Scrapper

4

AT THE PRECINCT, IT WAS always the same detective who questioned Kelly, a baby-faced man with a hard belly busting over his belt. The heavy detective came in and out of the blank square of the interview room and each time he entered he questioned Kelly and each time Kelly promised to tell him everything he could. At first Kelly thought he remembered almost nothing, that finding the boy had overwhelmed every other possible interest, but with every new question he remembered a little more, and so how to trust what he wanted to say, if he knew it could change?

What do you remember, the heavy detective asked again. What do you remember now?

The boy, he started to say, before the detective interrupted: Daniel, the heavy detective said, and Kelly blinked, said, Who?

The boy, the detective said. The boy’s name.

Daniel. Kelly knew he wasn’t a reliable eyewitness because when he was confused he believed everything he was told. He remembered more about going into the basement than he had when he walked into the hospital. Or else he thought he did. He could see the shape of the low room, its walls that before had disappeared into the dark. He had not recognized the mattresses nailed to those walls but as the heavy detective described them he saw the sagging outline of each one, the rolled towels and eggshell foam duct-taped to fill the creases between.

The detective searched his notes, shook his head. He was testing Kelly’s recall but Kelly recalled mostly only what the detective had told him first. The detective said the boy hadn’t seen much either, only a mask over the kidnapper’s face, only the hood of a red slicker worn against the weather.

The detective asked, Why didn’t you call the police?

I didn’t think, Kelly said. But whoever put the boy in the basement must have meant to come back for him. I wanted to be gone when he did.

He asked the detective if they knew who took the boy. The man in the red slicker. Who was he? The detective didn’t know, wasn’t afraid to admit it, at least here in this closed room. The boy’s parents had reported him missing but not until he’d been gone a day. Investigation revealed it was just a miscommunication — each parent had thought he was with the other — and bad parenting wasn’t necessarily an indicator of foul play.

The heavy detective said, There’s a reward, you know. Did you know about the reward?

Kelly hadn’t but he said, I saw something, and the detective nodded, made an appreciative noise. It was best when they could agree. What Kelly remembered most wasn’t any particular detail but how the experience had split, how there was a basement with a boy and a basement without. How somehow he had gone into both basements and perhaps two people had come out, with slightly different ideas about what they had seen.

He’d felt this way before, when he was a boy himself.

The boy, the reward, Kelly wasn’t sure what he knew and didn’t know. The boy’s face wasn’t the same as in his last yearbook photo, the one the news had shown, broadcast beside some stranger’s cell-phone picture of Kelly cradling the boy in his arms, carrying him into the emergency room, the boy’s face blank, the chainless cuffs clasped around the boy’s ankles, the boy’s skinny bones swinging limp from Kelly’s grip.

The expression on Kelly’s face hadn’t been one he recognized. The blonde reporter had called it bravery but Kelly didn’t think this was the word.

When there was nothing else to say the heavy detective put his card on the table. Probably they would have more questions but Kelly wasn’t a suspect. The detective said this several times and each time no qualifications followed, no yet, no at this time. Kelly knew he wasn’t guilty but it was good to hear the detective say the words. Surely the detective must have said his name before this but here it was on his card, seemingly for the first time: sanchez.

The heavy detective taped the interview, would file the recording for future use. Other officers wanted to collect other evidence and Kelly let them take whatever they wanted. In the parking lot they photographed his truck, measured the tread of his tires, and in the precinct house they did the same with his shoes before attempting to take his fingerprints without success. Fifteen years of manual labor had worn away the ridges on his fingertips and perhaps for years he hadn’t left a proper fingerprint on anything he touched. He’d committed crimes but he’d left less of a stain than he’d thought. He pulled his hood over his hair, shivered in the precinct lobby, waited for the police to release him into the remainder of the night. Perhaps he was freer to act than ever before. But even without fingerprints there were other ways to leave a mark.

THE EVENING NEWS BROADCAST HIS face, showed his picture every night for a week. To pass the boredom of workless afternoons he visited his regular bars but now everyone there knew his name. He hated beards but started growing one anyway, layered hooded sweatshirts beneath every jacket. He couldn’t go back to scrapping but with the promise of the reward he rented a new apartment in a better neighborhood, farther from the places where he’d worked.

The phone rang. Once Christian women knew his name they found him too, dropping off casseroles and staying for prayers. More reward. The first woman sheepish when he opened the door, then bold once in his kitchen, opening cabinets and shaking her head at the paltry plates, glasses, silverware. He lived alone but the next day the first woman returned with others, women who brought him food for a family, then circled his table in their Sunday dresses, and when he wouldn’t take their offered hands they closed their circle around him, centered him in their words.

His kitchen table only had two chairs but the women said they didn’t mind standing. He opened their packages of paper plates, plastic silverware, fed their food back to them: rigatoni for days, a deli platter feeding a dozen. The Christian women said saving Daniel was his penance for the scrap he’d stolen. He listened but he didn’t agree. He didn’t believe in the god they did, didn’t see the benevolence in the universe. Instead the past repeated, with every action representative of a type, every thought representative of a common idea. The Christian women patted his hand, held his in theirs. They said their prayers as if unafflicted with doubt but he thought doubt and fear were the only places he’d found to put his faith.

The girl with the limp came over to help but what remained was more than any two people needed. She wasn’t supposed to eat food this rich, started to complain. He put on weight too, found the ten pounds of beer weight held back by the swing of the sledge. When he opened his new refrigerator he already thought he could smell some excess turning. The way sealed plastic filled with moisture. The yellow sour of thickening milk, a waste of greening ham.

The phone rang. The husband of one of the women called Kelly to offer him a job. The husband worked in demolition, owned a small outfit working the zone, removing the wreckage of industry, tearing down other buildings on government contracts. The husband said Kelly would have to start at the bottom but it was fair money and at least it was honest work.

It’s work you’re used to, the husband said. Though we might do things a bit different. More professional.

What to call the tone in the husband’s voice. In the word probationary. In the words trial basis. Kelly listened, waited for his chance to speak. He said, How did you get this number?

The husband’s voice changed, expanded its reproach. The offer was a favor to his wife. Did Kelly want the job or not?

He did want the job, knew it could last. He had his own truck, he said, his own tools. He had the reward money but it was better if he didn’t have to touch it.

He said Thank you but not before the husband hung up the phone.

The phone rang. The heavy detective again, working through the same questions, searching for new angles of entry. There were no suspects. No family enemies, no fingerprints in the basement. The detective said undercover cops had watched the house but no one had returned after the boy had been removed.

He said whoever took the boy might have seen Kelly’s truck, seen Kelly’s face. He had to assume the kidnapper had seen the news, would remember Kelly’s name.

Be careful, the detective said. Don’t make a big deal of where you live. Be as cautious as you can, but if you see anyone suspicious following you, you know my number. Probably there isn’t anything to worry about. Probably a person who kidnaps little boys is a sex criminal. He wouldn’t come after a grown man.

Kelly tried to use the word rape, the word molested. Was this what had happened to the boy?

There’s a lot of confusion there, the detective said. When we asked Daniel what the man did to him, the boy insisted the man who took him had watched. That’s it.

The man had worn gloves and a mask and a red hooded slicker and he had cuffed the boy to a bed in a basement and then he watched him. The detective said this as if it were hardly anything at all.

The detective said there were court psychiatrists, social workers, a process they had to go through to question the boy. The detective joked he could call Kelly whenever he wanted. No rules against talking to you, he said, then laughed, a sort of nervous grunting.

The detective said, Once in a while a kidnapper gets nervous, brings in the victim himself. Even if he’s done everything right, even if he might never be caught. The kidnapper gets nervous or scared or he becomes concerned for the victim, having come to care for him. Maybe he decides to get out before something worse happens.

Kelly could deny the insinuation but he didn’t have to. He knew who he was, what he’d done. The detective said the house belonged to the bank but the bank wouldn’t press charges. Kelly was a thief but he was a hero too. Fighting over copper at three dollars a pound wouldn’t buy the bank anything it wanted.

THE BLONDE REPORTER CALLED and Kelly made her repeat her name until he believed it. Would he see the boy again? She wanted a story of the two of them reunited, the saver and the saved. The salvor, Kelly said — drunk again, slurring into the receiver, and where had this word come from? — and she said, What? He wasn’t sure this was a good idea, hung up. Later she called again, put a number on the table. He could take it or leave it, she said. They weren’t in the business of negotiating for human interest.

When the reporter appeared the next morning she wore knee-high boots under a pressed tan skirt, had so much blonde hair he couldn’t believe it was all hers. She lingered in Kelly’s doorway, considered his living room, the clothes he’d picked out to wear.

Do you have a suit, she asked, or at least a tie?

He’d meant to buy one but there hadn’t been time. There was his new job, the girl with the limp. She had wanted to come along to support him and he’d told her he didn’t know what he needed support for but now he did. The parents would be waiting with his reward, ready to pay him for the boy’s return. They had lost something precious and he worried he’d returned them something quieter, skinnier upon its bones. On the television, the reporter had said only three days had passed between the boy’s abduction and his rescue, barely any time at all. The boy was physically unharmed, except for where Kelly had bruised him, when he’d pulled the boy’s ankles against the cuffs.

A miracle, the reporter had said, almost as if nothing had happened. But even in a local story you had to listen for what no one was saying.

At the hospice shop the cameraman stayed in the car while the blonde reporter led Kelly between the crowded racks. She was good at colors and sizes and she said she knew what would look right on-screen. She made him try on the suit, then came into the dressing room. He saw she wore a wedding ring when she reached up to straighten his tie. She saw him looking, said she wasn’t married, said the station made her wear the ring to boost her credibility.

It’s cubic zirconia, she said. This close to worthless.

I’m so young, she said. And no one wants the young telling them anything.

The shoes she picked pinched his toes but he didn’t complain. They were close enough and they were cheap and they matched the suit. After she approved she reached up again, fixed his hair with a licked finger. Every time she moved he could smell her. He didn’t know the names of perfumes but he’d smelled this one before. The confines of the dressing room were tight and their bodies kept touching at new angles. They were all brushes but they started to add up. He knew better than to expect more. Yesterday she’d said he was a hero but this was only the story the news at five had wanted to tell.

W

It was the presence of the reward that confused him, a number large enough he assumed the boy’s family would live outside the city, farther north in the surrounding suburbs. Instead the reporter exited the freeway early, staying within the city limits, within the zone. Now the vague terrain of lonely blocks, the way the old and hopeful names for neighborhoods no longer described what you found. Trees grown close around houses, fallen leaves over trashed yards, tall brown grass sticking through the early snow. The blackened frame of a house, all the doors and windows stolen, all its insides gutted, dragged outside and left in the yard.

A spray-painted sign over a burnt storefront: pet store any varmit you want free.

Now the house of the boy’s family, as old as the other houses on the block, built of the same architecture but otherwise seemingly from another era. The brick powerwashed and graffiti-free, the porch a new bit of construction and nicely stained, the siding painted a cheerful green. Last week’s snow covered the earth but Kelly could see flowerbeds in front of the house and trellises built along the sides, ornamentation readied for spring growth, summer bloom, the future.

This was the kind of home he desired, maybe the kind of life.

The boy’s father answered the door, shook their hands, invited them in. Kelly hadn’t thought to guess the boy was adopted until he saw the father, the bearded man around the same height as Kelly but heavier, dressed in dark jeans and a short-sleeved checked dress shirt. In the boy’s house Kelly found himself more aware of his movements, knew he was being watched by the father, the cameraman, the blonde reporter. He wiped his forehead with his sleeve, tried to smile. The walls were decorated with pictures of the boy, all the official documents of a child, starting when the boy was a toddler and ending at whatever age he was now, ten or eleven or twelve. In the photos from later years another boy appeared in the pictures, after which Kelly assumed the children had taken on new titles: the boy, the brother, the boy’s brother.

The mother came out of the kitchen to meet him, her long dark hair restrained in a single braid, faded freckles on her face and arms and hands, everywhere else pale skin escaped the bright fabric of her dress.

Thank you for bringing Daniel back, she said. Thank you for finding him for us.

As if Kelly had done something purposeful, something tried. She called the boy’s name up the stairs and the boy appeared, dressed in his own gray suit. Kelly knew the boy’s name but there were so many Daniels in the world, so many Dans and Dannys. The boy? There had been a boy before. There was this boy now. It was only generic in the mouths of others.

The father talked to the blonde reporter, explaining their move back to the city, the price they’d paid for the house, the sorry shape it’d been in. Kelly flushed when the father spoke of the house being ransacked, how the hardwood floors and the winding staircase and the brick walls had held but how scrappers had come in and taken the wiring, the plumbing.

They did us a favor, the father said. We would have had to tear it all out to put in a modern system. Now the house has grounded plugs, new pipes, central air.

All new appliances, as of last winter, the mother said, joining in. The walls were already gutted so we took down the plaster to put in drywall, painted the rooms brighter colors.

In the summer we mow the neighbors’ lawns, the father said. To keep up appearances. To make it easier to hope other people might move here too.

The mother and the father: their titles made them sound older than they were but they were the same age as Kelly or else younger. The father was a veteran, had come home from overseas to study, work, start a family. His grandparents helped with the down payment on the house and with adoption costs and they were the ones who had paid the reward.

We don’t have much, the father said. We have to be willing to take help wherever we can find it.

They didn’t have much but they had a family. Kelly sat down on a creaky wooden chair, focused on not putting his head in his hands. Before the small talk was exhausted Kelly stood and again began inspecting the family photos on the walls, tried to imagine the life they suggested. The mother saw him looking, came to stand beside him, touched his arm. He looked at where she had touched him, followed her hand as it left his skin to gesture through the photographs, indicating various ages, after-school activities, the brother playing basketball for the school team, the boy sitting at a piano dressed in the same gray suit.

The mother asked, Do you have kids?

No, Kelly said. No kids.

She said, We wanted kids of our own. And when he couldn’t have them, then we wanted to love a child no one had wanted. We wanted there to be less suffering because of our love.

Her earnestness embarrassed him. He turned and looked for the boy, wondered what the boy had heard. The blonde reporter asked where the brother was and the father and mother looked at each other before answering.

He’s out, the father said.

We didn’t know you would want him here, the mother said.

