(2006) The Zero

by Jess Walter

  “Ooh,” she said, “we’re in a hurry.”

  They made their way downstream and were outside baggage claim when Remy saw a flash of Hawaiian shirt behind him and suddenly pulled her toward the door and outside. “Come on.”

  “What about our bags?” April asked.

  “Leave them,” he said.

  They stepped into the giant horseshoe of the airport turnaround, the air buzzing in the late afternoon with cars and vans like insects on a carcass. Remy could hear his new cell phone chirping as he hustled April toward a cab. He opened the door for her and she told the cabbie the address of their Union Square hotel. “Just a sec,” Remy said.

  He ran back and pitched the ringing cell phone into a garbage can.

  THEY UNDRESSED quietly, and began making love, and at first Remy found himself hurrying, afraid that he would lose track before they finished. “Hey, hey,” she whispered. “Slow down. I’m not going anywhere.” And indeed, there was a syrupy languor in this hotel room in the late afternoon that caused him to believe her, and they fell into a rhythm that seemed to go on all afternoon, until Remy found himself experiencing a kind of overwhelming sentience that was disconnected from what they were doing, his body moving on its own while he found himself thinking pleasurably about the sounds of car horns and trucks on the street outside, and the San Fran! tourist magazine on the nightstand (with a photo of that famous, stupid crooked street on the cover) and tracking the drops of sweat on his own face, and listening to someone watching television in the room next door and, finally, with the sun setting through the open curtains and casting a fevered glow across their bodies, he fixated on the inside of her ear, a pink curling seashell of cartilage that amazed him with its delicacy and its utter efficiency—skin stretched over it like a drum, and somehow, all the sound in the room (Oh yes mmm yes) flowed into it, to be sorted, defined, and acted upon instantaneously. And this made him wonder about the other human miracles he took for granted: speech and smell and his own shattered vision, and at that very moment, such thoughts were vanquished by the sheer tyranny of nerve endings, those in his fingertips and, of course, those in the suddenly intense elsewhere, which was the only feeling right then, a wet hot friction that caused a low groan to rise in his throat and finally…

  “Well,” she gasped when he fell off her. “That was certainly…a lot of sex.” She rubbed his belly and pulled a sheet across her own midsection as they lay on the big king-size bed, breathing deeply. She put her head on Remy’s chest. “What’s the opposite of premature?” she asked. “Postmature?”

  “Sorry,” he said, and he remembered Nicole, and squeezed his eyes shut to make her go away, lost in the swirl of failing tissue.

  “Were you going for some kind of endurance record? Or just seeing if you could make me taller?”

  “I was distracted,” he said. “Sorry.”

  “No, it was nice,” she said. “I always wondered what it would be like to have sex with an oil derrick.”

  Remy stood next to the bed.

  “Go get me a wheelchair and we’ll go to dinner.”

  He walked to the window and looked outside. The sidewalks were full of people with briefcases, making their way down the city’s hills, leaning back as they walked, as if they were being sucked down into the creases of the city, as if they were winding down a drain.

  “Every man has the same ass,” April said, leaning up in bed. “When you’re young they’re all different, but by the time you get to a certain age…same ass. So why is that? There are a thousand varieties of women’s asses, but you all have the same one.”

  Remy came back to bed. April had gotten a little bottle of wine from the minibar, and she drank from it with one hand while she held the remote in the other, running through the channels faster than Remy could register the programs.

  “I can’t see anything,” he said. “What are you watching?”

  “Electrons,” she said.

  So he watched electrons with her, the screen flickering with transient images, and every once in a while he caught one, but they all seemed like pictures from an older America: a woman drove a farm truck; someone ran on a soccer field; a house burned; a couple was married; and then there were the faces, thousands of faces that failed to register anything but the idea of a single shifting face. Aside from the speed, there was something hypnotic and familiar, something intoxicating in this view of life, something that he recalled knowing. But finally the fluttering television was too much like the disorder in his eyes and Remy had to turn away. He reached for the room service menu. “Want to get a real bottle of wine?”

  “That,” she said, patting him on the thigh, “is exactly what I want.”

  Remy was flipping past the dinner menu toward the wine list when he suddenly turned back. The menu was contained in a three-ring binder, and a separate page had been slipped in, handwritten, and showing that day’s specials.

  “We have to leave.” Remy got up and began dressing, the menu open on the bed below him to the dinner special: wasabi marinated duck.

  AT NIGHT the homeless in San Francisco operate like cabbies, she explained to him as they hurried down the block. “Trust me, I know this city. If you make eye contact, they’ll offer to give you directions or walk with you to where you’re going. There’s a whole underground city of the homeless and they come up at night to get money for wine and slices of pizza. And there is always one willing to show you to your hotel for a buck or two, or take you to the best club or restaurant. They all know each other and they wave at each other when they pass, and sometimes roll their eyes, just like cabbies with bad fares. I think there’s even a union,” April said, “like the Five-One-Six or something, the international brotherhood of the homeless and indigent.”

