(2006) The Zero

by Jess Walter

The Boss just stared.

  “I’m not…working for the government…on some secret case.”

  “Are those agency bastards trying to steal you away from me? Or is it the Bureau?” he asked. “Look, Brian. I know you must be nervous because this job is ending, but this is not the end. After this, we’ll have plenty of other jobs. This is only going to create more opportunity. And I’m not going to forget your contributions, if that’s what you’re worried about. There is no shortage of opportunities for someone with your unique…” His pause seemed long, intentional. “Skill set.”

  Remy pulled out the credit card statement he had taken from one of the cubicles. “We make money on this?”

  The Boss sat up straight, stung. “You and I serve our country, Brian. We stepped in to do work that the government couldn’t.” The Boss tried another tack. “It’s just like we said in our proposal, Brian: in today’s world, there is no separation between civilian and soldier, between business and government. The private sector is the ultimate covert ops. We won’t win this war without using our greatest weapon—our free market economy. You said it yourself.”

  “I wouldn’t say that,” Remy offered weakly.

  The Boss waved him off. “It doesn’t matter who said what. Things were said. I’m sure you said something.” He sighed. “Look, I know how you feel. I do. Your work is coming to an end. Everything has been set in motion, and when it plays out the credit will go to other people. We will fade into the background again. I understand how that feels. But you and I will know, Brian. You and I…we’ll always know what we did.” The Boss reached in his breast pocket, pulled out an envelope, and slid it across the desk at Remy. “Here you go. Last of the seed money.” The Boss stood and began pulling on his coat.

  Remy opened the envelope, saw the bundles of hundred dollar bills. His mouth was dry. “What if I quit?” he asked.

  The Boss had turned to take his briefcase from the desk. He smiled.

  “What if I don’t do anything else?” He thought of April. “What if I just…leave.”

  The Boss considered him for a long time. “What’s this about, Brian? Are you asking for a raise?”

  “No, I’m not asking for money. I’m quitting.”

  “You’re going to quit your own operation, just as it’s coming to fruition? I don’t believe that.” The Boss smirked. “You’re free to do that, of course. You’ve done your part. But ask yourself this, Brian: If someone gets hurt because you failed to see this through to the end…can you live with that?”

  Remy felt sick. He thought about Jaguar, about Markham and Dave and Buff. He thought of Assan on the boat and the way Kamal blamed that on the terrorists, al-Zamil on the sidewalk and how Dave blamed that on the terrorists. His head fell into his hands.

  The Boss was at his ear, speaking in an insistent whisper. “I know this has been hard, Brian. I know you’ve second-guessed yourself…but do you honestly believe for a second that either one of us would be involved in anything that wasn’t entirely necessary? I’ll ignore for a moment the implication that you don’t trust me…. Surely you trust yourself.”

  Remy didn’t say anything.

  “Come on. What are you afraid of?”

  “That I’m causing something bad to happen.”

  The Boss laughed. “That you’re causing it? That’s a little grandiose, isn’t it? Look around you, Brian. We live in a divided world. You and I didn’t make that up. We didn’t make up the hole in the heart of this city, or the people who want to see our way of life destroyed. Whatever is happening now was going to happen whether we were involved or not. We’ve always known that another attack was inevitable.”

  “But these guys all work for—”

  “These guys…are our enemies. These guys have all engaged at one time in anti-American actions or thoughts or they wouldn’t be where they are,” The Boss said. “These guys hate our freedoms. You didn’t cause the seditious letters these men wrote or the conversations they had. We owe it to the people who died in this city to find animals like this, animals capable of this kind of barbarism, and stop them before they even think of it.” He seemed to be searching for a way to make Remy understand. “Look, a hunter can’t flush birds without sending a dog into the brush. My firm was hired to flush the birds. We provided a dog. A dog doesn’t ask questions. He doesn’t worry about causes. He runs where he’s told. He barks. And then…” The Boss pulled on his coat. “He waits for ducks to start falling.”

  The Boss shook his head as he buttoned his coat. “You want to know what caused this, Brian? All of this? I’ll tell you.” He looked around the ornate office, as if noticing it for the first time. “Ask yourself this: What causes hunger?” He didn’t wait for an answer. “Hunger.”