The blonde reporter needed a family reunited but it didn’t matter to her who the family contained. The cameraman shot video of the father and the mother, of the family together, and then the boy by himself. The father put his hand on the boy’s shoulder and the boy flinched. On the news the reporter had said basically nothing had happened to the boy. But it wasn’t nothing, couldn’t have been nothing. Even if he was unhurt now, he had not been unhurt in the basement. He had been watched and Kelly knew watching could be its own kind of injury.

The boy had been left too, and hadn’t he screamed in the dark?

The boy was looking at Kelly and Kelly tried not to stare back. The cameraman maneuvered closer, asked Kelly to sit beside the boy. They were supposed to talk but about what? Kelly had good teeth too but never showed them in pictures because before they’d been bad. He had to keep blinking to keep his eyes from watering. He never paid much attention to his face but the camera made him aware how it was moving wrong.

Kelly wanted to say something to the boy but not in front of these hovering people, not with their hands touching the boy, his head, his hair, his hands. He saw the way the boy suffered under their touch but he didn’t know if this was new. After the photographs were finished the father pumped Kelly’s hand and thanked him, handed him a check. The worth of a boy, paid for again. Who was the real criminal, the one who took the boy or the one who took the ransom? They treated him like a hero but he’d been acting like a thief and yet here was the payment for the best thing he’d ever found, in any abandoned house.

Kelly could smell the suit he was wearing, his sweat tanging through the harshness of the cheap chemicals used to wash away whoever had worn it last. He kneeled down in front of the boy, touched the boy’s skinny arm.

Daniel, he said. I want to see you again.

He hadn’t meant to say it so loud but there it was. Conversation stopped and he knew he’d made a mistake. The father bristled and the mother put her hand on the boy’s head, pulled the boy away before Kelly could see his reaction.

The parents had been friendly with him but now he saw their truer feelings cloud their faces, suspicion shifting toward accusation. They were happy for their boy’s return, had paid the reward, but honestly what was he doing in that house.

The boy was too old for the gesture but now he hid his face in the mother’s side, tucked away an expression Kelly couldn’t track. Then the boy nodded, his face moving against the fabric of the mother’s dress.

If it’s okay with you, Kelly said — speaking to the boy’s parents, being careful not to address the boy again — I’ll leave my phone number, in case you need me.

Need you for what, the father said, but the mother brought Kelly a pen and a pad of paper. An instinctual courtesy.

The father said, I don’t think this is a good idea. We want this to be over. I’m sure you understand.

The boy stayed where he was and shuffled his feet, scuffed his dress shoes against the linoleum. An odd smile crossed the father’s face and Kelly knew he would be polite enough to wait until Kelly left the house to throw the number away. The cameraman shot more footage but Kelly knew it wasn’t the story they’d come to tell and afterward Kelly cried out in the reporter’s car, a tremor in his hands and his voice not making the words he wanted to say, not any apologetic noise. The blonde reporter touched him on the shoulder but her touch wasn’t what made him stop. He was almost done when she took her hand away, checked her watch, put the car into drive.

By late afternoon, the local news was teasing the story, displaying a ticker along the bottom edge of daytime programming: local hero meets saved boy. When the broadcast began, Kelly poured himself a tall-enough drink to watch the video of the family together, a video of him and the boy. He wasn’t in the first shot, and the second made him look criminal. He had three days’ worth of beard, needed a haircut. The suit fit him but its origins showed. How long had it been since he’d seen himself look so naked. You stopped looking in mirrors when you brushed your teeth, you learned to shave by feel and muscle memory, maybe you never had to look yourself in the eye ever again.

He watched the blonde reporter speak, heard something missing in her cause and effect, in the suggestion that he had always been the hero, that the boy had always been the saved boy, their meeting a plan instead of coincidence. The national news picked up the story, reran the report. He’d been invisible for a year but now he was so easy to find. Other reporters called, wanted their own exclusives. A news van parked outside and Kelly called into work, pushed his luck. He wondered if the southern woman saw. He wondered about her boy. How they would not be convinced by the new narrative of his life, despite the eerie parallels. How he would always be sorry for what he’d done, his own worst thing. The collapse within the collapse. How sorry wasn’t enough, how nothing he could say would be. Always there would be the complete insufficiency of words. On the worst day he had promised not to contact them and this was a promise he would keep. There had been love but he of all people knew love was not enough.

Later a familiar sickness returned as he pushed the cashier’s check across the counter at his new bank. How he could have sent it to the southern woman. How he could have given it to her boy.

When he asked, the bank teller said he probably would have to pay taxes on the reward but not until the end of the year.

THE OTHER WORKERS KNEW he’d been hired to appease the boss’s wife, smoked and swore and spat and ignored him. He wanted a reputation as a hard worker but first he had to match their pace. The challenge of the right kind of slow. He wanted to work safely but it was hard to keep yourself safer than the least-safe guy. He said he knew how to swing a sledge, to work a torch, wanted to be inside the buildings putting his skills to use but after the first week Kelly never saw the man who hired him again. The other men showed him where to shovel the debris, told him to move the shattered plaster or concrete into the long red dumpsters in the parking lot, they made fun of his name and he let them. They weren’t the first to try.

Once the walls of a building came down Kelly swept broken glass in the open air, breathed hard under a paper mask. Snow fell, made every shovel-load heavier. He wore layers of shirts, long underwear under thick brown pants, filled the layers with sweat and silence. He swept and shoveled and hauled what the others knocked down and it was beneath the skills he’d acquired in the zone. Sometimes he worked straight through the day. More sweeping glass, more dragging splintered rafters and crushed wood paneling. In one building he carried cracked urinals down five flights of stairs in one wing, down six in another. Often someone shit in a toilet long after the water was shut off. The others joked it beat walking all the way downstairs but Kelly was the one who had to carry what they made, had to crouch over and reach around the loaded bowl to back out the four bolts securing it to the wall. Shit on his hands and piss on his shoes, a hard hat on his head and a fluorescent vest fastened around his chest. A mask might keep his lungs from turning black but nothing stopped his stomach turning.

How do you rate, one of the others said, shouldering past him in a narrow hallway littered with broken glass, shattered plaster. My brother used to do your job and now look at how shitty you’re doing it.

One day the foreman made him maneuver a fire hose, spraying water over the dust forced free by an excavator. The dust could explode, the foreman said, and Kelly nodded, did what he was asked. The water turned the worksite into a puddled muck, gray water moving fast over frozen ground, thick with floating particulate. The dust rose and he knocked it down. It was a job anyone else might get complacent about but never him. He could never tell anyone about the fire at the plant but he knew some part of him was constantly turning over what had happened. He had worked to make this part inaccessible to the rest of him. This was a diminishment in capacity but so far he thought he was getting along fine.

When the Christian women left, the city watch entered. Five men, volunteers dressed in orange t-shirts and orange football jerseys worn under winter coats, each shaking Kelly’s hand, each bearing a name forgotten immediately for some identifying mark instead: the first, big as a linebacker; another white haired and white mustached; another bad toothed, tattooed; the fourth with one cloudy eye, as white as the other eye was yellow, jaundiced. The fifth a former cop with silvered temples, a nose broken multiple times.

We saw you on the news, the cop said. A hero. We want you to come to our meetings.

Kelly balked but opened six beers, dumped an ashtray so the men could smoke. He’d seen men like these men before, in other neighborhoods, had learned to recognize their type, the sunglasses and ball caps and leather gloves, how against their own rules some disguised their bright uniforms beneath dark jackets. The city watch held its own training sessions, invited city councilmen and police veterans and the survivors of horrible crimes to come and speak. If you could tell yourself you were protecting someone else, how much further might you be able to go.

In his apartment, the men told stories and Kelly relaxed into their tall tales, the bravado and the dismay. The volunteers spoke the name of a minor dealer; the name of a raped girl, the name of her child; the name of a minister who fed gang members because he said everyone deserved a chance at redemption. A roll call of scared neighbors they each checked on, of old women living on blocks all their own, their yards growing high and snarled as the streetlights clicked off for good. The last white family living in what used to be a white neighborhood. The last black family living in what used to be a black neighborhood. After both families were gone, only ghosts would remain. And what color were ghosts.

The men drank and the men smoked and Kelly followed along better when they used the names of streets and neighborhoods, the numbers and letters of freeways. In the zone they drove pickup trucks or SUVs, installed brighter headlights, dashboard cameras, did their best for the city they loved. Kelly asked the former cop if he carried a gun on his rounds, and the cop said, Never tell them either way. Don’t say you do and don’t say you don’t.

We don’t talk about firepower, he said, but whatever they got, we can match it.

Kelly nodded. He understood but he didn’t want a weapon of his own. He had a short temper he controlled by not putting himself in places it might erupt. If he had a handgun in his truck he knew someday the handgun would go off.

Would go off. As if it were the gun doing the work. As if a plastic Glock had its own agency.

He would go to their meeting, he said, but that didn’t mean he was joining their cause.

They laughed, clapped him on his shoulders. He’d see, they said. He had saved a boy but the police hadn’t found the boy’s kidnapper. Maybe these volunteers would.

Kelly put down his cigarette, rubbed his eyes. For a moment he’d had trouble telling one man from another. What was similar was stronger than what was different, their station an ideal better than any individual. He moved his gaze from face to face, trying to match the names they’d offered to the features he saw.

The suspect, he thought. The volunteers were right: he had been thinking about the suspect. Maybe there was something more he wanted done. Or else something he wanted to do.

He wasn’t scrapping anymore but nights the girl with the limp worked he drove the oldest neighborhoods, cruised the streets bordering overgrown fields and crumbling industrial parks. He bought a police scanner, affixed it to the dash, listened for arsons and burglaries, domestic violence, the reported sounds of gunfire. Dispatch spoke at a remove, spared the details. Most nights he heard her voice on the airwaves, disappearing fast into a squelch of turning static. Her radio voice was pleasantly dispassionate, speaking from within an unfolding tragedy but without inflection. She narrated codes, directions, the street addresses, and the names of cross streets. Sometimes he went the places she named. If he didn’t know how to get there he plugged the address into the dash and then there were two female voices telling him where to go. The satellites pointed him in the direction of her mind. He often beat the first responders to the scene but what could he do next, what else except drive by a burning building and hope everyone inside had escaped the flames.

He wasn’t scrapping but it didn’t keep him out of the oldest buildings. The night he found the boy he had come home to his apartment and found all his relics uncharged, their thrum dissipated. His life had changed but he didn’t want to lose what he’d gathered, needed more. He pry-barred the lock on a door in a house he was sure was empty and walked its rooms, ran his fingers through the carpet, put his palms against the plaster walls. There was a mailbox out front with a series of numbers meant to separate this home from all others. Someone could live here again but who. Someone had owned this house but where had they gone. He listened to the boards creak, waited to hear the way the house held both a whisper and a hush. The absence of expectation: nothing more would happen in this house. The phone would not ring, the kitchen timer would not go off, no one would knock on the door. He’d gotten used to so much quiet but never this.

The boy still appeared on the television but less and less. What had happened to the boy was a crime but who would solve it. The scene had given the heavy detective nothing, thanks to Kelly’s obscuring work, his covering of every surface in drywall dust and tracked dirt. He gauged his responsibility, tried to assign fault in right proportion. He tried to imagine what might happen next, if the kidnapper knew his name, the name of the boy. He tried to imagine if the balance of power might be upset, if he could come to know the watcher, the man in the red slicker.

From the relics he’d found in the zone Kelly had learned it wasn’t possible to know what the hearts of others would treasure or protect. He was coming to believe that if he wanted something saved he had to save it himself.

THEY ATE COLD SANDWICHES and hot soup in a diner, split a piece of apple pie for dessert. She told him about her week, rehashed all the stories that made the newspaper. Even worse, she said, were the ones that never would, the lower cries of human misery answered at her terminal every hour of her working day: a mother with her kitchen on fire, a wife with a voice slurred by drink or bruises, a child calling for help from the last pay phone on earth, lost and unable to explain where she was, where she was supposed to be. The car crashes, the slip and falls, the temporary troubles and the irreversible blows. The insane cruelty of chance, the magnificent dangers of the everyday, all filtered through her station.

When I started this job, she said, I thought the voices went right through me. I took each call, passed its information to someone who could help, moved on.

The first month, she said, I couldn’t remember the calls by the time I got home. I dealt with them and then I forgot. But I didn’t stay uninvolved forever. I became something else.

A salvor, Kelly said. Salvor. A word he’d been thinking of ever since the first step out of the basement in the blue house. One possible future.

She said, One day I came home and I told someone else what I’d heard on the phone. I’d never done this before, never talked about the day. The someone else was a man but who he was isn’t important. The story I told him was about a boy who had fallen into a sewer opening while playing with some friends. They shouldn’t have been doing what they were but their mistake wasn’t my concern. My concern was getting the boy out of the hole.

There’s always a boy to be rescued, he said. Or else a girl.

Public works, she said. The fire department. Both called and put on the case and when I hung up the phone I didn’t know how the case would end but I believed it would be resolved. It was so simple, a boy at the bottom of a ladder, too scared to climb back up, maybe hurt.

She stopped talking, stuck her fork through the pie to scrape the plate below, carving the slice into smaller pieces without taking a bite.

The fire department radioed back, she said. This happens. They need more information than what I’ve provided, or else the person calling has made a mistake. It’s so hard to be accurate in the presence of trauma. The firemen and the men from public works had arrived at the open sewer cover to find the first two boys, the one who stayed and the one who made the call. From the street the men couldn’t see the third boy at the bottom of the hole and when they went down into the sewer — it was ten feet down, nothing any man and a flashlight couldn’t handle — the boy wasn’t there. There was nowhere for a boy to go but the firemen searched the shallow passage, trolled the water, shined their lights across every foot of the sewer entrance, all its holes and cubbies, any place a boy might have hidden.

Why would he hide? she asked. From who? Public works unlocked the gratings at each end of the chamber and a further search was organized. Even as they searched they must have known they wouldn’t find the boy, because how would he have gotten past those same grates? At first they thought the boys had made up the fallen friend, but he was real enough. It turned out the friend’s parents hadn’t seen him since before school. They never saw him again.

She said, Once there was this single mystery, the missing boy in the sewer. Now there are so many. Your boy too. Because you saved him — at last she lifted a bite of cold pie to her mouth — but from who?

It’s not the unsolvable that bothers me, she said. It’s the solvable unsolved.

