Scrapper

7

THE PLANT BECKONED AGAIN. A year later and it was still merely scheduled for destruction, hunkered in all its crumbling glory upon the famous avenue. One January afternoon Kelly drove his truck around the front of the buildings first, then into the back alleys, parking along the frozen and rutted mud of the broken roads. He walked across the rubbled yard and into the vast vacancy of the plant, moving through rooms whose shapes loomed differently than what he’d imagined, with ceilings that climbed and swelled or else sagged and fell, with floors cracking and curving away from the level. In other places the reinforced concrete held, looked ready to last another hundred years, and in the interior there were places where no sunlight penetrated and in those dark halls he used his headlamp to peer through piled debris, followed a patina of mold and rust through doorways without doors, the wood long ago rotted, the hinges pocketed. But what was on the other side of any wall was never so different than where he’d come from: a similar kind of cold, better lit or more dark, scavenged or else cluttered with trash, the unmaintained grandeur of open space, everything useful carried away.

Inside the plant he followed the sun’s dappling path, the hours of the day clocked by its transit. It took longer to cross the building in this slow fashion but it was something to do with his body, its newly inexhaustible muscles. As he walked his cell phone rang and voicemail notifications beeped and though he rarely listened to the messages he never deleted them. He let messages pile into his inbox, let voices remain upon his device, caught between satellites in the sky and servers buried in the coolness of the earth. He was well acquainted with how anything might happen. If he wasn’t careful he could lose the people under his care and he feared then he would forget them so fast. This was the cruelty of the linear life, its adaptations: not that you would move on but that the moving on would obscure the past, bury it deep.

Once he’d thought he would never forget the sound of anyone he loved but now he couldn’t remember his grandparents, his mother, his childhood friends. The southern woman was gone only a year and it was as if he had never known her voice.

He could see her boy’s face but could he hear her boy’s speech?

Such a quiet son. So little conversation between them, even at the end when they were always together. More and more all he could remember was his error. All the good destroyed by what he’d done wrong. How he’d stood beside the boy’s bed in the night, how after he’d undressed he had thought he had not been naked but instead dressed in father, as he believed now his father had dressed in his own father’s skin, a trick of black magic for the blackest hours.

When he closed his eyes he could see the southern woman and her boy speaking but he could not hear their voices, their images keeping company among all the other silent faces, all motion, no noise. People he’d loved, fading toward the abstract. There were grids buried beneath the earth and floating above the sky and threaded up the bellies of skyscrapers and from them he would delete nothing. The machines would hoard it all. He didn’t love the modern world but he loved this. If the girl with the limp died tomorrow then he would listen again to her last messages because to keep her alive in memory would be to keep her alive. Because one day there would be no one living who remembered the form of your face or the sound of your voice and on that day it would be as if you had never existed. This was the final death of the unremarkable. No record, no remembrance, no one to carry your speech and your image forward into the future. It would happen to the memory of others because you couldn’t always be vigilant against it. You would not know when it happened to you.

He arrived at the location of the fire not from the outside but from within, from above. It took hours but he knew the general direction through the plant, climbed the floors as he walked until he emerged onto the roof at the edge of the building. The fire was a year old but he thought he could smell the blackened earth somewhere below him, beneath the snow, the bent steel moved aside for the extraction of the bodies. He remembered: How the fireball unfurled as every alight mote of dust lit the next, the distance of air so slim and the fire traveling easy across the gap. How he’d watched the fire engulf the building, the company of men. How he’d put his back to the fire and fled. How as he had he’d imagined the better man who might have stayed, the brave man who might have called for help, who might have heard the voice of the girl with the limp months earlier, when he’d needed it most.

How different this past year could have been.

He might be dead, consumed in the secondary blast bursting after he was already far enough for safety.

He might be in prison and then there would be no girl with the limp for him to know.

The boy would not have been found, at least not by him.

Memory didn’t require remembering to exist. Memory could wait dormant, metastasizing in silence. What he had forgotten might dismantle or appropriate what surrounded it. A mass of loaded neurons fired across gray matter, set off a squelch of wet distortion and biofeedback until there appeared these nameless men lost in the fire, lost as from a safe distance Kelly had stared helplessly into the scorched place of their anguish, their screaming and flailing.

Next came the boy, lost already, who was always to him the boy he became after his captivity, never again the same boy he had been before. It was an agreed-upon fiction that he could be made so again. This was the creed of parents, teachers, therapists, that there was a previous state the boy could be returned to. As if a boy were a fixed quantity. As if the quality of a boy were not a thing in flux.

Then the southern woman, then her child, her own boy, their names he couldn’t bear to speak.

How the nightmare of time was that time was not linear but simultaneous.

How everything that had ever happened to him or from him was still happening, even if he couldn’t always remember the cause. Even if he wouldn’t always admit what he remembered.

How what he’d done meant that he was still his father’s son. How he had become the man the father had been to him, that he thought the grandfather had been to the father.

Their inheritance: Once a killer, always a killer. Once a victim, always a victim.

And could the good man be made to last as long.

Now the fading twilight of the midwestern winter: the site of the fire lay below but whatever he thought he saw wasn’t lit by anything but memory. He had wanted to finish climbing the plant during the day but when he looked around him all he surveyed was the deepening gray of the zone, stretching as far as he could see. The streetlights extinguished, the roads untrafficked for long stretches, each set of headlights a mere wrinkling of the dark. In all directions he saw fewer windows lit than the architects and city planners had intended, than the first citizens of these blocks had hoped.

His headlamp illuminated almost nothing in the open air but if he pointed it at his feet he could see where he might go next. He took a step out onto the central girder leading across the open span of air below and the metal received his weight without movement or sound or other complaint. He put his arms out to steady his walk and then he took another step. Somewhere above him he heard the passage of a passenger jet but he didn’t look. Everything peripheral became unnecessary distraction, increased the danger of forgetting the necessary forms of attention. From this height he could see more headlights moving in the street around the plant, lone cars making lonely traffic. There was a tightness in his chest but it was only more fear. There was a ringing in his ears but there was always a ringing in his ears. He was sweating but couldn’t lift his hands to wipe his face. His legs didn’t start to shake until he was past the halfway point but then his heartbeat came unbound from expectation, set its own rhythm. There was the starting a task and there was finishing what you started and he was making the move across. The air freezing around him and above him, and in the zone below the air was black beneath the furrowed winter sky, and almost everywhere he looked there was no light. Only a single length of glass blazed, a fluorescent banner stretched at street level some blocks away: a storefront church, holding a late service. The power of prayers he had believed in, caught brightly behind distant glass. The girl with the limp believed there were good men and women in the city and as Kelly looked out across the architectural darkness of the zone he wished those secret saints would come to their windows, wished they would each lift to the glass a single lit lamp, a flashlight, a flame. For his sake, he wished they would make themselves known.

The place where the fire had burned waited closer than ever, a short plummet to the ground below, where in his nightmares he’d dreamed of the dirt mixed with concrete and dust, the char of bone, the flaky remnants of skin. A single breath gathered, enough to let out one or two words, no more than several short syllables. His body was moving forward as if disconnected from his mind but if he could retouch the connections he would begin to speak. What he wanted to say might have been Help me. It might have been I’m sorry. The cold slid through his layers of clothing, found purchase in the holds of his body. He had saved a boy but what other goodness could he do, alone in the zone. He blinked and when he opened his eyes the light had changed again and he was closer to the other side of the beam. When he thought he couldn’t take another step he reached up and strobed the headlamp, moved the switch back and forth, the lamp’s flashes lighting the nearest bricks. He noticed he was only wearing one glove, the skin of the bare hand blotched and rashed. He closed his eyes, wavered on the beam. This was the purest manifestation of alone: the cold, the dark, the absence of anyone to hear what he meant to say, the way he moved his mouth around the words. The cold grew absolute, its deep numbness a weariness piercing muscle and organ and bone, but he imagined there was a colder cold farther down, the permanent freeze, where movement and breath and heat would all cease. For a moment he saw around him every wrong thing stilled, slowed until he might step outside their wrongness. He knew who he was, who he had been becoming, what he would have at last done to himself if not for the girl with the limp, for the boy. How now he had something to live for, found in the zone where he had not expected to find it.

He took the next step. The step after. He wasn’t sure he believed he’d make it but with every step less of the crossing remained and into the abridged remainder of the dark he spoke the words he was most afraid to say, the admittance of his failure to find the man in the red slicker, the splash of color he sought surely moving somewhere within this muted world and still somehow nowhere to be seen.

8

IF THE INTRUDER FOUND YOU again it wouldn’t be in any basement. All the boy could give the detectives was the brown car and the black mask and the red slicker and you had left the car and the mask and the red slicker behind. The intruder couldn’t know where you’d fled but every night you imagined him finding you inside this upper room readied for a boy, readied for listening to his muttering, for watching his face, the tiny movements of a boy, the tiny features, the eyes, ears, nose, lips. The opening and closing of the hands. The little hairs tall on the arms but nowhere else, not yet.

When you were inside the room with a boy the only noises would be the boy breathing, the words the boy spoke, if there were words — and there were always words, small phrases, beggared queries — plus all the small exclamations of the body and of the shifting room. In the new city you began to have dreams of a new and better boy but you remembered the dreams best in the little room, inside its small measurements made smaller by mattresses secured to the walls, the carpeted floor thickened and deadened with more carpet, remnant scraps. Upon the carpet there was the bed and the chair, the bed prepared for a boy and the chair meant for a man, and in your dream the boy stayed in the bed, cuffed to the bottom rail, and in the bed the boy aged: first the age of the taking, then the ages after, one year after another, and at every age the boy was naked on the bed, too big for his first clothes and without you offering to find him anything else.

I’m hungry, the dream boy would say, his voice huskier now.

Or he would say, I’m thirsty.

