Scrapper

DETROIT

THE ARENA HAD SPECIAL SEATING for the handicapped and their caretakers, designated entrances. Kelly showed the parking-garage attendant their tickets, then followed the attendant’s directions to push the girl in her wheelchair out onto a street named for one of her heroes. When he said the name and pointed at the sign, her head didn’t move but he thought she might have shifted her eyes. They had lived together for almost a year now and he had spent the first months learning the new range of her expressions, had started to recognize the small differences between a good day and a bad day, slight shifts in her mood and movements.

In the handicapped section he cataloged the previously unimagined configurations of men and women, their varied dependencies, the results of age, disease, awful chance: An old man with an oxygen tank strapped to his walker, linked armed in arm with a woman who must have been his daughter. Another woman in a wheelchair, her limbs distorted, her age impossible to determine through her deformity. A teenager ancient in his seat, his head wobbling, mouth open, full of soft teeth and dumb sound. All of them dressed in the same red jerseys as anyone else, loose over their differences. The other wheelchairs decorated with stiff flags, bumper stickers for the team, the city, other abstracted allegiances.

The game hadn’t started yet. There were twenty-ounce beers available for nine dollars twenty feet away but he didn’t want to take her with him to get one, didn’t know how to ask someone else to watch her. There wasn’t much she needed but he wouldn’t leave her alone. To not leave her was the rule. There was a backpack hung over the back of her chair and it contained most of what she might require. Whenever he remembered he kept one hand on her shoulder, let her know he was there. He talked more now than ever before. She couldn’t talk but she could make some sounds and he applied certain kinds of sense to each. There wasn’t as much hunger in her as before but she was putting on weight, acquiring a sedentary sag to her flesh. They didn’t have sex anymore but one of his tasks was to lift her naked in and out of the tub, to rub soap and sponge over her sore skin. Up close there was still something sexual about her body but sooner or later he stepped back.

He was thirsty and he knew caretakers left their charges, took breaks by stranding them in other rooms. Maybe it wasn’t right to leave your charges behind when you went to the store or the bank but sometimes it seemed impossible to bring them along. The caretakers learned how to be alone again, despite the work. When and where, even with someone else in the room. You took money from the government for caring for your own disabled person but presumably you loved the person too because the money was shit. Nothing given ever replaced what was given up.

He didn’t care what anyone else did. He never left her behind, took her everywhere with him. They were sharing a life and this was it. At home he lifted her out of the chair and into the bath, out of the bath and into the chair, into the bed, into a recliner in her living room, into the passenger seat of her car. Twice a week she went to physical therapy where the therapists moved her muscles like she was a coma patient laid out on a mat in a room of the similarly injured.

The doctors said this was the best it would ever be again. They said this to him and he asked them to talk to her. She was the patient. They were her doctors, not his.

She had asked him if he understood what was coming but he couldn’t believe either of them imagined this. The difference between being told and being there. At first he’d thought what had happened to her was his fault: an eye for an eye, a pound of flesh to pay a debt, the taking of the girl for the taking of the brother. But this only was the old belief talking, the remnants of childhood, the holy before. The world without doubt. Even if she had never met him this was going to happen. He wasn’t the center of anything. Nothing revolved, nothing was attracted or repulsed by his command.

Every day he told her another secret and the knowledge didn’t make her any sicker. He was careful to pace the telling, to make it last. There was only so much of him left.

He wasn’t sure what she heard. Or if she heard, did she understand? Her eyes were alive and expressive enough but it wasn’t like he saw words in her gaze, it wasn’t like there was actual conversation happening between them.

He told her about the low room, how he had named it and prepared it, how he had hurt the brother there. He tried to tell her why. He wouldn’t think the brother’s name but the brother’s last face lingered still. There was a photo the news showed but it wasn’t the face he’d seen in the dark. This was another person entirely, someone with parents, a school to attend, a future requiring having left the room. He’d made the brother something different, an abstraction in the dark, he’d hurt him to protect the boy, to remove a single danger from the boy’s world.

Time and distance might have done the same work. He’d chosen to accelerate it. To not let a harm he could prevent continue even a single day longer.

I lied myself into belief, he’d told her, in the first days of the wheelchair. It was a crime of impatience, of wanting to ensure causal effect. I was impatient with the good acts of others, he’d said. Because I knew the good was nothing anyone could see enough to fear. Goodness alone stopped nothing.

But then the lie’s comfort had deserted him in the last moment. By the end the lights had been off and he had worked in the blackness, imagining whatever he couldn’t have seen. Now every night he remembered that imagining, relived it again.

