Scrapper

by Matt Bell

  When he said, Walking around in the rain. This guy is up to no good or he is on drugs.

  When he said, These assholes. They always get away.

  The absence of doubt. The pushing back of almost. This was what the killer wanted. To be sure. To be right. To be righteous.

  The killer was not afraid of what he knew. These assholes.

  The killer was not afraid when the dispatcher said, Stop.

  When the dispatcher said, We don’t need you to follow him.

  When he said, I’m not afraid.

  The killer was not afraid because he knew he was in the right. The total absence of doubt. The end of almost.

  These assholes, said the killer. They always get away.

  The killer was not afraid when he drew the gun from his waistband.

  Because at that range the killer couldn’t miss.

  Because there was nothing to be afraid of.

  Because all he had to do was close his eyes and squeeze the trigger.

  The killer was not afraid because squeezing the trigger required basically nothing.

  The killer was not afraid of the sound of the shot. He could barely even hear it, the blast muffled by the body.

  These assholes. They almost always get away.

  Not always. Not this time.

  The killer was not afraid.

  The killer was not afraid when the police arrived.

  The killer was not afraid when they cuffed his hands behind his back or when they asked him if he needed medical attention or when they pushed his head down as they helped him into the back of the squad car.

  The killer was not afraid when the ambulance came for the body.

  The killer was not afraid when the news vans arrived.

  The killer was not afraid when the squad car drove him from the scene in front of their cameras.

  The killer was not afraid when the detectives questioned him at the station.

  I stood my ground, the killer said. I saved myself first.

  The killer was not afraid when he walked out into the lobby of the precinct, when he saw outside the protesters already gathering their anger against him, or when his wife appeared to take him home, when he saw she knew she was the wife of a killer.

  The killer was not afraid because he had kept safe his family, his home, his community.

  These assholes. The killer did not think in the first person except when the killer thought us and them. And so what if the kid had been living there too, if he had been a part of their community. Because inside a community there were other communities.

  The killer was not afraid when he watched the television news, where the reporters and the pundits called him a killer for the first time. Nor when the pundits asked themselves who the killer was because if there was anything the killer knew it was this, who he was. He had almost been the killer before. Now there was no doubt. The law could quibble over whether he was a murderer but forever he would be a killer either way.

  The killer was not afraid even during the lengthening nights in the dark of his house, where in those endless hours he lay unsleeping, listening to the charged noise of the street outside his house, listening to the steady clock of his heart while he thought about the spot blocks away where he had killed, where these assholes had made him kill.

  Even now, deep in the aftermath, the killer is what the killer was. Surely this has not changed.

  Because surely the killer was not afraid.

  Surely the killer was not afraid then or ever again.

  Surely the killer was not, is not, will not ever be made afraid.

  PART THREE:

  THE LOW ROOM

  7

  THE PLANT BECKONED AGAIN. A year later and it was still merely scheduled for destruction, hunkered in all its crumbling glory upon the famous avenue. One January afternoon Kelly drove his truck around the front of the buildings first, then into the back alleys, parking along the frozen and rutted mud of the broken roads. He walked across the rubbled yard and into the vast vacancy of the plant, moving through rooms whose shapes loomed differently than what he’d imagined, with ceilings that climbed and swelled or else sagged and fell, with floors cracking and curving away from the level. In other places the reinforced concrete held, looked ready to last another hundred years, and in the interior there were places where no sunlight penetrated and in those dark halls he used his headlamp to peer through piled debris, followed a patina of mold and rust through doorways without doors, the wood long ago rotted, the hinges pocketed. But what was on the other side of any wall was never so different than where he’d come from: a similar kind of cold, better lit or more dark, scavenged or else cluttered with trash, the unmaintained grandeur of open space, everything useful carried away.

  Inside the plant he followed the sun’s dappling path, the hours of the day clocked by its transit. It took longer to cross the building in this slow fashion but it was something to do with his body, its newly inexhaustible muscles. As he walked his cell phone rang and voicemail notifications beeped and though he rarely listened to the messages he never deleted them. He let messages pile into his inbox, let voices remain upon his device, caught between satellites in the sky and servers buried in the coolness of the earth. He was well acquainted with how anything might happen. If he wasn’t careful he could lose the people under his care and he feared then he would forget them so fast. This was the cruelty of the linear life, its adaptations: not that you would move on but that the moving on would obscure the past, bury it deep.

  Once he’d thought he would never forget the sound of anyone he loved but now he couldn’t remember his grandparents, his mother, his childhood friends. The southern woman was gone only a year and it was as if he had never known her voice.

  He could see her boy’s face but could he hear her boy’s speech?

  Such a quiet son. So little conversation between them, even at the end when they were always together. More and more all he could remember was his error. All the good destroyed by what he’d done wrong. How he’d stood beside the boy’s bed in the night, how after he’d undressed he had thought he had not been naked but instead dressed in father, as he believed now his father had dressed in his own father’s skin, a trick of black magic for the blackest hours.

