by Matt Bell
Where had he learned these things. What long-forgotten encyclopedia, read by flashlight so his father would know he wasn’t asleep, because his father would only enter after the room was dark. The accumulation of so many useless facts a by-product of a childish defense.
In the video his face was utterly serious but more animated than ever. His hands sat in his lap, atop his spread knees, one hand limp across each thigh. He spoke the weight of the whitetail deer. The weight of bears, the male, the female, the cub each a different weight. The weight of the whale and the squid. He was slurring worse, exhibited a strokelike stutter. If Kelly had been watching someone else he would have thought this was a man dying delirious.
If Kelly had been watching anyone else he would have been happier than he was watching himself.
The video ended. The phone was not a magic window. There was not another Kelly here. The Kelly he had seen was the only Kelly he was. He saw again how he didn’t have access to all of himself but no matter what was revealed he did not believe he could be made to quit the story or to turn from its end.
CONCRETE EVERYWHERE, CEMENT EVERYWHERE ELSE. Gray clouds and gray snow and gray earth. The destruction of the plant had advanced since he was last there or else he was more aware of what was gone. There was heavy equipment parked on-site, long red trailers for scrap and garbage. He couldn’t come during the day anymore, wouldn’t risk being seen by credible witnesses. He searched the plant at night, moved his light through the shattered rooms. As he walked he imagined finding a chasm in the floor of a building, and beneath that hole a great staircase spiraling into the earth, each landing another hallway full of rooms, locked and unlocked doors. Instead he found a tiny aperture secreted into the ground, a break in the surface wide enough to fit a man. Underneath, an uneven descent led to a single set of stairs, a single door. Beyond the door waited a hallway, its first span barely intact, the rest collapsed ten or fifteen feet in, and at the end of that hallway there was another door giving access to a small square room, a space sufficient to the task.
The enumerating of possibilities, the weighing of costs, the sharp rise toward a cliff of certainty: this wasn’t the easiest way but for every action there was a right space. Whenever the variables increased he tried to back up, to rethink. In his apartment he loaded the tools into two duffel bags, each meant for athletic gear but put here to different use. Their weight strained his new shoulders, curved his back. He loaded the truck with the bags, returned for the generator and the lights, everything else hidden at the back of his only closet, buried behind his few outfits. As he worked he heard from some cave within his chest the salvor, unopposed by the scrapper one last time.
He could always abandon the tools, he heard himself say. There was still a choice to be made.
It was enough to have saved the boy, he argued—but then he had to ask, Was the boy saved enough?
The salvor and the scrapper were not exactly voices, more urgencies, rushing gushes of suggestion, potential actions. At first hearing them had required a diminishing of Kelly’s own personality through alcohol or exhaustion. Now he heard their urges in every moment and either might make him move.
Underground there was no difference between day and night but he could only risk arriving in the night. He drove back to the plant, found the building again. Everything looked different in the dark but he was careful as he carried the duffel bags in past the shattered outer walls, over dumped trash, blown debris. There were long hallways leading into the plant but he knew which way to head. Inside one room there was the hole and the shattered slope of floor and at the bottom the door busted out of its shape.
Past the door there’d be no way to see him from the surface. There was a certain deepness he wanted, a certain distance from the ground and the city and the sky. Any violence there would be a private act: A man and a man went into a dark room and only one of them came out. A terrible fairy tale the length of a sentence.
When Kelly was finished he took the case notes from his back pocket and he placed them on the floor, their pages thickened with pasted maps, poor photographs, the weight of ink and frequent handling. He took his lighter from his pocket and because he didn’t need them anymore he set the case notes on fire. The flames of his confession didn’t last long but for a time they lit the blank cave of the room with their flicker.
There was the cave down within Kelly too and now he had made that cave this room.
He left the plant but he wasn’t ready to go home. The girl with the limp wasn’t at work but he knew he wasn’t ready to see her, not in this mood. The boy was lost to him and there wasn’t anywhere else he was wanted. As he drove the streets he passed the storefront church he’d seen from the top of the plant, the bright glow of the prayers within. When he parked the truck in front of the windows to watch the dancing prayer inside he caught the eye of some apostle, the leader of the congregation. The apostle held a plastic sword in one hand, lifted the other to beckon Kelly in. A gesture of ecstatic welcome. As if it were so easy for a prodigal to return to the fold.
THE CIRCLE TURNED and the congregation turned around its hem, the apostle leading his followers, their feet dancing behind his feet, tracing the invisible circle his steps circumscribed, a geometry of belief cut across the stained concrete floor, the blackened squares where the rows of washers used to be. The circle contained and guided them and as they turned they lifted toy swords and crimson banners, raised voices toward tongues. The folding-table altar held the speakers and the speakers were containers too, containing cheap electric crackle and the salvation of the congregation, which did not require fidelity, only volume, the voice of the spirit technology-amplified, extracted out of the fire and the dove and magnetized onto tape and uttered upward at decibel strengths born of the far end of the dial.
There were ways to take the air out of a room and this noise was one conceivable method.
