(2006) The Zero

by Jess Walter

  “Sure,” Bishir said, “I can see that.”

  A knock came at the door and they all looked up, except Remy.

  “That’s probably our friend,” Markham said, a bit nervously. “Okay. Are we ready for this, Brian?” Markham walked to the door and opened it. “Come in,” he said. “Thanks for coming down.”

  In came a tall, regal-looking man with braces and brushed hair, wearing a pressed golf shirt that hardly moved as he walked into the room. Remy wasn’t terribly surprised that it was Dave, the caramel macchiato agent.

  “Hello, Bishir,” Dave said.

  Bishir nodded.

  “Shawn Markham,” said Markham, offering his hand to the agent.

  “Dave,” said Dave.

  “That’s my partner, Brian Remy,” said Markham.

  “Good to meet you, Brian,” said Dave carefully, as if they’d never met. “So, what are we serving this morning?”

  “Pecan encrusted sole,” Markham said.

  “Of course,” Dave said to Markham. “I’ve heard some good things about this recipe. Heard you used it to justify sticking your noses where they don’t belong. You’re not eating…Brian, was it?”

  Remy ignored him. He cracked a tiny bottle of gin and downed it.

  “Yeah, Brian Remy,” Markham said. “He’s doing some contract work for us.”

  Dave settled in at the table. He unwrapped his cloth napkin with a snap of the wrist. “So how is it going, Bishir? Are these minor league spooks treating you okay?”

  “Can’t complain,” Bishir said, his mouth full of sole.

  Markham slid a plateful of fish in front of Dave, who took a bite and nodded his approval. “So would you mind telling me what this is all about, Brian?” Dave asked. “Why two rogues from the paper department are holding my CI hostage?”

  Remy ignored the question. He felt oddly at ease, nonplussed. He would just drink until this all went away. This seemed like a good strategy, although he noticed that the big flake was in front of his left eye again.

  Dave waited, and then became agitated. He shot a glare at Markham, who looked away. “I don’t even get an answer?”

  “I just want to be left alone,” Remy said.

  “Oh, really. You want us to stay out of your way. Is that it?”

  Markham chewed nervously on his thumbnail.

  “So you really want to endanger this investigation, the security of the nation, over what…turf?” Dave stared at Remy.

  Remy was getting dizzy crouched like this, so he dropped to his knees. Turning back to the drawer of tiny booze bottles, he was momentarily dazed by scale: Gulliver on a bender. He decided on Crown Royal and it went down like an easy compliment.

  Bishir broke the icy quiet. “These guys thought I was holed up with an old girlfriend—this chick, March.” He pointed his fork at Markham. “It was a crazy-ass theory, but you know what, if I could’ve warned one person, it might’ve been her. She was a sweet girl. Good lay, too.”

  Markham shrugged. “Yeah, we kind of whiffed on that one.”

  Dave set his fork down and spun in his chair. “All right,” he said. “Let’s cut to the proverbial chase.”

  “You know, I don’t think that’s an actual proverb,” Markham said.

  “What?” Dave asked.

  “You said proverbial chase. No such proverb.”

  Dave stared at Markham with disbelief before turning to Remy. “What is it you guys want…was it, Brian?”

  “Yes,” Markham said. “His name is Brian.”

  “I told you,” Remy said. “I don’t want anything.”

  Dave leaned his head back and his Adam’s apple moved up and down like a freight elevator. “Come on. We both know you didn’t pick up Bishir accidentally. So what do you want?”

  “All I want is for this to go away,” Remy said. “All of this. All of you.”

  “Oh, that would be nice, wouldn’t it?” Dave sputtered, his angular face reddening. “Look. We have been piecing together the members of this cell for more than a year. If you think for one second the agency is going to step aside so you can hijack our investigation…” His lips formed a thin scowl. “We need this! You want to screw the bureau, fine. But I don’t think you fully appreciate the pressure we’re under.”

  Vodka, Remy thought, and the pattern appealed on some basic level: clear, brown, clear, brown, clear. He cracked the seal, tossed the little cap, and drank it, like rolling a tiny red carpet down his throat. “Leave me alone.”

