by Matt Bell
I’m looking for someone, he said. Somewhere in the zone, he said, then waved his hands across the graph-paper maps spread out across the diner table. Somewhere out here.
It’s a big city to hunt a person in, the linebacker said. You’ll need something better than luck if you want to see it through.
The linebacker carried a pistol, a black shape inside a black holster tucked under his jacket. He taught gun-safety classes, he said, helped others get concealed-carry permits. He sold guns out of his house but only to men he trusted.
Whatever you need, the linebacker said, I can help.
The year dwindled. The farther Kelly moved from the center of the good story the more dangerous the story seemed. Somewhere in the zone there would be a space where no one suffered names. He wouldn’t ascribe complexity to every actor. The more blank the image the more able to inspire terror, to excuse hurt. He moved through the frigid desperation, a lone striver walking rooms where many had lived, studying floor plans that had housed the generations, three children to a bed, two beds to a bedroom, houses standing through booms unimaginable, eras resigned to the unknown expanses of the past. When he arrived home he added the squares of graph paper to the case notes, tucked them loosely in the back of the notebook. On nights the girl with the limp worked latest he thumbtacked the maps to the walls of his living room, placing each block beside its neighbors, each sheet covered with simple diagrams, streets drawn in a shaky hand, outlined squares and rectangles for houses, filled in black if they were confirmed vacant. He paced the room, poured a drink, considered the spreading stain. In the zone Kelly had seen the lengthy shapes of the world, how what was to come was set down by what had passed, the long story of progress bendable only by degrees. He’d acquire the tools, he’d choose the space, he’d find the man in the red slicker, he’d take him and make him pay.
Because what if a degree was enough. What if the slimmest fraction of a degree made all the difference.
How to press an advantage. How to break through a defense. How to feint and have the feint believed. How to make a man of eighteen or twenty-one or twenty-five worry the peak of his powers wouldn’t be enough. How to accept the same when it was your turn to fall. To stay in the ring three minutes at a time, to take the fists upon your head and body until each punch stuck in the meat of your bones. How to stay. How to stay. How to bear anything no matter the hurt. How in another age agony had meant contest. How there was nothing in the fight not brought there by an act of will. How to take the other’s will and push it out of the square. How to have all your options reduced to violence, no way out except to strike or be struck.
He woke up, he trained, he sparred, he put his fists against the speed bag and the heavy bag and against toughened skin. He relearned a forgotten vocabulary, better ways of getting strong, to go past bench presses, shoulder presses, squats, and dead lifts, ways to pack on mass, power cleans, dumbbell snatches, power jumps, ways to pack on speed, explosiveness, fast-twitch muscle. Ballistic movements. There were ways he could train himself, could work out at home too, pull-ups and push-ups, box runs, medicine balls. At night he closed his eyes and imagined he could hear his muscles stretching and in the morning when he woke up he saw he was bigger, so slightly enlarged, cut with a bit more bark beneath the bruises.
The others ate creatine, protein, ZMA, vitamins you could choke on. Some evenings Kelly swallowed pills smuggled from the girl’s purse and they thickened his veins until he thought if he didn’t keep moving he might turn to stone. With them he saw with some new dilation, how the streetlights glowed big as suns. The buildings never wavered or blurred but perhaps they throbbed. If he saw a man on the street who looked like the man who mugged him, then he raised his phone, took a picture of the man. The phone’s digital zoom was useless and as it brought him closer it showed him less: vague impressions, the color of skin, the shape of the skull, a slash or curve of expression. At an office-supply store he plugged his phone into a printer, ran color prints of every face he’d gathered. At home, Kelly taped the prints into the case notes where no one would find them, where the pictures began to color whatever pages they opposed.
