The Zero Read Free

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. AnEMT 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