  “Leave you alone?” Dave crossed his arms defiantly and the anger seemed to be percolating in his red ears. “Fuck you, Brian. You want to go over my head, fine. I suppose you think that you’re going find some people on the Hill or some holdover in the media eager to hear that the agency might be operating slightly—” He looked for the words.

  “Out of bounds,” Markham contributed.

  Dave winced as if those weren’t the words he wanted.

  The room was quiet for a moment. When Dave turned back to Remy he was smiling solicitously. “So we’re at an impasse. Okay. But I have to believe we can come to an agreement. Right? That we can work together? Otherwise, you wouldn’t have called us. I mean—we have a common enemy, right? The bureau? So, just tell me. What do you want?”

  Remy wanted brown. He opened a bottle of Glenlivet.

  “We want our piece,” Markham said from the kitchen, looking at Remy for approval. “We want credit. We don’t want our work to go to waste.”

  “And that means—” Dave said.

  “Joint task force,” Markham said, still looking at Remy, as if for approval. “Operational, tactical, command…we want our half of the pie.”

  “Your half? You’re out of your mind,” Dave said to Markham and then turned back to Remy as if he were the reasonable one. “Come on, Brian. You hassle my informant, stumble across a cell we’ve been investigating for months, endanger a deep intel project, and now you expect to get—”

  “Joint. Task force,” Markham repeated. “Or we go to Congress. Maybe even the press.”

  “Press?” Dave laughed. “Who you gonna call? Morley Safer? Edward R. Murrow? Come on. There is no press anymore.”

  “Joint task force,” Markham said. “Final answer.” He untied his apron.

  “Wait. I know what this is.”

  “Yeah?” Markham said. “What is this?”

  Remy drank.

  “This is a shakedown,” Dave said. He leaned back in his chair and crossed his legs. “That’s all, a half-assed, political stab at creating a permanent seat at the table. You’ve finished your mandate and your funding is going away so you’re pulling paper out of garbage cans while you try to get a foothold…turn yourselves into some kind of an actual investigative operation. You’re like the bureau eighty years ago, under that swish Hoover. Well, I’m sorry, but I’m not going to write your funding for next decade. No way. Key investigative assistance,” Dave said. “My final offer.”

  “Are you serious?” Markham laughed from the kitchen. “‘Key investigative assistance?’ Why not just say we answered the phones? Got coffee for you guys? Come on. You’re offering us a handjob, Dave. You come in here on your knees offering us a handjob? What is that?”

  “He’s the one on his knees,” Dave said, pointing to Remy, who was indeed genuflected before the most holy drawer of plastic booze bottles. But then Dave’s mouth twitched and he smiled at Remy, and stepped toward him. He spoke under his voice. “Come on, Brian. Be reasonable here. Take a minute and think about what you’re asking.”

  “I am not asking for anything,” Remy said, and he took a plastic bottle of Gilbey’s and drained it. His head felt like it was moving in tiny figure eights. The fleck in his left eye seemed to be growing.

  “So, it’s screw-with-the-agency day, is it? Fine. You want to screw with me? Screw with me?” Dave’s voice screeched. Then he laughed bitterly and stepped in close, so that he was standing directly over Remy. “I know things, Brian. And I won’t hesitate t
o start talking about what I know.” When Remy said nothing, he spat, “Do you think I’m bluffing?”

  Remy looked up through the flashers and floaters into the flared nostrils of the older man. “I have no idea what you’re doing.”

  Dave hissed, “Goddamn you.” But then he stepped away, rubbed his mouth, and looked up at Markham for a long moment, and then back down at Remy. “Okay,” Dave said finally. “I can’t give you Joint Task Force. I just can’t. But here’s what I can give you: Cooperating Agency. Solid second chair. You get one suit standing in the back at the presser and you can print up your own release about your involvement. But that’s it. That’s all you get.”

  Markham shot a what-do-you-think glance to Remy, who couldn’t seem to get drunk enough fast enough.

  “Cooperating agency,” Markham said, pointing with his spatula, “two suits at the presser, joint release, and our logo on the dais.”

