The Zero

Remy’s chin and forehead were pressed into some kind of smooth, cool plastic. The green light moved back and forth. “Brian? Are you seeing the streaks right now? The floaters and strings?”

“Yes,” Remy answered. “Streaks. And the ones that look like chains. Floating.”

“Okay. Look up, please.”

He looked up.

“Now down.”

Down.

“Okay. That’s fine. You can sit back now.”

Remy sat back in the chair, which had a cushion for his head. The lights came up and Remy’s eyes burned as the pieces scrambled for cover. His wild-eyed ophthamologist, Dr. Huld, wore a small light above his head, a tiny miner’s helmet. “I wish I had better news for you. But it’s definitely gotten worse. Much worse.” The doctor turned and looked maniacally at Remy – his bulging round eyes framed by thick black lashes, Marty Feldman after corrective surgery – and then scratched some notes on a pad. “I definitely don’t want you to fly. The change in air pressure would be bad for your retinas. Do you think driving would be too hard on your back?”

“No,” Remy said. “My back is fine.”

“Well then, if you must take this trip, I think it’s best that you drive. At least for now… until we get the pressure stabilized.”

“Okay,” Remy said. Then he would just have to drive. “Uh… Dr. Huld. Did I… by chance… Did I happen to tell you where I was going?”

Dr. Huld didn’t look up as he wrote on his pad. “Kansas City.”

“Right, Kansas City,” Remy repeated. He laughed, as if trying to pass this all off as a game, but the doctor ignored him and spoke without looking up from his pad.

“How’s the medication working out for you? Do you need another prescription?”

“I don’t know.”

The doctor looked up again, his eyes bugging. “Are you taking the pills I prescribed, Brian?”

“Honestly, I’m kind of having trouble remembering some things. There are these… gaps. They’re coming faster now… Could that be a side effect of the medication?”

Dr. Huld removed the miner’s light. “What kind of gaps?”

“Well, sometimes-”

HIS OWN face stared back at him from the bathroom mirror: thi

“Is everything okay in there?” A woman’s voice… youngish, a little tentative, maybe, but… nice.

Remy stared at the door. “Yeah. I’ll be right there.” He tried to come up with the girl’s name: Amelia? Olga? Maria? Jesus, it could be anything. Betsy? Phil? Rotunda?

He looked around wildly and then opened the medicine chest, looking for prescriptions. But there weren’t any. He opened a drawer and there were two medicine bottles. He read the names on the bottles: April Kraft. April. Kraft. April. April Kraft. Was he with this April Kraft? What if April Kraft was the girl’s roommate, not her?

“Uh… you don’t have a roommate, do you?”

She laughed on the other side of the door – a sad, distant sound that trailed off.

Remy reached to open the door when he was frozen by a troubling thought. Had they already had sex? Didn’t he usually piss after sex? He looked down at his half-erection. Was it the before kind of half-on or the after kind? If they’d already done it, and he tried again, it might not work. He might look… how exactly would that look? Valiant, for giving it an effort? Or like a jackass who can’t close the deal? And if they hadn’t had sex yet… Suddenly, he thought of the prescription bottles again. He opened the drawer. The first was for Celexa, prescribed for “anxiety and depression.” The second was for penicillin, the fourth refill of five. That’s all it said. Shoot, people took penicillin for all kinds of things. No reason to assume the worst. Had he used a condom? Was he about to use a condom? Did he have a condom? His erection was totally gone now.

“Please hurry… before I change my mind,” she said. Okay, before. Maybe he was looking for a condom. She laughed a little, but there was some quality in her voice that gave him pause and made him think this wasn’t just something she said, that this was a tentative match, that the moment could slip the way so many moments slipped now – loosed of their context and meaning and floating gently to the ground.

“Okay,” he said, and he reached for-

SCOTCH. REMY tasted it in his mouth and felt the heavy glass in his hand. He let the booze trickle down his throat. It was delicious. He closed his eyes and watched the floaters drift by, like leaves on a pond. When the taste had faded Remy opened his eyes. “Wow. That was good.” He was sitting in an oak-lined room, on a leather sofa, across from a handsome guy in his forties. The guy was wearing a suit with a striking shirt: sky blue with a bright white collar and white cuffs pinched by gold links that just barely peeked out of his jacket. His hair was carefully combed and curled up at the collar. He was holding copies of the photographs of March Selios and he was glaring at Remy.

“Look, friend,” the guy said – Remy caught a slight Texas accent – “I’ve been shaken down before. So go ahead and act tough. Take my drink. Try to intimidate me. Arrest me if you want. But I’m not answering any questions until you tell me how you found my name.”

Remy had no clue. “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he said.

The two men stared at one another for a long moment, before Remy held up his glass and asked: “I don’t suppose I could get some more of this?”

The guy rubbed his jaw and then raised the index finger on his right hand.

Remy looked around. They were in a club somewhere, rich dark wainscoting on the wall behind them, and above that a thickly painted landscape and a plaque engraved with the club officers’ names. Two guys in te

A waiter approached and spoke sotto voce. “Mr. Eller, shall I call security?”

“That’s not necessary, Carlos. In fact, why don’t you bring Mr. Remy here another scotch.”

“And for you?”

“No. Thank you.”

Eller looked around the butterscotch room. He hissed: “Okay. I knew March… Yes. Obviously.” He carefully set one photo down between them: March drinking the Gibson. “And you’re right. I did take this one.” Then he set down the other picture, the one of March in her office. “But I didn’t take this one. I don’t know who took that one. I’d guess they were both taken with her camera. She always had that camera. She was always giving that camera to people to take pictures of her in different situations. She used to say she was recording her life in case she forgot anything.”

The memory made this Eller lose his voice for a moment. He rubbed his jaw and continued. “We met about a year ago. I had just moved here from Houston. My company had some business in the Sudan, oil futures.” He pronounced it ol’ futures. “We were having some… difficulties with Khartoum, and we hired March’s firm to help us. While the lawyers hammered everything out, March gave us some cultural advice – how to play certain families, which palms to grease…” He shifted on the couch. “When the first part of the deal was finalized, I asked her out to di