Untouchable

by Scott O'Connor

He looked through the camera’s viewfinder. The TV played in a corner of the frame, another helicopter shot of the compound. He lowered the camera and walked to the TV, switched off the set, stood back in the doorway between the rooms. Looked through the viewfinder again. The silence of the unfinished room roared in his ears. He thought of the sick woman buying garbage bags at the grocery store, placing photographs and cards on the dresser and tables. He thought of the woman kneeling on the floor, cutting and spreading the black plastic.

  There was something on the bedside table he hadn’t noticed before, lost among all the cards and photographs. He lowered the camera. It was a small plastic snow globe, a winter mountain scene. A pair of tiny lawn chairs sat at the base of a steep mountain. Two pairs of skis were stuck upright in the snow between the chairs. A bucket of frosted beer bottles rested beside the skis. Darby picked up the globe, shook it. The snow lifted and swirled in the water, drifted back down onto the lawn chairs, the bucket of beer. There was a message printed in raised white type across the base of the globe. Wish You Were Here.

  He thought of the woman lying on the bed, exhausted, head turned to the side, watching the snow in the globe gathering at the base of the mountain.

  He put the globe into the bottom of his bucket, covered it with the last half roll of unused paper towels. Felt the feeling lift from his body, the noise in his head going still. The room finished, the room complete. He stepped back into the doorway, raised the camera to his eye, took the picture.

  He turned to leave and Stella was standing in the outer room of the suite, looking past him into the clean bedroom.

  “I have not been able to work well today,” she said. “They told me I should go home but I did not want to go home, I wanted to keep working.”

  Darby pulled the developing photo from the front of the camera.

  “I am afraid to open doors,” she said. “I have not been able to open a door since I opened this one.”

  Darby stayed silent. Looked at her hands, her wrists.

  “Something like this,” she said, “so close to you, to your body, your face. You breathe it in. How can you not? The room is sealed and then you open the door and you breathe it in, whatever was left. I cannot stop thinking about it. How do you stop thinking about it?”

  Darby stayed silent, gripped the handle of his bucket.

  “It is incredible, what you have done,” she said. “Someone will stay in this room, tomorrow maybe. I will clean this room how many more times? You would never know.” She looked at the bed, the dresser. “May I?”

  She wanted to enter the room. Darby took a step back, allowing her to pass. She walked slowly, looking at the floor, the walls, the furniture. She didn’t touch anything, kept her hands pressed to her apron, as if she didn’t really believe in what they’d done, as if she still saw the room the way it was when she’d first opened the door.

  There was a cardboard box on the floor of the bedroom, filled with the family photos, stuffed animals, the cards they’d taken from the room. The box would sit with the hotel manager until someone claimed them or he threw them away. Stella crouched beside the box. She lifted them carefully, one picture to the next, until she finally settled on the most recent, the woman she remembered, smiling bravely in a hospital bed, surrounded by many of the same cards and flowers and stuffed animals in the box. She turned back to Darby.

  “If you will not tell anyone,” she said. “I would like to have one of these pictures.”

  She looked at Darby, then down at his bucket, the roll of paper towels he’d set on top of the snow globe. She stood with the photo in her hand, smoothed the front of her apron.

  “No one notices such things,” she said. “But I would like to take it with me.”

  The Kid waited in bed, listened to the pickup pull away down the street. When he was reasonably sure his dad wasn’t coming back, he got dressed, double-checked that the mask and goggles were still in his new backpack, pulled his flashlight from under the bed and went down through the dark house, out the security door to the front porch.

  Night on the street. Half moon high overhead, lighting the black sky to gray. He knew that he shouldn’t be out there. What would his dad do if he knew The Kid was out of the house, ready to go out into the city at night? Blow his stack, probably. The Kid would see his dad in full anger mode, in red-face, jaw-clenching mode. He knew he should be back in bed, waiting for his mom to come home, but he was afraid that they were going to tear down the burned house. He was afraid that he’d never find out more about that wing drawing, about the giant chalk bird’s wing or whatever it was, floating out of the front door.

