(2006) The Zero

by Jess Walter

  She waited. He was lying on his back and she was crouched over him, breathing softly, naked from the waist up. He glanced down at her lovely jutting collarbones, at her cupped breasts and the flat plain of her lovely stomach. Before this moment he could only recall brief glimpses of her—strobe flashes of her face, an arm, a thigh—and so it amazed him to see her so fully, to trace the narrow, lovely terrain of her body. She wore plaid pajama bottoms and nothing else, and he kept thinking that word: lovely. She stared at him inquisitively, as if trying to read him in a poker game. “Hmm,” he said again.

  “It’s not a test.” She laughed at him. “It’s a simple question.”

  “Right. What was it again?”

  “I said…do you want to know what I hate?”

  “Oh. Yes.”

  April rose and flopped across his lap, so that she was facing the other way. She slapped at the newspaper, which was at that end of the bed. “This.” After a second, Remy sat up. She had the Sunday Times spread out at his feet. He was shocked by the date—could so much time have passed? Could he account for all of those days?

  “You hate the newspaper?” he asked.

  “No, not the paper. I hate this page.” She held up the Portraits in Grief page, where the Times ran little cross-section obits of the people who’d died that day—four or five every day, presumably until their inventory ran out. “I hate the way I read this page now,” she said. “It’s the same way I used to read the wedding announcements. When I first moved to the city I didn’t know anyone and I’d read the weddings like someone trying to learn a language. I’d look for people I knew—maybe someone I went to school with, or someone I met at a party, someone I sold an apartment to. Then I’d look for attractive people. Where they went to school, where they vacationed, where their parents lived, where they went to college. Like an entire life could be captured in a paragraph. I’d imagine my life in a paragraph: grand ceremony, two sophisticated families coming together, a romantic honeymoon, the couple going back to their fascinating jobs. The bride plans to keep her name. It filled me with such jealousy and self-loathing.” She swallowed. “That’s how I read these portraits now. Don’t you think that’s crazy?”

  “I might not be the best judge,” Remy said.

  “Of…”

  “Crazy.”

  “I don’t mean crazy, I guess. I mean shallow.”

  “You’re not shallow.”

  “How do you know that?”

  Remy had no answer.

  April turned back to the newspaper. “Reporters still call me all the time.” She folded the paper. “They come across so caring and compassionate; ‘It must have been horrible to lose two people in one day.’ I say, ‘Oh. Do you think?’ I put them off…say I don’t want to talk about it yet. ‘Maybe later.’”

  “Why don’t you want to talk about it?”

  “You don’t talk about it,” she said, “what happened that day.”

  “I don’t really remember it.”

  “Oh,” she said. “I remember it.” She looked away, at the place where the floor met the wall. “Lawyers call, too. They’re even more persistent.”

  “What do they want?”

  “A third.” She looked back down at the newspaper again. “It just surprises me, I guess. Afterward, I really thought that everything would change…I don’t know…that we would be different. Stores would never open again…businesses shut down…lawyers quit their practices and run into the woods.” She smiled wistfully. “I just assumed the newspaper would stop coming out. Instead…” She chewed a thumbnail. “This whole thing…it just became another section in the paper. Like movie reviews. Or the bridge column.”

  Remy looked up at the dresser in April’s bedroom, to see if the picture she’d kept up there was still facedown. Her husband. Derek. But his picture was gone.

  April was staring at the newspaper, and seemed to be choosing her words with great care. “I just don’t know how we all got so…” And then she stared off again, as if the rest of the sentence were somewhere out the window.

  “So…what?” Remy asked.

  “Used to it,” she said.

  April looked back, one breast peeling off the comforter so that he could see a dark nipple. His eyes traced her neck and her face: dark, serious eyebrows arched over candy brown eyes. She watched him staring at her. “What?” she asked.

  “You’re beautiful.”

  “You always say that like it’s the first time you’ve ever seen me.”

  “It is,” he said.

