Jess Walter - The Zero

“Go home,” Remy said. “Go see Stacy. And your kids.” Then he stood and patted the roof of the car. “And don’t follow me anymore.”

Paul rolled up his window. Remy watched Guterak drive down the block and then he began walking, his shadow growing in the streetlight before him. He moved steadily down the dark sidewalk, careful to stay in the shadows. Above him, the fading rind of moon tailed him down the narrow street. Remy walked south and then east through neighborhoods he’d never seen on foot before, quiet, precise neighborhoods bordered by rows of businesses – copy companies and juice bars and cell phone sales, their façades covered with cages and bars and garage doors. He caught a glimpse of an avenue and the storefronts on it seemed to stretch forever. These had been cobblers and butchers at one time, and printers and razor salesmen and soul food restaurants and record stores and pawnshops, and one day they would be genetic splicers and pet cloners and jet pack distributors. This city . Yes, everyone believes they’ve invented the place, that their time is the only time, and yet the truth was-

THE GROUND is where history lay. They didn’t put the Gettysburg memorial somewhere else. They put it at Gettysburg, or some version of that place, of that ground. They were the same: ground and place – plowed and scraped and rearranged, sure, but still you knew that in this place the soil was tamped with bone and gristle and bravery. That was important. The ground was important, imprinted with every footfall of our lives, the DNA of the profound and the banal, every fight, chase, panhandle, kiss, fall, dog shit, con game, stickball hit, car wreck, bike race, sunset stroll, fish sale, mugging – the full measure and memento of every unremarkable event, and every inconceivable moment. Remy turned from side to side, taking the whole thing in, feeling incomplete, cheated in some way, as if they’d taken away his memory along with the dirt and debris. Maybe his mind was a hole like this – the evidence and reason scraped away. If you can’t trust the ground beneath your feet, what can you trust? If you take away the very ground, what could possibly be left?

And yet that’s what they had done. He stepped back from the fence line and stared out over the place. They took it away. Nothing left here but a hole, a yawning emptiness fifty feet deep, football fields across, transit tracks cutting through the hole like hamster ramps, roads climbing the walls, excavation trails scratched across it, earthmovers and dump trucks, spotlights shining into the emptiness. God, they scraped it all away. No wonder they couldn’t remember what it meant anymore. No wonder they’d gotten it all wrong. How can you remember what isn’t there anymore? Remy leaned over the railing. He looked down the fence line, at rows of dying flowers, at notes of encouragement and defiance left by visitors. It looked like any other place now, like the site of a future business park, or a mall parking lot.

He imagined for a moment that he was in the wrong place. Was this really it? Christ, it seemed so small. Before, it had been vast enough to contain every horror (falling and burning and collapsing)… but that was all gone now. Everything was gone: the silhouetted steel shapes, half-buried I beams, berms of window blinds and powdered concrete, mounds of rubble and jagged window frames, gray undefined rubble, hills and pits of gypsum and cloth and… and steel! Steel forming itself into cathedral walls and sheaths and arches and caverns and trunkless legs of stone, like perfect ruined sculptures.

He had expected to feel something. But what can you feel about a place when that place has been scraped away? What was beneath all those piles? Nothing? No one?

It was just a deep tub now, a concrete-walled construction site, like any of the other sockets in a city that lived by creating such holes, cannibalizing itself block by old block to make way for the new, smoking sockets surrounded by razor-topped construction fences, waiting for buildings to be screwed in – and this the largest socket, a cleaned-up crater ringed by American flags and dead bouquets. Waiting for cranes. Above, the sky was washed out, colors faded like an old movie, everything the dull sallow of new concrete. What’s left of a place when you take the ground away? Is the place even there anymore? If you scratched away the whole island and moved it somewhere else, would the city be where it had been, in the widened channel of opposing estuaries… or would it be in the new place, where you’d moved the ground?

Remy felt the man next to him even before he spoke.

“Aptly named,” he said. “Don’t you think?” Remy turned and really wasn’t surprised to find Jaguar. In the first light of dawn, he got the best look at him he’d ever had. The man was in his sixties, intelligent looking, with a thin, craggy face and close-cropped gray beard and hair. He pulled his long wool coat up around his shoulders, and nodded at the epic construction site before them. “The absence of all magnitude or quantity.”

“What?”

“Zero. The absence of all magnitude or quantity. A person or thing with no discernible qualities or even existence. The point of departure in a reckoning. Zero hour – that sort of thing. A state or condition of total absence. The point of neutrality between opposites. To zero in: to concentrate firepower on the exact range of something. That’s a good one, too, although it’s a bit literal.”

Remy felt in his coat pocket and found two things. His handgun. And the thick envelope from The Boss. His hand moved from one to the other.

The man continued. “But I tell you the best derivation, for my money: zero sum . That’s what we’ve got here, if you ask me. Gains and losses coming out equal. No possible outcome except more of the same. And yet…” The man shrugged. “No. Say what you will. It is a fitting name.”

Remy looked up and saw the edge of moon again, faint now, about to disappear for the day. For the next fifteen hours the moon would be invisible, though of course it would still be there, driving tides and bipolars and the births of babies. And yet they insisted on saying each night that the moon came out, like superstitious men scratching their fear onto cave walls.

“It’s an Arab word,” the man continued. “Zero. From the word sifr . Means empty, like cypher. The world had no concept of zero, of nothingness, until we brought it west. Of course, we stole it from the Hindis. But it had never occurred in the West that there could be a number before one.” He scoffed. “ Civilization. They couldn’t even get their minds around the concept of emptiness, of infinity, the circle completing itself. If you can’t count nothing, you can’t conceive of everything. Without zero, you can’t comprehend negative numbers. So you can’t see infinity. There’s no sense to the universe. No negative to balance the positive, no axis on which to turn, no evil to balance the good. Without zero, every system eventually breaks down.”

He nodded, as if convincing himself. “No,” he said again, “it’s the right name.”

Remy swallowed. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m doing what we agreed to do, what you told me to do.”

Remy felt for the gun in his pocket. “I’m not going to let anyone get hurt.”

Jaguar stared at Remy with those implacable eyes. “I am on your side, remember?”

“Is that good or bad?”

The corner of Jaguar’s mouth rose in a smirk. “Point taken.” He cocked his head and seemed to be reading Remy for the first time. “For just a second there you looked like you couldn’t decide whether to pay me or shoot me.”

It sounded like he was joking, but Remy’s hand remained in his pockets, between the gun and the money The Boss had given him. “Does it matter?” Remy asked.