The boy would grow but not by getting bigger, he would age but he would shrink against his bones and you would shrink with him. Your bodies slimmed to skin and thin muscle. Hair falling out. Teeth, toenails, fingernails. A complete lack of nourishment but never pain or diminishment or death. You were tired but you wouldn’t sleep. Both your tongues so large in your mouths, those disgusting organs. You not clothed either. Your bellies distended, plump with absence. Your penis collapsed, your scrotum hanging loose between skinny legs, your bones resting atop the wood of your chair, which by then you wouldn’t have left in decades.

See the bowl and spoon from the boy’s last meal, eaten years ago. See the flies, many seasons past. Their husks moving with the dust. The boy staying a boy as the years pass. Heartbeats louder without muscle between heart and skin. Ribs so soft without nutrition. The rubbery thud of the body, the papery rasp of breath.

One day the boy would be as big as you or else you would be as small as a boy and the boy would slide his emaciated ankle through the catch of the cuff and stand up beside the bed. Then he would speak or not speak, then he would stay or he would leave. If the boy went from the room you would follow. If the boy stayed, then you would stay too, content at last.

You were in the upper room when they entered the house. You heard their footsteps on the floorboards, their voices loud but casual. They were not the ones who were afraid. Whenever you were caught you hid and you were already in the best room for hiding, the last room with a lock, one you’d installed yourself. A padlock latch for either side of the door, for whichever world you occupied.

You closed and locked the door but what was a locked door but an invitation.

Inside the soundproofed room you couldn’t hear their movements. Time passed but how much. Impossible to tell. All the sound in the room the sound you made yourself. The huff of breathing, a nervous wheeze through weird teeth. Perhaps they were dismantling the bathroom, ruining the walls to get to the pipes. Probably they were tearing the wiring from the bedroom or the living room. There was a kitchen without appliances but there was more wiring, more pipes. There was a basement and there was more metal downstairs in the dark. Surely they wouldn’t need to enter this one room, the smallest room in the house.

But what was a locked door but an admittance there was something worth hiding.

You counted your breaths. You lost count, counted again. The impossibility of knowing how much time passed inside a clockless room.

Then the door bucking in its frame. The dampened sound of a body thrown against wood. The return of motion to the air.

Then the door bucking again.

The door would not hold. Nothing in the wasted house would hold against such men. The door opened.

The heatless sunlight from the hallway windows flooding the room.

The silhouettes of the men, pausing only momentarily in the doorway.

You turned on the flashlight, caught white eyes and white teeth rushing into its beam of light and even though there were two men, didn’t you think they were him? The one you had been waiting for, ever since he took the last boy. Your intruder. Didn’t you think he’d somehow split into two men, each with slightly different reasons to want your blood?

Your intruder remained in the other city, the city you left, the city where all the gone boys were buried, but where it was no longer safe for you. What happened to you next had nothing to do with him or the last boy or anything else you’d done.

This was only the terrible randomness of the world.

You lifted the chair as the men with white eyes and white teeth charged, swung it once before it was taken away. They started in with their fists, a hammer. The men held you to the ground, opened your pockets, found your wallet, pulled your coat over your head. There was blood on the floor and when was the last time you’d seen your blood. Maybe never but there it was. How you’d assumed what was inside you was so different than what was inside everyone else. But you’d seen this mess before, inside the gone boys. How your last conscious thought was to renew your belief that you were at the center of a story — but then here was your premature ending — and outside your soundproof tomb the story continued without anyone even once having spoken your name.

9

BY THE NEW YEAR, ONLY one fighter stood out from the undistinguished rest and Kelly thought of him as the contender.

The others named the contender Bringer, a name that was an action, fit for cultivation into legend, this man a myth in the making, forged before the deed, taller than Kelly by six inches, every pound of his flesh corded and bulged even under a sweat suit, his skin covered in tattoos scribed in a script Kelly could never read, his footwork quick and sure and his reach like something out of prehistory, made for bringing down the megafauna. It was only the contender that Kelly avoided, by never approaching him in the locker room, by ceding weights and machines at his advance, giving up the speed bag, the heavy bag, the sparring ring itself. Kelly thought the contender was the only boxer in the gym who would escape the zone, who might one day earn his way out of the city by the strength of his blows, the steel of his skin, his endless will.

The contender’s trainer was younger and taut too, different than the other trainers, the aging men dressed in tracksuits, bellies barely covered, questionable primes long past. The contender paid no attention to Kelly but Kelly saw the trainer watching whenever he sparred on the mats at the center of the gym. Kelly’s punches would send another man reeling and in the gap the trainer would appear, standing beside the mats, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his shorts, his eyes bright and scanning with the kind of gaze that lit you up to yourself.

Kelly, almost half past thirty and without an honest future, in this world or any other, but still strong, angry, willing. The human body as perfectible tool. The other men thought Kelly was without fear but in the trainer’s eyes Kelly saw a more honest reflection, how he was almost nothing but afraid, afraid in every straining muscle fiber, every sliver of bone, every gush of blood, bile, marrow. The fear sweat from his body, stained his clothes, broke his skin with every blister and bruise. What the trainer saw would make him want something from Kelly and one day the trainer would ask. And when the day came Kelly would not deny him. It was the man who was most afraid who needed to put his fear into someone else. There had been so few people who had seen Kelly for who he was and now when he met one he wished only to say yes.

His activities began to jam against one another, a tectonics of overlap and damage. At the gym, he lifted heavier weights, lifted to forget, heaved the loaded bars over his shoulders again and again, probed the limits of his endurance. He was getting stronger faster than ever before and he took his new strength into the ring with him. When he sparred the men he fought were like ancient golems brought to new life by his want for opposition, their muscles carved of rock, their fists hard as the oldest earth. They knocked yesterday’s booze out of his flesh and the breath from his chest and if he found he couldn’t win he thought he’d at least bloody a lip, bruise an eye.

The world could destroy him but first he would become a destroyer too.

Now he watched the contender sparring, the contender’s trainer watching too. If any of the others were boxers going anywhere he couldn’t tell. He didn’t know how to measure a man’s quality except to throw himself against the man. A more personal metrics. The others had names but Kelly wouldn’t use them, kept to guy or sport or champ. They called each other words he wouldn’t repeat. He wasn’t ignorant and as they exchanged punches he hoped they knew. He respected their difference, wanted to see it preserved. There was no equal ground anywhere but the ring was close. The body the most personal tool, its absolute lack of any privilege you didn’t make yourself. Fists like meat mallets thudded against his skin and he felt the muscles beneath wearing thinner, he no longer had any fat on him so it was like their fists were striking his bones. He went down on one knee and the other man didn’t stop swinging because another time Kelly hadn’t either. There was a frustration in the others at his insistence on standing again, asking for more. They weren’t supposed to be going this hard but Kelly always forced the blow.

At work he carried gunmetal gray file cabinets to stairwells on his broadening shoulders and dropped them down two or three or five stories, let them crash off banisters all the way to the ground, where they’d wait in the pluming dust to be dragged out across the ice. He worked with other men but they had their own tasks and he barely saw them, acknowledged them less. Every possible friendship had ended before it began. The other men just pale shades of the better men he’d known at other jobsites, separated from him by a veil of disinterest, their comradery living in a world he could see but not touch.

In the absence of time and charity his meals with the girl with the limp reverted to meat and potatoes, everything starch and protein. Winter vegetables, carrots and beets, frozen foods. Cans of beans and cans of soup. They let the hockey games play through dinner so often they only spoke during the commercials, their voices loud over the volume of Budweiser, Labatt Blue, Molson Ice. One night she looked surprised as she reached out to touch his beard, his temples — he was going gray but you couldn’t tell until he got a haircut. He had stopped buying fresh food, stopped replacing his clothes. He was getting ready to leave again but he wasn’t leaving her, he didn’t think. He had started to notice how much more space he was taking up on the couch, the way his neck stretched the collars of his t-shirts, his thighs pulling his jeans tight into his crotch whenever he sat down. He knew how to throw a powerful punch without breaking his own wrist but he couldn’t stop his skin from splitting across the knuckles. She picked up his hands and frowned at the damage she found.

Is this from the gym? she asked. Don’t you wear gloves?

He said, Gloves and helmet. Mouthguard. Hand wraps and taped ankles.

He said, The gloves protect the other person. Not the striker but the one struck. Every punch you throw opens you up. You have to be willing to hurt yourself.

Be careful, she said. You’re not young anymore. We’re not young together.

She said, What will happen to me could happen any day and I can’t do anything to stop it. But this is something you’re choosing.

She wasn’t wrong. He had begun wearing the watch’s orange jersey underneath his other clothes, its mesh scratchy against his skin, under flannel or sweater or sweatshirt. He hadn’t expected there to be so much power in the bright fabric but its intention clung to its flesh, authorized his vigilance. Now the jersey stunk no matter how he washed it, its material discolored under the armpits and around the neckline. He rinsed it every night in the sink but too often he put it back on before it was fully dry, wrapping himself in the smell of laundry soap, unscrubbed sweat.

He hid the jersey from the girl, felt more naked than ever when he removed it in the secretive dark of the bedroom. She was worried enough, already had her reasons. There was a space growing between them, the case shortening his days and nights, constraining the chances for him to be with her, the attention she received. He thought he would make it up to her soon, ask her to move in or to move to a new place together, somewhere they’d have no previous history. A new beginning. He would ask her soon but not until he closed the case. He wanted to be with her but he didn’t want the case to come along.

How to protect yourself from the blow you can’t see coming. This was what the other boxers talked about, beside the mats, in the locker room, while lifting heavier quantities of dull-black weights over their heads, straining thighs and calves and backs and shoulders. Chalk everywhere, on their hands and arms, the floor and the benches, and always the same topic: how to protect yourself from the invisible blow. Because it was the blow you couldn’t see coming that knocked you out. If you stared into every punch you could never be put down. The illusion of control. Self-determination in battle. Kelly didn’t believe in anything else he’d once believed in but he thought he might believe in this. To stop escaping what was coming. The recognition of the inevitable, the way a boxer’s knees might be buckling before the blow landed, the eyes rolling back, the mouth slacking open to utter some last dumb sound.