  He headed up the street, past the apartment building and the vacant lot, up the hill to the intersection. There was some traffic on Sunset, adults going to restaurants or bars while the kids of the city slept. Traffic lights changing, a few horn honks. The mysterious world of night. The Kid was a little afraid, a little thrilled. He kept his head down, worried that an adult he knew would drive by, that Amanda or Bob would pass on their way somewhere and recognize The Kid standing at the corner waiting for the stoplight. He kept an eye out for his mom, like he always did. He looked into cars stopped at the intersection, searching for the familiar face.

  Where had she gone? Was she in Chicago with The Kid’s grandmother? Was she living in that upstairs bedroom, where he and his mom had stayed the time they went out to visit? That sad blue room? The Kid didn’t know. For a while after she was gone, The Kid’s grandmother would call the house. When The Kid picked up the phone and heard his grandmother’s voice, he’d wanted to ask if his mom was there, if she was staying up in that room. But he had already made the Covenant, so instead of asking anything he just listened to his grandmother saying, Hello? Hello? on the other end of the line until one of them hung up.

  There had been a memorial service. The Kid and his parents didn’t have a church, so Amanda organized it at her church in Burbank. It wasn’t a funeral like The Kid saw on TV shows, because there wasn’t any coffin. This confirmed The Kid’s suspicions. He asked his dad why there wasn’t any coffin and his dad said it was because his mom hadn’t wanted a coffin. She’d wanted to be cremated. His dad asked him if he knew what this meant. The Kid knew what it meant. He couldn’t remember where he knew it from, but he knew it. It meant that they burned the body until it was ashes.

  There were a lot of people at the service. Bob and his dad’s boss Mr. Molina and his family, Amanda and her husband, teachers and students from his mom’s school. People got up and said nice things about his mom, read poems they said reminded them of his mom. It seemed like a lot of work. All those people fooled by The Kid’s dad. The Kid kept his mouth shut, didn’t say anything, didn’t tell anyone that they were being fooled. During the service, The Kid kept looking over at the group of his mom’s students. It would have been so easy to find out for sure if his dad was lying. Just go over to the students and ask if his dad’s story was true. Ask if they’d really seen his mom fall on the floor. Ask which one of them had carried her down to the nurse’s office. It would have been so easy. But The Kid kept his mouth shut, sat in his new black suit, didn’t say anything. He was sad and embarrassed, just like his dad. Sad and embarrassed that his mom had been so fed up she’d had to leave.

  The Kid’s grandmother didn’t come out from Chicago for the memorial service. This also confirmed The Kid’s suspicions. Why waste money on a plane ticket for something fake? Why come to a memorial service if the person the service was for was maybe really staying in that upstairs bedroom?

  He crossed Sunset, then down the sloping sidewalk alongside the strip mall. He passed the red-lit Gift 2000 sign on the side of the building. He passed the big cardboard box, heard rustling, snoring inside. The streets grew quieter the further he got from the intersection. No movement, no cars except those sleeping at the curb, a few dogs barking from backyards, blue TV glows in living room windows. The burned house was still there, sitting silent and dark. A streetlight gave off
just enough light to see shapes, outlines, the figure of the house, the roof, the porch. The blown-out windows were even darker than the night around the house, bottomless black, neverending pits.

  The Kid stood in the front yard and thought about going home, going back to bed. He thought about getting into trouble with his dad, about missing his mom when she finally came home. But then he saw the eagle’s wing, or whatever it was, the chalk drawing on the front wall of the house, and he stepped up into the dull heat of the front porch, put his hand on the steel security door and pulled.

  The smell from inside was still strong, but The Kid was ready. He put on the safety goggles, the paper facemask. He took a deep breath and stepped into the house.

  So dark inside that the darkness looked purple. The Kid switched on the flashlight. The beam played wildly across the front room. There was no paint on the walls. There were no walls on the walls. The walls had been burned of plaster, burned down to the wooden skeletons of walls. There were small clumps of metal on the floor. The Kid knelt beside one, shone the flashlight on it. Forks, knives, spoons, all fused together. They looked like little meteors. This must have been the dining room. The Kid took careful steps, glass crunching under his feet. What was left of the windows, maybe, picture frames and flower vases. The Kid could still smell the awful smell, but not as much, not as bad. The goggles and the mask were working.

