(2006) The Zero

by Jess Walter

  “Target is inside. Move into positions,” Buff said into his wrist. The other agent eased out of the car and began wading into traffic, as Buff let go of his smothering hug and stepped in behind the other agent.

  Remy was left on the sidewalk, his feet glued to the spot. He turned to his left and saw, in the building he’d just left, Dave and Markham and another agent from the wire room emerge on the street. They began crossing the street in the middle of the block, and then Dave turned to look up the street, to where Buff was crossing at the corner, his head bobbing above the cab line.

  “Come on. You’ve got to be kidding me,” Dave yelped. He began moving faster.

  Buff turned, saw Dave and began running for the building.

  “Wait,” Remy said helplessly. He looked up to the building Jaguar had gone into and saw two men suddenly appear in the top-floor windows, wearing black Kevlar jackets, rifles strapped across their backs. They began rappelling down the face of the building. “This is crazy,” Remy muttered, to no one. And that’s when the phone at his waist buzzed. He reached down and saw the number. April—

  “HELLO?” REMY stood in a crowd, breathing heavily. He was covered in sweat, as if he’d been running. “Hello?”

  “Yes?” asked a confused man in return. “Do I know you?” The man had a long burn on his face, like a baby’s footprint. He was sitting on a wheeled trunk.

  “Oh. No. I’m sorry. I was just,…” Remy looked around. “Talking to myself.”

  “You said ‘Hello’ to yourself?”

  “I guess I did.” Remy tore his eye from the man’s face and looked around. He was standing at the gate of a subway station, between MetroCard machines, in front of a map encased in Plexiglas. Remy moved past the confused man to the wall map, which showed subway lines snaking toward the bottom of the island and then going hard left—red, blue, orange, green, and brown—like the plumbing schematic for a high-rise. A huge piece of pale green chewing gum was stuck to the map. After a moment, Remy pulled the gum away and saw the You Are Here arrow. He was at a subway stop at the train station.

  Remy turned away from the map. He put his hands to his head, as if he could locate his memory manually. April had called. Yes. Remy pulled his cell phone out, but there was no service down here. His breath shortened; he felt a twinge of the same creeping claustrophobia he’d felt that helpless morning (standing on the street…paper raining…no-service message on his cell…)

  Remy looked around wildly. He tried to concentrate, but there was nothing. She had called. Was she leaving on a train? She’d be going west, home to Kansas City, or maybe to San Francisco. Perhaps a bus? The bus depot was only a block away. No, she wouldn’t take a bus. Maybe the train to one of the airports; he remembered there was a line to Newark Airport. The platforms would be across the terminal, two underground blocks away. He tried to remember: Was it New Jersey Transit or Amtrak that went to Newark?

  Remy ran down the stairs and sprinted along the tunnel that ran beneath the street. He bumped people at the end of the hallway and was leaping up another set of steps, head clouded with memory (moving slowly up the hot stairwell…coughing stragglers with smoke-stained faces going the other direction) when he spun around a group of soccer players and crashed into a kiosk—like a machine gun nest of consumer goods. And he had the strangest thought as he tried to put the things back that cascaded down around him: magazines and candy bars, pistachios and gum, cigars, razors, pain relievers, batteries, film, pens and pencils (how long could a person survive on the contents of a single kiosk?) “Hey asshole!” said the clerk, but Remy was running up the ramp.

  He came into the great terminal, but here he was slowed by the crowd, by streams of subway riders with backpacks and bags and crosscurrents of rail riders with briefcases and rolling suitcases, their faces flipping past his good eye like snapshots. Though he’d grown used to having a blind side, now and then he still bumped someone and mumbled his apologies. He stopped in the middle of the huge terminal for a moment, surrounded by travelers, their voices low and humming, like droning bees on a nest. Something felt wrong, and familiar (turning back suddenly…stopping on the stairs…trickle of people moving down…).

  The crowds thinned and Remy ran across the terminal toward the ticket windows for the commuter trains—NJ Transit and LIRR and Amtrak. A handful of people were waiting on lines at the ticket windows. A woman was wrangling two boys in matching Giants jerseys. One of them looked up at Remy and covered his left eye.

