THEY BURST INTO THE SKY, every bird in creation, angry and agitated, awakened by the same primary thought, erupting in a white feathered cloudburst, anxious and graceful, angling in ever-tightening circles toward the ground, drifting close enough to touch, and then close enough to see that it wasn’t a flock of birds at all – it was paper. Burning scraps of paper. All the little birds were paper. Fluttering and circling and growing bigger, falling bits and frantic sheets, some smoking, corners scorched, flaring in the open air until there was nothing left but a fine black edge… and then gone, a hole and nothing but the faint memory of smoke. Behind the burning flock came a great wail and a moan as seething black unfurled, the world inside out, birds beating against a roiling sky and in that moment everything that wasn’t smoke was paper. And it was beautiful.
“Brian? Is everything okay in there?”
Brian Remy’s eyes streaked and flaked and finally jimmied open to the floor of his apartment. He was lying on his side, panning across a fuzzy tree line of carpet fiber. From this, the world focused into being one piece at a time: Boots caked in dried mud. Pizza boxes. Newspapers. A glass. And something just out of range…
The flecks in his eyes alerted and scattered and his focus adjusted again: sorrow of sorrows, an empty Knob Creek bottle. They were both tipped over on their right sides on the rug, parallel to one another, the whiskey fifth and him. In this together, apparently. He told himself to breathe, and managed a rusty-lunged wheeze. He blinked and the streaks and floaters ran across his eyes for cover. Outside Remy’s apartment, Mrs. Lubach yelled again. “Brian, I heard a bang! Is everything okay?”
Remy had heard no bang himself, although he tended to believe literalists like Mrs. Lubach. Anyway, a bang of some sort would explain the muffled ringing in his ears. And how it hurt to move his head. He strained to raise his chin and saw, to his right, just past the bottle, his handgun, inert and capable of nothing but lying among the crumbs and hairs on his carpet. If he waited long enough, a rubber-gloved hand would pick it up by the butt and drop it in a Ziploc, tagged and bagged – and him too, as long he didn’t move, a bigger bag, but the same – thick plastic the last thing he smelled before the last sigh of the reefer truck door.
Mrs. Lubach’s voice came muffled from behind the door: “Brian? I’m going to call the police.”
“I am the police.” His own voice was tinny and small inside his skull; he wasn’t sure the words had actually come out of his mouth.
“Brian?”
He sat up on the floor and looked around his studio apartment: collapsed futon, patched plaster walls, paint-sealed windows. He put his hand against the left side of his head. His hair was sticky and matted, as if he’d been lying in syrup. He pulled his hand away. Sure. Blood.
Okay. Coming together now.
He called to the door, louder: “Just a minute, Mrs. Lubach.”
Brian Remy stood, queasy and weak, trying once again to find the loose string between cause and effect – long day, drink, sorrow, gunshot, fatigue. Or some other order. Steadied on the stove, he grabbed a dish towel and held its fringed end against his head. He looked back at the table and could see it all laid out before him, like the set of a student play. A kitchen chair was tipped over, and on the small table where he had been sitting, a self-determinate still life: rag, shot glass, gun oil, wire brush, note.
Okay. This was the problem. These gaps in his memory, or perhaps his life, a series of skips – long shredded tears, empty spaces where the explanations for the most basic things used to be. For a moment he tried to puzzle over it all, the way he might have considered a problem on the job. Cleaning oil might indicate an accident, but the note? What lunatic has ever written a note before…
Cleaning a gun?
He picked up the note: “Etc…”
Et cetera?
Well, that was funny. He didn’t recall being so funny. And yet there it was, in his own handwriting. Okay. He was getting somewhere. Whatever had happened, whatever he’d done, it was funny. Remy stuffed the note in his pocket, then righted the chair and bent over to pick up his nine, wobbled, set the safety, and laid the gun gently on the table.
“Brian?”
“I’m coming.” He followed the path to the wall and put his finger in the fresh hole in the brick behind his chair. Then he stepped away from the wall and held the dish towel to his head, braced against a slithering jolt of pain, and when it passed, walked to the door. He opened it a crack on the hallway outside his apartment, Mrs. Lubach’s orange face filling the gap between door and jamb.
“Brian? Is everything okay? It’s three o’clock in the morning.”
“Is it?”
“There are noise ordinances, Brian.” Her voice echoed a split second behind the movement of her mouth, like a badly translated movie. “Rules,” she continued. “And that bang. People work. We have jangly nerves, Brian. If you’re not hurt, then it’s inconsiderate, all that noise.”
“What if I am hurt?”
Mrs. Lubach ignored him. “Just imagine what we thought that noise could have been.” She was small and lean, with short straight white hair and wide features; her heavy makeup was painted on just a fraction off-center, giving her the look of a hastily painted figurine, or a foosball goalie. Before, she had been an accountant. Now, he thought he remembered, she wasn’t sure what she would be. Would people just go back to the same jobs? As if nothing had happened? “For all we know the air might be combustible,” she said now.
“I don’t think so.” Remy shifted the towel against his head.
“Jennifer-in-6A’s boyfriend says that we’ll all be in trouble when the wind shifts. Do you think that’s true, Brian?”
“I don’t know.” Remy had no idea who Jennifer’s boyfriend was, or who Jennifer was for that matter, or who lived in 6A or which way the wind had been blowing before.
“They don’t tell us what’s in the smoke. Do they tell you, Brian? Have they told you what’s in the smoke?”
“No one has told me anything.”
“Would you tell me if they had?”
Remy wasn’t sure how to answer that.
“I didn’t think so.” She leaned in and whispered: “Karl in 9F said it’s only a matter of time. He says we’re wallowing in carcinogens. Soup of our own extinction. Those were his exact words. Matter of time. Soup. He’s atheist. Very scientific. Cold.” Then she looked over her shoulder. “I have a friend at the hospital. There are birth defects. Pocked gums. People without legs. I don’t like to be in crowds, Brian.”
Remy felt blood trickle down his neck and pool in the triangle of his collarbone.
Mrs. Lubach craned her neck to see. “Spontaneous bleeding,” she said.
“No. I was just cleaning my gun, and…” She stared at him as if he knew how to finish the sentence. “Et cetera,” he said.
But Mrs. Lubach seemed to have lost interest in Remy’s head wound, in the bang that had brought her to his door. “I won’t go downtown anymore,” she said, “or on the subway, or to any building taller than ten stories. I think we might leave the city.”
Remy rearranged the towel against his head. “I’m gonna go clean this up, Mrs. Lubach.”
“I was in the shower,” she said, as if he’d asked. “I was in the shower and sometimes the water slows to a trickle, and it did, maybe ten seconds before, and then when I got out, the phone rang, and it was my sister and she told me to turn on the TV. She lives in Wilmington. Her power went out at that precise moment.” Mrs. Lubach’s eyebrow arched. “In Wilmington. I don’t understand any of it, Brian.”
Remy pulled the towel from his head. “I need to go clean this up, Mrs. Lubach.”
“When do you think it will get back to normal?”
Normal. The word itself seemed familiar and strange, like a repressed memory. At one time there had been a normal. “You know,” he said. “I guess I’m not sure.”
“Your friend said things will be better when all the paper has been cleaned up.”
“My friend?” Remy asked.
“The young man who was here looking for you this morning. The paper guy.”
“Paper guy?” Remy asked.
Mrs. Lubach opened her mouth to answer but-
REMY SAT alone in the emergency room, across from a dew-eyed Vietnamese girl holding a washcloth around what seemed to be a burned hand. She was nine or ten years old, and she was wearing footed pajamas. She was staring at Remy. Every few seconds she would close her eyes and sigh. Then she’d open them again, stare at Remy, and squeeze them shut, as if he were the thing causing her pain. She appeared to be here by herself. Remy looked around, but there was no one else in the ER except a senior volunteer sitting at the check-in desk, reading a hardcover book. After a moment, Remy stood and walked up to the senior volunteer, a shell-eyed man with a dusting of white whiskers on his cheeks. The man refused to look up from his book. Peering over, Remy saw he was hiding a ratty paperback behind the hardcover. At first Remy thought it was a blank book, but then he saw that he was merely at the end of a chapter and there were only a few words on the page: nothing more hopeless, than this freedom, this waiting, this inviolability…
Remy waited but the man didn’t look up, didn’t even turn the page, just sat reading over and over: nothing more hopeless… this waiting…
“Excuse me,” Remy said finally. “But that girl-”
“I told you, Mr. Remy, it will just be a minute,” the senior volunteer said. “Please sit down. The doctors know all about you.” The old guy stared at Remy and refused to break eye contact, until finally he turned the page and Remy read the first line of the next chapter: “And he tore himself free…”
“But the girl-”
“They are aware,” the man said, “of your condition.”
Remy tore himself free and returned to his chair. The Vietnamese girl sighed again and then her eyes snapped open and she stared at Remy evenly, as if she were waiting for the answer to some question. Finally, Remy had to look away.
His eyes fell on a small television bolted to a pillar in the center of the waiting room, flickering with cable news. Remy felt a jolt of déjà vu, anticipating each muted image before it appeared, and it occurred to him that the news had become the wallpaper in his mind now, the endless loop playing in his head – banking wings, blooms of flame, white plumes becoming black and then gray, endless gray, geysers of gray, dust-covered gray stragglers with gray hands covering gray mouths running from gray shore-break, and the birds, white – endless breeds and flocks of memos and menus and correspondence fluttering silently and then disappearing in the ashen darkness. Brian Remy closed his eyes then and saw what he always saw: shreds of tissue, threads of detachment and degeneration, silent fireworks, the lining of his eyes splintering and sparking and flaking into the soup behind his eyes – flashers and floaters that danced like scraps of paper blown into the world.
DAYS AFTER – with everything sun-bleached and ash-covered, with a halo of smoke still hanging over the island – Remy’s partner Paul Guterak announced that he’d never been this happy. Paul and Remy were driving one of the new Ford Excursions that FEMA had sent over – “beautiful fuggin’ truck,” Paul said, white with tinted black, bulletproof windows, bumpers and back window plastered with stars and stripes, a tiny plastic flag fluttering furiously on the antenna. People lined up all along the West, waving signs and flags of their own, crying, holding up pictures and placards: “God Save…” and “Help Us Avenge…” and “We Won’t Break.”
Broken – that’s how they looked to Remy. Busted up and put back together with pieces missing. They stood on roadblocks and behind barricades on the street, in flag T-shirts and stiff-brimmed ball caps, animated by Paul and Brian’s passing like figures on an old Disney ride, grinding and whirring buccaneers from the Pirates of the Caribbean. A boy in a long-sleeved rugby jersey waved a yin-yang painted skateboard over his head near a woman holding a Pomeranian to her chest. Two women in jeans and heels, a bearded guy in a wool coat, and hundreds more, great bundles of open faces, until, after a few blocks, Remy could no longer look and he had to turn forward. And still they cheered and called out, as if desperate to be noticed into life. They cried. Saluted. They yelled for Remy to acknowledge them, but he stared ahead until they blurred together, the picket faces sliding by, the voices blurring together as he tried to place their longing.
“This is what I mean. We’re fuggin’ famous.” Guterak said it the way someone might admit to being alcoholic. Maybe Paul was right, in his way – this was what it was like to be famous, to have people desperately reflected in the glow of your passing.
Paul pulled the truck off West Street before they reached the tunnel and the line of double-parked dinosaurs – the sat-news trucks and flatbeds, the reefer meat trucks. They stopped for coffee at a corner deli with an American flag taped to the corners of the window. There were flowers again, in pots and in window boxes, freshly misted, bleeding dirty water onto ashy sidewalks. That was something, anyway: For a day or two afterward, Remy remembered, there had been no flowers in the shops. At the deli door, an old couple smiled and gave them a thumbs-up. Brian adjusted his ball cap, which was clamped too tightly against the rough stitches he’d gotten in the ER the night before.
“Listen, I ain’t sayin’ I’m glad it happened,” said Paul through his teeth. He was built like a bowling pin, wide at the hips and narrow at the shoulders. He spoke out of one side of his mouth, a gambler giving a tip. “Nothin’ like that. But you gotta admit, Bri…”
“No, I’m not admitting anything, Paul.” His head hurt.
“No, see, what I’m sayin’…”
“I know what you’re saying,” Remy said, “I just don’t want to hear it.”
“I ain’t a fuggin’ moron here, Bri. I know this ain’t politically correct. I ain’t gonna say this to anyone else. But come on… for you and me… I mean… we’re alive, man. How can we help feeling-”
“I don’t want to think about it, Paul. I don’t want to talk about how you feel.”
“No, you’re not understanding me.” Paul rubbed his neck.
They lined up for coffee, but the people on line parted and let them move to the front. As they passed, a woman in fur came to life and reached out to pat them on the shoulders of the new Starter jackets the bosses had gotten for everyone. Remy reached for some gum, but his hand went left a few degrees and he bashed his knuckles into a box of Snickers. No one seemed to notice.
When Paul tried to pay, the coffee guy waved them off. “Heroes drink free,” he said, and the people on line applauded and Paul tipped the guy three bucks.
“Thank you, sir,” Paul said, and he swallowed that thing that kept trying to choke him up.
“God bless!” said an older woman pushing a dog in a baby stroller.
“Thank you, ma’am,” Paul said. “God bless you.”
The dog stared at Remy, who finally had to look away.
Back on the sidewalk, Remy looked over his shoulder to see if people were still moving in the deli, but the sky’s reflection glinted off the glass doors and he couldn’t see inside. Clouds coming. Jesus, what would the rain do to the dust and ash? And the paper, the snow banks of résumés and memos and reports and bills of lading – what would rain do to all the paper? He knew there must be meetings taking place right now, officials preparing for just that possibility: that the vast paper recovery efforts would be complicated by rainfall. Paul and Remy climbed back in the truck. “That’s exactly what I’m talkin’ about, what happened in there just now,” Paul said. “You can’t tell me that ain’t the best feeling, them people treating us so good like that. That’s all I’m saying, Bri. That’s all.”
Remy closed his eyes.
“See,” Paul pressed on, “before, no one said shit to us, except to gripe about a summons they just got or bark about why we didn’t catch the mutt who broke into their fuggin’ car, you know? Now… free coffee? Pats on the back? I know you been off the street for a while, but Jesus, don’t it seem kinda… nice?”
Remy hid behind his coffee.
Paul whipped the Excursion back into traffic. “I mean, the overtime. And the shit we get to do. Taking the Yankees on a tour a The Zero. The fuggin’ Yankees. Look at what we were doin’ before this. Picking up The Boss’s dry cleaning, runnin’ his girlfriends around the city. Sitting through meetings with morons. You can’t tell me you’d rather be doing that. And it ain’t just that… it ain’t just relief. It’s something else, maybe even something…” He leaned over, and for a moment Remy thought he looked completely insane. “…something bad. You know?”
Remy stared out the window, down a deep coulee of dusted glass and granite, at palettes of bottled water stacked along the street and crates of donated gloves and granola bars. And then the rows of news trucks, two dozen of them queued up for slow troll, grief fishing, block after block – Action and Eyewitness and First At, dishes scooped to the sky like palms at a mass, and beyond them flatbeds burdened with twisted I beams, and then, backing up traffic, the line of expectant refrigerated meat trucks and the black TM truck, the temporary morgue where Remy had taken-
“See, what I’m sayin’…” Paul wrestled with his words.
“I know… what you’re saying,” Remy said quietly. “And maybe you’re right. But there are things we can’t say now. Okay? You can’t say you’ve never been this happy. Even if you think it, you can’t say it. Everything is… there are things… we have to leave alone. We have to let ’em sit there, and don’t say anything about ’em.”
“Like the scalp.”
Remy rubbed his mouth and remembered it. Second day at The Zero, he’d found a section of a woman’s scalp – gray and stiff – in the debris. He hadn’t known what to do, so he put it in a bucket. They searched all afternoon near where it was found, but there were no other body parts, just a six-inch piece of a forehead and singed hairline. An EMT and an evidence tech debated for ten minutes what to do with the scalp, before they finally took it out of the bucket and put it in one of the slick body bags. Remy carried it to a reefer truck, where it sat like a frog in a sleeping bag, a slick black bump on the empty floor. At least five times a day, Paul brought up the scalp. Whose scalp did Remy think it was? Where did he think the rest of the head was? Would they simply bury the scalp? Finally, Remy said he didn’t want to talk about it anymore – didn’t want to talk about what a piece of someone’s head felt like, how light it was, how stiff and lonesome and worthless, or about how many more slick bags and meat trucks there were than they needed, how the forces at work in this thing didn’t leave big enough pieces for body bags.
“See,” Paul continued, “you ain’t hearing me right, Bri.”
“I’m hearing you.”
Paul drove to the checkpoint, where two nervous-looking National Guardsmen in sunglasses and down-turned M-16s flanked a short foot cop, who stepped forward and leaned a boot on the running board of the Excursion. Paul reached into his shirt and came up with his ID tags. He held them out for the cop to read.
“Hey, boss,” the street cop said, breaking it into two syllables: buoss. “How’s it goin’?”
“Goddamn tough duty, you know?”
“Fuckin’ raghead motherfuckers.”
“Yeah. That’s right. That’s right.”
Paul put his hand out. Remy removed the tags from his neck and put them in Paul’s hand. Paul showed Remy’s tags to the street cop, who wrote something down and then gave the tags back to Paul, who handed them back to Remy.
The street cop patted the Excursion’s hood. “Nice truck, though.”
“Freddies gave it.”
The foot cop jerked his head toward the two guardsmen. “All they gib’ me was these two stupid fuckers. And I know one of these Gomers is gonna shoot me in my leg before this is over.”
“Maybe they got rubber bullets.”
“In a perfect world, huh? Hey, you gib’m hell in there, boss,” the cop said. He patted the hood of the Excursion again and stepped back, waving them through.
Remy watched the street cop, watched with a certain wonder the way that word, boss, was tossed between the two men, connoting everything of value, the firm scaffolding of reverent loyalty that promised each guy below the chance to rise to heights: his own crew, driver, office, parties, and budgetary discretion and security details, a shot at being boss someday himself. Wasn’t this the ladder Remy had patiently climbed before? But now… what? Remy vaguely remembered thinking it was a corrupting and cruel system, but he had to admit… it lived for days like these.
Guterak drove through the checkpoint, to a cascade of applause and waving flags. He chirped the siren, then touched two fingers to his forehead and pointed. “Wish I could do something for these people,” he muttered. “Anything. Mow their lawns.” Remy leaned back in his seat and tried to breathe through his mouth. The smell never left him now. It lived in the lining of his nose and the fibers of his lungs – his whole body seemed to smell, as if the odor were working through his pores, the fine gray dust: pungent, flour of the dead. Remy was surprised at the air’s ferocity down here, acrid with concrete dust and the loosed molecules of burned… burned everything. It was amazing what could burn. We forgot that, Remy thought, in our fear of fission and fusion, radiation, infection, concussion and fragmentation. We forgot fire.
“You see Durgan’s kid on TV?”
Please be quiet.
“Big. I hadn’t seen his kid since we all played softball. That’s what I’m talkin’ about… seeing Durgan’s kid. I mean… honestly? Better him than me. Right? Come on. Admit it. Better his kid crying on TV than mine. Or yours. Right?”
Remy stared out the window.
“But here’s Durgan… dead as an eight-track, never get to see his kid again. And that could have been me, right? Except that, instead a bein’ dead, I ain’t even injured… or bankrupt. Or outta work. I got overtime comin’ out my ass. I got backstage passes to Springsteen, right? Durgan’s in pieces out there somewhere and I can’t even get anyone to let me pay for a fuggin’ cuppa coffee no more. All because I was standin’ here and he was standin’ there. See? I’m just sayin’-”
“I know,” Remy interrupted. “Please. Paul.” Remy took off his cap and rubbed the stitches on the side of his head.
Guterak looked over. “Hey, you got your hair cut.”
“Yeah.” Remy put the cap back on.
“What made you do that?”
“I shot myself in the head last night.”
“Well.” Paul drove quietly for a moment, staring straight ahead. “It looks good.”
THE ZERO was humming. A raccoon-eyed firefighter had heard something, most likely the shriek of shifting steel, and was convinced that someone was calling his name. Rescue workers in respirators and surgical masks scuttled around the southwest corner of the pile, putting their heads in crevices, rappelling down cracks, furrowing between beams. Remy had watched as the ground began to shift beneath them, but even as they managed to pull away one husk of steel they just found more, turtles all the way down, bent steel shells as deep as anyone could imagine, and below that, seams of liquid fire, which they dug toward frantically, in the hopes of purifying some rage.
“Ants on a fuggin’ hill,” Paul said as they walked, too loudly, always too loudly, and Remy grabbed his partner by the wrist. It was as if Paul had lost whatever filter used to separate his mind from his mouth. He said whatever came into his head now.
“No, don’t you think?” Paul asked. “Don’t we all look like ants out here?” Remy couldn’t remember if Guterak had always been this way or if his Touretic insensitivity was new. He turned to Paul to tell him to be quiet, but just then the soot-eyed firefighter held his hand up and the bucket brigades froze in place, eyes on the smoking fissures, everyone stone quiet, like some children’s game, desperate to hear over the generators and construction equipment and the low buzz of conversation. The firefighter was staring at them – no, right through them. Goddamn.
“You know what? I can barely stand to look at these fuggin’ smokers now,” Paul said at his elbow. “I used to hate those lousy, pampered mopes. You know? Bravest, my ass. The old ones are lazy fat fuggs and the young ones spend all day working out-”
“Paul-” Remy began but his partner just kept talking.
“And they get all that tail. For what? Let’s see one of those lazy-ass work-two-days-a-week assholes foot a beat on the Deuce, right? Let’s see one of those steroid-suckin’ probies make a buy in some hooch in the Heights.
“But I can’t begrudge ’ em now. Sons-of -bitches just walked right in. You know? I mean, damn. They can get all the blow jobs, all the cooked meals. Fuggers walked right in. Half of ’em off duty, and they walked in. I can’t say I would’ve-”
“Shut the fuck up!” The poor smoker was still running around the edge of the pile, yelling at people who were already staring blankly at him, until he was the only one making any noise. “Please, shut the fuck up! Why can’t everybody just be quiet? Why can’t everyone shut up?”
Paul and Remy drifted back a block. They were supposed to meet Assistant Chief Carey at the southern entrance of the vast stadium of debris, beneath B-Trust, what Guterak called “the holster,” its face pierced by a steel javelin, just to the south of The Place That Stunk. Everyone knew that it stunk especially bad here, and everyone knew what the smell had to be, but no one could find the exact source. An elevator bank? A stairwell? A fire rig? A few years ago, when he was still married, Remy had kicked his kid’s jack-o’-lantern underneath his porch and this was how it smelled in the spring. It drove people crazy, smelling that at the south end of The Zero, and not being able to find the thing that was deteriorating. And now that the smell was getting weaker, the fact of it was even worse, like they were losing whoever was down there. He’d see guys wrinkle their noses, raising their faces to the sky, as if they just needed to try harder. And that was another thing you couldn’t talk about. While the slick bags sat piled on sidewalks and the meat trucks sat empty and you took apart the piles one goddamned bucket at a time, like taking pebbles from a mountain, you knew what was happening below, you could smell what was happening, the quickening decay and dissolution, like paper burning in air.
The bucket brigades started up again: only six today, and the bosses were trying to get even these to stop, so they could bring in more heavy machinery to get at the rubble. The machines tested the edges of the pile, nosing their way in, sampling the surrounding buildings, yanking twisted I beams like horses grazing at deep-rooted grass. Eventually, the smokers and cops and hard hats would have to give way to the machines – they all knew this – and the order would be forever reversed, people pushed to the edge, snacking at the corners while the machines ate to their fill from the center.
“Fuckers took your sweet time.” Ass Chief Carey strode over to Remy and Guterak, wearing a hard hat and one of the new satin jackets. The jackets made them look like a slow-pitch softball team. “I was trying to call you on the Nextels.”
Paul shrugged. “I gave my Nextel to Kubiak two days ago. He said we was getting new this week.”
The Ass Chief’s eyes bugged. “You gave your Nextel to Kubiak?”
“I thought we was getting new, boss.”
“What? You didn’t get new walkies?”
“No!”
“And you gave yours away?”
“Come on, Chief. Why you bustin’ my balls here? I… fuggin’ told you.”
The Ass Chief wrinkled his long forehead, all the way to the hard hat perched on his black brush-cut hair. He turned to Remy. “That true? You didn’t get new Nextels?”
“I don’t know,” Remy said.
Carey turned and snapped his own walkie-talkie out. “Pirello! Where the fuck you at, you piece of shit? Where the fuck are my Nextels? My guys got no radios.”
Ass Chief Carey stalked off, shouting into his hand, and Remy turned back to the pile. Water was being pumped from three angles, from ladder trucks on the fringe of the massive smoldering jungle, while fire raged in its roots and hot shoots jutted from the pile. Up close, you didn’t really get any better idea what the smoking leaves and vines were made of, except a few things like window blinds. Everywhere, window blinds. How many window blinds could there be? A billion? Everywhere Remy looked he saw hoary window blinds, hung over bent beams like casual summer wash. He longed for the cool comfort of raw numbers. What percentage of the pile was steel? What percentage window blinds?
And paper. What percentage paper? Much of the paper had made a dramatic escape; that’s what Remy recalled, watching the paper flushed into space, a flock of birds hovering over everything, and then leafing down on the city. That would help, somehow, knowing what percentage of the pile was paper. And people. Most of the pile was steel and concrete and window blinds and you became grateful for these because they mostly stayed put. You could figure out how much steel and how many window blinds; you could account. It was a simple math problem. But the people were different. And the paper. The people and the paper burned up or flew away or ran off, and after it happened, they were considerably less than they had been in the beginning; they were bellowsed and blown, and they scattered like seeded dandelions in a windstorm.
This seemed to upset everyone, not just him, and he supposed this explained the new agency, the Office of Liberty and Recovery, with its two independent bureaus: the Remains Recovery Department, the R &Rs – former military coroners, forensic specialists, top medical and EMS people – and the even more secretive Documentation Department, the Double-D’s, the Docs, comprised mainly of retired military intelligence officers and some handpicked librarians and accountants rumored to have Special Forces training. The very difficulty of the Docs’ job was what made it so essential, as The Boss had testified before Congress and later on the morning talks and prime-time panels, his words adopted by the administration and repeated every few minutes on cable news: There is nothing so important as recovering the record of our commerce, the proof of our place in the world, of the resilience of our economy, of our jobs, of our lives. If we do not make a fundamental accounting of what was lost, if we do not gather up the paper and put it all back, then the forces aligned against us have already won. They’ve. Already. Won.