She wasn’t as emotive as every other woman he’d dated. He didn’t know the shapes of all her thoughts, had no taxonomy for her modes of expression and speech and careful withholding. After her third bite of pie he realized he didn’t have to respond. As with every other conversation it was often enough for him to be the listener, to remember what he’d been told.

There was a grocery in his new neighborhood but he didn’t need more food. He bought a handle of whiskey, a twelve-pack of beer, a carton of cigarettes, a squat spiral notebook, and a package of black pens. Back in his apartment he started at the beginning, listed details, whatever precursors of memory he might be able to tug. What had he seen. What did it mean. Who had hurt the boy. The boy had given the detective only the mask, the gloves, a red slicker; no identifying details, no sure guesses of height or weight. As if he’d been abducted by a ghost or an idea. Kelly could picture someone more solid but the imagined man wore a face born from movies, crime procedurals.

In the notebook he wrote what he had not told the heavy detective: How before he’d returned to the basement, he had tried to pretend he’d never seen the boy. And how when he returned it was for a moment the blankness he’d seen.

He wrote, The two ways of seeing the room: the scrapper and the salvor.

The boy was screaming the first time Kelly touched him. He couldn’t get the boy to stop. He had tried to pick the boy up because he couldn’t see the cuffs around his ankles.

The cuffs caught and the boy screamed again.

Kelly had sawed the handcuff chain but he barely remembered doing it. By then the boy had almost stopped crying. Maybe there wasn’t any sound except for the scraping pull and push of the saw, the breaths in between.

Kelly wrote: The night of the first snow. The night I found the boy. The beginning of my involvement in the case but not the beginning of the case. When had the boy been reported missing? Two days earlier. When had the boy actually gone missing? The day before that. The entire case three days long, the crime cut short by my entrance. My last night as a scavenger. I must have known but I went back for my tools. While the boy waited in the locked truck, down in the dark of the pit.

The facts of the case, the scenes of the crime: The boy’s school, the house where the boy was kept and watched. The car that ferried the boy. The man in the red slicker. The accumulation of mattresses and foam and handcuffs. The purchase of tools. The lock on the basement door. The coming and going from the house and how had no one seen him coming and going. Easy. The complete absence of neighbors. The total lack of community. The man in the red slicker and the boy, adrift in the zone, waiting for the first to find the second.

The confidence it took to take a boy. The confidence it took to park right in front of the school. Confidence or else direst need. And if the man who kidnapped the boy wore a mask, then when the boy first saw my face he must have thought I was the kidnapper, carrying the same wants into that basement.

What if this wasn’t the first time. Then what happened to the other boys. Then what would have happened to the boy if I hadn’t found him. And if there is this depravity what other depravities exist, wherever no good man is looking.

What is the responsibility of the good man in the zone?

Is detective a role or an action. Is the good man an action too.

Can I take on the role of the detective and carry it to its completion.

Can pretending to be a good man one day make me a good man.

Outside, a great rain filled the city, overwhelmed the sewers. Another hundred thousand homes went without power and today there would be no work and in the dark of the apartment Kelly smoked and listened to the thunder announce the lightning and he wrote in the notebook and when he got bored he did one hundred push-ups, one hundred sit-ups, sets of one hundred squats, lunges, leg lifts. He thrilled at his body in motion, his body hurting. He was strong from the zone but he knew he could be stronger. In high school he’d put on muscle fast, lifted his way into the starting lineup, the top of his weight class. The pride of his father’s coaching. County wrestling champion one year, state champ the next. Once he’d been able to run for miles without tiring and he wondered if he could make himself do it again.

5

THE PHONE RANG and Kelly didn’t recognize the number. The phone rang again and he let it go to voicemail. He waited for the beep and then he pressed the button, put the phone to his ear, heard the boy’s voice. He listened to the message, listened to it again. Five minutes later, the first text arrived: this is daniel call me

Then: this is daniel i have my own phone

so i don’t get lost again

this is daniel

Kelly had given the boy his phone number and the boy had put it to use. What could Kelly write back? The one thing he knew.

this is kelly.

They were strangers but now they would be something else. Kelly couldn’t pretend he didn’t know what a bad idea was because here they were at the start of one, a mistake amassing potential.

this is daniel

whats your address

i want to see you too

Kelly unbuttoned the top button of his shirt, smeared the sweat from his neck and chest. He put his thumbs to the screen, typed his new address. The invitation had become a trap. He was the sole suspect in the kidnapping and he had shown who he was: someone who wanted the boy, who couldn’t keep from asking for more.

how will you get here.

i’ll come get you.

are you home.

are you home.

are you home.

An hour passed before the phone beeped again. Kelly went to the intercom beside the door and he buzzed the boy in, then opened the door to find the boy in his school uniform, the blue jacket and the striped tie, the khaki pants over clean white sneakers. He wanted to ask the boy why he’d come but it wasn’t the right way to start.

Kelly asked, How did you get here?

My brother brought me, the boy said. I told him this was a friend’s house.

Okay, Kelly said. Come in. This way.

Kelly pointed to a chair on the other side of the room, took his own seat on the couch. The boy sat where he was told. He had a quiet politeness in his movements Kelly had seen before, known himself, the boy moving as if afraid to make a mistake. The notebook was on the coffee table, folded open. The case, Kelly was calling it. The case notes. Kelly picked up the notebook, folded the cover around the spirals. The television was tuned to a documentary about whales, whale songs. The narrator claimed whales could recognize voices through a thousand miles of black water but military outposts and underwater fiber-optic cables disrupted the songs, confused the whales, and limited the range of their speech. The sound was below the limits of human hearing and so it took special equipment to know what had been lost. The cost of progress, above the earth and below it and upon the air and in the sea.

Kelly muted the television. The boy asked if he could have something to drink and Kelly appreciated knowing what to do next. There wasn’t anything in the refrigerator for a boy so he filled a glass of water from the tap. He had plenty of food left from the Christian women and when he asked the boy if he was hungry he thought it was better if the boy said yes.

But then the boy’s voice spoke from closer than Kelly expected.

Kelly turned around and found the boy in the kitchen with him. A mere foot of separation breathing between their bodies. Kelly set the table, retrieved the last of a deli tray from the fridge, a plastic container of potato salad. A bottle of mustard, a jar of mayonnaise. Salt and pepper. He only had enough dishes for two people but there were only the two of them eating.

Kelly asked, How old are you?

Twelve, the boy said. Until next summer.

Twelve, thirteen. What had changed for Kelly in the gap between those years. The arrival of the new body that brought him further under his father’s gaze, bought admission into the gym and the mat room and his father’s coaching.

Kelly thought he wasn’t hungry but he knew better than to have another drink on top of the two he’d had before the boy arrived. The boy grinned above his sandwich and Kelly’s appetite awoke. He piled more meat on his plate, more cheese than the bread needed. The boy finished his sandwich first, excused himself from the table. Again the politeness but when the boy returned to the living room he sat on the far end of the couch instead of the chair. The whale documentary was still playing and the boy picked up the remote, fingered the mute, returned volume to the room. The boy watched the whales and when Kelly wasn’t watching the boy they watched the whales together.

All slap and splash atop the surface, quiet consumption underneath. Nothing was bigger than the biggest of their number, and their only predators were men and giant squid and other whales. On-screen a whale carcass appeared on the seafloor, lit by an unmanned submersible. Thirty-five tons of gray whale a mile below the surface, crawling with life: the whale had fed off the ocean and the ocean would feed off the whale. The narrator intoned the stages, the eras of the mobile scavenger, the enrichment opportunist, the sulfophilic, spoke over footage of eel-shaped hagfish swimming through the whale fall, through the fallen timber of the bones: Two years of soft-tissue consumption, one hundred thirty pounds of blubber and muscle and organ consumed every day. Then years of unimaginable creatures colonizing what was left. Then bacteria breaking down lipids in the bones for fifty more years, a hundred. The bacteria not needing oxygen to live, not expelling carbon dioxide. Sulfate in, hydrogen sulfide out. Mussels and clams living on chemosymbiotic bacteria. Limpets and snails grazing bacterial mats, biofilms.

There were many places any one animal couldn’t live but nowhere no animal would not. All these animals Kelly had never known: the squat lobster, more amphipods, impossible mollusks. Zombie worms born without digestive tracts. A name for everything, no matter how strange. So many hundreds of thousands of dead whales crashed into the ocean floor they created a migratory path, a way for organisms to move, evolve. If you were a single cell wide, how many cities might one whale comprise, falling blackly through the black water? Another exclusion zone filled with rot, shared by other scavengers. A bowhead whale could live two hundred years, and one hundred years after it died it might at last disappear from the earth, dispersed entirely. Off the shore there were carcasses of American whales as old as America and what did this say for this past century, for what was man-made and had lasted only half as long.

When the show ended the boy stood from the couch and retrieved his backpack, paused by the door. He was nervous but there was something brave in him and Kelly recognized this too. He had come through his own troubles with something similar, an unspoken belief nothing worse would happen next.

Kelly asked, Where are you going? It’s a long way home.

I’m not going home, the boy said. I’m going to my father’s.

Now the boy began to speak, slowly, carefully, his backpack on his shoulders. At first the boy hadn’t noticed his father had moved out. In the first month of the separation, his father had come back every night for dinner, stayed listening to records in the living room until the boy was in bed. He wasn’t there for breakfast but he’d always left for work before sunrise. He’d realized the father was gone only when the father’s things went missing. The books stayed on the shelves because the father didn’t read but one day there was hardly any music left in the house. Certain kinds of food stopped being stocked. The boy hadn’t said anything. He didn’t mention every obvious problem he saw. His parents had separated before what happened but afterward they’d reunited for the photo op, made nice for the cameras. The appearance of normalcy for the return of their boy. Now the cameras were gone and the boy’s father was back in his apartment, didn’t have to pretend to show up for dinner.

This was why the parents hadn’t understood he’d gone missing. They weren’t speaking and both of them had thought the other had the boy.

I’ll drive you, Kelly said. He gathered his keys, found a ball cap and a sweatshirt. He checked his watch. On the way to the truck he called the girl with the limp, offered her a time, then adjusted his arrival into the further future, said all estimates were dependent on weather and traffic. She heard the truck start, asked him where he was going first.

He gave her the details: The boy had come to him. They had spent some hours together. He was taking the boy home.

She said, I don’t know if that’s a good idea.

Be careful, she said. I hope you know what you’re doing.

He gave her the details but what did the details mean. She was the soul of understatement but maybe she understood. Something had begun in the basement of the blue house and this was how it continued. He hung up the phone, maneuvered the truck out of the neighborhood and onto the freeway, moved the truck into the left lane, kept his foot on the gas. There was a joy to going fast and when a grin broke over his face he looked over at the boy, hoping to share it.

The boy’s face crumpled. He cradled his backpack in his lap, hugged it against his chest. He wasn’t crying yet but maybe he would. Kelly reached out a hand, put it on the boy’s shaking leg.

I’m sorry, Kelly said. I forgot you’d been in the truck. I forgot how it might feel to be in it again.

He waited until the boy was calm again and then he removed his shaking hand, put it back against the wheel. The questions should have been hard to ask but somehow Kelly got them out. The truth at higher and higher speeds, acquiring motion, dopplering through the night.

He said, You don’t have to tell me anything you don’t want to.

Yes, I do, the boy said. Because you were there too.

What the boy remembered hadn’t changed. There was no more or no less story than before, when he told it to the heavy detective.

The boy said, My brother was supposed to pick me up in front of my school. We don’t go to the same school anymore but his school excuses first so he’s supposed to be there waiting for me when I get out. But my brother didn’t come and then there were less cars waiting.

My mother used to pick me up but now she was looking for work. My brother used to be late all the time but now he didn’t always show.

I didn’t have a cell phone then, the boy said. I have one now.

The boy said, He isn’t my real brother. My parents aren’t my real parents but I know you know. My parents are separated and they don’t talk and my brother uses their two houses as a way to never go home, by saying he’s always at the other house.

He hasn’t been in our family long, the boy said, putting his head against the steamed window. The boy was quiet for a mile, two miles. An eerie silence complemented his calm speech, too controlled for his age. Snow fell over the pavement, obscured the lines marking the edge of the road. As the miles passed the boy began to speak again. He said he wasn’t telling Kelly anything he hadn’t told the police.

The boy wasn’t confused. This was a repetition of the facts.

He had been waiting for his brother.

He waited until there wasn’t anyone else waiting.

When the brown car arrived, the boy thought it was his brother’s or else he never would have been so close to the curb. The car was the right color and make and model, the right year, a car like the brother drove.

The boy didn’t know if the man in the car was trying to take him or just anyone there waiting. The boy opened the back door, the boy climbed in, sat down, closed the door, and buckled his seat belt. The boy said, The whole time I was doing it, I could see it wasn’t my brother’s car. It didn’t smell like cigarettes and pot. It wasn’t littered with fast-food wrappers. It was spotless and there was no smell and as I buckled my seat belt I saw the man who was driving it wasn’t my brother. He was shorter than my brother and he was wearing a red hooded slicker. In the car the man wasn’t wearing a mask. It was the only time he wasn’t. He wasn’t wearing a mask but he was wearing gloves and as I slid into the backseat he pulled his red hood up.

The boy said, The sound of the child safety locks.

He hadn’t meant to sit down. He hadn’t meant to close the door. He’d been tired or uncareful. Habit took over and by the time alarm arrived it was too late.

Kelly knew this mode too, the maturity in the boy’s voice, the flatness of affect: the shock that outlasted the trauma. What the boy said he remembered most wasn’t the fear but the confusion. The car was the same car his brother drove. The same color exterior, the same patterned fabric inside. At first the boy had thought the brother’s car had been stolen. For a moment, he’d worried about the brother. He couldn’t understand why the car thief would pick him up from school. He hadn’t realized yet it wasn’t the car the thief had stolen but him.

The boy said, The man told me to unbuckle my seat belt, to lie down on the floor. Down where my feet were supposed to go.

I used to call it the pit, Kelly said. When I was a kid.

Yes, the boy said. The pit.

The boy said in the basement he had been frightened of worse but worse had not come. The man made him strip naked so he wouldn’t escape, but after he was naked he was given a blanket, allowed to cover himself. The boy was naked beneath the blanket but the man who took him didn’t touch him. The man wore a hooded red rain slicker and the man didn’t take the slicker off while he sat in the chair beside the bed or while he fed the boy or while he came and went.