  “Your logo!” Dave boomed. “Your fu—!” His jaw fell. “Your…”

  Markham continued. “And we make it clear that we developed our intelligence on this cell independently, through the Loose Materials section of the Liberty and Recovery Act,” Markham said. “If you think about it, it’s a good deal for you. There might be some information you gathered that might make some people uncomfortable, which we could provide some cover on. Some information that might even be seen as…illegal under the old rules.”

  Dave’s eyes narrowed, as if he were considering this.

  Markham could see this was his move. “Sure. You can attribute anything…uncomfortable…to us. Take advantage of the temporary latitude we’ve been granted for domestic intelligence gathering.

  “And,” Markham continued, “we all still get to fuck the Bureau.”

  Remy couldn’t remember if he was on clear or brown, so he went with a tiny bottle of designer raspberry vodka. But it was too sweet. He looked over at Bishir, who was ignoring all of this, concentrating on the pecan fish on his plate.

  “But…and this is important…” Markham said. “We get second mike at the press conference.”

  “Second mike!” Dave screeched again. “Come on! Be reasonable. Do you want our cars, too? Our sat-phones? Our chopper? You want my office?” He rose out of his chair and bent down so that he could see into Remy’s eyes. “Come on, Remy,” Dave said, all spotty and streaky. “Be reasonable. You got us over a barrel. We both know that. But for the good of the country—”

  Markham and Bishir both laughed at this, Bishir choking for a second on his sole.

  It was quiet. Dave straightened up, stared off into space, and finally sighed. “Fine. Cooperating agency, but there’s no question that we’re lead, right?”

  “No question,” Markham said. “Of course.”

  “We maintain operational and tactical control…we’ll provide daily briefings to you on everything. And you can have a guy there when it goes down,” Dave continued. “We make a joint release and you get your”—he choked on the word—“logo on the dais. But all I can guarantee is third shot at the mike during the presser. Third mike. That’s all I got, fellas. I’m not giving you our spot no matter what you say.”

  Markham glanced over at Remy, who looked away and reached for another bottle. He was dizzy, and his hand missed. He stumbled and fell sideways…and in that moment it was as if something popped behind his left eye: a piercing pain shot through his skull and he leaned forward and clenched his eyes tight. He fell forward, against the minibar, then curled up in a ball, and rolled on the floor, moaning.

  “Brian?” Markham asked.

  He cried out in pain, his hands covering his face as he crawled across the carpeted floor toward the other wall.

  “Fine!” he heard Dave snap above him. “You can talk second at the press conference.”

  Remy reached the wall, leaned against it, and opened his eyes. This wasn’t right. There was a big problem with his left eye, a dark shadowy band across the middle of his field of vision. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened only the left one, but the black band was still there, as if the center of the room had been torn away, like a page in a magazine. And then the pain seemed to gather at the base of his skull and make another advance, until it was nearly unbearable and it doubled him over, the anguish blossoming outward and from within, like black water bubbling up from the earth. Like blooms of smoke roiling into a clear day.

  PART THREE

  The Zero

  “MR. REMY, ARE YOU AWAKE?” Interesting question. Technically he had to be awake, since he’d heard her ask it. And yet, if he really were awake, would she have to ask? Wouldn’t it be obvious? Maybe he’d dreamed the question. How had April described her grief—as a fever dream? A dream—that would help explain the gaps, and the general incongruity of life now—the cyclic repetition of events on cable news, waves of natural disasters, scientists announcing the same discoveries over and over (Planet X, dinosaur birds, cloning, certain genetic codes), the random daily shift of national allegiances, wildly famous people who no one could recall becoming famous, the sudden emergence and disappearance of epidemics, the declaration and dissolution of governments, cycles of scandal, confession, and rehabilitation, heated elections in which losers claimed victory and races were rerun in the same sequence, events that catapulted wildly out of control, like plagues of illogic…as if some faulty math had been introduced to all the equations, corrupting computer programs and causing specious arguments to build upon themselves, and sequential skips—snippets of songs sampled before their original release, movies remade before they came out the first time, victories claimed before wars were fought, drastic fluctuations in the security markets (panic giving way to calm giving way to panic giving way to calm giving way to panic), all of it narrated by fragments of speeches over staged photo ops accompanied by color-coded warnings and yellow ribbons on trees.