Staring at the massive ribs, the shattered steel exoskeleton in pieces as far as he could see, smoldering bones draped with gray, like a thousand whales beached and bleached, rotting in open air, it was hard for Remy to imagine that they hadn’t won. But the thought ebbed away as he stepped over thick bands of electrical cord and fire hoses and made his way to the pit, which was the hardest place for him, because it was the same endless, shapeless debris as the pile, but concave. Sunlight sparked off the helmets of rescue workers as they dropped down into voids, drawn by the enigmatic pull of gravity; one after another, like strings of pearls, they went in one hole and came out another. Those holes, he thought, were made by something beyond even fire, by a force that could push a half mile of vertical steel and life into a banked pit fifty feet deep. Maybe, he thought, there are gray holes.
Remy squinted his eyes, trying to make himself comfortable with the view, imagining a high mountain lake surrounded by acres of smoldering iron forest, the smoke not smoke, but warm autumn fog, a floating memory of some misted morning at camp when he was a boy. It was familiar, not like an actual place he’d seen before, but like a postcard committed to memory, a sharp pit of regret that he couldn’t quite locate. He told himself it didn’t mean he was deadened; a person could grow used to anything.
It occurred to him then that he had kept a pretty good line on this day so far. He hadn’t lost track of it, and in this he felt a small measure of pride. Maybe he was getting better. Maybe the gaps were going away, the crack in his mind – or wherever it was – was sealing itself. Maybe his thoughts were coagulating. And that’s when something on his waist vibrated. Remy took it off his belt and stared at it, not sure when he’d gotten a pager. He pressed the button on top and a single word appeared on the little screen: “NOW.”
Remy stared at the pager. Now? Now what? Something about the message chilled him and he backed away from Guterak, who was watching the bucket brigade intently. Remy stuffed the pager in his pocket and moved south, edging down the street toward a familiar storefront – his favorite ghost bar, windows broken and jagged, dust covering everything. He pushed open the busted door and stepped in.
Just inside was a small round table waiting for a busboy who would never come: two martini glasses, one still holding a gray olive, a highball glass with a stir stick. The chairs that went with this table were dumped, as if its owners had leapt up and run off. Remy had come here the second day and noticed three bills beneath one of the gray martini glasses. Every day he expected someone to take that tip, but the rescue workers only added to it – for luck maybe, or more likely, irony – until a flower of twenty or thirty singles fanned out beneath the dusty glass. Steal the booze; leave a tip. Remy pulled a dollar from his own wallet, lifted the glass, and slid the money beneath it. He patted the table. Now… what to have? Behind the bar, the top-shelf bottles were gone; the guys had begun going down-shelf to the well booze: empty Canadian Mist and Gilbey’s and the like, although there was still a bit of Bookers. Decent gin, just what he wanted. Cool, clear, unambiguous. Remy looked beneath the counter for a clean glass. Beautiful ghost bar.
When he looked up, a slender man in a dark suit was standing in the doorway, holding a briefcase. He was younger than Remy, but about the same height, with a short, military haircut. But his exact age was hard to determine because he had the youngest face Remy had ever seen on an adult, as if a ten-year-old’s head had been grafted onto the body of an adult lawyer. He wore a name tag (“Markham”) tucked into his lapel pocket, the way Feds did it, but if he was a Freddie, the tag didn’t identify which agency. Markham smiled and set his briefcase on the bar, sliding a dusty highball aside. Remy thought about pretending he was just a bartender, a holdover who hadn’t fled that day. He thought about offering this baby-faced Markham a drink, and for a moment he flashed on what a nice life that would be, the simple transaction of warm comfort for cold money, glass clinked on a counter, the long pour, a bar rag to clean off the dust, and what else could you possibly need? What ghost bartender ever had gaps in his memory, or woke with a gunshot to his head? What ghost bartender ever lost track of days, or had to convince his partner to stop talking? What ghost bartender ever suffered temporal streaks and floaters?
“I see why you wanted to meet here,” the baby-faced man said. “Appropriate.”
Remy didn’t know what to say. Had he wanted to meet there?
“I should begin by saying that we’re all thrilled,” the man said, “to get someone with your experience to help us” – he smiled slyly and thoughtfully – “expand our responsibilities. Obviously, we don’t have the institutional history of other investigative agencies.” The man leaned forward. “To tell the truth, we’re all eager to show the bureau and the agency that we’re not just some kind of clerical service. And, if I may add a personal note, may I say that I’m looking forward to-”
A cell phone rang and Markham held a finger up to Remy while he took the call. “No, no problem at all. Yes. In fact, I’m here with him now.” Markham looked up and met Remy’s eyes. “I’ll ask him.” He covered the mouthpiece of his phone and asked Remy: “Is there anything else you’ll need?”
Remy looked down at the glass. He needed this gin, but that didn’t seem to be what the boy-man was asking. He lifted the dusty glass but it slipped out of his hand and with it slipped the moment, Remy reaching for the falling glass and finding-
TWO YANKEES, it turned out, were all that showed up to take the tour that day, much to Guterak’s apparent dismay. Remy looked back and recognized a big second-year relief pitcher and the bullpen catcher in the backseat. Looking down, he saw he was still cradling the glass that was no longer there. He hoped at least he’d gotten to drink his gin. He shook his hand and looked back at the marginal Yankees. “I guess The Boss took most of the big-name guys down,” Paul said. He was pissed. Remy recognized the players: a young reliever everyone was hoping would develop a curve and the stones to become a setup guy, and a backup catcher who’d once given The Boss’s kid some pointers on hitting. It didn’t matter to Remy which Yankees they got, but Paul was clearly angry, and seemed to wonder what it meant – if they’d fallen out of favor, somehow. He told Remy that he heard Bannerman and Dooley were taking Bruce Willis around, and that Lopez and Dunphy got the cast of Sex and the City.
Paul was furious. “What I’d give for an hour in a car with that goddamn Sarah Jessica. Fuggin’ Carey… he knows how I feel about Sarah Jessica. It’s disrespect.”
Remy looked around the truck. Be quiet, be quiet, be…
“It ain’t a sexual thing, either. I think she’s got style. I like them little skirts and she wears a lot of… what would you call it… flouncy stuff.” He turned to face Remy. “I wish Stacy would wear more flouncy stuff.”
Remy stared out the window.
“You think Stacy’s too fat for flouncy stuff?”
“I… I don’t know, Paul,” Remy said.
“You think my wife’s fat?”
“No. Of course not.”
“Aw, I’m just fuggin’ with you, man. ’Course she’s fat. I know she’s fat. Krispy Kreme knows she’s fat. White Castle, Schwann’s, Burger King knows she’s fat.” Paul turned back to the road. “I’m just sayin’… you and me, we almost die in here and all we get are a coupla scrubs-” He looked in the rearview mirror. “No offense.”
The pitcher shrugged. The catcher, who didn’t speak English, smiled and gave them a thumbs-up.
Paul looked over at Remy again. He spoke more quietly. “It just pisses me off… fuggin’ Lopez takin’ Sarah Jessica around.”
“Paul-”
“What the fugg is he gonna show her? Here’s the building where I hid under a desk and shit my pants?”
They drove down the West for the second time that day, the gray cloud drawing them down, passing beneath people on banisters and fire escapes, leaning out windows, cameras following them. The Yankees were staring out the windows in the backseat, quiet and respectful. Every few minutes, Paul chirped the siren to clear the traffic but Remy could tell he wasn’t into it.
“Something else,” Paul said to the car, and Remy sensed danger and closed his eyes. “You notice how the number keeps dropping? Eight thousand. Seven thousand? Six. It’s like the swelling going down. I was thinkin’, maybe it’ll go back to zero. You know? I mean, where are the bodies? Maybe it’ll turn out that everyone was at home that day. Maybe we’ll actually gain people when this is all over.”
As usual, no one knew how to respond to Guterak, so he just kept talking. “How would they explain that? More people than we started with? Wouldn’t that be some trick, huh?” As they approached The Zero, Paul began to fidget, the words struggling to get out. Remy could see him getting ready. Everyone who took tours had his own version of this place, names for different landmarks. Remy saw a firefighter and a welder get into it one time over whether the deep part was called The Pit or The Hole. Among the guys who took tours – and especially on The Boss’s detail and staff – it was acknowledged that Guterak’s names were the best. A few of them had even become standard: The Ribs, Cathedral, Spears, The Void, Big Peach, Dry Falls. Maybe this was Paul’s art: He couldn’t stop talking about the things that so many others had trouble talking about. Guterak always started his tours on West Street, where he and Remy had come in that day. He’d circle below to east, then north, and finally back south, and always end right across from the hole, where Remy’s car was still visible, its windows shattered, up to its axles in grit and paper. Even though they’d only gotten two Yankees and no Sarah Jessica, Remy knew that Paul would set aside his disappointment and do what he always did. Talk.
“So this is where we came in,” Paul said to the Yankees as they approached the West Street checkpoint. “I was on a mission in midtown for The Boss – there’s this frozen yogurt he likes – when I got the call. Brian was on his way down, so he stops and gets me and we run his car down the West just like we’re going now, smoke everywhere, and we get down here, on the south end, and we’re just standing around, watching all this shit, and bang, the second one comes in, and then we’re running around – and here’s what you didn’t get on TV, it was so far up there, it didn’t seem real, not until someone jumped, arms flapping crazy like they could change their minds, but of course, they couldn’t… and you’d watch ’em grow as they came down… hitting like fuggin’ water balloons, but deeper, you know – thumping and… and… bursting… and then Brian wanders off and I’m alone, just walking along, lookin’ at all these people and this kid firefighter, I’ll never forget his little face, some probie starin’ up at the sky and I don’t even have to look at what he was seeing because I hear this groaning noise and this pop and then it’s so quiet – eerie quiet, you know, just for a split second, not even long enough to think, Oh shit, it’s quiet – but I can tell by the look in this kid’s eyes that it’s not good, and then comes this horrible grinding and a roar, like thunder in your head, ten fuggin’ seconds of hard thunder as the floors pancake, and as soon as it starts, this firefighter does the crazy bravest thing I ever seen, he starts running toward the thing, as I start goin’ in the other direction, toward Brian’s car, and throw myself against the car and then it’s like we’re in the middle of a hurricane of shit, and this wave crashes all around us, black and thick, pushes me under Brian’s car and all the way through to the other side and I know I’m gonna get buried with all this shit that’s flying around and I can’t breathe or see and the wind is still blowing hot shit – see on my arm here, this burn came from some shit blown against me, and this cut, four stitches there – I’m crawling on my hands and knees until I bump the corner of a building and I crawl through a broken window and over people and I can’t tell if I’m inside or out – it’s all black – except the floor beneath all the dust is marble, so I think, I must be inside and it seems like I crawl forever, and then I get up and walk, and all of a sudden there’s a hundred of us, ghosts, gray and choking, and we come out of this cloud one at a time, like little fuggin’ kids waking up on Christmas morning, and no one says a word, not a single word, and we’re walking toward Battery Park, like someone threw a switch and we couldn’t speak no more. All we could do was walk. Just walk.”
The Yankees stared.
Paul blinked it away. “But I’m getting ahead of myself. I’ll cover all of that once we get inside. Any questions so far?”
Nothing.
Then Paul had a thought: “Oh, oh, oh! Look at Brian’s eyes.”
Remy rubbed his temples.
“Come on, man. Show ’em.”
Remy turned in his seat and opened his eyes wide. Paul liked to make sure people saw the broken blood vessel in Remy’s right eye.
“He’s got that muscular vicious disintegration. You know what that shit is?”
The Yankees didn’t know.
“Macular degeneration,” Remy corrected. “And vitreous detachment.” He’d told Guterak ten times that his eye condition had nothing to do with the burst blood vessel in his right eye, and therefore with that day, that he’d had escalating eye problems for years. But Paul insisted on making it part of the tour.
“What it is, see, is his fuggin’ eyes are flaking off. From inside, is what that shit is. Creepy, huh? I mean this is some serious shit we went through here.”
The relief pitcher winced. “That sucks.”
“Yeah,” Remy said to the genial reliever, and he thought about how nice that would be: relief, a guy in the bullpen waiting to take over when you run out of gas. Go to the left-hander. Life would be much easier if we all had a coach watching us, looking for any sign of fatigue or confusion, specialists waiting just down the foul line to stride in and save our work, to salvage what we’ve done so far, make sure we don’t waste the end of a well-lived life. A good reliever might’ve saved his career, his marriage – what else? That’s all Remy wanted: someone to save him.
They eased up to the checkpoint, third on line.
“What are those?” the pitcher asked.
“Those?” Paul looked out his window. “Reefers. Refrigerated meat trucks.”
“For…”
“Bodies.”
“Jesus, are they…”
“The trucks? Nah, they’re empty.” He leaned back conspiratorially between the seats. “Look, don’t tell no one, but the truth is… we can’t find the people. Little pieces. A body here and there. But mostly the people are…” Paul held up his fingers and rustled them like a field of wheat. Then he began driving again.
They pulled up to the checkpoint and a street cop stepped forward. “Hey, boss. How’s it goin’?”
“Goddamn tough duty, you know?” Guterak said.
Remy wondered, wasn’t I just here? Didn’t I just hear this conversation? Were the gaps moving him backward now? Skipping like a record? Maybe he’d get to go back and drink that gin, or find out what the guy in the ghost bar had wanted. He felt a vibration, put his hand on his waist and found the pager again.
“Fuckin’ raghead motherfuckers,” the street cop was saying.
“Yeah. That’s right. That’s right.”
REMY’S EX-WIFE Carla lived out past Jericho with her new husband Steve in a grand new house – four bedrooms, three dormers, two baths, something called a great room, and a lovely brick façade – and that’s where Remy found himself, sitting on the couch, drinking weak coffee from the good china. About six months before the divorce, Carla had declared that she needed to start living my life or else go crazy, and the next day she’d opened the big oak cabinet and begun using their good wedding china for every meal; that morning, Remy came downstairs to find little Edgar eating Cap’n Crunch in a shallow, hand-painted bone bowl. Six months later, Remy and Carla were separated.
Steve pried his lips from the rim of a Bud Light. “Personally? I don’t see that it matters who we bomb, long as we do it while we still got the upper hand. Line ’ em up. Clean house. But I don’t need to tell you that, right?”
“No. You don’t.” Remy looked up at a triptych of school portraits above the mantle: brilliant Edgar at six, at ten, and now at sixteen, long black hair parted on the side and swooped in a spit over the front of his lineless forehead. He was wearing a rugby shirt and sticking his bottom lip out in this latest picture, not defiant, but like someone contemplating the workings of the camera. He didn’t look much like Remy anymore, not like when he was little, when Remy would look at Edgar and fight the urge to feel for the pieces that had been taken from him to make the boy.
“See, we’re never going to have a better excuse,” Steve continued. “I’d use the Times as my guide. Go to the UN and say, ‘Let’s make a deal. If your country shows up on the front page of the Times for anything other than a travel feature, you’re toast.’ We should’ve had the Stealth bombers in the air before the smoke cleared.”
“The smoke hasn’t cleared,” Remy said quietly.
“My point exactly!” Steve swallowed a big mouthful and pointed the neck of the beer bottle at Remy. “See? You know what I’m talkin’ about. Don’t waste time separating guilty from innocent. Let them sort it through later.”
Remy cleared his throat – start living my life or else go crazy – and leaned forward. “Steve? Do you think you could tell me what I’m doing here?”
“That’s exactly what I mean!” Steve sat back on the couch. “If we ain’t gonna make the assholes pay… what are any of us doin’ here?”
“I mean… could you tell me where Carla is?”
“Well… I think she agrees with me on this, but you know how women are, Brian. A little squishy when it comes to actually pulling the trigger.”
“I mean where she is physically, Steve. And Edgar?”
Steve laughed. “That’s good. You’re so funny, man. I tell people that. You’re hilarious. I tell people, if I was Carla, I might’ve stayed with you. You’re a hell of a lot funnier than me. You could even make an argument that you’re better looking, although, classically, I’d probably be considered more handsome. And younger. Obviously. And I make more money.” He waved his hand around the house. “I’m taller… more of a man’s man, probably, athletically… although you, being a former cop and all, could probably kick my ass if you wanted… at least back in the day… are you losing weight?”
“I’m not sure.”
“What size pants you wear?”
“I don’t know… thirty-two.”
“What about the length?”
Remy looked down. “Thirty-three?”
“Thirty-two, thirty-three? No shit?” Steve stood up and lifted his shirt, patted a wide stomach. “I’m a thirty-five, thirty-four now. That’s when it starts getting messed up for guys, when our waists get bigger than our inseams. No shit, right?”
Remy took a drink of coffee and closed his eyes, wondering if he could induce a gap, open his eyes and find himself somewhere else. He watched the marionettes dance behind his lids for a while, tracking their drift across the vitreous. When Remy opened his eyes, Steve was still there, watching him intently.
Remy heard footsteps on the stairs and nearly cried out in relief as Carla came up the stairs, lips drawn tight, followed closely by the loping Edgar. Carla wore thin, tight, low-waisted teenager jeans, a big, wide-necked T-shirt, and tennis shoes. The older she got, it seemed, the younger her clothes became. They sat on the couch next to Steve, across from Remy.
“Sorry,” Carla said. “He was in the middle of a video game.”
Edgar wore a black armband over his gray T-shirt. He smiled patiently at his mother. “It’s not a video game.” He looked up at Remy. “It’s called Empire. It’s a communal computer experience… like an alternate world. It’s character-driven and action-reaction oriented. Just like the real world.”
Yes, Remy thought, the real world is action-reaction oriented. He needed to remember that.
Carla smiled. “More coffee, Brian?”
“No,” Remy said. “Thanks, though.”
“So… would you like to start?” she asked.
“Uh… why don’t you,” Remy said.
Irritation broke on Carla’s face. As if she’d grown hot, Steve removed his arm from her shoulder. “I’m gonna get another beer.” He winked at Remy. “Let you-all talk.”
Carla took a breath. “Well… apparently… this is another important issue your father would like me to handle… so, Edgar… it has come to our attention…” She looked at Remy again, as if to see if this were the right way to start.
Remy nodded. He felt sick. What had come to their attention? Drugs? A pregnant girl? Honestly, he’d prefer drugs. He wasn’t ready to be a grandfather, to be responsible for another person. Suddenly, he felt guilty for not worrying more about the boy. Edgar had been only nine when Remy realized that his son was smarter than he, and from that moment they had started growing apart, as if Edgar had reached his father’s height and had begun growing out, in directions that Remy couldn’t comprehend. And, honestly, Remy had simply stopped worrying about him then. There didn’t seem to be anything more Remy could do to help him. And now… whatever this was, he hoped it wasn’t permanent. He hoped this problem was something manageable. An F. Or a messy room.
But surely he wouldn’t have been summoned to Jericho for a messy room.
“It has come to our attention that… well…” Carla searched for the words: “Brian, are you sure you don’t want to do this? It really has more to do with you.”
“Uh… no. I think it’d be better coming from you.”
Carla turned back to Edgar. She took a breath, looked once more at Remy and then back at their son. “Edgar. Honey. Your physics teacher called yesterday… and… said…” She seemed to hit a dead end, and tried reshaping her point into a question. “Apparently you’ve been telling everyone at school that your father died the other day, in the… well… in the events of the other day?”
Edgar nodded as if his mother had just proposed a math problem. “Mmm,” he said. “Ri-i-ight. I had a feeling that’s what this was about.”
Remy slumped forward with a mixture of relief and something a few miles south of relief.
“Well… you do realize… your father isn’t dead. He’s right here.”
Edgar looked up at his dad, brushed the hair out of his eyes, and nodded again. “Ri-i-ight.”
Carla looked over at Remy for help. He offered none. But Steve had come back into the room with another beer, and he leaned on the arm of the couch and jumped in. “Edgar, why would you go around telling people that your old man was dead?”
“Well.” Edgar took a deep breath. “Let me start by saying that I appreciate your concern.” He smiled warmly at Remy. “Obviously, I know my father’s not dead. I’m not delusional, and I certainly don’t wish he were dead.” He cocked his head. “I haven’t told anyone that he’s dead. I simply haven’t corrected that impression.”
He shrugged as if that covered it, but when no one said anything, Edgar laughed impatiently. “Look. What if I’d written a story for a class about a boy who lost his father? We’d be talking about my A paper, instead of everyone looking at me like I’m sick.” Edgar laughed again, as if this cleared it all up.
Remy couldn’t think of a single word to say.
Carla spoke up. “But Edgar, honey. This isn’t a story you wrote. This is something you’re allowing your classmates to believe. Your homeroom teacher said that you sit at your desk crying. She said you got out of a physics test and that you’ve stopped going to PE altogether.”
“Yeah…”
“Well, I guess I don’t understand.”
Edgar shrugged as if it were the simplest thing. “If I had lost my father, would you really expect me to take a test? Or to play Frisbee golf?”
“Well… no. I guess not.”
“Okay,” Edgar said, as if that solved it.
Carla shifted on the couch, so that she was facing their son. She broke out her gentle relationship voice, the one Remy recalled from the awful counseling sessions they tried before the split. “Honey, is it that you don’t get to see your father enough? Is that what this is about?”
Edgar cocked his head.
“That he works too much, sweetie? That he’s gone all the time.”
“No.”
“Is it his drinking? Are you trying to tell your father that his lifestyle is going to kill him? Is this a kind of metaphoric death you’ve created for him? Is that what you’re trying to tell us, honey?”
Remy wondered how far this line of questioning would go. Maybe this was about the time he flirted with that waitress in front of Carla. Or maybe it was about the fact that he didn’t like her family. The way he used to drop his dirty clothes next to the bed?
Steve leaned forward helpfully. “Is it to impress chicks, Eddie? Is that what you’re doing, ol’ buddy? Trying to get a little sympathy ass?”
“No, Steve,” Edgar said patiently. “I’m not trying to get… ass.”
Remy wished he could infuse his own voice with as much flatness when he spoke to Carla’s new husband, that he could speak so ironically with such an apparent lack of irony. Suddenly, his pride for his child overwhelmed him, and Remy flashed on the idea that if he actually had died, he might save Edgar this awkward questioning.
“Well, I think we deserve an explanation,” Carla said. “That’s all.”
The boy looked around the room for help. When Edgar was little, Remy used to find solace in the shards of himself that he saw in the boy’s in-trouble stare, in his shrugs and shifts, in the things he feared. But now Edgar was so self-assured that Remy could barely remember why his son had ever needed whatever shelter he’d once provided. Edgar was a stranger to him, an alien with long, blocky hair and sinewy arms and a clipped, hyper-intellectual way of speaking that made it seem as if he were reading.
“Okay,” his son said. “First of all, by agreeing to talk about this, I want you to know that I’m not apologizing. This is entirely my business.” Edgar took a deep breath and stared at the carpet. “Grieving is personal.”
“That’s fine, Edgar, honey. But what are you grieving? The divorce? Your father’s inability to commit emotionally-”
Remy interrupted: “You know, I think we’ve covered that.”
“I’m grieving my dead father!” Edgar was losing his patience. “I don’t know why that’s so hard to understand.”
“But… your father isn’t dead, honey.”
“I know that.” Edgar rubbed his temples, as if talking to these morons was more than he could bear. “Weren’t there fathers who died that day?”
“Of course they did.”
“And didn’t they leave children behind?”
“Sure.”
“And didn’t I have a father?”
“Yes. Of course.”
He put his arms out as if finishing a magic trick. “Then why is it so hard to believe that I could be grieving the same thing as those other children? I suppose you’d rather I behave like everyone else and grieve generally. Well, I’m sorry. I’m not built that way. General grief is a lie. What are people in Wyoming really grieving? A loss of safety? Some shattered illusion that a lifetime of purchases and television programs had meaning? The emptiness of their Palm Pilots and SUVs and baggy jeans? Look around, Mom. Generalized grief is a fleeting emotion, like lust. It’s a trend, just some weak shared moment in the culture, like the final episode of some TV show everybody watches. It’s weightless. You wake up the next day and wonder when the next disaster is scheduled.
“But real grief… oh, God.” He cocked his head and stared at his mother. “Real grief weighs on you like you can’t imagine. The death of a father… is the most profound thing I’ve ever experienced.” Edgar’s eyes seemed to be tearing up. “It’s hard to get out of bed. And you want me to take a test? Play softball? Are you kidding? There are times when I can barely breathe. I can’t… get over it. And I don’t want to. The only way to comprehend something like this is to go through it. Otherwise, it’s just a number. Three thousand? Four thousand? How do you grieve a number?”
His voice was a whisper. “So… yes… I have chosen to focus my grief on one individual. On the death of my father.” He shrugged and looked down at the carpet. “And you know, frankly, I guess I expected a little more support from you.”
“I…” Carla looked from Steve to Remy and back. “I…”
Remy squeezed his eyes as tight as they would go, and then opened them again. Still here. Except for Steve, who apparently sensed that the potential for humor had faded, and backed carefully out of the room.
Edgar wasn’t finished. “Ask yourself this: what separates me from some kid whose father actually died that day?”
“The fact that I’m alive?” Remy asked. Even to him, his voice sounded like it was coming from another room.
“Fair enough,” Edgar said, without meeting Remy’s eyes. “Okay, now let’s take that kid, the one who actually lost his father, but is somehow coping by getting consolation from his girlfriend or from drinking or from writing poems. Are you going to tell him he isn’t grieving enough? Are you gonna tell some poor kid doing his best that he should feel worse about the death of his father?”
“No…” Carla shook her head. “No. Of course not.”
“Then don’t tell me I shouldn’t be devastated by the death of my father just because he isn’t dead! I mean… Goddamn it, Mom. All things considered, I think I’m doing pretty well… Do you know there are kids out there getting high every day? Kids selling drugs. Is that what you want me to do?”
“No, of course not.” Carla started crying; this had always been her deepest fear for her child, that he would use drugs. “We don’t want that. Do we, Brian?”
Remy just stared straight ahead. Honestly, he’d rather have Edgar smoke a little weed and acknowledge that Remy was alive, but he knew better than to say so.
“I’m sorry, honey,” Carla said. “I’m sorry we got divorced and I’m sorry about your father.”
“Thank you.” Edgar straightened the black armband. “Thank you. That means a lot to me. It really does.”