Everything he added to his life became another repetition, a way of filling the endless everyday. He went to work, pushed his wheelbarrow down long industrial hallways, carried the broken fixtures from every bathroom, removed everything too valuable to leave for when the machines came to crush the building. The foreman trained him on other tasks, let him get a taste of the excavator. When they cleared one block they found a steel swimming pool dug into the dirt and the foreman showed Kelly the push and pull of the levers, how to reach down to puncture the pool’s floor, to crumple its steel walls. Everything they encountered could be removed but Kelly was starting to think about what was closest to permanence. About cement, masonry, stonework. About close enough. It would require new skills but if the need emerged he had time, ambition, the will to learn.
Maybe it was enough to hide the deed between the gaps of attention. To put an action into a space where no one wanted to look.
Kelly made the boy a key so he could come and go as he pleased. He picked the boy up from school and because the boy hadn’t eaten lunch Kelly took him out for fast food, filled the table between them with paper-wrapped burgers, red-boxed fries. When they ate together the boy often ate his food out of order: he would start with dessert, not finishing his burger because he’d already had a shake, a paper-boxed apple pie. The inversion of norms, left over from the last time the rules disappeared and so maybe the rules were gone. They sat in a booth at the back of the dining area and behind them was a glass wall cordoning off an indoor playground. Someone had soundproofed the glass so you couldn’t hear the children playing. Every time Kelly looked over his shoulder there was another child there, shoeless or sockless, running across the floor, disappearing into a plastic tube. The smallest steps of the smallest children. There were cameras everywhere but the only one they warned you of was the one in the playground, a guardian behind smoky glass.
Kelly raised his phone, snapped a picture of the boy’s face, flushed and full over the remains of his meal.
Because you’re my friend, Kelly said.
Kelly dropped the boy off at his mother’s then returned to where he had rescued the boy to find the blue house demolished, removed. Kelly squatted, graded the ground with his gloves, found nothing except a tenth of an acre of bare earth and dirty snow, not a single nail, a single screw. He knew the basement walls were gone too, torn out in dirty chunks, like he’d removed the swimming pool in another part of the zone. They would have used an excavator to dig a ramp, then sent the excavator to break the walls, the cement flooring. The machine digging into the hard and frozen earth, the house more joined to the dirt than in any other season.
If there was any physical reminder of the boy’s captivity it was gone. Kelly lay down in the snow, let its shivery melt radiate into his clothes until his teeth chattered, until his skin burned. Later in the night he dreamed he heard a smile in the dark: a faceless man spoke up in the offenseless volume of the hopeless, testified in favor of his acquittal. There weren’t handcuffs but duct tape held sturdy enough in the deep. Despite the mask Kelly wore he understood the man fine as long as he was standing right beside the chair. He was sure the man had had a face but it wasn’t visible. He wasn’t sure he could hurt the man but how could he let him go.
LATER PERHAPS there would be all kinds of perverse accusations but you didn’t think they would be true. Certainly there was no touching beyond the necessary. But if the accusations were true how surprised could you be. You did not know yourself well. You guessed, conjectured. You had urges but not toward the boys. You had urges but you didn’t understand where they originated.
In the faces of others you most often saw a certain kind of blankness, neither sad nor happy nor angry. A lack of gladness, a lack of sorrow. You saw on the television a show about people whose brain
injuries left them unable to recognize emotion in expressions and you thought you were probably one of those people.
But where was your injury.
The watching was an exhaustion. Of the boy and of you. You had not expected this. You couldn’t watch continuously but the longer you watched the greater the unfolding of the boy. It took time to get beneath the surface. You had to watch and you had to be sure the boy knew you were watching. At first the boys were merely confused, unsure of who you were, why you had picked them. There was something you wanted and the more the boy showed you the longer you kept the boy. The best boy had long since come and gone but others had been good enough. Their eyes couldn’t stay afraid forever. There was curiosity. One spoke and told you he would never forget your face but everyone had forgotten you and if this boy did not then he would be the first.
When the watching was over you didn’t want to see the boy ever again. There were a few ways to ensure you would not.
Boys ran away, disappeared for reasons not related to being taken, to being watched, what came after the watching. The getting gone. This was why you took boys and not girls. If you took girls, then no one would ever believe they had gone missing on their own.
