Scrapper

1

WHEN KELLY SAVED THE BOY he was not yet again living any real life, just wallowing in the aftermath of terrible error. Later he would say he’d lived that year by his hands and by his back and by his shoulders and his wrists and his legs and his knees. The year of the body, he’d say, showing his opened fists, the thick white blistering of his calluses — and forget the head, never mind the heart. After the collapse began he’d barely thought, barely spoken, tried for a time to slow his thoughts to silence, or else to bury them with effort, exhaustion. He’d worked past the pains he’d known, found deeper places to lodge a throbbing, but then in the zone the incompleteness of every building became an inkblot for the subconscious. Whatever was missing would be supplied.

The farther he moved toward the center of the zone the more the neighborhoods sagged, all the wood falling off of brick, most every house uninhabited, the stores a couple thousand square feet of blank shelves, windows barred against the stealing of the nothing there. Paint scraped off concrete, concrete crumbled, turned to dust beneath the weather. Wind damage, water damage. Fire and flood. Before the zone Kelly had never known rain alone could turn a building to dust. But rain had flooded the Great Lakes, ice had sheered the cliffs of the state from off the land, shaped the dunes he’d dreamed of often after he’d left the state. The streets here were empty of traffic and in some neighborhoods the grass overran the sidewalks. He parked his truck, got out, walked the paved lanes instead. On trash days he could tell whether a house was occupied by whether or not a container appeared at the curb. There were other methods of determining inhabitation: the sound of televisions or radios, the presence of cut grass. But some men cut the grass for their neighbors to hide how they were the last ones living on their block. A way of pretending normality, despite the boarded windows, the graffiti, the other front doors never opened. Despite the absolute absence of other cars, other human voices.

Mostly it was easier. Mostly there was no question where there were people left behind. The only questions he had to ask were about opportunity, risk, metal.

Whenever Kelly entered an uninhabited house he understood he entered some life he might have lived, how the emptiness of every room pulled him inside out. A furnishing of the self. He opened the front door and the house ceased its stillness. If it had ever been inert it wasn’t now. No structure was once it held a human consciousness. In the South Kelly had worked construction, had seen firsthand how a house unlived in wasn’t a house. It was so easy to awaken a place. The way a doorknob awoke a memory. The way the angles of a room recalled other rooms. There were blueprints etched across his memories, and in some houses those memories activated: the bedrooms of his parents, the bedrooms of his parents’ friends. An angle of light like one he’d lain in as a child, reading a book on birds. The deep dark of a basement, the other dark of an attic. How the fear of the dark hung at the lip of a basement stairs, how it hesitated at the foot of any stairs leading up, toward whatever was below or above the house, outside its public space.

With his smartphone he could check the prices of what he salvaged: the amounts offered changed day to day but he couldn’t wait days to sell what he’d dug. At the salvage yards the workers weighed the truck loaded and then they weighed the truck empty, paid him a price multiplied against the difference. The salvage men photocopied his ID, took an inky thumbprint. This was a legitimate business, they said. They asked where he’d gotten the scrap and he lied. They asked again and he took a lower price per pound.

Whatever the salvage yards wouldn’t take he took to other men, brokers running scrap out of a backyard or an idle warehouse. There was no trouble with space. There was space everywhere. The unofficial yards kept unofficial hours. You could show up in the middle of the day and find the place deserted, show up at midnight and find three guys playing cards, getting high, cutting scrap. They paid a fraction of the price, the price of no questions asked. Whatever was suspect they’d break until it was sellable. There were scrapyards where no one asked these brokers questions, contractors who would mix the questionable stuff with more honest trade.

Once he’d arrived to find a man cutting a copper statue with a power saw. The man shirtless, skin gleaming, working without eye protection, a stub of a cigarette clamped in his mouth. The statue’s arms sawed at the elbows. The head on the ground. The saw working its way through the torso at a steep diagonal. The kerf of the cut wide like a wound from a sword. Then the smashing the hands with a sledge. Then the mutilating the head into unrecognizable shards.

Broker: a ridiculous word for such a man but everyone self-justified. Everyone wanted to be more than what they were.

The salvage men reminded him: it wasn’t the function they sold but the form. It didn’t matter if he broke a broken refrigerator. What mattered was getting it to the truck without straining his back. There was more steel and iron than anything else but they paid the least of anything. A hundred pounds of copper pipe paid more than double a truckload of steel. Same for copper wire, copper cable. You could ransack the rooms of a house but the best stuff was hidden behind the walls. It wasn’t the metal that held the house up but you wouldn’t want to live there with it gone.

Kelly could picture the city’s glory days but it took a certain imagination. On the television in his barely furnished apartment he watched a blonde reporter say the collapse was still in progress but now it was down to the aftershocks. Sometimes the news interviewed one of the left behind. Once this man or woman had been an autoworker or a grocery clerk like anyone else. What mysteries they were now, the blonde reporter said, these unemployed men and women with their forlorn streets, their locked doors nested behind locked doors.

Why didn’t they leave, if things were so bad.

Why didn’t we understand why, if we had homes of our own.

Inside a rotting duplex, he opened a refrigerator long unplugged and pulled its bulk away from the wall, found a carton of milk dated more recently than he’d expected. A house stayed intact as long as it had inhabitants but after they left the decay began. Wires lost their hum, pipes went dry. Doors and windows could be covered or replaced with plywood but their protection would not last and then the inquiries of thieves exposed the inside of the house, then the upper floors filled with wind and rain, the changeable weather of the Midwest. Soon every carpeted room turned to molder and rot, roofs fell through, the rats and cockroaches had their way.

A howl of wind came banging through a front door, the repeated slamming of a thrown bolt against a doorframe shivered his skin. He knew it wasn’t human voices that held back the fall of cities. It wasn’t any number of people sharing a room, wasn’t the presence of family meals. Everywhere he went he saw the quiet creep of falling down, falling in. A contest of wills, the agonies of architects against the patience of nature.

Opened to the elements the inside of a house smelled mostly like the outside. There was everywhere more emptiness than he’d imagined. The surface was void of anything valuable and so he had to go deeper. There were inferences to be drawn from the locations of outlets, junction boxes. A house changed after he saw its walls as containers. He began to understand the arcane layouts of the worlds behind walls, learned to find the bathroom before he went looking for the pipes. He opened the walls with a sledge and the older the house the more copper he found. He wrapped his gloves around the jacketing of wires and leaned back, leveraging his weight toward the snap. Or else he took a hacksaw to a piece of pipe, catching it before it fell into the wall.

He kicked through a plaster wall and after he withdrew his foot he found the remains of a squirrel nestled against the studs. Tiny skull, tiny feet, all the clamber long ago gone out of it. He cradled the bones, walked slowly toward the back of the house, the bouncing screen door he’d left open. Halfway there he caught himself in the last arc of a busted mirror. What was he doing here. What jumble of bones and the past was in his hands. What was he doing and why.

Outside another house, he found a broken window, cleared the glass to grant access to the interior. The house’s first floor skewed back a couple of decades, gave off a story of wood paneling and thick carpet, avocado appliances. The furniture was mostly gone except for a sagged couch propped against the front wall of the living room, its seats facing in, and in another room he found a busted dresser, missing its drawers. He thought it was possible to underestimate how many people had lived in each room, the distance between the ideal and the necessary. Kelly had grown up in his own bedroom but his father had shared his with two brothers. His grandfather had been born in a one-room house, home to nine brothers and two parents, the ghosts of three miscarriages and a stillborn daughter. Theirs was a family of men, no women except the ones they were born to or married. And of all the men in this family it was only Kelly who had never married, never bred.

He worked within the zone during the day where he could and at night where he couldn’t. In the deep dark of unlit streets there was less chance of being disturbed but the need for light gave away his position. He wore a headlamp strapped around his forehead but the light meant others could see him moving. Sometimes he thought he saw shapes swarming outside the windows. If he heard a voice call out in the darkness, then he paused where he was. If he heard two voices he shut off his headlamp and let the darkness reshape his pupils. He didn’t have much imagination left but what imagination he had he thought he could do without.

After the fire, the ringing he heard in his ears never went fully away, but it got worse when he did too much, worked too hard, pushed himself inhuman. Sometimes in the dark he stood still and listened to it sing.

He didn’t carry a weapon, didn’t keep one in his truck. If he bought a gun he would always know where it was and one day he would use it. But often there was a tool in his hands, a hammer perhaps, and even if his hands were all he had it didn’t mean they couldn’t be used to defend himself, to fight back, to hurt in turn.

