Zero Zone Read online

  ALSO BY SCOTT O’CONNOR

  A Perfect Universe: Ten Stories

  Half World

  Untouchable

  Among Wolves

  ZERO ZONE

  Copyright © 2020 by Scott O’Connor

  First hardcover edition: 2020

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. No part of this book may be used or reproduced in any manner whatsoever without written permission from the publisher, except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles and reviews.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events is unintended and entirely coincidental.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: O’Connor, Scott, author.

  Title: Zero zone : a novel / Scott O’Connor.

  Description: First hardcover edition. | Berkeley, California : Counterpoint Press, 2020.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2020001930 | ISBN 9781640093737 (hardcover) | ISBN  9781640093744 (ebook)

  Subjects: GSAFD: Fantasy fiction. | Science fiction.

  Classification: LCC PS3615.C595 Z47 2020 | DDC 813/.6—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020001930

  Jacket design by Jaya Miceli

  Book design by Jordan Koluch

  COUNTERPOINT

  2560 Ninth Street, Suite 318

  Berkeley, CA 94710

  www.counterpointpress.com

  Printed in the United States of America

  10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

  For Jenn and Linda O’Connor,

  and for Marion Blow

  I have longed for people before, I have loved people before.

  Not like this.

  It was not this.

  Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.

  —ANNE CARSON, “This”

  CONTENTS

  Prologue

  The White Room

  Chapter 1: Jess

  Manifesto

  From Light + Space

  Spectrum

  Chapter 2: Jess

  From Light + Space

  Breezeway

  Chapter 3: Jess

  From Light + Space

  Fire Season

  Chapter 4: Isabella

  Chapter 5: Jess

  Chapter 6: Isabella

  Chapter 7: Jess

  Zero Zone

  Chapter 8: Martha

  Chapter 9: Tanner

  Chapter 10: Jess

  This World and the Next

  Chapter 11: Martha

  Chapter 12: Jess

  Chapter 13: Tanner

  From Light + Space

  The Way Out

  Chapter 14: Martha

  Chapter 15: Isabella

  Chapter 16: Jess

  Chapter 17: Martha and Isabella

  From Light + Space

  Chapter 18: Jess

  From Light + Space

  Chapter 19: Isabella

  Light and Space

  Chapter 20: Jess

  Chapter 21: Martha

  Chapter 22: Tanner

  Chapter 23: Jess

  Rooms

  Chapter 24

  Chapter 25

  Chapter 26

  Chapter 27

  Chapter 28

  Chapter 29

  Chapter 30

  All Things Bright and Beautiful

  Chapter 31

  From Light + Space

  Chapter 32

  Waterfall

  Acknowledgments

  WINTER 1954

  Jess stood in the crowd on Colorado Boulevard, jumping for a better view, straining to see. She was restless and chilly in the bright, sunny morning, but hopeful, too. Her mother had promised them all something wondrous, a beautiful disruption in the middle of a city street on the first day of the new year.

  They had come to Los Angeles for a week after Christmas. Jess’s mother had long wanted to see the Rose Parade in person. For years Barb read about it in Life magazine, marveling over the colorful photos of the floats, their elaborate designs and ingenious use of flowers and fruit, calling Jess and her brother, Zack, over to the kitchen table, pressing a fingertip to a glossy image: Kids, look—will you look at what they did with the poppies!

  So they made the trip, and waited shoulder to shoulder in the crowd. Jess grew impatient, feeling a little claustrophobic, surrounded by so many larger bodies. Her legs ached from standing so long. She was about to complain again when she heard the sound of drums, the bass thump deep in her chest, a marching band approaching, and then a giant pinwheel of color appeared, the first tall float coming into view.

  Her mother had been right. Wondrous was the word. They pointed and clapped, oohing and aahing for the bands and high-stepping horses and the floats, the floats, sprouting colors Jess had never seen before, deep reds and yellows, pale oranges and pinks (Zack knew the names of the colors, of course—coquelicot and mikado, gingerline and lusty gallant—or at least he said he did, and wanted to make sure everyone knew that he knew), a kaleidoscopic spectrum that made Jess feel like Dorothy stepping from her drab farmhouse into the Technicolor world of Oz. They all watched in a kind of manic shock; the sensory experience was overwhelming. At one point, Jess even saw her father crack a smile. Donald leaned down to whisper into her mother’s ear, and Barb nodded, delighted, her eyes glued to the floats, whispering something back that added even more color to the scene, a rising blush on Donald’s cheeks.