  (emerging into the empty plaza…white paper and smoking pieces of steel and bodies…and for the briefest moment he was alone, paper falling…he’d never heard the city so quiet…and then: a deep, low moan…)

  He bounced from window to window, reading the train schedules, the list of departures: Trenton and the NE Corridor. Dover. New Brunswick. The Acela Express.

  “Where the hell is Newark?” he yelled. People on line turned and stared at him. Finally he found the gate number, and was turning to run when he heard a familiar jingle.

  April! He had service again. Remy nearly dropped the phone pulling it out.

  “Where are you?” Remy asked.

  “Where do you think I am? Making myself scarce.” It was Markham. “I assume you’re shredding documents. That’s what I’m headed to do. Obviously…any work you did for us no longer exists.”

  “What?”

  “God, what a mess that was. The bureau and agency are gonna say it was some kind of joint operation, but it was a clusterfuck is what it was. Twenty competing agents busting in doors and swinging through windows, dropping through vents. The crossfire was nuts. Two bureau guys got hit. They’re lucky they were wearing vests and that the targets were the only ones…you know…neutralized—”

  “You killed them?” Remy’s head fell to his chest.

  “Well…yeah,” Markham said: another stupid question from Remy. “They were making suicide videos. They were holding a machine gun, Brian.”

  “You got all of them?”

  “All but Jaguar. They figure he got spooked by something because he never made it up to the apartment. He got on the elevator but they think he got off on two, went down the stairs and slipped out a loading dock in the back. But they don’t think he got far. I would not want to be that guy right now. It’s only a matter of time.” And then he paused. “You know, the more I think about it…maybe you can race time. But I don’t think you can win.”

  Remy surprised himself by hanging up. It was as if his hand snapped the phone shut on its own—as if his hand had finally had enough of this lunacy. He stuffed the phone in his pocket. He felt the urge to leave. Find April and just go with her, wherever she was going. Maybe back to San Francisco. He edged his way through the crowd. Markham called again, but he ignored it. He moved through the station, watching the flow of people. And then Remy recalled Jaguar’s stare. All but Jaguar. And then came an awful thought: Soft target. Crowds. Major disruptions. Easy media access. Home videos and camera phones to maximize the horror. He stopped and looked around the train station.

  He was here to find April—

  Soft target.

  —wasn’t he? His phone was ringing again. It wasn’t Markham’s number. Or April’s. He opened it and held it to his head.

  The voice was slick and cold but didn’t seem angry. “Did you follow me, Brian?”

  Remy looked around the station again. “Listen—”

  “No. You should listen to me.” Jaguar spoke in his steady lecturer’s voice, a tone that Remy recognized from their other meetings: “For on that day there will be shining faces, blithe with joy, and there will be faces blackened with dust—the faces of the faithless and the graceless.”

  “Look,” Remy said. “I swear…I didn’t—” But he didn’t know what he had done, or what he hadn’t done. “Where are you?” He scanned the crowd. “Are you here?” He spun around slowly.

  A couple in matching sweatsuits, holding hands—

  A woman with headphones pushing a
baby stroller—

  Two young men in scrubs, holding paper coffee cups—

  “You know, it’s ironic,” Jaguar said over the phone. “I used to tell my students that there are a hundred ninety-two mentions of Allah’s compassion in the Koran. And only seventeen instances of his vengeance. And yet, it is always the vengeance that seduces. Just like here. You claim to follow a simple prophet of poverty and compassion and build temples celebrating riches and power.”

  “Where are you?” Remy asked again.

  “It occurred to me when I saw you talking to that agent on the street, when I realized that I was being betrayed—”

  “No—” Remy began, but Jaguar kept talking.

  “It occurred to me that I’ve been wrong all these years. Maybe power and vengeance…are exactly what we should build temples to. We marvel at the zealotry of a man who would blow himself up for a cause. But imagine, too, the desperation. The fear. And maybe even something alluring—something…primal.”

  Remy continued to spin slowly.

  “Isn’t this what you wanted?” Jaguar asked. “This?”

