The Zero (4 page)

The Yankees stared.

Paul blinked it away. “But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll cover all of that once we get inside. Any questions so far?”

Nothing.

Then Paul had a thought: “Oh, oh, oh! Look at Brian’s eyes.”

Remy rubbed his temples.

“Come on, man. Show ’em.”

Remy turned in his seat and opened his eyes wide. Paul liked to make sure people saw the broken blood vessel in Remy’s right eye.

“He’s got that muscular vicious disintegration. You know what that shit is?”

The Yankees didn’t know.

“Macular degeneration,”
Remy corrected. “And
vitreous detachment
.” He’d told Guterak ten times that his eye condition had nothing to do with the burst blood vessel in his right eye, and therefore with that day, that he’d had escalating eye problems for years. But Paul insisted on making it part of the tour.

“What it is, see, is his fuggin’ eyes are flaking off. From inside, is what that shit is. Creepy, huh? I mean this is some serious shit we went through here.”

The relief pitcher winced. “That sucks.”

“Yeah,” Remy said to the genial reliever, and he thought about how nice that would be: relief, a guy in the bullpen waiting to take over when you run out of gas. Go to the left-hander. Life would be much easier if we all had a coach watching us, looking for any sign of fatigue or confusion, specialists waiting just down the foul line to stride in and save
our work, to salvage what we’ve done so far, make sure we don’t waste the end of a well-lived life. A good reliever might’ve saved his career, his marriage—what else? That’s all Remy wanted: someone to save him.

They eased up to the checkpoint, third on line.

“What are those?” the pitcher asked.

“Those?” Paul looked out his window. “Reefers. Refrigerated meat trucks.”

“For…”

“Bodies.”

“Jesus, are they…”

“The trucks? Nah, they’re empty.” He leaned back conspiratorially between the seats. “Look, don’t tell no one, but the truth is…we can’t find the people. Little pieces. A body here and there. But mostly the people are…” Paul held up his fingers and rustled them like a field of wheat. Then he began driving again.

They pulled up to the checkpoint and a street cop stepped forward. “Hey, boss. How’s it goin’?”

“Goddamn tough duty, you know?” Guterak said.

Remy wondered, wasn’t I just here? Didn’t I just hear this conversation? Were the gaps moving him backward now? Skipping like a record? Maybe he’d get to go back and drink that gin, or find out what the guy in the ghost bar had wanted. He felt a vibration, put his hand on his waist and found the pager again.

“Fuckin’ raghead motherfuckers,” the street cop was saying.

“Yeah. That’s right. That’s right.”

REMY’S EX-WIFE
Carla lived out past Jericho with her new husband Steve in a grand new house—four bedrooms, three dormers, two baths, something called a great room, and a lovely brick façade—and that’s where Remy found himself, sitting on the couch, drinking weak
coffee from the good china. About six months before the divorce, Carla had declared that she needed to
start living my life or else go crazy,
and the next day she’d opened the big oak cabinet and begun using their good wedding china for every meal; that morning, Remy came downstairs to find little Edgar eating Cap’n Crunch in a shallow, hand-painted bone bowl. Six months later, Remy and Carla were separated.

Steve pried his lips from the rim of a Bud Light. “Personally? I don’t see that it matters
who
we bomb, long as we do it while we still got the upper hand. Line ’em up. Clean house. But I don’t need to tell you that, right?”

“No. You don’t.” Remy looked up at a triptych of school portraits above the mantle: brilliant Edgar at six, at ten, and now at sixteen, long black hair parted on the side and swooped in a spit over the front of his lineless forehead. He was wearing a rugby shirt and sticking his bottom lip out in this latest picture, not defiant, but like someone contemplating the workings of the camera. He didn’t look much like Remy anymore, not like when he was little, when Remy would look at Edgar and fight the urge to feel for the pieces that had been taken from him to make the boy.

“See, we’re never going to have a better excuse,” Steve continued. “I’d use the
Times
as my guide. Go to the UN and say, ‘Let’s make a deal. If your country shows up on the front page of the
Times
for anything other than a travel feature, you’re toast.’ We should’ve had the Stealth bombers in the air before the smoke cleared.”

“The smoke hasn’t cleared,” Remy said quietly.