Along the edges went the chairs, the buckets lined with plastic bags, ready for the vomit and the retching and the casting out. The congregation used to unfold the chairs into rows but now the chairs were rarely used. Let the faithful sit in their houses. In God’s house they would stand and move to his Word. The spirit needed space to churn but the apostle wasn’t fancy about smells, walls, former tenants. Any empty room could be a space for the spirit to move a miracle and the apostle and his ministers were there to work the deliverance, to cast out the demons of anxiety and shyness, the demons of addiction, the demons of obesity and fornication.
The miracle was that the swords were just imported plastic, made from recycled soda bottles and lead paint. It was the symbol they needed, not what the symbol was made of.
The miracle wasn’t how you were cured. The miracle was how God was willing to cure you again when you fell.
There were at least one hundred eleven ailments a deliverance could cure and the saints could name them all. When the apostle told stories, he encouraged people to take notes. A reminder of what could go wrong. Tattoos drew demons close. Piercings revealed the promiscuous. A woman with a stud in her nose had opened herself to wantonness. When the microphone squealed it was the demon Bling Bling. It wasn’t a biblical name but most of the demons weren’t so named. The enemy bred them from scratch in every age, improved his technology. Anything new could bear his sigil.
The apostle had seen third-degree burns take on cloaks of baby skin, seen cataracts leeched from eyes. Mending lame legs was old and easy work that started in the circle, with the dancing, the music so loud it could shatter eardrums for the spirit to heal. The will was tied to the flesh. You had to get the body exhausted so what ailed it could be drawn free and broken by the Word.
The apostle clapped, asked for a volunteer: Who among you came to be delivered?
Now someone unfolded a chair, placed it before the two ministers in heavy sweaters and slacks flanking the one to be delivered. Everyone else shaking plastic swords in the air, howling i
n tongues, spinning the circle. From the street passersby could see what they were doing, through the floor-to-ceiling glass meant to show off the mechanics of laundry. Some of the storefront churches smeared their windows with paint or covered them with paper but the apostle left them clear, kept them clean. Some nights he saw a face pressed to the street side of the glass, leaving the smear of the curious, but inside the church they weren’t doing anything needing hiding. He wanted the dark streets to see the bright work being done beneath fluorescent light.
The one to be delivered stepped forward, took his seat. The apostle could see what was inside him, could reckon all his failures, the demons obvious but the bad choices visible too. Because not every impulse was the enemy’s and this man had as much free will as any other.
The one to be delivered shook at the apostle’s touch, recoiled from his voice. His boots stamped the floor, wrung more sweat free from his jumping body. It was darkest bluest winter and the man was dressed for the weather, had kept his coat on the whole dance. The look in his eyes, the exhaustion, the fear, his and not his. He named some of his demons at sentence length, readying his voice for story, but the apostle stopped him.
Demons aren’t complicated, the apostle said, smearing a thumbprint of ash across the other’s forehead. No need to confess their every title. Just give us their names.
Give us Grief. Give us Sorrow.
Say the names Abuse, Abuser, Abused. Say the name Suicide.
If it’s drink, then name it Drink. If it’s drugs, then name it Drugs. If you’re a thief, then you’ve got a thief inside you, named by his action.
Name the killers, the apostle said. Speak every name of every bedeviling thing. The music boomed. The members of the congregation held their swords up and they spoke their high speech and at his command the apostle saw the angels filling the room too, their winged glory summoned, their pale and dark faces. God had made an angel for every shade and an office to obliterate every shadow and they were in the room too, ready for the one who was to be delivered to call out the names of their opposites and as he did so the expressionless angels stepped forward and put their flaming brands to what was called. Someone set a plastic-lined trash can in front of the one being delivered and he filled it with retch and when the sickness was out of him the two ministers on his sides lifted him to his feet, wrapped him in their embrace, a new brother.
Say what you’ve come for, the apostle said, and the one delivered answered.
Sanction, he said. Protection.
The one delivered was wobbly on his feet but the ministers added him to the circle again, got him back in step, pressed a dollar’s worth of plastic into his hand. There were others to save and his voice would help the saving get done—a charge, a commission. The speakers offered loud directions to the body, and if the one delivered couldn’t speak right yet, it owed to how he opened his mouth. He could mimic, work out some call-and-response until he earned his own voice, his own universal manner of speech. The apostle hollered above the noise, danced with his feet high, lifted his knees and kicked up his robes, promised tonight they would all sleep sweet dreams, and the one delivered heard this, considered. The apostle said it was hard to sleep with the lights on but it was impossible to rest without the light within and by the end of the night they would all have their light renewed. The apostle said he would preach until dawn if it delivered them all. The apostle said he was sixty-two years old and if it took forever to put all these waiting angels to work then he planned to live forever.
