(2006) The Zero

by Jess Walter

  They were in a long dark aluminum tunnel, as if several Quonset huts had been laid end to end. The tunnel made a ninety-degree right turn and ended at a door marked “M.P.D.” There was a buzzer and a small white intercom box next to the door. A smaller sign quoted The President: “Our enemy are haters who hate our way of life and our abilities of organization! We will confound them!” The woman stood in front of the door, staring at it, but didn’t touch the buzzer. She turned to Remy, who stared back at her.

  “Mr. Remy?” she asked, finally.

  “Yes.”

  “You know I don’t have clearance beyond this point, right?”

  “Oh,” he said, and looked at the door again. “Do I?”

  She laughed, reached out and touched his arm. “You’re funny.”

  “Thanks,” he said.

  She turned and began walking the other way down the dark tunnel.

  Remy watched to see if she’d look back over her shoulder, but she didn’t. Finally, he turned back to the door and pressed the buzzer.

  After a moment, the door buzzed and the lock clicked. Remy waited for just…a second and then reached for it. He opened the door and passed through—

  “A DREAM. That’s what it seems like to me, like a kind of fever dream.” It was the same voice he remembered hearing when he was in that bathroom, the tentative woman’s voice. She was lying across his chest, facing away from him, so that all he could see was the whorl of her dark hair in a warm nest of blankets and sheets on a bed Remy didn’t recognize—hers, apparently. His legs felt tired. He was staring down at the crest of her dark hair and he could feel the vibration on his abdomen as she spoke, but he couldn’t see her face.

  “You know what I mean?” she asked. “The dreams you have when you’re sick…or drifting in and out of consciousness, not quite asleep and not quite awake…?”

  Remy leaned sideways, hoping to see around the back of her head to her face, but all he could see was that tangle of dark hair. Her voice was low and he could feel it as much as he could hear it. “You’re not sure what’s real and what isn’t…the real world intrudes on your dreams, but you can’t quite find your way into either world…not completely. The phone rings and you stare at it, wondering if you should answer it, or if it’s a dream and if you shouldn’t bother, if the phone is just going to turn into a cat anyway.”

  Remy looked around the bedroom. There were two dressers. Hers was a vanity with a mirror on top; on the other side of the bed was a more masculine dresser, a His dresser, upright, with a watch tree on top, and some bottles of cologne. Not Remy’s watch tree. Not his cologne. There was also a picture in a frame, facedown on the dresser. The man who’s facedown on that dresser probably owns it, he thought.

  “Voices come in and out. People hover above your bed. You open your eyes and real people are silhouetted and this becomes your dream, too—these halos, ghostly figures. You don’t know: Are the things they’re saying real? Or part of the dream?

  “You can’t wake up and you can’t go back to sleep. Physically, you’re in that…middle place, moving in the real world while your mind is in a dream.”

  Remy felt her hand on his thigh and he closed his eyes. “April?” he tried, quietly, a kind of plea.

  She made no noise for a moment and he worried that he’d gotten it wrong. “Yes?” she said finally. “What is it, Brian?”

  He was just so relieved that this woman’s name was April, and that she knew his name, that he could think of nothing to say. Finally: “Do you know what time it is?”

  “Eight thirty,” she said. “Why? Do you have to be somewhere?”

  “I don’t know.” In fact, he had no clue why he’d asked the time, maybe just to have some real detail to cling to. It was eight-thirty. He looked down at her then, sprawled across his chest. He wished he could see her face. He put his hand on the narrow small of her back and traced the steps of her spine. Her skin was cool and damp. He felt dizzy…and he realized he was in love with her, even though he couldn’t recall ever seeing her face, and really had no idea who she was.

  “Did you ever read the science stories in the Times?” she continued. “They always made me feel so lonely. That’s what the feeling reminds me of. They’re always running stories about some new experiment done in the supercollider, or some new particle of light that’s been bouncing around space since the beginning of the universe, without really explaining how they know this. They discover new stars, galaxies exert some effect on some other body, effects they can only determine mathematically, and none of it means anything. It’s like that now—like we’ve all become theoretical, bending light or exerting gravity, but never really touching.”

