The Zero

by Jess Walter

  “Cereal?”

  “Yeah. That’s what they want me for. This new cereal called…” Paul hesitated, then just spit it out. “First Responder.”

  “First Responder?”

  “Yeah,” Guterak said. “They needed one smoker and one cop for ads and PR and shit. They were gonna go with actors, but they decided they wanted true stories and real guys on the boxes. The smoker’s a guy named Brad. I like him. He’s a solid guy. He’s on the flakes and I’m on the one with marshmallows. My agent says I was real lucky to get the marshmallows.”

  “Yeah, I could see that.”

  “Yeah.” Paul shrugged, a moment of unusual circumspection.

  Remy looked over at his old partner and friend. He thought about confiding in Paul that he’d cheated on April, but he wasn’t sure he wanted to admit it to himself. Paul’s hair covered the peak of his head like spring snow, cut high above the ears and melting on his forehead. He turned the steering wheel gently with one hand and the car listed that way, and Remy felt as if he were on the ocean again. He grabbed the armrest and held onto it, trying to fix himself in the moment.

  Remy closed his eyes and the streaks did a slow waltz for him, bits gently circling one another in the dark, like a choreographed fight. He opened his eyes and looked out the windows at the flattened landscape slowly dragging alongside the turnpike—brush-lined riverbanks and ledges of condos, freight cars stacked and lined like old shoeboxes, river-flat refineries, and, across the gray slick of water, the brick, steel and glass anthill of the city. April was there, in one of those buildings. And that’s when Remy had an idea.

  He fell back against the headrest. “Paul. Can you do something for me?”

  “Anything, buddy. You know that. I’d do anything for you. I mean…within reason. You know, obviously I wouldn’t eat garbage off a sidewalk, or sleep with a man…well, I mean, if it meant your life or something…you know, depending on how much shit. And I guess what the dude looked like.”

  “I need you to follow me.”

  “Follow you.”

  “Right.”

  “Follow you?”

  “Yes.”

  Guterak scratched his head. “You mean…like keep track of what you’re talking about? That kind of follow?”

  “No. I want you to physically tail me. Follow me around and see where I go. What I do. Keep track of it. Don’t let me see you.”

  “You don’t want to see me.”

  “Yeah. I don’t want to know you’re doing it. And then write down everything I do and tell me about it afterward. Make up a report.”

  “Who do I give the report to?”

  “Me.”

  “And why am I doing this?”

  “So I can figure out what I’m doing.”

  “Uh-huh. You want me to follow you so you can figure out what you’re doing.”

  “Yeah. I need to see if I’m hallucinating or if I’m really involved in something…something bad.”

  “Oh,” Paul said. “Okay then.”

  “You’ll do it?”

  “Of course I’ll do it,” he said. “I’ll use my black helicopter. I’ll shove one of them fuggin’ GPS transmitters in your ass, put a wire in your teeth. Get one of them Air Force drones to track you. Or…remember that movie where they shrunk those guys and put ’em in the president’s body? I’ll do that.” Guterak shook his head and laughed as he steered the car through traffic. “You fuggin’ kill me, man.” He looked over at Remy and shook his head. “You know, you get funnier every day.”

  “WAIT. WAIT.” A stout woman wearing jeans and a bulging fanny pack came into April’s living room. “Look, that was great, but we didn’t quite get it. Do you think you could repeat that exchange?” Remy was sitting on the couch with April, across from a young man sitting on a chair in front of them, leaning across his knees as if he were breaking something to them. The young man had olive skin and thick eyebrows that ended just inches from his bushy hairline. But it was in this boy’s eyes that Remy saw April and especially March and old Mr. Selios, eyes that made him realize right away that he was staring at Gus—April’s brother Augustus Selios.

  Behind Gus, a man with a television camera on his shoulder and a utility belt around his waist was scurrying to change positions as the woman with the fanny pack moved the power cords and a bundle of audio equipment. The lights in the room were blinding.