10
THE EVENING OF THE FIGHT Kelly awoke with ashes on his forehead and his heart thudding wrong—a scuttling, a shallowness. In the bathroom he listened as his heartbeat drummed louder, the blood jerking. He locked his hands over the ache in his chest, pressed hard, as if from outside the ribs he might hold the jumping muscle still. When he turned on the shower he didn’t wait for the water to warm, just sat down on the edge of the tub and let the cold water fall. Afterward his eyes jittered in the mirror, bloodshot and blank. There was a slackness to his mouth he hadn’t seen before. He brushed his teeth, scrubbed the night from his skin, ran a comb through his hair, forced the part. When he dragged the razor across his face the coldest skin resisted, begrudged. He moved carefully across the floor, water everywhere underfoot, slicking the tiles. He fed his body broader commands, noticing every step of every action, thinking of the parts of objects. He smoked before he brushed his teeth and then he dressed, an undershirt, underwear and pants, the watchman’s jersey under heavy flannel, thick socks and the worn boots, the impossible loops of the laces.
While he dressed he watched the news and on-screen the blonde reporter said this was the week ten new homicides were reported inside the zone. Ten homicides including two triple killings. Ten homicides including five men and four women and one child. The names of the victims withheld pending notification of the family. The names of the killers withheld pending arrest and arraignment.
This was the week a burnt and decapitated body was found inside a closed and shredded elementary school, found in a hallway with torn ceilings, with busted tile, without locker doors or lockers left.
This was the week a suspected arson killed a man and a woman and a seven-year-old girl at one thirty in the morning, their bodies falling through the collapsing house, drowned in the smoke and the fire.
This was the week a woman was shot dead in her driveway, still sitting in the driver’s seat with two other friends in the car. The shooter a man in dark clothing.
This was the week a clerk and two elderly customers died at a check-cashing center in a strip mall, the clerk shot despite the bulletproof storefront. There was a buzzer she had to press to let customers in but how could she know who was dangerous before they were standing at the counter.
This was the week a charred body was found inside a trash can behind a bar and this was the week the spokeswoman for the medical examiner’s office said the body was burnt beyond recognition but at least they had his teeth.
This was the week a woman was killed by a neighbor when she knocked on his door, her face bloodied and cut, seeking help after a car accident. This was the week the homeowner opened a locked door to fire a shotgun at the color of her skin.
This week was the week it always was.
What would it have taken to make this week different.
She wouldn’t come to the fight because she didn’t want to see him get hurt and for Kelly there was no one else. Before the appointed time arrived the trainer came into the locker room, sat down in the corner where Kelly was resting, his eyes heavy, hands wrapped and gloved and ready. Kelly wore the red shorts and the red shoes and the orange jersey of the watch, considered his color-draped bulk in the mirror across from the bench. He lifted his eyes at the trainer’s approach but didn’t stand to meet him. Whatever had happened in the circle of swords had taken everything he had but he hoped his energy would return before the fight began. The effects of the late mass lingered, the lifting of the swords, the turning circle, the loud thunder of the boombox, the ashes streaked across his forehead, the presence he hadn’t felt in many years. Perhaps imagined, he didn’t know. In his youth he had craved this feeling. He thought he did not believe in God again but he did still believe in that feeling, the absolute and temporary lack of doubt.
You’re not wearing the robe, the trainer asked.
No, said Kelly. Is it time?
Not yet. Soon.
I’m ready.
Soon. Make it a good show and you’ll get your money.
I won’t fall for nothing.
You will.
I won’t.
I wanted you because I knew you’d think so.
I won’t.
He’ll hit you. He’ll hurt you. Bringer will punch you until you go down or the referee makes him stop and you will have no chance of changing this.
This isn’t what’s going to happen
.
Like I said. I knew you’d think so.
It was nothing but bravado speaking. Kelly hadn’t come to win but to lose in the right way. He’d never understood the scoring, didn’t want to keep score. He only needed to understand if he didn’t plan on forcing the knockout.
When Kelly entered the gym he saw the lights turned up, a spotlight over the center of the mats inscribing a glowing circle in the center of the ring. The crowd wasn’t large but there were more people watching than Kelly was used to, more noise. The chatter before the spectacle, the boredom muddled with expectation, the crowding of bodies in the motionless air, the gym the hottest room Kelly could remember, sweat already wicking his skin.
The trainer walked out beside Kelly, lifting the ropes for Kelly to climb into the ring. He spoke to Kelly’s corner man, then took his place on the opposite side: the contender assigned the blue corner, Kelly dressed in his gifted red. The contender not coming out until Kelly was set. Making Kelly wait, trying to shake his nerve. At last the contender ducking under the ropes, arriving tall and sleek in his corner, his body in motion even before he dropped his robe.
The revealment of the boxer hidden beneath the garment, the contender’s name on the lips of every spectator: Bringer. Bringer. Bringer. This man Kelly did not know but that he had agreed to hurt, to be hurt by. An abstraction of the deadliest order.
Kelly pulled the orange jersey over his head as the referee began to speak. The call to the center. The expectations of a good fight, a clean fight. The gloves touching gloves. The bell ringing and the contender not waiting for Kelly, coming at him faster and stronger than Kelly had imagined but in both men there existed a matching will to hurt, to be hurt, the suspension of the man outside the ring for the man within, for the contest, the agony, the two words that once meant the same thing.