by Matt Bell
The boy said, The man told me to unbuckle my seat belt, to lie down on the floor. Down where my feet were supposed to go.
I used to call it the pit, Kelly said. When I was a kid.
Yes, the boy said. The pit.
The boy said in the basement he had been frightened of worse but worse had not come. The man made him strip naked so he wouldn’t escape, but after he was naked he was given a blanket, allowed to cover himself. The boy was naked beneath the blanket but the man who took him didn’t touch him. The man wore a hooded red rain slicker and the man didn’t take the slicker off while he sat in the chair beside the bed or while he fed the boy or while he came and went.
Three days passed. The boy not molested or tortured or killed.
The boy merely kept.
Kept and watched.
Kelly had entered the low room too. There was the boy before and the boy after, and at the boy’s suggestion he remembered his own feeling of being split by entering the room: into the scrapper, perhaps, or else the salvor, two new ways of naming this second self he’d perhaps always known, recognized at last after a lifetime of mirrors.
THE VOLUNTEERS WELCOMED KELLY INTO their fold, pressed one of their orange jerseys into his hands, then pushed him to his knees and pulled it over his head. The men laid their hands upon him and they prayed for protection and his wisdom and grace in securing their city until Kelly was one of their number. The taking on of new duties, how immediately the office weighed upon him: He had not intended this. He had not intended any more than the acquisition of the uniform. A mode of access and anonymity, a man dressed up behind a symbol.
The watch met in schools and in churches and in bars, in backyards in the summer and in community halls in the winter, and wherever they met there would be the smell of barbecue and baked beans, piles of coleslaw and bread, all surrounded by men in their orange t-shirts, their orange jerseys and orange caps. They prayed before they ate, they ate before they invited the week’s speaker to the podium, and then Kelly was pointed out, made an example: This was the good man, the speaker said, in this bad world.
The speaker said this was the week a mother flushed her premature newborn down the toilet, then changed her mind, calling emergency services in time for firemen to cut the bawling baby loose from the pipe.
This was the week a woman beat her husband with a bat while he slept, too drunk to defend himself, as she had once been too afraid.
This was the week the homicide rate eclipsed the previous year’s and there were still six weeks left in the year.
This was the week the mayor cut the police force again, expanded the border of the zone another few blocks, darkened another row of streetlights, abandoned another portion of the city. The volunteers had dedicated themselves to keeping those streets safe when the police could not but they couldn’t hide their dismay, let their voices cry out in anger, the opposite of hallelujah, the cursing opposite of giving thanks.
This was a bad year, the speaker said. But this was also the year when Kelly saved a boy.
Like Lot in Sodom, he said. The good man who tries to rescue his city.
Afterward men swarmed to clap Kelly on the back or shake his hand or else they offered some more intricate greeting Kelly couldn’t follow or reciprocate. He had done what they had dreamed of doing: he had stopped a crime, he had saved a life. A child endangered, a victim rescued, a hero in their midst. They asked him what it had been like to carry the boy out of captivity and he said he didn’t know how to explain it. They wanted a story about a hero but he didn’t know how to say he hadn’t had the kind of feelings they wanted to hear. He didn’t know how to say that what he thought he had felt was responsible.
He couldn’t tell them about the scrapper, about the salvor, about the two voices he heard whenever he worked on the case notes. How there was a voice that wanted to punish the guilty. How there was a voice that wanted to protect the innocent.
Or not voices, exactly. Not voices but modes of thought, systems of organization, suggestions for action. Actions themselves, actions in waiting.
There were other support groups for other needs. After hours in a high school classroom, Kelly sat in a circle of chairs and listened again. This time the circle contained mostly women but it was the men he’d come to hear. When it was Kelly’s turn, he wanted to speak but the words wouldn’t come. He opened and closed his mouth, choked out a sound. The words wouldn’t come. My father. My father, who never took anything he didn’t ask for first. What had Kelly done to hold the words back. What would it take to reverse the damage. He shook his head, studied his hands. An older man touched his knee. The older man had been through something terrible, had done something equally bad. Kelly pitied the older man, the absolute safety of pitying in others what you wouldn’t pity in yourself. Kelly wanted to say what happened in his youth was worse because it had not left a mark, because it had not hurt, because he had only touched, not been touched. Because he had been asked to do it and he had agreed and even if it wasn’t fair—even if he had been too young to know better—even then what had happened to him had happened out of his own free will.
My father, so big upon his bones. All thick flesh, so that even where he was fat he was hard. In those years Kelly had believed in a world where you could be forgiven for every worst thing but later he threw away his rosary, revoked his right to those comforts, and so the world in which Kelly had passed on his hurt was a world in which his crime would not be forgiven, could not be redeemed or righted.
When he had paid for his vasectomy the nurses made him sign extra forms because of his age, because he was young and unmarried and childless. They asked him again if he was sure.
Yes, he said. He knew he would never have children of his own. Because he would not risk it.
But then the southern woman, who already had the only child she wanted. Then her boy.