  “We need to get this again in a two-shot,” said the fanny-pack woman cheerily. She and the cameraman both wore windbreakers reading From the Ashes. “That was amazing, Gus. Really powerful.”

  Gus smiled in spite of himself and then worked to clear his face.

  “Okay,” said the producer in the fanny pack. “When I say go, I want you two to repeat what you just said. Just like you did it before. Natural.”

  “Sure, Tina,” said Gus. Remy searched Gus’s face for connections to April, but they seemed to have less in common the longer you looked at their faces. Behind him the cameraman moved into position in the dining room.

  “Mike pack,” said the cameraman, and Tina the producer adjusted the microphone pack strapped to the back of Gus’s belt so that it wouldn’t be visible in the shot. “I wish we could use a boom.”

  “Well, we can’t use a goddamn boom,” the producer snapped, and then smiled, and asked, “Ready?” She pointed to Gus, who nodded and took April’s hands in his.

  “Look, Sis.” Gus stared into her eyes. “I’m sorry I wasn’t here for you, then. Afterward, I mean. I just…couldn’t face it. I guess I was…” He stared out the window, and took a practiced pause. “…angry. Angry at myself for not being here.”

  April glanced at the camera through the corner of her eye and then looked at Tina the producer. “Don’t look at me,” she said in a stage whisper.

  “What am I supposed to say?” April asked.

  “Say something like, ‘That’s okay, nothing you could’ve done would’ve brought March and Derek back, anyway,’” Tina said helpfully.

  “I don’t think I can say that,” April said. She looked at Remy, who tried to look supportive, even though he felt like he’d been banished to the farthest corner of the room.

  Tina the producer and her cameraman huddled for a moment near him but Remy could only make out a few words: first unit and truck and boom and editing bay.

  Then Tina turned and smiled. “You know what? Okay. That’s okay,” she said. “Pete says we have the audio and we can cut away. No…we’re good. Why don’t you just do your goodbyes and we’ll take care of it in editing.” She chewed a thumbnail and shrugged to the cameraman as if that were all she could do.

  April and Gus stood awkwardly, like actors in a scene that’s just broken. Gus drank water from a plastic bottle and rolled his shoulders while April looked around the room, as if looking for some place to hide. Tina grabbed April’s arm. “Look, April, I totally get your discomfort. Totally. And I respect it. In fact, I don’t want you to do anything that makes you feel phony. That would be creepy. Do you know why we call it ‘reality’? Do you? Because it’s best when it’s…real. The realer the better. That’s what our show is about. Taking these stories of tragedy and letting people inside.”

  April looked at Remy again.

  “So…you just forget we’re here. Just say goodbye…to your brother,” Tina said. “Just say goodbye, whatever you feel like saying…that you love him, whatever…that it’s just the two of you now, you know…talk about your grief…and pretend we aren’t here.”

  “It’s kind of hard,” April said.

  “Sure. I understand. Just try to be as natural as possible. You know, give him a hug. Cry if you want to. The most important thing is that you act as if we’re not here. Just do exactly what a normal person would normally do…when seeing your last living sibling for the first time since your sister…died such a horrible, unbearable death. This is reality; what we want is real emotions.”

  Gus shifted his weight and looked around the apartment. “Maybe we could
just, like, hug at the door…and I could say something like—” His face melted in sorrow. “You look so much like her.” When he was done his face returned to normal.

  “Yeah, that’s good.” Tina pulled a piece of thumbnail off her tongue and stared at it. “Or…I have an idea.” She walked to the window and looked down. “Pete.” The cameraman came over, holding the camera by its handle like a suitcase, as Tina pointed out the window to the street below and they spoke in hushed voices. Pete shrugged as if it would be okay.

  “Listen,” she said. “Let’s do this downstairs. We’ll shoot it two ways. First, I want you two to go down there and say goodbye and we’ll shoot it from up here. You can have some privacy right there on the sidewalk below us. We’ll get audio from the mike packs and you two just…be yourselves. Just make sure you stand just to the right of the stoop down there. You know…just talk for a second and then hug…maybe grab her head, Gus, like you’re consoling and convincing at the same time. And then, Gus, you walk away. Don’t look back. Then we’ll come down and get it again close in a two-shot. Okay? Everyone ready?”

