“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.”