At the hospice shop the newest clothes went the fastest. He pledged anew his old loyalties to the state’s teams, showed his allegiance with t-shirts in team colors. He thought he’d kept up while he was away but if he recognized a name on the back of a shirt maybe the player had been retired for years. The oldest shirts were three for a dollar fifty and if one fit he bought all three.

If he had to buy his soap at the hospice shop he worried it was the soap of the dead. Some weeks he could afford better but he’d traveled to the city with a new frugalness and he was determined not to chase it away. He walked the shop, wondered whose life the photo frames had contained. He wasn’t ever in a hurry. He had to hustle to do enough work but it hardly took his whole week. He thought he would like reading a book inscribed with someone else’s marginalia but when he got the book home he found he didn’t need the voices of more ghosts. That was already what reading was.

This was his year of diminishment. Less was all there was. Even where there were people left there wasn’t any of the commerce people needed to make good. He bought his cereal in the same place he bought his beer and the two choices were flakes with sugar, flakes without. There was hardly anything fresh on the shelves anywhere. At best a bowl of apples next to the cash register, a couple bananas under the cigarettes, beside the lotto tickets.

He didn’t believe in luck but he believed in bananas.

A new twelve-pound sledgehammer was forty dollars, replacement handles fourteen. A pipe cutter cost twenty dollars, tinner snips thirteen. A heavy cable cutter might run one hundred ninety. He could make any purchase worth it but he had to be sure. He was never sure. The locking toolbox for the truck had cost three hundred dollars but his tools were safer there than in his apartment. His truck became his most necessary possession: an all-new chassis the better year he’d made the purchase, a multidisplacement V-8 under the hood. Live axles for maximum longevity and durability. Inboard dash navigation, maps swinging with the sweep of overhead satellites. An anxiety of attractive credit terms, secured with a down payment of wages earned and a loan guaranteed by the promise of more paychecks which had not come.

He bought a lamp, a folding table, a pair of unmatched chairs. His bedroom was small, his bathroom smaller. There were just the two rooms. There was more room than he needed. He bought dishes and utensils and a glass and a mug, took them home to the kitchenette barely hidden behind a thin wall. He had to listen to the refrigerator cycle while he tried to sleep. The apartment sat on the first floor of a converted motel, with other apartments on both sides, behind and above. During the day he had to listen to two children crisscross the floor above him for hours. As if running were so novel an activity they might never quit. At night he heard the laughter of loud men, the anger of shrill women, the frustrations of both sexes. A cheap apartment meant living in a cloud of your neighbors, their sounds and smells, the obscene evidence of their activities. He had to turn the television up at least as loud as his neighbors or he couldn’t understand the shows. Often the nightly news became a lesson in lip-reading but he watched until he’d seen both the weather and the blonde reporter, smart in her pantsuits.

The floor was the only quiet surface and so sometimes he lay down upon the scratchy wear of the carpet to put one ear and then the other to the ground. Trying to hear how hearing nothing sounded.

The city was bisected by a freeway reaching from north to south, eighteen hundred miles running head to heel across the country. There weren’t any mountains in this part of the state but there were mountains on this road, farther off in either direction. The road knew the ocean. It knew the greatness of the lakes. The road could take Kelly to Canada or the Deep South or the Atlantic coast. The road could take him home, to a small town two hours north, named for a tree sharing its name with a poison.

Last he’d heard everyone he knew there was still around, except his parents and the other assorted dead. The last time he visited was for his mother’s funeral. All the faces in the church were so old but they were mostly the same faces he’d grown up among. The swishing movements of suit and skirt, of standing and kneeling and standing and sitting in a half-empty church. He’d seen his mother lowered into the ground but hadn’t watched the ground close. The woman he’d been with had wanted to see where he grew up but he’d asked her not to come. They weren’t married but they lived together, owned a house down south. There wasn’t anything to be ashamed of but he didn’t want to answer any questions. He didn’t plan on ever going back again so better to tell his aunts and uncles he was alone.

He had some cousins there, a few lost friends. There wasn’t any juice left. If he went to them it wouldn’t be as their relation but as the stranger he’d become. If there was one thing he needed the zone to teach him it was how to be alone again. Unquestioned and uncharged.

When he awoke disoriented in the strobing dark of the apartment he opened the phone’s map to watch the satellites locate him exactly. First a series of shrinking circles, then a blue light pulsing atop the city. The hated screen, so brightly assuring. This is where I am, he would whisper. This is what I am doing. It was so clean a fact. If the noise in his building or the ringing in his ears wouldn’t let him sleep he lay on his mattress, watched documentaries on the television. There he rediscovered the life on other continents, the wilder world beyond raccoons and squirrels and whitetail deer, the ordinary menagerie of the midwestern states. On-screen, elephants mourned their dead and buried the bones, an alligator waited in a pit of drought and mud for thirst to make the meat stupid. A dung beetle pushed a ball of shit across a desert. You did what you had to do. You organized your life, moved every action into categories and compartments of time and type and task, you looked at your life and you knew who you were: this was worldview, ideology, what you had of either, who you were, who you’d been. Today he was this person, speaking these words, concerned only with this narrow sliver of experience, whatever could be had within the confines of the zone.

There had once been a magnificence to these streets and the evidence of those times was still there, in the zone, in edifices to ideas that had not endured. On many days Kelly saw the endurance of the beautiful, the way the slow degradation of acid rain and other weather could make the zone more lovely, not less. He entered churches where painted crosses faded from the walls, where wind howled some days through stolen stained glass, while on other days birds flitted between the iron braces left behind. The braces waiting for the theft. The pews remaining but the organ pipes long gone. Dust and smatter everywhere, a city’s silt fallen, unswept, a manifestation, the refuse of long-ago prayers. The birds, nesting in the rafters. American gods, American temples, all the evidence anyone needed to indict the temporariness of American belief.

He walked shredded schools lacking students but not piles of serviceable desks, ran his hands along the spines of books left behind, the previous fictions of history. Stories no one wanted to steal. Bottles of printer’s ink lined glassless windowsills, glowed in shafts of sunlight, colored vacant offices blue and red and black and superblue. Locker rooms lay unlocked, the locker doors removed, the opened walls spilling onto gym floors made of century-dead trees, the wax scuffed with shoes and time, tagged with layers of spray paint.

He wandered the rows of emptied houses and overgrown yards, roamed grassy blocks beneath bare-socketed streetlights. In every structure he entered he found some objects trashed and some he could sell and also some rare and better and less-valuable objects, objects abandoned by accident, chance’s castaways. Soon he lifted some new bauble from nearly every site, folded a broken-spined paperback into his pocket, ripped a single pencil-marred Ave Maria from a hymnal, pocketed a child toy’s heavy as lead, a bent-tined fork kicked behind a counter. He brought home some objects he planned to use and some he wanted to look at and in his apartment he chose a cupboard meant for dishes to store these more-useless thefts, an exhibit of his travels in the zone, of what relics had called out in the places he’d been, the bleak houses of the blackout city.

Kelly thought the world wasn’t full of special objects, only plain ones. Nothing was assembled special, nothing and no one, but the plainest objects could be supercharged by attention, made nuclear by suggestion. He could pick up the same object in two different houses and in one sense a completely different thrumming. What he wanted was anything loved. When he couldn’t remember anymore where he had taken something from, then he threw it out. Making emotion last wasn’t the objects’ first power but it was the power he wanted most. Anything he took from someone else’s life wouldn’t work forever but if he kept acquiring more maybe the feelings might remain, transferred across the overlap.

The fall sun shining on the waving grass, the hardy scrub of trees spreading across vacancies. Everywhere he took something he tried to leave something else behind. The unexpected juxtaposition of nature and ruin. Metal for memories, memories for metal. There was so much he wanted gone. There was such a sprawling untenanted city in which to dump it. And in the falling streets he discovered the great perseverance of the people who remained. Their faces shined in the light wherever he saw them, on porches or in driveways, outside liquor stores and bars. He wasn’t their neighbor but he saw their beauty. They looked crazy with grief. The great glory of their sadness. The way it would last and last. He needed to eat and there wasn’t any work but what was he taking from these people. Nothing, he told himself, they had not already lost.

To leave the edge of the zone for its center was to abandon the present for the future and wherever Kelly went he thought he might be the last person to see these sights. Others would come with bulldozers and excavators — or else with arson and theft — but they wouldn’t see how he saw, moving carefully through these rooms and hallways, staring out these windows, marveling at the way you could see the lit skyline of the inhabited city from the endless dusk of its unlit neighborhoods. There were still some progressions in play but he saw how the zone had moved beyond time. Or at least outside of the time marked by digital clocks, smartphone calendars. Inside the zone events moved along paths solar, lunar, seasonal; new geological epochs marked by strata of waste, eras identifiable by the brand names left inside cupboards, by the industrial design of unpowered appliances. A preview of what the world would look like during its coming decline. Kelly pretended he carried the last human gaze door-to-door, window to window, exploring the first outpost of a culture pushed past repair. It could be destroyed but could it be fixed? All the better futures might not arrive. He didn’t think his was the final generation, but perhaps the last might already be born.

