Jess Walter - The Zero

“Are you serious?” Markham laughed from the kitchen. “‘Key investigative assistance?’ Why not just say we answered the phones? Got coffee for you guys? Come on. You’re offering us a handjob, Dave. You come in here on your knees offering us a handjob? What is that?”

“He’s the one on his knees,” Dave said, pointing to Remy, who was indeed genuflected before the most holy drawer of plastic booze bottles. But then Dave’s mouth twitched and he smiled at Remy, and stepped toward him. He spoke under his voice. “Come on, Brian. Be reasonable here. Take a minute and think about what you’re asking.”

“I am not asking for anything,” Remy said, and he took a plastic bottle of Gilbey’s and drained it. His head felt like it was moving in tiny figure eights. The fleck in his left eye seemed to be growing.

“So, it’s screw-with-the-agency day, is it? Fine. You want to screw with me? Screw with me? ” Dave’s voice screeched. Then he laughed bitterly and stepped in close, so that he was standing directly over Remy. “I know things, Brian. And I won’t hesitate to start talking about what I know.” When Remy said nothing, he spat, “Do you think I’m bluffing?”

Remy looked up through the flashers and floaters into the flared nostrils of the older man. “I have no idea what you’re doing.”

Dave hissed, “Goddamn you.” But then he stepped away, rubbed his mouth, and looked up at Markham for a long moment, and then back down at Remy. “Okay,” Dave said finally. “I can’t give you Joint Task Force. I just can’t. But here’s what I can give you: Cooperating Agency. Solid second chair. You get one suit standing in the back at the presser and you can print up your own release about your involvement. But that’s it. That’s all you get.”

Markham shot a what-do-you-think glance to Remy, who couldn’t seem to get drunk enough fast enough.

“Cooperating agency,” Markham said, pointing with his spatula, “ two suits at the presser, joint release, and our logo on the dais.”

“Your logo!” Dave boomed. “Your fu-!” His jaw fell. “Your…”

Markham continued. “ And we make it clear that we developed our intelligence on this cell independently, through the Loose Materials section of the Liberty and Recovery Act,” Markham said. “If you think about it, it’s a good deal for you. There might be some information you gathered that might make some people uncomfortable, which we could provide some cover on. Some information that might even be seen as… illegal under the old rules.”

Dave’s eyes narrowed, as if he were considering this.

Markham could see this was his move. “Sure. You can attribute anything… uncomfortable… to us. Take advantage of the temporary latitude we’ve been granted for domestic intelligence gathering.

“And,” Markham continued, “we all still get to fuck the Bureau.”

Remy couldn’t remember if he was on clear or brown, so he went with a tiny bottle of designer raspberry vodka. But it was too sweet. He looked over at Bishir, who was ignoring all of this, concentrating on the pecan fish on his plate.

“But… and this is important…” Markham said. “We get second mike at the press conference.”

“Second mike!” Dave screeched again. “Come on! Be reasonable. Do you want our cars, too? Our sat-phones? Our chopper? You want my office?” He rose out of his chair and bent down so that he could see into Remy’s eyes. “Come on, Remy,” Dave said, all spotty and streaky. “Be reasonable. You got us over a barrel. We both know that. But for the good of the country-”

Markham and Bishir both laughed at this, Bishir choking for a second on his sole.

It was quiet. Dave straightened up, stared off into space, and finally sighed. “Fine. Cooperating agency, but there’s no question that we’re lead, right?”

“No question,” Markham said. “Of course.”

“We maintain operational and tactical control… we’ll provide daily briefings to you on everything. And you can have a guy there when it goes down,” Dave continued. “We make a joint release and you get your” – he choked on the word – “ logo on the dais. But all I can guarantee is third shot at the mike during the presser. Third mike. That’s all I got, fellas. I’m not giving you our spot no matter what you say.”

Markham glanced over at Remy, who looked away and reached for another bottle. He was dizzy, and his hand missed. He stumbled and fell sideways… and in that moment it was as if something popped behind his left eye: a piercing pain shot through his skull and he leaned forward and clenched his eyes tight. He fell forward, against the minibar, then curled up in a ball, and rolled on the floor, moaning.

“Brian?” Markham asked.

He cried out in pain, his hands covering his face as he crawled across the carpeted floor toward the other wall.

“Fine!” he heard Dave snap above him. “You can talk second at the press conference.”

Remy reached the wall, leaned against it, and opened his eyes. This wasn’t right. There was a big problem with his left eye, a dark shadowy band across the middle of his field of vision. He squeezed his eyes shut and opened only the left one, but the black band was still there, as if the center of the room had been torn away, like a page in a magazine. And then the pain seemed to gather at the base of his skull and make another advance, until it was nearly unbearable and it doubled him over, the anguish blossoming outward and from within, like black water bubbling up from the earth. Like blooms of smoke roiling into a clear day.

“MR. REMY, ARE YOU AWAKE?” Interesting question. Technically he had to be awake, since he’d heard her ask it. And yet, if he really were awake, would she have to ask? Wouldn’t it be obvious? Maybe he’d dreamed the question. How had April described her grief – as a fever dream? A dream – that would help explain the gaps, and the general incongruity of life now – the cyclic repetition of events on cable news, waves of natural disasters, scientists announcing the same discoveries over and over (Planet X, dinosaur birds, cloning, certain genetic codes), the random daily shift of national allegiances, wildly famous people who no one could recall becoming famous, the sudden emergence and disappearance of epidemics, the declaration and dissolution of governments, cycles of scandal, confession, and rehabilitation, heated elections in which losers claimed victory and races were rerun in the same sequence, events that catapulted wildly out of control, like plagues of illogic… as if some faulty math had been introduced to all the equations, corrupting computer programs and causing specious arguments to build upon themselves, and sequential skips – snippets of songs sampled before their original release, movies remade before they came out the first time, victories claimed before wars were fought, drastic fluctuations in the security markets (panic giving way to calm giving way to panic giving way to calm giving way to panic), all of it narrated by fragments of speeches over staged photo ops accompanied by color-coded warnings and yellow ribbons on trees.

“Mr. Remy? Can you squeeze my hand?”

Another tough question. Was he supposed to answer or squeeze? Would a squeeze be an answer? What was it that April said? I couldn’t walk around pretending any of this made sense anymore . Perhaps nothing made sense anymore (the gaps are affecting everyone) and this was some kind of cultural illness they all shared. But just as Remy was getting his mind around the question, he felt a woman’s hand in his and he became aware of the pain behind his eyes; it roared and squealed into his head like a train pulling up to a platform, lights flashing, brakes screaming, and then it changed, became more specific, like someone nailing his left eye to his skull, hammer blows, cracks against a three-penny, and a pitched agony sought out the vacuum behind his eyes, wiping away the epiphany he was trying to have, just as Remy was putting words to it: What if I’m the only one aware of this? A lonely, chilling thought, and he wasn’t sorry to see it slipping away, too – leaving only a momentary impression, like a print in sand, before it blew away. He squeezed the hand.