘Yes,’ he says. I say, ‘Not so fuggin’ good, you really wanna know.’

  “This jerkoff says: ‘Well, don’t worry. It’s gonna get better.’ That’s it. It’s gonna get better. That’s my fuggin’ counseling. Right? So you know what I said? I said, ‘Fugg you. I don’t want it to get better.’”

  They ate in silence. Remy watched the door but he didn’t see the guy from the gypsy cab. “What happened with Stacy?” he asked.

  “Come on, Brian.”

  “Indulge me,” Remy said.

  “Indulge you.” Paul drank his coffee, then shrugged and stared at his fork. “Well…pretty much the same thing. She said maybe it would get better and I said, ‘Fugg you, Stacy. I don’t want it to get better.’” He took a bite of his hash, and stared out the window into the parking lot as he chewed. Remy looked outside, too. The silver gypsy cab tooled past once more, the two men staring straight ahead at—

  THE DESK in front of him was smooth, whorls of blond wood like a satellite image of oak storms. He ran his fingers along its mostly empty surface, over a monthly planner with nothing on it, to a nameplate that was turned away from him. He spun it around. The nameplate read REMY. Next to his name was a phone, with buttons for five lines, none of them marked. He picked up the receiver, listened to the buzz of the office dial tone, and set it back. There was a computer, turned off. Remy pushed the button beneath the screen, but nothing happened. He looked around his windowless office. It seemed to be brand new: very little on the walls. It was a good-sized room, with dark-wood walls, two chairs on the other side of the desk, and a lawyer’s glass-fronted bookcase. Remy walked over and crouched to look at the books in the case, hoping they would provide some clue about what he did in this office. But the only thing in the case was a World Book Encyclopedia set from 1974 and two rows of faded old Reader’s Digest condensed books that looked like they’d been picked up at a yard sale. There was also a photo on the wall, of him at The Zero in the days after—The Boss on one side, The President on the other. Remy stared at the picture. He didn’t remember meeting The President. There was nothing else in the office—no file cabinets, no photos of April or Edgar. He went back to the desk and began opening drawers. In the top drawer was a stack of blank paper with the word SECURE written across the top in a bold font. He tried the big bottom drawer next, but it was locked. The middle drawer was empty, except for a manila envelope with REMY written on it in black block letters.

  Remy hefted the slender envelope, turned it over, set it on the desk, and stared at it. Was he supposed to open it? Was it some kind of report on him, not for him? Was it a test?

  Remy took the report, walked to his office door, and opened it, looking for someone to ask about the report. He stuck his head out and looked both ways, down a wainscoted corridor that stretched about forty feet in either direction. A half-dozen closed office doors lined the corridor, all of them with unlabeled windows of frosted glass. Remy turned right and followed the corridor to its end, where it came to a T with another hallway. Remy turned left this time and walked about fifteen feet, until he came to a pair of swinging doors that opened on a vast room, a maze of soft-walled cubicles bathed in fluorescent light. Again, there were no windows. He could hear the tapping of computer keys, like rainfall, and the low hum of people talking. The cubicles spread out before him like a huge field of crops, broken only by pillars every thirty feet or so. Inside the first cubicle a woman was hammering away at her computer keyboard, a telephone headset perched on her head, a plastic-sealed document in front of her. “Hell he did,” she said into her headset. “Bullshit. Come on now!”

  Perhaps sensing Remy behind her, the woman turned. “Oh, hello, sir.”

  Remy held up the envelope with his name on it. “Do you know—” he began.

  The woman gestured to the phone headset, and Remy nodded and backed away. Leaving the room, he followed the T-shaped corridor in the other direction. It ended at another, more impressive pair of doors, the word SECURE lettered on the frosted glass. Remy
opened the door and peeked inside. A woman sat behind a round desk reading a furniture catalog; behind her a big dark-wood door led to another office. Remy backed out, eased the door shut, turned left, and followed this hallway until he found himself back at another entrance to the huge maze of cubicles. He looked back over his shoulder. On the wall above the doorway he’d just come through was another sign like the ones he’d seen in the airplane hangar and the Quonset huts: “Our enemies should know this about the American people, which will not rest until Evil is defeated.”

  Finally, Remy backtracked again down the T and down the corridor toward his office. Inside, the phone was ringing. He walked in and picked it up. “Hello?”

  “Oh, good, you’re still there.” It was a woman’s voice.

  “I’m still here,” Remy said.

  “Did you get the envelope Shawn sent over?”