What did this mean for him, for the good man he had tried and failed to be?

In some houses he found handwritten notes. He found one taped to the cracked plaster across from the house’s front door: we’re leaving in the morning. And then the date the last inhabitants left, not so long ago. In the back of a child’s closet he found a scrawl of crayon reading i’ll be back for you, written to the house, to whatever the child thought a house was. Sometimes there was an animal living there still. The animal was always a cat. What did these cats eat? Where did they sleep and piss and shit? Sometimes it wasn’t hard to see. The skeletons of mice. Shit in one corner of a room, the smell of piss everywhere.

The cat following Kelly from room to room, rubbing its body against his boots.

Names everywhere. On the houses. In the asphalt. Carved into trees, fences, doors.

i love you house, one note read.

i built this house with my hands, said another.

goodbye.

i’m sorry.

we had to leave but this was home.

2

KELLY SCRIBBLED HIS FIRST NAME on a name tag, adhered it to his shirt pocket, took a seat on the unoccupied side of the circle of chairs. The group’s facilitator crossed the church basement, offered her hand. She was all trunk, her middle dwarfing her limbs, had a small mole sprouted from the sensitive skin beneath her lip, a tiny flaw in a good face. She called Kelly by his name, asked if he wanted to share.

No, he said. He wanted to listen.

She nodded, patted his hand, released him. When the sharing began the others repeated the past, made it present again. The simultaneity of error and accident, of grief and loss. A red-haired woman had lost her husband in a car crash. A beautiful teenager lost her best friend in a drive-by shooting. The automobile had made the city great but look how much it took in return. The night stretched long. A house fire, a drowning, all the cancers and their medieval treatments. Whenever there were suicides no one ever mentioned the methods. There was a parade of misery described but much of it sounded familiar, stories whose ends could be known by their beginnings. Kelly’s face twisted and he didn’t know how to make it stop. How long had the others been coming. How many times had they come together to share their stories, in these words. There was change pushing forth from their faces but he could see how deep the past had carved them. He didn’t know how to escape the constraints of the past either but maybe he’d come to the group to find out.

If Kelly had shared he would have said that he was afraid, that what he wanted was a way to end his fear.

For a long time, he might have said, he had at least succeeded in feeling it less.

Love meant letting his vigilance down but his vigilance had served him better. He had slipped only once.

As the others talked Kelly remembered the hardness of his father. How big the man’s face had been, all jowls and grinding jaws, the father chewing side to side like a ruminant. Those square teeth against pot roast, carrots, root vegetables. Biscuits from a can. The way the man’s joints popped when he walked, how he cracked his knuckles at the table and during the news and after, his father’s limbering of his body for food, information, fucking. The way he shook his shoulders loose when he stood from the table, when he exited the bedroom pale and spindle legged and splendid in his underwear. His father the wrestling coach, Kelly his best student, a state champion like his father before him. In those boyish days Kelly had loved the father with an intensity never again felt, loved the way the man strode the earth grimed with work, his bones shining through his skin as he sat silent before the glowing television, his voice rarely eloquent except in the darkest hour of night, when sometimes he came into Kelly’s room, as some stranger Kelly would have to pretend was not still there when they awoke.

Wrestling in high school had led to wrestling in college but he hadn’t lasted. With others it was a knee or a shoulder but his injury had been some failure of will, an inability to show up. A deep lethargy had come over him once out of his father’s home, out from under his father’s coaching. He’d started sleeping long and late, ten or twelve hours a night. In classes he’d dozed and dreamed and at practice he’d refused to work his hardest, turning in the slowest laps, the laziest reps and calisthenics, shying away from the contact of position drills, mock rounds.

Takedown, reversal, escape, takedown, breakdown, fall: a basic plot that could be complicated by a clever strategy, some technical achievement. He stopped shooting on the legs, stopped working toward the pin. A flinching from the fight. Three rounds passed, three minutes then two minutes then two more. During matches he got cited for stalling, a refusal to engage. If he started on top the other boy would explode unchecked to his feet. Kelly tried to keep his distance but it was after he was taken down his real talents emerged. There were only a few ways to escape: the stand-up, the switch, the sit-out, the roll. He didn’t engage but he didn’t give up either. He could be taken down and turned on his back but he was hard to pin, grew more stubborn the closer he got to defeat. Maybe he wouldn’t try to win but he couldn’t stomach losing.

Weigh-in days you could check your weight in the morning with a banana in your hand and if you were underweight you could eat the banana. In the mirror there were always the folds of your former self, the hanging skin around the waist, self as shame refusing to fall away. You ate or didn’t eat the banana. You ran the miles. You carried the carcass of before. You climbed the scale naked and nervous and old as you had ever been and you were so young and you wondered if today was the day you measured light enough for battle.

He remembered the bodies of the other boys, lean and carved, organized by weight class. Veins cording forearms and calves, throbbing out of a neck the size of a thigh. Fingers cracked and broken and taped, eyes screwed and bulged out of a drawn face, all bones and bravery. He could go days without food, without any more liquid than it took to rinse his mouth. All your own meat could be made of was food and if you didn’t eat any food there’d be less meat.

Every morning he lifted and ran and every afternoon he threw his body at the body of another boy, practiced takedowns and reversals and arm bars, the half nelson, the quarter nelson. There were illegal moves no one ever taught but the team learned them anyway, taught each other, passed them down. Armlocks, leglocks, spinal locks. Small-joint manipulation. Choke holds, other methods for smothering. Slamming or spiking. No punching, no kicking, no gouging of the eyes. No fishhooking the mouth or nose. No squeezing the genitals. These were the ways to hurt a man, to bend his will faster than the rules would allow. You couldn’t use them in a match but after you had the knowledge weren’t you waiting for your chance.

His coach yelled but Kelly’s failure wasn’t a matter of motivation. Kelly skipped a practice, failed a weigh-in, missed the bus for a meet. There were better weeks where he found his enthusiasm and the coach said he thought maybe Kelly was shaking off a freshman slump but before the season ended Kelly packed his dorm room and left campus. There wasn’t anyone to tell he was leaving. He appreciated the coach giving him a chance but he didn’t owe the man a call. They weren’t close, not like the coach was close to the other guys.

He hadn’t made the kind of friends he wanted to make. He knew he wasn’t stupid but the classes had bored him too. Their steady drip of fact, fact, fact. He didn’t call his parents but before he left his father called him, said the coach had called first.

You can always come home, his father said.

Back home Kelly’s grandfather had worked for the copper mines in the state’s Upper Peninsula, his father in the auto factories near the town named like poison. The mines were long exhausted, the mine towns exhausted too. The factories weren’t hiring or they were paying half wages and no benefits or they were closed. If there wouldn’t be work, what else was there to go home to? Nothing Kelly wanted again.

Gas was cheap and a dollar could buy Kelly twenty miles in his ancient red Firebird, the car all he had to show for a year spent in fast food, his wrestler’s body hungry over the fryers. How far he escaped depended on how he drove but he wasn’t so careful in those days, liked to depress the pedal past prudence. He picked a southern city, rented an apartment, slowly bought used furniture, dishes, appliances. Then a progression of years, compressed into a list of occupations: there was work in kitchens, work in lumberyards, work painting the sides of houses, and then building houses too, framework and roofing and drywall, wallpaper and paint. There were girls but for a long time nothing steady. All he had left were isolated incidents, recurring images preserved by their rarity: the opening clasp of a front-closure bra, the first time a hand slid down the front of his undone jeans without his asking, the way community-college legs crossed in the low cramp of the Firebird’s passenger seat.

He didn’t remember anyone’s name from those years. Not the names of the girls, not the names of the boys he had wrestled with, not the names of the men he had worked beside.

As a boy he’d thought to know the name of a thing was to love it. But his father had known his name. So had his mother who had done nothing, said nothing.

There was a painter with the construction outfit with hands too big for his body and after a shared brawl in a dive bar parking lot it was this man who first took Kelly to the gym, said he saw a nervous energy Kelly needed somewhere to put. Kelly lowered his bruised face and said yes, lifted his busted hands. He’d missed the combat part of wrestling, the working out of aggressions in the mat room. Together Kelly and the painter lifted weights, hit the speed bag and the heavy bag until the painter said Kelly was ready to spar.