They all stared at their shoes for a moment, and then Carla held out her hands. Edgar stood, walked over, and melted into his mother’s arms. They cried together. Remy watched them from across the room and found he could imagine another life in which he’d never met either of them. Carla looked up at Remy then and wiped her eyes. “Well, Brian. I suppose this is as good a time as any to tell him your news.”
“I suppose,” Remy said.
Carla put her hands on Edgar’s cheeks. “Honey, your father has got a new assignment at work. And he’s going to be gone a lot. In fact, he’s taking a trip very soon. I know this is a bad time, with you so upset over his death, but he’ll be back. He promises. Don’t you, Brian?”
“Yes,” Remy said. “I promise.”
Edgar looked up at his father, and Remy worked to place those eyes, and then it hit him. When Edgar was a little boy, you couldn’t get him out of the tub. He’d spend hours in there, lying on his back, staring up at the ceiling, Carla always adding more hot water, his fingers and toes like raisins, and when you went in to ask if he were ready, he’d look up with those pleading, impatient eyes, as if you were too stupid to comprehend the seriousness of Edgar’s work in the bath. Remy loved seeing those eyes again, staring at him from his mother’s embrace, across the room. In fact, the moment was so nice he didn’t have the heart to ask Carla where he was going.
AT NIGHT, The Zero was lit like a stage. Or a surgery. It was quiet – not exactly peaceful, but a person could think. The work seemed less showy to Remy, the loss more personal, less produced than during the day, when everyone posed for photographers and TV cameras, when grief and anger became competitive sports. At night people were left alone with their emptiness. The bucket brigades mostly gave up their symbolic place and the pails sat in huge piles, while a skeleton crew worked quietly, without the frantic edge of the daytime workers. Generators chugged and machines ground away and men hid in the long shadows behind the spotlights. Remy liked the night better. It felt… appropriate. For another thing, in the darkness there were fewer streaks and floaters. The world behaved, stood still.
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, pinned to crumbling walls and across the hoods of crushed cars. On a tall section of iron lattice, a welder’s spark dripped light onto the ground. A guy in all black inched slowly along an I beam, down into a burned black steel crevasse until only his shoulders and head were visible, and then nothing. Guys crouched everywhere, resting or thinking. Herds of construction workers and firefighters moved along the street, their hooded and masked heads pointed down. They sniffed the air, and one another, and kept moving.
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 connect with that day; now that sweater was the most important piece of clothing in her life. Or maybe she bought one of these sweaters the day before and wore it to the office, thinking the guy in HR would finally notice her. And she was wearing a sweater just like this one as she huddled in the smoke-choked stairwell with a bunch of strangers and stragglers, the brave and unlucky in the same narrow space when it began, the thunder of the world clapping down to nothing.
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 planner, about the size of a motel Bible. He dusted it off. Engraved on the cover in gold was a name – G. ADDICH – and a phone number and address. Remy flipped through the pages. Each page recorded a single day – appointments on the top of the page, notes from the meetings on the bottom. This Addich had meetings every day – so many meetings. There had to be a thousand of them. What could a person possibly do at these meetings? The notes on the bottoms of the pages were cryptic – mostly numbers. Most of the meetings seemed to be held in restaurants or coffee shops. Maybe he was a restaurant supplier, Remy thought. He flipped through the days, approaching the end nervously.
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 planner at arm’s length, blinked, and read it again. Of course it couldn’t be him. Another Remy. He’d never heard of anyone named Addich. Of course Remy wasn’t a common name, but there were certainly others. It was just a coincidence, he thought – a strange one, but that’s what coincidences were, strange. And yet, some voice in his head was dubious: That day? My name?
He looked back down at the planner. The word Early was underlined. How early had G. Addich arrived? Too early and he or she would have been pulverized, this planner blasted out the window, across the street and into this building. And what about the other Remy? Maybe he could check the list of the missing, see if anyone with his name had died.
And then Remy heard raised voices. Someone yelling from the street below. At first he thought they were yelling at him, and he dropped the day planner guiltily. But then he realized the voices were coming from outside and he picked up the black book and stuffed it in his coat. He jogged back down the flotsam-lined hall toward the marble stairs, toward the yelling.
On West Street, a handful of cops in masks and riot gear were holding off three firefighters who had come down drunk from the Heights and gotten into it with one of the construction crews. A crowd had gathered. The young firefighters were wearing jeans and T-shirts, even though it was cold outside; their roped veins strained at the skin, ready to burst. They all had facial hair – various mustaches and wispy goatees – and opaque, boozy eyes. A red-faced construction supervisor, his ventilator pulled down around his neck, stood behind the cops, pointing with a blunt finger, demanding that the smokers be arrested, but the night commanding officer had interceded and was suggesting that they just be driven home.
“I’ll take ’em.” Remy stepped from the shadows.
It took the night boss a few seconds to see him. “What are you doing here?”
Remy paused a moment. “I could ask you the same thing,” he finally said.
That seemed to work. Without another thought, the young firefighters started trudging along behind him, down the West toward his car. One of the firefighters went to sleep as soon as they got in. The other two sat staring out opposite windows. They were so young that for a moment Remy flashed on a night years earlier – driving Edgar and two of his friends home after a movie. Only… no, that wasn’t right. He breathed into one of his hands, and was strangely comforted by The Zero smell. He skirted the lights and midtown, cutting west until he found an avenue that flowed beneath him, a black stream centered with gold lines, faster and faster, yellow cabs parting and then closing in his wake, and he flicked on the siren’s false cheer – whoop whoop whoop whoo – and decided to ignore the traffic lights, his car nearly coming off its axles at the cross streets. He pushed the speedometer to ninety-two, same as the sweater – just to see – swerved to miss something that turned out to be a flasher inside his eye crossing against the glare of a streetlight, and finally eased off the gas. The tanked firefighters were nonplussed, their mouths half-open.
“Like the way you drive,” one of them said.
“Thanks.”
He volunteered to drive each of them home, but the smokers wanted to go back to their firehouse for breakfast, so Remy let them out there. He wanted to ask them something, anything, but they climbed out of his car without a word, stretched, and walked toward the red station house decorated with cards and bouquets, the steps littered with picnic baskets, the walls covered with the smiling dead. They looked so small. Remy watched them go inside and, for just a moment, he envied the smokers their brotherhood, their warm house.
WORD CAME sometime before lunch: The Boss wanted to see Remy tomorrow. He and Guterak were at Fresh Kills, taking two state senators on a tour of the massive salvage, recovery, and remains operation at the old landfill when Paul asked if Remy was nervous about the meeting.
“I don’t know,” Remy answered honestly.
“Well, you probably should be,” Paul said through his paper mask. Was he nervous? Remy tried to remember. Sometimes the gaps were like this: He was unaware that any time was unaccounted for except some bit of information that he didn’t recall getting – how he knew The Boss wanted to see him, how he inferred that it was serious business, whether he knew anything more about the meeting. There was a gap where that knowledge should have been. A phone call? That was the obvious answer, but Remy couldn’t remember any call. He hadn’t even replaced his phone. It was somewhere among all those window blinds and rebar. Had the message come over the pager he’d been wearing? Or maybe The Boss had called Paul to arrange the meeting. Paul certainly seemed more nervous about it than he was. But why would Paul be the go-between?
These were the most common gaps that Remy had been suffering, holes not so much in his memory but in the string of events, the causes of certain effects. He found himself wet but didn’t remember rain. He felt full but couldn’t recall eating. It wasn’t important, he supposed, how he came to know that The Boss wanted to see him, except that he should be able to remember whether it was a phone call or someone telling him. Instead, it was as if he’d always known that he had a three o’clock meeting tomorrow afternoon, a one-on-one, and that Paul was nervous about it.
“Remember, wait for the questions, think hard about them, and then answer slowly.” The paper surgical mask muffled Guterak’s voice.
“Okay,” Remy said through his own mask.
Paul turned back. They stood on the pavement at the edge of the rolling landfill, a moonscape of busted concrete and scorched steel. Pockets of methane gurgled and belched from beneath the debris – the city’s history in garbage: Andy Warhol’s coffee filters, Ethel Merman’s dress shields, Mickey Mantle’s chaw. Every gust out here seemed to stink in some new, groundbreaking way, and now there were these new hills of debris. Above the mounds seagulls broke and rolled and caught the wind, rising on waves of dust. The fine dust was everywhere, drifting and reddening the sun, which seemed higher out here, as if even the heavens were repelled by the smell.
Remy watched the senators in their work boots pause and shake hands with two space-suited techs who had been using rakes and pitchforks on eight-foot stacks of rubble in a corner of the debris field. Remy hated the way they’d imported the air out here on barges of concrete and rebar. It was not as sharp as at The Zero, and there was the underlying smell of methane to compete with, but the dust rose, and the smell found you, and Remy could imagine that one day everything in the world would be reduced to such a fine dust – replacing even the air, so that you not only smelled it but tasted it, and felt it too, on your skin, in your mouth, deep to your bones like a chill, that the whole world would swim in dust – finer and finer until there was nothing but an absence of substance and meaning.
At the waterfront, gulls rose on updrafts of methane and stink, and swooped down among the cranes unloading beams and bars from barges onto dump trucks overseen by thick guys in sweatsuits and gold bracelets, all the connected guys waiting for their piece. Crushed debris dripped from the cranes and barges, and trucks paraded endlessly up to the landfill and spread their loads out on rolling hills, where it looked like a fleet of plane crashes, all of it raked and sorted by crews of twelve, under close invisible supervision by rumored officials from the Office of Liberty and Recovery. The piles themselves were hard for Remy to comprehend: tangled steel and rebar and concrete dust, and no matter how long you searched the gray mass you never saw anything normal, a telephone or a computer or a floor lamp. These things were just… gone, he supposed, liquidized into dust and endless tons of bits, indistinguishable pieces of rubble to be sifted in big construction-site shakers. Every so often he saw a truck head off to a series of big temporary buildings nearby, carrying loads of hastily stacked paper and organic material, jigsawed bits of people.
“They found a chin yesterday,” Paul said. “Some mismatched fingers, part of a foot… got a whole head the day before. That’s the biggest piece so far, at least out here.”
“Paul-”
“A head,” Paul repeated. “Can you imagine, Bri? Look at my head. Can you imagine it just… showing up? Or your head. How did we miss that? Can you imagine your head bein’ out here, buried under all this, fuggin’ steel on top and shit on the bottom? What kind of look would you have on your face, do you think?”
Remy shifted uncomfortably.
One of the state senators, the fat one, his suit pants tucked into his work boots, was coming toward them. He had been struggling all morning, beet-faced and breathless. Twice he had started crying and his eyes and nose were lined with gray. He walked over to Paul and Remy and removed his surgical mask, red-eyed and nauseous. It was clear he’d been vomiting. “This is very difficult for me.”
“Yeah,” Guterak said. “We really feel for you.”
“I didn’t expect everything to be so…”
“Raw,” Guterak said.
“Yes,” the senator said.
“You see the chin?”
“No,” the senator said.
“Got a head yesterday. Biggest single chunk I’ve seen.”
“Really?” The senator looked around, uncomfortable.
“Still, there aren’t enough pieces,” Guterak said, “for how many are still missing. Not even close.”
The senator nodded and looked back at the space-suited workers. “I feel like they want me to say something,” he said. “Like I should know what to say. But I don’t have any idea.”
“Tell them they’re doing a good job,” Paul said.
The state senator nodded, took several breaths, wiped his brow, and said, “Thanks.” He pulled his mask back up. Remy and Guterak watched him walk away, trip on a tangle of something, fall forward, and recoil when his hands hit the debris. He got back up and picked his way over the piles of steel and rubble.
“Go fugg yourself, fat boy,” Guterak said quietly, almost gently, when the senator was gone.
Afterward, they drove back in silence. At the bridge Remy looked back, beyond the exhausted senators, the island receding behind them. At the toll plaza, Paul pressed his E-Z Pass against the window. Somewhere, accounts were tabulated, identities recorded, order inferred, and they passed easily over to the other side.
“These things can read your thoughts now, when you come over the bridge,” Paul told the senators, although Remy had the feeling Paul was talking to him. “It’s new. Top secret. Very hush-hush. They just started it.”
The senators exchanged a glance.
“It doesn’t work very well, yet. Staffing is tough, from what I hear… All those fuggin’ thoughts of all those people crossing in and out of the city. You can’t keep up with it, all the shitty things that people think. They got six big rooms with agents sitting on wires, watching what people think as they drive on and off the island. Got translators and psychiatrists and charts and espresso machines, but it’s still too much. The burnout alone… they can’t keep up. Every day they fall further behind.”
“Paul,” Remy said.
“Aw, I’m just fuggin’ with the senators,” Guterak said. “They know I’m screwin’ around, right, fellas? Right?” He smiled at them in the rearview mirror so long that Remy had to fight the urge to grab the wheel. Finally, Paul looked back at the road. “Just fuggin’ with ’em.”
They dropped the senators off at their hotel in midtown. But Paul didn’t drive right away. He turned in the driver’s seat to face Remy. “Listen,” he said. “This meeting with The Boss tomorrow. Be careful. Think of it like a session with IA, or with Psych on a shooting review. You with me? And Jesus, Bri, don’t say anything about me. For God’s sake. If he doesn’t ask about me, don’t volunteer a fuggin’ word about it. And if he asks how I’m doin’, you just say fine. Nothin’ else. I don’t want no problems. Tell ’em you haven’t seen any weird behavior, no mention of nightmares, nothing like that.” Paul took a moment to reconsider this, like chewing the last bite of sandwich. He raised a finger. “Unless… you know… they think it’s weird that I’m not having nightmares. Then tell ’em I’m totally fugged up… can’t sleep… cryin’ all the time. And Jesus, that shit I was sayin’ the other day?”
“About the Nextels?” Remy asked.
“The Nextels? No. Fugg the phones, Brian. I mean that shit about bein’ happy. About this bein’ a good time? The funerals and all that? You gotta forget that shit, okay?”
“Okay,” Remy said.
“Okay?”
“Yeah. Okay.”
“I mean… I was just talkin’ out my asshole there. I just wanted a be funny. Don’t mean shit, what I said. I don’t even know what I was talkin’ about.” He squinted like he’d eaten something sour and waved his hand at the world.
“It’s okay,” Remy said. “I’ve already forgotten it.”
“But it’s not that I’m unhappy. If they want to know that.”
“Sure.”
“I’m just fine. Fine. But not happy. At least not unreasonably.” Paul chewed his thumbnail and looked over his shoulder, then started driving.
Traffic lurched and halted, the cabs pulsing like blood cells. Guterak was too distracted to blow the siren. A white passenger van pulled up beside them and the passengers pressed their faces against the windows, waving and giving them the thumbs-up, but Paul had lost his feel for even this and he drove in silence, without acknowledging the waves from the vehicle next door.
Remy closed his eyes and watched the wallpaper peeling down his lids, strips of fiber drifting down in the jelly. Soup ofhis own… Sometimes it was calming. He opened his eyes and saw Guterak chewing his thumbnail as he pushed the Excursion through muddy traffic.
“Relax,” Remy said. “I’m sure this has nothing to do with you, Paul. There’s nothing to worry about.”
“Yeah.” Guterak nodded uneasily and glanced out the window, at the people lining the street, desperately cheering the cars going into The Zero. He pulled the E-Z Pass clip off his visor and tossed it in back. “Still.”
They pulled up to the entry point on the West and the same cop stepped forward.
“Hey, boss. How’s it goin’?”
“Goddamn tough duty, you know?”
“Fuckin’ raghead motherfuckers.”
“Yeah. That’s right. That’s right.”
Remy fell back in his seat and smelled-
SMOKE WAFTED across forests of dusted steel. “Hey. You okay?” The guy in front of Remy lowered his ventilator. His cheeks were pink beneath the mask; above it, his eyes were banded with soot. He was wearing heavy coveralls and thick gloves, the kind a welder might wear, and holding out a yellow five-gallon bucket for Brian to take.
“Oh. Sorry.” Remy looked away from the cloud and took the bucket by the handle – light, this one, just a few twisted pieces of aluminum, maybe ductwork, gray and bent – and passed it back to the pair of hands behind him, connected to an ancient firefighter, struggling to keep up. The buckets kept coming, each one a game of name that piece. You watched the guy’s shoulders in front of you to see if he strained with the bucket before you grabbed for it; the ridge of Remy’s gloves were worn at the pads on his palms. He squeezed his blistered hands.
More heavy pails passed, and then the buckets stopped and Remy took a minute to look around. There were tents everywhere now; he wondered when they’d arrived, some new team every few minutes, search and rescue from Ohio, Missouri, Maine, new volunteers seemed to spring from the cracks and crevices, people asking if he wanted energy bars or bottled water or socks. There were so many socks. Had there been a call for socks? Did he need socks?
In line, the guys edged forward and peered around one another like kids waiting for recess, trying to see why the buckets had stopped. Their boots crackled on the surface of the debris, tiny shifts like the warm pack on a deep snowfall. Remy stepped around the snaking line of men to see what was ahead. And, as was happening to him more and more, even though he didn’t exactly remember, he knew: the buckets only stopped for one reason. As if on cue, in place of a bucket, a question slowly made its way back.
“Cops? Any cops? Any cops on this line?”
Remy stepped out of line and raised his hand. He made his way carefully over the shards, each step tentative and sharp, bent steel and aluminum giving beneath his feet. As he passed the others on line, they nodded or touched him on the back. It was hot. Remy’s breath buzzed in his mask. It was a strange feeling – humbling and horrifying – to be called forward. At the front, the line took a sharp turn upward and dropped into a steaming crevasse. Halfway down, a burly ironworker had made a ledge for himself on a blackened piece of steel. He removed his ventilator and held up a bucket for Remy to see. There was something gray in there, curled and flat, and at first Remy saw a snake in the process of swallowing a rat, but then he realized what he was looking at. It was a holster. A dust-covered belt and flashlight holster. A cop’s belt and holster.
“We haven’t found anything else yet,” the ironworker said. “But we thought… someone should… I don’t know… do you want to take it?”
Remy bent over the lip of the void and reached out for-
THE BOSS was wrapping up his daily meeting in a conference room at the Javits, getting everyone ready for the next round of press conferences. He was wearing slacks, a PD polo shirt, and a satin jacket, although he changed his outfit five or six times a day. Every morning the sub-bosses had their chiefs of staff check in with The Boss’s chief of staff to see what the succession of outfits would be. They all kept at least one dust-covered jacket handy; it magically inoculated them from any second-guessing.
The Boss anchored a U-shaped table covered with odd blue bunting – as if there had been a retirement party or an anniversary – and lined with the other bosses, he at the point of the table like the star on a spur. Sub-bosses flanked him, falling away in importance: his capo de capi, the blackguard police boss, then the droopy-eyed fire boss, sanitation and housing and emergency services, tourism and legal services, and a couple of bosses Remy had never even seen. Remy remembered meetings he’d attended as the police liaison to the city counsel’s office. Their role was to present numbers to The Boss every month, and for each meeting they made up the figures a few minutes beforehand, arbitrarily increasing the numbers The Boss liked to see bigger (attorney caseload) and subtracting from the ones he liked to see smaller (claims against the city). The Boss liked to have everyone in his field of vision in these meetings, so that he could look from one to another without moving his head.
Remy looked down. He was still covered in dust, wearing work boots and coveralls, and a few people wrinkled their noses and stared at him. He edged along the wall with the sub-bosses, the capos de regime and chiefs of staff, the outer ringlet of ringers, comers and clingers, made men, drivers and ass-sniffers who sat behind the commissioners and directors and handed them briefing sheets and hankies, took notes, covered for them, and occasionally turned away to talk on cell phones, to set up lunch with mistresses and cronies. Behind The Boss, at the head of the table, was a map of the city, covered with pins, and a more detailed map of The Zero. The ceiling was low and white and it flattened the room. TV lights were set up in the corners; the light coming from them seemed like a liquid, filling the squat room.
They were getting the daily roundup, the list of casualties, and the room was suitably quiet and tense as an aide read off, one by one, the names of those gone and those barely holding on: perishable retail down sixteen; nonperishable down forty-four; advance ticket sales down fifty-nine; door sales down eighty-one; restaurant and hotel down fifty-two. The Boss shook his head at the carnage: shops failing to make lease payments, some of his favorite restaurants threatened. He struck that look, concerned but resolute, and rubbed his temples throughout the recitation of numbers. “No,” he said. “No, no, no.” A film crew was capturing the meeting for posterity, or for something, and he was careful to give them time to set up the next shot before he continued.
“Listen,” he finally said. “This is what it’s about. This. These bastards hate our freedoms. Our way of life. They hate our tapas bars and our sashimi restaurants, our all-night pita joints… They hate our very… economic well-being. This is a war we fight with wallets and purses, by making dinner reservations and going to MOMA, by having drinks at the Plaza. And we will fight back. We will fight back even if it means that every American sits through Tony and Tina’s goddamn Wedding!”
Applause and nods and then The Boss sat back in his chair. Out came the briefing books with that day’s message, schedules, and a chart that showed everyone where to stand during the next presser. Someone dumped a box of hats in the middle of the table, and they all reached in. When they were done, there were still four Port Authority hats on the table, and while The Boss read a briefing sheet his chief of staff threw up his arms at the lowered eyes around the room: “Come on, people. Someone needs to trade a police hat for a PA hat.”
Hats were swapped and then someone mentioned that the Jets wanted to come down and The Boss snapped to attention. “All of them?”
“Yes, sir.”
“What, twenty-two guys?”
“Actually, that’s just the starters. There are, like, fifty on the team.”
They debated why a football team needed fifty players and whether it was fair for teams to put healthy players on Injured Reserve and then the discussion turned to whether they could get Jets jerseys for their kids, and whether they couldn’t just get the stars’ jerseys or if they had to get the whole team and who the Jets’ stars might be. Then a deputy assistant on the wall murmured that it might be logistically impossible to bring fifty players down to The Zero without disrupting the work.
“Impossible? Hell, if I decide I want to do it, I’ll get the Jets and the Sharks down there!” The Boss slammed his fist on the table again and the camera crew became agitated. “I don’t ever want to hear that word again. Do you understand me? What kind of message does that send? That it’s impossible to get a little football team where we need them to go? That it’s impossible to get a decent curry at two A.M.? The world is watching us and if someone tells me I can’t get the Jets to the scene of a national tragedy… then goddamn it, that’s all the justification I need.”
Plans were made to get the Jets downtown, the meeting ended, the film crew’s lights went out, looks of defiance faded, and the bosses and sub-bosses began drifting out of the room, complimenting one another for their courage and compassion. The Boss glanced over at Remy, raising a hand for him to stay behind. He turned away for a moment and talked under his breath to his advisers and to a couple of commissioners. And then The Boss sat back down, lowered his head, and waited for the room to clear.
When everyone was gone he looked up at Remy with a forced smile. They shook hands and sat down at one corner of the long conference table. The Boss stared. He crossed and uncrossed his legs, waiting for something. One of his aides – a waifish young man in round glasses – brought him a beige file folder, which had the word SECURE stamped on it. The Boss held the folder in his lap and waited for the aide to clear the room. Then he smiled like a guard dog showing his teeth. “How are you, Brian?”
Remy thought of Guterak’s warnings. “I’m good, sir. Fine. Okay. Good. Fine.”
“Excellent.” More staring. And then The Boss opened the file folder he’d been given. Remy could clearly see there was only one page in the folder, and that it didn’t appear to have anything on it, but The Boss pretended to flip through pages. He even licked his fingers at one point, to pry apart the one blank page.
Remy shifted in his chair, wondering what was on the page The Boss was pretending to read. The Boss ruffled the page and made popping noises with his lips. “Just a moment,” he said, running his finger down it. “Yes, yes,” he said. “Right. Et cetera.”
“Sir?”
The Boss looked up. “First of all, I want to thank you for agreeing to this. When I heard what they were looking for, in my mind, there was only one choice. Your combination of expertise and willingness to sacrifice, to do what needs to be done… But before we finalized things I wanted us to meet face to face, to make sure you haven’t had any second thoughts.”
Since he couldn’t recall having first thoughts, Remy laughed. “Well…”
The Boss cocked his head.
“Honestly… I’m not sure what you’re talking about.”
“What do you mean?”
“I don’t… really know what we’re doing here.”
The Boss’s face flushed red. He leaned forward. “I hope you’re not questioning the direction of the country?”
“The country? No,” Remy said quickly. “I don’t… I don’t think so.”
“Good.” His lips were pursed. “Nothing pisses me off more than that. That’s exactly what the other side wants, Brian. For us to start doubting our actions before we’ve even had a chance to take them. Every question we ask is a love letter to our enemies.”
“No,” Remy protested. “I’m not sending any love letters-”
The Boss snapped out of it, as if he’d just realized he was no longer delivering a speech to the cameras. “Of course you’re not. You’re with us. You, of all people.” The Boss held up the one-page file and rolled his eyes. “I’m sorry. I just get so… emotional… when I think of people questioning our resolve, our commitment to reclaiming our place in the world, our heritage, to gathering everything that was lost, recapturing the record of our people, and our commerce… well, I don’t have to tell you, Brian.”
Remy sort of wished he would, but he shook his head. “No.”
“I chose you for that very reason: your commitment to your country, and your unbending personal loyalty. You are in a unique position, Brian, a pioneer, a bridge between two worlds. Running interference between the police and the city attorney was difficult, but I’m sure it taught you how to live in two worlds – the suits and the shields. In a way, you’ll be doing that again now – living in two worlds.”
“Okay,” Remy said.
The Boss smiled. “That’s all I wanted to say, Brian, to make sure you knew my genuine… and complete…” His voice cracked and he stared at the folder in his lap. Then he assumed his campaign voice again and fell back into his usual patter. “By God, we will gather every receipt, every purchase order, every goddamned piece of paper… otherwise… well, I think you know.”
“Sir?”
“They win,” The Boss whispered.
“Win, sir?”
“They win, Brian. They…” The Boss opened the empty file again. “They win.” He put on a pair of glasses and looked down at the blank page. “As a side note, your reports on Sergeant Guterak have been very informative.”
“My reports?” Remy rubbed his temple, trying to recall if he’d said something about Guterak. He wondered how you undo what you don’t remember doing. “Paul’s a good man.”
“Yes, we can’t have that.”
“No. Paul’s just fine, sir.”
