The Zero (19 page)

“Hey, if you change your mind…” Guterak said.

They finished loading Paul’s pickup truck and climbed into the cab. It smelled like cigarette smoke, but otherwise it felt nice, sitting in a truck with Paul. It was like being a kid, Remy thought, riding in a car with no idea where he was going, no expectation of how long the trip would take, just the sun fluttering between buildings.

They turned a corner and Remy looked back to make sure the tarp was tied down and that’s when he noticed a beat-up silver Lincoln behind them, probably fifteen years old. It looked like a gypsy cab, but it had two guys in front. That seemed strange to Remy. Gypsy cabs never had two guys in front. Paul turned the truck twice more and the car stayed with them. At a stoplight, Remy adjusted the side mirror and got a good look at the two men in the car. The driver was a white guy with a mustache, wearing a ball cap, staring straight ahead. The passenger was a heavyset black guy, also staring straight ahead. He looked over at Paul, who didn’t seem to notice the car behind them.

Paul was rambling about women. “And do you know why? Because they don’t really want what they say they want. Look at Stacy. Spends twenty-two years riding my ass:
Why don’t you tell me what you’re thinking? Why don’t you talk?
Then when I finally decide to start talking, she says I won’t shut up.”

Remy looked behind them. The gypsy cab was still there.

Paul stopped at a diner. As he got out, Remy watched the car tool slowly past, the driver—the thick guy with the mustache—glancing in Remy’s direction and nodding. Remy followed Paul inside and they took a booth in the corner. They got a couple of coffees. Paul ordered hash. Remy ordered huevos rancheros. He watched the door.

Paul lit a cigarette. “I tell you they divided The Zero into quadrants?”

“No.”

“Yeah, each quadrant is under a different bucket company. The fuggin’ hard hats are pushing us out. They wanna work faster. Snow days are over, man. Even the smokers—they want those poor shits out, too. But they’re havin’ trouble there. The smokers are in no fuggin’ mood. Some of those guys are total pricks, showboats, like the fuggin’ Yankees of grief, you know? But…I hate to admit it…I know how they feel. I mean, after a while…you start to feel like it’s
yours
. Like you own it.”

Remy drank his coffee.

“You remember that night, Bri? When we went back down there, afterward? You remember that? How quiet and spooky it was?”

“Not really. No.”

“All of those black smoking shapes…and the searchlights and the glow from the fuggin’ fires…and you couldn’t see the end of it. It was like goin’ someplace where people had never been, like some dark jungle. Remember? You’d be on a street, but all of a sudden it wasn’t a street any more…you take five steps and you’re in some place you can’t imagine, like some hole in a kid’s nightmare. I couldn’t believe the next morning, how gray it all was. That night it really seemed black to me.” Guterak rubbed his scalp.

“Here’s what gets me,” he went on. “Remember, the first morning, the flatbed trucks were already there? They took a hundred-some trucks to Fresh Kills.
On the second fuggin’ day, Bri!
From the beginning they were already cleaning up the mess…before they even knew for sure what it was. I mean…what is that? Is that right?”

“I don’t know,” Remy said.

“You wanna know what I think?” He looked over his shoulder, and then leaned in closer to Remy. “I think the bosses knew all along that we weren’t gonna find anyone. I don’t think they cared. They wanted to clean it up fast, but they had to pretend that they expected us to find people. Right? All along they’re saying,
We will not rest until blah-fuggin’-blah
and
There is still fuggin’ hope,
and all the time what they’re
really thinking is
we gotta move a million tons of shit before we can rent this fugger out
. I mean, how do you move a million tons? You should see it. It’s like a strip mine down there. Like we’re digging for something.”

The words sounded familiar and disturbing, and Remy badly wanted to end this line of conversation. He excused himself to go to the bathroom. He walked past the counter and into the men’s room. He stared at himself in the scratched mirror, through his scratched eyes. Behind him, one of the urinals was overflowing, with the insistent sound of running water. Remy went into a stall, closed the door, undid his pants and sat, his head in his hands.

A few seconds later, the door to his stall flew open.

“Hey! Do you mind?” Remy looked up and saw one of the men from the gypsy cab, a heavy guy with a crooked mustache, teardrop sunglasses, and a baseball cap that bore a single word in block letters: BUFF.

