The Zero

“What did we forget, Paul?” Remy cracked a little dark rum and drained it.

“The people,” Paul said, as if it were obvious. “We forgot the people. I mean… where are they? It’s like they’re in a giant room somewhere, sitting, crouched against walls, and… if we just find that door and open it, they’ll all be in there, just staring at us. Thinking, What the fugg took you so long?”

“Jesus, Paul…”

“Sometimes I wish we’d just gone to a bar that morning and watched the whole thing on CNN. You know what I mean? I envy people who watched it on TV. They got to see the whole thing. People ask me what it was like and I honestly don’t know. Sometimes, I think the people who watched it on TV saw more than we did. It’s like, the further away you were from this thing, the more sense it made. Hell, I still feel like I have no idea what even happened. No matter how many times I tell the story, it still makes no sense to me. You know?”

There was something important Remy wanted to say, but he felt dopey with booze and the gaps seemed to be coming so fast now. Remy gripped the side of the bed, as if to keep himself from sliding out of the moment until he could remember what he wanted to say.

“People always ask the same question,” Guterak said. “When everyone is around, it’s all respect and bravery and what-a-fuggin’-hero and thanks for your sacrifice, but the minute someone gets me alone, or the minute they have a drink in ’em, they get this creepy look and they ask me what the bodies sounded like when they hit the sidewalk. They ever ask you that?”

Remy couldn’t say. “What do you tell ’em?”

“I say to clap their hands as hard as they can, so hard that it really hurts. Then they clap, and I say: No. Harder than that. And they clap again, and I say, No, really fuggin’ hard. And then they clap so hard their faces get all twisted up, and I say, No, really hard! And then, when their hands are red and sore, they say, ‘So that’s that what it sounded like?’ And I say, ‘No. It didn’t sound like that at all.’”

“Paul, have you thought about getting help? Maybe take some time off?”

“What? Take disability for my back, like you?”

Remy couldn’t tell if Guterak was mocking him. He knew there was nothing wrong with his back, didn’t he? “I don’t think I’m on disability, Paul,” he said. “I think I’m working on something.”

Guterak laughed. “Oh. Then I guess I can cancel your going-away party.”

“I swear, Paul. I’m working. On some kind of case.”

“Yeah? They put the blind guy with the bad back on some big, top-secret assignment, huh?”

“My back is fine.”

Paul laughed again. “What do you do on this secret assignment?”

“I go places… Talk to people.”

Guterak seemed to be tiring of the joke. “Yeah? Then what happens?”

Remy put the funeral a

“Yeah,” Paul said. “Well. I know that feeling.”

HIS PANT leg was caught on something sharp. It was dark and he had to feel with his hand along the wall of a narrow, paved tu

Remy pulled himself to the mouth of the tu

Remy spilled out of the opening onto the concrete floor. The two men ahead of him were already standing and brushing themselves off, the beams from their flashlights creating plumes of dust and light. One of the men was Markham, the Documentation guy who had assigned him to find March Selios. The other man was someone Remy had never seen before, an older guy in coveralls and a utility jacket. This older man removed his respirator, and so Remy and Markham did the same. Markham’s smooth face screwed up in a sneeze.

Remy’s first breath was choked with dust. The Zero smell was even stronger down here, and he couldn’t help wondering if, as they moved down, they weren’t nearing some hot wet core of the thing – and he imagined a river of smell, perhaps guarded by a robed ferryman or a cabbie sitting on a beaded chair. Markham pulled blueprints from his back pocket and walked over to the hood of a Mercedes coupe, its front end pristine except for the dust, its trunk bashed by falling concrete. Markham spread the prints out, pulled a flashlight from his pocket, flicked it on, and put it in his mouth between his teeth.

When Remy didn’t budge, Markham had to pull the flashlight out of his mouth and beckon him over. “Brian. Please. We don’t have much time.”

Remy edged over. Markham put the flashlight back in his mouth and pressed down on the creased blueprint. It showed the levels of this underground parking garage, both from above and in relief, its ducts and staircases and elevator shafts, its relation to the commuter train tubes. The other man, who wore gray coveralls, pointed with a drafting pencil at a long slender line on the page, and then at the collapsed parking structure in front of them. “Okay. We’re here.” He pointed to a spot on the blueprint. “On the northeast corner. There were six basement levels down here, filling up most of the entire sixteen acres – parking, shopping, public transportation, air condition, elevators and other machinery – like a honeycomb. About sixty percent of all that was destroyed.”

He ran his pencil along a tu

“Well, that’s a hell of a choice,” Markham said, as his flashlight fell to the ground, the light frantically testing the walls for escape before hiding beneath a crushed Lexus sedan. “Fire or flood or poison. Burn or drown or choke on your own vomit. I guess I’d take drowning, you know, if I had to pick. How about you, Brian? You seem like a burn guy… like you’d want to go out in as much glory as possible.”