“My point exactly!” Steve swallowed a big mouthful and pointed the neck of the beer bottle at Remy. “See? You know what I’m talkin’ about. Don’t waste time separating guilty from innocent. Let them sort it through later.”

Remy cleared his throat—
start living my life or else go crazy
—and leaned forward. “Steve? Do you think you could tell me what I’m doing here?”

“That’s exactly what I mean!” Steve sat back on the couch. “If we ain’t gonna make the assholes pay…what are any of us doin’ here?”

“I mean…could you tell me where Carla is?”

“Well…I think she agrees with me on this, but you know how women are, Brian. A little squishy when it comes to actually pulling the trigger.”

“I mean where she is
physically,
Steve. And Edgar?”

Steve laughed. “That’s good. You’re so funny, man. I tell people that. You’re hilarious. I tell people, if I was Carla, I might’ve stayed with you. You’re a hell of a lot funnier than me. You could even make an argument that you’re better looking, although, classically, I’d probably be considered more handsome. And younger. Obviously. And I make more money.” He waved his hand around the house. “I’m taller…more of a man’s man, probably, athletically…although you, being a former cop and all, could probably kick my ass if you wanted…at least back in the day…are you losing weight?”

“I’m not sure.”

“What size pants you wear?”

“I don’t know…thirty-two.”

“What about the length?”

Remy looked down. “Thirty-three?”

“Thirty-two, thirty-three? No shit?” Steve stood up and lifted his shirt, patted a wide stomach. “I’m a thirty-five, thirty-four now. That’s when it starts getting messed up for guys, when our waists get bigger than our inseams. No shit, right?”

Remy took a drink of coffee and closed his eyes, wondering if he could induce a gap, open his eyes and find himself somewhere else. He watched the marionettes dance behind his lids for a while, tracking their drift across the vitreous. When Remy opened his eyes, Steve was still there, watching him intently.

Remy heard footsteps on the stairs and nearly cried out in relief as
Carla came up the stairs, lips drawn tight, followed closely by the loping Edgar. Carla wore thin, tight, low-waisted teenager jeans, a big, wide-necked T-shirt, and tennis shoes. The older she got, it seemed, the younger her clothes became. They sat on the couch next to Steve, across from Remy.

“Sorry,” Carla said. “He was in the middle of a video game.”

Edgar wore a black armband over his gray T-shirt. He smiled patiently at his mother. “It’s not a
video
game.” He looked up at Remy. “It’s called Empire. It’s a communal computer experience…like an alternate world. It’s character-driven and action-reaction oriented. Just like the real world.”

Yes, Remy thought, the real world is action-reaction oriented. He needed to remember that.

Carla smiled. “More coffee, Brian?”

“No,” Remy said. “Thanks, though.”

“So…would
you
like to start?” she asked.

“Uh…why don’t you,” Remy said.

Irritation broke on Carla’s face. As if she’d grown hot, Steve removed his arm from her shoulder. “I’m gonna get another beer.” He winked at Remy. “Let you-all talk.”

Carla took a breath. “Well…apparently…this is another important issue your father would like
me
to handle…so, Edgar…it has come to our attention…” She looked at Remy again, as if to see if this were the right way to start.

Remy nodded. He felt sick. What had come to their attention? Drugs? A pregnant girl? Honestly, he’d prefer drugs. He wasn’t ready to be a grandfather, to be responsible for another person. Suddenly, he felt guilty for not worrying more about the boy. Edgar had been only nine when Remy realized that his son was smarter than he, and from that moment they had started growing apart, as if Edgar had reached his father’s height and had begun growing out, in directions that Remy
couldn’t comprehend. And, honestly, Remy had simply stopped worrying about him then. There didn’t seem to be anything more Remy could do to help him. And now…whatever this was, he hoped it wasn’t permanent. He hoped this problem was something manageable. An F. Or a messy room.

But surely he wouldn’t have been summoned to Jericho for a messy room.

“It has come to our attention that…well…” Carla searched for the words: “Brian, are you sure you don’t want to do this? It really has more to do with you.”

“Uh…no. I think it’d be better coming from you.”

Carla turned back to Edgar. She took a breath, looked once more at Remy and then back at their son. “Edgar. Honey. Your physics teacher called yesterday…and…said…” She seemed to hit a dead end, and tried reshaping her point into a question. “Apparently you’ve been telling everyone at school that your father died the other day, in the…well…in the events of the other day?”