The painter was right: there was something Kelly had been looking for and here in the gym he was finding it, better than wrestling. More his own. The absence of his father, his father’s coaching. The complete absence of team. When sparring Kelly didn’t have the right kind of quickness and he wasn’t strong enough but he was plenty angry if provoked right. He’d move his feet wrong, sluggish, hold his hands too wide, but after the first few punches got through he’d discover his anger, find his gait. He wore himself out quick and never won anything but he made a lot of faces uglier, colored some ribs black and blue. He told the painter he saw better with blood in his eyes, with one eye bruised shut. He didn’t smile when he was joking. He didn’t know how to look friendly enough with his teeth bared.

What he remembered most was how much he had wanted the hitting, the being hit. Direct damage replacing submission, fists in place of locks and holds. He craved the space right before a punch landed in either direction, how there was a second where you could put a thought in harm’s way, let it get pulverized within a crater of flesh. He started to cut all ties with home, as easy as refusing to call. By the time he came back north, many years later, he had all the agency he’d ever thought to wish for. Even if his parents had lived forever he would have found a way to orphan himself.

He went to the church on the wrong days too, to watch other people pray. The kneeling and rocking, the low murmur of their speaking in tongues, mimicking the voices of angels. The habits of his parents, his parents’ friends, the parents of his friends. The prayers of thanks, the prayers of protection from suffering, the prayers of thanks for how suffering made them strong. He’d carried a rosary in his pocket long after he stopped believing but one day he’d left it behind, abruptly filled with ridiculous mistrust of its possession. He wasn’t about to start speaking in tongues again but he still liked the way those beads looked between other people’s hands.

When he didn’t understand what he saw he took a picture with his phone: a sign he hadn’t seen before, the absolute shadows of dusk on a street lacking streetlights, a high cast of graffiti, a flyer bearing the insignia of the city watch, the orange-clad volunteers he occasionally saw in the zone. Or else inside the houses, some configuration of wiring he wasn’t familiar with: knob and tube, the Carter system, the California three-way. He took pictures of his queries and sometimes he discovered their answers but other times he hit some wrong button and reversed the camera to accidentally take a picture of his own face, this man covered in dust and sweat and always sporting the same grime-stained expression. There was a record of his year in the city accumulating in the camera roll but who was he supposed to show the pictures. There was an icon on the screen meaning share but it wanted to know who with.

The city was famous for its music and when Kelly knew he wouldn’t sleep he went looking for the sound he remembered. On the best nights the music pounded heavy from the PA, its rolling torpor loud enough to make talent an irrelevant measure. He set himself apart, moved his feet and his arms in his own approximation of the rhythm. He wasn’t without feelings but he was aware of their constrained range, his distance from their centers.

The band quit the stage, the drinkers hung on to the rail. The door to the parking lot opened, admitted a woman on her own, arrived late enough to skip the cover. There was an open seat beside Kelly but there was a longer run of seating on the opposite end of the rail, around the curve, past the uninhabited waitress station.

Kelly watched the girl make the turn, sensed something surprising drag at his gaze.

When he thought about this moment afterward, he could see her limp more clearly, but this wasn’t memory, just familiarity’s revision.

He would call her girl from the start but even then he knew she was the same age as him, maybe older. From across the rail he watched her hands move, her bare fingers lighting cigarettes, tearing the labels away from consecutive bottles of beer, her painted nails scratching at the brown glass. He raised a hand to the bartender, sent another beer around the bar. The girl with the limp didn’t acknowledge the drink but he watched her smile to receive it.

There was a kind of bravery in his heart but it didn’t prevent him from knowing what he was. He wasn’t afraid of self-deception except in others.

When she left the bar she left on foot, which meant she lived in the neighborhood. There were others who lived here too but not in every house. She was a block ahead and now he saw her limp entire, the way one foot dragged and turned, the extra sway it added to her step. She slowed, turned the corner away from these houses and toward the rare apartments beyond. Even before she reached the stairs leading up to the barred gate of her building he knew she knew he was behind her. He tried to signal his innocence but what did innocence look like. He could smell the city and he could smell himself, a shared pungency. He wiped at his face and ran his fingers through his hair and on his hands he smelled his cigarettes mixing with stolen steel, copper’s tang, the other alloys and elements each inert until touched. Even every handful of coins smelled like its owner and on his hands he could smell all the old metal of the city, the dead sweat of its lost citizens mingled with his own living scent.

The girl with the limp turned upon the stairs and he saw her face clearly for the first time. He hadn’t realized he’d gotten so close. There were words he wanted to say. Who she looked like. Why he had bought her a drink. Why he had followed her home.

He said, I’m sorry I followed you.

He said, I thought you were someone else.

He had, back in the bar. And there was no mistaking the resemblance now.

He said, I think I knew you.

But what he’d meant to say was I thought.

She put her key in the door, turned the key. Even from his distance he could hear the clunk of the bolt. She pushed the door inward an invisible inch. When she turned back he could see the damage, had learned to recognize it in others. The way what happened to you either made you defensive or reckless and how now it was the reckless who were his people. When she entered the white light of the hallway beyond the door he knew she would invite him in without additional word or gesture, by leaving the door open wide to the street, by waiting for him to leave it yawning or else to close it, to close the door behind him as he entered.

THE CITY CLOSED ANOTHER DOZEN schools and after the students were gone the scrappers came. The schools left the security systems intact — cameras, passive infrared monitors — but eventually someone cut the power, hauled away the transformer box. The battery backup kept the security live for eight hours but turning the power back on would take days of work, twenty thousand dollars the city didn’t have. When the security died the most aggressive scrappers came first, headed straight for the copper: The concrete in every bathroom shattered with hammers, the wire mesh inside bent with pry bars or else yanked free by grabbing hold and leaning back, letting body weight pull the mesh free of its fastenings. Then turning a pipe cutter around whatever they could see. Then down to the basement for the boiler, its own set of copper piping. Dismantling the plumbing could set off the sprinkler system. Then water cascading on chalkboards, bookshelves, hardwood floors, destroying whatever the scrappers left.

The other scrappers didn’t wait for night. The scrapyards closed at five and so you took the five o’clock price if you didn’t have somewhere to stash what you took. Or else the scrapping started at three or four or five in the morning, so it could be done by the time the scrapyards opened again at eight.

Kelly refused to be the first thief. He worked other sites during the day, dropped his scrap, hit the bars. By midnight he was back in the truck, driving a loop of closed schools, looking for broken glass, a pryable door. The city boarded windows, put up chain-link fences. But boards didn’t stop anyone. But scrappers would take the fences too, cut the posts off at the dirt.

Inside an elementary school Kelly dragged a makeshift sled of locker doors down the front stairs, busting the concrete with the bounce of the weight. Outside the night air was cool, the sound of the season’s last crickets louder than anything else, the school surrounded by pasture, grass overtaking the long absence of nearby houses. Kelly had parked his truck within the school’s courtyard, the most convenient cover, but if anyone else came while he was inside, they might take the scrap out of the truck instead of heading in. They might take the truck.

The men came for him in the darkest hour of night. A gloom of moonlight fell through the tall windows of the second-floor gymnasium, where Kelly piled coils of insulated wire pulled from the circuit breaker, the conduits within. He thought he’d been listening but by the time he heard their footsteps coming they were in the vast room with him, rushing out of the shadowed hallways. He turned his headlamp fast, caught white eyes and white teeth in its light as the first shape struck him, knocked him to the ground. Fists bruised his face and forearms and when he was almost stilled the man’s hungry hands pushed into Kelly’s pockets, looking for his wallet, keys, phone. Kelly brought up a knee, cracked some breathing room from the man’s ribs, rolled him over and off.

The lamp slipped from Kelly’s forehead, its beam falling uselessly diffuse across the gym floor. Before he had his feet the other was coming fast and Kelly reached out blindly for the man’s head, catching the hood of his sweatshirt. He spun, dropped to his knees, turned the fabric around the man’s throat, bunched and twisted, and the man cried out, kicked, and tried to pull out of his shirt. Kelly lifted the man to his feet, tightening his grip, reeling him in. Robbers in the night. He wouldn’t have to hurt them much more. These weren’t the actions of brave men. Kelly was a thief too but he told himself he only stole what no one wanted. What he could tell himself hurt no one. A hierarchy of opportunity and morality.

The first man stood too, a slimness of air between him and Kelly and the second man. The darkness massed in the high room, everything sure reduced to touch and smell and sound, to echo, to the fear expanding inside everything you couldn’t sense.

I’ll let him go, said Kelly. But if you come back at me I don’t know what I’ll do.