In the morning the trainer approached Kelly in the locker room to pitch the fight, Bringer’s first. The trainer said he would train them both, with his assistant serving as Kelly’s corner man. There was no conflict of interest because no one — not the contender, not the trainers, perhaps not even Kelly — actually expected or wanted Kelly to win.

I think you’re wrong, Kelly said. I could beat him.

No, the trainer said. But I want you to think so. I’m betting on you believing.

Kelly shook the trainer’s hand, saw how the trainer knew the truest shape of his heart. His ability to keep fighting even after he’d been hurt. How even if he knew he would be hurt badly it didn’t mean he wouldn’t fight back, wouldn’t push against every fist in the world. Always he had left behind what he’d done by giving up the portion of himself it lived within. With enough versions of himself he might compartmentalize anything. Diminishment could be a path to action and if Bringer did nothing else he might diminish what little resistance remained.

The boy wakes up in the middle of the night. A nightmare. He’s back in the blue house, back in the basement. But this time it’s not the man in the red slicker in the chair. This time it’s the brother.

The boy’s ankles are handcuffed to the bed. He can move but he can’t leave.

He is naked but there is a blanket covering him. His body exposed but hidden.

He waits quietly. This is the brother. He is not in danger.

But then the brother says, Watch me.

The brother says, Watch this.

He says, Boy, just watch, and then the boy watches. The brother walks away from the bed, into the dark corners of the room. He’s looking for something but the boy can’t see what.

But I can. He’s donning the red slicker, slipping inside it one arm at a time.

When the brother comes back into the light the boy starts to scream.

And then whose dreams are these.

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

Who do I see when I picture the kidnapper?

Anyone I can put inside a red slicker.

W

Once upon a time the brother claimed a calendar’s worth of extracurriculars but I cannot find the evidence. If the brother was on the basketball team, then there would be practices, games, public places to surveil from within a crowd. But if these events existed they were without schedule or record.

Despite these mysteries, the brother is not impossible to track and so I track him.

I follow the brother’s brown car, memorize its license plate. The same model as the man’s in the red slicker, an accidental overlap with dire consequences. The boy’s false schedule buys him freedom behind the wheel, access to all the city from school’s end to curfew, eleven on the weekdays, midnight on Saturday. The brother’s friends are not indistinguishable but at this distance I know them only by their grossest types: there is the fat one and the tall one and the thin one, each more similar than distinct. Always the brother drives, the others fighting for shotgun and the losers crowding into the backseat.

Together they visit certain houses in the zone. The brother stays in the car while the fat one goes inside. I hang back but afterward I roll by the houses again, scan the metal screens over the windows. The game the brother’s playing isn’t basketball but I think I know the rules.

The brother and the brother’s friends drive the neighborhood closest to their school, stop to pick up girls from front porches. They smoke in the car, keep the windows rolled up for blocks before letting the world back in. I think I can hear their laughter but I know I’m not close enough. I never had these kinds of friends but I was once young and dumb too, know the story, know these girls with bad taste.

I watch while the brother and these others get high in his car, get high in lots between abandoned houses, then high in the houses. At first I maintain my distance, stay down the block in the truck. The brother knows my face but the brother never sees me. The obliviousness of youth is all the cover I need. I leave the truck behind, walk into the small trees circling the house the boy and the friends and the girls have found, approach it from the back. I can’t get close enough to look through the windowless walls but I can hear the sounds of laughter from the first floor, then the brother’s voice upstairs, then the sounds of him with one of the girls. A girl, yes, but a girl is not adequate cover. Not proof of anything. There had been girls for me too. There is a girl now and I know better than to believe it means the past is ended.

The brother going to school but not staying all day. The brother cutting out early, leaving at lunch and not coming back. Or else not going at all.

The brother sitting in the fast-food restaurant where the fat friend works, hanging out in the backmost booth. Not buying anything. Sitting there drinking a soda. Thumbs on his cell. Bored but nowhere to go.

The brother at the mother’s house, turning off the light in the boy’s bedroom.

The brother at the father’s apartment, where they have to share the second bedroom.

The brother in the dark with the boy. The brother hurting the boy. Because the boy is in the room. Because the easiest victim is the one at hand.

Before he was taken from me I let the brother bring the boy to my apartment. The brother driving him there even though the brother skipped school. A certain amount of normalcy necessary to retain access to the mother and the father, their separate homes.

There were ninety minutes between the end of school and when I arrived home from work and some days the boy was there, let in with his own key, and some days he was not.

On the days the brother didn’t bring the boy, where did the boy go?

The boy told me the brother took him home but now I know this wasn’t true.

I have to be waiting outside the boy’s school if I want to follow so I leave work early. It’s easier if I don’t ask, and the jobsite is big enough I can just wander off. I’m there on the street when the brother pulls up in the brown car. It’s like watching a reenactment, every time.

The brown car pulls up. The boy gets into the car. The car takes the boy away. And if the destination is harm for the boy, does it matter who’s driving?

What I want to ask: Is he your brother or isn’t he?

What I want to hear: He is and he isn’t.

I would say, I would never want to hurt anyone you loved.

He is and he isn’t.

But I would hurt anyone who hurt you.

He has but what if someone hurt him first. What if he could learn to stop, like you learned.

But I didn’t learn. But look what it cost when I failed.

The night of the brother’s birthday party, I am there too, watching from the evening gloom through the windows of the green house, its lonely outpost upon this neighborless block. Inside the house, the boy attends the brother’s birthday dinner, father and mother and sons reunited again. Chocolate cake, presents, a video game and a pair of sneakers. The celebration ends, the father leaves. I was inside just the one time but I know which window is the boy’s. I shiver and shake and watch for him to appear in the glass. Much later I am sure the boy is asleep but still there is a nightlight burning somewhere in the room. He never told me he was afraid of the dark — a ward, perhaps, against what else he had to fear.

The brother, eighteen at last — but despite his age you had to want to call him a man.

The next week the brother moves out of the mother’s house and I watch him go. He wasn’t their real son and they’d never become close and what other options were there. The mother helps him carry his boxes to the car, hugs him goodbye. At first I don’t know where the brother will go but it isn’t hard to tail him to his new place, an apartment with the fat friend in a worse part of town. I sit in the parking lot and watch his windows, try to imagine a scenario where this is how the case ends. Because if the brother is out of the boy’s life forever, then maybe there is nothing else to do.

The next day I watch as the brother picks the boy up from school. I follow the brown car as the brother drives deeper into the zone, back to the house where he had gone with his friends, his friends’ girls. From a distance I watch the house, watch the silhouettes of the brother and the boy move window to window, climbing to an upper room. It’s not the same room as when he was here with the girl. They’re on the wrong side of the house and I can’t see anything more, can’t hear what is being said or done.

What I want is an excuse, a reason to let the brother go.

Certainly I admit there are blanks in the records.

Certainly I fill in what I can’t prove.

I speculate. I deduce.

I make connections.

What I want for the boy is an end to fear but first I have to leave the boy in danger a little longer. Another crime, like closing the basement door one last time before returning with the hacksaw, before rescuing the boy from the dark of the low room.

I say I want to protect the boy but to do so I cannot imagine any action that is not violence against someone else. And is this limitation found in the world or is it my own most obvious flaw.

THE HEAVY DETECTIVE APPEARED at the apartment door, flashing his badge to gain entrance. As if Kelly could refuse, as if the detective believed he would.

You again, Kelly said. The detective.

Kelly invited him in, waved him toward one of the two chairs seated at the kitchen table. The hockey game was on the television but Kelly made no move to turn down the sound. He lit a cigarette, held out the pack to the detective. The detective waved away the offer but removed his own from the inside pocket of his jacket.

Sanchez, the heavy detective said. My name is Sanchez. And today is the three-month anniversary of you walking into the hospital with Daniel in your arms. Ninety days without any new evidence means the kidnapping is officially a cold case. I’m supposed to stop working on it.

Daniel. How long had it been since Kelly last heard the boy’s name spoken aloud? The day he’d given him up.

I didn’t know, Kelly said.

You’ve been seeing him, the detective said. He comes here after school.

Kelly smoked and maintained eye contact and waited. The detective had not come to tell Kelly things Kelly knew, unless he had come to tell Kelly he knew as well. There was something the detective had come to hear him say but Kelly didn’t know what. These weren’t questions, required no confession.

Daniel’s parents mentioned it, the detective said. They said they’re not concerned but I am. I’m concerned about why the boy comes here, about what you do when the boy comes. I’m concerned because there are no clues in this case except you.

The boy is my friend, he said.

Daniel is your friend, the detective said. And my name is Sanchez. Detective Sanchez.

Kelly said, Yes. Detective Sanchez.

But that’s not how you think of me.

No. It’s not.

It was simply a guess. A deduction by a detective. And anyway, he wasn’t wholly correct.

Never my boy, Kelly said. The boy. I think of him as the boy.

Yes, that’s right, the detective said. That’s the way you say it, the way you’ve said it from the first time we met. The way you said it when you made those phone calls where you wouldn’t identify yourself. As if it could have been anyone else calling. So tell me: What does it mean when you call him the boy?

Kelly didn’t answer. It wasn’t anything so crude as a clue. As a child he’d learned how in the beginning there were the animals, nameless in the Garden, nameless and without knowledge of their uses. The first man, the giver of names, subjugating the beasts into a system of kingdoms, phyla, classes, and orders: thorny-headed worms, wheel carriers, claw bearers, all the rest. It was an impossible task to name all of creation but in the task there existed a chance to own the world.