Three days passed. The boy not molested or tortured or killed.

The boy merely kept.

Kept and watched.

Kelly had entered the low room too. There was the boy before and the boy after, and at the boy’s suggestion he remembered his own feeling of being split by entering the room: into the scrapper, perhaps, or else the salvor, two new ways of naming this second self he’d perhaps always known, recognized at last after a lifetime of mirrors.

THE VOLUNTEERS WELCOMED KELLY INTO their fold, pressed one of their orange jerseys into his hands, then pushed him to his knees and pulled it over his head. The men laid their hands upon him and they prayed for protection and his wisdom and grace in securing their city until Kelly was one of their number. The taking on of new duties, how immediately the office weighed upon him: He had not intended this. He had not intended any more than the acquisition of the uniform. A mode of access and anonymity, a man dressed up behind a symbol.

The watch met in schools and in churches and in bars, in backyards in the summer and in community halls in the winter, and wherever they met there would be the smell of barbecue and baked beans, piles of coleslaw and bread, all surrounded by men in their orange t-shirts, their orange jerseys and orange caps. They prayed before they ate, they ate before they invited the week’s speaker to the podium, and then Kelly was pointed out, made an example: This was the good man, the speaker said, in this bad world.

The speaker said this was the week a mother flushed her premature newborn down the toilet, then changed her mind, calling emergency services in time for firemen to cut the bawling baby loose from the pipe.

This was the week a woman beat her husband with a bat while he slept, too drunk to defend himself, as she had once been too afraid.

This was the week the homicide rate eclipsed the previous year’s and there were still six weeks left in the year.

This was the week the mayor cut the police force again, expanded the border of the zone another few blocks, darkened another row of streetlights, abandoned another portion of the city. The volunteers had dedicated themselves to keeping those streets safe when the police could not but they couldn’t hide their dismay, let their voices cry out in anger, the opposite of hallelujah, the cursing opposite of giving thanks.

This was a bad year, the speaker said. But this was also the year when Kelly saved a boy.

Like Lot in Sodom, he said. The good man who tries to rescue his city.

Afterward men swarmed to clap Kelly on the back or shake his hand or else they offered some more intricate greeting Kelly couldn’t follow or reciprocate. He had done what they had dreamed of doing: he had stopped a crime, he had saved a life. A child endangered, a victim rescued, a hero in their midst. They asked him what it had been like to carry the boy out of captivity and he said he didn’t know how to explain it. They wanted a story about a hero but he didn’t know how to say he hadn’t had the kind of feelings they wanted to hear. He didn’t know how to say that what he thought he had felt was responsible.

He couldn’t tell them about the scrapper, about the salvor, about the two voices he heard whenever he worked on the case notes. How there was a voice that wanted to punish the guilty. How there was a voice that wanted to protect the innocent.

Or not voices, exactly. Not voices but modes of thought, systems of organization, suggestions for action. Actions themselves, actions in waiting.

There were other support groups for other needs. After hours in a high school classroom, Kelly sat in a circle of chairs and listened again. This time the circle contained mostly women but it was the men he’d come to hear. When it was Kelly’s turn, he wanted to speak but the words wouldn’t come. He opened and closed his mouth, choked out a sound. The words wouldn’t come. My father. My father, who never took anything he didn’t ask for first. What had Kelly done to hold the words back. What would it take to reverse the damage. He shook his head, studied his hands. An older man touched his knee. The older man had been through something terrible, had done something equally bad. Kelly pitied the older man, the absolute safety of pitying in others what you wouldn’t pity in yourself. Kelly wanted to say what happened in his youth was worse because it had not left a mark, because it had not hurt, because he had only touched, not been touched. Because he had been asked to do it and he had agreed and even if it wasn’t fair — even if he had been too young to know better — even then what had happened to him had happened out of his own free will.

My father, so big upon his bones. All thick flesh, so that even where he was fat he was hard. In those years Kelly had believed in a world where you could be forgiven for every worst thing but later he threw away his rosary, revoked his right to those comforts, and so the world in which Kelly had passed on his hurt was a world in which his crime would not be forgiven, could not be redeemed or righted.

When he had paid for his vasectomy the nurses made him sign extra forms because of his age, because he was young and unmarried and childless. They asked him again if he was sure.

Yes, he said. He knew he would never have children of his own. Because he would not risk it.

But then the southern woman, who already had the only child she wanted. Then her boy.

How at first he had felt nothing. How he celebrated the nothing, the future he thought it promised. They bought their house, they moved in together, and for a long time nothing bad happened to anyone, for a long time when Kelly looked at her boy he had told himself he wanted to feel only love, something fatherly forming in the accumulation of days.

The collapse changed everything. The loss of his employment, their house. The constrained summer months they shared a single motel room, man and woman and child, when too often it was only the boy’s mother who left the room, who had her insufficient work to take her away.

The collapse changed everything but what if it merely sped the inevitable.

Just watch me, he had said, in the hot dark of the motel room, the night he and the boy were alone for the last time. After Kelly and the southern woman had fought again, after the woman took her purse and her car keys but not her boy. And how by then Kelly had loved the boy. How Kelly thought he would never hurt the boy but in his worst moment he knew he had somehow not known the boy’s name.

How in his worst moment he had said, Boy, just watch, but the boy had not wanted to watch.

What happened next had not taken long. When it was over Kelly grunted with relief, some clenching softening so fast it hurt, like the aftermath of a cramp. But then the horror of what he had done, what he had set his whole life against doing.

To have for so long restrained yourself from every urge and to have it buy you nothing. To still have to be yourself, everywhere you go.

The older man told Kelly this was a safe space but Kelly shook his head again. There were no safe spaces except those you made yourself. Safety could not be granted. Safety was the absence of anyone stronger or weaker. And always there was someone stronger or weaker, someone greater than, less than. The only true safety was the deepest kind of loneliness and for a time Kelly had chosen it. Now he was choosing something else, Daniel and Jackie, the found boy, the girl with the limp. Now the world’s every angle would be sharp with danger, for him and from him, until the case was closed. Until he found the watcher, the man in the red slicker. Until the boy was as safe as Kelly wanted him, as saved.

He gained another five pounds, another ten, stopped weighing himself, promised himself it was temporary, tried to compensate with more calisthenics on the worn carpet of his living room. He drank out of the cupboard and he ate out of the freezer, cleared the least-wanted remnants of Christian charity. There was a limit to how much pasta salad a man could crave but he passed the limit and kept going. Whenever he was alone and he couldn’t sleep he sat down at the table, clicked open his pen and began to write, scrawled bits of memory, details about the house where he’d found the boy, the low room inside.

He’d traded away distraction but he had obsession and so who missed it. He started bringing the police scanner in from the truck with him every night, and if the girl with the limp was away at work or in her own bed, then he listened to the scanner in his, fell asleep to the addresses of gunshots, arson, domestic disturbance, animals abandoned, abused. Every human horror reduced to a number, a flattening of fear and disgust into numeric code. Names repeated, last name, first name, middle initial. Say again. License-plate numbers, makes and models. Say again, say again. The ringing in his ears meant Kelly struggled to separate meaning from sounds. The litany of the nighttime city. The squelch and the static obscuring speech, every word so distorted the casual listener might make a mistake.

He was more tight-lipped than anyone else but he still worried he might begin to leak his secrets whenever he shared an afternoon with the boy, whenever the girl with the limp came home to find him drunk and reeling, chair to wall to floor, bed to morning. When the boy wasn’t with Kelly he was with his parents in their separate homes, or else with the brother, who sometimes didn’t go to school, staying home while the father worked, while the mother worked too, preparing for a life without the father’s income, his grandparents’ support. The boy put Kelly’s name to use, said it into the telephone, when he answered the door, when Kelly picked him up after school. The boy said it was easy to confuse the parents, to do as the brother did to make room between them. The boy’s parents were more careful now but the only person they ever checked with was the boy. His phone rang constantly and the boy told them he was wherever they expected him to be.

The boy’s brother treated him rough too. It wasn’t the first time they saw each other when the boy told Kelly this part of the story but almost. From the moment of his adoption the brother had pinched the boy, twisted the skin on his arms when out of sight of their parents, when in the room they shared, in the twin beds for boys who were not twins. Don’t tell anyone, the boy said the brother said. Or else.

Kelly asked, Is that all? Is that the worst of it?

The boy looked away, covered half his face with one hand, tugged at his ear with the other. Kelly tried to take the boy’s hand away from his mouth but stopped when the boy recoiled. The boy and the brother hadn’t been in the same family long but already Kelly thought the boy flinched where he hadn’t flinched before.

You can tell me, Kelly said. What happens next?

Kelly saw the boy often had to prepare himself to speak. The boy wanted to share what was happening to him but Kelly thought it could take all afternoon for the boy to gather the force of a sentence. He didn’t push and the next time they were together in the apartment the boy began again, said, It’s easier to talk to you, and so Kelly said, Then talk.

Day by day Kelly felt a rough and growing affection for the boy, a swelling knocking about his chest. Sometimes Kelly woke in the night and walked his featureless hallway into the living room, looking for the boy even though the boy couldn’t be there. If the boy was there the television would have been on, the boy would be sitting on the floor with his homework spread across the carpet. There would be sound and light surrounding his presence, instead of only the standby hum of the television, the louder drone of the refrigerator. Only voices in the night. Kelly listened to his neighbors, the sounds of scuffling feet, of television and radio, the murmur of their conversations, the noises of sex and kitchen, the huffing slap of bodies and the clatter of dishes. Whenever he was alone he found himself pulling his phone from his pocket to answer phantom vibrations, imagined missed calls. The boy had never spent the night but Kelly knew he would let the boy if the boy asked. It was another bad idea but Kelly was full of them. The important thing was not to ask, not to let your need be known.

6

YOUR NAME WAS NOT IMPORTANT but you believed one day an inquiry would begin, an organized speculation of detectives and reporters asking who was he and who was the real him and how was a man like him made. To refuse these interrogators you scrubbed the name clean, restarted yourself, removed all of the old life’s worldly tarnish. You had a past but in the present it was only this you who remained, this you and a boy, one boy at a time. Or so it had been, before the intruder.

At birth you had been given up before being given a name, any name.

Later came the first name, the one ill fit for the child you’d become. Then your second name, the one you gave yourself. You hadn’t wanted a last name but the judge wouldn’t let you refuse one. The use of a middle initial was a matter of deep ambivalence to the court but at the last minute you chose an X, made to leave no box unmarked.

Someday reporters and detectives would repeat the name chosen, its simple syllables, its known unknownness a cipher standing in place of a man. They would debate the deepening of the mystery by the middle initial standing for nothing, the X in the middle of a name whose whole stood for nothing either, not even to you.

The boy was a phrase that was a moving target. There had been a number of boys but you were careful not to think too often in specifics. The given name: mere words elevated to description, to knowledge of what a thing was. How all the power resided in the giver. How without such a gift an individual could be made a type, how the type specimen could be returned to the herd.

When you were a boy you had been nameless and now you unnamed each boy.

Anonymous then, anonymous now. You were not a name but a watcher, dedicated to a philosophy of watching, of inaction except for where action was necessary, and there was no way to put a boy into a house except by the taking. What else couldn’t be omitted? Food for the boy, food and drink. Whatever could be fed from a bowl, served with a spoon at room temperature. Even for yourself you wouldn’t make anything more complicated, couldn’t see the point of intricacy.

You read but you were not good with books. Every written word was an abstraction instead of the thing. What use were articles, conjunctions, prepositions. The way an adjective or an adverb revealed nothing except a wrong-named object or action. But who could know all the right names against the vagueness of the world, the insufficient exactness of nouns. You didn’t want a better system but rather a removal of all systems, the reduction of complex things to their simplest parts. What you wanted was the irreducibility of a centermost point, occupied by a single set of figures. The hollow inside, the blank at the heart of mystery.

The few people who saw you thought you were a mute or else slow, but you could talk, think for yourself. Only in the manner of your choosing. Only at a time of your making. You would talk only to the next boy, vowed silence against all others. Until then you revealed nothing. No one would ever know your names for the gone boys. The story others told about you would not be the story of the boys. For it was always the killer who was remembered, never the killed.

So grandiose: the killer, the killed.

You didn’t want to hurt the boys. Not until there was no other choice. And with the last boy, the intruder had made sure you hadn’t had to hurt anyone. The intruder saved the boy and also he saved you, because when you were finished with the boy you hadn’t had to hurt the boy to set you both free.

THE PAYCHECKS DIDN’T COME IN the mail. The office was at the front of a warehouse, a small rectangular room with a glass partition over wood paneling, separating the receptionist’s desk from the chairless waiting area. The receptionist was bleached blonde, tanned brown, embraced a certain brand of department-store professionalism. He could stand there grinning all day and still he’d never be invited past the glass, the locked door.

He opened the check in the truck, read the number lower than what he’d expected. The reductive mathematics of taxes, Social Security, Medicare. The bank was closed by the time he arrived but there was an ATM outside. In the dusk and the falling snow he pulled the new card from his wallet, followed the screen’s instructions prompt to prompt. He forgot he needed a pen to sign the check, jammed the cancel button until the screen reset. There was a pen in the truck, clipped to the case notes. He found it in the glove box, then shut the truck door, turned to walk back.

In three separate movements Kelly saw the gun, the hand holding the gun, the man who owned the hand.

He did what the man with the gun said. At his urging Kelly opened his wallet to reveal small bills ordered by denomination, some faded receipts. Back at the machine the man with the gun lurked out of the camera’s eye, told Kelly where he wanted him to stand while he worked the keypad, depositing the check, guessing at his daily limit. The mugger kept a stride’s worth of distance but occasionally he closed it for effect, pressing the barrel of the pistol into Kelly’s back, where Kelly could barely feel it through the thickness of his coat.

Each time the nub of the pistol’s barrel touched him Kelly felt a diminishment of effect. He could get used to anything, even a pistol snug against the small of his back. He withdrew another hundred dollars, watched the worth of his time pass into the mugger’s hands.

Now your keys, the man with the gun said. Hand them over.

No more, Kelly said. You’ve taken what I have for you to take.

