The Zero (29 page)

“We can go anywhere?” she asked.

“Anywhere.”

“How about—”

“Shhh,” Remy interrupted. “Don’t tell me. I’d rather be—”

WEDGED INTO
the round window at the back of the plane, Remy saw what looked like toy ships on the bay below, their wakes like chalk scratches on a blackboard. The jet banked and Remy felt himself pressed against the door, and in a glance he could see where the water ended and then the rough line of shore and the city lay suddenly before him like a grid of transistors, gray and white rectangles and reflected bits of sun, rising in the center of the peninsula like a mound of sifted sand. San Francisco. He’d never been to San Francisco. At least, not that he knew. He’d always wanted to go to California.

The jet leveled. “Excuse me, sir.” A flight attendant took Remy’s arm and smiled at him. “The captain has turned on the fasten seat belt sign. You’ll need to return to your seat. We’re about to land.”

Remy looked ahead at the full rows, a hundred heads bobbing above the cloth seats. He could hear low conversations but he couldn’t see a single pair of lips moving, and for a moment the roar of the jet and the murmur of people seemed like the same noise, as if this plane ran on empty talk. Should he just walk forward until he found an empty seat? Remy felt his back pants pockets hopefully, and was relieved to come up with a folded ticket. Seat 2A. First class. Well, that was good. But something seemed wrong. If he was in first class, why was he in the back of the plane?

As he walked forward, Remy’s shoulders slumped. Ten rows from the back, Markham was reclining in the aisle seat, wearing a Hawaiian shirt and sunglasses, and reading an airline magazine. How did he find out? As Remy approached, Markham stood and pretended to be looking in his overhead bin for something. Remy edged past and Markham turned and bumped him, pressing a cell phone into Remy’s hand.

Remy put the phone in his pocket and walked toward the front of the plane. He looked over his shoulder once, but Markham was hidden behind his magazine. At the bulkhead Remy stepped through the open curtains into first class, relieved to see April in 2B. She had a glass of red wine. Another mini-bottle of Syrah was waiting its turn on her seat tray. Remy eased in, latched his seat belt, and looked out the window. They were south of San Francisco, circling back toward the airport.

“You’re right,” she said, toasting him with the wine. “This does help. This helps a lot.” She filled her glass. “To more help.”

Remy looked back over his shoulder.

“So why’d you go to the back of the plane?” she asked.

“I guess to meet someone.”

“Really?” She laughed. “You a member of the mile-high club now?”

“No,” he said. “It was a guy I know. He gave me a phone.” He held up the flip phone for her to see.

“Someone gave you a phone?” She took his arm and nestled in. She laughed. “That makes absolutely no sense.” She laughed again. “I like being drunk.”

The new cell phone rang.

“Hey!” she said, delighted.

Remy stared at it before opening it. “Hello.”

“Hey, so here’s something funny,” Markham said. “You know how people are always describing the exciting part of a movie as
a race against time
? Like, say at the end, they’ve got to discover a vaccine before the virus wipes out everyone, or they’ve got to cut the wires on the bomb before it blows up, or find the ruthless killer before he strikes. But think about how stupid that is: a race against time. You can’t race time. It’s like trying to swim faster than water. No matter how fast you go, time is the thing you’re moving in; it’s the thing against which your speed is measured. How can you race time? I guess Einstein showed how time bends at certain speeds, or that it slows down or speeds up,
but that still isn’t like
racing
time, and anyway, the truth is, we can’t go those Einstein speeds anyway…they’re science fiction, right? I mean…you can’t go faster than time. It doesn’t even make sense. It’s like being taller than faith, you know? Or smarter than hope. Anyway, I just knew that’s the kind of thing you’d get a kick out of, you know, given the situation.”

Remy looked over at April, who was nestled into her first-class seat, holding her wine and smiling at him.

“Who is it?” she mouthed.

Remy didn’t know what to say.

“Sir,” said a male flight attendant. “You are not allowed to use your cell phone while we’re in flight.”

“I gotta go,” Remy said into the phone.