He had been questioned when the brother was reported missing, again when the brother’s car was found stripped a week later. Sanchez again, bulky as ever but now smaller than Kelly, the detective diminished by Kelly’s new size. But there were no suspect fingerprints and without a body Kelly didn’t have to tell the detective what had happened next, how after Kelly left the low room he walked from the blackened buildings of the plant out into the fading hours of night and into the predawn of the city, to a certain house in the zone, a certain driveway in a devastated block where he had left his truck overnight, where the brother had taken the boy the last day he had followed him, the day Kelly finished the case notes.

When Kelly talked to Sanchez he had wanted to tell him about the boy’s father, about the brother’s last accusations. He had wanted to say that if he could have found the man in the red slicker he would have taken him first. But instead he had told himself the brother had not spoken in the low room and now he was no longer sure the man in the red slicker had ever been real. Now it was impossible for Kelly to see anyone else but the brother in the low room’s chair.

There hadn’t been running water in the house but in the truck there was bleach. He’d known it wouldn’t remove everything but it would remove enough. In the dark basement he’d stripped, scrubbed his hands, his face, his neck and chest, twisted against the burn of the bleach. He lit another fire, sat on the basement steps and shook while his spent clothes smoldered on the concrete.

When he’d arrived at her apartment she was already on the kitchen floor, slumped away from the counter, her feet splayed awkwardly, her face awake but her tongue stilled and her body turned out of sensible position. The burner had been turned on high to boil water, the apartment filled with steam long after the pot had emptied, its bottom blackened and starting to smoke. She’d been wearing slippers and one had fallen off her left foot.

Almost morning then. The city waking up. There had been alarm clocks bleeping through her apartment walls, then the first sounds of breakfast, television news. She’d been making dinner when she fell, had lain there on the tile all night.

Her cell phone was in her pocket but she hadn’t been able to reach it, couldn’t have opened her hands to work it if she had.

She couldn’t talk anymore but her eyes found him, set him to action. He shut off the stove, moved to simplify her posture, untangling her limbs and laying her flat.

He’d spoken in a low voice, spoke slowly in the careful and culled language of apology. He needed to call for help but he couldn’t call the way he looked. He had scrubbed his skin with snow and gravel and bleach but it was hardly enough. He wondered what she’d seen: he was her only hope but look at the condition he’d arrived in. Clean jeans and a t-shirt over skin roughed with grit and gore, bruised and battered from boxing and worse, hair streaked with bleach. He didn’t know what he’d looked like but he knew how he’d felt and he hadn’t felt like himself.

But himself had been a shifting thing then. Later the scrapper receded, sated, leaving something else behind, the remainder of Kelly, the broken salvor. He’d done something far from the irreducible center of the supposed law and what did it mean? Just another chink in the universe, another proof of its senselessness, its rules that did not reach all the way up from physics and chemistry and biology to define the right path of human action.

Into that gap he had put his guess.

The jersey was gone and with it all its borrowed symbolism. The gun he’d left in the low room, the sledge beside it. He’d never started praying again so there wasn’t anything to quit. Something had happened in the circle of swords but after the low room he let that feeling fly away, and as always when the last angels fled they left their ringing behind.

The morning in the girl’s apartment he’d arrived knowing the boy was safe. Then he’d found his girl was not. Now protecting her would require a more ordinary violence, a killing of the moments to come.

That morning Kelly had spoken to her in slow tones, tried to explain. He needed to know if she would die if he took a shower. He needed her to know he was going to leave the room but when he came back he would get her all the help she needed without anyone asking questions.

It was harder to clean away blood than you expected. It took so much longer than he wanted it to take. When it was done he knew he would never do anything worse. In the low room, in its aftermath, he had found the furthest expression of his corruption. Now there would be no more waiting for the blow, only this unforgivable relief.

The national anthem played and Kelly sang along, a swell of patriotism catching in his chest, how no matter what he did wrong he would always be an American. The game started but they were far enough from the ice that he had trouble following along without the girl’s constant commentary. The last greats of the past age were retired or retiring and she had mourned the passing of her giants, would have spoken in favor of their legacies, their place among the endless, the names and numbers memorialized on uniforms hung in the rafters. He watched her gaze flicking back and forth across the ice, wondered how well she could track the puck. He held a water bottle to her mouth, let her suck the straw as long as she wanted. He reached down with a thumb and wiped the corner of her mouth, dragged the cloudy spittle across the leg of his jeans. It wasn’t only her expressions that had changed. There was plenty of makeup in her apartment but he didn’t know how to apply it to her new face. He’d thought of trying to practice with her but couldn’t bring himself to do it.