  She turned back to the paper again and read for a few seconds. “Here. Look at this woman.” April slapped the paper. “Allowed herself to be cut in half by a magician for her twin granddaughters’ birthday party. I mean…that’s so…what? Funny and ironic and sad and wonderful. Everything. I don’t know what to feel about that. How are we supposed to feel about that?”

  “Alive?” Remy asked.

  “Well, I’m tired of feeling like that.”

  She reached back with her hand and rubbed his thigh and Remy thought that maybe he could take this skidding life, as long as he landed here sometimes, in this nest of bedding in April’s apartment, glancing down at her body, at her slender back and notched waist. He wondered if this could be enough, if this could tether him, the pressure of another person against his skin. Remy wanted to say something, about them, or her, but he found it impossible because he had no idea what had already been said. Maybe that was normal, too. Maybe every couple lived in the gaps between conversations, unable to say the important things for fear they had already been said, or couldn’t be said; maybe every relationship started over every time two people came together.

  She hit the newspaper again. “Or this guy. Bought a vintage motorcycle for himself when he turned twenty-two. Rode it across the country and camped in the Canadian Rockies for a month to shoot photos of migrating geese. Jesus. Who does that?”

  April turned to face him again and her long dark hair pooled in his lap. Remy recalled the pictures of March. Her face was wider than April’s, and darker. Their father was right: even though she was older, April seemed younger and frailer than her younger sister had been.

  April’s eyes narrowed then as if she were thinking the same thing. “So…do you ever think about what yours would say?”

  “My—” Remy opened his eyes.

  “Your portrait in grief. They’re not like obits—see. They’re not résumés or tributes. They’re more like crosscuts, a strobe flash on one part of your life. One moment. One theme. So what would yours say?”

  “I don’t know,” Remy said.

  “I know what mine would say.”

  “What?”

  “She saw death as just another wedding she wasn’t invited to.”

  “AND DO you see them now?” The voice was calm, almost to the point of being alarming.

  “See what?” Remy asked. His eyes were closed and he was sitting on a soft couch somewhere. He felt with his hands. A leather couch.

  “These…what did you call them…floaters? Flashers?” the calm voice asked. “Can you see them now, with your eyes closed? Yes? Are they here? Are they with us?”

  The calm voice made Remy increasingly anxious and he crossed and uncrossed his legs. “Sure. They’re always here. I get used to ’em, but they’re always here.”

  “Describe them. What do they look like?”

  “Strings. They look like strings.”

  “Strings.”

  “Right. Little segmented strings.”

  “Strings?” The man sounded intrigued.

  “Yeah. I said. Strings.”

  “And do these strings tie you to the world, Brian? Is that what they do? Are these ropes binding you, or holding you down? Are they keeping you from being who you long to be?”

  “No. Not ropes. Strings.” Remy opened his eyes. The man across from him was in his late forties and balding, wore narrow blue-rimmed glasses and had pursed lips like someone sucking a milk shake through a
straw. He had a yellow pad of paper open on his crossed leg. The nameplate on his desk read: Dr. Rieux. They were in a small office in an old building, an office with nothing but a desk, a chair, and the couch where Remy sat, his arms at his sides. The rest of the room was taken up with bookshelves, a framed diploma, and a cartoon poster of a boy fighting a huge dragon, the dragon huddling in fear as flames burst from the little boy’s nose.

  “Isn’t this what your strings are?” Dr. Rieux asked. “Aren’t these the tethers that keep you from floating away?”

  Remy looked back at the psychiatrist. “No. They’re little pieces of tissue floating in my eyes. My ophthamologist says they’re floating in the gel inside there, the vitreous humor. The tissue surrounding it is shredding. He’s worried it could eventually lead to the retinas detaching.”

  “Oh. Retinas.” The psychiatrist was noticeably deflated. “Huh.” He frowned and flipped through his notes. His voice lost its smoothness. “Okay, what else have we got?”

  “Well,” Remy said, “there are the gaps.”

  “The what?” Dr. Rieux didn’t look up from his notes.

  “I’m having gaps.”

  “You’re having what?”