  Remy set it on the desk. “Yes.”

  “What do you think? Any of it helpful?”

  “Uh…Probably too early to tell,” Remy said.

  “Sure,” she said. “I tried to tell them it could wait until he got back from Washington, but you know those assholes in Partials.”

  “Do I,” Remy said, surprised that it didn’t come out like a question.

  “I know it. They’re all so mystical. I swear they could find significance in a used scrap of toilet paper. I guess it’s the training they get.”

  “I guess,” Remy said

  “Have you noticed how everyone in Partials eventually stops speaking in full sentences?”

  “I hadn’t noticed that,” Remy said.

  “Anyway, they’re ready for you now.”

  “Right. Who’s that again?”

  “Isn’t that the truth?” She laughed and hung up.

  Remy hung up and opened the envelope. Inside were two sheets of paper sealed in Ziploc bags. The first was a crumpled empty letter-sized envelope addressed to Lisa Herote—the name Assan had offered him at the interrogation—at an address in Virginia. There was a coffee cup stain on the envelope and a stain that might have been yogurt, as if it had been found in a garbage can. There was no return address on the envelope, but someone had affixed a yellow flag: “CKed w/Bishir’s hw sample—positive.”

  Remy heard footsteps in the hallway. He looked up from the letter and saw the silhouette of a man standing behind the frosted glass.

  Remy waited for a moment, then said “Hello.”

  The silhouette moved on.

  Remy looked back at the documents on his desk. The second plastic bag contained a half sheet of burned paper, its corners like burned toast. Remy carefully picked up the document and read it through the plastic, his fingers instinctively avoiding the blackened edges to keep from crushing them. It was a printout of an e-mail from MSelios@ADR to a BFenton at the same company. The right-hand corner of the paper was burned, leaving only the left side readable.

  So guess who calls last ni

  asleep. What am I suppose

  around makes me fee

  sex is good, though and I

  part of the attraction

  worried about t

  scared to March

  Remy turned the page over, but there was nothing on the other side. The yellow flag indicated that a copy of the e-mail had been “Forwarded by Markham, Investig. Unit. Doc. Dept., reconstruction under way from Partials.” It was initialed three times; he didn’t recognize any of the initials.

  Remy put the two baggies back in the envelope, walked back to the door, and looked once more down the long, empty corridor. The last time, he had ventured right; this time he turned left, following the corridor to another T and another right turn. He walked a short distance and knew, even before he went through the swinging doors, that he would find himself again in—

  THE SKY, impossibly close, shimmered like the surface of a lake, giving Remy the perverse impression that if he stepped off this fire escape he wouldn’t fall, but float up instead into that perfect autumn blue. Every summer when he was a kid Remy took swimming lessons at a camp upstate; the instructor had always told him that he would float if he’d just lie back and trust the water to hold up his body. Finally, one summer at a family reunion for his mother’s side in West Virginia, Remy tried it. And he floated. Not the way he expected: He didn’t float on top of the water, but rather seemed to become the water, to float within it. Maybe that was the answer. To float in this life, like paper on a current. Just lie back and let himself be.

  Remy looked down at the barbecue tool in his hand and he knew to lift the cover on the little charcoal grill. There were three thick steaks and a veggie burger, all sizzling above ash-white coals. He didn’t question it, just flipped them. Perfect: black lines like prison bars across the steaks. The smell was so precise, so not-Zero that he simply stood there, inhaling. Right. This is what cooking steaks are supposed to smell like. Maybe this was not some condition he had, but a life, and maybe every life is lived moment to moment. Doesn’t everyone react to the world as it presents itself? Who really knows more than the moment he’s in? What do you trust? Memory? History? No, these are just stories, and whichever ones we choose to tell ourselves—the one about our marriage, the one about the Berlin Wall—there are always gaps. There must be countless men all over the country crouched in front of barbecues, just like him, wondering how their lives got to that point.

  Remy glanced around—he was kneeling on April’s fire escape. Looking down the block, he saw a couple walking below him on the sidewalk, holding hands, leaves cartwheeling before them. Their low voices rose on the air to the fire escape, the man saying “…and the lucky bastard found the last beater in Park Slope.”

  There was a glass of red wine next to the little charcoal grill. Remy grabbed it and took a drink, relieved that it tasted just like wine. Cause met effect. Good wine. Shiraz? Yes, this felt better. There were places—in bed with April, here on her fire escape—where he felt grounded. Real. The steaks, as steaks tended to do, needed a few more minutes.

