The Zero

April looked at Remy again.

“So… you just forget we’re here. Just say goodbye… to your brother,” Tina said. “Just say goodbye, whatever you feel like saying… that you love him, whatever… that it’s just the two of you now, you know… talk about your grief… and pretend we aren’t here.”

“It’s kind of hard,” April said.

“Sure. I understand. Just try to be as natural as possible. You know, give him a hug. Cry if you want to. The most important thing is that you act as if we’re not here. Just do exactly what a normal person would normally do… when seeing your last living sibling for the first time since your sister… died such a horrible, unbearable death. This is reality; what we want is real emotions.”

Gus shifted his weight and looked around the apartment. “Maybe we could just, like, hug at the door… and I could say something like-” His face melted in sorrow. “You look so much like her.” When he was done his face returned to normal.

“Yeah, that’s good.” Tina pulled a piece of thumbnail off her tongue and stared at it. “Or… I have an idea.” She walked to the window and looked down. “Pete.” The cameraman came over, holding the camera by its handle like a suitcase, as Tina pointed out the window to the street below and they spoke in hushed voices. Pete shrugged as if it would be okay.

“Listen,” she said. “Let’s do this downstairs. We’ll shoot it two ways. First, I want you two to go down there and say goodbye and we’ll shoot it from up here. You can have some privacy right there on the sidewalk below us. We’ll get audio from the mike packs and you two just… be yourselves. Just make sure you stand just to the right of the stoop down there. You know… just talk for a second and then hug… maybe grab her head, Gus, like you’re consoling and convincing at the same time. And then, Gus, you walk away. Don’t look back. Then we’ll come down and get it again close in a two-shot. Okay? Everyone ready?”

April looked once more at Remy but he didn’t know what to say, and finally she and Gus walked out the apartment door and started for the stairs. Remy was left with Pete the cameraman, who seemed infinitely bored, and who began setting up by the window while Tina the producer looked him over. “Your girlfriend seems a little uncomfortable.”

Remy didn’t say anything.

Tina shrugged. “Well, this is going to be a great segment. Her brother is… really… really something. We’re go

“Ready,” said Pete, and Tina moved over to the window. Remy walked over too, and looked down on the street as Gus took his sister in his arms and they hugged on the sidewalk below. She looked so tiny down there. She started to glance up at the camera, at Remy, but Gus took her face in his hands. Then he said something to her and walked away without looking back, the camera tracking him every step.

THE HANGAR didn’t appear to be emptying at all. Remy stared out at the alphabetized signs – above him, AM-AZ – hanging over tables covered with paper, stacks and stacks of white paper. The white space-suited technicians were going over each piece, giving them out one by one to other people who filed them in the rows of filing cabinets beneath the strings of fluorescent lights. At the end of the hangar, two forklifts were moving palettes of filing cabinets.

Something was different about the paper, though, and it took Remy a moment to realize what it was. He walked over to the nearest table and saw what it was: These pages weren’t scorched or bent or wrinkled. In fact, they were neatly stacked. Remy took a page from one of the stacks and was surprised to see that it didn’t smell at all like The Zero. It was an electric bill from a house in San Leandro, California, dated months after the attacks.

Almost out of habit, Remy patted himself down for his medication.

“You shouldn’t be handling that without gloves,” came a woman’s voice from behind him.

Remy put the power bill back in the stack. “These aren’t even from that day.” He walked over to the woman, who was standing between two signs, one reading PARTIALS, the other PERSONAL/MISC.

The woman’s head tilted slightly; her voice took on a rote quality. “The Liberty and Recovery Act mandates the recovery and filing of documents. It doesn’t specifically limit us to those documents recovered that day.”

“So… you go through garbage cans… or what?”

The woman’s face flushed. “Perhaps you should have this discussion with someone higher than me, Mr. Remy. I’m following my job description. I understand why you’re in a bad mood, but taking it out on me is not going to make the mistake go away.”

Remy felt awful. “I didn’t-”

She shook her head. She was tall and thin, with adult acne scars. “Trust me. This is embarrassing enough without you mocking me,” the woman said.

She handed Remy a piece of burned paper in a plastic baggie. “The reason the note was misfiled was that we mistook the signatory for the begi

Remy looked down. He was holding a note written on the letterhead of March Selios’s law firm, scribbled in felt-tip pen. Most of the right side of the note was burned away, and he could see why someone might’ve thought it was the begi

Hey -

We need to talk. I changed my mi

I can’t to go through wi

you understand.

March

Remy turned the note over. There was nothing on the other side. “I’m sorry,” he said. “I wasn’t implying that you’d done something wrong.” He laughed. “I couldn’t do that. I don’t even know what you’re supposed to do.”

Her eyes welled with tears. “Now you’re belittling me.”

“No.” Remy reached out and touched her arm. “No. I promise I’m not. I didn’t mean anything. Look, can I just… ask you something?”

The woman shrugged.

“Do you think…” He laughed. “Is it at all possible… that this is… all an illusion, that this is all in our heads?”

The woman looked around the vast airplane hangar, crews of workers filing millions of pages of documents. Her face flushed again and her eyes welled with tears. “Oh, go to hell,” she said.

EDGAR WORE clothes so similar to the ones he’d been wearing the last time Remy had seen him – baggy pants, hooded sweatshirt, tiny earphones – that Remy wondered if they actually were the same. And yet, there was something different about him; he seemed… bigger. Had Remy been away so much lately that he’d missed a kind of growth spurt? He was parked a block behind Edgar, and on the other side of the road, watching him through binoculars as he moved down the suburban street, with that hip-hop bounce.

When he got out of sight, Remy started his car and drove a few blocks, until he was in front of the boy again. He parked at the crest of a hill, in a dentist’s office parking lot, across from the back entrance to a mini-mall. He trained the binoculars on the sidewalk across the street.

Edgar came loping up the hill. Then he suddenly stopped, climbed over a retaining wall, and dropped out of sight into the mini-mall parking lot. Remy turned the key, pulled out, and drove around the block, finally turning into the back of the lot. The sky was low and overcast, as if a gray tarp had been thrown over the local suburbs.

Remy tooled through the parking lot, trying to find his son. The mall was shaped like a U, with a courtyard in the center and small stores clinging like barnacles to both the inside and outside of the U. As he drove, Remy ran his eyes over the storefronts – cell phone services and guitar sales and Army recruiting and bagels and ice cream and ta