Neither man spoke but the man caught in Kelly’s arms stopped his struggling. Kelly released the man, watched him flee in the same direction as the other. He crouched into the silence of the room, found his tools. First the hammer, then the headlamp. He moved the beam of light across the gymnasium but the men with white eyes and white teeth stayed gone. He couldn’t catch his breath and bruises lifted from his skin but otherwise he could pretend the men had never existed. Once he had been stronger than he was but had he ever heard his heart thudding so loudly. He shut off the lamp, sat down on the floor among the wiring he’d pulled from the wall. He waited, listened. He moved to the windows, watched the courtyard, saw his truck untouched. Still no sound from below but there were exits without doors, windows without glass. You could walk through the broken world like a wraith. As Kelly waited the night spoke to him, crickets again, wind and far-off traffic and what he swore were voices, speaking somewhere at the limits of sense. At such great distances it was impossible to understand the words the voices said, what they intended, whether these were the voices of bad men, whether the invisible evil all men carried was something they were born into or something they chose.

THE GIRL WITH THE LIMP wanted to see a hockey game but Kelly didn’t think he had the cash. He asked her when her birthday was, calculated the distance. He wasn’t confident making the promise but maybe the question was enough to suggest his hopeful thinking. There was the arena by the river where the hockey team played and all around there were banners above the street proclaiming the team’s championships, redubbing the city Hockeytown, and on game day he offered to take her to a bar nearby.

It wasn’t what she wanted but close enough would work to start. When he picked her up outside her apartment she wore a red-and-white jersey over skintight jeans and in the car he admired the way the jersey’s shapelessness draped her form, worked by suggestion. You couldn’t tell she limped when she was sitting down, standing still. There wasn’t anything wrong with the shape of her muscles, only their function.

At the bar, she said what was wrong with her was going to get worse and in its progression she had lost her fear of everything else. Her limp didn’t keep her from getting places, didn’t affect the quality of her walk, just its character. She told him she couldn’t hurry anywhere and he didn’t argue. He liked where they were starting and what it required. There were other places they might end up but he thought it might take something dramatic to get him there.

She worked as an emergency dispatcher but he hadn’t known the first night, hadn’t asked, had only learned her name beyond the point of further questions. Jackie. When she revealed her profession she said she’d just wanted a job, hadn’t meant to get so close to the unfolding tragedy. She laughed before he knew he was supposed to. It was a cynical view, and sure, she said, she never saw the endings of things. All she had was the prologue, the in medias res, the confusion amid the disaster.

Panic sets in, she said. People lose their heads. It’s my job not to lose mine.

When she laughed he could see more of her teeth than when she didn’t. Her teeth weren’t perfect but what did it matter. Her name was Jackie but her name wasn’t what he thought when he saw her. He didn’t tell her what he called her in his head.

On the big screen the game unfolded and the crowd in the bar erupted whenever there was a goal scored or a fight started. Between highlights she told him about her week and this week was the week a teenager burbled into the telephone for three minutes after his grandmother shot him in the chest.

This was the week a mother miscarried in the checkout line, squatting over the linoleum, crying and screaming and surrounded by strangers, all bonded by the intimacy of her disaster.

This was the week a toddler drank drain cleaner and this was the week Jackie didn’t know if she’d ever know if the toddler was alive or dead.

Despite her week she smiled more than he did and he didn’t know why. She touched his arm across the table and she said if she was sure a caller was passing then she never hung up, not before the paramedics arrived. She didn’t want anyone to be alone when they died. It mattered to her even after it couldn’t matter to them. He bought her a beer and himself a beer he couldn’t afford. Even after the game went bad for the home team he thought his face might hurt from happiness in the morning. Joy’s spreading warmth, starting low and swelling fast. How long had it been since he’d lived this close to its hum.

They met for coffee, drinks, lunch, made the expected small talk. She told him more about her work, her week, about new car crashes, heart attacks, domestic violence. She asked him about his days too but he didn’t know what he wanted to tell her. The work was a series of repetitive motions. There were surprises but all of a kind. Before he met her, he had been training himself to feel less about everything and now he gave her the unadorned actions, without explanation or inflection, what sights he saw in the zone’s abandoned places: A busted flip-flop found in an alley, its imagined implications like at the scene of a crime. A bird he couldn’t save, trapped in a crumbling chimney. A house whose roof had fallen in, seedlings growing where the living room turned to moss. Because after you broke the shell of the house who knew what might come next.

He said, I never imagined how hard we worked to keep the world out, to stop its taking back the places we’d claimed.

There were streets with every business barred and nearly every house vacated and still there could be a shamble of people shuffling the sidewalks. He required an enormous vocabulary for describing degrees of distance, a vocabulary he didn’t possess. He called a lot of parts of the zone empty or abandoned or derelict but those words never meant there was no one there.

He said, I saw a child hollering in a front yard yesterday, in a block I thought was vacant. A boy, eleven or twelve. The child alone, shirtless, his skin glistened with sweat, sunshine. It was fall but the year had a few warm days left.

He told her this but what he told her wasn’t a story. It was something he’d seen, not something he’d done. He was merely a spectator, didn’t want to paint the image tainted by his action or inaction, didn’t want the responsibility of cause and effect.

There’s this creeping kind of fatigue, he said. If he thought harder about what he heard and saw from his apartment he didn’t think he could live there. The vast turnover of the people with loud voices, louder problems, the small miseries and the daily cruelties. Better to focus on external anxieties, on crises more far-flung, the news. On what he read in books or saw in documentaries. It was easier if he could pretend the tragedy was happening somewhere else.

She touched his hand until he calmed. She said, You think the world is a bad place but you want to be a good man in it.

Yes, he said. The fatigue, the exhaustion, his own mistakes: he’d seen bad things happen in the zone but so far he’d kept his distance, worked to forget what he’d seen. What he was most afraid of was the time when he would be the only one who could help, when there was a choice between letting harm continue and getting involved.

He liked her but it was simpler to talk about the hockey team, the news on television. It was easy to get her to switch topics: she liked him but she loved hockey, and this was the week her team was winning. She filled their table talk with Russian names and American rules and he nodded along and when without warning she asked if he was divorced he was able to say no and let the subject drop.

After the confrontation in the gymnasium he decided he didn’t have to work in the night, didn’t have to live in the darkness. He could live in the distance instead: the distance between inhabited houses, the distance between open schools and working hospitals and still-thriving businesses. The distance between a family sleeping softly on a Saturday morning and the wind clanking a twisted metal door against a doorframe it no longer fit. A single lot could be enough. A single lot bought plenty of looking the other way.

He worked harder in the day so he could spend his evenings with her, and at the table even sitting still his muscles ached. She was the one with the limp but by the time they went to bed he wasn’t standing straight either. One day he noticed her fingernails were a different color every time he saw her. She wore so many shades of lipstick. When he woke up the next morning he saw in the mirror where she’d marked him, the drag of a lip across his stomach, his hip bone. Little she did outlasted his shower but for a moment he remembered. With her, he was getting his color back, began to dress a rack better, again paid a whole price for a whole shirt. He’d kept himself up before but he’d never liked maintenance for its own sake. Now there was a reason.

They didn’t go many places he wouldn’t have gone on his own but he was louder in the places they went. He had kept his own company so long their conversations renewed the ringing in his ears. She called him the quiet type. He nodded and she laughed. It was so easy, this beginning. He hoped it lasted a long time. He struggled with the absurdity of middles, and endings happened so fast or violent there wasn’t anything to do but let loose and wait for the impact. He had the kind of blank face women liked least to fight with, his features passive even when he was angriest. Almost every woman he’d ever dated had one day learned to hate it.

They both failed at darts and pool but they celebrated the arcade machines left in their kinds of bars, the residue of an earlier age. With her by his side he got better at moving the frog across the street than when he was a kid but he got worse again as he drank. Then the digital splat and splatter. She couldn’t pilot a spaceship for anything but loved any game with a trackball, analog action making digital moves, the imprecision of desire. Once they played a bowling game inside a bowling alley and he grew irritated when she liked it better than the real thing but she said she preferred wearing her own shoes. She couldn’t wear high heels but he said heels weren’t everything. In another game she spun the ball as hard as she could, then lifted her hand, letting fate take over for control. It didn’t save her life but he could buy her three more for a quarter.

He obsessed over certain parts of her shape, the ways of her speech. The swoop of her clavicle, the word clavicle. He could catch a sound or an idea and good luck getting rid of it. The titles and designations, the taxonomies of compound words. The exactness of language he desired, the way the right word might be used to name an object. The girl with the limp: it wasn’t like she hadn’t told him her name. He’d learned it the first night, never forgot it, could reproduce it immediately if asked. Jackie. He thought often of the sound of her voice but he didn’t hear her voice saying her name. Her name wasn’t who she was. When he thought of her he saw first her shape, her way of movement, her facial expressions. His affection wasn’t for the name but for the shape, wasn’t for the name but for the action it contained.