“It’s taken care of.” The Boss rubbed his mouth. “I know this is also a personal favor to me, Brian. Your commitment and sacrifice-” He rubbed his mouth and launched into a version of his inspiring speech again, but after a while it seemed to devolve into random words. “…courage… liberty… reconstruction… resilience… faith… spending… ” He shook his head. “And this thing you’re doing… well… obviously.” The Boss closed the file folder and focused again. “But we’ll need a story. We’ll work it through disability. What do you want? Back? Disability loves backs. Or would you rather do the thing with your eyes?”
“My eyes?” Reflexively, Remy squeezed his eyes shut to check on the strings and floaters and when he opened them he saw-
THE FACE, young and lineless, the face from the ghost bar, stared at him from atop the same thin neck, perched above the same body of a man in the same deep black suit. Remy looked again at this perfect little face, like a blank sheet beneath short brown hair. He’d never seen such a smooth surface. Just as he had in the ghost bar, the man wore a generic federal ID tag over his suit’s breast pocket: “Markham.”
He was speaking: “…your background, of course, on the street and in the office. This is a unique assignment, removed as it might first appear from the initial… mandate of Liberty and Recovery. There’s an argument that this assignment encroaches somewhat on the activities of the bureau, or the agencies, which is one reason we wanted to go out of shop.” Markham waved this off. “But we’ll figure out jurisdiction issues after we blow up that bridge. This is neither the time nor the time to debate such things. Am I right? Huh?”
They were in a small conference room, nothing on the walls, in black executive chairs. The room had a high ceiling; Remy could hear mechanized sounds coming from beyond the door.
Markham was still talking. “Of course, your work must be treated with the utmost discretion. I will be your primary contact. I trust you haven’t told anyone about your negotiations with us to this point.”
“With-”
“With us,” Markham said.
“Yeah.” Remy laughed nervously. “Well, I don’t think that’s going to be a problem.”
Half of Markham’s young face smiled. “That’s good.”
“Hell, I don’t even know who you are.”
Markham seemed momentarily startled, then smiled. “Wow. Yeah. That’s good. You could be in one of our training videos.” Markham sat smiling at Remy a moment longer, then set his thin briefcase on the table and opened it. “Okay, then, why don’t we talk about what we’re here to talk about?”
Markham pulled an eight-by-ten photograph from the briefcase and slid it across the table. It showed a young woman with round cheeks, dark eyes, and long black hair, a beautiful girl. In the picture she was sitting in a restaurant patio wearing a spaghetti-strap evening dress and holding a martini up to the camera.
“Gibson,” said Markham.
“What?”
“You said martini. It’s not a martini. It’s a Gibson. Onions instead of olives.” His perfectly manicured index finger pointed to the tiny glass in the picture.
Had he said martini out loud?
“Yes, you did. But see, it’s a Gibson.” Markham pointed to the glass again. “You can just make out the cocktail onions. Here, you can see them better in this one.” He thumbed through his briefcase until he came up with another photo, a blown-up detail of the drink showing fuzzily but unmistakably that there were, indeed, two tiny white onions in the glass. “I don’t like onions. I prefer olives myself,” Markham said. “Without pimientos. You have to request it that way or they’ll just assume you want pimientos. I mean, honestly… what is a pimiento? A fruit? A vegetable? A legume? I mean, come on-” He was taking on the tone of a standup comic. “Does it even occur in nature?”
“I think it’s a pepper,” Remy said.
“I know. It was a…” said Markham, clearly disappointed that his joke had fallen flat. “Oh. Well, then…” He put the onion picture away and pointed again at the picture of the girl. “This is March Selios.”
Remy looked at the picture. Marge?
“No, March. Like the month.”
Remy bit his lip so no more words would sneak out. He looked at the picture again, taken from across the table of a restaurant, ferns everywhere.
“She worked for a firm that managed legal issues for importers of various goods through foreign contracts, international consortiums, that sort of thing. She was trained as a paralegal. That’s two legals.” Markham spit laughter, but became serious so quickly that Remy wondered if there had been another gap. “She specialized in shipping, trade law, tariffs, oil. Spoke fluent Greek, but also passable Arabic and a bit of Farsi. Did a lot of work with Middle Eastern and Mediterranean companies: Greek, Italian, Saudi, Syrian, Lebanese. Intelligent girl, single, moderate drinker, liberal politics: for a time in the 1990s, she raised money for Palestinian relief charities, protested Israeli aggression, that sort of thing. A bit of a wild child, a drinker, no drug use that we can find. She wasn’t afraid of sex, but then, she was in her twenties. Worked for this firm, ADR, for approximately two years. The firm’s offices were sprinkled throughout the top floors, so as you might guess, the company was hit hard – a third of its employees, everyone who was at work that morning, twenty-three people, all MPD. Although-”
Remy looked at the picture again.
“-the number of Missing Presumed Dead from that firm would be twenty-two… if one were to take Ms. Selios off the official list.” Markham let this hang in the air.
“You think… she shouldn’t be… on the official list?”
“We have reason to believe…” Markham paused again. “There are indications…” He stopped again. “There is some evidence that… Ms. Selios may not have died that day. She may, in fact, be alive.”
Remy waited for more, but this Markham seemed to revel in dripping details one at a time. “How?” Remy finally asked.
Markham crossed his hands and put his index fingers across his lips. “Based on document re-creation and interviews, we are exploring the theory that she may have gotten advance warning and fled moments before…”
Again Markham was quiet. Remy made an effort to speak out loud. “I’m not sure I’m following you.”
Markham pulled on a rubber glove, reached back in his briefcase and pulled out a zipped plastic bag with a small piece of paper inside. He put the bag on the table, then pulled it back. “Obviously, this is classified.” Then he slid it forward again, as if it contained some magical secret.
Remy reached for the baggie. Inside was a single index card. On the card was a recipe, handwritten with a blue pen, for something called pecan encrusted sole. Remy read through the last ingredient (1 tsp sea salt) and the preparation (Drip with virgin olive oil), all the way through the directions (Let stand for five minutes, garnish with two twisted orange slices, and serve). He stared at the recipe, then looked back up at Markham. For several seconds, there was no noise in the room.
“A recipe,” Remy said.
“Ah! Somebody’s got some college,” Markham said. “And where do you think we found this recipe?”
“I… I don’t have any idea.”
“Do you know where Crystal Beach is?”
“I don’t think so.”
Markham looked suspicious, but he continued. “Crystal Beach is in southern Ontario, on Abino Bay, across Lake Erie, near Buffalo. Lovely place. Cold in the winter, though… cold as a sober lesbian at a frat party. As you might guess.” He waited for a laugh again, and then became serious. “We found this recipe… in the possession of a forty-six-year-old homemaker, Mrs. Linda Vendron. Mrs. Vendron claims she was at Kennedy Airport that day, after a visit with her sister, and was waiting for a commuter flight to Buffalo when she heard about the attacks. Do you see what I’m getting at?”
“No.”
“When the airport closed, this Mrs. Vendron wasn’t able to get a flight to Buffalo, so she returned to her sister’s house. Finally, two days later, she took a bus to Buffalo. A very crowded bus, as she says now.” Markham leaned forward. “This Mrs. Vendron claims she found the recipe wedged in the seat of the bus. She says she picked it up because… she thought it would taste good. She thought her husband would like it. He likes pecans.”
“But you… don’t believe her?”
Markham looked stung. “Yes, we believe her. Of course, just to be sure, we polygraphed her.” He shook his head. “But why would anyone lie about liking pecans? Who doesn’t like pecans? Especially in a good fish recipe, a tender filet? No, the pecans give it some substance, some crunch. Some weight. They’re soaked in honey. I think you could substitute corn syrup. But it specifically calls for honey. A hint of cayenne. Sea salt. You bake it for twenty minutes on low heat. Some chives. No, it’s a good little fish for a summer meal. Tasty. Light. We had the lab make it, just to be sure it was, you know… good.” Markham leaned back. “We’ll probably make it again; I’ll let you know.”
He leaned forward again, his index finger at his mouth. “But the question is not what does this fish taste like, or even what wine should you serve with the fish – I suppose you could get away with a Gewurtzemeiner or even a buttery Chardonnay. The question, Brian, is this: Who left this recipe on that bus?”
“Her?” Remy picked up the photo.
“March Selios,” Markham said, gesturing with his palms as if he’d performed a magic trick. “It’s a Greek surname. Second-generation immigrant. Older sister lives here in the city, works in real estate. Younger brother lives back at home in Kansas City with the parents. Dad runs a Greek restaurant there.”
Remy looked at the recipe again. “And what makes you think this recipe belonged to…” He looked at the girl again. “…to March?”
“We don’t have the luxury of thinking, Brian.” He reached in his briefcase for another photo. This one showed the same girl, March, sitting at her cubicle, smiling, holding some red Mylar balloons with Happy 26th Birthday written on them in silver. Markham reached in the briefcase, returned with another detail blowup, and handed Remy a jeweler’s loupe. “Here,” Markham said, and pushed the picture over to Remy. “Look closely. Over her shoulder.”
It was hard to make out at first, but then… yes, there was no doubt. On the wall of March Selios’s cubicle was the very same handwritten recipe for pecan encrusted sole that sat on the table between Remy and Markham.
“Jesus, that’s amazing,” Remy said.
“Thank you.”
“I mean, how did you know to look for…” Remy was having trouble following all of this. “How did this… I mean… it’s just one piece of paper. All this for…”
Markham got serious again. “What are you saying, Brian?”
“Nothing… I’m not saying anything. I’m just amazed. I just don’t see how you knew to connect… and you did all this work for… a recipe?” Remy looked through the jeweler’s loupe again. “You don’t even know that it had anything to do with that day… I mean… maybe she took it off her wall months earlier.”
Markham pointed to the birthday picture again. “Her twenty-sixth birthday was six days before the attack. That’s when this photo was taken, her twenty-sixth birthday – six days before she supposedly died.”
“Maybe someone else picked up the recipe after… I mean, the paper went everywhere, didn’t it?”
Markham nodded as if he’d been expecting such an answer. “There is no dust on this recipe, Brian. None. We had it tested in the lab. Right after we made the fish. This sheet of paper had to be in a briefcase or in a purse. It was not blown out of the building. It was taken out beforehand.”
Remy looked at the office picture again. She was even prettier in this one, shy and wide-eyed, and it occurred to Remy that she was in love with whoever took the picture.
“Yeah, that’s what we think, too,” Markham said.
Jesus. Was he still saying aloud what he was thinking? Remy looked up to see if he was speaking this thought too, but Markham didn’t seem to notice if he was. He put the two pictures side by side: March smiling in a restaurant, March smiling at her desk.
“These pictures were taken with the same camera. Whoever took them is the key. A lover. Possibly illicit. We find the person who took these pictures, we’re halfway there,” Markham said. “I believe that if we find this camera, there’s a good chance we’ll find March Selios alive. And there’s a good chance we’ll find her with someone you might find interesting.”
Remy felt slow, as if he were thinking in mud. “Who?”
Markham reached in his briefcase and emerged with another picture, of March sitting outside at a little table on a rooftop with a handsome young Middle Eastern man, his hair and beard both at stubble length, his deep-set eyes seeming to peer through the camera.
“This was taken on the roof of March’s apartment building. March cooked the meal and a neighbor served them and took this picture. The man is Bishir Madain,” Markham said. “Saudi ex-pat. In the United States for twelve years. Worked for an importing consortium. Romantically linked with Ms. Selios until about eighteen months ago. Mr. Madain hasn’t been seen since the morning of the attacks. We have recovered documentation – telexes, e-mails, rustic catalog order forms – that could indicate that Mr. Madain is part of a sleeper cell here. We believe he may even have had advance knowledge of the attacks that morning, and that he may have decided to alert his old girlfriend.”
“But I still don’t see how-”
Markham slid a two-page interview report across the table. On top was stamped the word Classified and the initials D.D. “That morning, at 7:12 A.M., soon after arriving, Ms. Selios called in a repair order for the laser printer on her floor. At 7:48, the technician arrived, as you’ll see by his interview. The technician had always found Ms. Selios to be-” Markham looked at his notes. “ – smoking hot. That morning, he flirted with Ms. Selios, who was, he claims, not entirely unaware of his intentions or unimpressed by his mac-daddy game. Dude was workin’ it, when March suddenly received a telephone call. She appeared agitated by the call. The technician was removing a jammed sheet of paper from the laser printer when he looked up and saw March Selios walking toward the elevators, crying. The technician himself left a few minutes later, arriving on the main floor, and was, as far as we know, the last person to get off that floor before…” Markham mouthed the word boom, and shrugged, as if that explained it.
Remy was surprised to hear himself asking questions. “Did anyone see her leaving the building? Or afterward? Is there any other evidence that she’s alive?”
Markham looked pleased. “These questions are why we brought you in.”
Remy looked down at the interview transcript. “I don’t know. I mean – couldn’t that call have been anything?” he said. “An argument with a boyfriend? Maybe she wasn’t going to the elevator. Maybe she went to the bathroom. What have you got here – a horny repairman and a recipe. And that’s supposed to prove she got advance warning?”
Markham pointed at the close-up of March Selios’s cubicle. “Imagine the walls of a young woman’s cubicle. Covered in pictures and recipes, Cathy cartoons, and Buddhist koans. Now, let’s say she has a fight with her boyfriend, as you say, and she runs off to the bathroom. Would she really stop to strip the walls of her cubicle on her way out? Would she grab recipes and pictures? Why would it occur to her that she was not coming back?”
Markham held out his palms again, then began collecting his papers. He glanced up at Remy. “Any questions before you get started?”
Remy didn’t know where to start. “This all seems so… sketchy. Maybe it’s just me, but…” He rubbed his eyes, trying for the millionth time to clear the streaks. “I’m having a lot of trouble… connecting things.”
Markham stared at him for a long moment and then nodded and looked like he might cry. “I know. It’s hard. I forget sometimes that you guys went through hell that day. I can’t know what that was like. None of us can. This is tough. And it never gets easier. But that’s precisely why we wanted you.” Markham reached back into his briefcase for the index card in the baggie. “Read the last line of this ‘recipe.’”
Remy read it: Garnish with two twisted orange slices.
Now Markham handed him another detail blowup, this one from the photo of March and Bishir Madain at dinner on her roof. On the platter between them he could clearly see what looked like a piece of fish garnished with two twisted orange slices. Then Markham cocked his eyebrows, as if he’d made another ironclad case, and took the picture back. “Look, this is going to be tough. I’m not going to kid you. But we’ve got to find March Selios. And if it turns out she is, in fact… dead… well, then everything is copacetic. Not for her, obviously…” He laughed uncomfortably. “But for the record. That’s our federally mandated charge, after all – to have a pure record. All the columns adding up. But if, in fact, she’s alive – well, then, we’ve got a problem. In fact, we’ve got a big problem.” And he closed the briefcase.
“A FORMALITY,” said a woman in her fifties, tall and professional, staring over the rims of stylish glasses up at Remy. She sat at a wide desk, next to a rooster-haired man roughing up his nose with a wet handkerchief.
“There are no right answers,” the man said. “Relax.”
The woman asked, “Chronic back pain?”
“What?” Remy asked.
“Just to get the paperwork flowing,” the tall woman said. “A formality. We just have to check a box.”
The man asked, “Chronic back pain?”
Remy looked around the room. There was a poster on the wall behind him showing a cartoon man with a push broom through his head like an arrow and the caption: Industrial Accidents Are Nothing To Laugh At. Remy leaned forward. “My back is fine,” he said. “I mean, if I need anything, I guess it’s some kind of counselor. See, I’m having some trouble… focusing. There are these gaps. I lose track of things.”
They stared at him.
“And my eyes… my eyes are flaking apart. Macular degeneration and vitreous detachment. I see flashers and floaters.”
A few seconds passed. Remy laughed nervously. “My son’s been telling everyone that I’m dead.”
They stared.
“And I… I drink a lot. Most days, I think. And… uh…” He rubbed his eyes. “I shot myself in the head. But I think that was an accident. Or… maybe a joke.”
They stared.
“But… you know… I’m fine.”
They stared.
“Well… except for the gaps, obviously.”
After a moment, the man chewed his pen and looked down at the file, running his finger down a list of some kind. “Chronic back pain,” he said.
“I WATCH a fair amount of television, Mr. Remy,” said the nervous woman with a silver skunk streak in her black hair. She glanced over at a set in the corner of her small apartment. Remy looked from the woman to her TV. On the screen, a man in coveralls was holding a piece of wood against a lathe. The sound was turned down. The skunk woman continued: “I haven’t turned off my TV since it happened. I was glued to the news coverage for the first few days. I even turned the TV so I could see it from the bathroom. I ordered out every meal and just went from channel to channel, watching it from different angles, listening to the newscasters and the public officials. Then, just like that, a few days ago I saw the first thing on TV that wasn’t news coverage. It was four in the morning.” The woman took a drag from her cigarette. “It was an infomercial. For a psychic. You know, that Jamaican woman with dreadlocks who tells people what’s in their future? Everyone’s either going to find a new job or fall in love, right? No one’s going to get cancer or fall down a well shaft. No one’s going to have a day just like the day before, lonely and sad, watching TV and ordering takeout. No one’s going to be burned to death on the eightieth floor of a building. It’s all new jobs and hunky new boyfriends. I suppose there was part of me that still hadn’t given up on March coming back – but I’m watching this psychic and she’s saying she’ll read your future for fifty bucks and they’re showing these people reconciling with their mothers or falling in love or getting promotions at work and it just hit me that I was never going to see March again. And I just lost it. I yelled at this TV psychic: Okay motherfucker! Where the hell were you?”
Remy shifted. He looked down at his palm-sized notebook. Written on the page in his handwriting was a series of fragmentary notes: the name Ann Rogers, an address on the Upper East Side, the words neighbor and family money. Remy looked around the apartment, a simple postwar studio. She was stick-thin, with long, black hair and that perfect gray stripe. She was wearing baggy pajamas. She had two cigarettes going, one pinched between her long, manicured fingers, another smoldering in the ashtray.
Below Ann Rogers and neighbor was a short list of abbreviated questions, also in Remy’s handwriting. He looked at the first one: That morning? “That morning,” he said.
“That morning?” Ann Rogers took a deep breath and sighed. “That morning, March and I went off to work. Like any other day. We walked to the subway station together. It was… six-thirty. We got a bagel at the World Coffee place on Lex. She had a cappuccino. I don’t drink caffeine, myself.” Ann Rogers set one cigarette down and picked up the other one.
Remy stared at the notebook before him. Should he be writing any of this down? That Ann Rogers doesn’t like caffeine? That she has a streak in her hair? He had the sense that any detail would become important if he wrote it down, that its importance would be determined by the record he kept.
“March and I hit it off right away, right after she moved into the building… oh… I don’t know, almost a year ago.” Ann Rogers ran her hand over her hair. “We’d meet in the hallway every day on our way to work. Sometimes we shared a cab. Or we’d walk to the subway together. We both rode downtown, although she went twice as far as me. It was amazing, really. We never said, Hey, let’s meet at this time or let’s meet at that time. It just happened. I’d step outside my apartment to get something to eat and March would be there, and she’d be going out to eat at the exact same time. It was amazing, if you think about it.”
Remy thought about it. “I guess so.”
Ann Rogers shrugged. “Anyway, that particular day, we caught our train, sat next to each other. We talked about the weather, our weekends, and then we got to the Union Square station and I got off. And that was it. I imagine she kept going downtown.”
The second question read: Unusual?
“Anything,” Remy said, “unusual about that day?”
“Hmm. Let me see. Oh, you know what. There was this one thing. About three thousand people died. Yeah. Including my best friend. And I haven’t been able to leave my fucking apartment or turn off my fucking TV since then. But otherwise, no, I’d say it was just like every other peachy fucking day.”
“No, I’m sorry, I…” Remy looked down. “I guess what I mean is… that morning. There was nothing unusual about that morning? Before? She didn’t say anything before…”
“Oh, sorry. Hmm. Let me think. Oh yeah, now that you mention it, she did say that she had a bad feeling she was going to burn to death in an inferno.”
Remy shifted in his chair. “Look, I didn’t mean to upset you, Ms. Rogers.”
Ann Rogers stared at him. Flat.
Remy looked back at his notes. Question three: Seeing anyone? He took a breath. “Do you know if she was seeing anyone?”
“Seeing?”
“Romantically.”
“Who did she fuck? Is that what you’re asking me, Mr. Remy? Who did March fuck? Is that what you’re asking?”
“Look, Ms. Rogers, I-”
“You want to know who banged my neighbor?”
“I guess…”
“Then why don’t you just ask that, you fucking pervert?”
“I did.”
“No, you didn’t. You asked if she was seeing someone. I’m seeing you right now, but you’re not fucking me. Or are you? Are you fucking me, Mr. Remy? Is this as good as it gets with you?”
“Look, I…”
“Do you want me to tell you who she saw or who she fucked?”
“The latter, I guess.”
“The latter? What’s the matter with you? Say it. Say it, you piece of shit. Say, Excuse me Ms. Rogers, but who did your neighbor fuck?”
“Who did your neighbor fuck?”
“Oh my God! None of your business, you fucking pervert.”
Remy felt dizzy. “Look, I don’t know how this has gotten so-”
“What makes you think I would even know that? We were neighbors. I can tell you she didn’t fuck me. Does that help? You want a full list of all the people who haven’t fucked me? Is that what you want? Because I’ll get some paper and get started.”
Remy cleared his throat. “Look, we got off on the wrong foot or something. There’s no reason-”
“No reason to what? No reason to be upset? What… are you asleep? Are you out of your fucking mind? Have you seen what’s happening out there?”
Remy tried to soldier on. He looked at the next question: That night. “That night… did you hear or see anything… anyone in her apartment?”
“Fuck fuck fuck! Screw hump dick lay! Fuck fuck fuck! There. Are you happy, Mr. Remy? Does that turn you on, you freak?”
Next question: Bishir.
“Did you know a man named Bishir Madain?”
She waved him off like an insect. “Fuck fuck fuck! She didn’t come home! Fuck fuck fuck! Are you happy, pervert? Fuck fuck fuck!”
Remy closed his notebook. “Maybe we’ll try this some other time, Ms. Rogers.”
She stared at him for a few seconds, and then turned back to the TV. She reached for her remote control and the sound came up, the guy in coveralls: “…abrasive substances will work, although traditional sandpaper is still…”
Remy started for the door, but paused. “Why did she live all the way up here?”
Ann Rogers jerked her thumb across the remote control, barely able to contain her disgust. “What do you want from me? Are you trying to get me to confess or something?”
“No,” Remy said, “I was just wondering…” What was he wondering? “March worked in the financial district-”
“Yes. You know she did. That’s why she died, you fuckhead pervert scumbag.”
Remy ignored her. “And she lived all the way up here? In this building? On a paralegal’s salary? That doesn’t make any sense. She could have found the same space over the river for a third the price. Where’d she get the money for this?”
Ann Rogers seemed calm, suddenly. Her eyes narrowed. “I don’t think I like what you’re implying,” she said.
Remy held his hands out. “What am I implying?”
“Aren’t you implying something?”
“Honestly,” Remy said, “I have no idea.”
Ann Rogers reached for the remote control, cocked her arm and threw it at-
THE GUY standing in the doorway was in his late thirties, the fat settling between knees and shoulders, a week’s growth coming in gray. Expensive haircut. He wore black slacks and a black T-shirt. He was barefoot. “Yes?”
Remy removed his hand from the doorbell and looked around. It was a nice house, two stories, blue-gray, with a square patch of new sod in front and a kid’s bike leaning against the Lexus in the driveway. He looked down the block. Every house was the same, as far as he could see, like dominoes, each one with an American flag tipped from the porch.
“Can I help you?” asked the guy.
“…I don’t know.” Remy’s badge was in the hand he’d used to ring the bell, so he showed it to the man, hoping one of them would know how to proceed. “Um, I’m sorry, but… do you… where am I?”
The guy just stared. “Englewood Cliffs.”
“Oh. Right.”
“What can I do for you?”
Remy looked down. In his other hand was the planner he’d found at The Zero. G. Addich’s day planner. Ah. “What’s your name?”
The guy pulled back just a bit. “Tony Addich. Why?”
“Oh. I found this.” Remy held out the thick black book. “I’m glad you’re all right. I didn’t know if you-”
Addich stared at the planner as if it were a ghost.
“It looked like there were a lot of meetings in there,” Remy said.
The man didn’t say anything.
Remy tried to appear nonchalant, as if they were sharing a laugh waiting for the subway. “It’s funny. When I found this, I thought to myself… what did we do at all those meetings? I used to have a lot of meetings, and now… I have no idea what we talked about.” He tried to laugh this off, just two guys talking about how important things can suddenly become trivial, but the whole thing came out shallow and raw.
The man just stared at the planner. “That’s my father’s,” he said. “Gerald Addich. How did you get it?”
“Oh, Jesus,” said Remy. “Is your father-”
“No. He’s not here right now.”
“But he’s…”
“He’s fine. He’s at a senior citizen function. I think they went to a casino.” Tony Addich took the planner and looked through it. He shook his head. “He used to work for the city, in the sixties. He’s retired now. Suffers from dementia.”
“Yeah,” Remy said. “But see, I found this at-”
“Yes, thank you,” said Tony Addich, and he closed the door in Remy’s face.
Remy stood on the porch for a minute. He looked around the neighborhood again. Should he knock on the door again? Ask who his father knew named Remy? All of a sudden he wished he’d kept the-
GRAY DUSK, smoke-tinged and heavy, crept up from the horizon. Remy was standing outside Famous Ray’s on Sixth, trying to decide if he was hungry, when he noticed a picture of March Selios with a phone number below it. The window in front of this Ray’s was being used as a makeshift bulletin board, covered with desperate flyers, the whole storefront papered with pictures of the missing, arranged in crude rows like a mockup of a high school yearbook. This was a different picture of March, one he’d never seen before, but it was definitely her, smiling politely in a living room somewhere, maybe when she was younger. Remy stood in front of the window and looked past the reflected glass into the flatness of all those photographs, March Selios among her people, like members of a lost tribe, their images trapped forever on the inside of this window. Each picture was glued or printed on a sheet of paper with a description of the missing person and phone numbers to call. Some of the notes were pleas for mercy, as if the missing had been kidnapped and might be released if the kidnappers found out they had two children, or had just overcome cancer; others were even more emphatic, punctuated with exclamation points and descriptions of the kindness of the person, their hardworking drive, their love of family, and punctuality – as if these things could somehow help in identifying them. The corners of the pages were beginning to curl. There were victim walls like this every few miles in the city now. They sprouted up in parks and at hospitals, on schools and on subway platforms – anywhere people could think to tape up pictures. As soon as one photo went up, people rushed from their apartments and houses to fill the entire wall with pictures. There could be no single photograph of the missing; every wall had to be covered, every space filled. And as a survivor, you had to stop and look at the pictures because that was what was required of you. Of course, these weren’t missing people anymore; they were dead people now. Everyone knew they were dead. There were no stories of people from these walls being found alive (and still: the dream of amnesiacs wandering suburban hospitals) and yet Remy stopped and looked anyway, and as the walls made this quiet shift from the missing to the dead, he looked at them differently, mentally riffling the faces and pausing on the familiar – a glimmer of recognition and hope – until he remembered that he’d just seen that face on the wall in Washington Square, or at St. Vincent’s, and eventually Remy came to wonder if maybe he hadn’t known them all, every one of these people, and when he stepped away from the walls, he sometimes saw those faces on the passing bodies, in the stares of strangers – such looks of sorrow and bewilderment, such gazes of disbelief and betrayal.
