The Zero

He dreamed of Edgar as a baby, but with a tree trunk for a neck.

And the dreams became even more outlandish: hushed conversations and bedside ceremonies, imaginary doctors offering absurd treatments. In one dream, they rolled him onto his back, just long enough to pin some kind of medal on him, before rolling him over again. In another dream, they moved him to a new room, and people rolled him from side to side, and he dreamed that they gave him a roommate, a man burned in a truck fire, and that they put a television on for them both, a television that turned its own cha

The televised dreams were especially clever the way they could skip away from anything unpleasant, go from death to music videos, and pass on information without informing. The way they could jump from cha

And when the dream television was off, Remy imagined that people came to see him – Guterak talking about his new job as spokesman for a tear gas company; Edgar shuffling his feet and mumbling that he had to get back to his base; The Boss pausing during a cell phone conversation long enough to ask if Remy was going to make it.

Dream trays of food came and went, and people asked if he needed anything, and through it all Remy clung to sleep. He knew that if she were right, and this had all been a kind of fever dream, that he should just stay in it and she would have to come. Life skipped along – snowboard races and cooking competitions and manatee rescues. “Holler if you hear something that sounds good.”

And one day he dreamed that his roommate was sent home. A window was open and he could smell burning leaves, and hear horns outside and the sounds of grinding traffic. The TV that day was offering a particularly insane dream in which grown-up child stars ate insects in an allotted amount of time. A nurse was laughing as she carefully removed the tape and gauze from his face. “That boy is crazy,” she said. “I used to love him on the TV. You ever watch that show he was on?” When the last of the gauze came off, Remy could feel the light behind one eyelid, and he could see the old flecks in his good eye. It was the most heartbreaking thing he’d ever seen.

“Okay,” she asked quietly, “Do you want to try to open your eyes now?”

But he squeezed them as tight as he could, waiting for her to come.

Acknowledgments

I AM DEEPLY INDEBTED to a number of friends, editors, agents and writers who believed in this novel from its first pages and gave it valuable reads: Cal Morgan, Judith Regan, Warren Frazier, Bill Reiss, Dan Butterworth, Jim Lynch, Da

This book is fiction. To those people whose real pain I witnessed five years ago, I hope there is real peace.

About the Author

JESS WALTER is the author of Citizen Vince, a novel named as one of the year’s best by the Washington Post, NPR’s Fresh Air, the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, the Milwaukee Sentinel, and others. His novels include Land of the Blind and Over Tumbled Graves, a New York Times Notable Book. Walter lives in Spokane, Washington, with his family.