The girl with the limp reminded him. She had slightly darker hair, a similar arrangement of curves. Her personality was different but he learned to adjust. He no longer thought the wrong name when he awoke and found her beside him, turned away. He wasn’t confused anymore: this was Jackie and no one else. Sometimes she woke to find him staring. Sometimes he woke up and found her on top of him. This was another way she was different. They ate and they talked and they watched the violence upon the ice, they fucked and they stayed hungry. He watched her take pills for the nerve damage, another prescription for depression. She wasn’t supposed to drink on either but they stayed thirsty too. It would be winter soon and he wondered what would last until spring came. After the first month her resemblance to the past waned. Or else her body had come to supplant the memory of the other body, his southern woman. An intercession of the physical: he’d had this happen before, with other pairs of women. He started seeing someone new because her outline reminded him of someone else but one day he couldn’t remember how the first shape had felt.

She didn’t shave her legs as often as other women he’d dated. They were harder to reach in her condition or else she always wore pants or else she was comfortable with him, with herself. In bed she commented on his suntan, on the contrast between the darkness of his public skin and the paleness of everything else. He said his tan persisted all winter. You could work hard enough in January to not need a coat and some years he had. Her skin was a paleness everywhere, a luminosity in the dark. He could walk back into the blacked-out bedroom and know exactly where in the bed she was sleeping.

Her car was low and bright yellow and growled when she punched the gas, she had nerves but she wasn’t nervous. She wasn’t supposed to drive in case she had an attack but she said the doctors weren’t going to take anything from her. At night she would drive them twenty or thirty miles above the speed limit on the darkest stretches of freeway and on the right nights they might see no one else. She took risks because she wasn’t going to live forever, because, she said, there was a finite length of time she could be punished for her mistakes, and Kelly knew this already, understood this was how they had met, why she had invited him in their first night. She kept another cane in the backseat of her car but worse than the canes, she said, were the forearm crutches. Psychological torture, she said, and when you got prescribed a forearm crutch you knew you were never going to get better. He said he didn’t know there were prescriptions for objects but he could see how he should have.

I’ve been healthy all my life, he said. It wasn’t ever my body I’ve had trouble with.

With his southern woman he hadn’t used anything. With her he had let down this guard, then that one, some at her request, some out of the creeping apathy of the familiar. It had been a mistake, his walls built for a reason. Now he was using protection again and said the condoms caused him trouble. He got nervous about the delay ripping the packages, snapped the latex against the skin during removal. All the little indignities collected. The reservoir nippled at the end of his cock made him feel ridiculous. If he couldn’t stop thinking, then he had trouble staying hard but he pretended his lack was something he could hide with enthusiasm. The girl with the limp wasn’t on the pill but she told him she couldn’t get pregnant. Something about ovarian cysts, surgical scarring. He didn’t ask questions. He let her know he was willing to listen but more often they kept their pasts behind them.

When she said Kelly during sex or after waking it was like a mystery unfolding. He had never loved his name except in the way a woman said it, except when she said it, when she said it like the woman before had. Their sex was slow and quiet and he did most of the work so the exertion wouldn’t cause her an attack. It wasn’t what he wanted to think about but he had to keep her safe. When her orgasms came they were soft and sudden: a movement of her mouth, a quick clenching, then the shuddery squeeze and release, the subtlest of hiccups.

Afterward they laughed and talked and smoked. Survivors of the day, sharing the inexplicable unspeakable elation that everything wrong in their lives had not brought them to ruin. But then she said that if she did get pregnant she would have to have an abortion because the pregnancy could worsen her condition.

He said there wasn’t anything to worry about. He wasn’t getting anyone pregnant, ever.

I had a vasectomy years ago, he said, speaking softly. He waited, listened to her breathing until he wasn’t sure if she was awake.

I never wanted kids, he whispered. I’m glad you can’t have children.

He’d thought she might be sleeping but now he saw her mouth contorting in the dark. She turned over, pulled the sheet across her bare back. He said, There was a woman I loved. The woman had a son. We lost our house and then I lost them.

IN THE CHURCH BASEMENT they circled the chairs, found a volunteer to begin. One by one they shared what had been lost and when a speaker completed her story the others clapped, hugged her, thanked her for sharing. Never a critique, always an acceptance. All those quavering voices, their narratives of death. The living came to meeting after meeting until they knew how to structure the story. These were the basic redemption tales, stories of education through suffering: All they had to do was learn to love someone through their hurt. To love them as much as when it had been easy. Or else learn to let someone go because of how bravely they’d borne their dying, their death. Or else they hadn’t come over to forgiveness, harbored some old pettiness or even well-deserved hate, because who hurt us like the people who were supposed to love us?

Kelly liked the people who couldn’t name their grief the best. If your betrothed died you were not a widower. There was no word in the language for a man who had lost his child before he ever got the chance to say the word father. It was impossible to offer your story by your title, to transfer it easily and without explanation, in the way husband told a tale, in the way father did.

If he told a story, this might have been one story he told. It wasn’t exactly the truth but for him the absence of the southern woman and her son had become a kind of death, a going away of love never to be undone, unfelt, forgiven.

Or else he might have told an earlier story, might have spoken of his father, about how he could have chosen to sit beside his mother at the moment of his father’s death, witnessed the spittle and the gurgle and the waste. What revenge would it have been to see the bones shining beneath the skin, to see all the crawling blue scrawl between? His father would have been enfeebled, weak of speech, unable to breathe. A tonnage of tubes pumping life back into a black balloon. A sack of air and blood, some deathly monster. Not the shape of myth he remembered best, the man taller and stronger and smarter than himself, always and forever the hale creature of his youth.

There was a man who cried at the end of every story and there was a man who never cried and Kelly thought he knew where his own sympathies lay. Outside in the dark the three men smoked and the man who never cried said the suffering of the individual had been eclipsed by the suffering of the masses. Earthquakes in Haiti, tsunamis and nuclear devastation in Japan. Genocides in Africa, riots in the streets in London, Athens, Los Angeles. It had happened here in the city, the city burning three times. There was what we had made with our wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, in places we probably didn’t know our country’s forces were fighting, and What is Syria was at least as good a question as Where. The longer the man spoke the more the qualities of pronouns got nebulous. Who was we and who was they. He said there were diseases in Asia making our vaccines look like the toys of children, unlucky Americans returning from foreign vacations with their flesh falling off their faces, crying out their disbelief for the nightly news.

The man who never cried said, It could be any one of us before the cameras, insane with the odds. While in vacationland there’s a thousand natives sick, unrecorded, unbroadcast.

Here we are, the man said. And am I the same as my complaint or am I worse for knowing better.

The other man was at it again. Still crying he tried to comfort the man who never cried but the second man nearly shoved him from the church steps.

All I’m saying, the man who never cried said, is there are whole cities falling into the ocean, whole species going extinct beneath the hottest sun in ten thousand years. We’re here wailing about a single human life.

He said, I loved my wife but she’s gone.

He said, I loved my wife but is she the equivalent of a thousand starving children I can’t see well enough to mourn.

My wife, he said, is statistically insignificant no matter how you’re counting.

The girl with the limp had a bad day and the cane came out from the side of the bed, its handle curled beneath her clenched hand. The muscles in her bad leg knotted and Kelly rubbed their tight cords, made amateur improvements. This was a different way of touching her body, her sickness more private than their sex. She had a bottle of muscle relaxers, a physical therapist she could call. He cooked the food she needed to take the pills, refused her the drink she requested next, poured them both water instead. And when was the last time they drank water.

How bad is it, he asked, and she lied to him: I’m fine, she said, I told you I’m fine. She could barely talk through the pain and as the pills took effect her voice thickened. She gestured aimlessly with the remote, hit its buttons with a senseless violence, found her hockey game and settled onto the couch. She knew the names of all the players, complained when Kelly forgot what she’d taught him. He wasn’t good with names, he said, and she laughed because she knew, because it was one of the first things she knew about him.

When he lost track of the game he watched her watching instead. There was something local to know about octopus, a play-off legend she couldn’t explain. Tradition, she said. Its origins were in the past and she didn’t care about history, only victory. She couldn’t be an athlete anymore but she cheered anyone who was. He had been one himself but he didn’t tell her the details. Boxing, he said. Wrestling, he said. More history. After the game ended they watched the news and at the bottom of the screen the scrolling ticker announced again the results of a televised singing competition, the flavor of a new color of soda, the failure of a bill promoting equal pay for equal work. The long emergency was visible anywhere the ticker ran. The ticker had come to life on the country’s worst day and it had never gone away: How you couldn’t always guard against what scared you most. How the urgency of your watchfulness dulled with time. How knowing this only made the remaining fear worse.