And so what did the man who named nothing own.

He’s not my boy, Kelly said. He comes and goes as he pleases.

It’s a mistake, the detective said. That’s what I came here to tell you. You are the sole person of interest in this case. You have placed yourself at the scene. If you are innocent of an unsolved crime, then it is a mistake to continue to associate with the victim.

He said, You have made yourself a suspect.

But he’s gone, Kelly said. The boy has gone back to his parents. I don’t see him anymore. Didn’t his parents tell you? They’ve taken him back. Cut off contact. Whatever might have happened has already ended.

The detective stared, waited for more. The case notes were in the bedroom, in the bottom drawer of the nightstand, next to the stacked mattress. Kelly could give them to the detective, free himself of their burden. He had failed to find the man in the red slicker and he could be released of the charge. He was not a detective. No one was expecting him to solve the case but he had tried his best. He was still trying but in the end he had to admit the paltriness of his notes. The lack of conclusiveness. All the pages were filled with his script but reading them again had left him more afraid than ever. The difficulty of premeditation. How long had he known his course? He was either in or he was out. Ever since he found the boy he had been telling himself a story and it was important that at the last moment the ending became its own inevitable answer to the world.

The simplest version of the ending to come: he had promised to protect the boy.

Kelly thought he could stop everything if he could give the case notes to the detective but he knew he couldn’t, not without explanation. Because he wouldn’t explain himself he sat in silence, let his face sag blankly, waiting for the questioning to be over or for the blow of something worse. Thoughts followed, but nothing he would say without prompting. The heavy detective continued to talk but Kelly stopped listening. He didn’t notice when he closed his eyes but when he opened them the detective was already walking out the door, shaking his head.

The blonde reporter was on the news every night and in his apartment Kelly watched the broadcast until he had seen her and the weather. The forecast was always for clouded skies and snow and whenever the reporter appeared she wore a series of pantsuits and power skirts, blue and black and light and dark gray. He watched every night but he never again saw the tan skirt, the knee-high boots. As if the outfit had been worn for his benefit.

On-screen, she stood beside a median over the west-east freeway, drive time passing fast behind her, the last gasp of quick movement before the nightly slowing of traffic. This was the day of the shooter on the freeway, each shot coming out of a moving vehicle, fired across the median. No one had been killed but the blonde reporter said a wounded man had tickets to the hockey game. The home team lost and the man got treated for a bullet wound and this was the city they lived in. Now the blonde reporter spoke over a photograph of a cracked window, the bullet hole intact in the middle of the glass. Kelly lifted his own loaded pistol from where it sat beside him on the couch, raised it to the screen. Aimed its barrel at the bullet hole.

The blonde reporter’s voice was speaking but he seldom listened to her words. He steadied the pistol. He mouthed the word bang until the bullet hole was gone, replaced by a map of the lower half of the state, covered in fluorescent clouds.

Snow again, the weatherman said, and temperatures dropping ever closer to zero.

Kelly picked up his cell, called the blonde reporter, the number on her card pasted in the case notes. When she answered Kelly said his name and waited. When she didn’t respond immediately he said it again, growled a question. Did she remember him or not. Would she see him again. Could he buy her a drink.

The case notes were in his hands now. He said, There’s something I need to tell you.

I’m married, remember? she said.

I do remember, he said. The ring’s fake.

Not anymore, she said. She’d met a man, engaged him. Now her ruse was her reality.

But you’re not married, he said. Only engaged.

Engaged to be married. It’s the same thing.

Nothing is the same thing, he said. There are no equivalencies.

Kelly liked how when you hung up a cell phone there was no dial tone after. Just the ending of sound, its trailing absence.

The next morning the reporter called back, said she could interview him again. The sports anchor had told her about the fight, about Kelly versus the contender. Bringer was someone who mattered, who viewers could be convinced to cheer. More human interest. The accidental hero versus some future greatness of the sport. A feature story, the blonde reporter offered, a way to close the loop, to connect the finding of the boy with the battle of man versus man.

As mornings passed the preparations for the fight took on a fated aspect: if Kelly were hurt or killed in the fight, then without him the target would go free. He threw himself recklessly against the bodies of the other men, sought a stance to bring them hardest against him in return. What could he say or do to them to remove their hesitance, their resistance to the possibility of lasting harm? He jabbed, circled, jabbed, and moved in for a clinch, a chance to push his forehead into the face of another man, a chance to lift a knee into a thigh or kneecap. He fought dirty, sought to anger, bragged in the locker room to anyone who would listen. There was no difference between the amount of force necessary to knock a man out and the amount necessary to kill a man and he invited whatever might come, wanted to taunt it out of his opponents. They shied away, left him alone in the shower room. He told himself they were practicing for an exhibition and he was preparing for something real, outside the ring. Not the representation of battle but battle itself. Every injury became an exhumation by exhaustion, until there would be nothing hidden, nothing buried, nothing left, and when he was nothing but bruises he would carry his blood in his skin and what was trapped within him would be brought to the surface.

The trainer stopped him in the locker room, handed him a paper-wrapped package. He smiled as Kelly tore the paper to uncover the necessary ceremonial garb: a new pair of red gloves, the red-and-white shorts, the hooded red robe.

A gift, the trainer said. For your first and only fight.

Now the scrapper. Now the salvor. Until the duty was done.

Now the deep winter. Now the blue air and the slow cracking of concrete against the frozen and immovable earth. Now the streets ever more vacant in the zone, all Kelly’s knowledge of their topography blurred by constant snowfall. Now the unbroken clouds hiding the pale and heatless heart of the sun.

Now Kelly returned to the neighborhood where he’d found the boy, circled the missing house, read the street’s graffiti as prophecies, premonitions, threats. the great hope, he read. once again spelled once agian. Words he couldn’t read, words in Spanish and Polish and Arabic, other scripts he couldn’t identify, mangled senseless by ornamentation. the only age. A dead raccoon crushed in the street, tagged with blue spray paint, the photorealistic face of a child stenciled onto a brick wall, bracketed by birth date, death date. He rarely saw another person outside but he saw their evidence. dead serious. amos, lied to. He saw snowplows moving through some blocks but more of the streets went unplowed. There were streets where he wasn’t convinced there was one human soul remaining and those were the blocks he searched the hardest. The longer the walk the braver it made him. The boredom of being alone, walking below the many names of the Messiah scrawled in spray paint, the higher the holier. More names everywhere, names falling down, and when the names were gone what city would remain.

This was his last chance but what was the chance the man in the red slicker was wearing the same clothes. What was the chance he looked anything like what Kelly had imagined. Kelly didn’t know, kept moving house to house, block to block. He opened gates, walked up to front doors, tested locks and knockers, and in every entranceway he wanted to yell Hello, to yell Is anyone home, to yell out some right name.

In one living room he looked around at the frozen carpet and he said, If I knew a name I wouldn’t be here.

In some kitchen — the sink thick with the petrified shit of some animal, a cat or else something larger, wilder — he said, I want to be the one who stops this but I don’t know if I am.

The zone was bigger on the inside than on the outside, the interior spaces of houses each yawning blanker than Kelly had ever imagined. Even without the case notes he made new guesses, inferences, imprecise triangulations. When he was tired of driving he parked the truck in front of nameless bars, their windows lit by neon signs advertising brands he’d thought extinct. He ordered whiskeys until he slurred his questions and then he backed down to beer. Other men drank from tall cans and low glasses and they watched the aggressive way Kelly moved his growing body and he liked the way they watched. In some bars there were nothing but men. All of his responses became inappropriate, crossed up. Once he got so angry he got most of an erection. In a parking lot he broke an offending nose with his fists, put a boot into the wheezing man’s ribs before stumbling off to vomit into the gravel. He said, This wasn’t an investigation but an interrogation — but later he couldn’t remember who he had said it to.

The reporter sent him clips from their filming, private links to web-hosted videos Kelly loaded on his phone. In her email she apologized, said the news loved weird but this was too weird to air: the fight hadn’t happened but they were done filming. The phone’s screen was three inches wide and so he saw himself in miniature, a homunculus moving through a blighted landscape, the monochrome of the midwestern winter. A certain kind of starkness, the elemental bleakness of a man astride a wilderness of concrete and steel, acid rain and brick and rust.

The word homunculus. Where had it come from. What documentary, what book.

She was trying to get promoted, her email said, not fired.

His teeth were still firmly seated but he worried other connections in his head were loosening. He watched the clips and he tried to remember their context. In the first clip he saw a house he had scrapped before finding the boy, where the cameraman and the blonde reporter followed from outside the frame so Kelly appeared to be talking to himself. The walls of the house were opened, and on-screen he kneeled beside them, explained what he might have removed from where. He couldn’t recall being so knowledgeable but here he was describing the kinds of pipes the wall had held, the old copper, the discarded technology of the wiring, knob and tube everywhere in the house. Single-insulated copper conductors, he heard himself saying. Joist and stud drill holes, porcelain insulating tubes, porcelain knob insulators.

The insulating sleeves pulled through the walls were called looms, he said.

In this house the looms were made of cloth, he said. Other houses, rubber.

In her email, the reporter wrote, Please do not contact me again. Please consider getting help. Best of luck to you in your recovery.

One of his ears was swelled and bruised, an ugly organ. He strained to hear over the ringing. The second clip showed Kelly at work, silently shoveling swept debris into a dumpster. His face was blank, his eyes distant. There weren’t any other people in the frame and this shot was lonelier than the last. He was in the parking lot in front of an abandoned motor lodge but you couldn’t tell from this angle. He could hear an excavator but not see it. The whole block was being leveled and this was one of the last structures. The space around him swelled, swallowed him up. The camera angle widened to better show the absence of nearer structures, the length of the remaining building, a sign bearing some of the letters of the name of the motel. The latest in a line of such signs, partial namings. As if a part of a word did you any good. As if you could half name a city, a country, the world.