He noticed distinctions on the walls, too, that he couldn’t help making. Remy had read once that America was a classless society, but the walls of missing and dead disproved this. These walls were testaments to class, and even though the pictures were all jumbled, Remy could mentally break them into three strata. The first: bankers, lawyers, brokers, executives and their assistants, mostly white, some transplanted browns, mostly in suits or tuxedos or dresses, or photos from their weddings or their college graduations or company Christmas parties. Some of the younger ones, like March, were in casual clothes: with family or, more often, outdoors, hiking or vacationing in some canyon or on a beach in the Caribbean. These people were always smiling in their death photos, not exactly as though they were happy, but as if they’d been told at some point that they had nothing to complain about.
The second class was comprised mostly of firefighters, a few cops, and these were nearly all men, or boys, most with mustaches, in old xeroxed pictures, in uniforms, in their official portraits, shaggy sideburns or military haircuts. They were rarely smiling, but had an eager severity. They were ready. If they were pictured in candid shots, their faces were invariably washed out, as if the photographers were always too close… too proud. These people all had a look that Remy had seen on the faces of people who died too young – as if they’d known – a look that said this was simply more than they bargained for, that they had only wanted a life in which they made a little bit of money and lived comfortably. They seemed like good people: white, black, and Latino, all with that look of someone who had just arrived somewhere. Remy could imagine thought bubbles above their heads: It will be easier for my kids.
And finally there was the last stratum, the workers who had been mostly invisible before, faces on the subway or at a bus stop: black and Hispanic, or foreign-borns, so many names heavy in consonants or vowels, the grunts who staffed the restaurants and cafeterias, the mailrooms and custodial sheds. These pictures were grim, like mugshots: work IDs and grainy family portraits and Polaroid-framed moments of forced relaxation. These people all seemed exhausted, as if they’d known disaster before this day, too, like flood survivors clinging to trees. Often, the missing person wasn’t even the focus of the photograph – you could see two other people had been cut away from the picture and all that was left was poor Jupaheen in a secondhand suit, standing in a building lobby, hands folded in front of his lap. Bleeding patience.
Remy was lost in the faces when he glanced over and saw a guy standing next to him, a Middle Eastern man in his sixties, about Remy’s height, wearing a beautiful wool coat, with razor-short hair, round glasses, and several days’ growth on his craggy face. “Do you want to know what I have always believed?” he asked, with a dentured whistle, and the faintest shadow of an accent.
“Okay,” Remy said.
The man turned back to the wall. “I have always believed that there are two kinds of people: those whose every day is a battle to rise up, and those whose every day is a battle to fit in. There are no other kinds of people. No races or religions or professions – you are either trying to rise, or trying to fit. That is the only war, between the risers and the fitters. That’s all.”
Remy looked back at the pictures. What was this man saying, that it was democratizing, all these people dying together? Remy couldn’t see it that way, didn’t imagine them coming together in the end, grabbing hold of one another in burning corridors or comforting each other as the heat rose and the ground beckoned. He’d seen too many people fall alone and it was too easy to imagine the rest crying alone, huddling alone, and burning alone – generally being alone, which, no matter how we live, is always the way we go. Remy looked down at his own hands, calluses on the pads and palms, gray dust in the creases of his nails.
“We miss Communism,” the man said. “Not as a form of government, or economics – obviously that was a failure, as rife with corruption and disincentives as any other system. But the ideal, the childlike optimism – without it the world grows into cynicism. Sometimes I think we need another way, a political or economic route to morality and generosity. When I was a young man I believed that my faith was a path through the violent thicket of modernity, but honestly, I just don’t know anymore. Maybe we all have to be dragged through, huh?”
The man gestured toward the photos. “Did you know that Jesus is mentioned ninety-three times in the Koran?”
“No,” Remy said, “I guess I didn’t know that.”
“Nobody knows that,” the man said. Then he put a manila envelope in Remy’s open hands. “I think this may be what you’re looking for,” the man said and turned to walk away.
DARK AT the edges, and in the center a blinding, narrow green light an indeterminate distance in front of him, sliding back and forth across a short horizon. “And tell me, Brian. What are you seeing now?”
Remy’s chin and forehead were pressed into some kind of smooth, cool plastic. The green light moved back and forth. “Brian? Are you seeing the streaks right now? The floaters and strings?”
“Yes,” Remy answered. “Streaks. And the ones that look like chains. Floating.”
“Okay. Look up, please.”
He looked up.
“Now down.”
Down.
“Okay. That’s fine. You can sit back now.”
Remy sat back in the chair, which had a cushion for his head. The lights came up and Remy’s eyes burned as the pieces scrambled for cover. His wild-eyed ophthamologist, Dr. Huld, wore a small light above his head, a tiny miner’s helmet. “I wish I had better news for you. But it’s definitely gotten worse. Much worse.” The doctor turned and looked maniacally at Remy – his bulging round eyes framed by thick black lashes, Marty Feldman after corrective surgery – and then scratched some notes on a pad. “I definitely don’t want you to fly. The change in air pressure would be bad for your retinas. Do you think driving would be too hard on your back?”
“No,” Remy said. “My back is fine.”
“Well then, if you must take this trip, I think it’s best that you drive. At least for now… until we get the pressure stabilized.”
“Okay,” Remy said. Then he would just have to drive. “Uh… Dr. Huld. Did I… by chance… Did I happen to tell you where I was going?”
Dr. Huld didn’t look up as he wrote on his pad. “Kansas City.”
“Right, Kansas City,” Remy repeated. He laughed, as if trying to pass this all off as a game, but the doctor ignored him and spoke without looking up from his pad.
“How’s the medication working out for you? Do you need another prescription?”
“I don’t know.”
The doctor looked up again, his eyes bugging. “Are you taking the pills I prescribed, Brian?”
“Honestly, I’m kind of having trouble remembering some things. There are these… gaps. They’re coming faster now… Could that be a side effect of the medication?”
Dr. Huld removed the miner’s light. “What kind of gaps?”
“Well, sometimes-”
HIS OWN face stared back at him from the bathroom mirror: thinning brown hair, faint beard over a jutting jaw, seams of blood in his left eye, and on his lips a distant, wan smile. And of course, the whole picture was covered with flecks, like a crackling old movie. Remy looked down. He was naked. He was getting thinner, lean muscles popping at the skin. And he was half-aroused. “The good half,” he said quietly, surprised by his own raspy voice. Jesus, was he drunk again? He breathed on his hand and smelled sweet booze. Brandy? Port? He didn’t drink port. Did he drink port? He imagined the syrupy coolness and suddenly craved a glass of it. Maybe he did drink port. Or maybe he should start. Remy looked around. This wasn’t his bathroom. Okay. The floor was tiled with small alternating tiles; there was a sink, a medicine chest, and a toilet. It was very clean. Okay. Okay. There were candles draped in ribbon on the back of the toilet. Candles. This was a woman’s bathroom. Well, that was good, anyway. If he was going to be naked in a strange bathroom, better to have it be-
“Is everything okay in there?” A woman’s voice… youngish, a little tentative, maybe, but… nice.
Remy stared at the door. “Yeah. I’ll be right there.” He tried to come up with the girl’s name: Amelia? Olga? Maria? Jesus, it could be anything. Betsy? Phil? Rotunda?
He looked around wildly and then opened the medicine chest, looking for prescriptions. But there weren’t any. He opened a drawer and there were two medicine bottles. He read the names on the bottles: April Kraft. April. Kraft. April. April Kraft. Was he with this April Kraft? What if April Kraft was the girl’s roommate, not her?
“Uh… you don’t have a roommate, do you?”
She laughed on the other side of the door – a sad, distant sound that trailed off.
Remy reached to open the door when he was frozen by a troubling thought. Had they already had sex? Didn’t he usually piss after sex? He looked down at his half-erection. Was it the before kind of half-on or the after kind? If they’d already done it, and he tried again, it might not work. He might look… how exactly would that look? Valiant, for giving it an effort? Or like a jackass who can’t close the deal? And if they hadn’t had sex yet… Suddenly, he thought of the prescription bottles again. He opened the drawer. The first was for Celexa, prescribed for “anxiety and depression.” The second was for penicillin, the fourth refill of five. That’s all it said. Shoot, people took penicillin for all kinds of things. No reason to assume the worst. Had he used a condom? Was he about to use a condom? Did he have a condom? His erection was totally gone now.
“Please hurry… before I change my mind,” she said. Okay, before. Maybe he was looking for a condom. She laughed a little, but there was some quality in her voice that gave him pause and made him think this wasn’t just something she said, that this was a tentative match, that the moment could slip the way so many moments slipped now – loosed of their context and meaning and floating gently to the ground.
“Okay,” he said, and he reached for-
SCOTCH. REMY tasted it in his mouth and felt the heavy glass in his hand. He let the booze trickle down his throat. It was delicious. He closed his eyes and watched the floaters drift by, like leaves on a pond. When the taste had faded Remy opened his eyes. “Wow. That was good.” He was sitting in an oak-lined room, on a leather sofa, across from a handsome guy in his forties. The guy was wearing a suit with a striking shirt: sky blue with a bright white collar and white cuffs pinched by gold links that just barely peeked out of his jacket. His hair was carefully combed and curled up at the collar. He was holding copies of the photographs of March Selios and he was glaring at Remy.
“Look, friend,” the guy said – Remy caught a slight Texas accent – “I’ve been shaken down before. So go ahead and act tough. Take my drink. Try to intimidate me. Arrest me if you want. But I’m not answering any questions until you tell me how you found my name.”
Remy had no clue. “I’m afraid I can’t do that,” he said.
The two men stared at one another for a long moment, before Remy held up his glass and asked: “I don’t suppose I could get some more of this?”
The guy rubbed his jaw and then raised the index finger on his right hand.
Remy looked around. They were in a club somewhere, rich dark wainscoting on the wall behind them, and above that a thickly painted landscape and a plaque engraved with the club officers’ names. Two guys in tennis clothes were sitting a couple of tables away, watching them carefully. Remy and this immaculately dressed guy were sitting across from each other on leather couches in the center of the room, an ornately carved mahogany table between them.
A waiter approached and spoke sotto voce. “Mr. Eller, shall I call security?”
“That’s not necessary, Carlos. In fact, why don’t you bring Mr. Remy here another scotch.”
“And for you?”
“No. Thank you.”
Eller looked around the butterscotch room. He hissed: “Okay. I knew March… Yes. Obviously.” He carefully set one photo down between them: March drinking the Gibson. “And you’re right. I did take this one.” Then he set down the other picture, the one of March in her office. “But I didn’t take this one. I don’t know who took that one. I’d guess they were both taken with her camera. She always had that camera. She was always giving that camera to people to take pictures of her in different situations. She used to say she was recording her life in case she forgot anything.”
The memory made this Eller lose his voice for a moment. He rubbed his jaw and continued. “We met about a year ago. I had just moved here from Houston. My company had some business in the Sudan, oil futures.” He pronounced it ol’ futures. “We were having some… difficulties with Khartoum, and we hired March’s firm to help us. While the lawyers hammered everything out, March gave us some cultural advice – how to play certain families, which palms to grease…” He shifted on the couch. “When the first part of the deal was finalized, I asked her out to dinner to celebrate.” He shrugged. “And yes, Mr. Remy, for a short time after that, we were…” He looked around. “…fucking… as you so bluntly put it.
“So, there, I’ve answered your question. Now I’d like an answer to mine. How did you find me?”
Remy thought about the Scotch that was coming. He wanted to extend the interview at least long enough to drink it. “You don’t know?”
Eller cocked his head. “I don’t think any of her friends knew. I don’t even think she told her sister. She was embarrassed about seeing a married man… Maybe someone at her office? Someone in her building?”
“You’re getting warmer,” Remy said, treading water. A few seconds later, his Scotch arrived and Remy reached out and accepted the caramel-colored glass. “This is really good,” he said to the waiter. “What is it?”
“Oban. Twenty-two years old.”
“God. It’s really good.”
“The lease on the apartment,” Eller said, slapping his head. He looked from the waiter to Remy’s glass and back. “Carlos. Do you think you could get Mr. Remy a bottle? Put it on my account.”
“Of course, Mr. Eller.” Carlos backed away from the table.
Remy held the drink in his mouth, savoring it.
“You’ll excuse my earlier outburst, Mr. Remy. It occurs to me that it was actually thoughtful of you to contact me here at the club, rather than at my office or my home, where this might have been… misconstrued. Clearly, you’re a reasonable man.”
“Thank you,” Remy said, draining the glass.
“I’ll help in any way that I can…” Eller tapped the photo of March in the spaghetti-strap dress. “You’re right – this is the Olympic Four Seasons in Seattle. How did you know that?”
Remy shrugged.
“I understand.” Eller nodded in a kind of admiration. “Well… I was at a conference there, last spring. I took March. I wanted to talk to her, outside the city. She was sensitive about my being married. She told me that’s all she’d met since she got to the city, married men. Except this one boyfriend she had briefly… Basil, I think his name was, something like that. An Arab student, real womanizer. They’d just broken up. She was bitter – looking for something different, I guess.
“Anyway, I guess I may have… uh… led her to believe that I was separated. It was on that trip, when I took this picture, that I explained that I actually wasn’t exactly separated, technically.” He cleared his throat. “That my wife and I were still together.”
Eller waited for a response, but Remy couldn’t muster one. “Technically,” he repeated.
“Yes.” Eller bit his lip. “Anyway, March ran out. And I didn’t see her for several hours. She was walking around Seattle. When she came back, I could see that she had been crying. But her face was set. Very determined. March could be that way. She was one of those people who lashed out when she was hurt. And, oh boy, was she hurt.” Remy thought Eller seemed almost proud of this fact, and he had to look away. “She started by saying that she was tired of feeling like a victim in every relationship and then she just laid out everything she wanted from me: bang, bang, bang. An apartment. A cell phone. A car. Stipend. Clothes allowance. She said that if she was going to be a mistress, by God she wanted to be compensated like one.” Eller stared at a spot over Remy’s shoulder. “Honestly, Mr. Remy. That outburst was the best thing that could’ve happened. For both of us. This might sound… cold. But I’m a businessman. This is what I do. It’s what I understand. Negotiations. Arrangements. I tend to gravitate toward those things I can control. And in that way, shoot, the arrangement was…” His eyes drifted down and for the first time, he looked like a man who’d lost someone. “Perfect.”
Something stuck in Remy’s mind, amid all these pointless details, one word: “Car? Did you say you bought her a car?”
“I gave her a car.”
“But she took the train to work.”
“I needed to be somewhat discreet about the car.” Eller squirmed. “My firm… provided it, a company car. I tied it to the work she was doing for us. March parked it in the garage below her office. We used it on the weekends to go to Connecticut.”
Just then the waiter returned with a tall, narrow box and set it on the table between them. The scotch. Eller stared at him, waiting for a question, but Remy just looked back at his scotch. Eller cleared his throat and filled the space. “About three weeks before…” he rubbed his mouth “…before she died, March suddenly said that it was over. I wasn’t happy, as you might guess. I asked if there was someone else… and when she hesitated, I knew. I asked if it was her old boyfriend, but she just said it wasn’t anyone. It was just… time, she said.”
Remy nodded.
“I know what you’re thinking.” Eller picked up the photograph and stared at it again. “Was I in some way… relieved that March died that day? Because I didn’t have to hold my breath every time the phone rang at home? Or look over my shoulder when I went to her apartment? I was bitter about the breakup; I won’t lie. But I cared deeply for her, Mr. Remy. I did. There were days when I thought I loved her.”
Remy didn’t say anything.
“I’m sure you don’t believe me.”
“Why wouldn’t I believe you?”
Eller straightened his neck. “I don’t care, Mr. Remy. Go ahead and mock me. March knew how I felt about her. I sleep at night. I-”
He coughed and seemed about to break down, but quickly composed himself. “That day… I watched TV and I was sick. I tried her cell phone but I couldn’t get through. I called the apartment and the hospitals… That night I went to the apartment. I still had my key. I just sat there thinking about her, and-” He trailed off and rubbed his jaw, looking down at the ground as if the magnitude of his actions was just making its way to him. “I gathered everything that might get back to me.” He looked up. “A magazine with my name on it. A razor and deodorant I kept in the bathroom. A bottle of wine from our cellar. I got those things… and I left.” Eller stared at the spot over Remy’s shoulder again, as if reading cue cards. Finally he looked back and met Remy’s eyes, composed and icy. “You said you were going to see her family in Kansas City?”
“Did I?”
“I doubt she told them anything about me, but if she did… can you tell them how genuinely sorry I am – for everything?”
“Sure.”
“Does any of this help?” Eller asked.
Remy looked at the scotch. “Yes.”
They both stood. Eller straightened his coat and looked at a spot on the ground. “The last time I talked to her… was two weeks before. A Sunday. She asked how I was doing. Miles… my son… had a soccer game. I told her about it, and she said, ‘I hope he has a great game.’ With no irony, either. March would’ve been a wonderful mother, if she’d ever gotten the chance.” He sighed. “Mr. Remy, if you knew that a conversation would be the last one you were going to have with someone, what would you say?”
Remy reached for the bottle of-
“I JUST keep thinking we forgot something,” Guterak was saying on the other end of the phone. He sounded drunk.
“What do you mean?” Remy adjusted the phone in his own ear. He sounded drunk, too. “What did we forget?”
“Not just us. Everyone. We just kept going on and… it’s like we all forgot to do something important. Like when you leave the stove on and go on a big trip.”
Remy didn’t know what to say. He looked at his watch. It was three in the morning. He was alone, fully dressed, lying on the bed in a hotel room that he didn’t recognize. He was wearing the suit he wore to funerals. He reached in the pocket and pulled out a funeral announcement. There was a picture of a forest and a verse from Luke: Father, if thou art willing, remove this cup from me; nevertheless not my will, but thine, be done. Below that was the name Donald Michael Morrone. Aw, Jesus. Not Donnie. They’d been at the academy together. Had he known about Donnie? Remy was drunk, but there was nothing around him to drink. His mouth felt velvety, warm. He edged with the phone over to the minibar and rifled through the browns.
“What did we forget, Paul?” Remy cracked a little dark rum and drained it.
“The people,” Paul said, as if it were obvious. “We forgot the people. I mean… where are they? It’s like they’re in a giant room somewhere, sitting, crouched against walls, and… if we just find that door and open it, they’ll all be in there, just staring at us. Thinking, What the fugg took you so long?”
“Jesus, Paul…”
“Sometimes I wish we’d just gone to a bar that morning and watched the whole thing on CNN. You know what I mean? I envy people who watched it on TV. They got to see the whole thing. People ask me what it was like and I honestly don’t know. Sometimes, I think the people who watched it on TV saw more than we did. It’s like, the further away you were from this thing, the more sense it made. Hell, I still feel like I have no idea what even happened. No matter how many times I tell the story, it still makes no sense to me. You know?”
There was something important Remy wanted to say, but he felt dopey with booze and the gaps seemed to be coming so fast now. Remy gripped the side of the bed, as if to keep himself from sliding out of the moment until he could remember what he wanted to say.
“People always ask the same question,” Guterak said. “When everyone is around, it’s all respect and bravery and what-a-fuggin’-hero and thanks for your sacrifice, but the minute someone gets me alone, or the minute they have a drink in ’em, they get this creepy look and they ask me what the bodies sounded like when they hit the sidewalk. They ever ask you that?”
Remy couldn’t say. “What do you tell ’em?”
“I say to clap their hands as hard as they can, so hard that it really hurts. Then they clap, and I say: No. Harder than that. And they clap again, and I say, No, really fuggin’ hard. And then they clap so hard their faces get all twisted up, and I say, No, really hard! And then, when their hands are red and sore, they say, ‘So that’s that what it sounded like?’ And I say, ‘No. It didn’t sound like that at all.’”
“Paul, have you thought about getting help? Maybe take some time off?”
“What? Take disability for my back, like you?”
Remy couldn’t tell if Guterak was mocking him. He knew there was nothing wrong with his back, didn’t he? “I don’t think I’m on disability, Paul,” he said. “I think I’m working on something.”
Guterak laughed. “Oh. Then I guess I can cancel your going-away party.”
“I swear, Paul. I’m working. On some kind of case.”
“Yeah? They put the blind guy with the bad back on some big, top-secret assignment, huh?”
“My back is fine.”
Paul laughed again. “What do you do on this secret assignment?”
“I go places… Talk to people.”
Guterak seemed to be tiring of the joke. “Yeah? Then what happens?”
Remy put the funeral announcement back in his pocket and unfolded another piece of paper he found there. It was the flyer from the wall at Famous Ray’s, with the picture of March Selios and the phone number beneath it. Remy put it on the bedstand. “I don’t know,” he said into the phone. “I guess… the days just skip by.”
“Yeah,” Paul said. “Well. I know that feeling.”
HIS PANT leg was caught on something sharp. It was dark and he had to feel with his hand along the wall of a narrow, paved tunnel, until he found the cuff of his jeans, snagged on a jagged section of pipe. He yanked it away, banging his elbow on the wall of the tunnel, and then continued crawling toward the light. He was wearing a respirator; the sound of his own breathing echoed in his ears. His hands were chalky with wet dust. There was a sound somewhere like a dentist’s drill. Two other men were crawling down this narrow tunnel ahead of him, the soles of the closest man’s hiking shoes twenty feet ahead. He followed the shoes toward a leaking yellow light, which bobbed ahead in a larger space, until, one by one, the two men ahead of him fell through an opening into a short white cave, or – no, he recognized it, even in its current state… a subterranean parking garage, the Orange level, apparently.
Remy pulled himself to the mouth of the tunnel and stared out. Along one wall the concrete pillars had been snapped and the roof had caved in, gunmetal Benzes and black BMWs crushed and blanketed in a fine coat of dust. Some of the car doors were open, as if people had gone through them and simply left the doors open. A CD wallet lay open on the floor next to one of the cars, and Remy imagined a rescue worker looking for something to listen to on the way down. The garage floor was wet, the dust piled where rivulets had run along construction seams and the newer cracks produced by the collapse above. Strings of utility lights had been laid like holiday garland along the remaining standing pillars, their bare bulbs illuminating the dank underground and lighting the dust particles like firebugs, dread shadows thrown in every direction.
Remy spilled out of the opening onto the concrete floor. The two men ahead of him were already standing and brushing themselves off, the beams from their flashlights creating plumes of dust and light. One of the men was Markham, the Documentation guy who had assigned him to find March Selios. The other man was someone Remy had never seen before, an older guy in coveralls and a utility jacket. This older man removed his respirator, and so Remy and Markham did the same. Markham’s smooth face screwed up in a sneeze.
Remy’s first breath was choked with dust. The Zero smell was even stronger down here, and he couldn’t help wondering if, as they moved down, they weren’t nearing some hot wet core of the thing – and he imagined a river of smell, perhaps guarded by a robed ferryman or a cabbie sitting on a beaded chair. Markham pulled blueprints from his back pocket and walked over to the hood of a Mercedes coupe, its front end pristine except for the dust, its trunk bashed by falling concrete. Markham spread the prints out, pulled a flashlight from his pocket, flicked it on, and put it in his mouth between his teeth.
When Remy didn’t budge, Markham had to pull the flashlight out of his mouth and beckon him over. “Brian. Please. We don’t have much time.”
Remy edged over. Markham put the flashlight back in his mouth and pressed down on the creased blueprint. It showed the levels of this underground parking garage, both from above and in relief, its ducts and staircases and elevator shafts, its relation to the commuter train tubes. The other man, who wore gray coveralls, pointed with a drafting pencil at a long slender line on the page, and then at the collapsed parking structure in front of them. “Okay. We’re here.” He pointed to a spot on the blueprint. “On the northeast corner. There were six basement levels down here, filling up most of the entire sixteen acres – parking, shopping, public transportation, air condition, elevators and other machinery – like a honeycomb. About sixty percent of all that was destroyed.”
He ran his pencil along a tunnel. “This part of the garage where you say this woman’s car might have been parked is here. Like I told you… it’s blocked, if not entirely collapsed. We might be able to follow this PVC cluster to the PATH tunnel, assuming the line is still there. And passable. But this is the way to the place you fellas want to go, and as you can see it’s blocked off. If we go this way-” He dragged his pencil across the print. “We’re going to hit the fire. This direction, we run into water. And all of this area is probably contaminated by Freon.”
“Well, that’s a hell of a choice,” Markham said, as his flashlight fell to the ground, the light frantically testing the walls for escape before hiding beneath a crushed Lexus sedan. “Fire or flood or poison. Burn or drown or choke on your own vomit. I guess I’d take drowning, you know, if I had to pick. How about you, Brian? You seem like a burn guy… like you’d want to go out in as much glory as possible.”
Remy picked the flashlight off the ground, extinguished its light, and handed it back to Markham.
The guy in coveralls talked to Remy as if he were in charge. “Like I told you up above, this is as far as we can go. Maybe after they get the fire down here controlled and pump out some of the lower levels. But even then, I doubt it.” The guy gestured toward the crushed cars. “You could try the lowest level, B-6, and then try to move up, but like I say, that’s seventy feet below the surface, and in this section it’s either on fire or under water. We could go north, but then you got the potential of gas from them old Freon tanks.”
Markham looked at Remy seriously. “What do you think?”
“What do you think?” Remy asked.