  THE GUINNESS fit perfectly in his right hand, the red shuffleboard stone in his left. Remy looked around. “I don’t think I’m supposed to be here,” he said.

  “Where you supposed to be?” asked an old man leaning against the shuffleboard table. Remy stared at him—it was Gerald Addich, the old man whose planner he’d found in the rubble. His head was dominated by those huge ears and by the spit of gray curly hair lapping his forehead. He spoke in grave, third-generation Irish, his head bowed slightly forward, as if the goddamn thing were too heavy to hold up.

  “I don’t know,” Remy said. “But there’s something happening…and I should probably be…” Be what? Remy was stumped.

  “Always something happening,” said the old man. “But if you don’t know where else to be…this place is as good as any. Your throw, Cap’m Hook.” The bar was small and crowded, and Remy was playing shuffleboard with this ancient little man, so pale he was nearly translucent in his vintage suit with a ruffled white handkerchief and gold-crested slippers. “Anyway, you can’t leave till I answer your question,” the old man said.

  “Okay.” Remy slid the stone across the cornmealed boards.

  “Hey, now, that’s got a chance,” said the old man as the disc spun and slid to the end of the boards, hung there for a moment, and finally fell. “On a planet with more gravity. Ah, you greedy old pirate,” said the old man. “You do realize that you don’t score any points if it flies off the end. I’ve explained that, right?”

  Remy took a drink of his Guinness.

  “Okay, then,” Addich said. “What did you ask? Oh, right. You wanted to know how a man knows if he’s done the right thing? Boy, that’s a doozy.” The old man stuck his bottom lip out and his chin slid away into his neck. “I’m going to venture that he doesn’t ever know.” The old man leaned forward. “But while he may never know if he did the right thing…I’ll tell you this: He generally knows when he’s doing the wrong thing. But that isn’t what you were really asking.”

  “It’s not?” Remy asked.

  “No. I think what you’re really asking, if I’m not mistaken, is about this city.”

  “The city?”

  “Not just the city,” said Addich. “This city. Listen: I know that arrogant shit bird you work for thinks he invented the place, but he didn’t. I worked for Lindsay when he was Boss and every goddamned day was a disaster would’ve broke that bully you worked for. Sixty-six in Browns and the east, Negroes fighting the PRs fighting the Guineas, it was a war in there. A goddamn war. This little three-year-old, little Russell Givens—you remember Russell Givens?”

  Remy didn’t.

  “How could anyone forget Russell Givens? See, that’s the problem: We got institutional memory like a whore on her fourth marriage. This poor Russell, he gets shot one day from a balcony. We send fifty cops in and it’s like a tickertape parade on these poor flats, ’cept with bricks and shoes and flaming beer bottles.”

  The little old guy skidded a stone down the boards and it came to rest squarely in the threes. “Look at that! Two more thick ones here, Mona!” he yelled, waving his beer. “For me and my troubled young friend—what’s your name again?”

  “Remy.”

  “Freddie. You know what just struck
me, Freddie? Russell Givens, he’d be, what, forty-something today?” The old guy shook his head. “’Bout your age. Course everyone stays at the age they die. Russell will always be three. And I’ll always be old.”

  Addich stared off for just a second. “So, yeah…Sixty-six? Transit workers go on strike…you wanna see a city shut down, put the bus drivers and subway workers on strike. Garbage men two years later, mounds of trash all over the Lower East, rotting peels, smells like the whole place died—the teachers in O-Hill, every union in the city woke up the same day and said, ‘Let’s shut this son-of-a-bitch down.’ Rockaways, Bushwick, South J, Corona—everyplace bubbling and melting in the heat of summer and it seems like every block got poorer and more racist and more violent every day—city was burning up. And we had crazy Muslims then, too, the Five-Percenters killing Jews up the heights, till someone shot their boss.” He grabbed Remy’s arm. “City was a tinderbox. Your turn, kid.”

  Remy slid a stone and again it rode the cornmeal to the end, hung on a little longer than the first throw, and then fell.

