by Matt Bell
The next day I watch as the brother picks the boy up from school. I follow the brown car as the brother drives deeper into the zone, back to the house where he had gone with his friends, his friends’ girls. From a distance I watch the house, watch the silhouettes of the brother and the boy move window to window, climbing to an upper room. It’s not the same room as when he was here with the girl. They’re on the wrong side of the house and I can’t see anything more, can’t hear what is being said or done.
What I want is an excuse, a reason to let the brother go.
Certainly I admit there are blanks in the records.
Certainly I fill in what I can’t prove.
I speculate. I deduce.
I make connections.
What I want for the boy is an end to fear but first I have to leave the boy in danger a little longer. Another crime, like closing the basement door one last time before returning with the hacksaw, before rescuing the boy from the dark of the low room.
I say I want to protect the boy but to do so I cannot imagine any action that is not violence against someone else. And is this limitation found in the world or is it my own most obvious flaw.
THE HEAVY DETECTIVE APPEARED at the apartment door, flashing his badge to gain entrance. As if Kelly could refuse, as if the detective believed he would.
You again, Kelly said. The detective.
Kelly invited him in, waved him toward one of the two chairs seated at the kitchen table. The hockey game was on the television but Kelly made no move to turn down the sound. He lit a cigarette, held out the pack to the detective. The detective waved away the offer but removed his own from the inside pocket of his jacket.
Sanchez, the heavy detective said. My name is Sanchez. And today is the three-month anniversary of you walking into the hospital with Daniel in your arms. Ninety days without any new evidence means the kidnapping is officially a cold case. I’m supposed to stop working on it.
Daniel. How long had it been since Kelly last heard the boy’s name spoken aloud? The day he’d given him up.
I didn’t know, Kelly said.
You’ve been seeing him, the detective said. He comes here after school.
Kelly smoked and maintained eye contact and waited. The detective had not come to tell Kelly things Kelly knew, unless he had come to tell Kelly he knew as well. There was something the detective had come to hear him say but Kelly didn’t know what. These weren’t questions, required no confession.
Daniel’s parents mentioned it, the detective said. They said they’re not concerned but I am. I’m concerned about why the boy comes here, about what you do when the boy comes. I’m concerned because there are no clues in this case except you.
The boy is my friend, he said.
Daniel is your friend, the detective said. And my name is Sanchez. Detective Sanchez.
Kelly said, Yes. Detective Sanchez.
But that’s not how you think of me.
No. It’s not.
It was simply a guess. A deduction by a detective. And anyway, he wasn’t wholly correct.
Never my boy, Kelly said. The boy. I think of him as the boy.
Yes, that’s right, the detective said. That’s the way you say it, the way you’ve said it from the first time we met. The way you said it when you made those phone calls where you wouldn’t identify yourself. As if it could have been anyone else calling. So tell me: What does it mean when you call him the boy?
Kelly didn’t answer. It wasn’t anything so crude as a clue. As a child he’d learned how in the beginning there were the animals, nameless in the Garden, nameless and without knowledge of their uses. The first man, the giver of names, subjugating the beasts into a system of kingdoms, phyla, classes, and orders: thorny-headed worms, wheel carriers, claw bearers, all the rest. It was an impossible task to name all of creation but in the task there existed a chance to own the world.
And so what did the man who named nothing own.
He’s not my boy, Kelly said. He comes and goes as he pleases.
It’s a mistake, the detective said. That’s what I came here to tell you. You are the sole person of interest in this case. You have placed yourself at the scene. If you are innocent of an unsolved crime, then it is a mistake to continue to associate with the victim.
He said, You have made yourself a suspect.
But he’s gone, Kelly said. The boy has gone back to his parents. I don’t see him anymore. Didn’t his parents tell you? They’ve taken him back. Cut off contact. Whatever might have happened has already ended.
The detective stared, waited for more. The case notes were in the bedroom, in the bottom drawer of the nightstand, next to the stacked mattress. Kelly could give them to the detective, free himself of their burden. He had failed to find the man in the red slicker and he could be released of the charge. He was not a detective. No one was expecting him to solve the case but he had tried his best. He was still trying but in the end he had to admit the paltriness of his notes. The lack of conclusiveness. All the pages were filled with his script but reading them again had left him more afraid than ever. The difficulty of premeditation. How long had he known his course? He was either in or he was out. Ever since he found the boy he had been telling himself a story and it was important that at the last moment the ending became its own inevitable answer to the world.
The simplest version of the ending to come: he had promised to protect the boy.
Kelly thought he could stop everything if he could give the case notes to the detective but he knew he couldn’t, not without explanation. Because he wouldn’t explain himself he sat in silence, let his face sag blankly, waiting for the questioning to be over or for the blow of something worse. Thoughts followed, but nothing he would say without prompting. The heavy detective continued to talk but Kelly stopped listening. He didn’t notice when he closed his eyes but when he opened them the detective was already walking out the door, shaking his head.