The guy in coveralls interrupted: “Look, I appreciate how important this is. I want you to know that if there was any way we could do this, I would… Because I think you fellas are the most important people down here, far as I’m concerned. I mean, I heard them talking about all them documents on TV. But this is a needle in a… haystack.” He looked around. “A really scary haystack.”
Remy looked around the garage. The collapsed corner troubled him. What was above that? How far up did the rubble go? To the pile? The Spires? Against another wall, a stream of black water minded its own business, flowing through the ruined garage into a fissure in the wall. Where did that water come from? Where was it going? And why was it black? These seemed like the real questions they should be asking.
Markham put his hands out. “Okay, Brian. You’ve gotta call the ball on this one. What do you want to do? Go back or follow the sewer line?”
“I don’t…” Remy surprised himself by laughing. “I can’t say.”
The guy in coveralls glanced at Markham, who sighed with disapproval. He took Remy by the elbow and pulled him aside. His voice was low. “What’s the matter with you today, Brian?”
Remy heard himself laugh again, maniacally. He said, under his breath, “I don’t have the slightest clue what we’re doing down here.”
Markham stared at him for a moment. Then he nodded. “Yeah, you’re probably right. Hell, even if we got to the floor where her firm kept their cars…” Markham walked over and folded up the blueprint.
“Were we looking for March’s car?” Remy asked.
“Yeah, when you put it that way, it does seem crazy.” Markham turned to their guide. “Brian thinks we should just turn back.”
The guy in coveralls sighed. “Thank you.” He looked over his shoulder, headlights of ruined cars peeking out from collapsed roof. “I don’t like it down here.”
Markham watched Remy for a moment, his face noncommittal. “Don’t worry about it, Brian. It was a long shot anyway. You made the right call.”
Markham and the guy in coveralls put on their respirators and moved back to the opening they’d crawled through. Remy looked around once more at the dusted windshields, which stared at him inscrutably. Then he put on his mask and followed the two men back into-
“MIDNIGHT SATURDAY I’m jacked up on some waitress, half-to bangin’ the ass off her when my fuckin’ pager goes off nine-one-one and I’m thinkin’ Oh shit, my wife found out I ain’t workin’ this weekend, right, but when I check the page, who do you think it is? Brian fu-u-uckin’ Remy, that’s who.” McIntyre gulped a breath as the guys barked laughter and Remy took the moment to glance around. About half the old detail was here, six of The Boss’s guys and five guys from the PC’s office – where Remy had been assigned for six months – twelve guys including Remy and Guterak, who sat at his right, laughing so hard he lacked the breath to say anything inappropriate.
“Right? Right? So Remy’s got body that night – and I don’t have to tell you which boss we were assigned to then, ’cept to say that poor Remy’s sleepin’ in one of the Town Cars outside some skank’s apartment in Alphabet City while the boss drills for soil samples, right-” The guys all laughed knowingly. “And that’s when the fuckin’ boss comes down barefoot with his pants undone, in a T-shirt – remember that? Remember, Bri? – stupid fat fuck, too goddam furious to use the phone, he wants to get in someone’s face because he’s gone and picked another whore with a tool, right? He’s out of his fuckin’ mind, wants every transvestite hooker off the fuckin’ street. That night! And this jackass is so in love with his own power and with his phony fuckin’ statistical results, he really thinks this can be done, right? Like it’s just a fuckin’ number on a graph – eight hundred or something. ‘So great,’ I tell Remy, ‘call patrol.’ But genius here-” McIntyre pointed at Remy “ – says the boss wants us to do it. And I’m like, ‘He wants us to do this?’ And Remy says, ‘Yeah. He wants us to do this. Right now.’ And I’m literally half in this fuckin’ waitress, on the upstroke, right? And I’m on the phone and I’m like, ‘Right now, Brian?’ And he says, ‘Right now, Billy.’ And I’m like, ‘All of ’em, Brian? All the whores?’ and this unflappable motherfucker here, this asshole thinks for a second, then says, ‘Well… I guess all of ’em with dicks, Billy.’”
The guys slapped the table and held their chests, doubled over, Carey’s high, squeaky laugh rising above the din.
“And I’m like, ‘How the fuck are we supposed to know which ones have dicks, Brian?’ And this brilliant son-of-a-bitch-”
Another delighted squeal from Carey stopped McIntyre’s story for a second, and the room dissolved into drunken laughter: deep, dissonant howls and hoots like a brass band warming up. Remy looked around at his friends and past them, through the filmy strands in his eyes to the banquet room of an Italian restaurant and then down at the checked table, covered with oval plates, gnawed scattered T-bones, surrendered piles of noodles and glimpses of garlic potatoes and green beans, spent shells of empty beer pitchers, wine bottles and highball glasses. For a moment he worried about their appetites, and wondered if they could ever be made full, these men, until this thought was replaced by a more important thought. Which glass was his?
“This! Cool! Mother! Fucker! Over he-yah!” McIntyre pointed to Remy again. “He says, ‘Well, from what I hear, you can tell by the hands.’ And I’m like, ‘You can tell what by the fuckin’ hands?’ And you gotta remember, while I’m talkin’ to Remy here I’m fuckin’ doin’ a pushup on this waitress, and that’s when she and I stop what we’re doin’ for a minute and we both look at her hands. And Remy says, ‘You can tell it’s a woman by her hands.’ And I’m lookin’ at this waitress’s big mannish hands and I say, ‘Jesus Christ, Brian, if we’re gonna get close enough to look at their hands we might as well reach up and see if we get a handful.’”
“Aaaagh!” Guterak made a noise that sounded as much scream as laugh, and clapped Remy on the back.
“So all night, fuckin’ Remy and me are driving around lookin’ at hookers’ hands and I swear to God, they all look like dudes to us, right? And I got mixed feelings. First, I’m startin’ to panic… if the fuckin’ boss wants tranny whores, then goddamn we better fuckin’ find some chicks with dicks, you know? But the other thing is this: I’m gettin’ so fuckin’ horny drivin’ around lookin’ at hookers that I’m half tempted to try one out just to see. And that’s when Brian remembers this fuckin’ Dominican scumbag up the Heights he’s arrested, what, five, six times, Bri? This motherfucker used to run a bunch of tranny whores… what the fuck was his name… Kiko something?”
Someone called out: “Ramirez!”
McIntyre pointed. “Right! Right! This fuckin’ mutt Kiko Ramirez, little fuckin’ Dominican pimp lived up off a hunnert and fifty-third by Broadway, we go drag this motherfucker out of his cousin’s bed and take him downstairs and I’m like, ‘Listen up, fuckball, you’re privy to some information we want, you know… very important investigation, top priority… you play along and you’ll get a two-month pass, right?’ Guy’s like: ‘Whatchu wan’, mang,’ and I say, ‘I need you to find us five whores with optional equipment,’ and this little shit looks at me like I’m fuckin’ king-a-the perverts, you know? And Brian says, ‘It’s not for us, Kiko, it’s for our boss.’” The laughter rose again. “And this little shitbag Kiko, he must know which boss we’re talkin’ about, because he just nods like we’ve just ordered five pizzas. Kiko, he got this thin little mustache, and he just shrugs, like, ‘Hey mang, eet don’ matter to me. Diff’rent strokes, mang.’ Yeah? Like this fuckin’ Scarface motherfucker he’s seen it all, right? All the shit in the world.” The laughter rises again.
“Now the three of us are drivin’ around in the fuckin’ Town Car, Brian and me in the front and Kiko in the back like we’re his chauffeurs, and at one point old Kiko goes to light up a fuckin’ cigarette and I turn and say, ‘You can’t be serious, Kiko? You smoke in my boss’s car and you know I’m gonna have to clean you like a fuckin’ fish, right?’ And we’re runnin’ down Broadway, cruisin’ the Deuce, and this shitbag Kiko is starin’ out the window like a fuckin’ four-year-old at a parade, checkin’ out all these whores, sayin’: ‘No. Ees a woman. No. Ees a woman. Ees a woo-man too.’ And finally, I turn around and I’m like, ‘Kiko, I’m gonna shoot you in your fuckin’ face you don’t find me a whore with a goddamned cock.’”
Laughter cascaded and crashed and Remy became slightly worried that someone would have a heart attack.
“And Kiko… this fuckin’ mutt Kiko, he’s just starin’ out the window, every few minutes, ‘No, ees a woo-man. No, ees a woo-man.’ And Remy and me are checkin’ our fuckin’ watches, thinkin’ the boss is gonna fuckin’ have us for breakfast, right? And then, finally, Kiko comes to the window, says, ‘Maybe her. Yeah, I think she’s a mang.’ So we park and walk closer and he says, ‘No. Ees a woo-man too.’ And by this time I’ve had about enough of this shit, I’m like, ‘Motherfuck Kiko! How the fuck do you know that one ain’t a guy?’ And this greasy fucker points to this whore and says, ‘You can tell by the hands, mang.’”
The room broke in screams and groans, guttural and full, the aging men given over to a grinding death rattle and release, and even Remy found that he was smiling, not exactly remembering, but wanting to, and thinking there’s not such a difference, that the best memories might be those you don’t remember, and the gales smoothed and calmed and guys hummed and wiped their eyes, and someone yelled, “Speech! Speech!” and then the others joined in and Remy was yelling, “Speech,” before he realized that it was him they wanted the speech from.
“Wait. Wait.” Ass Chief Carey held up his left hand. “Before we let Remy say something the rest of us will regret, I got something for you cocksuckers.” Carey bent over. “To mark the occasion. A taste.” He came up with a backpack that he set on the table. “Compliments of the bosses.” He unzipped the backpack and began removing watches, still in the bottom halves of their boxes, as if they’d been on display, like tiny open caskets. He handed around the table, to whistles and hoots. One by one, the guys slid watches (“Aw, boss.” “No fuckin’ way.”) onto thick, hairy wrists.
“Goddamn, boss. This is too fuckin’ much.”
Carey waved them off. “Ain’t half what you guys deserve. You’re the best fuckin’ crew in the city. I mean that. The other bosses mean it, too.”
Remy looked down at the half-box in his hand. It was dark wood, and in the center was a pointed crown, the word Rolex engraved in gold.
“Come on. Put it on,” Carey said. Remy stared down at the dark face of a gold watch, and caught the bursts of light in the face’s jewels. He wiped a thin coat of fine dust off the glass.
“They’re limited edition Gent Omegas,” Carey said. “Fuckin’ James Bond watches. Remy’s is gold-plated.” The guys were all sloughing their sleeves and holding their wrists in the air. Guterak held his arm out to Remy. “Look at this shit, Bri. How’s it look on me? Jesus, you ever think I’d wear a fuggin’ Rolex?”
There was a folded envelope under Remy’s watch. He removed it and opened it. Inside was a small note signed by The Boss: “To New Opportunities. And Old Loyalties.” The word Loyalties was underlined.
“Speech!” the guys began yelling again, and Guterak pushed Remy up.
He was still holding the watch loosely in his hand. He looked down at it, and then rubbed his mouth again. “I… I don’t really know what to say. Honestly, I’m not entirely sure what’s happening to me. Or why.”
Some of the guys laughed. Others nodded as if he’d struck a chord, the infinite emptiness of the last weeks.
He rubbed his short hair. “I mean… I can see that I’m leaving. Am I retiring? I’m supposed to be taking disability, right?”
The laughter built.
“I mean… I’m not dying or anything, am I? Is it my eyes?”
Ass Chief Carey made that high-pitched squeal again. Guys were hugging and laughing and holding each other up.
Remy looked down at the table. “Can anyone tell me which glass is mine?”
This seemed to be the perfect end to his speech. Waves of laughter rolled through the room and Guterak stood and hugged Remy. “That was great. Classic Remy. I love you, man.” The guys came by one at a time, paying their respects, hugging him and telling him to relax or to have good luck or not to worry, and after a while Remy couldn’t imagine what difference it made, what was happening to him. This was the important thing, these guys who had risked their lives, these guys who loved him so much, and whatever it had taken to accommodate this occasion… well, it was going to happen whether he knew about it or not. “I hope you realize what a lucky motherfucker you are,” McIntyre said.
“We’re goin’ down to Copley’s girlfriend’s strip club, you wanna come,” Carey added.
“No, I don’t think so,” Remy said.
McIntyre hugged him again. “I’m gonna miss you, asshole.”
Finally, Remy was alone, watching as the guys moved in packs of two or three to the door. Guterak gave a quick wave as he went with the guys. When they were all gone, Remy carefully put the watch back in its case.
Sometimes the gaps came like cuts in a movie, one on top of the other, with Remy struggling for breath; at other times he seemed to drift, or even to linger in moments that had ended for everyone else. Was there something he was supposed to take from such moments? Remy pulled the watch from its box bottom again and looked at its face, half expecting to see the second hand standing still, jittery and frozen, waiting for Remy to be jolted into the next moment. But the needle slid gracefully around the numbered face, scratching away moment after moment after… Remy put the watch back in the box bottom and walked out of the banquet room, down a paneled hallway past the kitchen. He peered in the round window on the swinging doors and saw an old Puerto Rican guy in a paper apron working on a tall stack of dishes, pots, and pans. Remy opened the door and slid the watch box along the floor, then let the door close. He looked through the window again. The old dishwasher was bending over to pick up the watch.
Remy walked down the hallway, through an empty restaurant and outside. He recognized the skyline across the river. Behind him, the huge four-faced clock tower loomed like a dragon. He thought of the watch face. No zero on a clock. Around and around. No rest. No balance. No starting place. Just on to the next number. The sky was clearing, cold, the clouds opening between the brownstones. He stood on the sidewalk and looked back at the city, the burnt tip of the island and the bright hole in the sky.
THE AIR was cool and dry and huge fans whirred above his head. Remy was standing in a vast airplane hangar, holding a memo, apparently from the information technologies consultant Lara Kane to Travis Fanning in the personnel department of Anderson Dugan Rippet, March Selios’s firm:
Re: status report: Firewall, Acrobat, Monitoring.
CC: Duncan, Wallace, Selios.
UTMI up and running as per meeting of 8-4 and inventory under way for separate worksheets regarding hardware, software, tools, Mac and PC, upgrades, printers. For access rights for MGT group, see confirmation e-mails and logs…
Remy looked up from the page. The airplane hangar was full of people, filing cabinets, and tables of burned and dirty paper. Temporary fluorescent lights were strung about ten feet off the ground, along the length of the hangar, which was otherwise completely filled with these long tables and filing cabinets in long rows that seemed to stretch forever. As far as Remy could see, these tables were covered with paper – notes, forms, resignations, and retributions, as if the whole world could be conjured up out of the paper it had produced. Next to each table was a filing cabinet. There were big posters hanging from the ceiling with letters written on them. Remy looked up. The sign above him read: AM-AZ. There appeared to be a sign every hundred feet or so, perhaps ten tables and ten filing cabinets per sign. At the far end of the hangar he strained to make out another set of letters: CO-CY. So how many other hangars did that mean, he wondered. Five? Eight? At each of these stations several attendants were working away, some of them combing over the paper mountains on each table, others filing. Each of them wore a white paper suit, a mask, and white gloves.
“Obviously, you’re interested in the partials, too,” said a young woman at the table in front of Remy. Her mask was pulled down around her neck.
“Partials,” Remy repeated. Their voices seemed both distant and loud in the cavernous hangar, which hummed with the low throttle of so many other voices.
She handed him another dusty sheet of paper, this one rounded and burned along the edges like a perfectly roasted marshmallow. It was a ledger sheet with several columns of numbers, although the top row had been burned off, so he couldn’t see what the numbers referred to.
He held the paper to his face. It smelled like The Zero. That same fine dust coated everything, almost a liquid form of grit. Remy looked down at the woman sitting at the table. She was tall and thin and wore glasses. Her hair was tied back. She seemed tired. She leaned in and confided, “I try to explain the smell to people, and I can’t.”
She smiled warmly and handed him another sheet of paper. It was an interoffice memo, its subject Portfolio Market capitalization statistics as of 7-01. There were about forty names in the cc: line, among them Selios. A note at the top said, All Market Cap Stats in millions. Then there were some mutual funds listed:
Remy looked up from the memo. He handed it back to the nice woman. Attractive-
“This one is intriguing,” she said, and quickly handed him another sheet of paper, a cargo receipt from a Venezuelan ship called the Sea Cancer. Listed under the consignee were two companies, including Anderson Dugan Rippet. Remy couldn’t understand most of the document. At the bottom was the ship’s gross weight, 136.153,320 KG , and:
Number and kind of Packages, said to contain 06 containers of 40’, said to contain rack with: RH side rail, 5087.117.334 LH side rail, 5087.117.235 (signatore: Selios, March for Anderson Dugan Rippet)
Remy handed the memo back. “You know, that’s probably enough.”
“Sure, we’ll send these over, and anything else we find,” she said. “Shawn said you just wanted to have a look at the process.”
“Oh, okay.” Remy looked around and then bent over to speak quietly to the woman. “Am I supposed to do something with these?”
She nodded. “I know. It’s a lot of information to process.”
Remy looked around the hangar and cleared his throat at the low buzz of working conversations. He rubbed his mouth. “How many hangars are there like this?”
One corner of the woman’s mouth went up in a kind of wry smile. “Is that some kind of test, Mr. Remy?”
“No,” he said.
The woman stood. “I understand you spent the morning in Résumés and Cover Letters?”
“Did I?”
“I know what you mean,” she said. “It does tend to run together down here. There’s one other place.” She pulled up her mask and began walking, and, after a pause, Remy followed her down one of the rows of tables. Each table was stacked with mounds of burned and dusty paper: business cards and charts and index cards and company stationery. The workers all wore white paper jumpsuits and gloves. Most of them also wore surgical masks. A few met Remy’s eyes, but most concentrated on the paper. Remy and the woman approached the closest end of the hangar.
Above the door was a billboard-sized sign that quoted The Boss: “Imagine the look on our enemies’ faces when they realize that we have gathered up every piece of paper and put it back!” There were such inspirational posters and signs all over the place, quoting The Boss and The President. Below this one was a smaller warning sign from the Office of Liberty and Recovery: “Removing unauthorized documents may result in prosecution for treason under the War Powers Act.”
The woman paused at a camera above the doorway, in some kind of metal detector, or the kind of merchandise scanners used in clothing stores. She held her hands at her sides. The door buzzed and she passed through. Remy did the same thing, holding his hands out, and was buzzed through the door.
They were in a long dark aluminum tunnel, as if several Quonset huts had been laid end to end. The tunnel made a ninety-degree right turn and ended at a door marked “M.P.D.” There was a buzzer and a small white intercom box next to the door. A smaller sign quoted The President: “Our enemy are haters who hate our way of life and our abilities of organization! We will confound them!” The woman stood in front of the door, staring at it, but didn’t touch the buzzer. She turned to Remy, who stared back at her.
“Mr. Remy?” she asked, finally.
“Yes.”
“You know I don’t have clearance beyond this point, right?”
“Oh,” he said, and looked at the door again. “Do I?”
She laughed, reached out and touched his arm. “You’re funny.”
“Thanks,” he said.
She turned and began walking the other way down the dark tunnel.
Remy watched to see if she’d look back over her shoulder, but she didn’t. Finally, he turned back to the door and pressed the buzzer.
After a moment, the door buzzed and the lock clicked. Remy waited for just… a second and then reached for it. He opened the door and passed through-
“A DREAM. That’s what it seems like to me, like a kind of fever dream.” It was the same voice he remembered hearing when he was in that bathroom, the tentative woman’s voice. She was lying across his chest, facing away from him, so that all he could see was the whorl of her dark hair in a warm nest of blankets and sheets on a bed Remy didn’t recognize – hers, apparently. His legs felt tired. He was staring down at the crest of her dark hair and he could feel the vibration on his abdomen as she spoke, but he couldn’t see her face.
“You know what I mean?” she asked. “The dreams you have when you’re sick… or drifting in and out of consciousness, not quite asleep and not quite awake…?”
Remy leaned sideways, hoping to see around the back of her head to her face, but all he could see was that tangle of dark hair. Her voice was low and he could feel it as much as he could hear it. “You’re not sure what’s real and what isn’t… the real world intrudes on your dreams, but you can’t quite find your way into either world… not completely. The phone rings and you stare at it, wondering if you should answer it, or if it’s a dream and if you shouldn’t bother, if the phone is just going to turn into a cat anyway.”
Remy looked around the bedroom. There were two dressers. Hers was a vanity with a mirror on top; on the other side of the bed was a more masculine dresser, a His dresser, upright, with a watch tree on top, and some bottles of cologne. Not Remy’s watch tree. Not his cologne. There was also a picture in a frame, facedown on the dresser. The man who’s facedown on that dresser probably owns it, he thought.
“Voices come in and out. People hover above your bed. You open your eyes and real people are silhouetted and this becomes your dream, too – these halos, ghostly figures. You don’t know: Are the things they’re saying real? Or part of the dream?
“You can’t wake up and you can’t go back to sleep. Physically, you’re in that… middle place, moving in the real world while your mind is in a dream.”
Remy felt her hand on his thigh and he closed his eyes. “April?” he tried, quietly, a kind of plea.
She made no noise for a moment and he worried that he’d gotten it wrong. “Yes?” she said finally. “What is it, Brian?”
He was just so relieved that this woman’s name was April, and that she knew his name, that he could think of nothing to say. Finally: “Do you know what time it is?”
“Eight thirty,” she said. “Why? Do you have to be somewhere?”
“I don’t know.” In fact, he had no clue why he’d asked the time, maybe just to have some real detail to cling to. It was eight-thirty. He looked down at her then, sprawled across his chest. He wished he could see her face. He put his hand on the narrow small of her back and traced the steps of her spine. Her skin was cool and damp. He felt dizzy… and he realized he was in love with her, even though he couldn’t recall ever seeing her face, and really had no idea who she was.
“Did you ever read the science stories in the Times?” she continued. “They always made me feel so lonely. That’s what the feeling reminds me of. They’re always running stories about some new experiment done in the supercollider, or some new particle of light that’s been bouncing around space since the beginning of the universe, without really explaining how they know this. They discover new stars, galaxies exert some effect on some other body, effects they can only determine mathematically, and none of it means anything. It’s like that now – like we’ve all become theoretical, bending light or exerting gravity, but never really touching.”
Remy wanted badly to agree with her, but he had no idea what she was talking about. His eyes burned, the flecks rising like ash from a fire. “April… I’m losing track of everything,” he whispered.
She patted his stomach. “I know.”
“It’s getting worse.”
“I know. You told me.”
“Oh,” he said. “Good.” At least someone knew. He reached out and felt the warmth of her back. “Good.”
“Maybe we’re all like people in dreams now,” she said, “aware that something isn’t right, but unable to shake the illusion. And maybe we could save each other, but we just drift pass, bending each other, moving through our own dreams like loosed worries.”
Remy reached out and stroked-
THE MAN was in his fifties, tall, thin, and aristocratic, with an expensive haircut and braces on his teeth. He wore a golf shirt and khaki pants, the way a man does when he’s trying too hard to be casual.
“Well?” the man asked. He was sitting across from Remy. They were at a table in a Starbucks. Remy could hear the steaming of milk behind them.
“Dave? Double caramel macchiato for Dave?” said the barista. Apparently this man’s name was Dave because he stood and got his drink. He took a sip as he returned to the table. “Macchiato means mark. They’re just supposed to mark the latte with espresso. They never do it right.” Foam coated the man’s braces. He put his hands out, as if he’d been waiting for Remy to say something. “So?”
“So,” Remy said.
“What do you want?”
“What do you want?”
Dave cocked his head and looked like an expectant professor who’s just called on a sleeping student. “What… can I do for you, Remy?”
“I guess that depends,” Remy said, “on what you can do for me.”
Dave looked both confused and intrigued. “I guess,” he said, “what I can do for you… depends on what you have to offer.”
“And what if I don’t have anything to offer?”
His face reddened. “Then you’re a complete idiot, because you’re the one who called this meeting.”
Remy was afraid of that. He took a drink of the latte in front of him. Cinnamon. “Okay.” Remy looked around for his notebook. “Maybe you could start by telling me what you know about March Selios.”
“What I know?” The man laughed through his nose and then his eyes narrowed again, became formidable, and it occurred to Remy that this might not be one of his standard interviews. “You really are something, Remy. You want me to tell you what I know about March Selios? Okay. I’ll tell you. I know that I requested any documents that related to this Selios woman, and I know your sleazeball handlers over at the DD saw this as an opportunity to fuck us. So, instead of cooperating with the agency – with a real intelligence gathering organization – they rejected our request and decided to launch their own investigation. And I know that since they’re all just a bunch of paper pushers, they had to bring in a mercenary – you – to do the actual work.”
Remy took another sip of foamy cinnamon as the thin man in braces continued talking.
“I know that they’re using this investigation to justify their outrageous encroachment on agency turf. And I know they’re hanging it all on the notion that this – what, some trampy import paralegal – might still be alive, which is laughable.”
“Is it?” Remy asked, more suspiciously than he intended.
Dave’s eyes narrowed. “Isn’t it?”
“I don’t know,” Remy said.
Dave stared at him. “What do you know, Remy? Do you know something?”
“Probably not.”
Dave cocked his head again. “What are you offering, Remy?”
“What makes you think I’m offering something?”
The man sat back in his chair and stroked his solid chin. Remy thought he must have had a beard at one time, because he ran his fingers over his face like a man with a beard.
Finally, Dave smiled. “You’d better not be messing with me, Remy.”
“I’m not,” Remy assured him.
Dave looked around. “Okay, so you and I stay in touch, outside the official channels? Show a little… professional courtesy? Is that what you’re saying?”
“I don’t know what I’m saying.”
The man considered Remy again. Finally, he took another drink of his latte. “Okay. I’m going to give you a little bit of rope. But if you amateurs get in our way on this investigation, I will hang you.” He stood up and grabbed his drink. “Do we understand each other?”
Remy took another drink. As the man walked away, he said, “Not so much.”
“GONE BUT…: A night of one-act, student-written and student-performed plays and monologues,” according to the playbill, which was photocopied on folded green paper and had a single firefighter’s helmet below the words. Remy arrived late, and sat by himself in a corner foldout seat in the back row, watching the streaks in his eyes swarm over the low stage lights. He could see Carla and Steve down near the front, Steve’s arm around her shoulder. A woman bent and said something to Carla, who nodded and covered her mouth proudly.
