The Zero (20 page)

“I hadn’t noticed that,” Remy said.

“Anyway, they’re ready for you now.”

“Right. Who’s that again?”

“Isn’t that the truth?” She laughed and hung up.

Remy hung up and opened the envelope. Inside were two sheets of paper sealed in Ziploc bags. The first was a crumpled empty letter-sized envelope addressed to Lisa Herote—the name Assan had offered him at the interrogation—at an address in Virginia. There was a coffee cup stain on the envelope and a stain that might have been yogurt, as if it had been found in a garbage can. There was no return address on the envelope, but someone had affixed a yellow flag: “CKed w/Bishir’s hw sample—positive.”

Remy heard footsteps in the hallway. He looked up from the letter and saw the silhouette of a man standing behind the frosted glass.

Remy waited for a moment, then said “Hello.”

The silhouette moved on.

Remy looked back at the documents on his desk. The second plastic bag contained a half sheet of burned paper, its corners like burned toast. Remy carefully picked up the document and read it through the plastic, his fingers instinctively avoiding the blackened edges to keep from
crushing them. It was a printout of an e-mail from MSelios@ADR to a BFenton at the same company. The right-hand corner of the paper was burned, leaving only the left side readable.

Remy turned the page over, but there was nothing on the other side. The yellow flag indicated that a copy of the e-mail had been “Forwarded by Markham, Investig. Unit. Doc. Dept., reconstruction under way from Partials.” It was initialed three times; he didn’t recognize any of the initials.

Remy put the two baggies back in the envelope, walked back to the door, and looked once more down the long, empty corridor. The last time, he had ventured right; this time he turned left, following the corridor to another T and another right turn. He walked a short distance and knew, even before he went through the swinging doors, that he would find himself again in—

THE SKY,
impossibly close, shimmered like the surface of a lake, giving Remy the perverse impression that if he stepped off this fire escape he wouldn’t fall, but float up instead into that perfect autumn blue. Every summer when he was a kid Remy took swimming lessons at a camp upstate; the instructor had always told him that he would float if
he’d just lie back and trust the water to hold up his body. Finally, one summer at a family reunion for his mother’s side in West Virginia, Remy tried it. And he floated. Not the way he expected: He didn’t float on top of the water, but rather seemed to
become
the water, to float
within
it. Maybe that was the answer. To float in this life, like paper on a current. Just lie back and let himself be.

Remy looked down at the barbecue tool in his hand and he knew to lift the cover on the little charcoal grill. There were three thick steaks and a veggie burger, all sizzling above ash-white coals. He didn’t question it, just flipped them. Perfect: black lines like prison bars across the steaks. The smell was so precise, so
not-Zero
that he simply stood there, inhaling.
Right. This is what cooking steaks are supposed to smell like
. Maybe this was not some condition he had, but a life, and maybe every life is lived moment to moment. Doesn’t everyone react to the world as it presents itself? Who really knows more than the moment he’s in? What do you trust? Memory? History? No, these are just stories, and whichever ones we choose to tell ourselves—the one about our marriage, the one about the Berlin Wall—there are always gaps. There must be countless men all over the country crouched in front of barbecues, just like him, wondering how their lives got to that point.

Remy glanced around—he was kneeling on April’s fire escape. Looking down the block, he saw a couple walking below him on the sidewalk, holding hands, leaves cartwheeling before them. Their low voices rose on the air to the fire escape, the man saying “…and the lucky bastard found the last beater in Park Slope.”

There was a glass of red wine next to the little charcoal grill. Remy grabbed it and took a drink, relieved that it tasted just like wine. Cause met effect. Good wine. Shiraz? Yes, this felt better. There were places—in bed with April, here on her fire escape—where he felt grounded. Real. The steaks, as steaks tended to do, needed a few more minutes.