  Remy wanted badly to agree with her, but he had no idea what she was talking about. His eyes burned, the flecks rising like ash from a fire. “April…I’m losing track of everything,” he whispered.

  She patted his stomach. “I know.”

  “It’s getting worse.”

  “I know. You told me.”

  “Oh,” he said. “Good.” At least someone knew. He reached out and felt the warmth of her back. “Good.”

  “Maybe we’re all like people in dreams now,” she said, “aware that something isn’t right, but unable to shake the illusion. And maybe we could save each other, but we just drift pass, bending each other, moving through our own dreams like loosed worries.”

  Remy reached out and stroked—

  THE MAN was in his fifties, tall, thin, and aristocratic, with an expensive haircut and braces on his teeth. He wore a golf shirt and khaki pants, the way a man does when he’s trying too hard to be casual.

  “Well?” the man asked. He was sitting across from Remy. They were at a table in a Starbucks. Remy could hear the steaming of milk behind them.

  “Dave? Double caramel macchiato for Dave?” said the barista. Apparently this man’s name was Dave because he stood and got his drink. He took a sip as he returned to the table. “Macchiato means mark. They’re just supposed to mark the latte with espresso. They never do it right.” Foam coated the man’s braces. He put his hands out, as if he’d been waiting for Remy to say something. “So?”

  “So,” Remy said.

  “What do you want?”

  “What do you want?”

  Dave cocked his head and looked like an expectant professor who’s just called on a sleeping student. “What…can I do for you, Remy?”

  “I guess that depends,” Remy said, “on what you can do for me.”

  Dave looked both confused and intrigued. “I guess,” he said, “what I can do for you…depends on what you have to offer.”

  “And what if I don’t have anything to offer?”

  His face reddened. “Then you’re a complete idiot, because you’re the one who called this meeting.”

  Remy was afraid of that. He took a drink of the latte in front of him. Cinnamon. “Okay.” Remy looked around for his notebook. “Maybe you could start by telling me what you know about March Selios.”

  “What I know?” The man laughed through his nose and then his eyes narrowed again, became formidable, and it occurred to Remy that this might not be one of his standard interviews. “You really are something, Remy. You want me to tell you what I know about March Selios? Okay. I’ll tell you. I know that I requested any documents that related to this Selios woman, and I know your sleazeball handlers over at the DD saw this as an opportunity to fuck us. So, instead of cooperating with the agency—with a real intelligence gathering organization—they rejected our request and decided to launch their own investigation. And I know that since they’re all just a bunch of paper pushers, they had to bring in a mercenary—you—to do the actual work.”

  Remy took another sip of foamy cinnamon as the thin man in braces continued talking.

  “I know that they’re using this investigation to justify their outrageous encroachment on agency turf. And I know they’re hanging it all on the notion that this—what, some trampy import paralegal—might still
be alive, which is laughable.”

  “Is it?” Remy asked, more suspiciously than he intended.

  Dave’s eyes narrowed. “Isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know,” Remy said.

  Dave stared at him. “What do you know, Remy? Do you know something?”

  “Probably not.”

  Dave cocked his head again. “What are you offering, Remy?”

  “What makes you think I’m offering something?”

  The man sat back in his chair and stroked his solid chin. Remy thought he must have had a beard at one time, because he ran his fingers over his face like a man with a beard.

  Finally, Dave smiled. “You’d better not be messing with me, Remy.”

  “I’m not,” Remy assured him.

  Dave looked around. “Okay, so you and I stay in touch, outside the official channels? Show a little…professional courtesy? Is that what you’re saying?”

  “I don’t know what I’m saying.”

  The man considered Remy again. Finally, he took another drink of his latte. “Okay. I’m going to give you a little bit of rope. But if you amateurs get in our way on this investigation, I will hang you.” He stood up and grabbed his drink. “Do we understand each other?”