  She talked as they hustled down the street with only their carry-on bags, Remy occasionally looking back over his shoulder. He saw what looked like a flash of Markham’s Hawaiian shirt a block back, in a crush of people waiting to cross Geary. Remy and April walked two blocks to Sutter, doubled back, and ducked into a dark corner hotel, the lobby bustling with a Japanese tour group waiting to go to dinner.

  “We should go with them,” April said. “Pretend we don’t speak English. Take pictures of everything. Buy postcards and snow globes.”

  Remy pulled her through the lobby and out a side door, where they were met by a black man in torn jeans and an engineer’s cap. His teeth were gray and placed at random, a handful on top, fewer on bottom.

  “You folks need directions?” the man asked. “I know this city better’n you know your wife’s poodum.”

  “We’ll need to see your union card,” April laughed.

  The man ignored her as Remy fumbled in his pocket for cash. He handed the man a five-dollar bill. “There’s a white guy in a Hawaiian shirt. Brown hair, really young looking. If he comes this way, I need you to stall him. Ask him for money, knock him down, anything.”

  They kept moving, zigging up streets and down their crosses as April turned and read the marquees of theaters and the names of stores and bars. Finally, Remy pulled her into a hotel lounge and they sank low into a table in the corner. “We’ll just sit here for a while and then I’ll go check in,” Remy said.

  “That sounds nice,” said April sweetly, drunkenly. “We can wear wigs and grow mustaches so no one recognizes us. And I’ll learn to sew. I’ll sew all our food. We’ll live off the grid, in a cabin built from empty wine bottles.” When the waitress came he ordered whiskey for himself and a glass of red wine for April. Remy looked back over his shoulder to the street outside. Faces moved past like the flickering images on the TV.

  April rubbed her foot against his leg. “We could take off all our clothes and crawl under the table,” April said. “They’ll never think to look for us there.”

  The waitress brought their drinks and Remy drained his whiskey and gestured for another.

  April raised her wineglass. “Just for the record, Mr. Remy, I am having the time of my life.” />
  Remy smiled. “Good.” But then he had a troubling thought. He picked up his menu and leafed through it quickly, running his index finger down the rows of appetizers and entrées. When he saw that it wasn’t there, he sighed, set the menu down and fell back in his chair.

  “Relax,” April said. “You’re doing a great job, whatever it is you’re doing.”

  “Have you decided?” The waitress was standing over them.

  “Yeah. I have,” he said, and with a relief that bordered on joy, Brian Remy ordered the yellow pepper, black bean, and artichoke quesadilla.

  THEY MADE love in the new hotel room, too, and when they were done Remy took a long shower. He closed his eyes and let the hot water cascade over his face, pelting his eyelids and his forehead. He opened his mouth and it filled with water and he spat it out, over and over. When he came out April was sleeping and he watched her for a moment, the slow rise and fall of her breasts.

  Finally, Remy dropped his towel and climbed into bed, nestling in behind her and staring into the tangle of her dark hair. He kissed the top of her head and she stirred slightly. She looked back over her shoulder at him, smiled, and faced the other way again.

  “How was your shower?” she whispered.

  “It was good.”

  “Good. I like showers. I like to let the water run right over my face like I’m standing in a waterfall.”

  They lay there quietly for a while, until her breathing caught up to his and for a moment they were inhaling and exhaling together, and then her breathing began to pull away again, with those cute little puffs of air. It occurred then to Remy that they had no clothes except the ones they’d arrived in, which were now lying on the floor. They’d either have to go back to the airport to get their luggage or go shopping.

  “Listen, tomorrow—” Remy began.

  “Shh,” she said. “No tomorrow.”

  HE WOKE at ten to the sound of a light knocking at the door. April was still asleep. He looked up. The walls in the room were off-white, and the room had a light oak armoire that contained the television, refrigerator, and stereo. The door was still deadbolted shut. “Yes?” he said.

  “Housekeeping,” said a voice on the other side.

  “Can you come back?” Remy said.

  “Chure. I comb back.”

  Remy sat up and looked around the room. It was smaller than the other hotel room, nothing in this room but a bed and a small desk with a business phone. He called downstairs for coffee, fruit, and bagels.

  “We could stay here forever,” she said from the bed.

  “You think so?” Remy asked.

  “Just run from hotel to hotel, screwing and pretending someone’s after us.”

  Remy didn’t say anything.

  “We’ll change our names every day. Today…I’ll be Monique. Who are you?”

  “What?”

  “Who are you going to be?”

  “Uh…Steve,” Remy said.

  “Steve and Monique. Good. Okay, who are we? What do we do?”

  “I don’t know,” Remy said.

  “Monique is a jewel thief. She’s fifty-two. A former actress and figure skater from the old Soviet Union who defected as a teenager, but after the Cold War ended she missed the old intrigue, so she works for an international cartel stealing jewels from wealthy industrialists and other assholes who capitalize on poor workers.”

  Remy looked back at her. “Monique doesn’t look fifty-two.”

  “She’s had a lot of surgery.”

  “So who’s Steve?” he asked.

  “A dentist. From Akron, Ohio.”

  “Yeah…I don’t think I want to be Steve.”

  “Okay,” she said. “Then I’ll be Steve. You be Monique. Come here, Monique, lie on your back and show me your mouth.”

