Jess Walter - The Zero

Remy walked up to the man. “Do you know me?”

He took a moment. “I don’t believe so, no. But if I had to guess I’d say you look like a cop.”

“I’m the guy who found your planner downtown,” Remy said.

“Oh, thank you,” he said. “That was nice of you to return it. I’d be lost without this thing.” He turned back toward his house.

“Your son said you weren’t downtown that day…”

The old man turned back and cocked his head, as if he didn’t understand.

“So I was wondering how it got down there.”

The old man said nothing.

“See,” Remy said and he tried to laugh nonchalantly, “the funny thing is that your day planner had a meeting listed on that day… with me, or a meeting with someone with my name.”

Addich looked down at the planner in his hands. “What’s your name?”

“Remy. Brian Remy.”

“I’ve never heard of you,” the man said. “So I don’t know how I could have had a meeting with you-”

“Could I just look in there?” Remy asked, pointing to the planner.

“In here?” Mr. Addich held up his day planner.

Just then, the door opened and Tony Addich came out, in suit pants, a white tank top and socks. “Come on, Dad. It’s almost dinnertime. We’re having salmon.”

“I’m sorry, I have to go,” Gerald Addich said to Remy. “We’re having fish.” He stared at Remy for a moment before moving toward the house.

Tony Addich came out and helped the old man up the sidewalk. “Leave him alone,” he said over his shoulder, through gritted teeth. “He can’t help you.”

REMY STOOD on the second floor of what appeared to be an old warehouse, in front of a heavy door, a kind of roughed metal, brushed and polished until it gleamed like a rocket. He looked around, then opened the door and stepped in the entryway of a huge loft apartment, unfurnished and mostly unfinished: exposed bricks and beams, joists and pipes hanging above stained wood floors, the whole thing feeling cold and exposed, lacking the civility and cover provided by basic drywall and carpet. “Hello?” he called out. “Anyone here?”

“In here,” came a man’s voice. Remy made his way through a long narrow living room, rough brick on the opposite wall and two big windows at the far end of the room. A small kitchen was on the right, with an angled slate counter lined with corrugated aluminum and a metal hood resting above a gas stove and oven. A young couple was standing next to the stairs, the man in faded jeans and a ski cap, the woman in form-fitting black pants. They both had the kind of windswept blond hair that made Remy think of places in Colorado he’d never actually seen.

“ – not that I think holding out for a six-burner is worth losing this place,” the woman was saying. Then she and her husband both looked up at Remy.

“Oh, hey,” the windswept man said. “She’s up there.”

“Up there?” Remy asked, looking at the open staircase.

“Yeah, man,” he said, “she was showing us this apartment and she got a phone call about something and she just lost it, man.”

“She didn’t seem right even before that,” the woman said to her husband.

“She was fine,” the man snapped, as if they’d been arguing the point. “But after the phone call she seemed really… spooked.”

“She locked herself in the bathroom and wouldn’t come out,” the woman said.

“We didn’t know what to do,” said the husband. “We told her through the door that we were going to call the agency, and that’s when she said she was going to call someone else instead. I’m assuming that was you?”

“I assume so,” Remy said. He started up the staircase, which was lined with cast iron poles topped with what looked like bowling pins. Remy stepped closer and looked upstairs, where he saw a mural painted on the ceiling, a kind of sunspot, dark in the center with yellow drips of flame leading away.

“Excuse me,” said the man. Remy turned and looked down at him, leaning on the railing in the kitchen. “Listen, we’re kind of… we’re worried about losing this place. If she’s okay, do you think you could tell her that we want to move on it before someone else gets it?”

“Okay,” Remy said.

He walked up the stairs and found her in the bathroom, sitting in the dark against the counter, still holding her cell phone. “April?” Remy turned on the light. He stared at the phone in her hand, wondering if Nicole had called her and said something. His stomach felt tight, as if it were folding up on itself.

“You think, at first,” she said, distantly, “that it’s a kind of penance you’re being forced to pay. You think that after you’ve suffered long enough, that the people you’ve lost can just… come back.” April’s eyes drifted down. “But they don’t. They never come back. That’s the trick. They die all over again for you, every few months.”

Remy removed his coat and tried to put it over her shoulders but she held up her hand.

“I dream about them… sometimes. I keep expecting them to say something profound or comforting. But they’re too busy to talk. They’re running around, late for things, and they won’t even meet my eyes. And I think… what’s the rush? You’re dead. Where could you possibly have to be?”

She looked up and met his eyes. “There’s something I probably should have told you. The reason I don’t like to talk about Derek. Do you remember the night we met at the bar and I told you all about him?”

Remy nodded, even though he didn’t.

“I said that when he died, I hadn’t spoken to him in four months…” she trailed off. “Well… that wasn’t entirely true. I don’t know why I lied about it… I guess I wanted you – or maybe me – to believe that I totally was over him.”

April rubbed her mouth and stared at a fixed point above Remy’s head. “Right at the end of summer, he called… he said he missed me. He wanted to get back together. So we talked about it… all through August and the first week of September. And then, one night…” She trailed off.

“You slept together,” Remy said.

She nodded.

“You were still married,” Remy, said and he shrugged as if it were no big deal, which it shouldn’t have been, and yet he could feel a tug in his chest, like he was snagged on a fishing line. He thought of Nicole again and stared at the floor.

“A couple of nights later he spent the night again.” She cleared her throat. “And it was… nice. The next morning… The next morning was that morning…”

She looked at him pleadingly, hoping he wouldn’t need any more information, and he didn’t. It seemed to him sometimes that that was the last morning; every day now started at noon.

“He left for work. I was lying in bed, thinking about him, and about us getting back together, and I saw that he’d left his cell phone on the bedstand. The light was blinking. There was a message. I wasn’t going to listen, but I was curious about whether he’d changed the password on his phone. Of course… he didn’t, the big idiot.” She smiled. “So I listened.”

Remy remembered the meeting with the lawyer. “It was the other woman,” he said. “The one from his office?”

“Yes.” April nodded.

Outside the room, Remy could hear someone climbing the stairs. Then he heard the Colorado guy’s voice: “Excuse me?”

“Just a second,” Remy said to April. He went out into the hallway and saw the man’s head, just peaking at the midpoint of the stairs.

“Sorry,” the guy said, “but my wife is really freaked that we’re going to lose this place. Do you think you could tell your girlfriend that we’re going to call someone else from her office about it?”