by Matt Bell
There had never been a pet to call your own. You weren’t afraid of dogs but didn’t see the draw.
Once a woman threw a coffee at you in a fast-food lobby and you never knew why. Sometimes you found yourself in line somewhere with an erection that wouldn’t go away. Then the long bus rides, the hands over the lap trying to hide your discomfort, leaving behind an ache you didn’t know how to soothe. Or you knew how others soothed it but you didn’t know how you should. It hurt too much to touch it yourself and you didn’t know how to ask someone else. In the group home you had watched other boys handle themselves in the darkened dormitory, watched their faces as they moved through the pains of pleasure. One night you had gone to one of those boys and asked for help, had begged for it. The other boy had punched you in the neck and in the ear, had knocked you to the ground and pressed your face to the linoleum floor. There were words to make him stop but who knew which words you screamed were the right ones.
It should have been enough to keep your hands to yourself, to not ask for others’ hands upon you. It should have been enough for you to watch. You had not wanted to go further.
This was the self you were bringing into the light: the one who wanted to stare out from behind the mask of new name, home haircut, hooded garment. Who looked at the world as it was and who only wanted to make the world look back.
THE CALL HAD COME FROM her number but it was her co-worker who’d answered. The co-worker said she wanted Jackie to go to the hospital but Jackie wanted to drive herself home instead. Calling him was their compromise. The building where she worked wasn’t what he expected but he wasn’t sure he’d had an expectation. The life they shared when they were in the same room was all he had of her. No shared past, no shared present outside of her apartment, his, the bars they drank in, the diners where they took their meals.
It was easy to forget. He saw a woman every day, shared a bed and a table until he thought he knew her, until she might imagine she knew him back. But what proportion did he know, what was the ratio between known and unknown. She saw him with the boy but so far the boy was his. She told him about her week but to him her experiences were mostly stories, as distant as the news.
When he arrived he found her sitting pale faced in her cubicle, clutching the edge of the desk as if she might fall out of her chair, the screen before her blank, every emergency in the city redirected. There was medication she was meant to take when this happened but he couldn’t remember its progress, if her dilated pupils meant she had swallowed her pills.
What did you say when you couldn’t say Are you okay. What did you say when you couldn’t say What’s wrong.
It was impossible to get her into his truck in her clenched condition so they would take her car instead. First the excruciation of pacing her slow progress, stooped and dragging toward the exit, because she refused to use her cane at her workplace, in the company of others. The elevator was farther than the stairs but the stairs weren’t an option. He put his arm around her and she cursed but as the doors slid closed she crumpled against him. When the doors opened onto the ground floor, she shoved herself free, used the elevator’s railing to yank herself upright.
In the parking lot, he offered to bring the car around and she glared again, pulled away.
He said, You can let me help you. There’s nothing wrong with letting someone help.
She scoffed, swore. She said, The last thing I need is you carrying me to the car. And who are you to talk about needing help.
He stopped walking but she kept going, didn’t look back, didn’t speak. He waited but she didn’t slow. She limped beneath the parking-lot lights, her shadow stretching her stagger. He caught up to her, didn’t let her walk alone. The attacks were coming faster now. Long ago she had said there wouldn’t be rhyme or reason but for Kelly there was no denying their increased frequency. She didn’t want him to carry her and wouldn’t take his arm but she let him stand beside her, let him match his pace to hers. She wouldn’t fall this time but it didn’t mean he couldn’t promise to catch her if she did.
W
He started to watch more closely, until every day he discovered some previously secret aspect of her life. Hobbies he didn’t know she had. A circle of friends he hadn’t met. In their earliest days they were always together and so there hadn’t been room for outside interests. He no longer spent every evening in her company and so she had returned to her life before him. He called her and she was out with the other women from work, drinking beer and playing pool. He called her and she was home, watching the hockey game by herself, or else he called her and she was at their usual bar, watching the game in the company of others. She hadn’t ever talked about books before but now he often found library books on her coffee table.
He picked up a murder mystery, flipped it over to read the jacket copy. A serial child abductor on the loose, an unlikely detective tasked to take him down. She brought him a beer from the fridge, put her hand on his chest. She took the book from his hands and put it back on the table.
It doesn’t mean anything, she said.
She liked the order, she said. She liked the way the evil in these novels was a solvable mystery temporarily unsolved. The guilty could be found, accused, punished. When a woman made a mistake, the woman could redeem herself. The world of her novels was not chaos but merely the appearance of chaos. Instead there were hidden systems, mechanisms that could be uncovered, put to use. The righting of the bad world. A point to suffering, a suffering that improved the sufferer. Three hundred pages and an expectation that by the end all the answers would be revealed. The transfer of weight as the pages fell from the right hand to the left, an accumulation of certainty.
I fell asleep reading last night, she said, and then I dreamed I was still reading but in my dream the room I was in was too dark for me to see the words. When I closed my book the dark got darker. I left the house, got in my car, started to drive. There was a lot of traffic but it dwindled as the road narrowed. When I passed the last car I realized my headlights were broken, that without other cars there would be nothing left to light the way. And then the last lights went out: streetlights off, moon gone, stars vanished. And I could not stop driving so very fast.