  A doorway led into a small kitchen. The flashlight made shadows jump, made things move, grow, shrink. The blown-out window above the sink let in some moonlight. Pinprick holes in the ceiling let more moonlight through in thin white columns. There was shattered glass all over the countertop, over the broken tile floor. The cabinets on the wall sagged where they hung. They looked like diseased lungs. They looked like cigarette smokers’ lungs The Kid had seen in science books, scorched and heavy.

  He went down a short hallway. Two more doors at the end. There was a small pile of rubble in the doorway on the right. He shone the flashlight into the room. One blown-out window and a bed frame, the mattress charred, the sear stain spreading up the walls, reaching across the ceiling back to the doorway. This room felt hotter than the others. This was where the fire had started. The person had been trapped in here. The Kid knew this. He didn’t know how, but he knew this. The person who lived in the house had burned in this room.

  He crossed the hallway into the second room, the biggest in the house. More tiny holes in the ceiling letting in little shafts of moonlight. This looked like it had been the living room. There was a couch against the back wall, blackened and gutted. Big piles of ash and scraps, burned bookshelves and books and rugs. There was an exploded TV lying on its side on the floor. More crunching under The Kid’s sneakers. Glass and something harder, maybe another fork-and-spoon meteor. The Kid knelt, shone his flashlight at the floor. Thick pieces of colored chalk, white and yellow and red.

  He shone the flashlight across the room, corner to corner to corner, the beam finally stopping on the opposite side of the room and the image that nearly covered the far wall. It was a chalk drawing of a red haired woman in a daisy-yellow dress. Her eyes were closed, her arms were at her sides and her small body stretched up, lifting toward the ceiling. Her bare feet were a few inches out of a pair of brown and black cowboy boots. Angel wings unfolded from behind her shoulders.

  This was the person who died, the woman who burned in the bedroom. The Kid knew this.

  The drawing was sort of cartoony. The woman was short, but her features were oversized—her round eyes, her long eyelashes, her big hands and feet. The woman’s head was tilted up as she rose, her eyes closed, a peaceful little smile on her face. The drawing was taller than The Kid. The top of his head only reached the bottom of the woman’s chin. He looked up. The roof had a hole in it, right above where the woman was drawn. Black sky above, hint of moonlight. The hole she would pass through on her way up, he guessed. He wasn’t sure if the hole had been there before the drawing, or if whoever had drawn the woman had knocked out the hole to let her through.

  He wondered when someone had drawn this. If they’d done it in broad daylight, the middle of the night, what. If they’d gotten someone’s permission. He wondered whose permission they’d have to get. The city? The police? The Kid wasn’t sure. He had a feeling whoever had done it hadn’t gotten permission. It seemed like something done secretly, like the tags on the walls of buildings. Someone draws or paints and then runs the other way. Like the tags but really not like the tags. This was something else. This was more like the murals disappearing underneath the tags.

  The woman was missing a hand. Her left arm ended at the wrist. The Kid didn’t think this was intentional. Whoever had drawn the angel had run out of time, gotten caught, something. The hand wasn’t missing; it was unfinished. Maybe the artist would come back and finish it. Maybe they would come back tonight; maybe they were on their way over right now. Maybe the artist would find The Kid in the house and be angry that The Kid had gotten inside, that The Kid was looking at the unfinished drawing.

  The Kid was getting nervous. He didn’t want to get caught. He backed out of the room, down the hallway, through the living room. Opened the security door, peering outside to make sure no one was on the porch waiting for him. The yard and street were quiet. He stepped out onto the porch, took off the goggles, the facemask, put them back in his backpack. He closed the security door tight behind him. There was no way of locking the door. Anyone could get in there, the chalk artist, the homeless person who slept in that big cardboard box, anyone. Next time he went inside the house, someone could be hiding inside, waiting to pounce. How would he know if someone was in the house?

