(2006) The Zero

by Jess Walter

  April nodded without looking up from her shoes.

  “As far as other supporting documents: any medical bills, funeral expenses, counseling you may have undergone, any after-tax income that your husband might’ve received. And we’re going to make the argument that as a contracts lawyer with a degree in finance Derek had virtually no risk of unemployment.” He smiled at April. “This is when you get paid back for him spending all that time at work.”

  Remy coughed and they both looked at him as if it had meant something. He looked away from them to his shoes and eventually the lawyer turned back to the wall and then thought of something else. The lawyer spun back around to face April and Remy. “Can you bring photos to the hearing?”

  “Photos?”

  “Yes. Wedding photos, vacation photos, holidays, that kind of thing. Pictures are tremendously effective…you can have the best sob story in the world, but what really sells it are photographs.” The lawyer began to turn back to his presentation, but then thought of something else. “Oh. And bring pictures of your sister, too. You’re not entitled to any compensation for her, obviously, but it doesn’t hurt to have the pictures handy.”

  “Excuse me.” April jumped up and left the room, covering her mouth.

  The lawyer stuck out his jaw again, stroked his neck again, and sighed. “That happens a lot. It’s…difficult.”

  They waited quietly for a few minutes and then the lawyer checked his watch. “I have a noon, so I’m going to go over the rest of this with you and you can explain it to Ms. Kraft afterward, okay?” He began flipping through PowerPoint pages, pausing on the important ones.

  Remy looked down the hall to see where April had gone.

  “Now these are the breakdowns of deductions that the compensation board will factor from the total: for life insurance, pension plans, social security, and workers’ compensation, the sum of which we’ve calculated to be about one-point-six million, which we subtract from the two-point-seven we arrived at to get…”

  “I don’t remember things too well,” Remy said, his voice a low croak.

  “Don’t worry. It will all be included in the report that Mrs. Kraft gets.” He spun through several more pages before the lawyer arrived at a page with smaller writing than any of the others. It was a breakdown of the fees the law firm would take. He said that they were taking a reduced rate, but the lawyer pointed to two columns on the bottom of the page, deductions for “Vicarious Trauma” and “Compassion Fatigue.”

  Remy leaned forward. Compassion fatigue? “Are those for…you?”

  “Yes. For the lawyers working on the case. As you might imagine, these are difficult cases…emotionally.” He removed his glasses and wiped his dry eyes. Then he seemed to think of something else and put the glasses back on. He looked hard at Remy. “Oh, in case you are wondering, April can remarry without affecting her settlement in any way. You wouldn’t have to wait, in other words.” He smiled as if he and Remy were in the same profession. “So that’s good. For you. Obviously.” He smiled and reached in his pocket, pulled out a tin of mints, and offered Remy—

  A BIG truck, the biggest he’d ever seen, sat on risers in front of him. It was a pickup as high as a two-story building, on tires taller than a man. At first Remy thought his sense of scale had been thrown off, that his eyes were playing some kind of trick, but this was, in fact, a giant truck. Remy looked around. He was in an arena of some kind—empty and dark—except here in the center, where spotlights shone down on the dirt floor and on this giant truck. He looked closer at the pickup. It was painted red and blue, airbrushed with American flags fluttering in an unseen wind, with an angry-looking eagle perched on the hood and, on the doors, a long list of familiar names, cops and firefighters, Italian, Irish, and Latin, like the roster of a Catholic school football league.

  “So what do you think?” Guterak came around the truck and stood next to Remy, gaping at it. He was wearing a suit without the tie and his hair was forcefully parted to the side. He seemed nervous. His voice seemed to disappear in the empty arena.

  “Big truck,” Remy said.

  “Yeah,” Paul said. “It’s pretty cool. Hey, thanks again for coming down.”

  “Sure.”

  “Impressive up close, isn’t it?” A woman was speaking behind them. Remy turned and saw her approach from an open door on the floor of the arena. She had curly brown hair, blonded at the tips, and wore a tight denim skirt, like a country music singer. A cell phone earpiece sat perched on her head as if she’d just walked away from a fast-food drive-through window.