The third video showed Kelly at the gym in sweats and a t-shirt, Kelly bigger than he had ever seen himself before. Heaving steel weights over his shoulders until every part of him bulged. A look in his eyes Kelly didn’t recognize from any mirror. Then his fists on the heavy bag, too slow, his movements looking stunned and stupid but delivering enough force to shudder the bag out of the grinning trainer’s grip.

The final clip opened with a close-up of Kelly, seated before the camera on his couch, his living room splayed in the background. All the familiarity gone. How anything could be rendered alien by the camera. He took the phone into the living room, sat on the couch, and pressed play, then stood, walked around the coffee table, kneeled where the cameraman had kneeled.

It was like watching through an instrument of magic. He could look above the phone and see he wasn’t there but through the screen he saw himself sitting in his usual spot, talking about scrapping, about the weight of things, the relative weights. Car batteries were worth so much a pound but they were so heavy, so dirty. Still he took one where he could find one, he said.

Steel was heavier than a lot of things, he heard himself say. A mass of aluminum weighed less than a mass of copper or iron.

The slow terror of his heartbeat. He didn’t remember saying what he was saying on-screen. Now he seemed to be reciting the weights of various mammals, various birds. A wolverine, he seemed to be saying.

What is the weight of a badger? he said. Twenty or twenty-five or thirty pounds.

He was a little drunk watching but how drunk had he been when he said these words, when he let them tape him saying them? A condor is a heavy bird, he said, and he looked so exhausted saying it.

The video was less than halfway over but he didn’t think there was anything else except more of this. The species and weights began to come faster, with less commentary. The weight of the hummingbird and the seagull and the common rat. The weight of the hyena. The weight of the buffalo—the bison, he slurringly corrected himself — and the weight of the spotted owl.

Where had he learned these things. What long-forgotten encyclopedia, read by flashlight so his father would know he wasn’t asleep, because his father would only enter after the room was dark. The accumulation of so many useless facts a by-product of a childish defense.

In the video his face was utterly serious but more animated than ever. His hands sat in his lap, atop his spread knees, one hand limp across each thigh. He spoke the weight of the whitetail deer. The weight of bears, the male, the female, the cub each a different weight. The weight of the whale and the squid. He was slurring worse, exhibited a strokelike stutter. If Kelly had been watching someone else he would have thought this was a man dying delirious.

If Kelly had been watching anyone else he would have been happier than he was watching himself.

The video ended. The phone was not a magic window. There was not another Kelly here. The Kelly he had seen was the only Kelly he was. He saw again how he didn’t have access to all of himself but no matter what was revealed he did not believe he could be made to quit the story or to turn from its end.

CONCRETE EVERYWHERE, CEMENT EVERYWHERE ELSE. Gray clouds and gray snow and gray earth. The destruction of the plant had advanced since he was last there or else he was more aware of what was gone. There was heavy equipment parked on-site, long red trailers for scrap and garbage. He couldn’t come during the day anymore, wouldn’t risk being seen by credible witnesses. He searched the plant at night, moved his light through the shattered rooms. As he walked he imagined finding a chasm in the floor of a building, and beneath that hole a great staircase spiraling into the earth, each landing another hallway full of rooms, locked and unlocked doors. Instead he found a tiny aperture secreted into the ground, a break in the surface wide enough to fit a man. Underneath, an uneven descent led to a single set of stairs, a single door. Beyond the door waited a hallway, its first span barely intact, the rest collapsed ten or fifteen feet in, and at the end of that hallway there was another door giving access to a small square room, a space sufficient to the task.

The enumerating of possibilities, the weighing of costs, the sharp rise toward a cliff of certainty: this wasn’t the easiest way but for every action there was a right space. Whenever the variables increased he tried to back up, to rethink. In his apartment he loaded the tools into two duffel bags, each meant for athletic gear but put here to different use. Their weight strained his new shoulders, curved his back. He loaded the truck with the bags, returned for the generator and the lights, everything else hidden at the back of his only closet, buried behind his few outfits. As he worked he heard from some cave within his chest the salvor, unopposed by the scrapper one last time.

He could always abandon the tools, he heard himself say. There was still a choice to be made.

It was enough to have saved the boy, he argued — but then he had to ask, Was the boy saved enough?

The salvor and the scrapper were not exactly voices, more urgencies, rushing gushes of suggestion, potential actions. At first hearing them had required a diminishing of Kelly’s own personality through alcohol or exhaustion. Now he heard their urges in every moment and either might make him move.

Underground there was no difference between day and night but he could only risk arriving in the night. He drove back to the plant, found the building again. Everything looked different in the dark but he was careful as he carried the duffel bags in past the shattered outer walls, over dumped trash, blown debris. There were long hallways leading into the plant but he knew which way to head. Inside one room there was the hole and the shattered slope of floor and at the bottom the door busted out of its shape.

Past the door there’d be no way to see him from the surface. There was a certain deepness he wanted, a certain distance from the ground and the city and the sky. Any violence there would be a private act: A man and a man went into a dark room and only one of them came out. A terrible fairy tale the length of a sentence.

When Kelly was finished he took the case notes from his back pocket and he placed them on the floor, their pages thickened with pasted maps, poor photographs, the weight of ink and frequent handling. He took his lighter from his pocket and because he didn’t need them anymore he set the case notes on fire. The flames of his confession didn’t last long but for a time they lit the blank cave of the room with their flicker.

There was the cave down within Kelly too and now he had made that cave this room.

He left the plant but he wasn’t ready to go home. The girl with the limp wasn’t at work but he knew he wasn’t ready to see her, not in this mood. The boy was lost to him and there wasn’t anywhere else he was wanted. As he drove the streets he passed the storefront church he’d seen from the top of the plant, the bright glow of the prayers within. When he parked the truck in front of the windows to watch the dancing prayer inside he caught the eye of some apostle, the leader of the congregation. The apostle held a plastic sword in one hand, lifted the other to beckon Kelly in. A gesture of ecstatic welcome. As if it were so easy for a prodigal to return to the fold.

THE CIRCLE TURNED and the congregation turned around its hem, the apostle leading his followers, their feet dancing behind his feet, tracing the invisible circle his steps circumscribed, a geometry of belief cut across the stained concrete floor, the blackened squares where the rows of washers used to be. The circle contained and guided them and as they turned they lifted toy swords and crimson banners, raised voices toward tongues. The folding-table altar held the speakers and the speakers were containers too, containing cheap electric crackle and the salvation of the congregation, which did not require fidelity, only volume, the voice of the spirit technology-amplified, extracted out of the fire and the dove and magnetized onto tape and uttered upward at decibel strengths born of the far end of the dial.

There were ways to take the air out of a room and this noise was one conceivable method.

Along the edges went the chairs, the buckets lined with plastic bags, ready for the vomit and the retching and the casting out. The congregation used to unfold the chairs into rows but now the chairs were rarely used. Let the faithful sit in their houses. In God’s house they would stand and move to his Word. The spirit needed space to churn but the apostle wasn’t fancy about smells, walls, former tenants. Any empty room could be a space for the spirit to move a miracle and the apostle and his ministers were there to work the deliverance, to cast out the demons of anxiety and shyness, the demons of addiction, the demons of obesity and fornication.

The miracle was that the swords were just imported plastic, made from recycled soda bottles and lead paint. It was the symbol they needed, not what the symbol was made of.

The miracle wasn’t how you were cured. The miracle was how God was willing to cure you again when you fell.

There were at least one hundred eleven ailments a deliverance could cure and the saints could name them all. When the apostle told stories, he encouraged people to take notes. A reminder of what could go wrong. Tattoos drew demons close. Piercings revealed the promiscuous. A woman with a stud in her nose had opened herself to wantonness. When the microphone squealed it was the demon Bling Bling. It wasn’t a biblical name but most of the demons weren’t so named. The enemy bred them from scratch in every age, improved his technology. Anything new could bear his sigil.

The apostle had seen third-degree burns take on cloaks of baby skin, seen cataracts leeched from eyes. Mending lame legs was old and easy work that started in the circle, with the dancing, the music so loud it could shatter eardrums for the spirit to heal. The will was tied to the flesh. You had to get the body exhausted so what ailed it could be drawn free and broken by the Word.

The apostle clapped, asked for a volunteer: Who among you came to be delivered?

Now someone unfolded a chair, placed it before the two ministers in heavy sweaters and slacks flanking the one to be delivered. Everyone else shaking plastic swords in the air, howling in tongues, spinning the circle. From the street passersby could see what they were doing, through the floor-to-ceiling glass meant to show off the mechanics of laundry. Some of the storefront churches smeared their windows with paint or covered them with paper but the apostle left them clear, kept them clean. Some nights he saw a face pressed to the street side of the glass, leaving the smear of the curious, but inside the church they weren’t doing anything needing hiding. He wanted the dark streets to see the bright work being done beneath fluorescent light.

The one to be delivered stepped forward, took his seat. The apostle could see what was inside him, could reckon all his failures, the demons obvious but the bad choices visible too. Because not every impulse was the enemy’s and this man had as much free will as any other.

The one to be delivered shook at the apostle’s touch, recoiled from his voice. His boots stamped the floor, wrung more sweat free from his jumping body. It was darkest bluest winter and the man was dressed for the weather, had kept his coat on the whole dance. The look in his eyes, the exhaustion, the fear, his and not his. He named some of his demons at sentence length, readying his voice for story, but the apostle stopped him.

Demons aren’t complicated, the apostle said, smearing a thumbprint of ash across the other’s forehead. No need to confess their every title. Just give us their names.

Give us Grief. Give us Sorrow.

Say the names Abuse, Abuser, Abused. Say the name Suicide.