AT THE GYM, THE RELATIVITY of age: the age of a thirty-four-year-old man. How there was almost no one older worth putting your hands on. It was folly for Kelly to be in the ring with these monsters of youth but he wasn’t trying to compete, didn’t need to ever fight a real match, the nine minutes of amateur spectacle. All he wanted to do was to throw himself against their strength. They knocked him down but he knocked them down too. The ones who refused to spar with him he called names, goading their pride until they split his lips, bruised his eyes, filled his skin with the language of their rebuttals. He turned an ankle at a jobsite and then he had to limp around the gym, push through his disadvantages. In his apartment he imagined filling his tub with ice, filled a tumbler instead, put ice packs on his hands and whiskey in his stomach and vowed tomorrow he would go back for more. Dead lifts, squats, lunges. The seated row, the shoulder shrug, the dozens of pull-ups he’d become capable of again.
His body expanded, screamed at its seams. The bigger the shell got the more obvious its emptiness in the mirror.
The trainers had their favorites and they hired some of the others to fight them. Harmless men with enough steel to fight but not enough to win. There was money in being such a man but so far the trainers had never approached Kelly. Like every job, you got paid for being predictable.
The house he sought would have to be deep inside the zone, at the crossing of all vectors of loneliness, abandonment, loss. He drove blocks he had scrapped, tried to recall each house’s layout of rooms and hallways, windows where neighbors might be able to see into the house. If there were neighbors. He wasn’t confident in his recall, had to check his street work, his graph-paper maps. There were too many indistinguishable houses, too many similar floor plans. He thought he required a basement but that was only parity. He could make do with any dark room, its windows blacked, its walls and floor and ceiling made dense against sound.
The sound of breaking glass carried in the silent streets but no one would come to investigate. The emptiest streets, emptier for winter. He cleared the glass with a pry bar or a hammer, climbed into small rooms cramped with drop ceilings and the pile of faded shag carpet. He tested light switches and water taps, tried to remember the qualities of the house where the boy had been held. But the boy was what had imbued the house with meaning: it wasn’t the structure but what the structure contained. Once a family, then vacancy, then a boy.
The shape of the house he picked mattered less than its proximity to others, its potential to remain undisturbed. He needed a house he could work in for an extended period of time. It would take time to make the necessary preparations, to assemble his tools, to soundproof a room, to be sure he would remain undisturbed until he finished.
It was possible to drug a man but he didn’t know how it was done. He remembered choke holds from his wrestling days, thought to put his body to use instead. He asked at the gym and the others reminded him, happily demonstrated: the hardness of his arms putting pressure on a throat caught in the crook of his elbow. The air choke, the blood choke. Compressions of the carotid arteries, the jugular veins, the upper airway. Asphyxia, cerebral ischemia, temporary hypoxic conditions. The health sciences put to harder use.
The reward dwindled but there was enough left for what he intended. He acquired a new set of tools secondhand, kept them separate from his regular equipment. In a steel toolbox heavy as a child he placed an ancient pair of pliers, a pair of scissors rusted at the hinge but sharp along the blade. A selection of blunted chisels. Hammers with splintering handles that’d hurt when he swung. Rolls of duct tape, more than he needed. He had to leave the zone to get some of what he wanted. He purchased a generator, ninety-nine cubic centimeters of engine inside a compact roll cage, twelve hundred watts, nine and a half hours of juice. He had plenty of gloves but he thought he might want a pair he had never worn. There was a welder’s mask in the same aisle and he put it in the cart. The mask wouldn’t hide his eyes but it might obscure his emotions, put distance between him and the suspect.
The suspect or the subject, how one would become another as the process progressed.
He paid cash at the counter but cash didn’t mean there wasn’t a record. There were cameras in the store, receipts stamped with the date and time. He spread out his purchases, some today, some tomorrow. He bought another LED headlamp, a handheld high-intensity discharge spotlight with a rechargeable battery. He thought maybe he might want more lights but how easy would it be to carry all of this in, to remove it after. One or two standing lights would be enough for the kind of work he was intending. All he needed was to illuminate a space the size of a man.