  When she was closer, the woman handed Guterak some papers. “Here you go, Paul. Countersigned contracts, as Michael promised. And the schedule for next week. Tractor pulls at seven each night, followed by the demos, and then before the finale we’re going to have a moment of silence. That’s where you come in.” The woman was in her thirties and her thin legs disappeared in elaborate cowboy boots. She smiled. “We’ll announce the Eagle Truck, Hero-One, and that’s when you come out with the firefighter—” She looked down at her notes. “—Davie Ryan, both of you in uniform. The two of you walk out, wave to the people, look…you know…serious or whatever. Then you climb that staircase over there and stand on that platform in the dark. Take off your hats. We have a moment of silence and then Bam! The lights come up and we play ‘America the Beautiful’ and then Hero-One comes out. People go ape-shit and the truck runs over a bunch of shit and everyone goes home. Easy, right? I’ll bet it’s much easier than chasing bad guys.” The woman handed Paul a brochure, which he read and handed to Remy.

  WE’RE TURNING VETERANS ARENA

  INTO A GIANT MUD PIT

  TO HONOR OUR DEAD HEROES!*

  Tractor pulls, monster trucks, demolition derby!

  And for the first time anywhere: The Eagle Truck, Hero-One

  With its haunting display of airbrush artistry featuring America’s lost heroes.

  “When do I talk?” Paul asked as he leafed through the program.

  “Talk?” the woman asked. “About what?”

  “Well.” Paul looked around the arena. “I don’t know. Maybe I misunderstood. I thought I was going to get to talk.”

  “No, no.” The woman smiled. “We don’t need you to talk.”

  “Oh. Yeah. See, I was under the impression that I would get to talk.”

  “No. There’s no talking.”

  Paul took a couple of steps and looked at the truck. “No. See that’s what I do…I talk. You know…about what I saw?”

  “No,” she said. “No talking.” She leaned forward. “Honestly, I don’t think people want any more talking. For a while they did. But I think they’ve had enough of that kind of thing. I think we get it. No, all we need you to do is…look appropriate.” The woman shrugged, opened her handbag, and handed Paul an envelope. He held it for a moment before opening it.

  While Guterak stared at his paycheck, Remy walked toward the truck and read the names, and indeed they were airbrushed with such artistry that the shadows seemed real and the letters had a disquieting depth. The names—all that was left of good people—rose like bruises from the metal-flake paint.

  THE DOCUMENT looked just like Australia; in fact, in a way it was Australia, its edges burned into a perfect representation of the coastline, in that distinctive, thick oblong shape of the continent, bent in the middle, with a hole at the top corresponding perfectly with the Gulf of Carpentaria. Helpfully, someone had paper-clipped an actual map of Australia to the file; he glanced from the burned page to the map and then back again, and at the yellow flag on the plastic baggy in which the paper was placed: “Forward to SECURE. Isn’t this uncanny? Doesn’t it look like Australia?—SM.”

  Remy looked around. He was back behind his desk. There was still nothing on the walls except the photo of him between The Boss and The President, nothing to make this office look like anyone actually worked here. He opened the top drawer, found a pen, and wrote, “Yes,” on the flag. Then, after a moment,
he initialed it. Before that day, when it became Australia, the page had been a simple expense report from a lunch meeting between March Selios and a man named Bobby al-Zamil, identified as “vice pre—” (the rest burned away down near the Great Sandy Desert) of a business called “Feynman-Mid-Ea—” something (burned away down in the populous regions near Melbourne and Sydney).

  Remy glanced around his office. He turned the nameplate around again, just to be sure. It said REMY. Good. He’d begun to feel he could manage the skips with nonchalance, and he thought it best to treat this burned piece of paper with the same knowing shrug. He picked up the phone and hit zero, and a few seconds later an operator’s voice came on line.

  “This is Diane.”