  Two girls in Catholic jumpers—

  A fat man in custodian’s coveralls—

  “Let’s go somewhere and talk. You and me.”

  “You and me,” Jaguar said. “Yes. We had interesting talks. Here’s something we can talk about: Does a man ever realize that he has been the villain of his own story?”

  Remy wasn’t sure which one of them he meant.

  “Perhaps on his deathbed?” Jaguar asked. “Does he realize it then?”

  Remy looked over his shoulder:

  An old couple wearing matching silk coats—

  A banger in a Bulls jersey—

  “All along,” Jaguar said, “I was the target?”

  Remy started to say that he didn’t know. But he was tired of saying that. “I’m not sure it even mattered,” he said finally.

  “And the others?”

  “They all worked for us. None of them knew about the others.”

  Jaguar was quiet for a moment. Then he asked “Why?” quietly, without bitterness.

  Again, Remy wanted to say that he didn’t know. But that just didn’t seem true any more. “Hunger,” Remy said.

  The phone went dead. “Hello?” Remy rubbed his cheekbone. “Hello!” He spun again. He was standing in the heart of the station terminal, at the center of this swirling maze of faces, all of them looking to him—and, finally, he had nothing left. His arms went to his sides and his head fell back.

  And that’s when he saw April.

  She was wearing a pea coat and a woolen cap, straining with two heavy wheeled suitcases, moving down a ramp toward the waiting area for the New Jersey Transit trains. And if there was nothing else, he thought, perhaps there was escape.

  “April!” Remy ran toward her, jumping a railing, following the line of departing trains. But he couldn’t see where she’d gone.

  He ran down the stairs toward the outdoor platforms. He caught a glimpse of her two platforms away, separated by two sets of rail lines, stepping into a shelter. She pulled her suitcases in behind her. “April!” he called again.

  He ran up the stairs, back down the ramp and down the other stairs, his hand sliding down the railing. When he reached the bottom of the stairs, he paused for a moment on the narrow platform. The glass shelter was fogged; he couldn’t see inside.

  He looked down the track—no train yet—then made his way toward the glass shelter. The automatic doors slid open. There were only a handful of people inside, sitting on plastic chairs, reading newspapers and paperback books. One man was talking on a cell phone.

  April’s suitcases were stacked in front of her. In one hand she was holding her ticket up, as if it might be collected any time. In the other hand she held a train schedule she was reading. Her pea coat was pulled up tight around her throat. She looked up slowly, taking him in with her dark, imploring eyes. The ticket slipped from her hand but she didn’t seem to notice, and her hand remained raised, graceful, half-open, as if she were awaiting a dance partner. Then her eyes shifted a few degrees, so that she was looking over his shoulder.

  Remy turned to follow the path of her vision, and through the open door he saw Jaguar coming down the steps to the platform. His face was wet and lined. His gray wool coat was bunched up around him, as if he had something bulky beneath it. And there was something in his hand, a phone, maybe.

  Remy turned back to April and opened his mouth to say something—but she was staring at him with such a look of…forgiveness that it took his breath away and he only wished he could stay forever in that moment.

  “You came,” she said—

  NOTHING MORE than air at first. And it wasn’t so bad. He’d read somewhere that buildings, too, were mostly air. Maybe that was the truly dangerous part: air. Maybe the rest was manageable, the steel and paper and people. Maybe it was the air you had to watch out for. It sucked inward, Remy with it, and then thrust out, like a bellows, the way the ocean gathers water for a crashing wave. When it came, the blast at Remy’s back wasn’t hot or cold. It had no qualities other than sheer insistence; noise filled every space, concussive and sharp, not a boom but a crack, heavy with glass, and accompanied a split second later by the deep thud he’d expected, a resounding bass thunder like someone trying to frighten him to death, and a blinding flash and then finally, when he could stand the noise no longer, the heat came—searing—and he was airborne, free, light…like paper, tossed and blown with the other falling bits and frantic sheets, smoking, corners scorched, flaring in the open air until there was nothing left but a fine black edge…then gone, a hole and nothing but the faint memory of a seething black that unfurled, that lifted him and held him briefly on the warmest current—

  IT WAS dark. No flashers or floaters. Nothing. Brian Remy dreamed or imagined that he was dreaming: He was on his stomach, staring down from the sky as great seams opened and people vanished into the rips. He dreamed that people ignored the tears in the sky and went about their business, filed their taxes, and that every once in a while one of them would fall up, disappear into the cracks, like falling into a manhole, and the rest would just go on with their lives. And he dreamed that people paused on the street, looked up and spoke to him in muffled voices, asking how he was doing and if he could hear them.