  Of course. Scotch tape. He had seen this tactic before in a detective comic. The Kid rummaged through his backpack, found the end of the roll they’d used while making the Halloween cards. Tore off a small piece, stuck half on the edge of the security door, half on the door jamb. Nearly invisible. If anyone opened the door, the tape would break and The Kid would see it before going inside next time. Sometimes The Kid was amazed at all the things he knew.

  He ran home as fast as he could, back up the hill, across Sunset, down his street, afraid that he’d see the pickup parked in the driveway, his dad sitting on the porch, angry and waiting.

  The house was dark when he got home. The pickup wasn’t in the driveway. The front doors were still closed and locked. He got back into his pajamas, back into bed. Really tired, suddenly, his heart and his breathing finally slowing. At least he hadn’t missed his mom coming home. He was disappointed that she wasn’t there but he was also glad that he hadn’t missed it. He tried to keep awake, tried to keep his eyes open so he’d hear it when she came through the door, but it was no use, he was so tired. Mad at himself as he crashed into sleep, dreaming of fires and ashes, feathers floating on walls, a glowing chalk angel trapped in a room while her house burned down around her.

  three

  There was a fire truck on the street in front of the house when Darby got home mid-morning. A small group of onlookers had gathered at the corner, older people from the neighborhood, grandparents, great-grandparents, a few children too young for school.

  The fire truck was blocking his view of the house. Darby’s first thought was the lights. The Kid had left the lights on in the house and one of them had caught fire, old wiring, a bad bulb, a bad fuse. He stopped the pickup on the other side of the street, ran across to the fire truck.

  The Kid. Had The Kid already left for school, or was he still inside when the fire started? The security bars, the security door. The Kid trapped inside while the house burned.

  Darby came around the fire truck, up onto the curb. The house looked just like it always looked. Nothing was burning, there wasn’t any smoke. He caught the toe of his boot on something lying on the sidewalk. The manhole cover, pried up, lying flat on the cement. He turned just in time to see a firefighter lower himself into the open manhole and disappear.

  Another firefighter stood over the hole
holding a large beach blanket, her arms spread wide as if waiting for something to leap out, as if she was going to catch it in the blanket when it did. The blanket was red and white and green, had a large Mexican beer logo splashed across its front.

  “Please keep back, sir,” she said. “We don’t know what’s in there.”

  Some kind of inhuman noise issued from the manhole, a ragged, fearful growl. The crowd at the corner moved back a few steps.

  The firefighter inched closer to the hole, adjusted the towel. “Everything all right down there?”

  The first firefighter’s voice came up through the hole. “It’s a big one. Be ready, Pat. I’m going to lift it out.”

  Pat moved into position, bent her knees, nodded at Darby to move away. “Take a few steps back, sir. Keep a safe distance from the hole.”

  The first firefighter’s voice came up through the hole, talking to someone, something down there. “It’s okay, big fella, I’m not going to hurt you.”

  The growl again, lower this time, a warning, and then the sounds of a struggle down in the hole, some splashing, cursing from the first firefighter, and then a head appeared, a big black dog, wet and wild-eyed, up through the open manhole. The body followed and Pat embraced it in the towel, pulling as the first firefighter pushed. The thing kept coming, an enormous animal, soaking wet and half-starved; a hairy, trembling bag of bones. Finally it was up and out, wrapped in the towel, shivering. The first firefighter lifted himself out of the hole, his uniform wet, his wading boots covered in sludge. He coughed and spat into Darby’s yard.

  “That fucker’s gigantic,” he said.

  He held the dog down while Pat pulled a length of rope from the fire truck and tied a loop at one end. The animal thrashed under the towel. The crowd at the corner moved a little closer, whispering in Spanish and English. The first firefighter pulled the towel down to expose the dog’s head and Pat slipped the loop over, tied the other end around a link in Darby’s front fence. The dog bucked at the constraint, flashing its teeth, and the firefighters backed away, letting the animal claim the towel, shake the water off its patchy fur.