  “Uh. Hi. Diane. This is Brian Remy.” He looked around again. “I’ve got this piece of burned paper that looks like Australia. Am I supposed to do something with—”

  “Let me see if I can get him on his car phone.”

  A few minutes later, Remy heard the buzzing of a phone and Markham picked up, apparently in traffic. “Markham.”

  “It’s Remy.”

  “Hey, buddy. We’re just on our way back. So…did you get the Australia document I sent over? Isn’t that wild?”

  “Yeah,” Remy said, holding it up again.

  “I wanted you to see the original before the probability companies started fighting over it.”

  “The probability companies?”

  “Yeah. We’re getting bids already.”

  “Bids?”

  “You know, to study the burn patterns?” Markham just kept going, as if all Remy needed was a little more information and then the whole thing would click. “Applying models of randomness and linear motion probability to the patterns in paper burns?”

  “I don’t—”

  “You didn’t see the story in the Times? The whole booming randomness industry…partial documentation recovery and interpretation…the old thought experiment about the drunkard’s walk?…Inevitability and random patterns, assuming unreversed trajectories and nonpreferred directionality? Applying that to burn patterns? You know.”

  “No, I guess…I don’t—”

  “The whole partials pedagogy…Jesus on a Fish Stick?”

  Remy was afraid this would go on forever, and so he said, “Oh. Jesus on a Fish Stick. Sure. Look, do you need me to do anything with this?”

  “No, I just wanted you to see it, that’s all. We got everything else handled. We’re on al-Zamil right now—should be ready to work him tonight.”

  Something in Markham’s voice made Remy uneasy. “Work him?”

  Markham laughed. “Would you relax. We’re following the protocols you wrote. We adopted ’em. No more sloppiness, I promise.”

  “Wait. What protocols?”

  Markham laughed again. “Come on, don’t test me. I swear: no more screwups.” Over the phone, Remy could hear a man saying something in Markham’s car, perhaps He’s moving. “Hey, I gotta go,” Markham said. “I’ll call you when we’re ready.”

  “Wait!” Remy said, but Markham was gone. He dialed the operator again, but after a moment she came back on the phone and said that Markham was unavailable.

  Remy hung up and looked down at his desk again. Had he written protocols? He tried the desk drawers but they were empty except for some blank paper, a letter opener, and a few pens. The big bottom file drawer was still locked. Remy yanked on it, then looked around the office for something to pry it open with. He tried the letter opener, but it just bent the metal blade. Wait—this was his office. Remy pulled his keys from his pocket, and separated a small one he didn’t remember having. The key turned the lock and he pulled the drawer back.

  The files were alphabetized and primary color-coded under different titles, which were typed on the tabs. Some of the tabs (AGENCY, BUREAU, FLORIDA, ICEMAN) were intriguing to Remy, but he was worried about losing the moment, so he skipped ahead to the file called PROTOCOLS, and was about to open it when he saw the titles of the next two files, RECIPES, and the one that really intrigued him, near the end of the drawer, a tab marked SUBJECT A.

  It could be anything.

  He pulled out the file. It was thin, just two dated reports four months apart, each no more than a few short sentences. The first read, simply: “Made contact with Subject A. Continuing deep cover.” It was signed with his initials—BR. Remy read the second report, which was slightly longer:

  Subject A remains reticent, possibly suspicious, could be deep grief…too early to determine if subject is concealing information…Recommendation: continued recon, deep cover and intel gathering.

  Again, the document was initialed by Remy. He swallowed. This wasn’t necessarily April. Subject A could be anything.

  Or anyone. He turned the report over. There was a handwritten note on the back, dated what he thought was just a few days earlier.

  Took Subject A to attorney to file claim on dec. husband. Continuing to gain trust—recomm. extend cover…

  Remy’s head slumped. He opened the top drawer and found a pen. He scribbled across the top of this second short report: Cancel. Then he thought better of it, balled up the two reports, and threw them in the garbage. He tossed the empty folder away, for good measure. He felt breathless. He had convinced himself that that if he just abandoned himself to this skidding, lurching life, without questioning it, things would turn out okay. Once you started down a road, what good did it do to question the road? But maybe that only worked, he thought now, if you can trust yourself in the moments between bouts of consciousness. What am I doing in those moments I don’t remember? He fell back in his chair, closed his eyes, and felt the moment leak away.