How at first he had felt nothing. How he celebrated the nothing, the future he thought it promised. They bought their house, they moved in together, and for a long time nothing bad happened to anyone, for a long time when Kelly looked at her boy he had told himself he wanted to feel only love, something fatherly forming in the accumulation of days.
The collapse changed everything. The loss of his employment, their house. The constrained summer months they shared a single motel room, man and woman and child, when too often it was only the boy’s mother who left the room, who had her insufficient work to take her away.
The collapse changed everything but what if it merely sped the inevitable.
Just watch me, he had said, in the hot dark of the motel room, the night he and the boy were alone for the last time. After Kelly and the southern woman had fought again, after the woman took her purse and her car keys but not her boy. And how by then Kelly had loved the boy. How Kelly thought he would never hurt the boy but in his worst moment he knew he had somehow not known the boy’s name.
How in his worst moment he had said, Boy, just watch, but the boy had not wanted to watch.
What happened next had not taken long. When it was over Kelly grunted with relief, some clenching softening so fast it hurt, like the aftermath of a cramp. But then the horror of what he had done, what he had set his whole life against doing.
To have for so long restrained yourself from every urge and to have it buy you nothing. To still have to be yourself, everywhere you go.
The older man told Kelly this was a safe space but Kelly shook his head again. There were no safe spaces except those you made yourself. Safety could not be granted. Safety was the absence of anyone stronger or weaker. And always there was someone stronger or weaker, someone greater than, less than. The only true safety was the deepest kind of loneliness and for a time Kelly had chosen it. Now he was choosing something else, Daniel and Jackie, the found boy, the girl with the limp. Now the world’s every angle would be sharp with danger, for him and from him, unti
l the case was closed. Until he found the watcher, the man in the red slicker. Until the boy was as safe as Kelly wanted him, as saved.
He gained another five pounds, another ten, stopped weighing himself, promised himself it was temporary, tried to compensate with more calisthenics on the worn carpet of his living room. He drank out of the cupboard and he ate out of the freezer, cleared the least-wanted remnants of Christian charity. There was a limit to how much pasta salad a man could crave but he passed the limit and kept going. Whenever he was alone and he couldn’t sleep he sat down at the table, clicked open his pen and began to write, scrawled bits of memory, details about the house where he’d found the boy, the low room inside.
He’d traded away distraction but he had obsession and so who missed it. He started bringing the police scanner in from the truck with him every night, and if the girl with the limp was away at work or in her own bed, then he listened to the scanner in his, fell asleep to the addresses of gunshots, arson, domestic disturbance, animals abandoned, abused. Every human horror reduced to a number, a flattening of fear and disgust into numeric code. Names repeated, last name, first name, middle initial. Say again. License-plate numbers, makes and models. Say again, say again. The ringing in his ears meant Kelly struggled to separate meaning from sounds. The litany of the nighttime city. The squelch and the static obscuring speech, every word so distorted the casual listener might make a mistake.
He was more tight-lipped than anyone else but he still worried he might begin to leak his secrets whenever he shared an afternoon with the boy, whenever the girl with the limp came home to find him drunk and reeling, chair to wall to floor, bed to morning. When the boy wasn’t with Kelly he was with his parents in their separate homes, or else with the brother, who sometimes didn’t go to school, staying home while the father worked, while the mother worked too, preparing for a life without the father’s income, his grandparents’ support. The boy put Kelly’s name to use, said it into the telephone, when he answered the door, when Kelly picked him up after school. The boy said it was easy to confuse the parents, to do as the brother did to make room between them. The boy’s parents were more careful now but the only person they ever checked with was the boy. His phone rang constantly and the boy told them he was wherever they expected him to be.
The boy’s brother treated him rough too. It wasn’t the first time they saw each other when the boy told Kelly this part of the story but almost. From the moment of his adoption the brother had pinched the boy, twisted the skin on his arms when out of sight of their parents, when in the room they shared, in the twin beds for boys who were not twins. Don’t tell anyone, the boy said the brother said. Or else.
Kelly asked, Is that all? Is that the worst of it?
The boy looked away, covered half his face with one hand, tugged at his ear with the other. Kelly tried to take the boy’s hand away from his mouth but stopped when the boy recoiled. The boy and the brother hadn’t been in the same family long but already Kelly thought the boy flinched where he hadn’t flinched before.
You can tell me, Kelly said. What happens next?
Kelly saw the boy often had to prepare himself to speak. The boy wanted to share what was happening to him but Kelly thought it could take all afternoon for the boy to gather the force of a sentence. He didn’t push and the next time they were together in the apartment the boy began again, said, It’s easier to talk to you, and so Kelly said, Then talk.