  Convincing Donald to lighten up was one of Barb’s specialties, so after the parade, when Jess and Zack had the idea of spending the next day at the beach, she began a new campaign. Donald hated the very notion: the frigid water, sand in his socks and shoes. They had an ocean back in Boston, didn’t they? And there were so many other unchecked boxes on the travel agent’s itinerary—the Walk of Fame, the Chinese Theatre, Griffith Observatory. But Jess and Zack insisted; they pleaded with their mother to plead with him. The thought of going to the beach in January was so implausible and delicious, playing in the sun and sand while their friends back home were encased in ice and snow.

  Barb sent the kids ahead, zigzagging along the emptying boulevard, gathering poppies that had fallen from the floats, so Jess didn’t hear how her mother made the case, how she insisted or cajoled or bribed, but by the time they returned to the motel the decision had been made.

  Early the next morning they drove their rented Plymouth out to Santa Monica. They walked barefoot over the smooth asphalt of the parking lot, past the big wooden Muscle Beach sign, where a few brawny, bare-chested men were already lifting dumbbells and swinging from what looked like acrobats’ rings. Off in the distance Jess could see the tops of flagpoles and strings of lights from the amusements on the long pier. Her father told them the pier was off-limits. According to his guidebook, it was full of gypsies and juvenile delinquents. Barb rolled her eyes, but cut off Jess’s and Zack’s protest with a quick look that said, We’re already at the beach—don’t press your luck.

  Jess and Zack played down in the wet sand, just within reach of the lapping morning tide. It was still early, and cold, with a thick low-hanging layer of cloud covering the sun, so they wore sweatshirts over their swimsuits as they dug a grid of connecting trenches. As always, Zack led the project. At thirteen, he was two years older than Jess, and obsessed with elaborate design. His school notebooks were filled with pages of branching patterns, mazes, multicolored spirals that bloomed from invisible centers. Supernovas, Jess thought, always awed by what Zack created. Explosions that left no trace of origin, a universe made solely of repercussion and resonance.

  Zack worked feverishly on the beach, draw
ing guidelines with his fingers, instructing Jess to follow behind and dig with her hands. Every time she thought she had completed a passage, she looked up to find he had moved even farther along, pulling his fingers through the wet sand, lengthening and expanding. Frustrated, she called out to him:

  “How do you know when it’s finished?”

  Zack stopped digging and frowned at what they had made so far, his head and one bony hip cocked in opposite directions.

  “It’s never finished,” he said. “But at some point it changes. It becomes something else.”

  They dug for a few more minutes, and then Zack stood again, heeding that mysterious internal signal. He turned to the water and raised his arms, shouting like Moses for the sea to heed his call. As if on command, the tide rushed in. They scampered back to safety and watched the water pour into the labyrinth. Jess saw what Zack meant. The maze was alive now with the surging, circling water, one stream finding another and then joining into a single flow, something new.

  The morning had grown bright despite the cloud cover, and Jess had to shade her eyes when she looked up the beach to her parents’ backlit silhouettes—her father sitting thin and rigid in a lawn chair, her mother cross-legged and bundled in a towel, knees to chin. Just beyond, a lifeguard shack stood on wooden stilts. Jess saw a tall, lean teenage boy in short red trunks on the deck, surveying the water, drinking a soda. The bottle glowed dully in the gauzy light. Jess watched him for a while, and then was struck with an impulse to wave. She raised a sandy arm and waited for a response, but the boy only lifted the bottle back to his mouth and took a long pull.

  “What do you think? Time to take the plunge?”