The blonde reporter was on the news every night and in his apartment Kelly watched the broadcast until he had seen her and the weather. The forecast was always for clouded skies and snow and whenever the reporter appeared she wore a series of pantsuits and power skirts, blue and black and light and dark gray. He watched every night but he never again saw the tan skirt, the knee-high boots. As if the outfit had been worn for his benefit.
On-screen, she stood beside a median over the west-east freeway, drive time passing fast behind her, the last gasp of quick movement before the nightly slowing of traffic. This was the day of the shooter on the freeway, each shot coming out of a moving vehicle, fired across the median. No one had been killed but the blonde reporter said a wounded man had tickets to the hockey game. The home team lost and the man got treated for a bullet wound and this was the city they lived in. Now the blonde reporter spoke over a photograph of a cracked window, the bullet hole intact in the middle of the glass. Kelly lifted his own loaded pistol from where it sat beside him on the couch, raised it to the screen. Aimed its barrel at the bullet hole.
The blonde reporter’s voice was speaking but he seldom listened to her words. He steadied the pistol. He mouthed the word bang until the bullet hole was gone, replaced by a map of the lower half of the state, covered in fluorescent clouds.
Snow again, the weatherman said, and temperatures dropping ever closer to zero.
Kelly picked up his cell, called the blonde reporter, the number on her card pasted in the case notes. When she answered Kelly said his name and waited. When she didn’t respond immediately he said it again, growled a question. Did she remember him or not. Would she see him again. Could he buy her a drink.
The case notes were in his hands now. He said, There’s something I need to tell you.
I’m married, remember? she said.
I do remember, he said. The ring’s fake.
Not anymore, she said. She’d
met a man, engaged him. Now her ruse was her reality.
But you’re not married, he said. Only engaged.
Engaged to be married. It’s the same thing.
Nothing is the same thing, he said. There are no equivalencies.
Kelly liked how when you hung up a cell phone there was no dial tone after. Just the ending of sound, its trailing absence.
The next morning the reporter called back, said she could interview him again. The sports anchor had told her about the fight, about Kelly versus the contender. Bringer was someone who mattered, who viewers could be convinced to cheer. More human interest. The accidental hero versus some future greatness of the sport. A feature story, the blonde reporter offered, a way to close the loop, to connect the finding of the boy with the battle of man versus man.
As mornings passed the preparations for the fight took on a fated aspect: if Kelly were hurt or killed in the fight, then without him the target would go free. He threw himself recklessly against the bodies of the other men, sought a stance to bring them hardest against him in return. What could he say or do to them to remove their hesitance, their resistance to the possibility of lasting harm? He jabbed, circled, jabbed, and moved in for a clinch, a chance to push his forehead into the face of another man, a chance to lift a knee into a thigh or kneecap. He fought dirty, sought to anger, bragged in the locker room to anyone who would listen. There was no difference between the amount of force necessary to knock a man out and the amount necessary to kill a man and he invited whatever might come, wanted to taunt it out of his opponents. They shied away, left him alone in the shower room. He told himself they were practicing for an exhibition and he was preparing for something real, outside the ring. Not the representation of battle but battle itself. Every injury became an exhumation by exhaustion, until there would be nothing hidden, nothing buried, nothing left, and when he was nothing but bruises he would carry his blood in his skin and what was trapped within him would be brought to the surface.
The trainer stopped him in the locker room, handed him a paper-wrapped package. He smiled as Kelly tore the paper to uncover the necessary ceremonial garb: a new pair of red gloves, the red-and-white shorts, the hooded red robe.
A gift, the trainer said. For your first and only fight.
Now the scrapper. Now the salvor. Until the duty was done.
Now the deep winter. Now the blue air and the slow cracking of concrete against the frozen and immovable earth. Now the streets ever more vacant in the zone, all Kelly’s knowledge of their topography blurred by constant snowfall. Now the unbroken clouds hiding the pale and heatless heart of the sun.
Now Kelly returned to the neighborhood where he’d found the boy, circled the missing house, read the street’s graffiti as prophecies, premonitions, threats. the great hope, he read. once again spelled once agian. Words he couldn’t read, words in Spanish and Polish and Arabic, other scripts he couldn’t identify, mangled senseless by ornamentation. the only age. A dead raccoon crushed in the street, tagged with blue spray paint, the photorealistic face of a child stenciled onto a brick wall, bracketed by birth date, death date. He rarely saw another person outside but he saw their evidence. dead serious. amos, lied to. He saw snowplows moving through some blocks but more of the streets went unplowed. There were streets where he wasn’t convinced there was one human soul remaining and those were the blocks he searched the hardest. The longer the walk the braver it made him. The boredom of being alone, walking below the many names of the Messiah scrawled in spray paint, the higher the holier. More names everywhere, names falling down, and when the names were gone what city would remain.
This was his last chance but what was the chance the man in the red slicker was wearing the same clothes. What was the chance he looked anything like what Kelly had imagined. Kelly didn’t know, kept moving house to house, block to block. He opened gates, walked up to front doors, tested locks and knockers, and in every entranceway he wanted to yell Hello, to yell Is anyone home, to yell out some right name.