Kelly turned. The man with the gun raised the weapon. Kelly wasn’t confused about whether or not the pistol was loaded but he didn’t think the man would fire it. The bank parking lot wasn’t the center of the zone. There were rules here, an expectation of law, punishment. They stood a couple blocks outside the most desperate geography, and maybe distance meant everything. It was dark and snowing but there were cars driving by on the avenue. Someone would witness whatever happened next unless the man timed it right. The police would come. Kelly had to believe this. The girl with the limp would send them, they would come by her voice.

Kelly laughed and the man with the gun started. Kelly remembered the school gymnasium, other incidents in other cities. How once the fight began there might be no stopping him. He took a step forward. The mugger’s face swapped expressions. At closer range Kelly could see the details were shaking.

Kelly said, You’re what I knew you would be.

The mugger spoke, his voice shifting. What are you talking about.

Kelly said, I would rather you were anyone else. Anyone different.

A surprise, said Kelly. That’s what I wish you were.

I’m not giving you my truck, he said. My truck is my life.

Kelly took another step forward and whatever sometimes happened to his heart happened again. All his blood gushing around and he could track every singing pint. Kelly’s face dropped its blankness for another expression, something sporting. He told himself it wasn’t the color of the man that made him feel this way. There were other factors. Dress and speech and something else, something learned. Greater than, less than. The beliefs of the town named like poison.

They were both sweating, breathing hard through the waiting.

Get the fuck out of here, Kelly said, with such force he thought the man with the gun would run. Instead the mugger slowly lowered the weapon, put it back into his pocket. He zipped his jacket, pulled the hood up, put it back down. It was a cold night but not that cold. Kelly waited next to the truck, fingers clenched around the keys, the metal carving his palms. He waited in the falling snow until the man with the gun had walked two blocks, three blocks, then around a corner. The pounding in Kelly’s chest continued, a fist trying to escape its slatted cage. He thought he wanted the feeling to last.

At the bar that night a man called another woman a cunt and the girl with the limp was there to tap the man on the shoulder, to register her complaint. She didn’t mind cursing but she wouldn’t put up with other kinds of comments, certain kinds of objectification. Her rude body had made her an object of curiosity and she had no tolerance for unwelcome comment. What was happening to her was vulgar but it was also hers.

To the man, she said, You can say what you want but don’t say it around me.

When the man called her a cunt too, then Kelly took her by the arm and dragged her from the room, leaving their drinks unfinished, their bar tab unpaid. Some people loved to talk and talk. Kelly didn’t default to the right words but if he talked slow enough he might say fewer of the wrong ones. On the way back to her place he tried to grope after the handle of the day’s story, the place to open it up, let it out. He was embarrassed by his victimhood. He knew he was angry but he was having trouble feeling more than some numb portion of the rage. He could see the man with the gun if he let his eyes close. She caught him blinking too much and asked if he was okay. He shifted his expression into a smile, made small talk about the new job he hated. The worst part about keeping a secret was anything going wrong seemed to be about the secret. But so little revolved around his gravity, held an orbit. The case was his secret, the mugger too. The latest in a long line of things he had done, would do, had had done to him. The confusion of past and present and future. He didn’t have to share. This was their agreement. They believed there was a certain kindness to keeping yourself to yourself.

He hadn’t wanted to reveal his nature in front of her but after she was asleep in her own bed he left the apartment, drove back. He liked the bar and the bartender and wouldn’t do anything within those windowless walls but that didn’t mean he couldn’t wait in the parking lot, huffing steam into the frozen air. When the breather of the insult stepped out toward his car, then Kelly was there — or else not Kelly but the scrapper. The action did not require a weapon. The object of the lesson was instruction and if instruction required infliction it was something he could add with his hands. The language of the bully, put to better uses: the sharp inhales and exhales, the straining lungs following a landed punch, a right hook he’d been missing throwing, the way skull and knuckles split the bruises. How long since he’d last felt this way. The wordless voice of the fistfight, the meaty thudding of flesh on flesh, how even if Kelly had to be hurt too he would never cry out, would keep punching and kicking and dragging the other down into the gravel and the broken concrete and the dust and the dirt.

THE FIRST BOY you watched only for short spans, walking twenty paces behind him on the street along the path from school to home, from three thirty to almost four in the afternoon. A pattern so obvious you waited every day for someone else to notice. You thought you craved the voice of a teacher, a school aide, a concerned parent, the bleep-bleep of a querying siren and the red-and-blue splash of lights. The tight stretch of action, the gathered potential, the desired flush of shame, suspicion: it walked with you, it walked you down the street after the boy.

The more you watched the more visible you became. Every hour spent walking behind the child was another chance someone might notice. A police officer, a neighbor. A passerby, a bystander. But the child himself would be the first to see you for who you were, although you didn’t imagine this possibility at first. This was another thing you learned only in the low rooms, each a new space carefully chosen, prepared, soundproofed, and locked, one room for one boy. On the surface, each face required you to separate one expression from another, from the endless variety of human emotion, but faces were different in private than in public. Faces were different in the dark.

You left clumsiness behind in the first few takings. There was a lesson in the early mistakes, prompting the cultivation of a care you had never before exhibited. You hid the taking from yourself but you couldn’t hide the preparation. The soundproofing and sequester. You liked the houses with names on them the best: names beside doorways, on mailboxes, anywhere. Scrawled into the back of closets.

You became more complex with every taking. In the past you had acted without premeditation but now all your life was premeditated. The difference between the now thought and the then thought: you hadn’t known the monochrome of your movements until the first watching busted the seams of the world, filling it with color, movement, a low hum becoming a buzz between the ears. This ringing was what it meant to be a person. You hadn’t known, hadn’t ever imagined, the dim world could be made so loudly beautiful merely by having someone to watch, to make watch you back.

HE HADN’T HIT THE HEAVY bag in ten years but after the fight in the parking lot he went looking for a gym, somewhere to train. The morning after his first workout he woke up unable to straighten his arms but before work he went back for more, tried to put the same soreness in his legs. It took a long time to lodge the feeling where he wanted it, so close to the bones. His body was strong from work but he wanted it to be stronger. He winced around the apartment, made breakfast hunched over with his arms curled up near his chest. He contorted his body in the shower, found an angle to brush his teeth where the burning in his biceps went away. Dressing became a supreme act of will. He’d done too much but he wanted to do more. The bench press, the lat pulldown, the curls and tricep extensions, these were the beginning, what he remembered without effort, what he could do alone without needing to ask for a spot.

He was the strongest he’d ever been but he wanted to find his limits. He lifted in the mornings and after he lifted he worked, swung the sledge and worked the shovel, drove busted drywall downstairs in wheelbarrows. When he went to bed he suffered through the angry stress of repetition, the lactic stretch of a body growing out of strained muscles, and after the first week he switched gyms, found somewhere cheaper, deeper in the zone, where he wasn’t wanted. The manager said he was welcome to try but he wouldn’t last. He referred Kelly back to the gym he had left but Kelly shook his head. He wanted to be held apart. He told himself the will to fight wasn’t about the color of a man but the otherness and he didn’t know how this was different, only that to him it was. He wouldn’t have said these things aloud, would have denied them if accused. The case notes had started calling for a man like the mugger and this place allowed him to fight such men. To align his aggression with the image in his mind.

The other boxers’ tattoos were different than the tattoos he’d known. He didn’t know the subtleties of their speech, the nuanced syntax of their slang. He couldn’t always beat the other men — in the beginning, he never could — but he could fight against their difference, could throw himself against what he told himself he was not. In the past, sparring had focused his instincts, forced him to act differently than in bar parking lots. Beyond the greater strength and training of his opponents he was also at a forgotten disadvantage, deprived of many of his oldest tactics, the wrestler’s grips and tricks he could use in the gravel and the dirt but not here, between the yellow lights and the cracking mats covering the floor. Out in the world he had counted on the other person having more to lose than he did or at least believe he did. In the ring there were safeguards in the way of total loss and so his pretense of fearlessness had less strength.

These men stood naked to the waist in their padded helmets and padded gloves and they put those gloves together and they spoke their prayers aloud, gave the familiar words new inflections. He’d grown up among people who mumbled their professions of faith, who sang hymns as if a monotone made the sweetest music. These men craved bravery and victory, forgiveness and salvation. They said that to perfect what you were given was to become mighty in your gift. They said a great fighter was a man who loved the body God had made, who loved it with bench presses and curls and squat thrusts and leg presses and the impact of fist on flesh.

The men at the gym had their methods but in the zone he had built his body in another way. It was not a temple. Or if it was then it was one more beautiful for being ruined. His uneven heart, an ulcerous stomach. Manual labor had set predictable pops and creaks into his joints, the telling music of early onset arthritis. He had forgotten the origins of most of his scars but he knew they spoke to other men, suggested a certain hardness. Or else bad luck, some idiocy in the way of his quitting.

Trainers arranged bouts by weight class but after the soreness receded Kelly signed up to spar with whoever would agree. He didn’t have the right shoes but you could buy shoes. He wrapped his hands and put in a mouthguard. He’d had to buy equipment but he had the reward money, the promise of more paychecks. He didn’t want all this protection but this was the price of arranged fighting.

He put his hands on men his own size but he preferred heavier fighters, the density of their bodies bowing below his blows, each jab like punching a statue made of meat. When their fists connected with his skull he heard memories realigning into new spaces. The shattering of old logic, his heartbeat rising as the speed of thought slowed, consciousness fading not in a subtle turndown but in a series of pulses, a drop in ability ten or twenty or thirty percent at a time.

They weren’t supposed to go this far but their honor system said it was up to him to stop the sparring, to wave off the bigger and stronger man. He never gave up, never gave in. There could be blood in his eyes or in his mouth and then he believed he heard it sloshing between his ringing ears, in the low cavities of the body. When he couldn’t breathe he spit out his mouthguard to clear his airway, gestured with his gloves that he was coming back for more.

In the case notes the story got more determined as time passed but maybe it remained a fiction. His own past often faded and cracked open, let in white space between fragments of sensible time. If he found he knew too much he stopped trusting what he thought he knew. Some of the pages of the notebook contained drawings, smeared sketches. Some drawings were of the house where he’d found the boy, its doorways and staircases, its blue siding and peaked roof. When Kelly next returned to the notebook he found several sketches of a suspect. He didn’t know what the kidnapper looked like and the boy remembered only the mask watching, the rough handling of gloved hands, the red rain slicker — Kelly didn’t necessarily remember drawing the sketches but there they were, rendered with his amateurish pen. The faces in the sketches wouldn’t have moved anyone else but they moved him: the sketches were of the mugger or else, sometimes, the brother, who Kelly had not met, who the boy would no longer speak of, who he would no longer blame for the bruises Kelly spotted pressed into his upper arms.

Kelly thought the tragedy of love wasn’t that we weren’t loved but that we weren’t loved by the people we’d been given. The problem with seeking revenge was that if he couldn’t find the one he was seeking, then who might get hurt instead.

One night, Kelly parked the truck down the street from the green house, the only lit rooms for blocks. In the darkness it would be harder to see out the windows than to see in, and from the far edge of the yard he watched the mother setting the table for a dinner for three. The mother’s car was in the driveway but the brother’s was gone and Kelly wondered who she was expecting, the older son or the husband. When no one else came he watched from the dark as she called the boy in to dinner, as the boy sat down in the bright room and ate his food silently, eyes cast to the task. The mother’s mouth moved but what was she saying. If she was asking questions the boy didn’t answer.

Kelly flexed his muscles, hopped from foot to foot to keep warm in the black and lightless air. He was starting to get his step back, remembering how to keep his torso and his head in a constant bob, an unpredictable weave. The painter with the big hands had taught him to fight by never taking the same step twice but Kelly thought a better tactic was to broadcast his every intention and still come out ahead. For now he was making a case. He was glad the boy came to visit. He thought no matter how long he spent with the boy he would never want to hurt him. He was aware of what lurked within and he had made moves to cordon that action from thought, present want. He would stretch his life beyond the mistakes of his past, and for this the boy was both the test and the answer.

W

The gym posted its rules on every wall. There was a maximum number of times you were allowed to spar in a week but no one kept close count. Most of the others sparred at sixty or eighty percent of full speed but if they held back against him he surged into the space of their hesitance. His head snapped back under jab after jab; in the locker-room mirror, his belly and ribs looked punched in, bruises sprawled over scrawny skin. He wasn’t eating again or when he ate he didn’t eat right. He was stronger than he looked but he wasn’t strong enough. His was a musculature fit for climbing the exposed structures of the zone, for swinging the sledge and dragging scrap. The others appeared molded for boxing alone, for punching into and through a man. Every opponent all veins and teeth, hungry eyes bursting from tight skin, angry under the brow of a padded helmet. They had taken the given and built the desired. He had made what body was necessary for his work and now he sought to bring it to a new task.

He didn’t want a trainer, couldn’t pay, wouldn’t ask. He trained by fighting. By getting hurt. Education by knockdown. Gloved fists pummeled his stomach but the next time a boxer came for Kelly he’d find the same tactics denied. Experience had made him who he was. If he could get hurt he could get better. A man raised his tattooed forearms over his face and Kelly battered his defenses until the man cried out. Kelly liked the way winning was temporary. You earned it but it didn’t last. He liked how after he showed his opponent he would give no quarter, then the man spit and swore and came at him senseless, his entire body open to the blow.

When Kelly got his insurance he went to the doctor but he didn’t tell the girl with the limp he went. The doctor measured his blood pressure, listened to the thumping chambers of his heart, counseled him to avoid strenuous activity. He laughed and told the doctor what he did for a living. The doctor lifted his chin, probed around his neck and jaw, put a light to his eyes and ears and nose and throat. His fingers and hands were blacked from work and his body was bruised as rotten meat and the doctor suggested nothing he didn’t believe he could be paid for. Kelly had insurance but the doctor said mostly it would only promise that if he died he would die in a bed.

Now Kelly walked the zone like a squared spiral, moving outward from his starting point in a series of right turns, every rotation allowing another block’s length to stretch the circle. He bought graph paper, plotted each block of buildings, their various modes of inhabitation. He got to know every boarded house, every chain-link fence. He found members of the city watch in the zone and he signaled to them, offered to buy them coffee. Each questioning began with the necessary small talk, family, children, church, work. The endless sameness of the weather. Eventually they invoked the holiness of their task: if the police wouldn’t protect their communities they would protect the city themselves.