  “Gaps,” Remy said. “I’ll be doing one thing and suddenly—”

  “EVERYTHING FADES after a while,” Guterak was saying. “Maybe that’s all it is.” His pool table was heavier than it looked. Remy waited at the top of the stairs to see which direction they were going—in or out. Paul pushed. Okay. They were taking the table out. Remy strained under the weight as he backed it down the wide staircase.

  “I mean, it couldn’t last forever, right?”

  “I don’t know,” Remy said. Even though it was a small one, and even though the legs were taken off, the slate top was massive and unwieldy, like moving a slab of concrete, like moving a driveway.

  “At first, the whole thing felt like a break from the world, like a fuggin’ snow day,” Paul said. “Remember? You know, when you were a kid and it snowed so much they closed the school? Remember those days?”

  “Yeah,” Remy said, struggling against the pool tabletop. “Kind of.”

  In the kitchen, they turned the tabletop sideways, grunting and huffing. Paul kicked away a plastic football, but it hit the counter and rolled right back in his way. “Just a sec. Hold up.” Paul set his end down to move the ball. Remy looked over at the Guteraks’ refrigerator, which was littered with paper: school lunch menus, report cards, pictures of friends’ kids, even a picture of Edgar. The kitchen had a vague, stale smell, and Remy imagined a crust of bread wedged beneath the dishwasher, or an orange rind behind the fridge. Finally, they got the pool table through the back sliding door and loaded it onto the bed of Paul’s black pickup truck, next to boxes of tools, a television, a dresser, and an ice chest. Paul went back in for the legs of the pool table as Remy stood outside, watching a checkmark of birds dissolve into an ashen sky.

  “I really appreciate you helping me,” Paul said when he came back out with the last two legs. “I know I keep saying that.”

  “It’s okay,” Remy said.

  “I just feel bad. Here you are, your back and eyes too fugged up for you to work anymore, and I make you carry all this heavy shit.”

  “My back’s fine, Paul. And my eyes—” Remy closed his eyes and saw paramecia swimming in the diffuse light. He opened them and the world became faded and flat again, filled with static as in an old movie.

  They went back in and Remy followed Guterak upstairs, to the bedroom, which was littered with Paul’s jeans and wrinkled button shirts. He piled hangered shirts, jackets, and pants on Remy’s arms and they started back down the stairs.

  “I tell you what happened last week?” Paul spoke over an armful of jackets.

  “I don’t know.”

  “I got a call from an agent,” Paul said. “Out of the blue. A talent agent. The Boss’s guy. Big sloppy bug-eyed fugger who helped him get his movie deal. Guy specializes in stories about that day, right? He says The Boss wants me taken care of, so I take him on a tour a The Zero and tell him my whole story and he says I got one of the best he’s heard. Says I pitch it good, too. Money in the bank. He says there’s gonna be all kinds of entertainment possibilities. TV shows are starting to…what did he call it…stockpile material. It’s going to be a while before anyone writes directly at it, but there’s lots of what he called subtext. And he said I could get gigs in the meantime.”

  “Gigs?”

  “Sure. Appearances and shit. Malls. Boat shows. Parades. They’re looking for cops and smokers to cut ribbons and salute flags and throw out pitches and read poems and shit. The agent says I’ll do gigs until the movie market matures for my kind of story. He says everything goes through this cycle of opportunity: first inspirational stories, kids and animals, shit like that; then the backdrop stories, he called it the home-front…and then the big money—thrillers.”

  “Thrillers,” was all Remy could think to say.

  “Oh yeah. Guy says it’s all about thrillers now, says history has become a thriller plot.” Paul shrugged. “After thrillers come anniversaries: five years, ten, and the real money—” Paul dragged it out, took a long drink of coffee. “Nostalgia.”

  “Nostalgia?”

  “He said a story like mine is like owning a good stock. And that nostalgia is like the moment my little company goes public. So, after he goes through this whole explanation of everything, guy asks, do I wanna sell my stock? Do I wanna sell him my experiences?”

  “What’d you tell him?”

  “I said, ‘Bet your ass I’ll sell my experiences. I sure as hell don’t want ’em anymore.’” Guterak threw the clothes into the back of the truck. “You want me to see if they want yours, too?”

