The Zero

Near him, three firefighters sat on the edges of collapsed wall, eating their lunches from metal buckets, respirators hung around their necks, legs dangling, like kids fishing from a dock. Forty feet away, a masked construction worker sat on his yellow iron horse, its massive jaws pointed down, waiting for permission to nibble at the pile. Below them ran the soft grinding hum of idling trucks and heavy equipment and portable generators, the hushed conversations of engineers and welders. At Remy’s feet, someone had made a pile of popped rivets; it looked like a marble collection. Was this an official pile with some purpose, Remy wondered, or the obsession of someone who didn’t know what else to do down here? There were so many people standing around, dying to do something. Anything. Had he made this pile himself? He didn’t think so, but the rivets made him uneasy and he felt the urge to leave. He drifted and found himself on a side street, staring at a line of scorched, mashed cars, picked up and stacked four deep, bumpers and side mirrors snapped off, bits of burned rubber clinging to the rims of the wheels.

Remy walked the bent edge of the city, everyday things suddenly as mysterious and suggestive as archaeological artifacts. Coffee cups. Parking meter heads. Edgar had written a paper once about Pompeii, and Remy kept thinking about the pictures he downloaded, the plaster casts of victims covering their faces, plates and tureens and sandals, the sudden artifacts of lives frozen by shit luck. Then something else in the street caught Remy’s attention, gray and familiar, until it focused under his eyes: an airline seat belt. Debris from the planes went in specially marked bins, so Remy picked up the belt and carried it over, dropped it in with engine parts and seat cushions. Nearby, beneath a tarp, dog handlers were feeding two panting German shepherds, while a third curled up and napped against a twisted I beam. The dogs watched Remy, sniffed the air, decided he wasn’t a corpse yet, and put their heads down together. Remy took a wide berth in case they changed their minds. Across West Street he found himself inside WF II, cold, dark, and empty, the face of the building scarred and scorched, the marble lobby coated with light gray soot and strewn with broken glass and paper, along with detritus from the firefighters – tables and foldout chairs, mattresses, water bottles, and ladders. His flashlight hit something in the middle of the room: a shoe. He walked over, bent to look at it, picked it up: Size eleven. Loafer. He tried to think of a scenario in which its owner was alive, but his imagination failed him. He flipped the tassel, turned it over, and set it back where he’d found it. Some things you just left where you found them; the fact that other people had walked past the same things somehow ritualized it.

Remy sauntered up the grand stairs, past banks of paper pushed to the sides like snow on a well-traveled stoop. Presumably, the Docs just hadn’t cleared this paper yet, although Remy thought he remembered hearing something about hidden cameras positioned to try to catch rescue workers and equivocators looking through documents. On the second floor he made his way down a narrow hallway that looked out on The Zero. The hall was lined with grit and more paper, pushed into more snowbanks along either side so people could pass. A line of windows facing The Zero was blasted open; black fangs hung from the frames. Through the jagged opening Remy stared down on the well-lit pile. At the edges, the rubble was dark, a black tangle of shadowed forms, but the center was spotlighted bright; it was like coming across a high school football game in the middle of a bomb crater. American flags hung everywhere, from cranes and earthmovers, pi

Remy was tired. He wandered the hallway, wondering if there were someplace he might catch a nap. He came to a clothing store, a little boutique – the clothes so tiny, the little jeans like children’s knickers, scraps of fabric with straps, all of it covered in that same dust, a circular rack of once-colorful sweaters, arms twice as long as the torsos, everything the same shade of gray now. He freed a price tag from a crust of sprinkler-pasted dust. Ninety-two dollars – not ninety or ninety-five, ninety-two. Remy tried to picture the store that morning: a woman considering the price tag, trying to decide whether she should pay that much for a sweater. Ninety-two. The number bothered him, its concrete arbitrariness. Did the woman let the tag fall, hurry out of the store? Or did she buy one of these sweaters, already anticipating winter? Normally, she would never have given a second thought to where she bought that sweater, but now it would always co

Remy let the sweater fall and backed out of the store. He continued down the hall to the lobby of an accounting firm. He ran his hand along a dusty leather couch. A door off the lobby opened onto a small workout room: three universal gyms, a stair stepper and two exercise bikes, gray bottles of water abandoned in the cup holders. There was a TV up in the corner; Remy could imagine the accountants taking their lunches in here, eyes tracking the ticker on CNBC while secretaries moved past in tight skirts and cross trainers, clutching yoga mats…

He stepped out into the hall, where another jagged window overlooked The Zero. On the floor in front of him a mound of paper and debris was raked into a pile. Remy reached in and pulled out a day pla

When he arrived at that day, he found only two meetings scheduled, one at four o’clock in the afternoon and the other one in the morning, recorded in small block letters: “Remy: Windows – 9 A.M. Early.”

Remy shivered. He held the day pla

He looked back down at the pla