  HE FOUND notes like this sometimes, notes written to himself, pointed questions on index cards that he’d unearth in his briefcase or his pocket: “What did you do today?” and “Where did you go?” But he never seemed to answer the notes, or if he did, it was such a cryptic response—a partial number or an acronym or some other obscure piece of work product—that it almost seemed like a taunt. He stared at this particular note, written in his normal block letters on the back of a business card that he found in his wallet behind his credit card. It said, simply: “Don’t Hurt Anyone.” He looked up.

  A bartender was staring at him.

  “Did you say something?” Remy asked.

  “I just asked if you want the usual, Brian?”

  “Oh. Okay.”

  Don’t hurt anyone. Remy slid the card back in his wallet and looked around. It was late afternoon and he was sitting in another downtown hotel lounge. He often found himself like this in the afternoons, sitting in some hotel lounge or restaurant bar. He tried to differentiate in his mind between these lounges but they all seemed vaguely similar, like this one, and it was only when he saw their odd, one-word names on his credit card bill later—Affair and Hedge and Nine and Chain, as if the words had been chosen at random in a dictionary—that the places became different in his mind. And even though the names were all different, he couldn’t help imagining them as one lounge that changed its name and its décor every few days. All of the bartenders in these places seemed to know him intimately, and he seemed to have a usual in each place—generous pours of scotch or bourbon or gin that arrived magically on paper coasters before he even had time to take off his suit coat. He could usually get in two or three drinks before April showed up, and then they had dinner. They ate quietly, without feeling the need to chatter. He appreciated this. Sometimes she’d ask about his day and he’d say it was good, or that he couldn’t remember, or that it had simply flown by. When he asked about the real estate business, she rolled her eyes and took so long to chew the food in her mouth that he often forgot the question. At dinner, he found himself ordering the same thing whenever it appeared on the menu, duck marinated in a red wine sauce and spiced with wasabi, and since he seemed to find it at so many restaurants, he thought it must be the recipe of the moment. He’d find himself wondering how the duck tasted, and so he’d
order, forgetting each time what it had tasted like the last time.

  How’s the wasabi duck? April would always ask.

  He’d shift the bite to the other side of his mouth. Mm. But he seemed to forget after each bite what it had tasted like.

  Remy thought about April as he looked around tonight’s version of the lounge, with its high ceilings and spinning fans, its smoke-mirrored walls. He picked up the restaurant’s menu; wasabi duck marinated in red wine, never failed. Twenty-eight bucks. The hostess smiled at him as she walked past. “Hi, Brian. Meeting April tonight?”

  “I sure hope so.”

  The bartender reappeared. “Looks like you’re ready for another, Bri.”

  “You know me,” Remy said, and set the empty glass on the bar.

  April came in two drinks later, wearing black pants and a short green jacket that stopped at her ribcage, like something a bullfighter might wear. It made her look long and exotic, and Remy felt that exhilarating embarrassment that he imagined was experienced by middle-aged guys with beautiful, younger girlfriends. “You look great,” he said. He stood and kissed her.

  She smiled nervously. “Thanks for doing this.”

  “Oh.” He reached for his fourth whiskey sour. “Sure.” Remy took her hand and followed her into the restaurant, listing a bit from the booze, and taking in the open stares from the tables, shadowed faces peering up in the harsh light of tabletop candles. They all seemed to be trying too hard to have a good time, to be casual, and it crossed Remy’s mind that they might be spirits of some kind, the ghosts of people who used to go out to dinner, before it became a form of patriotism. The candles agitated the flashers and floaters behind Remy’s eyes, but he couldn’t look away, the bits swarming like summer insects around flickering candlelight. Finally he closed his eyes and let April pull him through the maze of tables.