There were steroids for the spasms, amphetamines for fatigue, sedatives to help her breathing. The doctors prescribed an antidepressant but somehow Kelly got the idea she didn’t want it, stopped helping her dissolve the pills on her tongue, started taking them himself instead.

She didn’t speak anymore but when agitated she laughed, a yelp, all rasp. At night Kelly might lie in their bed with his head on her fading chest, listen to her breath shallow, then recover, shallow again. The shortness of breath might be pain related, the doctors said, it might be the continued loss of involuntary systems, and one night her breathing would stop, the last breath impossible to name until it wasn’t followed by another.

The doctors kept telling him to talk to her, that her mind was sound. He said he knew, said she was the same person he’d fallen in love with. He’d promised not to forget. It was an easy mistake to make. It was a hard mistake to stop making.

He tried to say her name more often. To force it out of his stubborn mouth. It wasn’t her name he loved but he didn’t know what else to call her. Of all the things she’d lost he doubted she missed the limp.

On the ice a fight broke out and he watched the way fighting on ice was different, how it required a different kind of agility to stay up on your skates with your jersey pulled over your head and fists thumping down on your back and neck. The crowd cheered and he cheered too. He wasn’t going to the gym anymore, hadn’t sparred since the fight. He didn’t plan to ever fight again but he didn’t want his body to go to waste so he kept working out at home. He lifted her from her wheelchair into her recliner, got down on the floor between her and the television, did long series of push-ups, sit-ups, squat thrusts. He installed a pull-up bar in the doorframe between the living room and the hallway, rotated her chair to face him so they could look at each other while he did his grunting sets, shirtless and sweating.

It seemed improbable but he was still growing. He looked taller too but taller was impossible. In the bed he took up more of the space, the covers, the air in the room. He thought often about buying a bigger bed or else another one. In the mirror he often saw he wasn’t as big as he imagined but he was big enough. This was how you stretched the limits of your frame, how you pushed how much muscle you could pack onto these bones, how you learned how much more could fit inside the shell, more again once the human was mostly gone.

When he didn’t know what else to do he plucked her from her wheelchair and carried her around the apartment, being careful not to strike her head against lamps or doorframes or walls. When the weather was better he would take her for walks outside, carrying her up and down the sidewalk, going farther every day. When she started to burn from the sun he smeared her face and neck and hands with sunscreen, found her sunglasses so the light wouldn’t hurt her eyes.

Despite his protests to the doctors she wasn’t exactly the same person she had been before, not the girl with the limp. That person never would have let him carry her, never wanted anyone’s help. But what choice remained. She made noises he interpreted as agreement or disapproval but mostly he was guessing.

At last a whistle blew. The referees separated the fighters, securing them for an agreed-upon number of minutes, the penalty box the punishment for bad behavior, the power play the reward for someone else’s. Every game a microcosm of a longer one. Kelly thought he would wait a long time for his punishment, had already decided he would not fight it when it came. In the meantime, he would be with the girl, sharing her life. It was what he had told himself he wanted, even if he’d never said he wanted it like this.

At intermission, he saw the group of boys before he saw Daniel emerge from their number, walking with the others in their blazers and khakis, shirts and ties. Coming up the stairs and then past, into the concourse, laughing and talking with his friends. Daniel inches taller, his face leaner, a teenager at last.

Kelly knew he should let Daniel pass without acknowledging him but he didn’t think he could help calling out. He couldn’t leave her behind so he backed her away from the railing, pushed her out into the concourse where the boy would see them.

When the boy passed Kelly said Daniel but the boy didn’t hear or if he heard he didn’t turn. And for a moment Kelly saw not the boy passing but the brother, saw how Daniel was growing to look like the brother even though they were not blood.

The boys moved as a unit through the crowd, followed one another into breaches in the confusion, then clumped back up in open spaces. They were moving faster than Kelly could, loudly weighing options for food, souvenirs, talking about the game, the chances for the next period. They cheered for the home team, applied all their boyish arcana, the percentages and statistics and strongly held opinions gleaned from televisions and fathers.

He thought he wanted something else from the boy but what. He couldn’t want thanks and hope to get it. He couldn’t want a relationship with the boy because those days were done. He had been brought into the boy’s life to do something for the boy that the boy couldn’t have done himself and now the deed was done. Now he only needed the boy to see him. He needed the boy to look up at him and see this new body, the spent man within, maybe changing again. But what he wanted to believe had changed him most was not what he had done in the low room but what he had done in the first basement, where he rescued the boy. That despite what happened next it was from the first the salvor he’d wanted to follow.