In one living room he looked around at the frozen carpet and he said, If I knew a name I wouldn’t be here.
In some kitchen—the sink thick with the petrified shit of some animal, a cat or else something larger, wilder—he said, I want to be the one who stops this but I don’t know if I am.
The zone was bigger on the inside than on the outside, the interior spaces of houses each yawning blanker than Kelly had ever imagined. Even without the case notes he made new guesses, inferences, imprecise triangulations. When he was tired of driving he parked the truck in front of nameless bars, their windows lit by neon signs advertising brands he’d thought extinct. He ordered whiskeys until he slurred his questions and then he backed down to beer. Other men drank from tall cans and low glasses and they watched the aggressive way Kelly moved his growing body and he liked the way they watched. In some bars there were nothing but men. All of his responses became inappropriate, crossed up. Once he got so angry he got most of an erection. In a parking lot he broke an offending nose with his fists, put a boot into the wheezing man’s ribs before stumbling off to vomit into the gravel. He said, This wasn’t an investigation but an interrogation—but later he couldn’t remember who he had said it to.
The reporter sent him clips from their filming, private links to web-hosted videos Kelly loaded on his phone. In her email she apologized, said the news loved weird but this was too weird to air: the fight hadn’t happened but they were done filming. The phone’s screen was three inches wide and so he saw himself in miniature, a homunculus moving through a blighted landscape, the monochrome of the midwestern winter. A certain kind of starkness, the elemental bleakness of a man astride a wilderness of concrete and steel, acid rain and brick and rust.
The word homunculus. Where had it come from. What documentary, what book.
She was trying to get promoted, her email said, not fired.
His teeth were still firmly seated but he worried other connections in his head were loosening. He watched the clips and he tried to remember their context. In the first clip he saw a house he had scrapped before finding the boy, where the cameraman and the blonde reporter followed from outside the frame so Kelly appeared to be talking to himself. The walls of the house were opened, and on-screen he kneeled beside them, explained what he might have removed from where. He couldn’t recall being so knowledgeable but here he was describing the kinds of pipes the wall had held, the old copper, the discarded technology of the wiring, knob and tube everywhere in the house. Single-insulated copper conductors, he heard himself saying. Joist and stud drill holes, porcelain insulating tubes, porcelain knob insulators.
The insulating sleeves pulled through the walls were called looms, he said.
In this house the looms were made of cloth, he said. Other houses, rubber.
In her email, the reporter wrote, Please do not contact me again. Please consider getting help. Best of luck to you in your recovery.
One of his ears was swelled and bruised, an ugly organ. He strained to hear over the ringing. The second clip showed Kelly at work, silently shoveling swept debris into a dumpster. His face was blank, his eyes distant. There weren’t any other people in the frame and this shot was lonelier than the last. He was in the parking lot in front of an abandoned motor lodge but you couldn’t tell from this angle. He could hear an excavator but not see it. The whole block was being leveled and this was one of the last structures. The space around him swelled, swallowed him up. The camera angle widened to better show the absence of nearer structures, the length of the remaining building, a sign bearing some of the letters of the name of the motel. The latest in a line of such signs, partial namings. As if a part of a word did you any good. As if you could half name a city, a country, the world.
The third video showed Kelly at the gym in sweats and a t-shirt, Kelly bigger than he had ever seen himself before. Heaving steel weights over his shoulders until every part
of him bulged. A look in his eyes Kelly didn’t recognize from any mirror. Then his fists on the heavy bag, too slow, his movements looking stunned and stupid but delivering enough force to shudder the bag out of the grinning trainer’s grip.
The final clip opened with a close-up of Kelly, seated before the camera on his couch, his living room splayed in the background. All the familiarity gone. How anything could be rendered alien by the camera. He took the phone into the living room, sat on the couch, and pressed play, then stood, walked around the coffee table, kneeled where the cameraman had kneeled.
It was like watching through an instrument of magic. He could look above the phone and see he wasn’t there but through the screen he saw himself sitting in his usual spot, talking about scrapping, about the weight of things, the relative weights. Car batteries were worth so much a pound but they were so heavy, so dirty. Still he took one where he could find one, he said.
Steel was heavier than a lot of things, he heard himself say. A mass of aluminum weighed less than a mass of copper or iron.
The slow terror of his heartbeat. He didn’t remember saying what he was saying on-screen. Now he seemed to be reciting the weights of various mammals, various birds. A wolverine, he seemed to be saying.
What is the weight of a badger? he said. Twenty or twenty-five or thirty pounds.
He was a little drunk watching but how drunk had he been when he said these words, when he let them tape him saying them? A condor is a heavy bird, he said, and he looked so exhausted saying it.
The video was less than halfway over but he didn’t think there was anything else except more of this. The species and weights began to come faster, with less commentary. The weight of the hummingbird and the seagull and the common rat. The weight of the hyena. The weight of the buffalo—the bison, he slurringly corrected himself—and the weight of the spotted owl.