“Oh yeah,” Markham said. “Sure. I just wanted to tell you how that thing about racing against time occurred to me. It just cracked me up, that’s all. And I knew you’d see the insanity in a phrase like that. Although, honestly, I don’t know what you’d substitute:
A wrestling match against fate?”
Markham laughed.
“A game of cribbage against lethargy?”

“Sir,” the flight attendant said again.

Remy snapped the phone shut and the flight attendant moved on.

“Who was it?” April asked again.

Before he could answer, the plane shuddered against a wave of turbulence and April grabbed his hand and closed her eyes. “Oh, I hate this,” she said. She drained the last of her wine and the flight attendant cleared the glasses.

“It’s okay,” Remy said.

Sometimes Remy knew things without specifically remembering how he knew them, and in this way he knew that this was the first time that April had flown anywhere since that day. He looked back at the faces on the plane, sets of wide eyes glancing around, one woman holding a string of beads and mouthing prayers. The couple across the row from him rocked with shared anxiety.

Remy turned back. “Really. It’s going to be okay,” he said again as the plane banked and lurched.

“I just hate it,” she said. “I close my eyes and I see—”

“I know,” Remy said, and he patted her hand and looked back again at the rows of imploring eyes. “We all see it.”

The jet bore down, grinding and moaning, toward the runway, then seemed to hover a few feet above it, before it lurched and skipped, fell several feet, and leveled, the hydraulic landing gear spitting, spinning, and catching and then the frantic clutch of elevators, strain of thousands of rivets, and the seize of brakes, and a thousand technological miracles later, Remy and April were walking down a jetway, Remy looking nervously over his shoulder. Act, he thought. Just do what you have to do. This is your life. She paused to switch her carry-on bag to the other shoulder, but Remy hurried her along, weaving in and out of the crowds.

“Ooh,” she said, “we’re in a hurry.”

They made their way downstream and were outside baggage claim when Remy saw a flash of Hawaiian shirt behind him and suddenly pulled her toward the door and outside. “Come on.”

“What about our bags?” April asked.

“Leave them,” he said.

They stepped into the giant horseshoe of the airport turnaround, the air buzzing in the late afternoon with cars and vans like insects on a carcass. Remy could hear his new cell phone chirping as he hustled April toward a cab. He opened the door for her and she told the cabbie the address of their Union Square hotel. “Just a sec,” Remy said.

He ran back and pitched the ringing cell phone into a garbage can.

THEY UNDRESSED
quietly, and began making love, and at first Remy found himself hurrying, afraid that he would lose track before they finished. “Hey, hey,” she whispered. “Slow down. I’m not going
anywhere.” And indeed, there was a syrupy languor in this hotel room in the late afternoon that caused him to believe her, and they fell into a rhythm that seemed to go on all afternoon, until Remy found himself experiencing a kind of overwhelming sentience that was disconnected from what they were doing, his body moving on its own while he found himself thinking pleasurably about the sounds of car horns and trucks on the street outside, and the
San Fran!
tourist magazine on the nightstand (with a photo of that famous, stupid crooked street on the cover) and tracking the drops of sweat on his own face, and listening to someone watching television in the room next door and, finally, with the sun setting through the open curtains and casting a fevered glow across their bodies, he fixated on the inside of her ear, a pink curling seashell of cartilage that amazed him with its delicacy and its utter efficiency—skin stretched over it like a drum, and somehow, all the sound in the room (
Oh yes mmm yes
) flowed into it, to be sorted, defined, and acted upon instantaneously. And this made him wonder about the other human miracles he took for granted: speech and smell and his own shattered vision, and at that very moment, such thoughts were vanquished by the sheer tyranny of nerve endings, those in his fingertips and, of course, those in the suddenly intense
elsewhere
, which was the only
feeling
right then, a wet hot friction that caused a low groan to rise in his throat and finally…

“Well,” she gasped when he fell off her. “That was certainly…
a lot
of sex.” She rubbed his belly and pulled a sheet across her own midsection as they lay on the big king-size bed, breathing deeply. She put her head on Remy’s chest. “What’s the opposite of premature?” she asked. “Postmature?”

“Sorry,” he said, and he remembered Nicole, and squeezed his eyes shut to make her go away, lost in the swirl of failing tissue.