  “Mr. Remy? Can you squeeze my hand?”

  Another tough question. Was he supposed to answer or squeeze? Would a squeeze be an answer? What was it that April said? I couldn’t walk around pretending any of this made sense anymore. Perhaps nothing made sense anymore (the gaps are affecting everyone) and this was some kind of cultural illness they all shared. But just as Remy was getting his mind around the question, he felt a woman’s hand in his and he became aware of the pain behind his eyes; it roared and squealed into his head like a train pulling up to a platform, lights flashing, brakes screaming, and then it changed, became more specific, like someone nailing his left eye to his skull, hammer blows, cracks against a three-penny, and a pitched agony sought out the vacuum behind his eyes, wiping away the epiphany he was trying to have, just as Remy was putting words to it: What if I’m the only one aware of this? A lonely, chilling thought, and he wasn’t sorry to see it slipping away, too—leaving only a momentary impression, like a print in sand, before it blew away. He squeezed the hand.

  “Hurts,” he rasped. He saw the usual streaks against the black, squirreling away when he tried to focus on them, but only half as many now, and only on the right side; the left was nothing but this sucking agony, a string of razor wire run through his left eye and into his brain, being tugged from the outside so that it strained everything on the way through. He tried to open his good eye but it was bandaged shut along with the bad one. He was grateful for the remaining flashers and floaters on the right side, so that there was at least something to see.

  “I’ll get you something for the pain,” the voice whispered.

  “Thank you,” Remy said. He reached up and touched the heavy bandages over his eyes. The tape covered most of his forehead and cheeks.

  “And I’ll tell the surgeon you’re awake. He wants to talk to you.”

  “What day is this?”

  “It’s Wednesday.”

  “Oh.” Then he heard her footsteps on the hard floor and Remy wished he’d asked a different question, a question about April. Wednesday meant nothing to him. For a few minutes there was only the pain and then more footsteps and the smel
l of briny cologne.

  “How are you today, Mr. Remy?” The doctor mispronounced it, with a long E, but Remy didn’t correct him. “I’m Dr. Destouches. Orb cutter.” The cologne doctor’s voice was smooth and cool, like a disc jockey on a Sunday night jazz radio show.

  “It really hurts,” Remy said.

  “I should hope so. That’s the only way I know I’ve done my job.” The doctor adopted the voice of a lecturing professor. “Post-surgical eye trauma presents a truly unique sort of pain, Mr. Remy. It’s not localized, like a broken leg or a burn on your arm. You can’t touch it; it’s a generalized pain—but it’s not an ache. It is, at the same time, both sharp and diffuse.”

  Remy just wished the man would stop talking about his pain.

  “The body views eye surgery as such a severe violation,” Dr. Destouches continued, “a unique shock on every level. The eye is not designed to be cut into, like the skin; the central nervous system doesn’t know what to make of it when someone goes poking around on the top floors.”

  “What was the surgery for?” Remy asked.

  “You don’t remember?”

  “No.”

  The doctor laughed. “Well, since I see your signature right here on the release, I’m assuming that’s the anesthesia speaking and that we didn’t randomly crack open your head and try reattaching your retina without your permission.”

  “No,” Remy said. “I’m having trouble keeping track of things. Everything skips.”

  “That’s the anesthesia,” the doctor said. “You’ll start to get your bearings back in the next few hours.”

  “No,” Remy said again. “It’s been that way for a long time. There are these gaps.”

  “Yes, it can seem like that,” the doctor said, “but don’t worry. Once the anesthesia wears off, and the pain medication kicks in, you’ll be clear as a bell.” He shuffled pages again. “As for the surgery, I’m sorry to report that we were unable to reattach the retina. It was too far gone. So the vision in that eye…is severely compromised, Mr. Remy. After we take off the bandages you may still see some blurry images, especially on the edges, but in essence that eye is…gone. Black. Kaput.” He trailed off, but gave Remy little time before speaking again.