Jess Walter: The Zero

Remy rearranged the towel against his head. “I’m gonna go clean this up, Mrs. Lubach.”

“I was in the shower,” she said, as if he’d asked. “I was in the shower and sometimes the water slows to a trickle, and it did, maybe ten seconds before, and then when I got out, the phone rang, and it was my sister and she told me to turn on the TV. She lives in Wilmington. Her power went out at that precise moment.” Mrs. Lubach’s eyebrow arched. “In Wilmington . I don’t understand any of it, Brian.”

Remy pulled the towel from his head. “I need to go clean this up, Mrs. Lubach.”

“When do you think it will get back to normal?”

Normal. The word itself seemed familiar and strange, like a repressed memory. At one time there had been a normal . “You know,” he said. “I guess I’m not sure.”

“Your friend said things will be better when all the paper has been cleaned up.”

“My friend?” Remy asked.

“The young man who was here looking for you this morning. The paper guy.”

“Paper guy?” Remy asked.

Mrs. Lubach opened her mouth to answer but-

REMY SAT alone in the emergency room, across from a dew-eyed Vietnamese girl holding a washcloth around what seemed to be a burned hand. She was nine or ten years old, and she was wearing footed pajamas. She was staring at Remy. Every few seconds she would close her eyes and sigh. Then she’d open them again, stare at Remy, and squeeze them shut, as if he were the thing causing her pain. She appeared to be here by herself. Remy looked around, but there was no one else in the ER except a senior volunteer sitting at the check-in desk, reading a hardcover book. After a moment, Remy stood and walked up to the senior volunteer, a shell-eyed man with a dusting of white whiskers on his cheeks. The man refused to look up from his book. Peering over, Remy saw he was hiding a ratty paperback behind the hardcover. At first Remy thought it was a blank book, but then he saw that he was merely at the end of a chapter and there were only a few words on the page: nothing more hopeless, than this freedom, this waiting, this inviolability…

Remy waited but the man didn’t look up, didn’t even turn the page, just sat reading over and over: nothing more hopeless… this waiting…

“Excuse me,” Remy said finally. “But that girl-”

“I told you, Mr. Remy, it will just be a minute,” the senior volunteer said. “Please sit down. The doctors know all about you.” The old guy stared at Remy and refused to break eye contact, until finally he turned the page and Remy read the first line of the next chapter: “And he tore himself free…”

“But the girl-”

“They are aware,” the man said, “of your condition.”

Remy tore himself free and returned to his chair. The Vietnamese girl sighed again and then her eyes snapped open and she stared at Remy evenly, as if she were waiting for the answer to some question. Finally, Remy had to look away.

His eyes fell on a small television bolted to a pillar in the center of the waiting room, flickering with cable news. Remy felt a jolt of déjà vu, anticipating each muted image before it appeared, and it occurred to him that the news had become the wallpaper in his mind now, the endless loop playing in his head – banking wings, blooms of flame, white plumes becoming black and then gray, endless gray, geysers of gray, dust-covered gray stragglers with gray hands covering gray mouths running from gray shore-break, and the birds, white – endless breeds and flocks of memos and menus and correspondence fluttering silently and then disappearing in the ashen darkness. Brian Remy closed his eyes then and saw what he always saw: shreds of tissue, threads of detachment and degeneration, silent fireworks, the lining of his eyes splintering and sparking and flaking into the soup behind his eyes – flashers and floaters that danced like scraps of paper blown into the world.

DAYS AFTER – with everything sun-bleached and ash-covered, with a halo of smoke still hanging over the island – Remy’s partner Paul Guterak announced that he’d never been this happy. Paul and Remy were driving one of the new Ford Excursions that FEMA had sent over – “beautiful fuggin’ truck,” Paul said, white with tinted black, bulletproof windows, bumpers and back window plastered with stars and stripes, a tiny plastic flag fluttering furiously on the antenna. People lined up all along the West, waving signs and flags of their own, crying, holding up pictures and placards: “God Save…” and “Help Us Avenge…” and “We Won’t Break.”

Broken – that’s how they looked to Remy. Busted up and put back together with pieces missing. They stood on roadblocks and behind barricades on the street, in flag T-shirts and stiff-brimmed ball caps, animated by Paul and Brian’s passing like figures on an old Disney ride, grinding and whirring buccaneers from the Pirates of the Caribbean. A boy in a long-sleeved rugby jersey waved a yin-yang painted skateboard over his head near a woman holding a Pomeranian to her chest. Two women in jeans and heels, a bearded guy in a wool coat, and hundreds more, great bundles of open faces, until, after a few blocks, Remy could no longer look and he had to turn forward. And still they cheered and called out, as if desperate to be noticed into life. They cried. Saluted. They yelled for Remy to acknowledge them, but he stared ahead until they blurred together, the picket faces sliding by, the voices blurring together as he tried to place their longing.

“This is what I mean. We’re fuggin’ famous.” Guterak said it the way someone might admit to being alcoholic. Maybe Paul was right, in his way – this was what it was like to be famous, to have people desperately reflected in the glow of your passing.

Paul pulled the truck off West Street before they reached the tunnel and the line of double-parked dinosaurs – the sat-news trucks and flatbeds, the reefer meat trucks. They stopped for coffee at a corner deli with an American flag taped to the corners of the window. There were flowers again, in pots and in window boxes, freshly misted, bleeding dirty water onto ashy sidewalks. That was something, anyway: For a day or two afterward, Remy remembered, there had been no flowers in the shops. At the deli door, an old couple smiled and gave them a thumbs-up. Brian adjusted his ball cap, which was clamped too tightly against the rough stitches he’d gotten in the ER the night before.

“Listen, I ain’t sayin’ I’m glad it happened,” said Paul through his teeth. He was built like a bowling pin, wide at the hips and narrow at the shoulders. He spoke out of one side of his mouth, a gambler giving a tip. “Nothin’ like that. But you gotta admit, Bri…”

“No, I’m not admitting anything, Paul.” His head hurt.

“No, see, what I’m sayin’…”

“I know what you’re saying,” Remy said, “I just don’t want to hear it.”

“I ain’t a fuggin’ moron here, Bri. I know this ain’t politically correct. I ain’t gonna say this to anyone else. But come on… for you and me… I mean… we’re alive, man. How can we help feeling-”

“I don’t want to think about it, Paul. I don’t want to talk about how you feel.”

“No, you’re not understanding me.” Paul rubbed his neck.

They lined up for coffee, but the people on line parted and let them move to the front. As they passed, a woman in fur came to life and reached out to pat them on the shoulders of the new Starter jackets the bosses had gotten for everyone. Remy reached for some gum, but his hand went left a few degrees and he bashed his knuckles into a box of Snickers. No one seemed to notice.

When Paul tried to pay, the coffee guy waved them off. “Heroes drink free,” he said, and the people on line applauded and Paul tipped the guy three bucks.