  Jess’s mother stood beside her, squinting up at the sky. She wore a new swimsuit, with a yellow-and-black sunflower print. Jess thought she looked pretty but cold, her pink skin pebbled with goose bumps. Shivering, Barb tried to convince the kids to shed their sweatshirts and head out into the water. Zack flatly refused, but Jess appreciated her mother’s determination to make the best of the intemperate morning. She pulled off her sweatshirt, took Barb’s hand, and they walked slowly out into the surf.

  The water was staggeringly cold. By the time they were up to their hips they were both laughing and gasping with the ridiculousness of the effort. They hobbled across a wide patch of rocky ground, then reached a quick dip. Jess lost her footing but Barb held tight to her hand, keeping her upright. They continued on, until the water cupped Jess’s chin and her mother’s breasts. They turned and Barb waved at the beach, but there was nothing to see. The sun had finally come out and the surface of the water was nearly blinding in its dappled brilliance. With her free hand Jess waved, too, thinking of the lifeguard at the shack, but then the hand her mother held was also free, and Jess was loose in the water.

  A wave hit her from the back, not a giant wave, but big enough, and then the undercurrent pulled her feet off the ground, spinning her around. She heard her mother shout. A shadow fell over her, a sudden dark chill. Straining to keep her head above water, she turned to find an even larger wave cresting, drawing up to its full height, its hooded head blocking the sun.

  It held for a moment, poised, terrifying and magnificent, and then fell upon her.

  Falling, then floating, suspended in the emptiness. She opened her eyes and saw nothing, just murky black, but after a panicked moment the salt washed them clear and she could see.

  Light reached down, dimly, through the surface far above. Orange and yellow streaks, gingerline and mikado, the light swirling with sand, revealing the vast space around her like columns defining a room. Miniature bubbles drifted by, captured moments of her own final breath.

  She floated in that space, the bubbles in the light like a thousand stars surrounding.

  Her lungs were full, she was dying and scared of dying but there was another feeling, too, surprising, incongruous. Her body was bright with it, her chest tingling, her fingers and toes. This was something she never could have imagined, this unknown she was now within, the terrible beauty of this once hidden place.

  Then a hand was on her, pulling hard, her vision blurring, and then her head was above water, she could see the sky, clear now, blue and white, the pier, the curl of coastline to the north. She was dropped onto the sand, she saw a flash of red trunks, and the lifeguard bent over her, his hands on her chest, pushing until she vomited water, then covering her mouth with his, breathing into her. Jess saw her mother standing behind him, her hands up at her cheeks, her mouth open like Jess’s mouth. She heard her father yelling her name from somewhere, and then Zack’s voice calling, Is she dead? Is she dead?

  The lifeguard lifted his head, his lips leaving hers. Jess watched him look off into some inner distance, counting, before lowering and breathing into her again. His mouth was warm and sticky sweet from the soda. After another breath the lifeguard turned his head, his ear at her mouth, listening. Jess wanted to whisper something that only he would hear, something about what she had seen underwater, the terrifying, beautiful place she had discovered, but before she could make a sound he nodded and helped her to her feet.

  Her mother grabbed her in a tight embrace. Her father placed a hand on her shoulder, squeezing. He tried to tip the lifeguard, pressing a small fold of bills into his hand, but the boy refused, embarrassed by the gesture. Zack had shut up. He watched Jess with a look somewhere between relief and disappointment.

  Back in Pasadena at the Hamburger Hamlet, Zack and her parents couldn’t stop talking about the incident, telling and retelling it from different angles, disputing details, already starting to mythologize what was certain to become a tentpole story in Shepard family lore. But Jess knew that this wasn’t the right story—losing her mother’s hand, disappearing beneath the waves, the lifeguard’s dramatic rescue. It was a story, it was their story, but it wasn’t hers.

  She was quiet in the booth, picking at her fries. What was this feeling? Not what it should have been. Not relief, or gratitude. It was something else. It was loss, it was grief. She felt the weight of it, alone and overcome, remembering the light under the water, the sacred stillness she had floated in, and feeling, against all logic, that she had been taken from it too soon.