The boy called from downstairs and Kelly buzzed the boy in, got up from the couch to unlock the door. The boy had a key but why didn’t he use it? When the boy entered he was followed by another, taller boy—the brother, Kelly realized. The brother was still in school, seventeen, a legal juvenile. Kelly didn’t know his name, had never heard it spoken. This was one difference between a person and an abstraction. This was the way he wanted it.
This is my brother, said the boy. He wanted to meet you.
The boy’s voice was quieter, cowed in front of the brother. For the first time in weeks Kelly looked at the boy and saw a child. The boy was dressed in his blazer and tie and khakis as ever, the brother was dressed the same but wore the clothes in his own way, looser, less what was intended by the public school dress code.
I heard you’ve been spending time with him, the brother said. Taking him places. Buying him things. Letting him stay here.
Kelly said, He comes after school. He does his homework while I watch television. We share a meal and I drive him home after.
I’m curious, the brother said. Just wondering what a grown man is doing with my brother.
Nothing, Kelly said. It’s harmless. Anyway you’re the one who brings him here.
The complicity of the brother driving the boy. Of Kelly leaving the boy within the brother’s reach so he could come into Kelly’s. Kelly wanted to ask if their parents knew too. He hadn’t done anything wrong. He had saved the boy and when the boy was with him the boy was still safe. He had to keep reminding himself the brother wasn’t the boy’s real brother, not the boy’s blood. No matter what the brother said. How the brother was cruel to the boy, by the boy’s own admission. How the brother had touched the boy or else made the boy watch. How the boy told Kelly this or else it was only conjecture, something Kelly had written in the case notes.
The brother put his hand on the boy’s head and the boy flinched and Kelly knew all he needed to know. He’d known the flinch himself. Not an instinct but something learned.
I’m going to stay today too, the brother said, moving his hand to the boy’
s shoulder. I want to make sure everything’s okay. If that’s all right with you.
If Kelly wanted to protect the boy he could do so right here. The brother wasn’t a man but he was the height of one, could be hurt the same.
When Kelly stood his joints cracked and popped, his strained muscles protesting every movement. He invited the boy and his brother in, pointed toward the coatrack, the couch, the kitchen. The boy knew where everything else was but if the brother wanted something he would have to ask. Kelly never smoked in front of the boy but he smoked now. The brother controlled the remote, scanned music videos, reality television, the late-afternoon reruns of some past evening’s entertainment, sports news repeating without end. On the other side of the room the boy watched the television too, his backpack unopened, his eyes glassy and absent, his quietness doubled.
The brother was here under the guise of protecting the boy from Kelly but this wasn’t the relationship the boy had revealed. The brother: Kelly thought he knew how such a person was made. It might not be the brother’s fault—not in the ultimate reveal of cause and effect—but wasn’t the brother still responsible for what he’d done, was doing. Hadn’t Kelly been responsible for the same.
THE MAN UNNAMED, THE BOY unlabeled, the toddler and baby so unwanted he did not merit three words of description, first and middle and last. This was the person they’d say you were but the real self had been obscured behind a series of labels: occupation, race, education, religion, political affiliation. The states, the conditions: you stockpiled canned goods, ate sparingly. Generic brands or worse, the white cans with the bold text, left over from foreign wars, humanitarian aid. Fingering peaches out of syrupy containers. Saving half a slice of cheese in its wrapper. Trying to remember to eat the leftovers before they got hard. Forcing yourself to eat the crust if you forgot. The crusts of bread. A sandwich only needed one slice. Everything open-faced, revealed. Water from the tap, the same glass used repeatedly. The repetition of minor acts. It wasn’t difficult to cut your own hair. You never bought your clothes new. You rarely gained or lost weight. You remembered your birthday but never on the right day. Some of your teeth were missing but you’d had the same number for several years. A stability even in decay.