If it’s drink, then name it Drink. If it’s drugs, then name it Drugs. If you’re a thief, then you’ve got a thief inside you, named by his action.

Name the killers, the apostle said. Speak every name of every bedeviling thing. The music boomed. The members of the congregation held their swords up and they spoke their high speech and at his command the apostle saw the angels filling the room too, their winged glory summoned, their pale and dark faces. God had made an angel for every shade and an office to obliterate every shadow and they were in the room too, ready for the one who was to be delivered to call out the names of their opposites and as he did so the expressionless angels stepped forward and put their flaming brands to what was called. Someone set a plastic-lined trash can in front of the one being delivered and he filled it with retch and when the sickness was out of him the two ministers on his sides lifted him to his feet, wrapped him in their embrace, a new brother.

Say what you’ve come for, the apostle said, and the one delivered answered.

Sanction, he said. Protection.

The one delivered was wobbly on his feet but the ministers added him to the circle again, got him back in step, pressed a dollar’s worth of plastic into his hand. There were others to save and his voice would help the saving get done — a charge, a commission. The speakers offered loud directions to the body, and if the one delivered couldn’t speak right yet, it owed to how he opened his mouth. He could mimic, work out some call-and-response until he earned his own voice, his own universal manner of speech. The apostle hollered above the noise, danced with his feet high, lifted his knees and kicked up his robes, promised tonight they would all sleep sweet dreams, and the one delivered heard this, considered. The apostle said it was hard to sleep with the lights on but it was impossible to rest without the light within and by the end of the night they would all have their light renewed. The apostle said he would preach until dawn if it delivered them all. The apostle said he was sixty-two years old and if it took forever to put all these waiting angels to work then he planned to live forever.

10

THE EVENING OF THE FIGHT Kelly awoke with ashes on his forehead and his heart thudding wrong — a scuttling, a shallowness. In the bathroom he listened as his heartbeat drummed louder, the blood jerking. He locked his hands over the ache in his chest, pressed hard, as if from outside the ribs he might hold the jumping muscle still. When he turned on the shower he didn’t wait for the water to warm, just sat down on the edge of the tub and let the cold water fall. Afterward his eyes jittered in the mirror, bloodshot and blank. There was a slackness to his mouth he hadn’t seen before. He brushed his teeth, scrubbed the night from his skin, ran a comb through his hair, forced the part. When he dragged the razor across his face the coldest skin resisted, begrudged. He moved carefully across the floor, water everywhere underfoot, slicking the tiles. He fed his body broader commands, noticing every step of every action, thinking of the parts of objects. He smoked before he brushed his teeth and then he dressed, an undershirt, underwear and pants, the watchman’s jersey under heavy flannel, thick socks and the worn boots, the impossible loops of the laces.

While he dressed he watched the news and on-screen the blonde reporter said this was the week ten new homicides were reported inside the zone. Ten homicides including two triple killings. Ten homicides including five men and four women and one child. The names of the victims withheld pending notification of the family. The names of the killers withheld pending arrest and arraignment.

This was the week a burnt and decapitated body was found inside a closed and shredded elementary school, found in a hallway with torn ceilings, with busted tile, without locker doors or lockers left.

This was the week a suspected arson killed a man and a woman and a seven-year-old girl at one thirty in the morning, their bodies falling through the collapsing house, drowned in the smoke and the fire.

This was the week a woman was shot dead in her driveway, still sitting in the driver’s seat with two other friends in the car. The shooter a man in dark clothing.

This was the week a clerk and two elderly customers died at a check-cashing center in a strip mall, the clerk shot despite the bulletproof storefront. There was a buzzer she had to press to let customers in but how could she know who was dangerous before they were standing at the counter.

This was the week a charred body was found inside a trash can behind a bar and this was the week the spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office said the body was burnt beyond recognition but at least they had his teeth.

This was the week a woman was killed by a neighbor when she knocked on his door, her face bloodied and cut, seeking help after a car accident. This was the week the homeowner opened a locked door to fire a shotgun at the color of her skin.

This week was the week it always was.

What would it have taken to make this week different.

She wouldn’t come to the fight because she didn’t want to see him get hurt and for Kelly there was no one else. Before the appointed time arrived the trainer came into the locker room, sat down in the corner where Kelly was resting, his eyes heavy, hands wrapped and gloved and ready. Kelly wore the red shorts and the red shoes and the orange jersey of the watch, considered his color-draped bulk in the mirror across from the bench. He lifted his eyes at the trainer’s approach but didn’t stand to meet him. Whatever had happened in the circle of swords had taken everything he had but he hoped his energy would return before the fight began. The effects of the late mass lingered, the lifting of the swords, the turning circle, the loud thunder of the boombox, the ashes streaked across his forehead, the presence he hadn’t felt in many years. Perhaps imagined, he didn’t know. In his youth he had craved this feeling. He thought he did not believe in God again but he did still believe in that feeling, the absolute and temporary lack of doubt.

You’re not wearing the robe, the trainer asked.

No, said Kelly. Is it time?

Not yet. Soon.

I’m ready.

Soon. Make it a good show and you’ll get your money.

I won’t fall for nothing.

You will.

I won’t.

I wanted you because I knew you’d think so.

I won’t.

He’ll hit you. He’ll hurt you. Bringer will punch you until you go down or the referee makes him stop and you will have no chance of changing this.

This isn’t what’s going to happen.

Like I said. I knew you’d think so.

It was nothing but bravado speaking. Kelly hadn’t come to win but to lose in the right way. He’d never understood the scoring, didn’t want to keep score. He only needed to understand if he didn’t plan on forcing the knockout.

When Kelly entered the gym he saw the lights turned up, a spotlight over the center of the mats inscribing a glowing circle in the center of the ring. The crowd wasn’t large but there were more people watching than Kelly was used to, more noise. The chatter before the spectacle, the boredom muddled with expectation, the crowding of bodies in the motionless air, the gym the hottest room Kelly could remember, sweat already wicking his skin.

The trainer walked out beside Kelly, lifting the ropes for Kelly to climb into the ring. He spoke to Kelly’s corner man, then took his place on the opposite side: the contender assigned the blue corner, Kelly dressed in his gifted red. The contender not coming out until Kelly was set. Making Kelly wait, trying to shake his nerve. At last the contender ducking under the ropes, arriving tall and sleek in his corner, his body in motion even before he dropped his robe.

The revealment of the boxer hidden beneath the garment, the contender’s name on the lips of every spectator: Bringer. Bringer. Bringer. This man Kelly did not know but that he had agreed to hurt, to be hurt by. An abstraction of the deadliest order.

Kelly pulled the orange jersey over his head as the referee began to speak. The call to the center. The expectations of a good fight, a clean fight. The gloves touching gloves. The bell ringing and the contender not waiting for Kelly, coming at him faster and stronger than Kelly had imagined but in both men there existed a matching will to hurt, to be hurt, the suspension of the man outside the ring for the man within, for the contest, the agony, the two words that once meant the same thing.

The contender loomed a foot taller than Kelly but Kelly moved in on him, ducked low under the contender’s sprawl. Kelly was comfortable in the clinch, tried to nullify the difference in reach, but the contender was fast on his feet, technically skilled in a way Kelly would never be. The contender landed a first punch harder than any Kelly had ever suffered and at first Kelly couldn’t find a way under the punches that followed. He took a step back, another. Another punch landed and Kelly thought of the tightrope beam above the plant, the impossibility of walking it backward like the total ineffectiveness of Kelly’s defense, the sudden uselessness of raising his arms, of trying to ball up against the contender — at last the real violence had arrived, the end of the simulation of sparring, the absolute terror of a fighter born to fight — and by the end of the first minute Kelly was forced to embrace his inability to defend himself, the muscles in the shoulders numbed and dumbed by the contender’s fists.

Kelly pushed back in, swung wildly, fought against the gaining lethargy. He crossed his feet, made other mistakes. For the first time in his life he felt his true age, the accumulation of injury obvious in the face of the contender’s still-limitless youth. The gap between them only a few years, a slim fraction of a life. But enough. More than.

The bell rang, the round ended. The water bottle, the towel, the encouraging word. The fight a third over and who knew what the score was.

The bell rang, the next round began.

Kelly knew someone should stop the fight but his trainer was the contender’s trainer and what the trainer wanted was a knockout. One of Kelly’s eyes was shutting, the swell of his brow collapsing his vision on the left side. The contender jabbed, jabbed again, followed with a hook, a cross, more punches Kelly couldn’t track, couldn’t count. The number of punches fewer than you might imagine. Kelly had made himself strong but strength alone wasn’t a strategy. He had made himself tough but toughness wasn’t enough.

With every strike his quiet mind exploded into sound.

The cacophony, the choir: thought, voice, memory, the simultaneous swarm.

Bringer drove a fist through the side of Kelly’s head and for the first time Kelly’s knee touched the mat. The brain suddenly a size too big for the shell. Sparks flooded Kelly’s eyesight as he pushed himself upright but a grin grew around his mouthguard, a wrong-shaped expression easily mistaken for a grimace.

What Kelly saw: the way the contender rushed in, the way he could be goaded.

The bell rang, the round ended.

The water bottle, the towel, the bell ringing again so fast.

The third round began. The contender uninjured, undaunted, moving fast toward Kelly’s corner. Encouraged by the damage he’d done. Kelly protected his face, protected his body, let the injury come. This was the way. Not only to turn the cheek but to offer the entire person. He took one blank step, then another. He was afraid but the fear could make him stronger. He would act out of his fear but first he needed to be scared enough to move.