  JESS

  SUMMER 1979

  Jess faced the blank wall, holding her paintbrush, looking for any marks she might have missed. It was a chilly seaside morning, gray and damp, but as the fog began to lift the light through the uncovered windows grew brighter and clearer, washing the white room free of seams and corners, the parameters of defined space.

  In the brightness her eyes swam with black floaters, flocks of short, dark lines like headless kite strings rising skyward. The floaters made it hard to judge whether the wall was clean. She dabbed at a few, unsure, but they defied erasure.

  On the other side of the studio, one of Beethoven’s sonatas turned on the record player. The piano’s notes climbed, reaching, vivid and glistening. She tried to focus on the music, its promise, but other sounds seeped in from outside: motorcycles rumbling down on Pacific Avenue; gulls screaming over Venice Beach; skateboarders grinding down the sidewalk on their way up to Dogtown, the abandoned amusement park that still clung to the crumbling pier.

  A lone runnel of paint slid down the brush handle to her wrist. She wore a sleeveless white T-shirt and her white painter’s pants. In the past, her achromatic work clothes made her feel transparent, enabling her to remove herself from the image of her studio and focus on what the space might become. But now when she saw the room in her mind she could not rid herself from it: her dark frizz of hair, the blue bruises on her elbows from cleaning the floor earlier that morning. She was an intruder, a blemish in the clean white space.

  The sonata ended, leaving a sudden silence. Jess crossed the studio and turned the record over. Zack had given this set of sonatas to their aunt Ruth for Christmas, that first year in L.A. Jess had inherited the records, or maybe just taken them, she supposed. They hadn’t been willed to her; she found them still
stacked on the spindle in Ruth’s stereo cabinet the morning after her memorial service.

  I listen to them when I need to retune.

  Jess could still hear Ruth’s voice, a steady, wonderfully nasal tone that never shed the open vowels of her New England upbringing. She remembered her aunt standing by the record player in her bedroom, looking out the back window, the piano’s notes rising like the sun over the short row of citrus trees behind the bungalow. It was Christmas morning, six months after their parents’ accident. Jess watched Ruth close her eyes in the wash of new light, as if waiting for something to arrive.

  Jess had never seen sunrises like those, vivid blue to purple to orange, the entire spectrum imprinted along the horizon. And then the other side of those hours, the bookend of the day, the deep rich sunset, bloodred in the west. In the evenings they watched from the front porch, Ruth with a can of Hamm’s in one hand, a Pall Mall burning between the fingers of the other. There was no music playing, but Jess still heard the echo of the sonatas, as if the sound had traveled to sink and fade along the sun’s arc.

  What did you think of that one? Ruth’s voice lower now, silvery with smoke. Asking about the sunset, or maybe about the entire day just passed.

  In her studio, Jess dipped the long-handled roller into the paint pan and pushed it along the floor. Starting in the far corner, she worked her way out and back. Slow strokes. The paint’s sour-sweet smell filled the room. The roller squished in the pan and then there was the sound of the push and spread, shush-shush, like a finger to the lips, a secret.

  She remembered how they mocked her for this, the ritual, the preparation. All those young men, that club of testosterone-fueled painters and sculptors leaning in the doorway of her big old studio space on Navy Street, smoking and chuckling. Housework, they called it. Hey, Jess, will you clean my room next?

  Another dark shape slid into the periphery of her vision, like a human shadow lurking. It stood for a long moment, blocking the edge of her sight before moving away.

  Most mornings when she left her apartment Jess walked down the stairs, past the locked studio door on the second floor and out onto Pacific Avenue, hurrying through the ever-growing gauntlet of junkies, Jesus freaks, doomsday prophets with their cardboard signs and spit-flecked warnings. But this morning she woke thinking of Ruth, and she wanted to hear the sonatas, not up in her apartment but in an uncluttered space, so she entered the studio for the first time in months. Now here she was, cleaning and repainting. Force of habit, maybe. Once there had been nothing more exciting than the possibility of the white room. This had been the place where she could transform her dreams and ideas and fears into something new. But that was impossible now. She had no new ideas, and her dreams were best swept into the dark corners upon waking. As for her fears, they had all bled free. They walked everywhere with her now, dark shapes floating just out of sight.