  Remy took another drink. As the man walked away, he said, “Not so much.”

  “GONE BUT…: A night of one-act, student-written and student-performed plays and monologues,” according to the playbill, which was photocopied on folded green paper and had a single firefighter’s helmet below the words. Remy arrived late, and sat by himself in a corner foldout seat in the back row, watching the streaks in his eyes swarm over the low stage lights. He could see Carla and Steve down near the front, Steve’s arm around her shoulder. A woman bent and said something to Carla, who nodded and covered her mouth proudly.

  The curtain came up with a jerk and the grind of ropes on pulleys and then the stage was bare except for a single light shining on a standup microphone. The first student was a mousy girl in dark jeans who shifted her weight every few seconds and delivered a monologue in which she described being at school that day, having her mother come get her, watching the whole thing on television, and then hearing, later that night, that her uncle hadn’t come home from work and was presumed dead. She liked her uncle, although he was really a step-uncle. She explained that he was a bond trader and that he was gay, and that he was the only gay person in her family and that she thought he was the coolest person in the family. She finished by describing a meal that her step-uncle had cooked for the family once, pasta with shiitake mushrooms and sun-dried tomatoes. She vowed that every year on that date, she would eat pasta with shiitake mushrooms and sun-dried tomatoes. The last words of her monologue were, “And the thing is: I hate mushrooms.”

  The applause was rich and full, and then two thin white boys came out and performed a rap tribute to a dead firefighter who had graduated from the school ten years earlier (“…y’all seen it on television/them boys packin’ some heroism…”)

  And then it was Edgar’s turn. There was a thunderous applause that caught Remy off guard, people sitting up in their seats. The woman next to Remy whispered to her husband, “His father,” and he nodded sadly. And then Remy’s son came out in tousled black hair, in an untucked white dress shirt, apparently having given up the armband. He looked good, if a little thin, but it was odd seeing him down there, in that harsh light. He seemed both smaller and older, and so far away. He sat at a small table on the left side of the stage, where he set up the chessboard and pieces that Remy had bought him when he was a kid. He walked over to the stand, removed the microphone, and returned to the chess table. He was quiet for a long moment, staring at that chessboard.

  “My dad taught me to play,” Edgar said, and he moved a pawn out. Remy felt a chill, seeing him at the table, playing chess alone. “My dad showed me how all the pieces moved.” Edgar moved his knight out to protect the pawn, even though he was playing by himself. “I had trouble with the knight at first. I used to ask, ‘Is it two up and one over or one up and two over?’

  “‘It doesn’t matter,’ my dad said. ‘You end up at the same place.’” There was a low murmur of laughter. Edgar spoke his father’s parts in a mock deep voice, and between each line of dialogue he pretended to wait for his opponent to move, then hunched over the board again. But no pieces ever moved on the father’s side of the board. “You end up in the same place,” Edgar repeated.

  “My dad always let me win,” he said, and he moved another pawn. “‘Boy, you got me again,’ he’d say. But one time when I was nine, the weirdest thing happened; it was like the board opened up for me and I could see in all of these directions at once. And I looked up and I knew he couldn’t see the board like that. That he’d never be able to see like that. And I beat him. I mean, I really beat him. I beat him fair and square. I think he’d been drinking that day. He drank some, my dad. After that, he won a game, and then he went back to letting me win. But that one night, I saw fear in his face, fear because he knew that I’d beaten him fair and square. That he had lost to his nine-year-old son.”

  Edgar brought out his other knight. “My father was a police officer, but he always wanted to be more, so he went to law school at night. But he dropped out before he could finish. He worked for a while as a liaison between the police and city. I asked him once what a liaison was and he said it was the person who was halfway between things. That’s how I thought of my dad. As someone who only got halfway to the places he wanted to go. He told me once that he’d always wanted to see the West Coast, but the farthest he’d ever made it was Chicago. I remember thinking, if that’s your dream, how hard could that be, to go to the West Coast? It’s not like he wanted to go to Tibet, right?”