  He crawled through the window into April’s living room. A man in his late forties, with thick brown hair, black glasses, and a sports coat, was sitting on one of April’s dining room chairs in the cramped living room, sipping a glass of wine. He straightened up a bit when Remy appeared. April sat on one end of the couch, and at the opposite end sat a sharp-featured woman with short, spiky blond hair. The woman was attractive in the way that women of a certain age could be, with the post-foreplay directness of someone who was finished wasting time. She engineered a smile for Remy. A red scarf was tied at her neck in a real-estate ascot, blooming as if someone had cut her carotid. There was nowhere to sit but between the two women. Remy sat.

  “The meat will be just a few more minutes,” Remy said.

  “I can’t wait,” said the woman.

  “Smells great,” said the man.

  “You get to taste Brian’s secret marinade, Nicole,” April told the woman.

  “Oh! What’s in it?” asked Nicole with mock interest, turning her unblinking blue eyes on Remy like prison spotlights.

  “You know,” Remy said, “I couldn’t tell you.”

  “I told you it was secret,” April said.

  They all laughed, like real people. They stared at their drinks.

  Nicole cleared her throat and spoke as if reading from a script. “Well, April, we are just so excited to have you back.”

  “Thank you.”

  “It must have been such a difficult time for you.”

  “Yes,” April said.

  “I suppose we can’t imagine what it was like,” Nicole said.

  “No,” April said.

  “So awful, losing two people like that.”

  “Mm,” April said.

  “Must have been harrowing.”

  “Mm.”

  “Yes.” Nicole seemed to finally understand that the subject was closed. “Well, it’s great to have you back. Our group is hanging onto fourth in gross commissions right now, and with you ba
ck in the mix we really believe we’ll be third by the end of the quarter.”

  “I hope so,” April said unconvincingly.

  “Associates like April are playing a bigger role all the time,” Nicole confided in Remy. “The growth is all under forty right now.”

  “Oh,” Remy said.

  “I’m just sorry it took this long for me to come back,” April said, and she reached for Remy’s hand.

  “Oh. My God! No.” Nicole leaned forward, her round eyes big with concern. “No, no, no! I told you to take as much time as you needed. We got along fine. And with what you’ve been through…no, it’s good that you didn’t rush back.” She sipped her wine. “Honestly, April, for those first couple of months, there was very little movement anyway. But now…we’re almost back to the number of listings we had before. In fact—” She leaned forward as if spreading rank gossip. “Everything points to an upsurge. An explosion. It’s taking off again, April. It’s about to get white hot.”

  “White hot,” the man in the dark glasses repeated, staring directly at Remy.

  “The downtime is looking like nothing more than a blip,” Nicole said.

  “A blip,” said the man in dark glasses.

  “It’s a very exciting time for you to be coming back,” Nicole continued. “There are going to be innovations…partnerships with developers…buying our own stock…options and hedges. Louis says the whole country is about to leverage its best asset.” She paused for dramatic effect. “Our optimism.” Then she sipped her wine and shook her head. “You watch. There will be a feeding frenzy. People will be buying product based on nothing more than models. People will be buying artists’ sketches. Ideas.”

  “Ideas,” April said weakly.

  Remy took this opportunity to rise. “I’ll bet the steaks are done.” He smiled at Nicole. “And your soy burger.”

  April had kept his hand in hers when he stood, and now she squeezed it. And only then did he realize how nervous she’d been, about her performance tonight in front of this woman who must be her boss. He let go of her hand and walked toward the window, thinking again that perhaps life had returned to normal, and that normal was a string of single moments disconnected from one another. No reason to think that anything had ever been different. You worked in an office all week. Your girlfriend’s real estate broker boss came over with her husband and you cooked them dinner. And when it came time to eat, it wouldn’t matter whether you remembered planning the dinner. A meal doesn’t care about the cook’s intention; it just gets eaten. All over the city, all over the country, people rose from bed and scurried and fought and returned at night to sleep, independent of any meaning except the rising, scurrying, fighting, and sleeping. They drove cars made in places they’d never been, used cell phones and computers and a thousand pieces of technology with tiny pieces collected from factories all over the world, in places whose existence they could never be sure of, technology they couldn’t begin to understand. The news played whether they watched it or not. And none of them ever stopped to say: Wait! I don’t understand how this car got here! Why this telephone takes pictures! They answered their phones. Ate their steaks. And if they woke up one morning divorced or with cancer, or if they found themselves at war, they assumed the reality of irreconcilable differences, malignant tumors, premonitions of evil.