  April looked once more at Remy but he didn’t know what to say, and finally she and Gus walked out the apartment door and started for the stairs. Remy was left with Pete the cameraman, who seemed infinitely bored, and who began setting up by the window while Tina the producer looked him over. “Your girlfriend seems a little uncomfortable.”

  Remy didn’t say anything.

  Tina shrugged. “Well, this is going to be a great segment. Her brother is…really…really something. We’re gonna run it over the holidays.”

  “Ready,” said Pete, and Tina moved over to the window. Remy walked over too, and looked down on the street as Gus took his sister in his arms and they hugged on the sidewalk below. She looked so tiny down there. She started to glance up at the camera, at Remy, but Gus took her face in his hands. Then he said something to her and walked away without looking back, the camera tracking him every step.

  THE HANGAR didn’t appear to be emptying at all. Remy stared out at the alphabetized signs—above him, AM-AZ—hanging over tables covered with paper, stacks and stacks of white paper. The white space-suited technicians were going over each piece, giving them out one by one to other people who filed them in the rows of filing cabinets beneath the strings of fluorescent lights. At the end of the hangar, two forklifts were moving palettes of filing cabinets.

  Something was different about the paper, though, and it took Remy a moment to realize what it was. He walked over to the nearest table and saw what it was: These pages weren’t scorched or bent or wrinkled. In fact, they were neatly stacked. Remy took a page from one of the stacks and was surprised to see that it didn’t smell at all like The Zero. It was an electric bill from a house in San Leandro, California, dated months after the attacks.

  Almost out of habit, Remy patted himself down for his medication.

  “You shouldn’t be handling that without gloves,” came a woman’s voice from behind him.

  Remy put the power bill back in the stack. “These aren’t even from that day.” He walked over to the woman, who was standing between two signs, one reading PARTIALS, the other PERSONAL/MISC.

  The woman’s head tilted slightly; her voice took on a rote quality. “The Liberty and Recovery Act mandates the recovery and filing of documents. It doesn’t specifically limit us to those documents recovered that day.”

  “So…you go through garbage cans…or what?”

  The woman’s face flushed. “Perhaps you should have this discussion with someone higher than me, Mr. Remy. I’m following my job description. I understand why you’re in a bad mood, but taking it out on me is not going to make the mistake go away.”

  Remy felt awful. “I didn’t—”

  She shook her head. She was tall and thin, with adult acne scars. “Trust me. This is embarrassing enough without you mocking me,” the woman said.

  She handed Remy a piece of burned paper in a plastic baggie. “The reason the note was misfiled was that we mistook the signatory for the beginning of the date it was written.” She winced. “I know. It’s a bonehead mistake and there’s no way, after all this time, that we should still be making mistakes like this.”

  Remy looked down. He was holding a note written on the letterhead of March Selios’s law firm, scribbled in felt-tip pen. Most of the right side of the note was burned away, and he could see why someone might’ve thought it was the beginning of a date.

  Hey—

  We need to talk. I changed my mi

  I can’t to go through wi

  you understand.

  March

  Remy turned the note over. There was nothing on the other side. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t implying that you’d done something wrong.” He laughed. “I couldn’t do that. I don’t even know what you’re supposed to do.”

  Her eyes welled with tears. “Now you’re belittling me.”

  “No.” Remy reached out and touched her arm. “No. I promise I’m not. I didn’t mean anything. Look, can I just…ask you something?”

  The woman shrugged.

  “Do you think…” He laughed. “Is it at all possible…that this is…all an illusion, that this is all in our heads?”

  The woman looked around the vast airplane hangar, crews of workers filing millions of pages of documents. Her face flushed again and her eyes welled with tears. “Oh, go to hell,” she said.