He crawled through the window into April’s living room. A man in
his late forties, with thick brown hair, black glasses, and a sports coat, was sitting on one of April’s dining room chairs in the cramped living room, sipping a glass of wine. He straightened up a bit when Remy appeared. April sat on one end of the couch, and at the opposite end sat a sharp-featured woman with short, spiky blond hair. The woman was attractive in the way that women of a certain age could be, with the post-foreplay directness of someone who was finished wasting time. She engineered a smile for Remy. A red scarf was tied at her neck in a real-estate ascot, blooming as if someone had cut her carotid. There was nowhere to sit but between the two women. Remy sat.

“The meat will be just a few more minutes,” Remy said.

“I can’t wait,” said the woman.

“Smells great,” said the man.

“You get to taste Brian’s secret marinade, Nicole,” April told the woman.

“Oh! What’s in it?” asked Nicole with mock interest, turning her unblinking blue eyes on Remy like prison spotlights.

“You know,” Remy said, “I couldn’t tell you.”

“I told you it was secret,” April said.

They all laughed, like real people. They stared at their drinks.

Nicole cleared her throat and spoke as if reading from a script. “Well, April, we are just so excited to have you back.”

“Thank you.”

“It must have been such a difficult time for you.”

“Yes,” April said.

“I suppose we can’t imagine what it was like,” Nicole said.

“No,” April said.

“So awful, losing two people like that.”

“Mm,” April said.

“Must have been harrowing.”

“Mm.”

“Yes.” Nicole seemed to finally understand that the subject was closed. “Well, it’s great to have you back. Our group is hanging onto fourth in gross commissions right now, and with you back in the mix we really believe we’ll be third by the end of the quarter.”

“I hope so,” April said unconvincingly.

“Associates like April are playing a bigger role all the time,” Nicole confided in Remy. “The growth is all under forty right now.”

“Oh,” Remy said.

“I’m just sorry it took this long for me to come back,” April said, and she reached for Remy’s hand.

“Oh. My God! No.” Nicole leaned forward, her round eyes big with concern. “No, no, no! I told you to take as much time as you needed. We got along fine. And with what you’ve been through…no, it’s good that you didn’t rush back.” She sipped her wine. “Honestly, April, for those first couple of months, there was very little movement anyway. But now…we’re almost back to the number of listings we had before. In fact—” She leaned forward as if spreading rank gossip. “Everything points to an upsurge. An explosion. It’s taking off again, April. It’s about to get white hot.”

“White hot,” the man in the dark glasses repeated, staring directly at Remy.

“The downtime is looking like nothing more than a blip,” Nicole said.

“A blip,” said the man in dark glasses.

“It’s a very exciting time for you to be coming back,” Nicole continued. “There are going to be innovations…partnerships with developers…buying our own stock…options and hedges. Louis says the whole country is about to leverage its best asset.” She paused for dramatic effect. “Our optimism.” Then she sipped her wine and shook her head. “You watch. There will be a feeding frenzy. People will be buying product based on nothing more than models. People will be buying artists’ sketches. Ideas.”

“Ideas,” April said weakly.

Remy took this opportunity to rise. “I’ll bet the steaks are done.” He smiled at Nicole. “And your soy burger.”

April had kept his hand in hers when he stood, and now she squeezed it. And only then did he realize how nervous she’d been, about her performance tonight in front of this woman who must be her boss. He let go of her hand and walked toward the window, thinking again that perhaps life
had returned to normal
, and that normal was a string of single moments disconnected from one another. No reason to think that anything had ever been different. You worked in an office all week. Your girlfriend’s real estate broker boss came over with her husband and you cooked them dinner. And when it came time to eat, it wouldn’t matter whether you remembered
planning
the dinner. A meal doesn’t care about the cook’s intention; it just gets eaten. All over the city, all over the country, people rose from bed and scurried and fought and returned at night to sleep, independent of any meaning except the rising, scurrying, fighting, and sleeping. They drove cars made in places they’d never been, used cell phones and computers and a thousand pieces of technology with tiny pieces collected from factories all over the world, in places whose existence they could never be sure of, technology they couldn’t begin to understand. The news played whether they watched it or not. And none of them ever stopped to say:
Wait! I don’t understand how this car got here! Why this telephone takes pictures!
They answered their phones. Ate their steaks. And if they woke up one morning divorced or with cancer, or if they found themselves at war, they assumed the reality of irreconcilable differences, malignant tumors, premonitions of evil.