Edgar nodded as if his mother had just proposed a math problem. “Mmm,” he said. “Ri-i-ight. I had a feeling that’s what this was about.”

Remy slumped forward with a mixture of relief and something a few miles south of relief.

“Well…you do realize…your father isn’t dead. He’s right here.”

Edgar looked up at his dad, brushed the hair out of his eyes, and nodded again. “Ri-i-ight.”

Carla looked over at Remy for help. He offered none. But Steve had come back into the room with another beer, and he leaned on the arm of the couch and jumped in. “Edgar, why would you go around telling people that your old man was dead?”

“Well.” Edgar took a deep breath. “Let me start by saying that I appreciate your concern.” He smiled warmly at Remy. “Obviously, I know my father’s not dead. I’m not delusional, and I certainly don’t
wish
he
were dead.” He cocked his head. “I haven’t told anyone that he’s dead. I simply haven’t corrected that impression.”

He shrugged as if that covered it, but when no one said anything, Edgar laughed impatiently. “Look. What if I’d written a story for a class about a boy who lost his father? We’d be talking about my A paper, instead of everyone looking at me like I’m sick.” Edgar laughed again, as if this cleared it all up.

Remy couldn’t think of a single word to say.

Carla spoke up. “But Edgar, honey. This isn’t a story you wrote. This is something you’re allowing your classmates to believe. Your homeroom teacher said that you sit at your desk crying. She said you got out of a physics test and that you’ve stopped going to PE altogether.”

“Yeah…”

“Well, I guess I don’t understand.”

Edgar shrugged as if it were the simplest thing. “If I
had
lost my father, would you really expect me to take a test? Or to play Frisbee golf?”

“Well…no. I guess not.”

“Okay,” Edgar said, as if that solved it.

Carla shifted on the couch, so that she was facing their son. She broke out her gentle relationship voice, the one Remy recalled from the awful counseling sessions they tried before the split. “Honey, is it that you don’t get to see your father enough? Is that what this is about?”

Edgar cocked his head.

“That he works too much, sweetie? That he’s gone all the time.”

“No.”

“Is it his drinking? Are you trying to tell your father that his lifestyle is going to kill him? Is this a kind of metaphoric death you’ve created for him? Is that what you’re trying to tell us, honey?”

Remy wondered how far this line of questioning would go. Maybe this was about the time he flirted with that waitress in front of Carla.
Or maybe it was about the fact that he didn’t like her family. The way he used to drop his dirty clothes next to the bed?

Steve leaned forward helpfully. “Is it to impress chicks, Eddie? Is that what you’re doing, ol’ buddy? Trying to get a little sympathy ass?”

“No, Steve,” Edgar said patiently. “I’m not trying to get…ass.”

Remy wished he could infuse his own voice with as much flatness when he spoke to Carla’s new husband, that he could speak so ironically with such an apparent lack of irony. Suddenly, his pride for his child overwhelmed him, and Remy flashed on the idea that if he actually
had
died, he might save Edgar this awkward questioning.

“Well, I think we deserve an explanation,” Carla said. “That’s all.”

The boy looked around the room for help. When Edgar was little, Remy used to find solace in the shards of himself that he saw in the boy’s in-trouble stare, in his shrugs and shifts, in the things he feared. But now Edgar was so self-assured that Remy could barely remember why his son had ever needed whatever shelter he’d once provided. Edgar was a stranger to him, an alien with long, blocky hair and sinewy arms and a clipped, hyper-intellectual way of speaking that made it seem as if he were reading.

“Okay,” his son said. “First of all, by agreeing to talk about this, I want you to know that I’m not apologizing. This is entirely my business.” Edgar took a deep breath and stared at the carpet. “Grieving is personal.”

“That’s fine, Edgar, honey. But
what
are you grieving? The divorce? Your father’s inability to commit emotionally—”

Remy interrupted: “You know, I think we’ve covered that.”

“I’m grieving my dead father!” Edgar was losing his patience. “I don’t know why that’s so hard to understand.”

“But…your father isn’t dead, honey.”

“I
know
that.” Edgar rubbed his temples, as if talking to these morons was more than he could bear. “Weren’t there fathers who died that day?”