“Have you had time to consider our offer?” the man said.

“I just sat down,” Remy said.

“We’re not going to interfere in your work, if that’s your concern,” the man said. “All we’re asking is that you show us a little…professional courtesy. Keep us in the loop. And, in return, the Bureau keeps you informed about what we find. Cooperation. That’s the key, am I right?”

Remy felt strangely compliant, hunched over in a stall with his pants at his ankles, and this thick man blocking the door to the stall. “Yes,” he said. “Sure.”

“Outstanding,” said the man in the BUFF hat. “See? We’re cooperating. Easy as that.” He put two fingers to his temple and then tipped the fingers toward Remy. “I’ll be in touch.”

The man was gone before Remy managed to say, “That’s not necessary.”

Remy finished his business and came out of the stall gingerly, looked around, washed his hands, had to dry them on his pants because there were no towels, and returned to the restaurant edgily, looking
around for the man from the gypsy cab. He didn’t see anyone. When he got back to the table, Paul was chewing his hash. He pointed his fork at Remy, as if he’d been waiting to finish his sentence.

“Look, Paul,” Remy said, “I’m not sure we should be talking about this stuff.”

But Guterak couldn’t stop. “We don’t do many tours anymore. Too many people. They’re building a goddamn observation platform. Like it’s the Grand Fuggin’ Canyon. They got these apartments overlooking The Zero donated for the rescue workers, and the bosses are using ’em for parties, to bang their girlfriends and hand out drinks to celebrities. Billionaires and soap actresses. The whole thing looks different now. Every day, they take shit away and it just never comes back. Take it to Fresh Kills and squeeze it like orange juice until all the paper and blood comes out and then they go back for another truckload.” He spoke in a low groan. “They’re gonna take it all away, Bri. All of it. The paper gets filed, bits of flesh buried, and you know who gets the steel? The mob. Goddamn bosses give all the steel to the mob. Everyone gets a piece a this thing.”

“Listen to me, Paul. You shouldn’t talk like this. Okay?” Remy scanned the restaurant for the man from the gypsy cab. “You have to be careful. You need to be quiet.”

“Yeah,” Paul said, “that’s what this agent of mine says. He says every time I open my fuggin’ mouth I give away what we could be getting paid for.
You only got one story,
he says,
you have to protect it
. So I promised him I’d shut up.” Paul shook his head. “But sometimes I think it’s crazy we don’t talk about this shit. Sometimes I think it’s crazy that we aren’t standing up and yelling about it.”

“Paul—” Remy began.

“I just wanna tell ’em,
‘Leave it!’
You know? Leave the shit. Everything. The piles and mounds. What’s the fuggin’ rush? Let me and the smokers spend the rest of our lives going through it one piece at a time if we want.”

The waitress filled their coffees.

“Maybe you should see someone,” Remy said quietly. “A therapist.”

“A what?”

“A therapist. A psychiatrist. I think I might be seeing one.”

Paul shrugged. “They got counselors and priests down there all the time, always trying to strike up conversations, staring at me like I’m a fuggin’ mental. One day I’m pissing and this guy with a ponytail comes up to me and asks me how I’m doing. I say, ‘My stream’s all right, but it looks like I could use a little more water in my diet.’

“And this humorless fugger says, ‘No, how are
you
doing, friend?’ So I turn to him and say, ‘You really wanna know how I’m doing, friend?’ and he thinks he’s got a live one and he perks up. ‘Yes,’ he says. I say, ‘Not so fuggin’ good, you really wanna know.’

“This jerkoff says: ‘Well, don’t worry. It’s gonna get better.’ That’s it. It’s gonna get better. That’s my fuggin’ counseling. Right? So you know what I said? I said, ‘Fugg you. I don’t want it to get better.’”

They ate in silence. Remy watched the door but he didn’t see the guy from the gypsy cab. “What happened with Stacy?” he asked.

“Come on, Brian.”

“Indulge me,” Remy said.