  He dreamed that a woman sat next to his bed and held his hand.

  April?

  No, it’s me, said March Selios.

  You got out?

  I was the last one.

  Where are you?

  Here. We’re all here. We’ve always been here.

  Is April…

  But the woman’s voice changed. “This is going to hurt a little,” she said, still holding his hand. And in the dream he was lowered into a scalding bath, and the pain broke him and later, in the darkness, he dreamed that he was spread out on his stomach on a board, and that people moved pins in and out of his back, perhaps marking the movements of armies in battle. He dreamed that people jabbed him with needles and poured liquid fire on his skin and then asked if he could feel it. He knew better than to answer questions in dreams and so he lay there, dreaming that they tugged on pieces of skin from the backs of his arms and legs, and that they removed tiny squares to sell to tourists. It wasn’t bad, this dreaming…the gaps were fluid and he no longer lurched, but skipped from moment to moment with no anxiety, no expectation of comprehension.

  He dreamed of Edgar as a baby, but with a tree trunk for a neck.

  And the dreams became even more outlandish: hushed conversations and bedside ceremonies, imaginary doctors offering absurd treatments. In one dream, they rolled him onto his back, just long enough to pin some kind of medal on him, before rolling him over again. In another dream, they moved him to a new room, and people rolled him from side to side, and he dreamed that they gave him a roommate, a man burned in a truck fire, and that they put a television on for them both, a television that turned its own channels
—slipping insanely from one reality to another, so that just as he got interested in the sound of strong men lifting kegs of beer a gap would interrupt things and he would find himself on the other side listening to an argument about gay adoption between a minister and a transvestite. And he dreamed that the man in his room, the man burned in a truck fire, told him to “Holler if you hear something that sounds good.” But Remy knew better, and the television skipped happily from rising poll numbers to the winners of ballroom dancing competitions, from a double date between teenagers to men worrying about the rate of inflation. And Remy recognized that this had been his condition. This was what life felt like. This.

  The televised dreams were especially clever the way they could skip away from anything unpleasant, go from death to music videos, and pass on information without informing. The way they could jump from channel to channel, from site to site, from wrenching tragedy to absurd comedy, with only the laugh track to differentiate them. One day he dreamed two men debating whether the recent bounce in The President’s popularity was entirely due to the recent victory over a terrorist cell, in which four of the five members were killed and only one bomb was detonated…on a mostly empty train platform…killing only six…including the bomber…and severely wounding a retired police officer—

  And when the dream television was off, Remy imagined that people came to see him—Guterak talking about his new job as spokesman for a tear gas company; Edgar shuffling his feet and mumbling that he had to get back to his base; The Boss pausing during a cell phone conversation long enough to ask if Remy was going to make it.

  Dream trays of food came and went, and people asked if he needed anything, and through it all Remy clung to sleep. He knew that if she were right, and this had all been a kind of fever dream, that he should just stay in it and she would have to come. Life skipped along—snowboard races and cooking competitions and manatee rescues. “Holler if you hear something that sounds good.”

  And one day he dreamed that his roommate was sent home. A window was open and he could smell burning leaves, and hear horns outside and the sounds of grinding traffic. The TV that day was offering a particularly insane dream in which grown-up child stars ate insects in an allotted amount of time. A nurse was laughing as she carefully removed the tape and gauze from his face. “That boy is crazy,” she said. “I used to love him on the TV. You ever watch that show he was on?” When the last of the gauze came off, Remy could feel the light behind one eyelid, and he could see the old flecks in his good eye. It was the most heartbreaking thing he’d ever seen.