What he wanted to ask was if the boy was at least safer than before. If safer was enough to be worth the cost.

The boys moved forward faster, slipped away through the cracks in the movements of the crowd. When Kelly pushed at the crowd most of the crowd moved for him, gave the wheelchair room. Others balked, hesitated, looked too long at her, at him, their new bodies, her loose limbs, his logoed t-shirt tight, how the team’s wings and wheel stretched taut over his immense muscles. When he couldn’t maneuver the chair forward through the crush he picked her up into his arms, left the chair where it was. Her body was so soft, limp against his chest, she was lighter and he was stronger. She started to make some noise and this time there was no ambiguity whether she approved or didn’t approve.

The boy, he said into her ear, her cheek beside his cheek. I have to see him.

Daniel, he said. I want to see Daniel.

He could pretend her sounds were no or yes, stop or go. He could pretend whatever he wanted. He stepped forward and the crowd parted. Someone asked if she was okay and he kept walking. He was attracting too much attention but what were his options. There would be a man or a woman who would retrieve the wheelchair and push it after them and he needed to find the boy before this person arrived to force him to play his part. The girl was mumbling into his ear, something repeated, a pattern of sounds, a prayer, a speaking in tongues. Other times he’d shushed her but here he wanted it, wanted it all, wanted her to fill his head with her sound so they might share its nonsense together.

No matter how fast Kelly moved, he couldn’t find the boy again, couldn’t spy a single blue-blazered friend. He wanted to be winded, exhausted, but there wasn’t the slightest need to set her down. This was what this body was good for. He kept walking. People were yelling but he could barely hear them. The ringing in his ears was back again, loud as ever, and Daniel had not turned when Kelly said his name. And no matter how long Kelly looked he knew that had been the moment he’d lost the boy forever.

Back home, Kelly lifted the girl’s cradled form, raising and lowering her as if baptizing her in a river of air, until she began to talk in her fastest speech, so she would give him all the noise she had left, all the sounds at once. That night he took her out into the parking lot, onto the sidewalk, carried her as far as he could. A block this first time. Then on another day two blocks. Then one day ten. The neighborhood they lived in had a name he couldn’t remember. He carried her around its streets, walked past her neighbors, said hello if they said it first but did not stop.

Her neighbors were the people who had known her but with him she was going away, becoming someone else. Someone new, someone new as him.

As he got stronger they went farther, past the bounds of her neighborhood, into the first circles of the zone. He knew there were men who carried their crippled children in triathlons and he thought he could outdo them all. He carried her past those abandoned houses, those shuttered buildings, all the shattered glass and bent steel, burnt wood and broken brick. The same few elements everywhere unresolved. They couldn’t walk at night, not because it was dangerous but because every week there were fewer working streetlights.

The farther they walked the fewer people they saw but he didn’t think they walked to be alone. There were dogs in the street, birds overhead. The power lines were electrified but you couldn’t get the power down on the ground. The rare car went by filled with staring faces but there wasn’t any aggression left in him, wasn’t any fear. Fear required hope to live and he believed he’d put his last hope into the earth. One day the rest of the steel and concrete would collapse overtop it. Everywhere they went they went into the painful past. These places where people had lived. Inside some remainder unrecovered. Their old posters of extinct pop stars, assimilated brands. Old uniforms hanging in closets. He knew what men and women had written on the walls, all the countless forms of goodbye. He’d see a pickup truck pass with a bed full of twisted metal and know it was the future being sold, never merely the past carted away. Every address was a reminder how this pasture had been a home. There were good people living in the zone but he no longer hoped to see them. Seeing the possibility of goodness would make it harder to have done what he had done, to have become what he was. He had come to the zone to escape the past. Then he had discovered the past was all the zone was. The city watch had given him its colors but now he was quitting the team. He had done his grim service. He wanted only to be a spectator again.

Now he thought he knew who he was. Not a name but a task. Not a name but an action. His capacity for distance grew. He carried her a half mile then a mile then five miles. He would carry her forever. She was the one he should have protected. He had promised. He would take her the length of the earth, he would never leave her behind, together they would keep moving until he was exhausted, until his muscles were stopped with salt, until his bones bent beneath their combined weight. Until neither of them could move. Until on their lips they tasted their last words. It would have to be far now. They would have to go so far that when they arrived at the center of the city they would be so exhausted they would not ever be able to make it back. When they arrived at their exhaustion he would kneel down upon the ground of the zone, cradle her in his arms, and press his lips against her ears. He would speak to make her believe he knew who she was. He would whisper her name.