  EDGAR WORE clothes so similar to the ones he’d been wearing the last time Remy had seen him—baggy pants, hooded sweatshirt, tiny earphones—that Remy wondered if they actually were the same. And yet, there was something different about him; he seemed…bigger. Had Remy been away so much lately that he’d missed a kind of growth spurt? He was parked a block behind Edgar, and on the other side of the road, watching him through binoculars as he moved down the suburban street, with that hip-hop bounce.

  When he got out of sight, Remy started his car and drove a few blocks, until he was in front of the boy again. He parked at the crest of a hill, in a dentist’s office parking lot, across from the back entrance to a mini-mall. He trained the binoculars on the sidewalk across the street.

  Edgar came loping up the hill. Then he suddenly stopped, climbed over a retaining wall, and dropped out of sight into the mini-mall parking lot. Remy turned the key, pulled out, and drove around the block, finally turning into the back of the lot. The sky was low and overcast, as if a gray tarp had been thrown over the local suburbs.

  Remy tooled through the parking lot, trying to find his son. The mall was shaped like a U, with a courtyard in the center and small stores clinging like barnacles to both the inside and outside of the U. As he drove, Remy ran his eyes over the storefronts—cell phone services and guitar sales and Army recruiting and bagels and ice cream and tanning beds and golf supplies and rattan imports and Remy could feel his blood pressure rising. Where was Edgar? Chiropractic and party supplies and maternity clothes. And Remy could feel something snap inside of him: I’ve had enough of this strobe-life, he thought. Fuck this! Why am I doing these things? Car stereos and tacos and espresso and computer repair. Why am I sleeping with April’s boss? Why am I haunting my own son? Tax preparation and futons and insurance.

  “Goddamn it, Edgar. Where are you?” If there was something he wanted to tell the boy, then goddamn it, he was going to tell him. He could feel his face flushing. And just then he felt powerful enough to simply decide to throw off this strange jerking life, whatever it was—hallucinations or an illness or just the way life was lived now. A life is made up of actions, and if he wanted the world to be different, then he only needed to act differently. Every minute of every day was an opportunity to do the right things, to make something of this mess. He didn’t need to be unfaithful to his girlfriend. He didn’t need to be involved in some shady investigation that may have hurt innocent people. And he certainly didn’t have to drive around wondering what he wanted to say to his own son. When he found the boy, he would j
ust open this car door and climb out, grab the boy by the shoulders, and say…something. Windshield glass and physical therapy and copies and—

  THIS TIME, Remy didn’t bother protesting, or asking what had happened, or taking his medication, or even pleading with her to leave him alone. His skin was covered with a slick sheen of sweat, not all of it his own, and even though he couldn’t quite remember exactly what had preceded this moment, as he watched Nicole climb out of the big king-size bed and pad off to the bathroom, he knew it was too late. “Whew,” Nicole said. “You do understand that the root of quickie is supposed to be quick, right?”

  The sheets were twisted around his ankles. He looked around the room, apparently Nicole’s bedroom: in each corner was a four-foot-tall Asian pot with a burst of dead sticks and flowers coming from it. On the wall in front of him was a triptych of abstract paintings, all with smears of pink on them. Next to that was a family photo of Nicole, her husband, and their son. When he heard the shower come on, Remy rose and slid into his pants, put on his shirt and his socks and his shoes, pulled his jacket off a chair, and slinked out of Nicole’s apartment. He took the elevator with a woman holding a terrier. The dog sniffed at him and then looked up at the woman as if to confirm her suspicions. On the first floor, the doorman was reading the Daily News, but he looked up in time to wink. Remy hurried past him, out the door.

  On the street he saw a car that looked like Guterak’s, but it sped away from the curb. Remy watched cabs slide down the avenue toward midtown, and wondered if he had enough cash for one. He pulled his wallet out to see how much money he had, and he saw the edge of his “Don’t Hurt Anyone/Grow Up” card. He slid the card out, read it, and slid it back into his wallet. And that was the first time it crossed his mind that there might be another way to consider this problem, that there might, in some way, be two Remys, one he knew and the other he didn’t, and that these two men might be as different as—