(2006) The Zero Read online

  “No. He’s not here right now.”

  “But he’s…”

  “He’s fine. He’s at a senior citizen function. I think they went to a casino.” Tony Addich took the planner and looked through it. He shook his head. “He used to work for the city, in the sixties. He’s retired now. Suffers from dementia.”

  “Yeah,” Remy said. “But see, I found this at—”

  “Yes, thank you,” said Tony Addich, and he closed the door in Remy’s face.

  Remy stood on the porch for a minute. He looked around the neighborhood again. Should he knock on the door again? Ask who his father knew named Remy? All of a sudden he wished he’d kept the—

  GRAY DUSK, smoke-tinged and heavy, crept up from the horizon. Remy was standing outside Famous Ray’s on Sixth, trying to decide if he was hungry, when he noticed a picture of March Selios with a phone number below it. The window in front of this Ray’s was being used as a makeshift bulletin board, covered with desperate flyers, the whole storefront papered with pictures of the missing, arranged in crude rows like a mockup of a high school yearbook. This was a different picture of March, one he’d never seen before, but it was definitely her, smiling politely in a living room somewhere, maybe when she was younger. Remy stood in front of the window and looked past the reflected glass into the flatness of all those photographs, March Selios among her people, like members of a lost tribe, their images trapped forever on the inside of this window. Each picture was glued or printed on a sheet of paper with a description of the missing person and phone numbers to call. Some of the notes were pleas for mercy, as if the missing had been kidnapped and might be released if the kidnappers found out they had two children, or had just overcome cancer; others were even more emphatic, punctuated with exclamation points and descriptions of the kindness of the person, their hardworking drive, their love of family, and punctuality—as if these things could somehow help in identifying them. The corners of the pages were beginning to curl. There were victim walls like this every few miles in the city now. They sprouted up in parks and at hospitals, on schools and on subway platforms—anywhere people could think to tape up pictures. As soon as one photo went up, people rushed from their apartments and houses to fill the entire wall with pictures. There could be no single photograph of the missing; every wall had to be covered, every space filled. And as a survivor, you had to stop and look at the pictures because that was what was required of you. Of course, these weren’t missing people anymore; they were dead people now. Everyone knew they were dead. There were no stories of people from these walls being found alive (and still: the dream of amnesiacs wandering suburban hospitals) and yet Remy stopped and looked anyway, and as the walls made this quiet shift from the missing to the dead, he looked at them differently, mentally riffling the faces and pausing on the familiar—a glimmer of recognition and hope—until he remembered that he’d just seen that face on the wall in Washington Square, or at St. Vincent’s, and eventually Remy came to wonder if maybe he hadn’t known them all, every one of these people, and when he stepped away from the walls, he sometimes saw those faces on the passing bodies, in the stares of strangers—such looks of sorrow and bewilderment, such gazes of disbelief and betrayal.

  He noticed distinctions on the walls, too, that he couldn’t help making. Remy had read once that America was a classless society, but the walls of missing and dead disproved this. These walls were testaments to class, and even though the pictures were all jumbled, Remy could mentally break them into three strata. The first: bankers, lawyers, brokers, executives and their assistants, mostly white, some transplanted browns, mostly in suits or tuxedos or dresses, or photos from their weddings or their college graduations or company Christmas parties. Some of the younger ones, like March, were in casual clothes: with family or, more often, outdoors, hiking or vacationing in some canyon or on a beach in the Caribbean. These people were always smiling in their death photos, not exactly as though they were happy, but as if they’d been told at some point that they had nothing to complain about.

  The second class was comprised mostly of firefighters, a few cops, and these were nearly all men, or boys, most with mustaches, in old xeroxed pictures, in uniforms, in their official portraits, shaggy sideburns or military haircuts. They were rarely smiling, but had an eager severity. They were ready. If they were pictured in candid shots, their faces were invariably washed out, as if the photographers were always too close…too proud. These people all had a look that Remy had seen on the faces of people who died too young—as if they’d known—a look that said this was simply more than they bargained for, that they had only wanted a life in which they made a little bit of money and lived comfortably. They seemed like good people: white, black, and Latino, all with that look of someone who had just arrived somewhere. Remy could imagine thought bubbles above their heads: It will be easier for my kids.