Whenever Kelly encountered the volunteer built like a linebacker again, the linebacker pulled Kelly into a headlock or else faked a jab to his stomach. Then to resist punching back. To resist locking his arms around the slab of the man’s belly and lifting, trying to put him on the ground. Later the linebacker answered Kelly’s questions over coffee, handling his crude maps, adding landmarks Kelly would never have known. The locations of legendary shootings, rapes, hate crimes. The names of families long extinct or fled.

What exactly are you doing here, the linebacker asked, and Kelly shrugged.

I’m looking for someone, he said. Somewhere in the zone, he said, then waved his hands across the graph-paper maps spread out across the diner table. Somewhere out here.

It’s a big city to hunt a person in, the linebacker said. You’ll need something better than luck if you want to see it through.

The linebacker carried a pistol, a black shape inside a black holster tucked under his jacket. He taught gun-safety classes, he said, helped others get concealed-carry permits. He sold guns out of his house but only to men he trusted.

Whatever you need, the linebacker said, I can help.

The year dwindled. The farther Kelly moved from the center of the good story the more dangerous the story seemed. Somewhere in the zone there would be a space where no one suffered names. He wouldn’t ascribe complexity to every actor. The more blank the image the more able to inspire terror, to excuse hurt. He moved through the frigid desperation, a lone striver walking rooms where many had lived, studying floor plans that had housed the generations, three children to a bed, two beds to a bedroom, houses standing through booms unimaginable, eras resigned to the unknown expanses of the past. When he arrived home he added the squares of graph paper to the case notes, tucked them loosely in the back of the notebook. On nights the girl with the limp worked latest he thumbtacked the maps to the walls of his living room, placing each block beside its neighbors, each sheet covered with simple diagrams, streets drawn in a shaky hand, outlined squares and rectangles for houses, filled in black if they were confirmed vacant. He paced the room, poured a drink, considered the spreading stain. In the zone Kelly had seen the lengthy shapes of the world, how what was to come was set down by what had passed, the long story of progress bendable only by degrees. He’d acquire the tools, he’d choose the space, he’d find the man in the red slicker, he’d take him and make him pay.

Because what if a degree was enough. What if the slimmest fraction of a degree made all the difference.

How to press an advantage. How to break through a defense. How to feint and have the feint believed. How to make a man of eighteen or twenty-one or twenty-five worry the peak of his powers wouldn’t be enough. How to accept the same when it was your turn to fall. To stay in the ring three minutes at a time, to take the fists upon your head and body until each punch stuck in the meat of your bones. How to stay. How to stay. How to bear anything no matter the hurt. How in another age agony had meant contest. How there was nothing in the fight not brought there by an act of will. How to take the other’s will and push it out of the square. How to have all your options reduced to violence, no way out except to strike or be struck.

He woke up, he trained, he sparred, he put his fists against the speed bag and the heavy bag and against toughened skin. He relearned a forgotten vocabulary, better ways of getting strong, to go past bench presses, shoulder presses, squats, and dead lifts, ways to pack on mass, power cleans, dumbbell snatches, power jumps, ways to pack on speed, explosiveness, fast-twitch muscle. Ballistic movements. There were ways he could train himself, could work out at home too, pull-ups and push-ups, box runs, medicine balls. At night he closed his eyes and imagined he could hear his muscles stretching and in the morning when he woke up he saw he was bigger, so slightly enlarged, cut with a bit more bark beneath the bruises.

The others ate creatine, protein, ZMA, vitamins you could choke on. Some evenings Kelly swallowed pills smuggled from the girl’s purse and they thickened his veins until he thought if he didn’t keep moving he might turn to stone. With them he saw with some new dilation, how the streetlights glowed big as suns. The buildings never wavered or blurred but perhaps they throbbed. If he saw a man on the street who looked like the man who mugged him, then he raised his phone, took a picture of the man. The phone’s digital zoom was useless and as it brought him closer it showed him less: vague impressions, the color of skin, the shape of the skull, a slash or curve of expression. At an office-supply store he plugged his phone into a printer, ran color prints of every face he’d gathered. At home, Kelly taped the prints into the case notes where no one would find them, where the pictures began to color whatever pages they opposed.

Everything he added to his life became another repetition, a way of filling the endless everyday. He went to work, pushed his wheelbarrow down long industrial hallways, carried the broken fixtures from every bathroom, removed everything too valuable to leave for when the machines came to crush the building. The foreman trained him on other tasks, let him get a taste of the excavator. When they cleared one block they found a steel swimming pool dug into the dirt and the foreman showed Kelly the push and pull of the levers, how to reach down to puncture the pool’s floor, to crumple its steel walls. Everything they encountered could be removed but Kelly was starting to think about what was closest to permanence. About cement, masonry, stonework. About close enough. It would require new skills but if the need emerged he had time, ambition, the will to learn.

Maybe it was enough to hide the deed between the gaps of attention. To put an action into a space where no one wanted to look.

Kelly made the boy a key so he could come and go as he pleased. He picked the boy up from school and because the boy hadn’t eaten lunch Kelly took him out for fast food, filled the table between them with paper-wrapped burgers, red-boxed fries. When they ate together the boy often ate his food out of order: he would start with dessert, not finishing his burger because he’d already had a shake, a paper-boxed apple pie. The inversion of norms, left over from the last time the rules disappeared and so maybe the rules were gone. They sat in a booth at the back of the dining area and behind them was a glass wall cordoning off an indoor playground. Someone had soundproofed the glass so you couldn’t hear the children playing. Every time Kelly looked over his shoulder there was another child there, shoeless or sockless, running across the floor, disappearing into a plastic tube. The smallest steps of the smallest children. There were cameras everywhere but the only one they warned you of was the one in the playground, a guardian behind smoky glass.

Kelly raised his phone, snapped a picture of the boy’s face, flushed and full over the remains of his meal.

Because you’re my friend, Kelly said.

Kelly dropped the boy off at his mother’s then returned to where he had rescued the boy to find the blue house demolished, removed. Kelly squatted, graded the ground with his gloves, found nothing except a tenth of an acre of bare earth and dirty snow, not a single nail, a single screw. He knew the basement walls were gone too, torn out in dirty chunks, like he’d removed the swimming pool in another part of the zone. They would have used an excavator to dig a ramp, then sent the excavator to break the walls, the cement flooring. The machine digging into the hard and frozen earth, the house more joined to the dirt than in any other season.

If there was any physical reminder of the boy’s captivity it was gone. Kelly lay down in the snow, let its shivery melt radiate into his clothes until his teeth chattered, until his skin burned. Later in the night he dreamed he heard a smile in the dark: a faceless man spoke up in the offenseless volume of the hopeless, testified in favor of his acquittal. There weren’t handcuffs but duct tape held sturdy enough in the deep. Despite the mask Kelly wore he understood the man fine as long as he was standing right beside the chair. He was sure the man had had a face but it wasn’t visible. He wasn’t sure he could hurt the man but how could he let him go.

LATER PERHAPS there would be all kinds of perverse accusations but you didn’t think they would be true. Certainly there was no touching beyond the necessary. But if the accusations were true how surprised could you be. You did not know yourself well. You guessed, conjectured. You had urges but not toward the boys. You had urges but you didn’t understand where they originated.

In the faces of others you most often saw a certain kind of blankness, neither sad nor happy nor angry. A lack of gladness, a lack of sorrow. You saw on the television a show about people whose brain injuries left them unable to recognize emotion in expressions and you thought you were probably one of those people.

But where was your injury.

The watching was an exhaustion. Of the boy and of you. You had not expected this. You couldn’t watch continuously but the longer you watched the greater the unfolding of the boy. It took time to get beneath the surface. You had to watch and you had to be sure the boy knew you were watching. At first the boys were merely confused, unsure of who you were, why you had picked them. There was something you wanted and the more the boy showed you the longer you kept the boy. The best boy had long since come and gone but others had been good enough. Their eyes couldn’t stay afraid forever. There was curiosity. One spoke and told you he would never forget your face but everyone had forgotten you and if this boy did not then he would be the first.

When the watching was over you didn’t want to see the boy ever again. There were a few ways to ensure you would not.

Boys ran away, disappeared for reasons not related to being taken, to being watched, what came after the watching. The getting gone. This was why you took boys and not girls. If you took girls, then no one would ever believe they had gone missing on their own.

AT THE GYM, THE RELATIVITY of age: the age of a thirty-four-year-old man. How there was almost no one older worth putting your hands on. It was folly for Kelly to be in the ring with these monsters of youth but he wasn’t trying to compete, didn’t need to ever fight a real match, the nine minutes of amateur spectacle. All he wanted to do was to throw himself against their strength. They knocked him down but he knocked them down too. The ones who refused to spar with him he called names, goading their pride until they split his lips, bruised his eyes, filled his skin with the language of their rebuttals. He turned an ankle at a jobsite and then he had to limp around the gym, push through his disadvantages. In his apartment he imagined filling his tub with ice, filled a tumbler instead, put ice packs on his hands and whiskey in his stomach and vowed tomorrow he would go back for more. Dead lifts, squats, lunges. The seated row, the shoulder shrug, the dozens of pull-ups he’d become capable of again.

His body expanded, screamed at its seams. The bigger the shell got the more obvious its emptiness in the mirror.

The trainers had their favorites and they hired some of the others to fight them. Harmless men with enough steel to fight but not enough to win. There was money in being such a man but so far the trainers had never approached Kelly. Like every job, you got paid for being predictable.

The house he sought would have to be deep inside the zone, at the crossing of all vectors of loneliness, abandonment, loss. He drove blocks he had scrapped, tried to recall each house’s layout of rooms and hallways, windows where neighbors might be able to see into the house. If there were neighbors. He wasn’t confident in his recall, had to check his street work, his graph-paper maps. There were too many indistinguishable houses, too many similar floor plans. He thought he required a basement but that was only parity. He could make do with any dark room, its windows blacked, its walls and floor and ceiling made dense against sound.

The sound of breaking glass carried in the silent streets but no one would come to investigate. The emptiest streets, emptier for winter. He cleared the glass with a pry bar or a hammer, climbed into small rooms cramped with drop ceilings and the pile of faded shag carpet. He tested light switches and water taps, tried to remember the qualities of the house where the boy had been held. But the boy was what had imbued the house with meaning: it wasn’t the structure but what the structure contained. Once a family, then vacancy, then a boy.

The shape of the house he picked mattered less than its proximity to others, its potential to remain undisturbed. He needed a house he could work in for an extended period of time. It would take time to make the necessary preparations, to assemble his tools, to soundproof a room, to be sure he would remain undisturbed until he finished.

It was possible to drug a man but he didn’t know how it was done. He remembered choke holds from his wrestling days, thought to put his body to use instead. He asked at the gym and the others reminded him, happily demonstrated: the hardness of his arms putting pressure on a throat caught in the crook of his elbow. The air choke, the blood choke. Compressions of the carotid arteries, the jugular veins, the upper airway. Asphyxia, cerebral ischemia, temporary hypoxic conditions. The health sciences put to harder use.

The reward dwindled but there was enough left for what he intended. He acquired a new set of tools secondhand, kept them separate from his regular equipment. In a steel toolbox heavy as a child he placed an ancient pair of pliers, a pair of scissors rusted at the hinge but sharp along the blade. A selection of blunted chisels. Hammers with splintering handles that’d hurt when he swung. Rolls of duct tape, more than he needed. He had to leave the zone to get some of what he wanted. He purchased a generator, ninety-nine cubic centimeters of engine inside a compact roll cage, twelve hundred watts, nine and a half hours of juice. He had plenty of gloves but he thought he might want a pair he had never worn. There was a welder’s mask in the same aisle and he put it in the cart. The mask wouldn’t hide his eyes but it might obscure his emotions, put distance between him and the suspect.

The suspect or the subject, how one would become another as the process progressed.

He paid cash at the counter but cash didn’t mean there wasn’t a record. There were cameras in the store, receipts stamped with the date and time. He spread out his purchases, some today, some tomorrow. He bought another LED headlamp, a handheld high-intensity discharge spotlight with a rechargeable battery. He thought maybe he might want more lights but how easy would it be to carry all of this in, to remove it after. One or two standing lights would be enough for the kind of work he was intending. All he needed was to illuminate a space the size of a man.

The boy called from downstairs and Kelly buzzed the boy in, got up from the couch to unlock the door. The boy had a key but why didn’t he use it? When the boy entered he was followed by another, taller boy — the brother, Kelly realized. The brother was still in school, seventeen, a legal juvenile. Kelly didn’t know his name, had never heard it spoken. This was one difference between a person and an abstraction. This was the way he wanted it.

This is my brother, said the boy. He wanted to meet you.

The boy’s voice was quieter, cowed in front of the brother. For the first time in weeks Kelly looked at the boy and saw a child. The boy was dressed in his blazer and tie and khakis as ever, the brother was dressed the same but wore the clothes in his own way, looser, less what was intended by the public school dress code.

I heard you’ve been spending time with him, the brother said. Taking him places. Buying him things. Letting him stay here.

Kelly said, He comes after school. He does his homework while I watch television. We share a meal and I drive him home after.

I’m curious, the brother said. Just wondering what a grown man is doing with my brother.

Nothing, Kelly said. It’s harmless. Anyway you’re the one who brings him here.

The complicity of the brother driving the boy. Of Kelly leaving the boy within the brother’s reach so he could come into Kelly’s. Kelly wanted to ask if their parents knew too. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He had saved the boy and when the boy was with him the boy was still safe. He had to keep reminding himself the brother wasn’t the boy’s real brother, not the boy’s blood. No matter what the brother said. How the brother was cruel to the boy, by the boy’s own admission. How the brother had touched the boy or else made the boy watch. How the boy told Kelly this or else it was only conjecture, something Kelly had written in the case notes.

The brother put his hand on the boy’s head and the boy flinched and Kelly knew all he needed to know. He’d known the flinch himself. Not an instinct but something learned.

I’m going to stay today too, the brother said, moving his hand to the boy’s shoulder. I want to make sure everything’s okay. If that’s all right with you.

If Kelly wanted to protect the boy he could do so right here. The brother wasn’t a man but he was the height of one, could be hurt the same.