“Indulge you.” Paul drank his coffee, then shrugged and stared at his fork. “Well…pretty much the same thing. She said maybe it would get better and I said, ‘Fugg you, Stacy. I don’t want it to get better.’” He took a bite of his hash, and stared out the window into the parking lot as he chewed. Remy looked outside, too. The silver gypsy cab tooled past once more, the two men staring straight ahead at—

THE DESK
in front of him was smooth, whorls of blond wood like a satellite image of oak storms. He ran his fingers along its mostly empty surface, over a monthly planner with nothing on it, to a nameplate that was turned away from him. He spun it around. The nameplate read
REMY. Next to his name was a phone, with buttons for five lines, none of them marked. He picked up the receiver, listened to the buzz of the office dial tone, and set it back. There was a computer, turned off. Remy pushed the button beneath the screen, but nothing happened. He looked around his windowless office. It seemed to be brand new: very little on the walls. It was a good-sized room, with dark-wood walls, two chairs on the other side of the desk, and a lawyer’s glass-fronted bookcase. Remy walked over and crouched to look at the books in the case, hoping they would provide some clue about what he did in this office. But the only thing in the case was a
World Book Encyclopedia
set from 1974 and two rows of faded old
Reader’s Digest
condensed books that looked like they’d been picked up at a yard sale. There was also a photo on the wall, of him at The Zero in the days after—The Boss on one side, The President on the other. Remy stared at the picture. He didn’t remember meeting The President. There was nothing else in the office—no file cabinets, no photos of April or Edgar. He went back to the desk and began opening drawers. In the top drawer was a stack of blank paper with the word
SECURE
written across the top in a bold font. He tried the big bottom drawer next, but it was locked. The middle drawer was empty, except for a manila envelope with
REMY
written on it in black block letters.

Remy hefted the slender envelope, turned it over, set it on the desk, and stared at it. Was he supposed to open it? Was it some kind of report
on
him, not
for
him? Was it a test?

Remy took the report, walked to his office door, and opened it, looking for someone to ask about the report. He stuck his head out and looked both ways, down a wainscoted corridor that stretched about forty feet in either direction. A half-dozen closed office doors lined the corridor, all of them with unlabeled windows of frosted glass. Remy turned right and followed the corridor to its end, where it came to a T with another hallway. Remy turned left this time and walked about fif
teen feet, until he came to a pair of swinging doors that opened on a vast room, a maze of soft-walled cubicles bathed in fluorescent light. Again, there were no windows. He could hear the tapping of computer keys, like rainfall, and the low hum of people talking. The cubicles spread out before him like a huge field of crops, broken only by pillars every thirty feet or so. Inside the first cubicle a woman was hammering away at her computer keyboard, a telephone headset perched on her head, a plastic-sealed document in front of her. “Hell he did,” she said into her headset. “Bullshit. Come on now!”

Perhaps sensing Remy behind her, the woman turned. “Oh, hello, sir.”

Remy held up the envelope with his name on it. “Do you know—” he began.

The woman gestured to the phone headset, and Remy nodded and backed away. Leaving the room, he followed the T-shaped corridor in the other direction. It ended at another, more impressive pair of doors, the word
SECURE
lettered on the frosted glass. Remy opened the door and peeked inside. A woman sat behind a round desk reading a furniture catalog; behind her a big dark-wood door led to another office. Remy backed out, eased the door shut, turned left, and followed this hallway until he found himself back at another entrance to the huge maze of cubicles. He looked back over his shoulder. On the wall above the doorway he’d just come through was another sign like the ones he’d seen in the airplane hangar and the Quonset huts: “Our enemies should know this about the American people, which will not rest until Evil is defeated.”

Finally, Remy backtracked again down the T and down the corridor toward his office. Inside, the phone was ringing. He walked in and picked it up. “Hello?”

“Oh, good, you’re still there.” It was a woman’s voice.

“I’m still here,” Remy said.

“Did you get the envelope Shawn sent over?”

Remy set it on the desk. “Yes.”

“What do you think? Any of it helpful?”

“Uh…Probably too early to tell,” Remy said.

“Sure,” she said. “I tried to tell them it could wait until he got back from Washington, but you know those assholes in Partials.”

“Do I,” Remy said, surprised that it didn’t come out like a question.

“I know it. They’re all so mystical. I swear they could find significance in a used scrap of toilet paper. I guess it’s the training they get.”

“I guess,” Remy said

“Have you noticed how everyone in Partials eventually stops speaking in full sentences?”