Jess Walter: The Zero

IT WAS dark. No flashers or floaters. Nothing. Brian Remy dreamed or imagined that he was dreaming: He was on his stomach, staring down from the sky as great seams opened and people vanished into the rips. He dreamed that people ignored the tears in the sky and went about their business, filed their taxes, and that every once in a while one of them would fall up, disappear into the cracks, like falling into a manhole, and the rest would just go on with their lives. And he dreamed that people paused on the street, looked up and spoke to him in muffled voices, asking how he was doing and if he could hear them.

He dreamed that a woman sat next to his bed and held his hand.

April?

No, it’s me, said March Selios.

You got out?

I was the last one .

Where are you?

Here. We’re all here. We’ve always been here .

Is April…

But the woman’s voice changed. “This is going to hurt a little,” she said, still holding his hand. And in the dream he was lowered into a scalding bath, and the pain broke him and later, in the darkness, he dreamed that he was spread out on his stomach on a board, and that people moved pins in and out of his back, perhaps marking the movements of armies in battle. He dreamed that people jabbed him with needles and poured liquid fire on his skin and then asked if he could feel it. He knew better than to answer questions in dreams and so he lay there, dreaming that they tugged on pieces of skin from the backs of his arms and legs, and that they removed tiny squares to sell to tourists. It wasn’t bad, this dreaming… the gaps were fluid and he no longer lurched, but skipped from moment to moment with no anxiety, no expectation of comprehension.

He dreamed of Edgar as a baby, but with a tree trunk for a neck.

And the dreams became even more outlandish: hushed conversations and bedside ceremonies, imaginary doctors offering absurd treatments. In one dream, they rolled him onto his back, just long enough to pin some kind of medal on him, before rolling him over again. In another dream, they moved him to a new room, and people rolled him from side to side, and he dreamed that they gave him a roommate, a man burned in a truck fire, and that they put a television on for them both, a television that turned its own channels – slipping insanely from one reality to another, so that just as he got interested in the sound of strong men lifting kegs of beer a gap would interrupt things and he would find himself on the other side listening to an argument about gay adoption between a minister and a transvestite. And he dreamed that the man in his room, the man burned in a truck fire, told him to “Holler if you hear something that sounds good.” But Remy knew better, and the television skipped happily from rising poll numbers to the winners of ballroom dancing competitions, from a double date between teenagers to men worrying about the rate of inflation. And Remy recognized that this had been his condition. This was what life felt like. This.

The televised dreams were especially clever the way they could skip away from anything unpleasant, go from death to music videos, and pass on information without informing. The way they could jump from channel to channel, from site to site, from wrenching tragedy to absurd comedy, with only the laugh track to differentiate them. One day he dreamed two men debating whether the recent bounce in The President’s popularity was entirely due to the recent victory over a terrorist cell, in which four of the five members were killed and only one bomb was detonated… on a mostly empty train platform… killing only six… including the bomber… and severely wounding a retired police officer-

And when the dream television was off, Remy imagined that people came to see him – Guterak talking about his new job as spokesman for a tear gas company; Edgar shuffling his feet and mumbling that he had to get back to his base; The Boss pausing during a cell phone conversation long enough to ask if Remy was going to make it.

Dream trays of food came and went, and people asked if he needed anything, and through it all Remy clung to sleep. He knew that if she were right, and this had all been a kind of fever dream, that he should just stay in it and she would have to come. Life skipped along – snowboard races and cooking competitions and manatee rescues. “Holler if you hear something that sounds good.”

And one day he dreamed that his roommate was sent home. A window was open and he could smell burning leaves, and hear horns outside and the sounds of grinding traffic. The TV that day was offering a particularly insane dream in which grown-up child stars ate insects in an allotted amount of time. A nurse was laughing as she carefully removed the tape and gauze from his face. “That boy is crazy,” she said. “I used to love him on the TV. You ever watch that show he was on?” When the last of the gauze came off, Remy could feel the light behind one eyelid, and he could see the old flecks in his good eye. It was the most heartbreaking thing he’d ever seen.

“Okay,” she asked quietly, “Do you want to try to open your eyes now?”

But he squeezed them as tight as he could, waiting for her to come.

I AM DEEPLY INDEBTED to a number of friends, editors, agents and writers who believed in this novel from its first pages and gave it valuable reads: Cal Morgan, Judith Regan, Warren Frazier, Bill Reiss, Dan Butterworth, Jim Lynch, Danny Westneat, Sam Ligon and my lovely wife, Anne Walter.

This book is fiction. To those people whose real pain I witnessed five years ago, I hope there is real peace.

JESS WALTER is the author of Citizen Vince , a novel named as one of the year’s best by the Washington Post , NPR’s Fresh Air, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Milwaukee Sentinel, and others. His novels include Land of the Blind and Over Tumbled Graves, a New York Times Notable Book. Walter lives in Spokane, Washington, with his family.