“Were you going for some kind of endurance record? Or just seeing if you could make me taller?”

“I was distracted,” he said. “Sorry.”

“No, it was nice,” she said. “I always wondered what it would be like to have sex with an oil derrick.”

Remy stood next to the bed.

“Go get me a wheelchair and we’ll go to dinner.”

He walked to the window and looked outside. The sidewalks were full of people with briefcases, making their way down the city’s hills, leaning back as they walked, as if they were being sucked down into the creases of the city, as if they were winding down a drain.

“Every man has the same ass,” April said, leaning up in bed. “When you’re young they’re all different, but by the time you get to a certain age…same ass. So why is that? There are a thousand varieties of women’s asses, but you all have the same one.”

Remy came back to bed. April had gotten a little bottle of wine from the minibar, and she drank from it with one hand while she held the remote in the other, running through the channels faster than Remy could register the programs.

“I can’t see anything,” he said. “What are you watching?”

“Electrons,” she said.

So he watched electrons with her, the screen flickering with transient images, and every once in a while he caught one, but they all seemed like pictures from an older America: a woman drove a farm truck; someone ran on a soccer field; a house burned; a couple was married; and then there were the faces, thousands of faces that failed to register anything but the idea of a single shifting face. Aside from the speed, there was something hypnotic and familiar, something intoxicating in this view of life, something that he recalled knowing. But finally the fluttering television was too much like the disorder in his eyes and Remy had to turn away. He reached for the room service menu. “Want to get a real bottle of wine?”

“That,” she said, patting him on the thigh, “is exactly what I want.”

Remy was flipping past the dinner menu toward the wine list when he suddenly turned back. The menu was contained in a three-ring binder, and a separate page had been slipped in, handwritten, and showing that day’s specials.

“We have to leave.” Remy got up and began dressing, the menu open on the bed below him to the dinner special: wasabi marinated duck.

AT NIGHT
the homeless in San Francisco operate like cabbies, she explained to him as they hurried down the block. “Trust me, I know this city. If you make eye contact, they’ll offer to give you directions or walk with you to where you’re going. There’s a whole underground city of the homeless and they come up at night to get money for wine and slices of pizza. And there is always one willing to show you to your hotel for a buck or two, or take you to the best club or restaurant. They all know each other and they wave at each other when they pass, and sometimes roll their eyes, just like cabbies with bad fares. I think there’s even a union,” April said, “like the Five-One-Six or something, the international brotherhood of the homeless and indigent.”

She talked as they hustled down the street with only their carry-on bags, Remy occasionally looking back over his shoulder. He saw what looked like a flash of Markham’s Hawaiian shirt a block back, in a crush of people waiting to cross Geary. Remy and April walked two blocks to Sutter, doubled back, and ducked into a dark corner hotel, the lobby bustling with a Japanese tour group waiting to go to dinner.

“We should go with them,” April said. “Pretend we don’t speak English. Take pictures of everything. Buy postcards and snow globes.”

Remy pulled her through the lobby and out a side door, where they were met by a black man in torn jeans and an engineer’s cap. His teeth were gray and placed at random, a handful on top, fewer on bottom.

“You folks need directions?” the man asked. “I know this city better’n you know your wife’s poodum.”

“We’ll need to see your union card,” April laughed.

The man ignored her as Remy fumbled in his pocket for cash. He handed the man a five-dollar bill. “There’s a white guy in a Hawaiian shirt. Brown hair, really young looking. If he comes this way, I need you to stall him. Ask him for money, knock him down, anything.”

They kept moving, zigging up streets and down their crosses as April turned and read the marquees of theaters and the names of stores and bars. Finally, Remy pulled her into a hotel lounge and they sank low into a table in the corner. “We’ll just sit here for a while and then I’ll go check in,” Remy said.

“That sounds nice,” said April sweetly, drunkenly. “We can wear wigs and grow mustaches so no one recognizes us. And I’ll learn to sew. I’ll sew all our food. We’ll live off the grid, in a cabin built from empty wine bottles.” When the waitress came he ordered whiskey for himself and a glass of red wine for April. Remy looked back over his shoulder to the street outside. Faces moved past like the flickering images on the TV.