Jess Walter: The Zero

“Thank you, sir,” Paul said, and he swallowed that thing that kept trying to choke him up.

“God bless!” said an older woman pushing a dog in a baby stroller.

“Thank you, ma’am,” Paul said. “God bless you .”

The dog stared at Remy, who finally had to look away.

Back on the sidewalk, Remy looked over his shoulder to see if people were still moving in the deli, but the sky’s reflection glinted off the glass doors and he couldn’t see inside. Clouds coming. Jesus, what would the rain do to the dust and ash? And the paper, the snow banks of résumés and memos and reports and bills of lading – what would rain do to all the paper? He knew there must be meetings taking place right now, officials preparing for just that possibility: that the vast paper recovery efforts would be complicated by rainfall. Paul and Remy climbed back in the truck. “That’s exactly what I’m talkin’ about, what happened in there just now,” Paul said. “You can’t tell me that ain’t the best feeling, them people treating us so good like that. That’s all I’m saying, Bri. That’s all.”

Remy closed his eyes.

“See,” Paul pressed on, “before, no one said shit to us, except to gripe about a summons they just got or bark about why we didn’t catch the mutt who broke into their fuggin’ car, you know? Now… free coffee? Pats on the back? I know you been off the street for a while, but Jesus, don’t it seem kinda… nice?”

Remy hid behind his coffee.

Paul whipped the Excursion back into traffic. “I mean, the overtime. And the shit we get to do. Taking the Yankees on a tour a The Zero. The fuggin’ Yankees . Look at what we were doin’ before this. Picking up The Boss’s dry cleaning, runnin’ his girlfriends around the city. Sitting through meetings with morons. You can’t tell me you’d rather be doing that. And it ain’t just that… it ain’t just relief. It’s something else, maybe even something…” He leaned over, and for a moment Remy thought he looked completely insane. “…something bad . You know?”

Remy stared out the window, down a deep coulee of dusted glass and granite, at palettes of bottled water stacked along the street and crates of donated gloves and granola bars. And then the rows of news trucks, two dozen of them queued up for slow troll, grief fishing, block after block – Action and Eyewitness and First At, dishes scooped to the sky like palms at a mass, and beyond them flatbeds burdened with twisted I beams, and then, backing up traffic, the line of expectant refrigerated meat trucks and the black TM truck, the temporary morgue where Remy had taken-

“See, what I’m sayin’…” Paul wrestled with his words.

“I know… what you’re saying,” Remy said quietly. “And maybe you’re right. But there are things we can’t say now. Okay? You can’t say you’ve never been this happy. Even if you think it, you can’t say it. Everything is… there are things… we have to leave alone. We have to let ’em sit there, and don’t say anything about ’em.”

“Like the scalp.”

Remy rubbed his mouth and remembered it. Second day at The Zero, he’d found a section of a woman’s scalp – gray and stiff – in the debris. He hadn’t known what to do, so he put it in a bucket. They searched all afternoon near where it was found, but there were no other body parts, just a six-inch piece of a forehead and singed hairline. An EMT and an evidence tech debated for ten minutes what to do with the scalp, before they finally took it out of the bucket and put it in one of the slick body bags. Remy carried it to a reefer truck, where it sat like a frog in a sleeping bag, a slick black bump on the empty floor. At least five times a day, Paul brought up the scalp. Whose scalp did Remy think it was? Where did he think the rest of the head was? Would they simply bury the scalp? Finally, Remy said he didn’t want to talk about it anymore – didn’t want to talk about what a piece of someone’s head felt like, how light it was, how stiff and lonesome and worthless, or about how many more slick bags and meat trucks there were than they needed, how the forces at work in this thing didn’t leave big enough pieces for body bags.

“See,” Paul continued, “you ain’t hearing me right, Bri.”

“I’m hearing you.”

Paul drove to the checkpoint, where two nervous-looking National Guardsmen in sunglasses and down-turned M-16s flanked a short foot cop, who stepped forward and leaned a boot on the running board of the Excursion. Paul reached into his shirt and came up with his ID tags. He held them out for the cop to read.

“Hey, boss,” the street cop said, breaking it into two syllables: buoss . “How’s it goin’?”

“Goddamn tough duty, you know?”

“Fuckin’ raghead motherfuckers.”

“Yeah. That’s right. That’s right.”

Paul put his hand out. Remy removed the tags from his neck and put them in Paul’s hand. Paul showed Remy’s tags to the street cop, who wrote something down and then gave the tags back to Paul, who handed them back to Remy.

The street cop patted the Excursion’s hood. “Nice truck, though.”

“Freddies gave it.”

The foot cop jerked his head toward the two guardsmen. “All they gib’ me was these two stupid fuckers. And I know one of these Gomers is gonna shoot me in my leg before this is over.”

“Maybe they got rubber bullets.”

“In a perfect world, huh? Hey, you gib’m hell in there, boss,” the cop said. He patted the hood of the Excursion again and stepped back, waving them through.

Remy watched the street cop, watched with a certain wonder the way that word, boss, was tossed between the two men, connoting everything of value, the firm scaffolding of reverent loyalty that promised each guy below the chance to rise to heights: his own crew, driver, office, parties, and budgetary discretion and security details, a shot at being boss someday himself. Wasn’t this the ladder Remy had patiently climbed before ? But now… what? Remy vaguely remembered thinking it was a corrupting and cruel system, but he had to admit… it lived for days like these.

Guterak drove through the checkpoint, to a cascade of applause and waving flags. He chirped the siren, then touched two fingers to his forehead and pointed. “Wish I could do something for these people,” he muttered. “Anything. Mow their lawns.” Remy leaned back in his seat and tried to breathe through his mouth. The smell never left him now. It lived in the lining of his nose and the fibers of his lungs – his whole body seemed to smell, as if the odor were working through his pores, the fine gray dust: pungent, flour of the dead. Remy was surprised at the air’s ferocity down here, acrid with concrete dust and the loosed molecules of burned… burned everything. It was amazing what could burn. We forgot that, Remy thought, in our fear of fission and fusion, radiation, infection, concussion and fragmentation. We forgot fire.

“You see Durgan’s kid on TV?”

Please be quiet .

“Big. I hadn’t seen his kid since we all played softball. That’s what I’m talkin’ about… seeing Durgan’s kid. I mean… honestly? Better him than me. Right? Come on. Admit it. Better his kid crying on TV than mine. Or yours. Right?”

Remy stared out the window.

“But here’s Durgan… dead as an eight-track, never get to see his kid again. And that could have been me, right? Except that, instead a bein’ dead, I ain’t even injured… or bankrupt. Or outta work. I got overtime comin’ out my ass. I got backstage passes to Springsteen, right? Durgan’s in pieces out there somewhere and I can’t even get anyone to let me pay for a fuggin’ cuppa coffee no more. All because I was standin’ here and he was standin’ there. See? I’m just sayin’-”