She pressed her body against Kelly’s, slurred through the pills until she slept with her feet in his lap, her bad leg twitching against the couch, scraping sweatpants over rough fabric. A series of the smallest gestures followed: one man, one woman, sleeping together on a couch in a rented apartment. When Kelly awoke the nightly news was flooding the screen with the day’s events, the political pronouncements and product releases. The president appeared again in his favorite hallway, a West Wing locale saved for announcing the deaths of enemies of the state, the upheld constitutionality of his laws. He claimed to have ended wars from this arrangement of white columns and gold light and red carpet, spoke his prepared speeches with his preacher’s cadence, allowed his hands the few acceptable motions of the American president: the fist-with-pointing-thumb, the chopping hand, the open clutch. Kelly thought the president was speaking directly to him, another of the president’s gifts. His undeniable charisma. Always his own people were beyond reproach, always the president had to believe in our exceptionalism.

In another story an iceberg sloughed off an ice shelf and fell into the sea. Competing viewpoints were offered but all Kelly believed in was human agency. As a child he had tried to imagine the state as it might have been before it was settled, still forested everywhere, the old growth dense and dark and endless with mystery and megafauna and tribal law. Later he’d watched a documentary that claimed the indigenous peoples decimated the trees so thoroughly they removed enough carbon dioxide from the atmosphere to cause an ice age. There was no end to the great harm men could do to the world, the unwitting cost of dominion. So far, every time the doomsday clock went off it got reset, but who knew how long such luck would hold. Sometimes when Kelly watched the president speak he thought the man could hear the dread clock ticking.

ON SATURDAY AFTERNOON THE CRUISERS parked their cars in rows, idled engines in a show of chrome, combustion, exhaust. The girl with the limp knew the makes and models and approximate years, had the arcana of automobiles down. There was talk of other men but she said her interests were hers, didn’t rely on outside influences. Kelly poked his head under raised hoods, searched out the parts he could name. He had never changed his own oil, didn’t necessarily know what the bottom of his truck looked like. He knew the word carburetor but that was another knowledge passing from the earth. There were questions he might have asked if he didn’t hate to open up his ignorance to others.

Everything mechanical sounded better in her voice. The way she said 1955 Chevy, 1964 Dodge. A throaty appreciation, an audible desire.

They surveyed the majesty of hood ornaments, the leaping jaguar, the Pentastar, the impala, the three-pointed star, the Spirit of Ecstasy, the cormorant. A Greek goddess, the archer, the Plymouth ship, the greyhound. An array of rockets evoking a future destined never to come, the face of a chief forced to roam taken lands at new speeds, a golden-winged Cadillac beauty the reminder of a past no one believed. In others cars they saw well-maintained seats, leather made of real animals, preserved to perfection fifty years after the skinned beasts were dust. They peered through windows, examined dashes crowded with dials and meters, buttons and knobs, analog extravagance. They saw a record player in a Dodge Polara and he asked when the car had been built. She didn’t know but she touched his arm, the gesture better than any answer. Before 1930 there were no radios in automobiles, she said, and so what did people listen to when they drove? The sounds of the road, the engine, each other.

She pointed and said, A 1947 Packard Clipper, a car red like all these cars were red. He walked around the vehicle, kneeled before its skinny grille, considered its endangered curves. He no longer thought about the fire at the plant every day. You couldn’t escape the past but he hoped you could choose what to restore, what to keep gleaming. This was the progress Kelly had seen, not the replacing of the old city with the new but the building of smarter exits and bypasses.

It wasn’t the cost of the object history wanted preserved, only the object. And this was the week a scrapper died inside a closed hospital, cutting steel beams, buried beneath a collapsing roof. This was the week a scrapper was shot by a private security guard inside a tenantless apartment building. This was the week a scrapper dropped an acetylene torch from atop a ladder, cutting the hose between the tank and the torch, igniting the insulation falling out of the ceiling. This was the week a scrapper climbed a power pole to cut through the dead wire and found the wire fully charged. When the fire trucks arrived the men had to wait, hoses in hand, until the utility company could turn off the power. By then the scrapper was fused to the pole and the firemen had to cut down the top half to take him away.

This life Kelly was living. How long did he expect it to last.

What are you thinking, the girl asked.

He looked up, shook his head, thought her name, said it aloud: Jackie. Sometimes it was so easy to say it.

Later they lay beside each other in her bed, hands touching, legs intertwined, and into the silent dark she said she didn’t like to talk about her past either but she couldn’t put off the future forever. She asked if he knew what he was getting into. Her limp wouldn’t be the last thing. Already there were attacks where she struggled to breathe, where her vision blurred and she lost sensation in her fingers and toes. Involuntary systems got confused, voluntary ones unresponsive. Once she’d shit herself at work. She was older than he was and she wasn’t going to live forever.

He shushed her, said it didn’t matter. He said, Okay. He said, Tell me everything. Tell me what will happen and I’ll tell you if I can handle it.

She said physical activity could make it worse. She had to be careful not to overheat herself or else it would cause an attack. No matter what she did there would be attacks and there would be relapses and after every attack she would be worse than she was before. There was no going back. The disease was progressive, untreatable, incurable. The doctors believed they knew how to slow it down but a delay was the best they could hope for.

Some patients smoked pot. Some self-infected themselves with hookworm to train their immune systems to fight. It was all guesswork. She took her pills and lived her life.

He nodded, slid closer, made a move.

No, she said. First tell me how much of this you want.

We’re together, he said. And not because of this. If we come to an end this won’t be why.

3

THE MORNING OF THE FIRST snow, Kelly drove an unexplored length of the zone, coasting the truck slowly from driveway to driveway, assessing doors left open, windows missing, porches collapsed by the removal of their metal supports. Some of the houses had been scrapped already but he knew he would find one more recently closed, with boards in the windows and an intact door. A space empty but not yet shredded. The zone sprawled beneath the falling snow, cast its imperfection wider than he could accept, but eventually he chose a house — two floors, blue paint on the siding, gray boards over the windows, a yellow door, surrounded on both sides by vacant lots, with only a burnt shell standing watch across the street — then went to the door and knocked, yelled greetings loaded with question marks.

He waited, yelled again.

He raised his hood, returned to the truck for a pry bar. He moved out of the front yard and along the side of the house, the brown grass crunching beneath the snow. Beside the blue house was a metal gate in a chain-link fence but the gate wasn’t latched. At the first window he pulled back the covering board, found the glass gone. He peeked in, searched for furniture, a television or a radio. Instead stained carpet, signs of water damage, a kitchen with no dirty dishes but an intact gas range, a sink and faucet he could wrench from the countertops.

He lifted himself through the window. Leading away from the kitchen was a staircase to the second floor and also a basement door, closed and latched with a padlock. He’d cut the lock later, after the other work was done. Upstairs the bedrooms were small, sloped to fit beneath the peaked roof, but there was enough room to swing a sledge. Back downstairs he opened the front door — the door not even locked, but he hadn’t thought to check before climbing in the window — then crossed the snowy yard to the truck for the rest of his tools. Already his first footprints were buried beneath the accumulation and afterward he wouldn’t be able to convince himself there had been others, no matter how insistently he was asked.

In the master bedroom he flicked the light switch to check the power, then aimed above the outlets and swung. He took what other scrappers might have left behind. With a screwdriver he removed each metal junction box from the bedroom, then in the bathroom he cut free the old copper plumbing from under the sink and inside the walls. He smoked and watched the snowfall through a bedroom window, the world hushed wet under its weight. In the South he’d forgotten the feeling of a house in winter, the unexpected nostalgia of watching the world disappear under snowfall. He put his forehead to the cool glass, watched the stillness fill the pane.

Downstairs he dismantled the kitchen, disconnected the stove from the wall, cut the steel sink from the counter. He worked quietly in what he thought was the wintry hush of the house but later he would be told about the amateur soundproofing in the basement, about the mattresses nailed to the walls, about the eggshell foam pressed between the basement rafters.

The soundproofing meant the boy screaming in the basement wasn’t screaming for Kelly but for anyone. There would be talk of providence but what was providence but a fancy word for luck? If the upstairs of the blue house had been plumbed with PVC Kelly might not have gone down into the basement. But then copper in the bathroom, but then the copper price.

It wasn’t until he cut the padlock’s loop and opened the basement door that he heard the boy’s voice, the boy’s hoarse cry for help rising out of the dark.