The reward should have made escape possible. He could have gone anywhere else, another city, a town. A simpler place for a simpler life. Now there was Jackie, there was the boy, there was the case, necessary to solve—but also his television, his couch and chair, all his possessions nothing special, only his. In the South he had owned a house full of such objects—or he had almost owned it—or else he had been only the completer of paperwork, the mailer of checks. Other people thought escape was something you did but Kelly knew it was an accretion of small choices, an action you earned. He worked and he drank and when he could he drove the streets of the zone, he checked his lists in the case notes, his homemade maps. A haphazard survey of the city no one wanted. More and more he wore the orange jersey underneath his coat. He kept his doors locked, smoked with his windows up, rolled through stop signs if there were men lingering on the corners of the street. Wherever he went he wore heavier layers, t-shirt, flannel, hood and coat and hat and gloves, thermal underwear under heavy pants tucked into insulated boots, but he arrived back in his apartment shaking, his fingers blue, all his skin full of needles and steam.
Whenever he woke up alone in his apartment he woke up afraid.
Where was the girl. Where was the boy.
For some time he couldn’t bring their names to mind.
But then Jackie. But then Daniel.
He wrote down the same details again but not in the same way. He began to call the heavy detective’s desk in the middle of the night, calling from pay phones to leave lengthy messages, the disconnected thoughts of the case notes:
I know the past is the past and cannot be changed. I accept this limitation but I do not accept that the past does not end, how I have to live
through the past again and again in the present, how the future must contain the same.
How do you see what might take the people you love. How do you understand which of their million hurts is the one that changes them forever.
What other stories are there. What other stories go on and on, waiting for someone strong enough to bend them toward their conclusions.
Kelly never identified himself, hung up if the detective answered with his voice too high pitched for his bulk, asking what, who, why, all the investigative cues. And what was the detective doing there so late, working past midnight, past the middle of the darkest hours.
In the last third of the case notes, Kelly wrote version after version of opening the basement door, of releasing the boy’s wailing, and as he descended the stairs again and again the bed never moved from the center of the room, but was it always the same bed?
The boy was still the boy but now he knew more.
The chair was there too but sometimes he put someone in the chair.
When he tried to picture the bed as he first saw it he also saw the cuff chain looped around the bedframe but he knew he had tried to lift the boy from the bed before knowing the boy was cuffed to the rail. On the page the boy screamed again. Kelly couldn’t have known about the cuffs in the darkness but now he remembered he had. Even as he knew he hadn’t.
The scrapper lived within one story. The salvor occupied another. The case thickened with what they added. What bothered him weren’t the gaps but their overlap. The many stories where there should be one.
Kelly spoke into the phone, said, The threat of physical violence is not enough to prevent violence but it is enough to match it. I used to know this. I used to have a savagery lodged within my bones. Once you could have taken out a rib to grow a killer. I haven’t been punished but who says I don’t want my punishment. I have excuses but I am exhausted by my excuses. Now I want to remove my own rib. To plant it back. The rib is named the scrapper. I recognize the arguments. Circumstances have made me uniquely qualified to be this specific kind of good man. An action that is the end that justifies the means.
The other good man is called the salvor. The one who salvages. Because what is there in the zone but ruin. Who is there left in this blue world but everyone lost at sea, sliding free of the sudden slant of a sinking ship.
Whenever he imagined finding the boy, the boy he saw in the bed became the boy he knew. Not a stranger trapped but his friend taken, an individual stolen from his care. Memory shifted to accommodate current emotion: What was he afraid of then. What was he afraid of now. What was the difference.
He knew so much more about the boy but who was the watcher, a name that meant nothing, the man in the red slicker, a description pretending to be a title.
In the absence of knowledge he inserted abstraction. In abstraction he had always found something easier to fear. It was easier to see if he put the mugger in the chair. If he made the man with the gun do the watching. It made him feel less unsure if it was the brother who sat there, supposedly cruel.
It was not difficult, in his mind, to put either inside the red slicker.
When Kelly called the heavy detective, he sometimes wanted to reveal his identity, to ask if the detective would play his statement back to him. So he could know how it had changed. Because what he remembered was that the salvor opened the door and the boy was there in the bed, whole and ready for rescue. Or else the scrapper opened the door and there was no boy. Or else the scrapper opened the door and there was a boy and there was a suspect and you finished rescuing the boy by punishing the suspect too. A rescue in two parts.
The man in the red slicker, Kelly said, is he a person or an action? An action that until I found the boy I had never been able to name?
Sometimes Kelly would look at the boy and also through him. When the boy sat on the living room floor watching the television or doing his homework. The boy didn’t flicker but maybe he fugued. Once when the boy was over Kelly looked out his window and thought he saw the detective sitting in an unmarked car across the street but what was the chance. He picked up his phone, dialed the detective’s cell number, got the voicemail message. If the detective was the man in the car, then he did not move to answer.