When Kelly stood his joints cracked and popped, his strained muscles protesting every movement. He invited the boy and his brother in, pointed toward the coatrack, the couch, the kitchen. The boy knew where everything else was but if the brother wanted something he would have to ask. Kelly never smoked in front of the boy but he smoked now. The brother controlled the remote, scanned music videos, reality television, the late-afternoon reruns of some past evening’s entertainment, sports news repeating without end. On the other side of the room the boy watched the television too, his backpack unopened, his eyes glassy and absent, his quietness doubled.

The brother was here under the guise of protecting the boy from Kelly but this wasn’t the relationship the boy had revealed. The brother: Kelly thought he knew how such a person was made. It might not be the brother’s fault — not in the ultimate reveal of cause and effect — but wasn’t the brother still responsible for what he’d done, was doing. Hadn’t Kelly been responsible for the same.

THE MAN UNNAMED, THE BOY unlabeled, the toddler and baby so unwanted he did not merit three words of description, first and middle and last. This was the person they’d say you were but the real self had been obscured behind a series of labels: occupation, race, education, religion, political affiliation. The states, the conditions: you stockpiled canned goods, ate sparingly. Generic brands or worse, the white cans with the bold text, left over from foreign wars, humanitarian aid. Fingering peaches out of syrupy containers. Saving half a slice of cheese in its wrapper. Trying to remember to eat the leftovers before they got hard. Forcing yourself to eat the crust if you forgot. The crusts of bread. A sandwich only needed one slice. Everything open-faced, revealed. Water from the tap, the same glass used repeatedly. The repetition of minor acts. It wasn’t difficult to cut your own hair. You never bought your clothes new. You rarely gained or lost weight. You remembered your birthday but never on the right day. Some of your teeth were missing but you’d had the same number for several years. A stability even in decay.

There had never been a pet to call your own. You weren’t afraid of dogs but didn’t see the draw.

Once a woman threw a coffee at you in a fast-food lobby and you never knew why. Sometimes you found yourself in line somewhere with an erection that wouldn’t go away. Then the long bus rides, the hands over the lap trying to hide your discomfort, leaving behind an ache you didn’t know how to soothe. Or you knew how others soothed it but you didn’t know how you should. It hurt too much to touch it yourself and you didn’t know how to ask someone else. In the group home you had watched other boys handle themselves in the darkened dormitory, watched their faces as they moved through the pains of pleasure. One night you had gone to one of those boys and asked for help, had begged for it. The other boy had punched you in the neck and in the ear, had knocked you to the ground and pressed your face to the linoleum floor. There were words to make him stop but who knew which words you screamed were the right ones.

It should have been enough to keep your hands to yourself, to not ask for others’ hands upon you. It should have been enough for you to watch. You had not wanted to go further.

This was the self you were bringing into the light: the one who wanted to stare out from behind the mask of new name, home haircut, hooded garment. Who looked at the world as it was and who only wanted to make the world look back.

THE CALL HAD COME FROM her number but it was her co-worker who’d answered. The co-worker said she wanted Jackie to go to the hospital but Jackie wanted to drive herself home instead. Calling him was their compromise. The building where she worked wasn’t what he expected but he wasn’t sure he’d had an expectation. The life they shared when they were in the same room was all he had of her. No shared past, no shared present outside of her apartment, his, the bars they drank in, the diners where they took their meals.

It was easy to forget. He saw a woman every day, shared a bed and a table until he thought he knew her, until she might imagine she knew him back. But what proportion did he know, what was the ratio between known and unknown. She saw him with the boy but so far the boy was his. She told him about her week but to him her experiences were mostly stories, as distant as the news.

When he arrived he found her sitting pale faced in her cubicle, clutching the edge of the desk as if she might fall out of her chair, the screen before her blank, every emergency in the city redirected. There was medication she was meant to take when this happened but he couldn’t remember its progress, if her dilated pupils meant she had swallowed her pills.

What did you say when you couldn’t say Are you okay. What did you say when you couldn’t say What’s wrong.

It was impossible to get her into his truck in her clenched condition so they would take her car instead. First the excruciation of pacing her slow progress, stooped and dragging toward the exit, because she refused to use her cane at her workplace, in the company of others. The elevator was farther than the stairs but the stairs weren’t an option. He put his arm around her and she cursed but as the doors slid closed she crumpled against him. When the doors opened onto the ground floor, she shoved herself free, used the elevator’s railing to yank herself upright.

In the parking lot, he offered to bring the car around and she glared again, pulled away.

He said, You can let me help you. There’s nothing wrong with letting someone help.

She scoffed, swore. She said, The last thing I need is you carrying me to the car. And who are you to talk about needing help.

He stopped walking but she kept going, didn’t look back, didn’t speak. He waited but she didn’t slow. She limped beneath the parking-lot lights, her shadow stretching her stagger. He caught up to her, didn’t let her walk alone. The attacks were coming faster now. Long ago she had said there wouldn’t be rhyme or reason but for Kelly there was no denying their increased frequency. She didn’t want him to carry her and wouldn’t take his arm but she let him stand beside her, let him match his pace to hers. She wouldn’t fall this time but it didn’t mean he couldn’t promise to catch her if she did.

W

He started to watch more closely, until every day he discovered some previously secret aspect of her life. Hobbies he didn’t know she had. A circle of friends he hadn’t met. In their earliest days they were always together and so there hadn’t been room for outside interests. He no longer spent every evening in her company and so she had returned to her life before him. He called her and she was out with the other women from work, drinking beer and playing pool. He called her and she was home, watching the hockey game by herself, or else he called her and she was at their usual bar, watching the game in the company of others. She hadn’t ever talked about books before but now he often found library books on her coffee table.

He picked up a murder mystery, flipped it over to read the jacket copy. A serial child abductor on the loose, an unlikely detective tasked to take him down. She brought him a beer from the fridge, put her hand on his chest. She took the book from his hands and put it back on the table.

It doesn’t mean anything, she said.

She liked the order, she said. She liked the way the evil in these novels was a solvable mystery temporarily unsolved. The guilty could be found, accused, punished. When a woman made a mistake, the woman could redeem herself. The world of her novels was not chaos but merely the appearance of chaos. Instead there were hidden systems, mechanisms that could be uncovered, put to use. The righting of the bad world. A point to suffering, a suffering that improved the sufferer. Three hundred pages and an expectation that by the end all the answers would be revealed. The transfer of weight as the pages fell from the right hand to the left, an accumulation of certainty.

I fell asleep reading last night, she said, and then I dreamed I was still reading but in my dream the room I was in was too dark for me to see the words. When I closed my book the dark got darker. I left the house, got in my car, started to drive. There was a lot of traffic but it dwindled as the road narrowed. When I passed the last car I realized my headlights were broken, that without other cars there would be nothing left to light the way. And then the last lights went out: streetlights off, moon gone, stars vanished. And I could not stop driving so very fast.

The reward should have made escape possible. He could have gone anywhere else, another city, a town. A simpler place for a simpler life. Now there was Jackie, there was the boy, there was the case, necessary to solve — but also his television, his couch and chair, all his possessions nothing special, only his. In the South he had owned a house full of such objects — or he had almost owned it — or else he had been only the completer of paperwork, the mailer of checks. Other people thought escape was something you did but Kelly knew it was an accretion of small choices, an action you earned. He worked and he drank and when he could he drove the streets of the zone, he checked his lists in the case notes, his homemade maps. A haphazard survey of the city no one wanted. More and more he wore the orange jersey underneath his coat. He kept his doors locked, smoked with his windows up, rolled through stop signs if there were men lingering on the corners of the street. Wherever he went he wore heavier layers, t-shirt, flannel, hood and coat and hat and gloves, thermal underwear under heavy pants tucked into insulated boots, but he arrived back in his apartment shaking, his fingers blue, all his skin full of needles and steam.

Whenever he woke up alone in his apartment he woke up afraid.

Where was the girl. Where was the boy.

For some time he couldn’t bring their names to mind.

But then Jackie. But then Daniel.

He wrote down the same details again but not in the same way. He began to call the heavy detective’s desk in the middle of the night, calling from pay phones to leave lengthy messages, the disconnected thoughts of the case notes:

I know the past is the past and cannot be changed. I accept this limitation but I do not accept that the past does not end, how I have to live through the past again and again in the present, how the future must contain the same.

How do you see what might take the people you love. How do you understand which of their million hurts is the one that changes them forever.

What other stories are there. What other stories go on and on, waiting for someone strong enough to bend them toward their conclusions.

Kelly never identified himself, hung up if the detective answered with his voice too high pitched for his bulk, asking what, who, why, all the investigative cues. And what was the detective doing there so late, working past midnight, past the middle of the darkest hours.

In the last third of the case notes, Kelly wrote version after version of opening the basement door, of releasing the boy’s wailing, and as he descended the stairs again and again the bed never moved from the center of the room, but was it always the same bed?

The boy was still the boy but now he knew more.

The chair was there too but sometimes he put someone in the chair.

When he tried to picture the bed as he first saw it he also saw the cuff chain looped around the bedframe but he knew he had tried to lift the boy from the bed before knowing the boy was cuffed to the rail. On the page the boy screamed again. Kelly couldn’t have known about the cuffs in the darkness but now he remembered he had. Even as he knew he hadn’t.

The scrapper lived within one story. The salvor occupied another. The case thickened with what they added. What bothered him weren’t the gaps but their overlap. The many stories where there should be one.

Kelly spoke into the phone, said, The threat of physical violence is not enough to prevent violence but it is enough to match it. I used to know this. I used to have a savagery lodged within my bones. Once you could have taken out a rib to grow a killer. I haven’t been punished but who says I don’t want my punishment. I have excuses but I am exhausted by my excuses. Now I want to remove my own rib. To plant it back. The rib is named the scrapper. I recognize the arguments. Circumstances have made me uniquely qualified to be this specific kind of good man. An action that is the end that justifies the means.

The other good man is called the salvor. The one who salvages. Because what is there in the zone but ruin. Who is there left in this blue world but everyone lost at sea, sliding free of the sudden slant of a sinking ship.

Whenever he imagined finding the boy, the boy he saw in the bed became the boy he knew. Not a stranger trapped but his friend taken, an individual stolen from his care. Memory shifted to accommodate current emotion: What was he afraid of then. What was he afraid of now. What was the difference.

He knew so much more about the boy but who was the watcher, a name that meant nothing, the man in the red slicker, a description pretending to be a title.

In the absence of knowledge he inserted abstraction. In abstraction he had always found something easier to fear. It was easier to see if he put the mugger in the chair. If he made the man with the gun do the watching. It made him feel less unsure if it was the brother who sat there, supposedly cruel.

It was not difficult, in his mind, to put either inside the red slicker.

When Kelly called the heavy detective, he sometimes wanted to reveal his identity, to ask if the detective would play his statement back to him. So he could know how it had changed. Because what he remembered was that the salvor opened the door and the boy was there in the bed, whole and ready for rescue. Or else the scrapper opened the door and there was no boy. Or else the scrapper opened the door and there was a boy and there was a suspect and you finished rescuing the boy by punishing the suspect too. A rescue in two parts.

The man in the red slicker, Kelly said, is he a person or an action? An action that until I found the boy I had never been able to name?

Sometimes Kelly would look at the boy and also through him. When the boy sat on the living room floor watching the television or doing his homework. The boy didn’t flicker but maybe he fugued. Once when the boy was over Kelly looked out his window and thought he saw the detective sitting in an unmarked car across the street but what was the chance. He picked up his phone, dialed the detective’s cell number, got the voicemail message. If the detective was the man in the car, then he did not move to answer.

How far back does the long stain go, Kelly asked, one hand opened against the window glass. How can we assign blame unless we know the original mistake, the first man standing over the first boy.

Kelly started to forget if the boy was with him. An amnesia of the commonplace. The first time the girl with the limp woke to the boy sleeping on the couch — to Kelly sitting in the armchair, watching him sleep — she didn’t say anything she couldn’t say with arched eyebrows, a crumpling of the forehead. The tight set of her mouth, holding back all the questions they’d agreed not to ask.

He knew he was making a mistake but he wouldn’t tell the boy no. Another afternoon the buzzer sounded and Kelly pressed the intercom button, asked who it was. The boy knew to let himself in but then the boy’s voice answered: he’d lost his key, needed to be buzzed into the building.

I’m sorry, the boy said, his voice crackling over the intercom.

Inside the apartment the boy hurried to unwrap himself, hat and gloves and scarf and overcoat and blazer, shivering and anxious.

I looked everywhere, the boy said. My room, my desk, my bag. Everywhere.

The constrained everywhere of the young.

Kelly had never seen this expression on the boy’s face: the boy was worried he would be punished. As if Kelly were Kelly’s father, the boy Kelly’s father’s boy.

Locks can be changed, Kelly said. I’m sure you’ll find it. It’s nothing.

Kelly reached for the boy and the boy flinched and Kelly grabbed him anyway. Kelly kneeled down, pulled the boy to his chest, put the weight of the boy’s head against his shoulder. He had never dared hold the boy before, had rarely touched him since bringing him out of the basement. He had barely let himself imagine all this heat, all these bones and scrawny muscles, all this need wrapping arms around him too. This amazing gesture, what he’d wanted for so long. Every moment after wouldn’t be this moment but this one could stretch as long as it had to, its memory becoming something lasting. A charm, Kelly thought, a reassurance in the dark.

THE WEATHERMAN SAID RAIN ALL day but they walked along the river anyway, her hand in his while the boy skipped ahead, kicked at loose rocks, debris fallen over the footpath. The water’s edge was the edge of the city and the edge of the country and on the other bank of the river there was another country because there was nowhere on earth where one nation ended and another did not begin. It was too cold, the end of the year, but it was still forecast to rain any minute and this was the right kind of danger for a man and a woman and a boy. A manageable catastrophe at worst, a story to share. There were other times of day when it wouldn’t be safe to be here. For now there was the rain that didn’t come and the charcoal sky and the high gusting wind putting new waves in the fast chop of the river. The boy ran ahead but he never failed to turn back, and every time he looked Kelly weighed the tangible substance of the gaze. He smiled, shook his head, pointed at the boy. She squeezed his hand. In the distance there was thunder but they couldn’t see the lightning and though they walked all day the rain never came. Ahead of them the boy passed into the darkness of a tunnel under a bridge and though Kelly couldn’t see him he could hear the boy’s laughter, the surprise at being alone in the dark and yet still safe.