  And finally there was the last stratum, the workers who had been mostly invisible before, faces on the subway or at a bus stop: black and Hispanic, or foreign-borns, so many names heavy in consonants or vowels, the grunts who staffed the restaurants and cafeterias, the mailrooms and custodial sheds. These pictures were grim, like mugshots: work IDs and grainy family portraits and Polaroid-framed moments of forced relaxation. These people all seemed exhausted, as if they’d known disaster before this day, too, like flood survivors clinging to trees. Often, the missing person wasn’t even the focus of the photograph—you could see two other people had been cut away from the picture and all that was left was poor Jupaheen in a secondhand suit, standing in a building lobby, hands folded in front of his lap. Bleeding patience.

  Remy was lost in the faces when he glanced over and saw a guy standing next to him, a Middle Eastern man in his sixties, about Remy’s height, wearing a beautiful wool coat, with razor-short hair, round glasses, and several days’ growth on his craggy face. “Do you want to know what I have always believed?” he asked, with a dentured whistle, and the faintest shadow of an accent.

  “Okay,” Remy said.

  The man turned back to the wall. “I have always believed that there are two kinds of people: those whose every day is a battle to rise up, and those whose every day is a battle to fit in. There are no other kinds of people. No races or religions or professions—you are either trying to rise, or trying to fit. That is the only war, between the risers and the fitters. That’s all.”

  Remy looked back at the pictures. What was this man saying, that it was democratizing, all these people dying together? Remy couldn’t see it that way, didn’t imagine them coming together in the end, grabbing hold of one another in burning corridors or comforting each other as the heat rose and the ground beckoned. He’d seen too many people fall alone and it was too easy to imagine the rest crying alone, huddling alone, and burning alone—generally being alone, which, no matter how we live, is always the way we go. Remy looked down at his own hands, calluses on the pads and palms, gray dust in the creases of his nails.

  “We miss Communism,” the man said. “Not as a form of government, or economics—obviously that was a failure, as rife with corruption and disincentives as any other system. But the ideal, the childlike optimism—without it the world grows into cynicism. Sometimes I think we need another way, a political or economic route to morality and generosity. When I was a young man I believed that my faith was a path through the violent thicket of modernity, but honestly, I just don’t know anymore. Maybe we all have to be dragged through, huh?”

  The man gestured toward the photos. “Did you know that Jesus is mentioned ninety-three times in the Koran?”

  “No,” Remy said, “I guess I didn’t know that.”

  “Nobody knows that,” the man said. Then he put a manila envelope in Remy’s open hands. “I think this may be what you’re looking for,” the man said and turned to walk away.

  DARK AT the edges, and in the center a blinding, narrow green light an indeterminate distance in front of him, sliding back and forth across a short ho
rizon. “And tell me, Brian. What are you seeing now?”

  Remy’s chin and forehead were pressed into some kind of smooth, cool plastic. The green light moved back and forth. “Brian? Are you seeing the streaks right now? The floaters and strings?”

  “Yes,” Remy answered. “Streaks. And the ones that look like chains. Floating.”

  “Okay. Look up, please.”

  He looked up.

  “Now down.”

  Down.

  “Okay. That’s fine. You can sit back now.”

  Remy sat back in the chair, which had a cushion for his head. The lights came up and Remy’s eyes burned as the pieces scrambled for cover. His wild-eyed ophthamologist, Dr. Huld, wore a small light above his head, a tiny miner’s helmet. “I wish I had better news for you. But it’s definitely gotten worse. Much worse.” The doctor turned and looked maniacally at Remy—his bulging round eyes framed by thick black lashes, Marty Feldman after corrective surgery—and then scratched some notes on a pad. “I definitely don’t want you to fly. The change in air pressure would be bad for your retinas. Do you think driving would be too hard on your back?”

