The Zero by Jess Walter Read Free Book Online Page A

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 theirlunches 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