How far back does the long stain go, Kelly asked, one hand opened against the window glass. How can we assign blame unless we know the original mistake, the first man standing over the first boy.
Kelly started to forget if the boy was with him. An amnesia of the commonplace. The first time the girl with the limp woke to the boy sleeping on the couch—to Kelly sitting in the armchair, watching him sleep—she didn’t say anything she couldn’t say with arched eyebrows, a crumpling of the forehead. The tight set of her mouth, holding back all the questions they’d agreed not to ask.
He knew he was making a mistake but he wouldn’t tell the boy no. Another afternoon the buzzer sounded and Kelly pressed the intercom button, asked who it was. The boy knew to let himself in but then the boy’s voice answered: he’d lost his key, needed to be buzzed into the building.
I’m sorry, the boy said, his voice crackling over the intercom.
Inside the apartment the boy hurried to unwrap himself, hat and gloves and scarf and overcoat and blazer, shivering and anxious.
I looked everywhere, the boy said. My room, my desk, my bag. Everywhere.
The constrained everywhere of the young.
Kelly had never seen this expression on the boy’s face: the boy was worried he would be punished. As if Kelly were Kelly’s father, the boy Kelly’s father’s boy.
Locks can be changed, Kelly said. I’m sure you’ll find it. It’s nothing.
Kelly reached for the boy and the boy flinched and Kelly grabbed him anyway. Kelly kneeled down, pulled the boy to his chest, put the weight of the boy’s head against his shoulder. He had never dared hold the boy before, had rarely touched him since bringing him out of the basement. He had barely let himself imagine all this heat, all these bones and scrawny muscles, all this need wrapping arms around him too. This amazing gesture, what he’d wanted for so long. Every moment after wouldn’t be this moment but this one could stretch as long as it had to, its memory becoming something lasting. A charm, Kelly thought, a reassurance in the dark.
THE WEATHERMAN SAID RAIN ALL day but they walked along the river anyway, her hand in his while the boy skipped ahead, kicked at loose rocks, debris fallen over the footpath. The water’s edge was the edge of the city and the edge of the country and on the other bank of the river there was another country because there was nowhere on earth where one nation ended and another did not begin. It was too cold, the end of the year, but it was still forecast to rain any minute and this was the right kind of danger for a man and a woman and a boy. A manageable catastrophe at worst, a story to share. There were other times of day when it wouldn’t be safe to be here. For now there was the rain that didn’t come and the charcoal sky and the high gusting wind putting new waves in the fast chop of the river. The boy ran ahead but he never failed to turn back, and every time he looked Kelly weighed the tangible substance of the gaze. He smiled, shook his head, pointed at the boy. She squeezed his hand. In the distance there was thunder but they couldn’t see the lightning and though they walked all day the rain never came. Ahead of them the boy passed into the darkness of a tunnel under a bridge and though Kelly couldn’t see him he could hear the boy’s laughter, the surprise at being alone in the dark and yet still safe.
W
On the way back to Kelly’s apartment the boy vomited without warning into the floor mats of Kelly’s truck, the cracks and crevices of the backseat. Then the boy vomited again because everyone vomited twice. He apologized softly from the backseat but Kelly waved his apology away. These things happened. It had been a long day or else the boy was overexcited. When they arrived at his apartment, Kelly lifted the boy from the backseat, the boy’s soiled clothes squishi
ng against Kelly’s chest, the boy’s sour breath hot in his ear. The boy was too big to carry far but young enough to sometimes need to be carried and this was one of those times. The girl with the limp shuffled ahead to hold open doors and Kelly brought the boy up the stairs to his apartment and into the bathroom and as Kelly moved through the building the memory of carrying the boy before manifested again: how he had ascended the basement stairs with the boy, how he had taken him to the truck, to the hospital, through the first snow into the waiting light of the emergency room.
Let’s get you out of these clothes, Kelly said. Can you do it yourself or do you need help?
The boy could do it himself but he wasn’t. In the bathroom they kneeled before him, working together to pull his shirt over his head. The boy’s chest so narrow, the unmuscled frame of a child still, his belly a soft roundness over the waistband of his pants. Jackie’s got you, she said, starting the shower while Kelly wet a washcloth. He kneeled back down to clean the boy’s face, his hair, the crusting vomit requiring a more vigorous method. Kelly never knew the right thing to do so he held the boy’s head in one hand and scrubbed with the other. The steam filling the room didn’t help the smell but it did change it. Kelly threw the boy’s t-shirt in the trash and threw the washcloth in after it and when he turned around to face the boy he saw the girl staring at the boy’s back. She didn’t say anything but he saw some of what she’d seen in her look, enough to guess. The shower was running loud and the room was thick with steam and she gently turned the boy by the shoulders to show Kelly the ugly markings on the boy’s back, a stretched series of pinched bruises riding both sides of his spine.