The curtain came up with a jerk and the grind of ropes on pulleys and then the stage was bare except for a single light shining on a standup microphone. The first student was a mousy girl in dark jeans who shifted her weight every few seconds and delivered a monologue in which she described being at school that day, having her mother come get her, watching the whole thing on television, and then hearing, later that night, that her uncle hadn’t come home from work and was presumed dead. She liked her uncle, although he was really a step-uncle. She explained that he was a bond trader and that he was gay, and that he was the only gay person in her family and that she thought he was the coolest person in the family. She finished by describing a meal that her step-uncle had cooked for the family once, pasta with shiitake mushrooms and sun-dried tomatoes. She vowed that every year on that date, she would eat pasta with shiitake mushrooms and sun-dried tomatoes. The last words of her monologue were, “And the thing is: I hate mushrooms.”
The applause was rich and full, and then two thin white boys came out and performed a rap tribute to a dead firefighter who had graduated from the school ten years earlier (“…y’all seen it on television/them boys packin’ some heroism…”)
And then it was Edgar’s turn. There was a thunderous applause that caught Remy off guard, people sitting up in their seats. The woman next to Remy whispered to her husband, “His father,” and he nodded sadly. And then Remy’s son came out in tousled black hair, in an untucked white dress shirt, apparently having given up the armband. He looked good, if a little thin, but it was odd seeing him down there, in that harsh light. He seemed both smaller and older, and so far away. He sat at a small table on the left side of the stage, where he set up the chessboard and pieces that Remy had bought him when he was a kid. He walked over to the stand, removed the microphone, and returned to the chess table. He was quiet for a long moment, staring at that chessboard.
“My dad taught me to play,” Edgar said, and he moved a pawn out. Remy felt a chill, seeing him at the table, playing chess alone. “My dad showed me how all the pieces moved.” Edgar moved his knight out to protect the pawn, even though he was playing by himself. “I had trouble with the knight at first. I used to ask, ‘Is it two up and one over or one up and two over?’
“‘It doesn’t matter,’ my dad said. ‘You end up at the same place.’” There was a low murmur of laughter. Edgar spoke his father’s parts in a mock deep voice, and between each line of dialogue he pretended to wait for his opponent to move, then hunched over the board again. But no pieces ever moved on the father’s side of the board. “You end up in the same place,” Edgar repeated.
“My dad always let me win,” he said, and he moved another pawn. “‘Boy, you got me again,’ he’d say. But one time when I was nine, the weirdest thing happened; it was like the board opened up for me and I could see in all of these directions at once. And I looked up and I knew he couldn’t see the board like that. That he’d never be able to see like that. And I beat him. I mean, I really beat him. I beat him fair and square. I think he’d been drinking that day. He drank some, my dad. After that, he won a game, and then he went back to letting me win. But that one night, I saw fear in his face, fear because he knew that I’d beaten him fair and square. That he had lost to his nine-year-old son.”
Edgar brought out his other knight. “My father was a police officer, but he always wanted to be more, so he went to law school at night. But he dropped out before he could finish. He worked for a while as a liaison between the police and city. I asked him once what a liaison was and he said it was the person who was halfway between things. That’s how I thought of my dad. As someone who only got halfway to the places he wanted to go. He told me once that he’d always wanted to see the West Coast, but the farthest he’d ever made it was Chicago. I remember thinking, if that’s your dream, how hard could that be, to go to the West Coast? It’s not like he wanted to go to Tibet, right?”
There was another low murmur of laughter and Remy had to fight the urge to stand up and defend his life. You think there’s always going to be time for things like travel, and then, it just gets away from you. But he didn’t stand.
“So that was my father,” Edgar continued. “And after I beat him at chess, when I looked at him, that’s all I could see for a long time – the unfinished half of his life. Maybe that’s the life of an adult: You reach a certain age and your life is defined more by the things you don’t do than by the things you do.”
Edgar stared at the chessboard, one side still unmoved. Finally he stood. “The night my father didn’t come home I stood at my bedroom window and wondered what becomes of all the conversations we have with each other, and all the feelings we have, the ones we talk about and the ones we don’t. Does everything just… evaporate? If one end of a conversation is still there, does the conversation still exist? Or is the whole thing gone the moment it hits the air?”
“People talk about the unconditional love of a parent for a child, but that’s not really it. It’s really the other way. Parents choose to have their kids. No kid ever chose to have his parents. They’re just there when you wake up one day. And you can’t just keep having sex and have more parents if those two don’t work out.”
There was a bigger laugh this time. Edgar was killing. He laughed, too, tossing off all the navel-gazing, as if these were the thoughts of a boy. “It always seemed like my dad had something important on the tip of his tongue, something he was just getting around to saying. The night he didn’t come home I thought about that. About how we always think of things we wished we’d said.
“I don’t know what I’d say to my father. But I know what I wouldn’t say. This is what I wouldn’t say: Dad, even when I didn’t love you… I never wanted you to stop loving me.”
Edgar put his hands in his pockets for a moment, then removed them and returned to the chess table.
“I never told my dad this, but after I turned nine, I could’ve beaten him at chess any time I wanted. I let him let me win.”
Edgar reached out to take a chess piece and the single light went dark.
HE SAT in the passenger seat of an unmarked, watching the alleyway entrance of a restaurant through small binoculars. The back door was painted black, the window covered with iron bars, empty boxes and garbage cans piled on either side of it. Remy peeked away from the binoculars to the driver’s seat, where Markham sat reading a National Geographic.
“Anything?” Markham asked. He was wearing a trim beige suit.
Remy glanced down. He was wearing a suit, too, a new one – dark blue. He looked back through the binoculars again. “I don’t think so.”
Markham turned the page of his magazine. “Hey, Brian, do you know how much time deer spend with their mates?”
“No.”
“Try to guess.”
“I don’t know.”
“I know you don’t know. That’s why I want you to guess. If you knew, you wouldn’t be guessing, you’d be telling me, and what would be the point of that?”
“Uh… their whole lives?”
“Nope. One day. You believe it? One day. An entire species of animal capable of nothing but one-night stands. Isn’t that perfect? I mean, if you’re a deer?”
Remy let the binoculars fall to his lap. “I don’t know.”
“Don’t you think deer are kind of sexy? For an animal?”
“I… I couldn’t say,” Remy said.
“I do. Not… you know, for me, specifically. I’m not saying I’d necessarily want to have sex with a deer. But just the way they’re put together, big asses and long legs, they’re kind of like people. And those cute little faces. Shoot, I’d do a deer. I mean, if I was a deer. You know? I can’t say that about every animal. If I was a hippo? Nope. Or a raccoon or something? I’d just be celibate. Or a cat? No way. You’d think we’d be more attracted to gorillas or other primates, but other than those little spider monkeys, I just don’t see it. But deer… I don’t know, I find it kind of evocative, the idea of all these bucks nailing those leggy does once a year and then just running off into the woods.”
Remy put the binoculars to his eyes again. A man was moving down the alley away from the back door, his back to Remy, carrying a plastic grocery bag, walking toward a car parked in the alley. “Are we looking for someone?”
“Is it him?” Markham said. He grabbed the glasses from Remy. “Yeah. That’s him. That’s our friend. Let’s go.”
Markham tossed the magazine in the back. “Don’t forget your briefcase.” Remy grabbed the briefcase at his feet and he and Markham hopped out of the car and began run-walking down the alley.
“You want me to do the talking?” Markham asked.
“I think you’d better.”
Markham stepped up his pace. “Excuse me. Mahoud?”
Twenty steps away Mahoud turned and stepped away from an Audi convertible. He was thick and bald, vaguely Middle Eastern. He wore a tunic under a black windbreaker.
“Mahoud. I’m Mr. Markham and this is Mr. Remy.” Markham offered a badge, which he took, studied, and then handed back.
“How are you, Mahoud?” Markham said.
“I am not good, as you can imagine,” he said. “I have reported hours ago this vandalism upon my restaurant and all day I have waited for you to come.”
“Yeah,” Markham said. “They passed the report along to us. I’m sorry. There are a lot of cases like this, as you might guess. Some of them are pretty serious. We have to concentrate on the ones with violence. Families, children… that kind of thing… we’re up to our assholes in this stuff.”
“Families? Oh. Oh my God.” Mahoud looked at Remy, his eyes dark and inscrutable. “I had no idea there was violence. Well, look here. Do you want to see the letter? I have it. I was taking it to the police department now.” Mahoud opened the bag and showed them a note. In red block letters it read: “Go home, camel-fucker. We know where you live.” Paper-clipped to the note was a wrinkled pink triangle of skin.
“Is that a pig’s ear?” asked Markham.
“Some jerk’s idea of a big joke, yes?” Mahoud said. “Give a Muslim the ear of a pig.” He frowned bitterly at the two men. “I can’t even look at it, I get so mad. My son is in the American army. My son!” Mahoud’s eyes teared up.
Remy stared at the note. He felt sick. Those block letters, that G. Jesus… he knew that handwriting.
“Yeah.” Markham had pulled a notebook from his back pocket. “And I understand they threw a rock through your window?”
“Yes. This note and the ear of the swine were duct-taped to the rock. That window is going to cost me four hundred dollars. Four hundred dollars! And I can’t turn it over to my insurance.”
“Yeah, that’s tough.”
“I put up a sign today that said, ‘I am Pakistani not Arab!’ but do you know what I think? I think I should not have to do that. I think in this country I should not have to explain that I am not a terrorist. I think these things are not anyone’s business but my own.” He was worked up. He wiped his mouth.
“Yeah, that’s tough, Mahoud. I wish there was something I could do, but there are a lot of these harassment cases and… frankly, between you and me… it’s hard to get one to float to the top… over just a rock.” Markham put his notebook in his back pocket. “In fact, we have to concentrate on the ones where there has been actual violence. As you might expect. I know it’s not a lot of consolation.” Markham looked over at Remy. “After they hurt someone, we’ll come back.”
“This is outrageous,” Mahoud said. “I am a citizen of this country too.”
“No,” Markham said. “No, you’re right. I mean… all I can do is write up the report and put a good word in for you. And after that… shit, I’m sorry.” He turned to Remy. “Unless you have any other ideas, partner?”
Remy was still staring at the note, trying to figure out how…
Markham turned to leave, but hadn’t even taken a step when he turned back. “You know what, Mahoud. There is one thing. Maybe I could go in and plead your case to my superiors. See if I can’t get some special attention on this.”
“You could do that?”
“Yeah, maybe if you were… helpful to us in some other area of our investigation, we could take an extra look at this harassment you’re getting.” He looked at Remy. “What do you think, Brian? Do you think it could work?”
Remy just stared at him.
“Yeah,” Markham acted as if Remy had agreed with him. “You still got those pictures, right, Brian? Maybe Mahoud can help with our pictures.”
Remy looked down at the briefcase in his hand. He opened it. There were three sheets with six mug shots on each sheet, all of them Middle Eastern men. Remy handed them to Markham and wiped the sweat from his face.
“These are some undocumented aliens that we’re trying to find,” Markham said nonchalantly. “Some fellas we suspect of not being very good guests in this country. We’re… showing these pictures to restaurant owners, cab companies, you know… see if anyone remembers employing any of these guys. Maybe if you’ve seen one of them, Mahoud, we can try to get some attention to your situation here. Some peace of mind for your family.”
Mahoud looked from Markham to Remy and back again. “I don’t understand…”
Markham shrugged. “Just look at these. It’s probably nothing.”
Mahoud looked at the first sheet. “No,” he said. “No one.” Then he began looking at the second. He looked up, his face red. “This is my brother-in-law, Bishir. The younger brother of my sister-in-law.”
“What?” Markham looked up at Remy, then at Mahoud. “Really? Which one? This guy? This attractive fella here?”
But Mahoud didn’t show him which one. He looked from Markham to Remy and back again. “I told the other agents who came to my restaurant that I have not seen him in more than a year and my wife has told them the same thing. Four times we have told agents this. Why do you continue to ask if I know where Bishir is?”
“Do you?”
“Do I-”
Markham got serious. “Do you… know where Bishir is?”
“No! No. I have told you!”
Markham smiled. “Look, this is just a little mixup. That’s all. It’s no big deal. We had no idea they’d already shown you this, Mahoud, or we wouldn’t have wasted your time. It’s not like we’re trying to harass people.” He laughed, strained and high-pitched.
Mahoud took a small step back from the pictures. “Why did you contact me in this alley, instead of coming in the front of my restaurant? Did you not want anyone to see you come here?”
“…What?” Markham put his hands in his pockets. “Come on, Mahoud… don’t go all paranoid on us, now. I know you’re a good citizen.”
“Yes,” Mahoud said.
“And that you’d do anything you could to help your country.”
“Of course.”
“Well, look at it this way. Now you’ve got your chance.”
Mahoud covered his mouth. “Who are you?”
“Listen, there’s no reason to get upset. All you have to do is help us find Bishir,” Markham looked over at Remy, and then back. He said, in a voice so flat it was barely audible: “Then maybe we can protect your family.”
“My God. I don’t…” Mahoud’s voice skipped. “Please!” He took a step back. “Maybe in Miami… there were two brothers he… knew. Assan and… Kamal. The last I heard, one of them was in Miami.”
“Okay,” Markham said. “Okay.” He handed Mahoud the notebook. “Write the brothers’ names down. I won’t even mention that you gave it to me. Sound good, Mahoud?”
Mahoud scribbled a name on the pad without saying anything.
“I need you to look at one more picture,” Markham said. He reached his hand out to Remy, who looked down in the valise and saw another print that had escaped him, up against the side of the case. He pulled it out. It was the picture of March Selios with Bishir. Remy handed it to Markham, who flicked it in front of Mahoud’s face. “Remember her, Mahoud? Bishir’s girlfriend, March. Do you remember her?”
Mahoud studied the face. “Yes. I think so. About two years ago. Bishir had… a lot of girlfriends. They run together.”
“Do you know why they broke up?”
Mahoud looked uncomfortable. “I don’t listen to wives’ chatter…”
“Do you know if he was still in touch with her?”
“No. I have no idea. Look, I have told you… Bishir has not contacted my family in more than a year. I am sorry.” He said this to Remy, who had to look away. “I cannot help you find him. Or her. I am sorry.”
Markham took the picture of March Selios back. “Okay. We’re going to check this out. I really appreciate your help. And you won’t mind if we contact you to help us out again, right Mahoud? I mean… if it means we can protect your family.”
“Who are you?” Mahoud asked again.
“Oh… one more question,” Markham said. “I couldn’t help noticing that you have a peculiar dish on your menu. Pecan encrusted sole. Is that a common Mediterranean dish?”
“We have a diverse menu. We also have Thai noodles and pizzas.”
“Sure.” Markham stared holes in the restaurant owner. “Diverse. Well, we’ll have to come in and try your food some time.”
Mahoud backed up and then turned and hurried away. Remy and Markham watched him go and then retreated to their car.
“Damn, you’re good,” Markham said, chuckling to himself. “When you turn on that silent thing… it’s really chilling. Mute cop, bad cop, huh?”
Remy opened the car door and sat down, trying to catch his breath, trying to remember… He felt sick. “Look, I don’t think I can do this anymore.”
Markham stared at him a moment longer. The alley was quiet, the hum of the city seeming to be blocks away. “Okay,” Markham said finally. “Next time I’ll throw the rock and you can do the talking.”
REMY STOOD on the curb outside his apartment and watched flakes come down from the sky, each one appearing lit from inside, each one like a cold secret. It occurred to him that maybe this snowfall was occurring in his eyes, and even as he quickly dismissed the idea, it seemed eerily plausible, that it could be snowing in his vitreous. He closed his eyes but the flakes were different, the familiar floating of tissue, up and down, flouting gravity; he opened his eyes and it was snowing down again. He felt for the stitches on his head, buried in his stubbled hair. He was about to go back inside when a stretch Town Car pulled up and double-parked in front of his building. The car sat there idling until finally the back passenger window lowered with a whir. Remy stepped closer, edging between two parked cars, to see The Boss’s oval face floating in the dark. Remy bent down to look inside and his eyes quickly adjusted. The Boss was wearing a tuxedo, and across from him sat the thick Police Boss, his own tuxedo tight around his neck as if it were a snake and he was a boar it was in the process of swallowing. He was telling some story but stopped grumbling when The Boss held up his hand. There were two other men in the car, one on each side, young guys with little round glasses, each holding a tape recorder.
“Hi, Brian,” The Boss said. “I’m sorry I couldn’t get here earlier.”
The window went up and Remy stepped back as the door opened.
The Boss climbed out of the car, followed by one of the young guys with the round glasses. “Let’s take a walk,” The Boss said, and pushed the door closed behind him. They moved down the sidewalk, shadowed by the stretch, which followed at their heels like an old dog, and the young guy, who walked a few steps behind them, holding out his microcassette recorder.
When Remy looked back at the young guy, The Boss looked over his shoulder at him, too, then he shrugged. “Ghostwriter,” The Boss said. The ghostwriter didn’t acknowledge the acknowledgment.
The Boss looked back at Remy. “So why don’t you tell me what this is all about, Brian?”
He hated when this happened. “I… called you?”
The Boss laughed. “Touché. Look… I’m sorry it took me so long to get back to you. The first time you called, I thought I should talk to the counsel’s office, to find out what… we could do for each other while I’m still technically on the public dime. But I’m here now. What’s on your mind?”
“I don’t know,” Remy looked at the ghostwriter again, who didn’t meet his eyes. Then he said to The Boss, “I’m not sure… this thing I’m supposed to be working on-”
“Wait.” The Boss grabbed Remy by the arm and raised his hand as if he didn’t want to hear the rest. He nodded at the ghostwriter, who turned off the tape recorder and drifted back a few steps. Then he said to Remy: “Go ahead.”
“It’s just…” Remy struggled. “I’m having a hard time keeping… track of things. And I may have…” Remy looked back over his shoulder at the ghostwriter, who had his hands in his pockets. Remy leaned in close to The Boss. “I may have done some… really bad things, sir.”
The Boss pointed his finger at Remy’s face. “Look, don’t you for a minute doubt yourself, Brian. I know for a fact you haven’t done anything that wasn’t necessary. In fact, I’ve heard” – he paused – “unofficially… very good things… from the top. Do you understand?” He mouthed a word that might have been Pentagon. “Your resourcefulness and commitment, Brian; you are striking a blow for… really taking some heroic… true leadership… showing that we won’t… I can’t begin to…”
Remy rubbed his temples.
“Wait a minute. I think I know what’s bothering you,” The Boss said.
“You do?”
“Sure. You feel like you’re alone.”
“Yes.”
“You think I don’t feel the same thing?” He waved his arm out at the city. “We took on their fear. And now they think they can do without us? Without us? They think anyone can just step in? After all I did for those frightened little fuckers?” He spat this last word, and then The Boss coughed. “No.” He glanced at Remy and seemed to realize that he’d shifted the discussion to himself. “They owe us, Brian. This thing we discovered that day… it has real value. It can make fortunes. Win elections. Wars. This thing… it could remake the world. And they owe us for that.”
The Boss looked around, at the quiet buildings. “Meantime, what does this all mean? That is what you’re asking, isn’t it?”
Remy wasn’t sure. “Maybe,” he said.
The Boss veered between parking meters to the limo, which came to a stop alongside him. The long car seemed to be a living thing, slithering, a long sleek black lizard guarding The Boss. He opened the car door and gestured to his ghost, who slid into the backseat in time to catch the end of an anecdote the police boss was relating about “…three Thai hookers and a bottle of rice wine.” The Boss listened for a moment, then walked back onto the sidewalk, until he was just a few feet from Remy.
“Look,” The Boss said quietly. “You need to have faith in what you’re doing. I’m going to give you two simple words to keep you going. Two words that will give you some sense of where this leads, of what will save you and me, what will save the entire country. And it ain’t plastics.”
Remy waited for the two words.
“Close your eyes,” The Boss said.
“What?”
“Close your fucking eyes, Brian.”
Remy hesitated, and then closed his eyes and when he did he saw a kind of captured reality: a black screen with snowflakes falling and streaking, like crawling beasts beneath a microscope lens. Paper falling against blooming darkness.
The Boss said the two words: “Private. Sector.”
For a moment, Remy stood with his eyes closed, waiting for something else. He heard a car door close, and when he opened his eyes the limo was pulling away slowly, brake lights blinking once from the corner, their red eyes taking him in one last time before the big car turned a corner and he was gone-
SITTING ALONE alongside a freeway, on the outskirts of a city, in the new FEMA Excursion, staring at a huge sign along the roadside. The Excursion was turned off. Cars were flying past him. He looked all around. There must have been a storm. The roadside was soaked, leaves pasted to the pavement. The sky was dark and seemed porous, like pumice, and Remy could still smell the rain. He looked all around his vehicle but didn’t recognize the stretch of freeway where he sat. He appeared to be in the suburbs of some town or city, a row of windbreak trees separating him from a development of homes and a mini-mall. He looked at his watch. Two o’clock. It was light outside. Two in the afternoon. He looked back at the sign, advertising one of the businesses in this mall. The top part was written in script letters: “Pure Interiors.” The bottom half of the sign was a reader board with movable block letters. It read: “God Bless America. New Furniture Arriving Every Day.”
In Remy’s lap was an open pint of Irish whiskey. His hands were shaking. He took a drink and looked back up at the sign: God Bless… New Furniture. He stared at the sign until the words threatened to make some sense, then started the Excursion and began driving. He passed two more exits that he didn’t recognize, and after a time it was no longer important where he was, and he just drove.
“DO YOU need to hear it again?” The man’s voice broke and then steadied, then quavered again. He cleared his throat. “I’m sorry.” He wore navy blue pants and a white T-shirt, his clothes dusted with flour, exposing thick, working arms and wrists. He was probably fifty, with a simple, good face, olive-skinned and framed by curly black hair, eyes rimmed with red and pearled with tears. Remy was sitting on a worn, slipcovered loveseat while the man stood above him in this small family room. They were surrounded by family pictures: young adults and children, senior pictures and vacations. Remy recognized March Selios in some of the pictures. The man in front of him, who appeared to be March’s father, held a telephone answering machine as if it were a holy relic.
Remy looked down at his notebook. He’d written the words: I just wanted you to know that. He’d underlined the words. After that he’d written, Twenty minutes before. And Saying Goodbye?
“I’m sorry,” Remy said. “Maybe play it just once more.”
March’s father nodded, braced himself, and shuddered as he hit the big black button on the answering machine. A young woman’s voice filled the room. “Hi, Mom. Hi, Pop.” In a room behind Remy a woman sobbed. “It’s March. You must be on your way to work already. Um… I guess… I just wanted to talk. I had kind of a…” On the machine, March Selios sighed. She sounded troubled. “Okay, well, that’s it. I just wanted you to know that I love you both and I… I just wanted you to know that. Well… bye for now.” A hint of sadness at the end, and then a mechanized voice: “Tuesday. Six fifty-eight A.M.”
“Thanks,” Remy said.
Mr. Selios’s face was tracked with tears. He wiped at them like they were mosquitoes he could kill. “She always went to work early, because she was working on things in Europe and the Middle East, other time zones. She called when she knew we had left for the restaurant. I think sometimes that she wanted to talk to us, but she didn’t want us to talk to her. We weren’t allowed to ask questions about her personal life.”
“The phone call was at six fifty-eight-?”
“Yes,” he said, “seven, that morning…” He covered his mouth.
Six fifty-eight in the city that morning. Forty minutes before. Just minutes after the technician said she got the call that agitated her. Minutes before she left her desk.
March Selios’s mother, tall and pretty, with a broad face and silver-streaked black hair, came into the room with a cup of coffee. The woman Remy had heard crying in the kitchen. She’d tried to compose herself but her eyes were red and swollen. “Here you are.” She set the coffee down on the table in front of him, which was covered with photo albums, school yearbooks, and letters.
“Thank you,” Remy said.
He picked up the coffee, and just then the wife fell into her husband’s arms.
They held each other, and the woman’s shoulders shuddered as she cried. Her husband cried too, but forced himself to do it silently. Remy was caught in the room because they were in the doorway and he was on the loveseat.
“Excuse us a moment,” Mr. Selios managed to say.
“Of course,” Remy said. “Take your time.”
They left the room and Remy rubbed his eyes. He put the notebook back in his pocket and looked around the room. Then he picked up one of the photo albums. There was a family picture: the parents, March, a young boy and another girl, an older sister who looked like a thinner, lighter version of March, pretty and dark-haired and familiar. Had he interviewed the sister and forgotten her? Or was it just that she looked like March? He flipped through the pages and came to the older sister’s wedding pictures. March was the maid of honor; the young brother, who shared their dark hair and eyebrows, was a groomsman. He looked at the young bride again.
March…
Remy’s throat went dry. April?
He stared at the picture. It could be, although he couldn’t recall her face just now, only the back of her head, the girl he had – April? April Kraft.
He stood and looked around the room. There were pictures of the two sisters everywhere, but none of the back of her head… senior pictures in front of fanned chairs and phony grottos, candid photos of the two girls in footed pajamas at Christmas. March. April. Was that when they were born? Some new immigrant’s trick to make them sound American? And what was the brother’s name – June? Remy sat back down and rubbed his temples. Had he slept with March Selios’s sister because he’d wanted to, or because he’d wanted information? Was he genuinely interested in her, or… he didn’t want to consider the alternative. His throat felt salty and dry.
Mr. Selios came back into the room. “You must excuse my wife. This has aged her twenty years, Mr. Remy. A horrible time for our family.”
“Yes.” Remy pretended to concentrate on his notebook. “Your other daughter…”
“April… this has been hardest on her, I would assume, losing both of them.”
Remy’s head fell back against the couch.
“Unfortunately, April and I…” Mr. Selios frowned. “We don’t really talk. We haven’t for years. She was the first to leave and I said some things… I thought this might make her realize… but she still won’t talk to me. She didn’t even come home for March’s funeral.” Mr. Selios shrugged. “Maybe it was just too much, losing March and Derek the same day.”
“Derek… her husband?”
“Yes,” he said. “They were separated when it happened. He worked in the same building as March. He was a contract lawyer for another firm.”
“Derek… Kraft?”
“That’s right.”
“How did they meet?”
Mr. Selios didn’t seem to find it odd that Remy had changed the subject to his other daughter. “March introduced them. Her company used Derek’s firm for some contracts and she thought he and April would hit it off, I guess.” Mr. Selios sighed. “I was furious. I believed Derek was a pushy man with women. Frankly, I did not approve when they married. He was older and too… fast. Everything was so fast with him. You have to understand, I did not want my daughters moving to the city, especially April. I was not as worried about March. Even though she was the younger, she always seemed more… solid. But I have always worried about April. I didn’t like her selling real estate. She is not a salesperson. She has the mind of a poet, too sensitive and… aware. Too trusting.”