  When he closed his eyes he could see the southern woman and her boy speaking but he could not hear their voices, their images keeping company among all the other silent faces, all motion, no noise. People he’d loved, fading toward the abstract. There were grids buried beneath the earth and floating above the sky and threaded up the bellies of skyscrapers and from them he would delete nothing. The machines would hoard it all. He didn’t love the modern world but he loved this. If the girl with the limp died tomorrow then he would listen again to her last messages because to keep her alive in memory would be to keep her alive. Because one day there would be no one living who remembered the form of your face or the sound of your voice and on that day it would be as if you had never existed. This was the final death of the unremarkable. No record, no remembrance, no one to carry your speech and your image forward into the future. It would happen to the memory of others because you couldn’t always be vigilant against it. You would not know when it happened to you.

  He arrived at the location of the fire not from the outside but from within, from above. It took hours but he knew the general direction through the plant, climbed the floors as he walked until he emerged onto the roof at the edge of the building. The fire was a year old but he thought he could smell the blackened earth somewhere below him, beneath the snow, the bent steel moved aside for the extraction of the bodies. He remembered: How the fireball unfurled as every alight mote of dust lit the next, the distance of air so slim and the fire traveling easy across the gap. How he’d watched the fire engulf the building, the company of men. How he’d put his back to the fire and fled. How as he had he�
��d imagined the better man who might have stayed, the brave man who might have called for help, who might have heard the voice of the girl with the limp months earlier, when he’d needed it most.

  How different this past year could have been.

  He might be dead, consumed in the secondary blast bursting after he was already far enough for safety.

  He might be in prison and then there would be no girl with the limp for him to know.

  The boy would not have been found, at least not by him.

  Memory didn’t require remembering to exist. Memory could wait dormant, metastasizing in silence. What he had forgotten might dismantle or appropriate what surrounded it. A mass of loaded neurons fired across gray matter, set off a squelch of wet distortion and biofeedback until there appeared these nameless men lost in the fire, lost as from a safe distance Kelly had stared helplessly into the scorched place of their anguish, their screaming and flailing.

  Next came the boy, lost already, who was always to him the boy he became after his captivity, never again the same boy he had been before. It was an agreed-upon fiction that he could be made so again. This was the creed of parents, teachers, therapists, that there was a previous state the boy could be returned to. As if a boy were a fixed quantity. As if the quality of a boy were not a thing in flux.

  Then the southern woman, then her child, her own boy, their names he couldn’t bear to speak.

  How the nightmare of time was that time was not linear but simultaneous.

  How everything that had ever happened to him or from him was still happening, even if he couldn’t always remember the cause. Even if he wouldn’t always admit what he remembered.

  How what he’d done meant that he was still his father’s son. How he had become the man the father had been to him, that he thought the grandfather had been to the father.

  Their inheritance: Once a killer, always a killer. Once a victim, always a victim.

  And could the good man be made to last as long.

  Now the fading twilight of the midwestern winter: the site of the fire lay below but whatever he thought he saw wasn’t lit by anything but memory. He had wanted to finish climbing the plant during the day but when he looked around him all he surveyed was the deepening gray of the zone, stretching as far as he could see. The streetlights extinguished, the roads untrafficked for long stretches, each set of headlights a mere wrinkling of the dark. In all directions he saw fewer windows lit than the architects and city planners had intended, than the first citizens of these blocks had hoped.

  His headlamp illuminated almost nothing in the open air but if he pointed it at his feet he could see where he might go next. He took a step out onto the central girder leading across the open span of air below and the metal received his weight without movement or sound or other complaint. He put his arms out to steady his walk and then he took another step. Somewhere above him he heard the passage of a passenger jet but he didn’t look. Everything peripheral became unnecessary distraction, increased the danger of forgetting the necessary forms of attention. From this height he could see more headlights moving in the street around the plant, lone cars making lonely traffic. There was a tightness in his chest but it was only more fear. There was a ringing in his ears but there was always a ringing in his ears. He was sweating but couldn’t lift his hands to wipe his face. His legs didn’t start to shake until he was past the halfway point but then his heartbeat came unbound from expectation, set its own rhythm. There was the starting a task and there was finishing what you started and he was making the move across. The air freezing around him and above him, and in the zone below the air was black beneath the furrowed winter sky, and almost everywhere he looked there was no light. Only a single length of glass blazed, a fluorescent banner stretched at street level some blocks away: a storefront church, holding a late service. The power of prayers he had believed in, caught brightly behind distant glass. The girl with the limp believed there were good men and women in the city and as Kelly looked out across the architectural darkness of the zone he wished those secret saints would come to their windows, wished they would each lift to the glass a single lit lamp, a flashlight, a flame. For his sake, he wished they would make themselves known.