As soon as Kelly heard the boy’s voice the moment split, and in the aftermath of that cry Kelly thought he lived both possibilities in simultaneous sequence: there was an empty basement or else there was a basement with a boy in a bed and it seemed to Kelly he had gone into both rooms. Kelly thought if he had fled and left the boy there and disappeared into the night he might never have had to think about it again, couldn’t be held responsible for everything that followed. Instead he had acted and now there would be no knowing where this action would stop.

Kelly climbed downward, descending the shaft of light falling through the basement door. His clothes clung to the nervous damp of his skin as he stepped off the stairs toward the bed at the back of the low room, toward the boy restrained there, all skin and skinny bones, naked beneath a pile of blankets and howling in the black basement air.

One by one each element of the scene came into focus, the room’s angles resolving out of the darkness, each shape alien in the moment, the experience too unexpected for sense: the humidity under the earth, the musky heat of trapped breath and sweat, piss in a bucket; the smell of burrow or warren, then the filth of the mattress as Kelly slid to his knees beside the bed, his headlamp unable to light the whole scene; the boy atop the stained and stinking sheets, confusing in his nudity, half hidden by the pile of covers, a nest of slick sleeping bags and rougher fabrics partially kicked off the bed, and beside the pile of blankets a folding metal chair.

The boy’s screaming stopped as soon as Kelly lit his features but Kelly knew the boy couldn’t see him through the glare. He shut off the headlamp, removed the glow between them, let their eyes readjust to the dimmer light. He leaned closer, close enough to hear the boy’s rasping breath, to smell his captivity, to touch the boy’s hand. To try to bring the boy out of abstraction into the sensible world.

Kelly’s body was moving as if disconnected from thought but if he could retouch the connections he would begin to speak. He tried to say his name, pointed to himself, failed to speak the word. He shook his head, reached down for the boy. The boy flinched from Kelly’s touch but Kelly took him in his arms anyway, gathered him against his chest and lifted quick — and then the boy crying out in pain as Kelly jerked him against the metal cuffs shackling the boy’s feet to the bed, hidden beneath the bunched blankets.

The sound of the boy’s voice, naming his hurt into the black air: this was not the incomprehensible idea of a boy abducted but the presence of such a boy, real enough. And how had Kelly come to hold him, to smell the boy’s sweat, then the sudden stink of his own, their thickening musk of fear? Because what if he had not left the South. If he had been able to find work instead of resorting to scrapping. If there had not been the fire in the plant so that afterward he worked alone. If he had not met the girl with the limp. If she had not been working today. If she hadn’t had another attack the night before, keeping him from drinking so much he couldn’t scrap. Providence or luck, it didn’t matter. He told himself he believed only in the grimness of the world, the great loneliness of the vacuum without end to come. You could be good but what did it buy you. You could be good and it meant more precisely because it bought you nothing.

Kelly cursed, lowered the boy back on the bed, felt the boy’s heat linger on his chest like a stain. He touched the place where the boy had been, felt the thump of his heart pounding beneath the same skin, listened to their bodies huffing in the dark as he relit the narrow beam of the headlamp, its light scattering the boy’s features into nonsense.

I have to go back upstairs, Kelly said. I’ll be right back.

No, the boy whispered, his voice swallowed by the muted room. Please.

Kelly quickly removed his coat and wrapped it around the boy to cover the boy’s nakedness, then moved toward the stairs as fast as he could, trying to outdistance the increasing volume of the boy’s cries. But there was no way of freeing the boy without his saw, no way of getting the saw without leaving the boy. The basement door opened into the kitchen and in every direction Kelly saw the destruction he’d brought, the walls gutted, the counters opened, the stove dragged free from the wall, waiting for the handcart. The day was ending fast, the light fading as Kelly moved across the dirty tile, looking for his backpack, the hacksaw inside.

Outside the opened window the wet whisper of snow fell, quieting the world beyond the house’s walls while inside the air was charged and waiting. When Kelly turned back to the basement he saw the door was closed, the boy and the boy’s sound trapped again. It was a habit to close a door when he left a room but this time it was a cruelty too. Back downstairs Kelly found the boy sitting with his bare knees curled into his naked chest, all of his body cloaked under Kelly’s coat. Kelly raised the saw so the boy could see what it was, what Kelly intended. I’m here to help you, Kelly said, or thought he did, the boy was nodding, or Kelly thought the boy was, but after he switched the headlamp on again he couldn’t see the whole boy anymore, only the boy in parts. The boy’s terrified face. The boy’s clammy chest. The boy’s clenched hands and curled toes. He ran the beam along the boy’s dirty bony legs, inspected the cuffs, the bruised skin below.

Kelly put a hand on the boy’s ankle and they both recoiled at the surprise. Hold still, Kelly said. He lifted the chain in one hand and the saw in the other and as he cut he had to turn his face away from the boy’s rising voice, speaking again its awesome need.

The boy was heavier than Kelly expected, a dead weight of dangling limbs. He asked the boy to hold on and the boy said nothing, did less. When Kelly looked down at the boy he saw the boy wasn’t looking at anything. Out of the low room, up the stairs, into the dirty kitchen. All the noise the boy had made in the basement was gone, replaced by something more ragged, a threatened hissing. The front door was close to the truck but the back door was closer to where they stood and more than anything else Kelly wanted out of the blue house, out into the fresh snow and the safety of the truck, its almost escape.

Other scenarios emerged. Other uses for the basement, what might happen to Kelly if they were caught here. What might happen to the boy for trying to escape if he were caught too. Outside the wind was louder than Kelly had expected and the thick wet snow would bury his newest footprints but there wouldn’t be any hiding what he’d done. Kelly carried the boy around the house to the truck, adjusted the boy’s weight across his shoulder so he could dig in his pocket for the keys. The boy was shoeless and Kelly couldn’t put him down. The boy was limp and shoeless in his arms but Kelly thought if he put the boy down the boy might run.

At the truck Kelly lowered the boy into the passenger seat, then stripped off his own flannel shirt. Kelly’s arms were bare to the falling snow but he wasn’t cold as he helped the boy stick his arms into the shirt, its fabric long enough to cover most of the boy’s nakedness. He bundled the boy back into the coat too but the truck was freezing and the boy’s legs were bare and Kelly wasn’t sure the boy’s shivering would stop no matter how warm he made the cab.

Kelly walked around to the driver’s side, opened the door. Without climbing inside he reached under the steering wheel, put the keys in the ignition, started the engine. He punched the rear defrost, cranked the heat, hesitated.

I have to go, he said. I have to go back into the house but I will be back for you.

The boy didn’t speak, didn’t look in his direction. It wasn’t permission. He didn’t know if the boy understood. This was shock, trauma. The boy needed to go to a hospital, he needed Kelly to call the police, an ambulance. He needed Kelly to act, to keep rescuing him a little longer.

However many minutes it took — moving back into the kitchen to gather his tools into his backpack, then down into the basement for the hacksaw he’d left behind — each minute was its own crime. In the basement Kelly knew the bed was unoccupied but when he entered the low room there appeared a vision of the boy still chained to the bed, an afterimage burning before him. He knew he’d saved the boy but when he made it back to the truck the doors were locked, the boy gone. A new panic fluttered in Kelly’s chest — but then he looked again, saw the boy hidden in the dark of the snow-covered cab, crouched down in the space near the floorboards beneath the passenger seat — a space which, Kelly remembered, as a kid he had called the pit.

The boy wouldn’t come out of the pit, wouldn’t unlock the doors or turn his terrified face toward Kelly. Kelly waited until he was sure the boy was looking away, then pulled his undershirt sleeve over his bare elbow and shattered the truck’s driver-side window. And before he drove the boy to the hospital he had to clear the safety glass from the boy’s seat, from the thick scrub of the boy’s hair.

As Kelly pulled into the hospital parking lot his cell phone rang and without looking he knew it was her. He wanted to answer but there wasn’t time. There weren’t the right words yet for what he needed to tell her, what he wanted to ask. He parked the truck under the emergency sign, stepped outside into the unplowed parking lot, the snow turned heavier than at the blue house. He walked around the truck, opened the passenger door, lifted the boy’s limpness into his arms, said his own name to the boy for the first time. The snow fell on Kelly’s face and on the boy’s face and neither said anything else as Kelly carried the boy across the parking lot. The boy didn’t look at Kelly and Kelly thought he had to stop looking at the boy, had to watch where he was going instead of taking in every feature, every eyelash and pimple and steaming exhale, had to concentrate on making his body move. A few more steps, he said to the boy. A few more steps and they would be inside, passing through the bright and sterile and inextinguishable light of the hospital, toward the company of others, where they would be safer than they were now, alone.