Day by day Kelly felt a rough and growing affection for the boy, a swelling knocking about his chest. Sometimes Kelly woke in the night and walked his featureless hallway into the living room, looking for the boy even though the boy couldn’t be there. If the boy was there the television would have been on, the boy would be sitting on the floor with his homework spread across the carpet. There would be sound and light surrounding his presence, instead of only the standby hum of the television, the louder drone of the refrigerator. Only voices in the night. Kelly listened to his neighbors, the sounds of scuffling feet, of television and radio, the murmur of their conversations, the noises of sex and kitchen, the huffing slap of bodies and the clatter of dishes. Whenever he was alone he found himself pulling his phone from his pocket to answer phantom vibrations, imagined missed calls. The boy had never spent the night but Kelly knew he would let the boy if the boy asked. It was another bad idea but Kelly was full of them. The important thing was not to ask, not to let your need be known.
6
YOUR NAME WAS NOT IMPORTANT but you believed one day an inquiry would begin, an organized speculation of detectives and reporters asking who was he and who was the real him and how was a man like him made. To refuse these interrogators you scrubbed the name clean, restarted yourself, removed all of the old life’s worldly tarnish. You had a past but in the present it was only this you who remained, this you and a boy, one boy at a time. Or so it had been, before the intruder.
At birth you had been given up before being given a name, any name.
Later came the first name, the one ill fit for the child you’d become. Then your second name, the one you gave yourself. You hadn’t wanted a last name but the judge wouldn’t let you refuse one. The use of a middle initial was a matter of deep ambivalence to the court but at the last minute you chose an X, made to leave no box unmarked.
Someday reporters and detectives would repeat the name chosen, its simple syllables, its known unknownness a cipher standing in place of a man. They would debate the deepening of the mystery by the middle initial standing for nothing, the X in the middle of a name whose whole stood for nothing either, not even to you.
The boy was a phrase that was a moving target. There had been a number of boys but you were careful not to think too often in specifics. The given name: mere words elevated to description, to knowledge of what a thing was. How all the power resided in the giver. How without such a gift an individual could be made a type, how the type specimen could be returned to the herd.
When you were a boy you had been nameless and now you unnamed each boy.
Anonymous then, anonymous now. You were not a name but a watcher, dedicated to a philosophy of watching, of inaction except for where action was necessary, and there was no way to put a boy into a house except by the taking. What else couldn’t be omitted? Food for the boy, food and drink. Whatever could be fed from a bowl, served with a spoon at room temperature. Even for yourself you wouldn’t make anything more complicated, couldn’t see the point of intricacy.
You read but you were not good with books. Every written word was an abstraction instead of the thing. What use were articles, conjunctions, prepositions. The way an adjective or an adverb revealed nothing except a wrong-named object or action. But who could know all the right names against the vagueness of the world, the insufficient exactness of nouns. You didn’t want a better system but rather a removal of all systems, the reduction of complex things to their simplest parts. What you wanted was the irreducibility of a centermost point, occupied by a single set of figures. The hollow inside, the blank at the heart of mystery.
The few people who saw you thought you were a mute or else slow, but you could talk, think for yourself. Only in the manner of your choosing. Only at a time of your making. You would talk only to the next boy, vowed silence against all others. Until then you revealed nothing. No one would ever know your names for the gone boys. The story others told about you would not be the story of the boys. For it was always the killer who was remembered, never the killed.
So grandiose: the killer, the killed.
You didn’t want to hurt the boys. Not until there was no other choice. And with the last boy, the intruder had made sure you hadn’t had to hurt anyone. The intruder saved the boy and also he saved you, because when you were finished with the boy you hadn’t had to hurt the boy to set you both free.
THE PAYCHECKS DIDN’T COME IN the mail. The office was at the front of a warehouse, a small rectangular room with a
glass partition over wood paneling, separating the receptionist’s desk from the chairless waiting area. The receptionist was bleached blonde, tanned brown, embraced a certain brand of department-store professionalism. He could stand there grinning all day and still he’d never be invited past the glass, the locked door.
He opened the check in the truck, read the number lower than what he’d expected. The reductive mathematics of taxes, Social Security, Medicare. The bank was closed by the time he arrived but there was an ATM outside. In the dusk and the falling snow he pulled the new card from his wallet, followed the screen’s instructions prompt to prompt. He forgot he needed a pen to sign the check, jammed the cancel button until the screen reset. There was a pen in the truck, clipped to the case notes. He found it in the glove box, then shut the truck door, turned to walk back.
In three separate movements Kelly saw the gun, the hand holding the gun, the man who owned the hand.
He did what the man with the gun said. At his urging Kelly opened his wallet to reveal small bills ordered by denomination, some faded receipts. Back at the machine the man with the gun lurked out of the camera’s eye, told Kelly where he wanted him to stand while he worked the keypad, depositing the check, guessing at his daily limit. The mugger kept a stride’s worth of distance but occasionally he closed it for effect, pressing the barrel of the pistol into Kelly’s back, where Kelly could barely feel it through the thickness of his coat.
Each time the nub of the pistol’s barrel touched him Kelly felt a diminishment of effect. He could get used to anything, even a pistol snug against the small of his back. He withdrew another hundred dollars, watched the worth of his time pass into the mugger’s hands.
Now your keys, the man with the gun said. Hand them over.