  The place where the fire had burned waited closer than ever, a short plummet to the ground below, where in his nightmares he’d dreamed of the dirt mixed with concrete and dust, the char of bone, the flaky remnants of skin. A single breath gathered, enough to let out one or two words, no more than several short syllables. His body was moving forward as if disconnected from his mind but if he could retouch the connections he would begin to speak. What he wanted to say might have been Help me. It might have been I’m sorry. The cold slid through his layers of clothing, found purchase in the holds of his body. He had saved a boy but what other goodness could he do, alone in the zone. He blinked and when he opened his eyes the light had changed again and he was closer to the other side of the beam. When he thought he couldn’t take another step he reached up and strobed the headlamp, moved the switch back and forth, the lamp’s flashes lighting the nearest bricks. He noticed he was only wearing one glove, the skin of the bare hand blotched and rashed. He closed his eyes, wavered on the beam. This was the purest manifestation of alone: the cold, the dark, the absence of anyone to hear what he meant to say, the way he moved his mouth around the words. The cold grew absolute, its deep numbness a weariness piercing muscle and organ and bone, but he imagined there was a colder cold farther down, the permanent freeze, where movement and breath and heat would all cease. For a moment he saw around him every wrong thing stilled, slowed until he might step outside their wrongness. He knew who he was, who he had been becoming, what he would have at last done to himself if not for the girl with the limp, for the boy. How now he had something to live for, found in the zone where he had not expected to find it.

  He took the next step. The step after. He wasn’t sure he believed he’d make it but with every step less of the crossing remained and into the abridged remainder of the dark he spoke the words he was most afraid to say, the admittance of his failure to find the man in the red slicker, the splash of color he sought surely moving somewhere within this muted world and still somehow nowhere to be seen.

  8

  IF THE INTRUDER FOUND YOU again it wouldn’t be in any basement. All the boy could give the detectives was the brown car and the black mask and the red slicker and you had left the car and the mask and the red slicker behind. The intruder couldn’t know where you’d fled but every night you imagined him finding you inside this upper room readied for a boy, readied for listening to his muttering, for watching his face, the tiny movements of a boy, the tiny features, the eyes, ears, nose, lips. The opening and closing of the hands. The little hairs tall on the arms but nowhere else, not yet.

  When you were inside the room with a boy the only noises would be the boy breathing, the words the boy spoke, if there were words—and there were always words, small phrases, beggared queries—plus all the small exclamations of the body and of the shifting room. In the new city you began to have dreams of a new and better boy but you remembered the dreams best in the little room, inside its small measurements made smaller by mattresses secured to the walls, the carpeted floor thickened and deadened with more carpet, remnant scraps. Upon the carpet there was the bed and the chair, the bed prepared for a boy and the chair meant for a man, and in your dream the boy stayed in the bed, cuffed to the bottom rail, and in the bed the boy aged: first the age of the taking, then the ages after, one year after another, and at every age the boy was naked on the bed, too big for his first clothes and without you offering to find him anything else.

  I’m hungry, the dream boy would say, his voice huskier now.

  Or he would say, I’m thirsty.

  The boy would grow but not by getting bigger, he would age but he would shrink against his bones and you would shrink with him. Your bodies slimmed to skin a
nd thin muscle. Hair falling out. Teeth, toenails, fingernails. A complete lack of nourishment but never pain or diminishment or death. You were tired but you wouldn’t sleep. Both your tongues so large in your mouths, those disgusting organs. You not clothed either. Your bellies distended, plump with absence. Your penis collapsed, your scrotum hanging loose between skinny legs, your bones resting atop the wood of your chair, which by then you wouldn’t have left in decades.

  See the bowl and spoon from the boy’s last meal, eaten years ago. See the flies, many seasons past. Their husks moving with the dust. The boy staying a boy as the years pass. Heartbeats louder without muscle between heart and skin. Ribs so soft without nutrition. The rubbery thud of the body, the papery rasp of breath.

  One day the boy would be as big as you or else you would be as small as a boy and the boy would slide his emaciated ankle through the catch of the cuff and stand up beside the bed. Then he would speak or not speak, then he would stay or he would leave. If the boy went from the room you would follow. If the boy stayed, then you would stay too, content at last.

  You were in the upper room when they entered the house. You heard their footsteps on the floorboards, their voices loud but casual. They were not the ones who were afraid. Whenever you were caught you hid and you were already in the best room for hiding, the last room with a lock, one you’d installed yourself. A padlock latch for either side of the door, for whichever world you occupied.

  You closed and locked the door but what was a locked door but an invitation.

  Inside the soundproofed room you couldn’t hear their movements. Time passed but how much. Impossible to tell. All the sound in the room the sound you made yourself. The huff of breathing, a nervous wheeze through weird teeth. Perhaps they were dismantling the bathroom, ruining the walls to get to the pipes. Probably they were tearing the wiring from the bedroom or the living room. There was a kitchen without appliances but there was more wiring, more pipes. There was a basement and there was more metal downstairs in the dark. Surely they wouldn’t need to enter this one room, the smallest room in the house.