Jess Walter - The Zero

“Wait. Wait.” Ass Chief Carey held up his left hand. “Before we let Remy say something the rest of us will regret, I got something for you cocksuckers.” Carey bent over. “To mark the occasion. A taste.” He came up with a backpack that he set on the table. “Compliments of the bosses.” He unzipped the backpack and began removing watches, still in the bottom halves of their boxes, as if they’d been on display, like tiny open caskets. He handed around the table, to whistles and hoots. One by one, the guys slid watches (“Aw, boss.” “No fuckin’ way.”) onto thick, hairy wrists.

“Goddamn, boss. This is too fuckin’ much.”

Carey waved them off. “Ain’t half what you guys deserve. You’re the best fuckin’ crew in the city. I mean that. The other bosses mean it, too.”

Remy looked down at the half-box in his hand. It was dark wood, and in the center was a pointed crown, the word Rolex engraved in gold.

“Come on. Put it on,” Carey said. Remy stared down at the dark face of a gold watch, and caught the bursts of light in the face’s jewels. He wiped a thin coat of fine dust off the glass.

“They’re limited edition Gent Omegas,” Carey said. “Fuckin’ James Bond watches. Remy’s is gold-plated.” The guys were all sloughing their sleeves and holding their wrists in the air. Guterak held his arm out to Remy. “Look at this shit, Bri. How’s it look on me? Jesus, you ever think I’d wear a fuggin’ Rolex?”

There was a folded envelope under Remy’s watch. He removed it and opened it. Inside was a small note signed by The Boss: “To New Opportunities. And Old Loyalties.” The word Loyalties was underlined.

“Speech!” the guys began yelling again, and Guterak pushed Remy up.

He was still holding the watch loosely in his hand. He looked down at it, and then rubbed his mouth again. “I… I don’t really know what to say. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what’s happening to me. Or why.”

Some of the guys laughed. Others nodded as if he’d struck a chord, the infinite emptiness of the last weeks.

He rubbed his short hair. “I mean… I can see that I’m leaving. Am I retiring? I’m supposed to be taking disability, right?”

The laughter built.

“I mean… I’m not dying or anything, am I? Is it my eyes?”

Ass Chief Carey made that high-pitched squeal again. Guys were hugging and laughing and holding each other up.

Remy looked down at the table. “Can anyone tell me which glass is mine?”

This seemed to be the perfect end to his speech. Waves of laughter rolled through the room and Guterak stood and hugged Remy. “That was great. Classic Remy. I love you, man.” The guys came by one at a time, paying their respects, hugging him and telling him to relax or to have good luck or not to worry, and after a while Remy couldn’t imagine what difference it made, what was happening to him. This was the important thing, these guys who had risked their lives, these guys who loved him so much, and whatever it had taken to accommodate this occasion… well, it was going to happen whether he knew about it or not. “I hope you realize what a lucky motherfucker you are,” McIntyre said.

“We’re goin’ down to Copley’s girlfriend’s strip club, you wanna come,” Carey added.

“No, I don’t think so,” Remy said.

McIntyre hugged him again. “I’m gonna miss you, asshole.”

Finally, Remy was alone, watching as the guys moved in packs of two or three to the door. Guterak gave a quick wave as he went with the guys. When they were all gone, Remy carefully put the watch back in its case.

Sometimes the gaps came like cuts in a movie, one on top of the other, with Remy struggling for breath; at other times he seemed to drift, or even to linger in moments that had ended for everyone else. Was there something he was supposed to take from such moments? Remy pulled the watch from its box bottom again and looked at its face, half expecting to see the second hand standing still, jittery and frozen, waiting for Remy to be jolted into the next moment. But the needle slid gracefully around the numbered face, scratching away moment after moment after… Remy put the watch back in the box bottom and walked out of the banquet room, down a paneled hallway past the kitchen. He peered in the round window on the swinging doors and saw an old Puerto Rican guy in a paper apron working on a tall stack of dishes, pots, and pans. Remy opened the door and slid the watch box along the floor, then let the door close. He looked through the window again. The old dishwasher was bending over to pick up the watch.

Remy walked down the hallway, through an empty restaurant and outside. He recognized the skyline across the river. Behind him, the huge four-faced clock tower loomed like a dragon. He thought of the watch face. No zero on a clock. Around and around. No rest. No balance. No starting place. Just on to the next number. The sky was clearing, cold, the clouds opening between the brownstones. He stood on the sidewalk and looked back at the city, the burnt tip of the island and the bright hole in the sky.

THE AIR was cool and dry and huge fans whirred above his head. Remy was standing in a vast airplane hangar, holding a memo, apparently from the information technologies consultant Lara Kane to Travis Fanning in the personnel department of Anderson Dugan Rippet, March Selios’s firm:

Re: status report: Firewall, Acrobat, Monitoring.

CC: Duncan, Wallace, Selios .

UTMI up and running as per meeting of 8-4 and inventory under way for separate worksheets regarding hardware, software, tools, Mac and PC, upgrades, printers. For access rights for MGT group, see confirmation e-mails and logs…

Remy looked up from the page. The airplane hangar was full of people, filing cabinets, and tables of burned and dirty paper. Temporary fluorescent lights were strung about ten feet off the ground, along the length of the hangar, which was otherwise completely filled with these long tables and filing cabinets in long rows that seemed to stretch forever. As far as Remy could see, these tables were covered with paper – notes, forms, resignations, and retributions, as if the whole world could be conjured up out of the paper it had produced. Next to each table was a filing cabinet. There were big posters hanging from the ceiling with letters written on them. Remy looked up. The sign above him read: AM-AZ. There appeared to be a sign every hundred feet or so, perhaps ten tables and ten filing cabinets per sign. At the far end of the hangar he strained to make out another set of letters: CO-CY. So how many other hangars did that mean, he wondered. Five? Eight? At each of these stations several attendants were working away, some of them combing over the paper mountains on each table, others filing. Each of them wore a white paper suit, a mask, and white gloves.

“Obviously, you’re interested in the partials, too,” said a young woman at the table in front of Remy. Her mask was pulled down around her neck.

“Partials,” Remy repeated. Their voices seemed both distant and loud in the cavernous hangar, which hummed with the low throttle of so many other voices.

She handed him another dusty sheet of paper, this one rounded and burned along the edges like a perfectly roasted marshmallow. It was a ledger sheet with several columns of numbers, although the top row had been burned off, so he couldn’t see what the numbers referred to.

He held the paper to his face. It smelled like The Zero. That same fine dust coated everything, almost a liquid form of grit. Remy looked down at the woman sitting at the table. She was tall and thin and wore glasses. Her hair was tied back. She seemed tired. She leaned in and confided, “I try to explain the smell to people, and I can’t.”