Jess Walter - The Zero

Remy looked back at her. “Monique doesn’t look fifty-two.”

“She’s had a lot of surgery.”

“So who’s Steve?” he asked.

“A dentist. From Akron, Ohio.”

“Yeah… I don’t think I want to be Steve.”

“Okay,” she said. “Then I’ll be Steve. You be Monique. Come here, Monique, lie on your back and show me your mouth.”

And then a thought bobbed to the surface and he had to ask it. “April,” Remy said. “If Derek hadn’t died… is there any chance you and he-”

She looked stung and her eyes moved almost imperceptibly to a point just beyond him. “No.”

“But you still loved him. You said so.”

“Yes,” she said. “I did.”

“Was it the other woman?”

“No… I don’t think there was really anything between them,” she said quietly. “In some ways it was… incidental.”

“So what… you just couldn’t forgive him for doing that?”

“Something like that,” she said. “Look, I don’t-” She sat up and reached for her shirt, tugged it on without a bra and pulled the sheet up around her waist. “We were having so much fun, Brian. Why’d you have to-” But she didn’t finish. She picked up the remote control and started running through the channels again. Remy watched the TV go from one reality to another and again – it was mesmerizing – and he thought about how familiar this was, the way the television skipped from news to sports to music videos, the way these imperceptible gaps led from sorrow to humor and pathos, from a game show to televised real estate listings to a panel talking about books. But this time, the pictures moved too slowly for April and after a minute of trolling inanity she turned off the TV and hurled the remote across the room. It hit the wall and fell in pieces of plastic and double-A batteries.

THEY BOUGHT new clothes in a store called Fugue. She got tight leather pants and a little spaghetti strap tank top, and Remy bought faded jeans and a powder blue dress shirt. Remy carried their old clothes in a shopping bag. They went to a boutique shoe store and picked out a pair for each other: hers had straps that wrapped around the backs of her ankles and he got low-cut boots with square toes.

“Wow. We look hot,” she said when he came out in his new shoes. “I kind of want to screw us.”

They hopped in a cab and April told the cabbie to take them to a romantic restaurant, so he dropped them off at a little place in North Beach, where they had lunch and a bottle of Chianti in a sidewalk café. The wine was gone before their entrées arrived, and they had another carafe and lingered over a split bowl of spumoni.

“What’s your names?” asked the walnut-eyed Italian waiter.

“I’m Steve,” April said. “And his name is Monique.”

“Steve,” the waiter said, looking at Remy. “Monique. Can I tell you something?”

“You can tell us anything,” she said.

The waiter proceeded to tell them how he’d been raised in a vineyard and hotel on the western coast of Italy and how he’d gone into debt over some gambling expenses and escaped to the United States to work for an uncle, who had kept him in a kind of indentured servitude at the restaurant ever since. Remy didn’t know if he believed the story, but he liked it very much.

“How old you think I am, Steve?” He put his face close to Remy’s. He looked to be about fifty, Remy thought.

“I don’t know… forty?”

“Come on,” the man said. “I look sixty easy, yes? Well what I am, I tell you, is thirty-eight, Steve. That’s all. Thirty-eight. An’ you know why I look so old, Monique?”

She was resting her chin in her hand, smiling. “Why?”

“Because I never fall so much in love like you two.” The waiter held his hands out between Remy and April, as if he were performing a wedding. “I never find no one make me so happy.”

“You’ll find someone,” April said.

“No. Not me. No more.”

“Sure you will.”

“No. It’s okay.” He seemed to be looking for words. “In America,” he said, “everyone thinks every story have a happy end, yeah? You’re not happy about one thing, what do you do? Sue each other. It’s so stupid. How can every story be a happy end? Someone got to be sad.”

A SIGN on a light pole advertised an End of the World Party at a club near the Haight, and April wanted to go somewhere in their new clothes, so they took a cab and waited on line with people at least a decade younger, overgrown boys in sideburns and girls with lower back tattoos rising from their pants like bursts of hair, all of them bouncing on the balls of their feet and yelling into their cell phones. Remy and April stared at the door and listened to the thumping for about thirty minutes until a thick bouncer took twenty bucks and waved them past and they walked through an awning, around an iron gate and down a staircase into a cavernous basement with pillars, floor lighting, and a low ceiling. A disc jockey was playing punkish electronic music on a simple turntable set up on milk crates, the sound a slush of guitars, synthesizers, and sibilant voices, punctuated by that same thud of drums, merely suggestive from the outside, insistent now that they were on the pulsing dance floor.

It was so crowded that all they could do, all anyone could do, was bounce up and down, jerking their heads, everyone occupying his own airspace – and for such a writhing, wriggling mass of people, Remy was surprised how little they touched each other. He tried to place the music, but his points of reference seemed more than dated, possibly anachronistic – David Bowie covers played by robots? Inside, the crowd wasn’t as young as it seemed on line, but it felt to Remy as if these people had all been given some sort of manual before they arrived explaining how to act in such a club. They all danced the same, heads jerking, bodies coiled, no partner in sight, and they raised their hands at the same time, but most of all they knew how to communicate with each other, bobbing in to the left ear of the listener so that, from a distance, every conversation looked like a mother bird feeding her chick.

There were no tables, and everyone along the walls was dancing, and yet people seemed to have drinks, so Remy began to search for the bar, and that’s when he saw a staircase to the left of the stage, lined with people trying to get a drink.

April was dancing with her eyes closed, her body snapping like a stiff whip, her head nodding as if she were being forced, over and over, to agree with something she found distasteful. When did I forget how to dance? Remy thought. When did I lose track of music and what you’re supposed to do with it? “Let’s get a drink!” he yelled, but her eyes didn’t open, so he did the mother bird and yelled in her ear. “Drink!” and she opened her eyes and grabbed his arm, shaking her head no.

“I’m going to get one,” he said and pointed to the stairs.

He read her lips. “No. Stay here. Dance. Unless your back’s bothering you?”

“My back is fine,” he yelled. And so they danced for more than an hour, until Remy’s back did ache, and his head swam with the unceasing drums, and finally he couldn’t dance anymore and he just stood in the middle of all those swirling young bodies, watching as April – eyes closed – snapped her body over and over, from her tight leather pants to the tendrils of black hair that lashed her face unmercifully.

MORNING AND Remy sat up cold and naked in the hotel bed, all the covers wrapped around April, who slept peacefully facing away from him. He looked around the bright room. Two empty wine bottles sat on the table with two red-rimmed wineglasses and their new clothes were strewn around the floor in front of the bed.