W

On the way back to Kelly’s apartment the boy vomited without warning into the floor mats of Kelly’s truck, the cracks and crevices of the backseat. Then the boy vomited again because everyone vomited twice. He apologized softly from the backseat but Kelly waved his apology away. These things happened. It had been a long day or else the boy was overexcited. When they arrived at his apartment, Kelly lifted the boy from the backseat, the boy’s soiled clothes squishing against Kelly’s chest, the boy’s sour breath hot in his ear. The boy was too big to carry far but young enough to sometimes need to be carried and this was one of those times. The girl with the limp shuffled ahead to hold open doors and Kelly brought the boy up the stairs to his apartment and into the bathroom and as Kelly moved through the building the memory of carrying the boy before manifested again: how he had ascended the basement stairs with the boy, how he had taken him to the truck, to the hospital, through the first snow into the waiting light of the emergency room.

Let’s get you out of these clothes, Kelly said. Can you do it yourself or do you need help?

The boy could do it himself but he wasn’t. In the bathroom they kneeled before him, working together to pull his shirt over his head. The boy’s chest so narrow, the unmuscled frame of a child still, his belly a soft roundness over the waistband of his pants. Jackie’s got you, she said, starting the shower while Kelly wet a washcloth. He kneeled back down to clean the boy’s face, his hair, the crusting vomit requiring a more vigorous method. Kelly never knew the right thing to do so he held the boy’s head in one hand and scrubbed with the other. The steam filling the room didn’t help the smell but it did change it. Kelly threw the boy’s t-shirt in the trash and threw the washcloth in after it and when he turned around to face the boy he saw the girl staring at the boy’s back. She didn’t say anything but he saw some of what she’d seen in her look, enough to guess. The shower was running loud and the room was thick with steam and she gently turned the boy by the shoulders to show Kelly the ugly markings on the boy’s back, a stretched series of pinched bruises riding both sides of his spine.

Who did this to you? she asked — and it was almost Kelly who answered.

No one, the boy said. No one did anything.

Kelly asked too but the boy wouldn’t say the brother’s name, only cried harder, his body trembling. The shame of being hurt, of being hurt again. And when Kelly didn’t move to the boy’s side she was there instead, sitting down on the floor and pulling the half-dressed boy into her lap, saying, Jackie’s here, saying, Daniel, you’re safe now. You’re safe with us.

Kelly stood against the vanity, a new kind of uselessness falling over him, another failure to act. In the swelling steam of the room he watched this fine woman comforting this fantastic boy, telling the boy she would keep him safe, sounding so sure she couldn’t fail, speaking as if a mother comforting her own child, her soft speech promising the long safety of love, every motherhood’s first and most lasting and most necessary lie.

W

The boy’s parents were already waiting when Kelly pulled into the mother’s driveway, the father and the mother reunited and shivering in the short dusk of winter. What had the brother told them after he visited? Enough that before Kelly opened the door he knew the boy would be taken. As he approached the boy’s parents Kelly could barely listen over the ringing in his ears but he knew they would speak all the expected words, all the other words Kelly must have known would one day come: It had been a mistake to let the boy spend time with Kelly. They hadn’t known until the brother told them but they should have paid more attention. They too had been the victims of trauma. What happened to the boy had happened to them, in their own way, and in the aftermath they hadn’t been the best parents they could be.

The father said, Thank you for taking care of Daniel. It’s been a hard year for all of us.

The mother said, We missed him but we didn’t know how to be with him. This is our fault, not yours.

The father spoke again, said, We appreciate everything you’ve done — Daniel’s brother told us you’ve been watching him after school — but I think this friendship has run its course. Daniel needs friends his own age, normal friends. I hope you understand.

What Kelly wanted most was to put his hand on the boy, to touch his head or his shoulder. For it to be as easy as it had been beside the river, as it had been the day of the lost key. Instead Kelly would give the boy back so they didn’t have to take him. He would surrender his affection for the boy and he would promise not to see him again, not to let him into his apartment, certainly never to take him away again. A week from now his apartment key would come in the mail, the second key he’d made for the boy, barely used. It would be the mother’s handwriting on the envelope but there would be no accompanying note. Kelly knew this and later it came true.

The father offered his hand. The boy stayed beside Kelly, waiting to move until Kelly reached out, took the father’s hand. The father released his grip, reached for the boy. The boy didn’t move yet but he would soon and in the last moment with the boy at his side Kelly surveyed the family the boy was rejoining: The mother, fit in her sweater and slacks and scarf. The father, bigger bearded than ever, looming in his winter coat, smiling his odd smile. The palpable presence of the missing brother. The boy moved toward his mother, put his arms around her. She would smell the sickness on his breath and know what to do. This was the boy’s mother, the boy’s father. If they were not perfect they were good enough. It was they who had claimed responsibility for the boy, who had freed him from foster care and group homes, who had promised to give him a better life. Theirs was the first taking of the boy, the best of its kind.

You had to trust, you had to have faith in their goodness.

But doubt. But fear. But how Kelly had always succumbed to the rush toward quicker action, immediate results.

Daniel, Kelly said, the word harsh in his mouth.

Daniel, he said again, softer, more sure.

He’s sick, Kelly said, speaking to the parents. He threw up today. He needs you to take care of him.

The mother smiled, ran her hands through the boy’s hair. She said, Of course. Of course we will.

Now there was worry in her eyes and for a moment Kelly thought he would tell her. He opened his mouth, closed it again. He could insert himself further into their lives but by what right, at what cost. He could tell them about what he believed the brother had done to the boy but the boy wouldn’t admit the brother’s fault, and so would the mother and the father believe Kelly or would they think Kelly was the one who had hurt their son.

She said, What is it? Is there something else?

Kelly shook his head. It’s nothing, he said. What would the fear of exposing himself to danger let continue, for how long. He wanted someone to tell him what to do next but the girl with the limp was already taking him by the hand, pulling him away. The boy wasn’t his boy, she would say. In the truck he shook and flushed and drove away too fast, accelerating through the unplowed streets until the girl objected. It was almost the holidays, almost the new year. A few more weeks. The weather had turned bitter and there was more snow coming. The snow wasn’t like the rain. He couldn’t smell the snow before it arrived but he knew there were other ways to read the sky. He thought he might at last train himself to suss out such deeper signs, to hear clearly the subtlest speech of the slower, colder world to come.

THE LAST HOUSE IN THE northern city, the city’s last boy: always the blue house had been silent and static but that night you arrived to a movement of the air whistling through an open window, to muddy tracks on the floor, boot prints leading from the foyer to the kitchen, upstairs, and then down into the basement.

Remember the powerful wakefulness, every nerve lighting up for the reappearance of the new. You had been bored and had tried to keep yourself away so your boredom might fade and now there was this newness, arrived again, lighting you into attention.

Remember how this boy had meant nothing. How there had been no joy in the watching. How you thought perhaps someone else had watched him first, how the other had removed what you sought, the unnamable portion of a boy the watching could claim.

You took your shoes off in the foyer. You had to kneel to undo the double knot of the laces. There wasn’t anywhere to hang your coat so you carried it into the kitchen, where the stove jutted out from the counter, half dragged into the middle of the room. A window hung open, let in snow accumulating on the dirty tile. The walls were opened too, the wiring and piping roughly removed. The basement lock was busted free and the basement door was ajar and no sound came from below.

You should have fled then but you needed to see for yourself. You moved slowly down the rough wooden stairs, descending through the busted plaster and the bare studs, down into the cool damp of the underground. You had a flashlight in your pocket but you didn’t use it.

Certainly the dark had never bothered you.

There were footprints upstairs, damage to the house everywhere. An intruder had come for the plumbing and had taken something better. You had known the boy — had almost already been done knowing him — and now the boy and the intruder were somewhere else, together.

In your anger you first thought you would find the intruder, find him and bind him and watch him. But in your fear you fled until one day you awoke in a new city, in the room at the top of this yellow house, into the terror of its absolute dark, its total quiet. The room sealed so tight it stayed warmer than the rest of the house even without heat. Your mouth starched, your tongue thick between your teeth, your heart hammering above the absence of other sound. Every wet noise outside your body dulled by the soundproofing but your licking your lips loud as a scrape of sandpaper across flesh. Your pride in your accomplishment as the movement of the chair against the wood disappeared into a whisper.

There was nothing in the room but yourself and when the boys were in their rooms like this room there were only whatever sounds their bodies could make, all those trapped breaths and thumping bloods, their fickle limitations. What a gift, given to every boy you’d taken.

Outside the yellow house the midwestern winter hung, cold and blue and uninviting. In every city in the country you believed you could find a place such as this, an uninhabited zone full of empty buildings, rooms waiting to be repurposed into function. You walked the long blocks from the yellow house into the brighter parts of your new city, the busy streets where you watched and waited and looked for the right boy. The yellow house was readied for the taking and yet perhaps it would not be enough. Perhaps the intruder had changed the terms of your watching. If you made any mistake in the blue house perhaps the mistake was in the fleeing. You could have waited for the police to arrive. Did you want to hear what they would say, once they could see you? The explanations of who you were, of what you had become? The great curiosity of the why. The question you had never answered even for yourself. Your captors would have tried to see the evil in your face and they would have been disappointed. No matter how long they watched they would never see what they wanted. Because you had already looked and whatever there was inside you it was nothing you could watch no matter how brightly the light shined upon the mirror. Because it was only in a boy you could make yourself seen, only in a perfection of fear you could reveal the name you most desired being called.

KELLY FOLLOWED THE LINEBACKER into his house, a squat building of brick at the end of the neighborhood’s last occupied block. Inside, a television voiced a repetition of sports news and on either side of the set there was a dog behind bars, in a cage barely wider than its shoulders, their animal smells swamping the crowded living room. The dogs barked at the sight of the linebacker, who swore in their direction, kicking at one of the cages but absently, without malice. Kelly didn’t recognize the dogs’ breed, imagined some combination bred cheaply together, a mix of incompatible angers, canine functions.

My girlfriend’s dogs, the linebacker said. I could take them or leave them. He asked a question, had to repeat himself before Kelly answered: What kind of caliber, what kind of stopping power?

Kelly said, I would like something the sight of would make a man do anything.

The linebacker said, There are certainly guns like that but they aren’t free. Have a seat.

The linebacker returned from the second floor with a logoed duffel bag, its two zippers padlocked together. He pulled a key ring from his pocket, separated out the right key from the clump. Inside the duffel were individual objects concealed in bubble wrap, their danger sealed away. The linebacker chose three of the bundles, peeled back the masking tape across their folds, laid out the contents on the kitchen table.

Each weapon was black, unloaded. There were some differences in ornamentation, some spread of calibers, stopping power. The smallest pistol was heavier than Kelly expected but immediately he knew he wouldn’t want anything lighter. If he was going to carry a loaded gun he wanted to know it every step. If he was going to hurt someone he wanted to carry the burden of that hurt across a great distance. The act might be a surprise to the killed but he thought the killer should know its weight. He put down the smallest pistol and picked up the biggest. He couldn’t imagine doing anything but killing with it.

He asked, What would the recoil be like?

Magnificent, the linebacker said. Like holding a stallion in your fist.

The safety was on but Kelly gave the trigger a pull anyway, explored the short range of motion the safety allowed. He put the pistol down, asked how much.

The linebacker laughed. That’s it? Five minutes ago you didn’t know what you were looking at and now you know exactly what you want.

The linebacker laughed again. The sound filled the room, overflowed it. Somewhere above them a baby started crying. Kelly had forgotten there was an upstairs. He hadn’t even known about the baby. A woman’s voice could be heard comforting the child. Kelly made an awkward apology. He wanted to leave but not without the pistol, its halo of deathly want. The linebacker named a price and Kelly opened his wallet. The linebacker sealed the pistol in the bubble wrap, reaffixed the masking tape, searched the kitchen drawers for a plastic shopping bag. Upstairs the baby cried and cried. As Kelly walked out of the house the dogs kept their silence, cowed in their cages. He wanted to get down on his hands and knees and growl into their faces but the linebacker wanted him out of his house. Upstairs, the baby continued to cry and the woman’s voice lost its whispered comforts, rising harsh and frustrated as Kelly stepped out into the snow.

On the last night of the year they made love carefully, bodies angling against each other in the dark, their motions unhurried. Her cane was beside the bed, her nightstand full of muscle relaxers, creams, lubricants. It was up to him to find the proper approach, to move them through the stations of their sex, and now he did so easily, knowing what she liked best. Or else he thought he did and she let him think it. She was vocal in her desire in a way he had not previously known. He had preferred a certain roughness but this was good too. He’d never known any tenderness within himself, had only briefly approached it in the past. The way a child supposedly rewrites its parents: he’d craved this, thought he needed it. Even though the child wasn’t his own he had wanted the child to make him new.

Afterward they lay naked beside each other, waiting without talking for the end of the year, and in the quiet dark preceding the midnight hour he didn’t speak the sudden sadness she couldn’t see. The new year came and went and at first he said nothing, instead thinking about how distant all the other years he’d known had become, how everyone he’d ever loved then had been lost to him, their faces gone dark, the smell of their skin faded from memory. Now here he was in the zone, in a new year, living some new life. But every new affection bred its own fears. Because anyone you loved became a responsibility. Because to be a good man meant taking their protection seriously, meant removing every danger it was in your power to remove, no matter what the consequences.

Because any responsibility taken far enough inevitably risked an atrocity.

He could only rarely speak openly but now he turned toward her, tried to tell her what he felt for her, how he wanted what he felt to last. But as he spoke she moved closer, then stopped his mouth with hers.

No, she said, pushing herself up on one elbow, her pale body lean and luminous in the streetlight descending through the window. This is all temporary. I won’t last. Sooner or later the attack that ends all this will come.

He shook his head, denied the obvious truth. He said, I am with you either way. I am with you no matter what happens.

Temporary, she said again. Everything you love about me is temporary.

Her hands pushed upon his stretched chest, lifted her body atop his again. He was so much bigger than her, the difference greater than ever before.

She said, I think you are temporary too. I think you believe you know who you are because of something that happened to you a long time ago. You haven’t told me but I know. But there’s always a choice. You could be this person or you could become someone else.

There is a good man, she said. There is a good woman. We could become those people. Sometimes it feels so easy to choose.