Jess Walter - The Zero

“Remy,” Guterak said, with as much formality as he could muster, “this is Tara. She works for the production company I signed with, and apparently she has an unhealthy attraction to old cops.”

They shook hands.

“I’ve heard a lot about you,” she said.

When she let go of his hand, Remy self-consciously touched his eye patch. He wondered why no one mentioned his eye.

“So how’s early retirement, you lazy mutt?” asked McIntyre. He sat with a beer on Guterak’s futon.

“Your back can’t be too bad,” Carey said, as a pile of dip fell from a tortilla chip into his thick hand. “You’re still walking upright.”

“My back’s fine,” Remy said quietly.

“Come on. I’ll get you a beer.” Guterak led Remy into the kitchen.

Remy looked around the kitchen of Guterak’s apartment, and at the pictures of his kids on the small refrigerator. He took the beer and managed a long swallow. He leaned against the kitchen table. “Listen, Paul… I need your help. I’m wrapped up in something here… I don’t know… there’s some crazy stuff happening and… I might be on the wrong side of it.”

“Yeah, you really fugged up, man. I talked to April. She told me you slept with her boss. What were you thinking?”

“You talked to April?”

Guterak leaned in close. “Who’d have thought we’d get these young women, huh? Like we got a fuggin’ sex mulligan, ain’t it? Tradin’ our old broads for these babes. No, you should definitely go back. On your hands and fuggin’ knees, man.”

“No, it’s more than just April,” Remy said. “I’m losing track of everything, Paul… I do things I don’t remember. It’s almost like there are two of me.” He leaned in closer. “There was this thing in Miami, and then I went to San Francisco… there’s this pecan dish and this duck, and this old Arab guy in a wool coat… and Jesus, I’m starting to think” – as the words formed in his throat, Remy knew the truth of this particular thought – “I’m starting to think that… this bad thing is going to happen no matter what I do.”

“I’ll call April tomorrow. I’ll talk to her.”

“This is not about April!”

“Paul!” Tara called from the other room. “It’s on.”

“Come on, man. You’re gonna want to see this.” Guterak walked into the living room and after a minute alone in the kitchen, Remy followed. He stood in the back of the room.

On TV was the cop show that was always shouting about being ripped from the headlines . The music played – duh-Duh – and then the first scene: A deliveryman was pushing a handcart with a big-screen television on it, when he came across a dead body. In the next scene, the two regular detectives were crouched over the body. Remy knew the ritual: the body always came first, and then the detectives’ job was to go to locations around the city and interview people quickly, asking one or two questions before moving on to the next interview, to make sure they caught the killer before the trial began in the second half of the show. The camera panned down to show the victim: a young Arab man splayed out on a sidewalk. The camera looked up to the window from which he’d tumbled, accidentally or, no doubt, otherwise.

Remy looked at Guterak, but he showed no reaction.

The show tramped along. The cops interviewed their witnesses; one, a social worker who lived in the building, told the detectives that she recognized someone on the sidewalk right after the man fell out of the window – a retired cop named Bruce Denny, who’d recently left the force because of back problems. The lab also had a footprint from a shoe at the scene and they wanted to compare the print to Bruce Denny’s shoe.

Remy covered his mouth. He looked around, but no one else seemed to see anything strange in what they were watching.

Duh-Duh . One of the detectives picked Bruce Denny up at the airport to question him. On the show, Bruce Denny wore an eye patch. Remy touched his eye patch again.

“Jesus, Paul,” Remy began.

“Shhh,” said Tara.

The detective asked Denny his shoe size. It was twelve – the same size as the footprint at the murder scene, the same size Remy wore. Then Bruce Denny asked if he could confide in the detective. He may have been at the scene, Denny confided, but he couldn’t remember. He said he was having some kind of problem with his memory, that he was having “gaps.” And he asked the detective to follow him.

“Follow you?” the detective asked.

“Yeah. Follow me.”

“Like… keep track of what you’re saying?”

“No. Tail me. I think I’m involved in something and I want to find out what it is.”

That’s when the first commercial break came.

Remy looked down at Guterak in disbelief. “Jesus, Paul, did you…”

“Shhh-” Guterak raised a hand and pointed at the TV. “Here it comes.”

The TV cut to commercial and Remy saw how seamlessly this happened, one world to another and the detectives were gone and two kids were standing in a clean suburban living room – just like Carla and Steve’s house, Remy thought – staring out a window as emergency lights rolled across their faces. “Cool!” one of them said. As the rousing music swelled behind them, the camera moved outside to settle on a firefighter and a cop standing in the street, talking and gesturing toward some unseen emergency, a blur of police tape and swirling lights. The cop was Guterak. He and the firefighter turned to the camera, shot and lit from below, like superheroes.

“When trouble comes-” said the firefighter.

“And it will-” said Guterak.

And then they both pointed to the camera and said in unison: “You need to have a hearty breakfast! The breakfast of heroes.”

And cut to a sunny breakfast table. On the table were two boxes of cereal, at perfect angles; behind them were the kids in soft focus, devouring their cereal as if they hadn’t eaten in months. Each box looked like an American flag; the firefighter was on one, Guterak on the other, looking serious, staring off into space. Through the magic of television, both men winked from their boxes of cereal.

The camera returned to the photogenic kids, their spoons overflowing with hearty oat goodness.

“I got the flakes!” said one, and Remy thought he sensed just the slightest disappointment in this boy, who also had slices of bananas in his cereal.

“I got marshmallows!” said the other kid, with no reservations.

And then the deep-voiced narrator said: “First Responder. The cereal of heroes.”

When it was over, McIntyre, Carey, and Tara applauded. Remy didn’t know what to do.

“Baby,” said Tara, “you’re a star.”

“So what do you think, Brian?” Guterak asked nervously.

But before Remy could answer, he felt the moment slipping and-

AT DAWN, joggers circled the kidney-shaped lawn. Their footfalls echoed softly against the retaining walls surrounding the edge of the park. Remy sat on the steps leading to the park, above the dewy grass. He had an open book in his hands, but he was staring past it toward the damp field. He was getting used to seeing out of one eye, to seeing around corners. In some ways, he wondered if this wasn’t a more accurate view of the world, without the gap between his eyes, that little bit of distance that the brain corrected and covered. And he wondered about blind spots, if there weren’t things that only he could see now, things the binocular missed.

In the park, a woman walking a little dog looked both ways before allowing the animal to shit in the bark surrounding the red jungle gym. Closer, a homeless man slept at the edge of the grass, parting the flow of runners as smoothly as a rock in a river. Remy counted six joggers in a lap, five men and a woman, and in the next lap it was seven, and then nine, and twelve, as if he were seeing in crackled time-lapse. Sunlight began to wash over the park. Nearly all the joggers wore tiny headphones, listening to music only they could hear, as alone in the world at that moment as it was possible to be. Soon the first commuters joined the joggers, slowly making their way across the park toward the financial district, like blood cells to a wound.