Remy’s teeth felt like sandpaper.
“I wanted April to have a man with his feet on the ground, not this slick lawyer, this man who was so fast. So I refused to pay for the wedding and-” Mr. Selios cleared his throat. “April was angry and said that she had never expected me to pay for the wedding. I told her she was disgracing my family.” He covered his mouth, but composed himself. “Are you married, Mr. Remy?”
“Divorced.”
“Do you have daughters?”
“A son.”… who believes I’m dead, he almost added.
Mr. Selios nodded and looked up at the picture of his own son. “Sons are the devil’s payback, yes?”
“Your son…”
“Augustus. Gus.”
“Yes,” Remy said. “Where is he now?”
“He’s in…” He paused, as if it were too difficult to admit.
Prison? Remy wondered. A cult?
“Entertainment,” Mr. Selios said. “He lives in Los Angeles.”
“Oh. I’m sorry.”
Mr. Selios shrugged. “Yes,” he said. “But girls. Ah, girls.” The old man’s eyes reddened beneath black lashes. “I suppose I was a rash and difficult father to them, Mr. Remy. Even though March still talked to me, she would never think of telling me about her life. Both girls believed that I was… disapproving. Old fashioned. And I suppose that I was. I wanted for them… what women have wanted for centuries. That’s all. Marriage and children… I wanted for them to work in the family restaurant, to stay here in Kansas City. Where I could protect them.” His head bowed forward. “When March was eight, she used to have nightmares. Every night… a dream that she was falling. She would brace and scream and I would run to her bed and hold her and tell her it was okay. Does that sound like a bad father, Mr. Remy? Does that sound like a hard man, a disapproving man?”
“No.”
Mr. Selios looked up and wiped at his mouth. “I am desperate to know what happened to her that day. I watch on the TV as long as I can but I always have to turn away. I imagine her curled up beneath a desk, crying… or tumbling… like when she was little. Every time they show one of those poor people falling…” Tears rose and migrated into the stubble on his round cheeks and his voice caught. “I just want to know what happened. Maybe it would be too hard to know, but maybe there would be some… peace.” His voice shattered and he spoke with wavering force, as if pushing each word through a mask. “As it is… Mr. Remy, I can’t forgive myself for not being there.”
“There was nothing you could have done,” Remy said gently.
“I could have caught her,” he cried. “I would have.”
Remy let Mr. Selios compose himself and then he stood. “Thank you for your time, sir.” He looked down at the wedding picture in the open album. As he put his coat on, he looked down at a mug shot he’d paper-clipped to his notebook: Bishir Madain. “Do you know this man?”
Mr. Selios looked at the photo. “No. What is his name?”
Remy shrugged. “Bishir Madain. He knew your daughter.”
Mr. Selios stared at the picture. “I never heard of him.” He sighed. “But as I say, she did not share such details with me.”
“Okay.” Remy started to put the picture back but Mr. Selios reached out and stopped his hand. He stared at the picture and tears pearled in his eyes again.
Finally he let go of the picture and wiped at his eyes.
“Can I ask one more question,” Remy said. “You said April was estranged from her husband when he-”
“Yes,” Mr. Selios said. “For a few months, I think.”
“Do you know what happened between them?”
“All I know is what March told me… that Derek wasn’t right for her.”
“Was she… was April sad?”
“Please.” The man’s face drained of color. “He was her husband, Mr. Remy.”
“Of course. I’m sorry.” Remy handed the cup to Mr. Selios and backed out of the room.
THE SOUND of whiskey was what he craved sometimes. Tip a half-full bottle, like this twelve-year-old Jameson, and the bubbles made a tinny gurgle as they ran up the neck into the bigger part of the bottle. And the gurgle got deeper with each tip. He made the sound over and over and the warmth ran through his chest and into his armpits.
It was a shitty little hotel room: two double beds across from a TV on a swivel. The HBO movies for the month were on a card on the nightstand. Someone was watching porn in a room next door, or below; he could hear thumping and synthesized music and metronomic grunting. Remy made the whiskey sound again, got a little less warmth this time, and made his way to the door. It opened outside onto the second floor of a motor hotel, horseshoed around a parking lot with trucks and motor homes and a couple of square sedans. The streaks and floaters were mild out here. It was night but there was a full moon, and Remy could see across the parking lot to a long fallow field that seemed to stretch forever.
Still carrying the bottle he walked along the second-floor railing, down carpeted steps and into the parking lot. The freeway ran behind the motel, and this horseshoe faced away from it, into the flattened field. Remy crossed the parking lot and stood on the edge of the field. Behind him, the hotel was alone against the sky, like a ship run aground. A few trucks rumbled by on the freeway, but before him there was only the lavender sky and the burning hole made by a full moon. A bank of gray-white clouds was on the horizon, a perfect straight line at eye level, like the floor of a stage. The colors ran from black through purple to a bruised red to this gray-white line. Remy had never seen anything like it, and yet there was nothing to it. It was just a set of parallel lines: the line of the prairie and the line of the horizon and the line of the clouds, nothing but lines and the hot pit of a moon, nothing but lines and the flecks in his eyes and the sound of bubbles gurgling through the neck of a bottle.
When he opened his eyes, a man was standing next to him in the parking lot. He was someone Remy thought he recognized, although he couldn’t be sure. The man was in his sixties, Middle Eastern, with small, round glasses and a beautiful gray wool coat. He had short gray hair and several days of whiskers on his cheeks. The whiskers and the coat were so mismatched that Remy had trouble imagining them on the same man. They stood at the edge of the field, side by side, staring at the sunset.
“So many countries in this one country,” the man said, “nations spilling out into nations, bordered by mountain ranges and great rivers. I sometimes think that people here used to believe that when one country disappointed them, they could simply move west and find another one. But then you ran out of room.”
Remy considered the man again. He wore jeans, dirty at the knees, and a black T-shirt, and over it, bizarrely, that beautiful wool coat. He looked so familiar. “I know you,” Remy said.
“Do you?” The man looked full at Remy.
“Don’t I know you?” Remy asked.
“How could I possibly answer that? I suppose I could answer whether I know you, but it would be presumptuous of me to say who you know.”
Remy couldn’t think of anything to say. And even that seemed familiar. “Maybe you can just tell me if I’m east or west of Kansas City.”
The man nodded. “Yes. You are.”
Remy took another drink and considered the man again. And then it hit him. “No. Wait. I remember. In the city. In front of Ray’s. You handed me an envelope.”
“No,” the man said. “I did not.”
“Yes, you did.”
“What was in the envelope?” the man asked.
“I… I don’t know.”
“So you’re telling me that I handed you an envelope. But you can’t tell me what was in this envelope? This is not a very convincing story.”
“No, I guess not.” Remy stared out at the horizon again.
“You seem troubled.”
“Yeah. I am.” Remy laughed. “I can’t keep track of anything anymore. I slip in and out of my own life.”
“Sure,” the man said.
“I find myself in these situations. I don’t know how I got there, or what I’m doing. I don’t know what’s going to happen until after it happens. I do things that I don’t understand and I wish I hadn’t done them.”
“Maybe that’s what life is like for everyone,” the man said.
Remy took a long swig of whiskey. “Is it?”
“I don’t know. But what makes you think you’re so special?”
Remy considered the man again. “And you’re sure I didn’t see you in the city?”
“How can I possibly know what you have seen or not seen? How can I know what exists in the frames of your eyes? There are millions of people in that city. Am I to tell you that I have never been one of them? That I have never passed before your eyes? How can I possibly say what you’ve seen? No man has access to another man’s vision.”
“I’m going crazy,” Remy said.
The man looked at the horizon again. He tapped the bottle in Remy’s hand. “They say this makes a man crazy.”
“Who says that?”
“I don’t know. The wise. The sober. People who say things.”
Remy handed the man the bottle. “I almost killed myself once.” He was surprised to hear himself confiding in the man.
The old man took a swig. “When?”
“Recently.” Remy touched the stubble on the side of his head.
“How?” The man took another drink, then handed the bottle back.
“Shot myself in the head.” After a moment, Remy laughed. “Isn’t it odd that I just told you I tried to kill myself and you asked when and how, but not why?”
“Why?”
“Well.” Remy stared at the ground, cast purple by the dye of the fading sun. “I don’t really know. At first I thought it was an accident. Or a joke. But I’m starting to think-” He looked at the man, then back down at the bottle in his hand. “ – that I was afraid of what I might do if I didn’t.”
“Yes,” the man said quietly. They watched the sunset together. Then, after a moment, the man reached in his coat and handed Remy another manila envelope. And then he walked away, across the parking lot, to a four-door sedan, which he climbed in without looking back.
Remy knew that if he waited long enough, he wouldn’t have to open the envelope, that whatever was going to happen would happen. This thought should have been freeing. It probably didn’t even matter if he threw the envelope away. But he found himself curious and so he opened it. There was a name, Assan al-Hafar – he knew that name, too, Assan – and an address for an apartment in a building on something called Treasure Island. Remy looked up, but the man’s car was gone, and the next thought he had was-
SLIDING, CLUTCHING, hands and toes clenched, hail streaking behind his eyelids, Remy woke in a gasp of stale air, claustrophobic, strapped in, his face pressed against a cold round window.
He looked around. He was on a dark jet, everyone around him sleeping. He was in a window seat, alone in his row, sitting in coach toward the front of the plane. He sat up and looked around. It was a light load, but all of the passengers seemed to be asleep, curled up on tiny white pillows or holding small gray airline blankets like toddlers with stuffed animals. No one stirred. Remy had heard stories of flights in which the ventilation system failed and everyone passed out and the plane crashed. Honestly, he wouldn’t mind; just going back to sleep. He checked his watch. 2:12. Dark outside, so 2:12 A.M. What time zone? Did it matter? Had he set his watch in Kansas City? Or was it on East Coast time?
He frisked himself and finally found a boarding pass, folded and stuffed in his pants pocket. Miami. He was going to Miami. On the back of the boarding pass he’d written “Markham” and a cell phone number. He stared at the number for a while, then wadded the paper and stuffed it in the pocket in front of his seat.
A pretty Korean-American flight attendant came by with a cup of coffee and sat in the aisle seat in his row. “I didn’t know if I was supposed to wake you… if you guys are supposed to sleep or not,” she whispered. “But you looked so tired, I didn’t have the heart to disturb you.”
Remy took the coffee. He wondered: what guys?
The flight attendant squeezed his arm.
“Thanks,” Remy said. “You know… I don’t think I’m supposed to fly. My eyes.”
She laughed politely, as if this had been a misfired joke. Then she stood up and walked away, bent over as if walking beneath a helicopter. When the flight attendant was gone, he patted himself and found a plastic case inside his breast pocket. He pulled it out and wasn’t entirely shocked to find a badge with his picture, and beneath it, the letters NTSA, and the words Air Marshal. He put his badge back in his jacket, leaned back in his seat and looked out the window.
REMY HATED the ocean’s smell, and the way it burrowed, not only into your nose, but your mouth and your ears, in your whole head. It was like the smell at The Zero in that way, overpowering and everywhere. You took it home with you, and once you smelled it again, it seemed to never have left you. Remy closed his eyes and felt the lurch of the boat as they churned through a rough patch of chop, the shore a narrowing band behind them. The sun was setting back there, too, and he felt a cool blast of sea wind that told him they were chugging toward night. He had the sense of the heat pouring off his skin, as if he’d been warm all day and now was about to get cold. He was in the open-air cabin of a cruiser about thirty feet long, sitting across from Markham, who wore a ridiculous nautical windbreaker and a jaunty cap, both with a gold anchor stitched onto them. He was sniffing at the air like an old captain who’d been away from the sea for years. The only other person on this boat was the man piloting it, a thin Hispanic man, pinch-shouldered, in black jacket and jeans, the smoke from a thick cigar drifting off him like morning fog. Next to the wheel a computerized screen showed their position on a topographical map, and the pilot kept checking it, until finally he turned and gave a toothy smile. “That’s it! International waters, my friends!” he yelled. “Tres Cubanos, por favor!” He reached beneath his seat and came up with three fat cigars, two of which he offered his passengers.
Remy waved his cigar off, but Markham happily took one. “Can I have yours?” he yelled over the rumble of the motor and the blasts of wind.
Remy nodded, and then closed his eyes and let the wind buffet his face. He imagined that he deserved this, whatever this punishment was. Cigar smoke wafted in the salt air. “Hey!” He yelled to Markham. “Am I an air marshal?”
Markham and the pilot both burst into laughter. “See what I mean?” Markham asked the pilot, who nodded furiously. “Guy’s a pro. Every once in a while he just pops off with that deadpan material.”
The boat’s pilot shook his head in appreciation. “So what do you guys do, back in the world, before all this?”
“Remy here used to be a cop,” Markham said. Then he glanced over, to see if Remy was listening and said, quietly. “And actually, I was an executive chef at a resort in Idaho.”
“No shit?” the pilot asked.
Remy closed his eyes again and held them shut for a long time, and when he opened them it was noticeably darker; the sun had fallen behind the thin, faint line of shore. He wondered if a normal amount of time had passed or…
Ahead of the cabin cruiser, a larger ship, a small freighter, bobbed on the water. It may have been an old fishing boat, or maybe a ship used for canning, the hull rusted and lightly pocked with barnacles, its profile growing as they approached it, a ketchup-red stripe just at the waterline.
They came abreast of the bigger ship, and in the dusky light Remy could see a rope ladder hanging off its inky black side. The pilot of the cruiser cut his motor and they drifted up against the freighter, their boat maybe an eighth its height, the hulls slapping together like someone smacking his lips. “Thanks, Chuck,” Markham said. “We should be right back. Wait here.” Markham hoisted a small pack on his shoulder, then grabbed the rope ladder and started up. Remy followed him, hands gripping the wet ladder, and swung over the railing onto the abandoned deck of the larger ship, which was about eighty feet in length, with a two-story cabin and stairs leading below. There was no one up top, although Remy could see in the bridge where a coffee cup sat next to the wheel.
The deck lilted back and forth on the light swells as they made their way toward the stairs. Remy peered below into the narrow staircase leading to a hallway, lit by bare bulbs strung along the wall. At the top of the stairs, Markham turned. “Okay. We all set?” He didn’t wait for an answer, but grabbed the railings and began lowering himself down the stairs. After a moment, Remy followed.
The hallway was too narrow for both of them to fit, so Remy followed Markham’s back as he made his way the length of the ship, past the closed, rounded doors of cabins. Remy couldn’t place the smell down here, or rather he couldn’t separate the blend of smells: sweat and salt and cigarette smoke and strong coffee. Finally, Markham paused in front of a white metal door, turned the handle, and stepped inside. Remy followed and they entered a long, narrow compartment, with chipped paint on the walls and a low, flaking ceiling, all of it illuminated by a bright, bare bulb in the center. There was no furniture, just a metal pole parallel to the ground, like a banister, or a high ballet bar, stretching the width of the room, about five feet off the ground. Remy gasped.
There, on the bar, a man was perched like a trophy, hanging forward, his arms tied behind his back and slung on the bar so that it held him by the armpits, his feet against the wall dangling a few inches from the floor. The man was wearing nothing but a pair of tight red briefs and one white sock. It was cold and clammy in the room and his thick chest hair was wet and matted. A bucket of water sat below his feet. His shoulders and clavicles rose to points well above his head, which hung limply, bushy black hair dripping wet. Two other men were leaning against the opposite wall, bored-looking young men in jeans and plain sweatshirts, with short haircuts, standing guard, laughing at a private joke.
“Hey, fellas. You takin’ a break?”
“We thought we should save you some. Guy’s an hour from being jerky.” One of the big guys walked over, got a tin cup out of the bucket, and threw water on the man’s face. His head rose slowly. Remy could see cuts on his cheeks and forehead and his lips, and guessed it was salt water they’d thrown on him. The man looked around wildly, his eyes finally settling on Remy, who had to look down at the ground. Markham nodded to the two men in the room and they backed out, leaving just Remy, Markham, and the young Middle Eastern man hanging by his arms. Remy could hear steps in the hallway, then on the stairs leading back up top.
Markham stepped up to the man. “Hey there, Assan. My name’s Doolittle.” He pointed at Remy. “And this is Poppins. Do you know why we’re here?”
Assan just stared.
“Because your name showed up on some checks, Assan. Some big checks.”
“My brother asked me to write those checks. Years ago. I told the other guys-” Assan began.
“The other guys? Those other guys are pansies, Assan. They can’t close the deal. Have you been in America long enough to know what happens when a used car dealer goes to get the manager to close the deal? Well, that’s us. We’re the closers. So what’s it gonna take to get you to drive off the lot today, huh?”
“What?” Assan looked around wildly.
“What’s it gonna take for me to get you down and pitch you overboard?”
Assan shook his head no.
“See, those other guys, Assan? They’re just interns. We’re the partners at the firm. They’re the JV. We’re the varsity.”
“P-please…” Assan’s lips were caked with white scum. He spoke with a faint accent, falling a bit heavily on the consonants. “Please… I have done nothing wrong.” He struggled against the bar and fell back.
“You hear that?” Markham turned to Remy. “Assan’s done nothing wrong.” He turned back to the man. “So what. You always tip fifteen percent, never cheat on your taxes, always pick up your litter? Is that what you mean, Assan?”
Assan’s bottom lip quivered as he looked from one man to the other.
“Are you some kind of police?”
“No. We’re no kind of police.”
Assan’s voice cracked. “This is wrong. I was taken… from my home. At night. I have not been charged. This is… not right. It is illegal. I demand to speak to a lawyer.”
“I’m a lawyer,” Markham said. “He’s a lawyer. The guys you were playin’ with before? Lawyers. Captain of the ship is a lawyer. Hell, everyone in America is a lawyer, Assan. I’d have thought you’d know that by now.”
He struggled on the bar.
“I’ll tell you what, Assan. The next civil rights lawyer I see on this boat I’m going to send in here. Okay? Now… why don’t you tell me why your name shows up on checks to Bishir Madain?”
“I have…” Assan’s cracked lips slid back over bright teeth, his head fell forward and he began crying, like a child. “…explained… my brother is in Saudi Arabia. He used to raise money for Islamic studies. He worked with Bishir on a program with exchange students.”
“I don’t care about that, Assan.” Markham got closer, until his voice was hardly more than a whisper. “I care about one question. Answer one question and it gets better. Where is Bishir?”
“I told them… I do not know where Bishir is.”
“You haven’t told me, Assan.”
He looked up, took short, shallow breaths, and said: “I have no idea where Bishir is. I promise you! He is my brother’s friend. I have not seen him in more than a year. I swear it. Now, please!”
Markham turned to Remy. “Wow. That’s pretty convincing. What do you think, pardner? Is Assan telling the truth?”
Remy felt the boat lurch and then fall back. His mouth tasted like salt and bile. He tried to say something, but there was nothing.
Suddenly Assan struggled against the bar, his feet running in place, his head swinging back and forth. After this burst, he roared at the ceiling: “There are laws!”
“True enough.” Markham nodded to the stern of the ship. “Two hundred yards west of here, anyway. But out here-”
Assan’s head fell again.
There was a knock on the door. Markham stepped away from the prisoner and listened as one of the guys whispered something in his ear. Then Markham approached Remy, walking like John Wayne. “What do you think, pardner?”
“I don’t believe this,” Remy said. “We can’t do this…”
“Yeah, yeah. I know. It’s sloppy. My apologies. I’m gonna go up deck and find out if this asshole said anything useful before. I’ll be right back. You watch him.”
Remy watched Markham open the white metal door and listened to his footfalls in the hallway outside and on the steps leading back above deck. The walls seemed to leach salt. Finally, Remy moved.
Assan’s skin was cold and clammy. “Come on,” Remy whispered. He lifted the man off the bar and lowered him to the ground, removed his own jacket and put it around Assan’s shoulders. “You’re going to be okay.” The man stunk like urine and sweat.
Assan lay in a pile on the floor, his back shuddering as he cried. His hands were bound with a zip-tie. Remy found a pocketknife in his front pants pocket and cut the plastic off his wrists. Assan opened and closed his fists.
“Thank you-” Assan began.
“We have to go fast,” Remy said. “Come on.”
He draped Assan’s arm over his shoulder and pulled the smaller man through the door, edging sideways down the hallway. When they reached the stairs Remy peered up, but he didn’t see Markham or the other two. He wasn’t sure what he was going to do once they got above deck. He didn’t think he had a weapon. He patted himself down – nothing but the pocketknife. “Wait here,” he whispered to Assan.
It was dark now, the night sky lit with stars and a three-quarter moon. Remy emerged from below deck and looked around. He counted four silhouetted heads in the pilothouse, and guessed they wouldn’t be able to see out into the dark. He reached back and grabbed Assan by the armpits. He winced again as Remy lifted him through the opening. The air was cool and briny. They crept along the deck, with the creak of the tight, wet planks beneath them and the smack of small waves against the side, until they reached the rope ladder, still slung over the stern of the ship. Remy looked down. Chuck, the pilot of the cabin cruiser, was sitting on the back of his chair, working another cigar. “Follow me!” Remy whispered to Assan, and began lowering himself over the edge of the freighter.
“Where’s Shawn?” the pilot of the cabin cruiser asked Remy when he’d dropped down into the smaller boat.
“He’s gonna stay a while. He wants us to take this guy back to shore.”
“Doesn’t the guy have any clothes?”
“He fell overboard,” Remy said. “They’re all wet.”
If the pilot registered the strangeness of this he didn’t show it. “Am I supposed to come back for Markham?” he asked.
“First thing tomorrow morning,” Remy said. “They’re having a party.”
The pilot stared at Remy for a long time before shrugging. “Okay.”
Remy helped Assan down the last steps of the rope ladder and then pushed him down onto the floor of the boat and covered him with the jacket.
He pushed off and they drifted away. The smaller boat started with a lurch, and soon they were speeding off. Remy looked over his shoulder. He could see the men still in the wheelhouse of the bigger ship, apparently looking the other way. Only now did Remy notice how quickly his heart was beating, how short were his breaths.
Remy crouched down on the floor of boat. Assan was sobbing. He rearranged his jacket on the shaking man.
“It’s okay,” Remy said. “You’re gonna be okay.”
Assan grabbed his wrist. “Listen to me. I don’t know where Bishir is. I swear. You’ve got to tell them. I barely knew him… in his dress and speech, he is very… American.” Assan shrugged. “I hadn’t heard from Bishir until maybe two years ago, when he suddenly contacted me.”
Remy’s voice was hoarse over the churn of the boat motor. “What did he want?”
“He had gotten my name from Kamal. He was raising money for charity from American Muslims. He wanted me to donate.”
“Did you?”
“Yes. A little. I told the men on the boat this. But I have not spoken to Bishir since that day. I swear it.” The boat jumped against the edge of some bigger swells and the pilot turned to angle across the chop. Remy stood and looked back over his shoulder, but he could see nothing in the dark. Not even the lights from the larger ship. He lowered himself to the deck to talk to Assan again. He caught the man’s imploring black eyes.
“The thing about Bishir-” Assan chewed his bottom lip.
“What?” Remy asked.
“I don’t want to get my brother in trouble… he and Bishir shared a fondness… for American women. Especially Bishir. More than his family, more than anything, I think sometimes, he liked these women. Kamal said he had a name for them…”
“What?” Remy asked.
“Vines.”
“Vines?”
Assan looked embarrassed. “Tarzan, yes? You know the movies? Bishir said that a man in America could swing from vine to vine here without ever touching earth.”
“Is that where you think he is… with one of these vines?”
Assan rubbed his temple. “I remember my brother once stayed with one of Bishir’s women. In Virginia. Near Charlottesville. A divorced woman. Very wealthy. Bishir considered marrying her at one point. He would stray with other women and then come back to her. He was seeing a young woman in New York-”
“March Selios,” Remy muttered.
“Maybe,” he said. “Kamal told me that Bishir genuinely cared for this woman, but that the woman in Virginia had a great deal of money, and when he got bored he would always return to her.”
“Do you know her name?”
“Herote.” Assan spelled it. “I don’t know her first name.” Remy put his hand in his coat pocket. There was a pen right next to the pocketknife; he tried not to dwell on the significance. He pulled out the pen and wrote on his hand: “Herote. Virginia.”
The air was cold now and Assan was shaking harder. Remy put his hand on the smaller man’s shoulder. “It’s okay. You’re going to be okay.” He lifted his head to look forward through the windshield of the cabin cruiser, to see if he could spot the shoreline. Instead, bobbing three hundred feet away, he saw the cabin lights of a ship.
As the cabin cruiser slowed, Assan lifted his head and cried out when he saw what Remy was staring at: the ship they had just left. Markham was standing halfway down the rope ladder, his arm hooked in it, smiling. The other two men were leaning over the side of the boat, holding bottles of beer.
Assan slumped back to the floor and began crying.
The cabin cruiser slowed and pulled up next to the ship. Markham lowered himself the rest of the way and plopped down on the floor of the smaller boat. “How was your ride, Assan? Did you get some fresh air?”
Markham fastened another pair of plastic zip-ties on Assan’s wrists, pulling them tight and cuffing the man’s hands in front of himself. A rope was lowered from the ship and Markham looped it around the cuffs, tied it, and then tugged on the rope. Assan was jerked from the boat, his arms above him, dangling like he was being hanged.
Remy rubbed his eyes. He would have liked to be more surprised. He watched as Assan was pulled up, banging against the ship, and then finally slipped over its side onto the deck like a huge fish.
“You’re right,” the driver said to Markham. “This guy is good.” He looked at Remy with something between respect and fear. “Scary good. He had me convinced.”
“So… you get anything?” Markham asked.
Remy felt sick. He showed Markham the writing on his hand: Herote. Virginia.
“So Assan was holding out on us.” Markham bowed in front of him in worship. “I was dubious, but damn if that didn’t go just like you said it would.”
“Is he gonna be okay?” Remy asked.
“Oh, sure,” Markham said.
“I’m serious. You need to let him go.”
“Of course,” said Markham. Then he smiled and turned back for the rope ladder. Remy slumped down in the seat on the cabin cruiser. The pilot offered him another Cuban cigar, and this time Remy took it. He leaned back, closed his eyes and listened to the waves lapping against the side of the boat, and even though he wished as hard as he could, for once, time was still.