“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.