  “Firemen had to carry sticks and guns to fires. People would set fires just to get a crack at beating a fire crew—used to steal their equipment, their pants, their trucks. We send in cops to protect the fire crews, and then we gotta send more cops to protect the cops we sent to protect the firemen we sent to put out the fire. We’re gettin’ three, four fires a day, and before too long the trucks just stop going to some neighborhoods…whole blocks burning down, and right in the middle of it, like some stupid weather girl telling you it’s hot in August, goddamn Kerner comes along to tell us the one thing we know: We got racist cops and crowded ghettos.”

  The old man stepped forward and threw another stone, gliding it along the boards until it came to rest against his first throw. Just then a waitress arrived with two more beers. “Pay the girl, Bluebeard. And tip her like you had a chance with her.”

  Remy handed the waitress a ten.

  “And the hippies!” The old guy shook his head and looked up at Remy, his eyes like tiny polished stones. “Village looked like a goddamn circus. Radicals at Columbia running around yelling, ‘Against the wall, mothers—’ protests every day, protesters protesting protests. And not like today, these ladies in jogging suits marching on their lunch hour. We had ex-cons with bricks. Honest-to-God agitators. Cops didn’t know whose heads to crack, so they just cracked ’em all.” He shook his head. “Cracked every goddamn one. Your throw.”

  Remy concentrated so that this stone wouldn’t go off the edge, and threw it about halfway, along the right rail. It drifted off the boards, hung a moment, and dropped.

  “You have got to be the worst goddamn shuffleboard player I ever seen,” said the old man.

  “Bottom line, I suppose it was garbage that killed Lindsay. And in the end it all turned to garbage. The whole city was garbage—schools bad, services bad, crime up, parks and subways a horror show, corrupt cops, and everything we did made it worse. Pay the sanitation workers more to get the garbage, and the teachers strike. Send cops to stop the protests and they beat the protesters, which causes more protests, so we gotta send more cops.”

  He turned, grabbed Remy’s arm, and spoke in a low growl: “This city—is a big goddamn place, kid. A monster. You can’t imagine all the stuff that can go wrong here in a day. This was the city Lindsay ran, the city I had a part in running. For ten goddamn years this place was unlivable. It was a sinkhole. An ungoddamnlivable sinkhole. And then you know what happened? Do you?”

  Remy waited. The old man got even closer, so near they could’ve kissed. “It got worssse,” he hissed. “Seventy-six…seven? Bottom rung of hell. Drugs. Gangs. Bankruptcy. I almost moved myself, four, five times.” Then the old man leaned back and thought a moment. “But then something happened. Something…unexpected. A miracle.”

  “What?” Remy asked.

  Addich took a long drink of beer. “I went…for a walk. One night I couldn’t sleep. I got up early, before dawn. Got dressed. And I went for a walk. It was spring. Air was fresh and clean. And it was amazing…the shopkeepers misting the flowers, kids delivering papers, and there was this couple standing on the stoop next to my building, holding hands, on this date that neither one of them wanted to see end. And it hit me. This is a hard place. God, it’s a hard place. But it wakes up every morning. No matter what you do to it the night before. It wakes up.”

  The old man backed away. He stepped up to throw, but turned and considered Remy’s face. “When I saw those lunatics in the Middle East on TV…jumping up and down celebrating because some nut jobs had murdered three thousand people, you know what I thought?”

  Remy shook his head.

  “I thought, Fuck you. We used to kill that many ourselves in a good year. This city, it doesn’t care about you. Or me. Or them. Or Russell Givens. This city cares about garbage pickup. And trains. That’s the secret…what the crazy assholes will never get. You can’t tear this place apart. Not this city. We’ve been doing it ourselves for three hundred years. The goddamn thing always grows back.”

  THE MOON was just a shaving, a bright sliver of lemon peel hung between two buildings. A tuft of cloud drifted below the moon, underlined it, and then skidded away. Remy was standing at the bedroom window of his apartment, staring out between fire escapes at the buildings across the street. He stepped away from the window and let the curtain fall. He rolled his neck, pulled on a pair of jeans, and checked his watch. It was quarter to four. He sat on the edge of the bed to tie his shoes, checking first to make sure there was no blood on them.