  “No,” Remy said. “My back is fine.”

  “Well then, if you must take this trip, I think it’s best that you drive. At least for now…until we get the pressure stabilized.”

  “Okay,” Remy said. Then he would just have to drive. “Uh…Dr. Huld. Did I…by chance…Did I happen to tell you where I was going?”

  Dr. Huld didn’t look up as he wrote on his pad. “Kansas City.”

  “Right, Kansas City,” Remy repeated. He laughed, as if trying to pass this all off as a game, but the doctor ignored him and spoke without looking up from his pad.

  “How’s the medication working out for you? Do you need another prescription?”

  “I don’t know.”

  The doctor looked up again, his eyes bugging. “Are you taking the pills I prescribed, Brian?”

  “Honestly, I’m kind of having trouble remembering some things. There are these…gaps. They’re coming faster now…. Could that be a side effect of the medication?”

  Dr. Huld removed the miner’s light. “What kind of gaps?”

  “Well, sometimes—”

  HIS OWN face stared back at him from the bathroom mirror: thinning brown hair, faint beard over a jutting jaw, seams of blood in his left eye, and on his lips a distant, wan smile. And of course, the whole picture was covered with flecks, like a crackling old movie. Remy looked down. He was naked. He was getting thinner, lean muscles popping at the skin. And he was half-aroused. “The good half,” he said quietly, surprised by his own raspy voice. Jesus, was he drunk again? He breathed on his hand and smelled sweet booze. Brandy? Port? He didn’t drink port. Did he drink port? He imagined the syrupy coolness and suddenly craved a glass of it. Maybe he did drink port. Or maybe he should start. Remy looked around. This wasn’t his bathroom. Okay. The floor was tiled with small alternating tiles; there was a sink, a medicine chest, and a toilet. It was very clean. Okay. Okay. There were candles draped in ribbon on the back of the toilet. Candles. This was a woman’s bathroom. Well, that was good, anyway. If he was going to be naked in a strange bathroom, better to have it be—

  “Is everything okay in there?” A woman’s voice…youngish, a little tentative, maybe, but…nice.

  Remy stared at the door. “Yeah. I’ll be right there.” He tried to come up with the girl’s name: Amelia? Olga? Maria? Jesus, it could be anything. Betsy? Phil? Rotunda?

  He looked around wildly and then opened the medicine chest, looking for prescriptions. But there weren’t any. He opened a drawer and there were two medicine bottles. He read the names on the bottles: April Kraft. April. Kraft. April. April Kraft. Was he with this April Kraft? What if April Kraft was the girl’s roommate, not her?

  “Uh…you don’t have a roommate, do you?”

  She laughed on the other side of the door—a sad, distant sound that trailed off.

  Remy reached to open the door when he was frozen by a troubling thought. Had they already had sex? Didn’t he usually piss after sex? He looked down at his half-erection. Was it the before kind of half-on or the after kind? If they’d already done it, and he tried again, it might not work. He might look…how exactly would that look? Valiant, for giving it an effort? Or like a jackass who can’t close the deal? And if they hadn’t had sex yet…Suddenly, he thought of the prescription bottles again. He opened the drawer. The first was for Celexa, prescribed for “anxiety and depression.” The second was for penicillin, the fourth refill of five. That’s all it said. Shoot, people took penicillin for all kinds of things. No reason to assume the worst. Had he used a condom? Was he about to use a condom? Did he have a condom? His erection was totally gone now.

  “Please hurry…before I change my mind,” she said. Okay, before. Maybe he was looking for a condom. She laughed a little, but there was some quality in her voice that gave him pause and made him think this wasn’t just something she said, that this was a tentative match, that the moment could slip the way so many moments slipped now—loosed of their context and meaning and floating gently to the ground.