  There was another low murmur of laughter and Remy had to fight the urge to stand up and defend his life. You think there’s always going to be time for things like travel, and then, it just gets away from you. But he didn’t stand.

  “So that was my father,” Edgar continued. “And after I beat him at chess, when I looked at him, that’s all I could see for a long time—the unfinished half of his life. Maybe that’s the life of an adult: You reach a certain age and your life is defined more by the things you don’t do than by the things you do.”

  Edgar stared at the chessboard, one side still unmoved. Finally he stood. “The night my father didn’t come home I stood at my bedroom window and wondered what becomes of all the conversations we have with each other, and all the feelings we have, the ones we talk about and the ones we don’t. Does everything just…evaporate? If one end of a conversation is still there, does the conversation still exist? Or is the whole thing gone the moment it hits the air?”

  “People talk about the unconditional love of a parent for a child, but that’s not really it. It’s really the other way. Parents choose to have their kids. No kid ever chose to have his parents. They’re just there when you wake up one day. And you can’t just keep having sex and have more parents if those two don’t work out.”

  There was a bigger laugh this time. Edgar was killing. He laughed, too, tossing off all the navel-gazing, as if these were the thoughts of a boy. “It always seemed like my dad had something important on the tip of his tongue, something he was just getting around to saying. The night he didn’t come home I thought about that. About how we always think of things we wished we’d said.

  “I don’t know what I’d say to my father. But I know what I wouldn’t say. This is what I wouldn’t say: Dad, even when I didn’t love you…I never wanted you to stop loving me.”

  Edgar put his hands in his pockets for a moment, then removed them and returned to the chess table.

  “I never told my dad this, but after I turned nine, I could’ve beaten him at chess any time I wanted. I let him let me win.”

  Edgar reached out to take a chess piece and the single light went dark.

  HE SAT in the passenger seat of an unmarked, watching the alleyway entrance of a restaurant
through small binoculars. The back door was painted black, the window covered with iron bars, empty boxes and garbage cans piled on either side of it. Remy peeked away from the binoculars to the driver’s seat, where Markham sat reading a National Geographic.

  “Anything?” Markham asked. He was wearing a trim beige suit.

  Remy glanced down. He was wearing a suit, too, a new one—dark blue. He looked back through the binoculars again. “I don’t think so.”

  Markham turned the page of his magazine. “Hey, Brian, do you know how much time deer spend with their mates?”

  “No.”

  “Try to guess.”

  “I don’t know.”

  “I know you don’t know. That’s why I want you to guess. If you knew, you wouldn’t be guessing, you’d be telling me, and what would be the point of that?”

  “Uh…their whole lives?”

  “Nope. One day. You believe it? One day. An entire species of animal capable of nothing but one-night stands. Isn’t that perfect? I mean, if you’re a deer?”

  Remy let the binoculars fall to his lap. “I don’t know.”

  “Don’t you think deer are kind of sexy? For an animal?”

  “I…I couldn’t say,” Remy said.

  “I do. Not…you know, for me, specifically. I’m not saying I’d necessarily want to have sex with a deer. But just the way they’re put together, big asses and long legs, they’re kind of like people. And those cute little faces. Shoot, I’d do a deer. I mean, if I was a deer. You know? I can’t say that about every animal. If I was a hippo? Nope. Or a raccoon or something? I’d just be celibate. Or a cat? No way. You’d think we’d be more attracted to gorillas or other primates, but other than those little spider monkeys, I just don’t see it. But deer…I don’t know, I find it kind of evocative, the idea of all these bucks nailing those leggy does once a year and then just running off into the woods.”

  Remy put the binoculars to his eyes again. A man was moving down the alley away from the back door, his back to Remy, carrying a plastic grocery bag, walking toward a car parked in the alley. “Are we looking for someone?”