The contender landed uncounted punches, each one accompanied by a grunted exhalation of angry breath. Their breathing grew sharp, strained. The contender tired now too. Every fighter exhausted in the third round. You could win and still injure yourself with the effort. Kelly dropped to a knee again, invited the overeager rush. It took everything left to stand into the next blow, to take one more punch on his way around the contender — and the gorgeous punch broke every last resistance, exploding a sound inside Kelly’s head, a tearing of some supporting structure twisting free of the skull — and for a moment Kelly found his advantage, its fantastic temporariness, the contender’s body turned sideways, his flank exposed for mere seconds.

Kelly filled those seconds with his fists, held back nothing. There was no future to his strategy, only a winnable present. He heard the dulled and distant roar of the crowd as he drove the contender to the mat, nearly punching him all the way down, as he stepped away from the falling body and into the rising sound.

The old ringing in his ears. The sound of the fire. The sound that existed long before the fire. He spit out his mouthguard, found the name caught behind his teeth.

Bringer, he said. Stand up.

The referee counting: one second, two seconds, three.

Bringer, Kelly said. Come on.

Now the contender standing into the same noise, the cries of the crowd, their vocalized belief in the possibility of his defeat. Now the contender left with no choice, now the outcome requiring a knockout because nothing else would satisfy the crowd. Now the trainer howling ecstatic, in love with his orchestration of the disaster.

Kelly raised his gloves, jerked his fists toward his body, called in the blow. Thou shalt not kill suspended for another minute and a half. He didn’t have any legs left but he raised his gloves and with them he said Kill me and when Bringer came carrying the killing punch across the mat Kelly surrendered into the absolute absence of doubt: If Kelly died the target would go free. If Kelly lived he would take the target. If Bringer struck him right he might never experience doubt again, instead only this fear perfect enough to swallow him whole, a whale of fear, and from inside its black body he saw more darkness, and from the dark he watched Bringer’s last punch leave the shoulder at speed, bringing with it the first pinpricks of light appearing somewhere in the black, stars come to see him home, constellations lit for no one else.

When the punch arrived Kelly felt every higher function stall, his body tumbling, feet turning under softening ankles, calves collapsing, the knees going sideways, the stupid body crashing like a carcass from its hook. The judder of the mat coming up to meet him. Behind closing lids he tried to protect the memory of the impossible thing he’d seen: the knockout blow you were never supposed to see coming, how as it had moved through space to strike his body Kelly knew he would never die. It was as if the match had not actually ended. Before the knockout Thou shalt not kill had been suspended and for as long as the injunction remained absent Kelly might do as he wished.

When he opened his eyes the contender was already leaving the ring, the trainer and his assistant both by the contender’s side, the crowd heading out into the night satisfied, high on the simulated destruction of a man. Kelly was alone upon the mat with the ringside doctor, who checked Kelly’s open eye, pronounced him concussed, guided him to the locker room. The doctor tested his reflexes, listened to his breathing, bandaged a cut atop his bruised cheek. Kelly measured the tightness in his chest, the numb ache in his limbs, said nothing. He was seeing two different rooms, one out of the closed eye, one out of the open eye, but he didn’t describe either to the doctor. He hadn’t eaten a meal all day but his stomach felt full, bloated. He’d known it could come to this but he kept quiet, wanted the ticking clock in his chest left untouched.

Or else not a ticking but a thudding, the wet slop of uneven blood forced through the centermost chamber of his body, a wet clock counting down to calamity.

After the doctor left Kelly opened his locker, found the promised cash waiting for him in an envelope folded into the back pocket of his jeans, the envelope thinner than he expected but the money all there.

Outside in the parking lot Kelly fell asleep behind the wheel of the truck, the engine off, the cab cold. He woke up, turned the key, put the truck in gear. The engine rumbled to life, the dash lit, its dials incomprehensible enough Kelly knew there was more damage. Or else his life had become a dream, because here was the impossibility of numbers and letters in dreams. He was tired but even tired he was strong. He thought something was punched loose and he thought it would let him do anything. There were a certain number of hours of night left and they would have to be enough. It would be over by morning or else it would never end.

11

HE HAD PRETENDED HE HADN’T built the body for this purpose but here was the powerful body in perfect motion: The target stepped out of his car, turning to lock the car door as the left fist struck his head twice, as the other arm snaked around the head, catching under the chin with the crook of the elbow, the same hand catching the opposite bicep. The right hand gripping the back of the skull, pushing forward. The elbows brought together, a steady pressure, the free hand squeezing the hold shut.

After Kelly let go he had to mind the seconds, work fast against the count. As soon as oxygen returned so would the world, beat by beat: the parking lot outside the apartment complex, the lit rooms above, the television glares and radio bass. He picked the dropped keys off the pavement, opened the trunk of the target’s car, lifted the groggy target inside. The body heavy and already stirring so he had to strike the target again, every movement nervous now, less controlled, until Kelly landed a punch across the side of the face disorienting enough to let him get the target’s hands behind the back, to get the wrists taped. The legs were stronger, took longer spins of the tape. He didn’t want to suffocate the target but he had to cover the mouth too, ran the tape around the head once, twice, trying to keep it below the nose but working fast.

Kelly shut the trunk, got behind the wheel, locked the doors. He checked his phone, considered the time remaining. It was late but there was plenty of night left. Had anyone seen him? Most of the apartments he could see were dark. The rest were lit by televisions, monitors, the eyes inside the apartments pointed anywhere except the windows. If you lived in a place like this maybe you tried not to look at it.

Now the black plant rose again before Kelly, some beginning and middle and end all contained within the plant’s long decline, its still-undemolished structure. Kelly navigated the plant’s expanse of concrete and brick, its streets that would have been strange in the uninhabited deep of the night even without the new snow falling wet and heavy, the slush on the road making the unfamiliar car harder to handle. He parked the car in a brick alley, close to the entrance to the underground. He stepped out into the falling snow, opened the trunk, waited until the target’s eyes found him before displaying the black pistol. He gave orders, explained next steps: How the tape around the ankles would be cut. How the target would get out of the trunk but not run. How running was the biggest mistake the target could make. How they would walk from the car through the open wall of the nearest building. How inside the building there was a broken floor, an aperture beneath which he would find a subtle path down into the basement. How you had to know to look for it. How in the basement there was a hallway that led to a room. How inside the room a metal chair waited. How the target would sit down on the chair.

When the tape was cut the target tried to run but the pistol was there to strike the back of his skull, to prod his stumbling in the right direction: the entrance to the building, the closed door, the collapsed floor, the pitched descent. The gun held the target steady while Kelly worked the padlock installed at the door, then again in the low room, when the target couldn’t find the chair where he’d been ordered to sit, instead reeling around the dark like Kelly had in the ring, the world he’d believed he inhabited having ended so violently it was as if it had never existed.

A sweep of his headlamp revealed the low room as he’d imagined it, untouched since he’d last visited, its square space separated from the world above by a difficult distance. A home for spiders but not much else. Even the rats gone for ages. When he turned off the lamp a stratum of darkness filled the vacuum. He listened to his breathing, listened to the other’s, the crying and the heaving. There was enough tape around the target’s body to make it hard to move, hard to breathe. The crying a nasal wheeze, signaling disbelief in what was happening. Kelly was having trouble too. Both of them together now.

The stale room burst with human activity. Kelly started the generator, let its hum fill the two heavy lights set facing the target. Now there was a darkness where Kelly could retreat, a space beyond the light the target’s vision wouldn’t be able to penetrate. Kelly had forgotten to don the mask but he did so now, the welder’s shield heavy upon his swollen face, burdening his skull. He returned in silhouette, palmed the target’s bound face and pushed it back, applied some pressure. The muscles moving the bones, the teeth and the tongue trapped behind the tape, everything he touched young and healthy, no sign of sickness in the body.

Kelly had waited, watched for borders, thresholds, a birthday. He’d had to make the target a man so he could hurt him like one.

Not a man but a bully, he heard someone say. The face of a bully.

The mouth below his hand was trying to speak too but the words were muffled by the leather of the gloves covering the face, the duct tape beneath. Kelly pictured the head of a horse, then a wasted ape. Something dumbly animal. But who was he picturing. And was it ever the victim who stopped feeling human first.

He used a pair of scissors to open the target’s shirt but he finished the cut with his hands, ripping the fabric to expose the target’s chest, the belly, the arms, the back, the skin swallowed in hurt, heaving with sweat. He was having trouble seeing the target through the harsh glare of the lights but by their glow he knew his own body’s recent unfamiliarity, the largeness of every part of it, the way his straining muscles had stretched over his frame. He was the heaviest he had ever been, possessed a certain enormity he hadn’t imagined possible. Now he thought the deep gravity of the world dragged upon him, the way that gravity grew the lower you sank, the way his hands were not any larger than before but their thickness increased. His thighs squeezed into his pants, feet squeezed into tight boots. His neck a widening trunk for his heavy head, his head lean and strained with veins but weighted with memory begetting action, weighted with the mask and its slim slot of vision. All of it another mistake. As if improving the body were the same as improving the man. As if physical strength made moral right.

When the flesh was exposed he opened one of the duffel bags on the floor, empty except for one last folded item. He shook out the folds, then draped the red robe around the target’s shoulders, pulled the hood up over his head. The target tried to throw off the garment but there were ways to stop his struggling. What was done to the boy couldn’t be undone. Kelly could punish the people who hurt him but it would not rewind the clock. These things happened and somehow he couldn’t help them happening again. He had lived a life meant to avoid the problem and he had slipped once, had sworn off children of his own, but had loved a woman with a child, had loved the child. Then love had not been enough.

Understanding required argument. The scrapper thought the sound of fists was one place they might start their speech. His hands already aching. His theologies had grown muddled but he said he believed even a single crime could charge you. Everything was equal, every action and word that crossed over from intent to occurrence. The scrapper needed to transfer the fear from one body to the other. He put bruised fists to use, he moved through the tools. He kicked the chair, then righted it again, its frame heavy with the target’s taped weight. Perhaps there were deep rituals in the world but he was making this one up as he went. The sound from behind the tape turned his stomach but didn’t unturn his hand. He wondered at the words, trapped inside the other’s mouth, tasting of the tack of tape. The lungs full of beggared screams, unable to push them out. He heard his own voice speaking but he struggled after the words. There was a certain lack of comprehension he had grown accustomed to but how quickly this encounter had moved beyond any previous threshold.