  So he would take a walk, to the one place where he might still be able to make sense of things. Remy grabbed his coat off a chair and left his apartment, walked down the hall, down the stairs and out onto the stoop. He looked down the block. It was empty; sidewalks glistened in the dark. The air was cool and clear, as if a new shipment had arrived by truck this morning, the old stuff flushed and packed in garbage cans. From the street, Remy looked up at his apartment window. It was dark and implacable, and he had the odd feeling that he might never see his apartment again. He started walking. The streets shined as from a fresh rain, but the sky was icy clear. He breathed in the morning smells: truck exhaust, sewage, bagels—but he didn’t find that smell, and he was surprised that he couldn’t come up with the odor. When had that happened? He had assumed the smell would never leave him. Now he had only a vague memory of it, but the odor itself was different from its memory, the way melancholy proceeds from sorrow.

  Remy stepped between two parked cars and crossed the empty street. He paused when he saw a familiar car parked a block from his apartment, illegally, next to a hydrant. Remy made his way over to it and looked down, to the driver’s seat, where Paul Guterak was leaned back, asleep, snoring lightly, his mouth slightly open. He wore a puffy winter coat, lined with horizontal seams, and binoculars around his neck. Across his lap was a notebook. Remy could see writing on the open pages: “0212: Subject BR returns to apartment. 0224: Lights out.” Remy let his hand linger on the windshield for a moment, then tapped lightly on the window.

  Guterak started, looked around, and then up at Remy, confused. Finally, he lowered his window. “Oh. Hey. I was just—” But he couldn’t think of anything.

  Remy crouched by the window. “Can I see that?”

  “Oh.” He handed Remy the notebook. “Sure. You know…you asked me to—”

  “Yeah, I remember,” Remy said. The log went back months, although it skipped days at a time. Each page had a date written on top; beneath the date were three columns, showing in military time where and when Remy went and where and when he left. Remy flipped through the entries and saw April’s apartment, Carla and Steve’s house (“stayed in car”), trips to the library and the courthouse and any number of bars and lounges. He saw Nicole’s apartment and the office of Secure Inc. Twice Paul tracked him to the airport, but didn’t follow him inside. It was strange seeing his life like that, and it was far less mysterious than Remy
had expected. He found he remembered just about everything on the log, and he was surprised at how useless it was, seeing the places and times without any context, without any why.

  Paul yawned. “I’m sorry it’s not more complete. I did the best I could. I’m pretty rusty. I lost you a lot and I kept forgetting to do it.”

  “No. It’s fine,” Remy said. He handed it back through the open window. He looked down on his friend. “Did I tell you how much I liked your commercial?”

  “You did? Thanks, man. That means a lot to me.”

  “You were great.”

  “You didn’t think I looked fat compared to that smoker?”

  “No. You looked good.”

  “Thanks.” Paul sat up in the driver’s seat and shook his head, as if trying to clear his mind. “Hey, can I ask you something?”

  “Sure.” He leaned against the window frame.

  Paul looked around, as if worried that someone was listening. “Do you ever feel like things got away from you?”

  Remy smiled.

  “I was sitting there the other night, with Tara, watching myself in that cereal commercial, and I swear to fuggin’ God, I couldn’t for the life of me figure out what happened. I mean, I should be as happy as shit. But the one person I wanted to see it with…was Stacy. Of all the people…that ungrateful cow. But I swear to God…it was like…I had this moment…I honestly didn’t know how I got where I was. Do you know what I mean? Does that ever happen to you?”

  “You should go home, Paul,” Remy said quietly.

  Guterak nodded. He looked down at the steering wheel, but then looked back up at Remy. “Tara left.”

  “Why?”

  “I don’t know. The commercial aired. I ran out of fuggin’ hair gel. Who knows?” He shrugged. “Maybe I talked too much about that day again.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “How come you never talk about it? Every other cop I know talks about it, even if they weren’t there. But you…you never talk about it.”

  “I don’t really remember.”