  And then a thought bobbed to the surface and he had to ask it. “April,” Remy said. “If Derek hadn’t died…is there any chance you and he—”

  She looked stung and her eyes moved almost imperceptibly to a point just beyond him. “No.”

  “But you still loved him. You said so.”

  “Yes,” she said. “I did.”

  “Was it the other woman?”

  “No…I don’t think there was really anything between them,” she said quietly. “In some ways it was…incidental.”

  “So what…you just couldn’t forgive him for doing that?”

  “Something like that,” she said. “Look, I don’t—” She sat up and reached for her shirt, tugged it on without a bra and pulled the sheet up around her waist. “We were having so much fun, Brian. Why’d you have to—” But she didn’t finish. She picked up the remote control and started running through the channels again. Remy watched the TV go from one reality to another and again—it was mesmerizing—and he thought about how familiar this was, the way the television skipped from news to sports to music videos, the way these imperceptible gaps led from sorrow to humor and pathos, from a game show to televised real estate listings to a panel talking about books. But this time, the pictures moved too slowly for April and after a minute of trolling inanity she turned off the TV and hurled the remote across the room. It hit the wall and fell in pieces of plastic and double-A batteries.

  THEY BOUGHT new clothes in a store called Fugue. She got tight leather pants and a little spaghetti strap tank top, and Remy bought faded jeans and a powder blue dress shirt. Remy carried their old clothes in a shopping bag. They went to a boutique shoe store and picked out a pair for each other: hers had straps that wrapped around the backs of her ankles and he got low-cut boots with square toes.

  “Wow. We look hot,” she said when he came out in his new shoes. “I kind of want to screw us.”

  They hopped in a cab and April told the cabbie to take them to a romantic restaurant, so he dropped them off at a little place in North Beach, where they had lunch and a bottle of Chianti in a sidewalk café. The wine was gone before their entrées arrived, and they had another carafe and lingered over a split bowl of spumoni.

  “What’s your names?” asked the walnut-eyed Italian waiter.

  “I’m Steve,” April said. “And his name is Monique.”

  “Steve,” the waiter said, looking at Remy. “Monique. Can I tell you something?”

  “You can tell us anything,” she said.

  The waiter proceeded to tell them how he’d been raised in a vineyard and hotel on the western coast of Italy and how he’d gone into debt over some gambling expenses and escaped to the United States to work for an uncle, who had kept him in a kind of indentured servitude at the restaurant ever since. Remy didn’t know if he believed the story, but he liked it very much.

  “How old you think I am, Steve?” He put his face close to Remy’s. He looked to be about fifty, Remy thought.

  “I don’t know…forty?”

  “Come on,” the man said. “I look sixty easy, yes? Well what I am, I tell you, is thirty-eight, Steve. That’s all. Thirty-eight. An’ you know why I look so old, Monique?”

  She was resting her chin in her hand, smiling. “Why?”

  “Because I never fall so much in love like you two.” The waiter held his hands out between Remy and April, as if he were performing a wedding. “I never find no one make me so happy.”

  “You’ll find someone,” April said.

  “No. Not me. No more.”

  “Sure you will.”

  “No. It’s okay.” He seemed to be looking for words. “In America,” he said, “everyone thinks every story have a happy end, yeah? You’re not happy about one thing, what do you do? Sue each other. It’s so stupid. How can every story be a happy end? Someone got to be sad.”

  A SIGN on a light pole advertised an End of the World Party at a club near the Haight, and April wanted to go somewhere in their new clothes, so they took a cab and waited on line with people at least a decade younger, overgrown boys in sideburns and girls with lower back tattoos rising from their pants like bursts of hair, all of them bouncing on the balls of
their feet and yelling into their cell phones. Remy and April stared at the door and listened to the thumping for about thirty minutes until a thick bouncer took twenty bucks and waved them past and they walked through an awning, around an iron gate and down a staircase into a cavernous basement with pillars, floor lighting, and a low ceiling. A disc jockey was playing punkish electronic music on a simple turntable set up on milk crates, the sound a slush of guitars, synthesizers, and sibilant voices, punctuated by that same thud of drums, merely suggestive from the outside, insistent now that they were on the pulsing dance floor.

  It was so crowded that all they could do, all anyone could do, was bounce up and down, jerking their heads, everyone occupying his own airspace—and for such a writhing, wriggling mass of people, Remy was surprised how little they touched each other. He tried to place the music, but his points of reference seemed more than dated, possibly anachronistic—David Bowie covers played by robots? Inside, the crowd wasn’t as young as it seemed on line, but it felt to Remy as if these people had all been given some sort of manual before they arrived explaining how to act in such a club. They all danced the same, heads jerking, bodies coiled, no partner in sight, and they raised their hands at the same time, but most of all they knew how to communicate with each other, bobbing in to the left ear of the listener so that, from a distance, every conversation looked like a mother bird feeding her chick.

  There were no tables, and everyone along the walls was dancing, and yet people seemed to have drinks, so Remy began to search for the bar, and that’s when he saw a staircase to the left of the stage, lined with people trying to get a drink.