Are you a boy or are you a man, Kelly heard the salvor ask. Because if he was a boy, then what different crime was this. Age was not enough. Age was hardly fair.

What if something horrible happened to you. What if some years later you passed it on. How long did your guilt indict you. What was the lasting effect of having been younger, of having been unhappy, of having been made mean and dumb in your unhappy youth.

Kelly knew he wasn’t different. One day someone might come for him too. An angry child grown stubborn and brave or else a champion sent on the child’s behalf. But first anything to protect his boy. Not his by birth or his by the law. His by the saving. His by the carrying up out of the earth. His by the taking, the better but not dissimilar version of this act.

The other had taken a boy and watched him. Now Kelly had taken a brother and hurt him.

It was a cheap escape to already render the act in the past tense. He rejoined his thinking to the present: He was hurting the brother, between some times of not hurting him. How far could he go and remain Kelly. How much farther could he go as the salvor. How he could go much farther by giving in to the scrapper. How he thought the scrapper could go all the way.

Beneath the lights Kelly watched the glassy eyes, the fading consciousness. There was blood trickling from the tape around the mouth and how long had it been there.

Kelly shut off the lights, removed the mask. He went into the far corner of the room and spit up into the dust. He took off his coat, the heavy flannel beneath, left the orange jersey sweat slicked against his skin. The low room wasn’t warm but his body was. When he returned to the front of the chair the target was awake, choked against the tape, his eyes wide and panicked. The target knew where he was again. Who he was with.

The man in the red slicker. Kelly’s father, his grandfather, himself. He could change roles with the brother and there would be no diminishment of what happened next, no matter who was in the chair.

A voice spoke, asked a question. Another spoke next, answered.

Because you hurt my boy.

The sudden appearance of the possessive. My girl, my woman, my boys, all my children I couldn’t risk. My parents, wasted and devoured. Myself, who had made nothing lasting and good. A person who couldn’t even speak the names of the people he loved. Who once prayed for the shapes instead of the persons within. Who saw the faces falling through his prayers and could not give them the names to lift them back up.

His father: Kelly remembered his face but not like he used to. The vague sheen of some last memory fading. It would have taken a picture to bring back the color of his father’s eyes but Kelly could still remember how it felt to hold his father’s gaze.

The scrapper remembered nothing. The man of action was a house of empty rooms, a city of empty houses, a nation of emptying cities. Dirt from end to end, from black to black. A dead land where there was nothing left to feel, no one to tell you how you had stopped trying. A place where you could do no wrong because you could do no right.

It wasn’t a place you found but a place you could make.

The salvor was not afraid of the dark or the deep but they were not his first elements. He was meant to descend, to take what was valuable, to return to the surface without harm. Past this point in the taking there was almost nothing the salvor could do. There was no redemption in suffering, no correction in violence. Just diminishment and death. A bad thing happened and then another bad thing and another and another until you broke.

Kelly removed the tape and the target began to speak. Kelly wasn’t confused by who was in the low room but still it took some time to recognize the soft voice. He had spoken to the brother only once before. The brother had been an idea more than a person but now here he was, his personhood everywhere, leaking in the low room. All the titles merely symbols for what had a better name. Estranging did not mean to make someone a stranger but Kelly did not know another word. Whatever he did next would be the final act of his friendship with the boy. He could hurt the target worse. He could let the brother go. The action was close to complete but nothing was yet irrevocable. To have free will was to be both good and evil. To have free will was to choose, moment by moment, one or the other.

The salvor interceded, spoke for the last time. Kelly heard the words, voiced them into the low room. To the brother he said, What if you could become a good man. What if there is good you might do still, what if there is a good man who could be salvaged, someone better inside you who could be brought back into the light. What if the longest story is the story that bends toward the gravity of the good.

Kelly said, What if the greater crime isn’t what we’ve done but that in trying to end it I stop some better you coming after?

But what if I let you go, he said, and you hurt the boy again?

With the tape removed the brother could at last speak in his defense. The brother’s voice was strained by a panic Kelly couldn’t bear to hear. He paced the dark stretch of room before the chair, clenching and unclenching his fists as the brother claimed unexpectedly familiar grievances: What if it wasn’t the mother’s house the brother had moved away from but the father’s. What if the boy and the brother had the same father Kelly had. What if their mother was his same mother, a kind woman but a woman who would say nothing, do nothing. Who accompliced herself by looking the other way.

The brother kept talking, faster now, less intelligible. There were more words coming but Kelly wanted to already be past them. He howled, grasped for the table, missed and crashed into it instead. The solvable unsolved arrived again, taunting. The table shuddered, scattered whatever little remained. The clatter of tools, the sound of wood and metal impacting concrete, the zone’s most common refrain. He hadn’t known what he was looking for until he came back up with the pistol. He couldn’t see the safety in the dark but he thought he could work it by touch. Even after the brother stopped speaking Kelly could hear him breathing, could hear all the small involuntary movements of his body. Kelly took a few steps back, waited for his blood to slow. He wanted to see what was behind the blackness, wanted to hear whatever was at the bottom of the sound, the new confusion echoing in the dark.

When nothing was louder than the ringing in his ears, then Kelly raised the pistol, lifting its heavy weight against the drag of the black air. Each time he fired the blast lit the room, light and dark interchanging so fast that all Kelly saw was a staccato sort of nothing. In the blindness that followed he put the pistol to his own chin, found the trigger. Nothing. Nothing and the smell of gunpowder. He put the pistol in his pocket. He took the pistol out of his pocket and placed it on the ground. There were new smells in the air and it was harder to hear with the ringing louder than ever. He stepped forward, moved toward where he thought the chair was, toward the body in the chair. With his hands outstretched he found the body gasping, speaking in syllables Kelly couldn’t understand, a tongue of one. He put his hands on the body, searching for the wound. When the body recoiled unharmed, shaking in its seat — all breath and voice, all blood and muscle moving beneath clammy skin, strong jumping flesh draped beneath the red hood — then Kelly stepped back disbelieving, fled the brother’s barking pleas until he tripped over some fallen object, its length sprawling him across the floor, smacking his face against the concrete.

Kelly lay quietly on the floor, breathed the disturbed dust of the century. Somehow all the rage had gone out of him even though the task wasn’t finished. What was left? Only an anxious regret. When he stood with the sledge in his hands he felt tricked. The arrival of grossest inevitability. The limit between one life and the next. The way the blow you never saw coming pushed you over. The land of the living, the land of the dead. Not one and then the other, but one nested within the next. When had it even happened.

The building would stand until one day someone claimed all that yet endured: they would tear it down with machines, they would break the bones of the buildings and rip the last of their guts from the ground. A mechanical reckoning, a recycling of the late greatness. A city collapsed, its citizens driven out, its halted factories left to linger. Thieves in the ruins, murder below the earth.

All the metal in the zone would one day be removed, forgotten, reset. Dental records could identify the body, forensic evidence might find Kelly, but metal had no memory. He’d left the red robe behind. Surely other stains would last. In the grayer light of the hallway he took off his gloves, ran his hands over the door, the doorframe, every surface impossibly cool beneath the earth. He would take his chances with the fingerprints he wasn’t supposed to have. Either a detective would catch him or else a detective would not and he would let his worn hands decide. He trudged up the stairs, toward the surface of the world. Already the event began diverging and he recognized this quality of his thought for what it was, not a flaw of memory but an enhancement, a way to believe in a better life than the one he had lived, some good world without a past. What was wrong with him included a way to prepare for an aftermath. How aftermath wasn’t necessarily a pejorative. How he had lived with the version of himself that had made possible every bad thing he could remember doing, by damage, by weakness, by choice. But surely somewhere within there must still be another man, one who had never done anything wrong, had never hurt anyone, who had been loved back by everyone he had ever loved. But what was this man’s name, by what title could he be called to appear.

Back out in the blue air of the zone, Kelly put his mouth to the cuff of his coat, sucked hard, tasted the crackle of sweat and grit. The visible world shuddered and the shuddering came in waves. He wanted to vomit again but the vomit was not coming out. He pressed his hands against his stomach, pushed his fingers and thumbs into the bruises he found. He gagged against the pain but nothing else came, only the familiar throb of overexertion. He sank down to his knees, rocked back on his heels, placed his hands on his thighs. He kept waiting to catch his breath and it kept not coming. Something had broken. His fingers were numb and if there had been anyone to call for help he knew he wouldn’t be able to work his mouth, wouldn’t be able to hear his own voice over the awful increase of the ringing in his ears.

The car had been parked close but not close enough. He tried to walk, brought himself to life by the effort. Every ache and strain shouted its blame. He heard a sound like a blur, watched a throbbing cross his vision as he tried again to stand. The alley where he’d parked the car loomed emptier than he expected. Paper trash caught against the bricks, lay buried in the snow. The flotsam of a city. He put his hand along one wall, moved forward through a weariness so encompassing he hoped it couldn’t have originated within him. Air as exhaustion. One eye was bruised closed and the other so badly diminished his eyesight refocused uselessly as he sorted the blearing scene: something was gone that was supposed to be present and for a moment he couldn’t place it.

He began to laugh when he understood the car was missing. A horrible, humorless sound, a high-pitched alien laugh that did not, at first listen, seem to belong to him. A loon, he thought, a bird of his childhood, a spirit bird announcing its flight. It was hard to know exactly how he was harmed, even when he had done the harm himself. Somewhere in the distance a horn honked, a warning or an exclamation, a horn honking and honking, panic and alarm but not from him.