  “Okay,” he said, and he reached for—

  SCOTCH. REMY tasted it in his mouth and felt the heavy glass in his hand. He let the booze trickle down his throat. It was delicious. He closed his eyes and watched the floaters drift by, like leaves on a pond. When the taste had faded Remy opened his eyes. “Wow. That was good.” He was sitting in an oak-lined room, on a leather sofa, across from a handsome guy in his forties. The guy was wearing a suit with a striking shirt: sky blue with a bright white collar and white cuffs pinched by gold links that just barely peeked out of his jacket. His hair was carefully combed and curled up at the collar. He was holding copies of the photographs of March Selios and he was glaring at Remy.

  “Look, friend,” the guy said—Remy caught a slight Texas accent—“I’ve been shaken down before. So go ahead and act tough. Take my drink. Try to intimidate me. Arrest me if you want. But I’m not answering any questions until you tell me how you found my name.”

  Remy had no clue. “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he said.

  The two men stared at one another for a long moment, before Remy held up his glass and asked: “I don’t suppose I could get some more of this?”

  The guy rubbed his jaw and then raised the index finger on his right hand.

  Remy looked around. They were in a club somewhere, rich dark wainscoting on the wall behind them, and above that a thickly painted landscape and a plaque engraved with the club officers’ names. Two guys in tennis clothes were sitting a couple of tables away, watching them carefully. Remy and this immaculately dressed guy were sitting across from each other on leather couches in the center of the room, an ornately carved mahogany table between them.

  A waiter approached and spoke sotto voce. “Mr. Eller, shall I call security?”

  “That’s not necessary, Carlos. In fact, why don’t you bring Mr. Remy here another scotch.”

  “And for you?”

  “No. Thank you.”

  Eller looked around the butterscotch room. He hissed: “Okay. I knew March…Yes. Obviously.” He carefully set one photo down between them: March drinking the Gibson. “And you’re right. I did take this one.” Then he set down the other picture, the one of March in her office. “But I didn’t take this one. I don’t know who took that one. I’d guess they were both taken with her camera. She always had that camera. She was always giving that camera to people to take pictures of her in different situations. She used to say she was recording her life in case she forgot anything.”

  The memory made this Eller lose his voice for a moment. He rubbed his jaw and continued. “We met about a year ago. I had just moved here from Houston. My company had some business in the Sudan, oil futures.” He pronounced it ol’ futures. “We were having some…difficulties with Khartoum, and we hired March’s firm to help us. While the lawyers hammered everything out, Mar
ch gave us some cultural advice—how to play certain families, which palms to grease…” He shifted on the couch. “When the first part of the deal was finalized, I asked her out to dinner to celebrate.” He shrugged. “And yes, Mr. Remy, for a short time after that, we were…” He looked around. “…fucking…as you so bluntly put it.

  “So, there, I’ve answered your question. Now I’d like an answer to mine. How did you find me?”

  Remy thought about the Scotch that was coming. He wanted to extend the interview at least long enough to drink it. “You don’t know?”

  Eller cocked his head. “I don’t think any of her friends knew. I don’t even think she told her sister. She was embarrassed about seeing a married man…. Maybe someone at her office? Someone in her building?”

  “You’re getting warmer,” Remy said, treading water. A few seconds later, his Scotch arrived and Remy reached out and accepted the caramel-colored glass. “This is really good,” he said to the waiter. “What is it?”

  “Oban. Twenty-two years old.”

  “God. It’s really good.”

  “The lease on the apartment,” Eller said, slapping his head. He looked from the waiter to Remy’s glass and back. “Carlos. Do you think you could get Mr. Remy a bottle? Put it on my account.”

  “Of course, Mr. Eller.” Carlos backed away from the table.

  Remy held the drink in his mouth, savoring it.

  “You’ll excuse my earlier outburst, Mr. Remy. It occurs to me that it was actually thoughtful of you to contact me here at the club, rather than at my office or my home, where this might have been…misconstrued. Clearly, you’re a reasonable man.”

  “Thank you,” Remy said, draining the glass.

  “I’ll help in any way that I can….” Eller tapped the photo of March in the spaghetti-strap dress. “You’re right—this is the Olympic Four Seasons in Seattle. How did you know that?”

  Remy shrugged.