  “My…”

  “Your experiences.”

  “No. That’s okay. I’ll hold onto mine.”

  “Hey, if you change your mind…” Guterak said.

  They finished loading Paul’s pickup truck and climbed into the cab. It smelled like cigarette smoke, but otherwise it felt nice, sitting in a truck with Paul. It was like being a kid, Remy thought, riding in a car with no idea where he was going, no expectation of how long the trip would take, just the sun fluttering between buildings.

  They turned a corner and Remy looked back to make sure the tarp was tied down and that’s when he noticed a beat-up silver Lincoln behind them, probably fifteen years old. It looked like a gypsy cab, but it had two guys in front. That seemed strange to Remy. Gypsy cabs never had two guys in front. Paul turned the truck twice more and the car stayed with them. At a stoplight, Remy adjusted the side mirror and got a good look at the two men in the car. The driver was a white guy with a mustache, wearing a ball cap, staring straight ahead. The passenger was a heavyset black guy, also staring straight ahead. He looked over at Paul, who didn’t seem to notice the car behind them.

  Paul was rambling about women. “And do you know why? Because they don’t really want what they say they want. Look at Stacy. Spends twenty-two years riding my ass: Why don’t you tell me what you’re thinking? Why don’t you talk? Then when I finally decide to start talking, she says I won’t shut up.”

  Remy looked behind them. The gypsy cab was still there.

  Paul stopped at a diner. As he got out, Remy watched the car tool slowly past, the driver—the thick guy with the mustache—glancing in Remy’s direction and nodding. Remy followed Paul inside and they took a booth in the corner. They got a couple of coffees. Paul ordered hash. Remy ordered huevos rancheros. He watched the door.

  Paul lit a cigarette. “I tell you they divided The Zero into quadrants?”

  “No.”

  “Yeah, each quadrant is under a different bucket company. The fuggin’ hard hats are pushing us out. They wanna work faster. Snow days are over, man. Even the smokers—they want those poor shits out, too. But they’re havin’ trouble there. The smokers are in no fuggin’ mood. Some of those guys are total pricks, showboats, like th
e fuggin’ Yankees of grief, you know? But…I hate to admit it…I know how they feel. I mean, after a while…you start to feel like it’s yours. Like you own it.”

  Remy drank his coffee.

  “You remember that night, Bri? When we went back down there, afterward? You remember that? How quiet and spooky it was?”

  “Not really. No.”

  “All of those black smoking shapes…and the searchlights and the glow from the fuggin’ fires…and you couldn’t see the end of it. It was like goin’ someplace where people had never been, like some dark jungle. Remember? You’d be on a street, but all of a sudden it wasn’t a street any more…you take five steps and you’re in some place you can’t imagine, like some hole in a kid’s nightmare. I couldn’t believe the next morning, how gray it all was. That night it really seemed black to me.” Guterak rubbed his scalp.

  “Here’s what gets me,” he went on. “Remember, the first morning, the flatbed trucks were already there? They took a hundred-some trucks to Fresh Kills. On the second fuggin’ day, Bri! From the beginning they were already cleaning up the mess…before they even knew for sure what it was. I mean…what is that? Is that right?”

  “I don’t know,” Remy said.

  “You wanna know what I think?” He looked over his shoulder, and then leaned in closer to Remy. “I think the bosses knew all along that we weren’t gonna find anyone. I don’t think they cared. They wanted to clean it up fast, but they had to pretend that they expected us to find people. Right? All along they’re saying, We will not rest until blah-fuggin’-blah and There is still fuggin’ hope, and all the time what they’re really thinking is we gotta move a million tons of shit before we can rent this fugger out. I mean, how do you move a million tons? You should see it. It’s like a strip mine down there. Like we’re digging for something.”

  The words sounded familiar and disturbing, and Remy badly wanted to end this line of conversation. He excused himself to go to the bathroom. He walked past the counter and into the men’s room. He stared at himself in the scratched mirror, through his scratched eyes. Behind him, one of the urinals was overflowing, with the insistent sound of running water. Remy went into a stall, closed the door, undid his pants and sat, his head in his hands.