This is a life, he thought, smooth skipping stones bounding across the surfaces of time, with brief moments of deepened consciousness as you hit the water before going airborne again, flying across the carpool lane, over weeks at a desk, enjoying yourself when the skipping stopped, and spending the rest of your life in a kind of drifting contentment, slipped consciousness, lost weekends, the glow from televi
sion sets warming placid faces, smile lines growing in the glare of the screen. He drained his wine.

It was cool on the balcony. Remy drank in deep breaths of city air. The steaks smelled so good he could barely stand it, and his eyes watered as he reached for the cover of the grill as—

HE SAT
in his car, disoriented, wondering if the gaps were somehow widening. Maybe it had to with the car, because the worst skips often occurred like this, when he was on the road, or waiting in traffic, only to look up and find himself in a tunnel or on the turnpike, with no clue where he was going or where he’d been (one time he found himself wet to his waist, reeking of sewage) or when he’d suddenly find himself in an unfamiliar neighborhood, parked outside a building, a notebook open in his lap and binoculars around his neck.

This time, he immediately looked around the car for his binoculars, figuring that he was on some kind of assignment he’d have to piece together later, or simply abandon. But he quickly realized that he had no binoculars and no notebook. He was in the suburbs somewhere. And that’s when he became reoriented and recognized the neighborhood, and Carla and Steve’s big house, in a herd of similar big houses grazing in a cul-de-sac on a gradual hillside, this neighborhood that couldn’t be more than two years old, where, Steve had once confided, there were four basic models, and his—the one with brick façades and pillared front porches—was the most expensive,
an extra hundy thou
.

Remy checked his watch. Quarter past three. Okay, so what was he doing here at three fifteen in the afternoon? He was wearing khaki slacks and a zippered jacket. He wasn’t in front of Edgar’s house, but four houses down the block. He looked around the neighborhood. For the most part, the lawns were obscenely green, like wet moss; in some of them you could still see the seams where new sod had been rolled
out—perfect little patches like felt on a pool table. How many turns of a lawn mower? Four? Five? And yet, in front of some of the houses, this little patch of grass was already beginning to die in places, brown circles like age spots where the roots hadn’t been able to take hold. And there were sickly trees, too, in most of the yards, still young, lashed to stakes and bundled in burlap turtlenecks. Little yellow ribbons were tied around the thin trunks, like scarves above sweaters.

Remy heard the squeak of hydraulic brakes, and watched in his rearview mirror as a school bus stopped at the corner behind him; then came the sigh of the bus door, and Edgar and another boy stepped off the bus, trudging off in different directions, without saying a word to one another, like duelers who forgot to turn and fight. The stop sign came in, the lights blinked off, and the bus rumbled on, Edgar bouncing to the beat in his tiny headphones as he walked on the sidewalk toward Carla’s house on the other side of the street. He looked good, though it was hard to tell in his baggy clothes, the hooded sweatshirt and pants bunched up at the ankles of his floppy tennis shoes. Remy thought he saw Edgar steal a glance toward his car, but the boy just kept walking toward his house as if he hadn’t noticed his dad. He paused at the mailbox, took out some catalogs, and continued to the house, up the steps to the pillared porch, fished in his pocket for a key, put it in the door, and disappeared inside. Remy thought he saw the boy’s face appear briefly in one of the windows, but it was gone too quickly to be sure. A few minutes later the boy came out, wearing the same clothes, and loped off again, without a glance in the direction of his father’s car.

Remy sat there a moment, trying to imagine what he’d wanted to say to the boy, but he couldn’t come up with anything. Hell, that didn’t seem so strange either, now that he thought about it—a father unsure what to say to his boy, haunting his kid’s adolescence. After a minute he started his car and drove away.