The Zero

“Relax,” April said. “You’re doing a great job, whatever it is you’re doing.”

“Have you decided?” The waitress was standing over them.

“Yeah. I have,” he said, and with a relief that bordered on joy, Brian Remy ordered the yellow pepper, black bean, and artichoke quesadilla.

THEY MADE love in the new hotel room, too, and when they were done Remy took a long shower. He closed his eyes and let the hot water cascade over his face, pelting his eyelids and his forehead. He opened his mouth and it filled with water and he spat it out, over and over. When he came out April was sleeping and he watched her for a moment, the slow rise and fall of her breasts.

Finally, Remy dropped his towel and climbed into bed, nestling in behind her and staring into the tangle of her dark hair. He kissed the top of her head and she stirred slightly. She looked back over her shoulder at him, smiled, and faced the other way again.

“How was your shower?” she whispered.

“It was good.”

“Good. I like showers. I like to let the water run right over my face like I’m standing in a waterfall.”

They lay there quietly for a while, until her breathing caught up to his and for a moment they were inhaling and exhaling together, and then her breathing began to pull away again, with those cute little puffs of air. It occurred then to Remy that they had no clothes except the ones they’d arrived in, which were now lying on the floor. They’d either have to go back to the airport to get their luggage or go shopping.

“Listen, tomorrow-” Remy began.

“Shh,” she said. “No tomorrow.”

HE WOKE at ten to the sound of a light knocking at the door. April was still asleep. He looked up. The walls in the room were off-white, and the room had a light oak armoire that contained the television, refrigerator, and stereo. The door was still deadbolted shut. “Yes?” he said.

“Housekeeping,” said a voice on the other side.

“Can you come back?” Remy said.

“Chure. I comb back.”

Remy sat up and looked around the room. It was smaller than the other hotel room, nothing in this room but a bed and a small desk with a business phone. He called downstairs for coffee, fruit, and bagels.

“We could stay here forever,” she said from the bed.

“You think so?” Remy asked.

“Just run from hotel to hotel, screwing and pretending someone’s after us.”

Remy didn’t say anything.

“We’ll change our names every day. Today… I’ll be Monique. Who are you?”

“What?”

“Who are you going to be?”

“Uh… Steve,” Remy said.

“Steve and Monique. Good. Okay, who are we? What do we do?”

“I don’t know,” Remy said.

“Monique is a jewel thief. She’s fifty-two. A former actress and figure skater from the old Soviet Union who defected as a teenager, but after the Cold War ended she missed the old intrigue, so she works for an international cartel stealing jewels from wealthy industrialists and other assholes who capitalize on poor workers.”

Remy looked back at her. “Monique doesn’t look fifty-two.”

“She’s had a lot of surgery.”

“So who’s Steve?” he asked.

“A dentist. From Akron, Ohio.”

“Yeah… I don’t think I want to be Steve.”

“Okay,” she said. “Then I’ll be Steve. You be Monique. Come here, Monique, lie on your back and show me your mouth.”

And then a thought bobbed to the surface and he had to ask it. “April,” Remy said. “If Derek hadn’t died… is there any chance you and he-”

She looked stung and her eyes moved almost imperceptibly to a point just beyond him. “No.”

“But you still loved him. You said so.”

“Yes,” she said. “I did.”

“Was it the other woman?”

“No… I don’t think there was really anything between them,” she said quietly. “In some ways it was… incidental.”

“So what… you just couldn’t forgive him for doing that?”

“Something like that,” she said. “Look, I don’t-” She sat up and reached for her shirt, tugged it on without a bra and pulled the sheet up around her waist. “We were having so much fun, Brian. Why’d you have to-” But she didn’t finish. She picked up the remote control and started ru

THEY BOUGHT new clothes in a store called Fugue. She got tight leather pants and a little spaghetti strap tank top, and Remy bought faded jeans and a powder blue dress shirt. Remy carried their old clothes in a shopping bag. They went to a boutique shoe store and picked out a pair for each other: hers had straps that wrapped around the backs of her ankles and he got low-cut boots with square toes.

“Wow. We look hot,” she said when he came out in his new shoes. “I kind of want to screw us.”

They hopped in a cab and April told the cabbie to take them to a romantic restaurant, so he dropped them off at a little place in North Beach, where they had lunch and a bottle of Chianti in a sidewalk café. The wine was gone before their entrées arrived, and they had another carafe and lingered over a split bowl of spumoni.

“What’s your names?” asked the walnut-eyed Italian waiter.

“I’m Steve,” April said. “And his name is Monique.”

“Steve,” the waiter said, looking at Remy. “Monique. Can I tell you something?”

“You can tell us anything,” she said.

The waiter proceeded to tell them how he’d been raised in a vineyard and hotel on the western coast of Italy and how he’d gone into debt over some gambling expenses and escaped to the United States to work for an uncle, who had kept him in a kind of indentured servitude at the restaurant ever since. Remy didn’t know if he believed the story, but he liked it very much.

“How old you think I am, Steve?” He put his face close to Remy’s. He looked to be about fifty, Remy thought.

“I don’t know… forty?”

“Come on,” the man said. “I look sixty easy, yes? Well what I am, I tell you, is thirty-eight, Steve. That’s all. Thirty-eight. An’ you know why I look so old, Monique?”

She was resting her chin in her hand, smiling. “Why?”

“Because I never fall so much in love like you two.” The waiter held his hands out between Remy and April, as if he were performing a wedding. “I never find no one make me so happy.”

“You’ll find someone,” April said.

“No. Not me. No more.”

“Sure you will.”

“No. It’s okay.” He seemed to be looking for words. “In America,” he said, “everyone thinks every story have a happy end, yeah? You’re not happy about one thing, what do you do? Sue each other. It’s so stupid. How can every story be a happy end? Someone got to be sad.”

A SIGN on a light pole advertised an End of the World Party at a club near the Haight, and April wanted to go somewhere in their new clothes, so they took a cab and waited on line with people at least a decade younger, overgrown boys in sideburns and girls with lower back tattoos rising from their pants like bursts of hair, all of them bouncing on the balls of their feet and yelling into their cell phones. Remy and April stared at the door and listened to the thumping for about thirty minutes until a thick bouncer took twenty bucks and waved them past and they walked through an awning, around an iron gate and down a staircase into a cavernous basement with pillars, floor lighting, and a low ceiling. A disc jockey was playing punkish electronic music on a simple turntable set up on milk crates, the sound a slush of guitars, synthesizers, and sibilant voices, punctuated by that same thud of drums, merely suggestive from the outside, insistent now that they were on the pulsing dance floor.