Scrapper

by Matt Bell

  His father: Kelly remembered his face but not like he used to. The vague sheen of some last memory fading. It would have taken a picture to bring back the color of his father’s eyes but Kelly could still remember how it felt to hold his father’s gaze.

  The scrapper remembered nothing. The man of action was a house of empty rooms, a city of empty houses, a nation of emptying cities. Dirt from end to end, from black to black. A dead land where there was nothing left to feel, no one to tell you how you had stopped trying. A place where you could do no wrong because you could do no right.

  It wasn’t a place you found but a place you could make.

  The salvor was not afraid of the dark or the deep but they were not his first elements. He was meant to descend, to take what was valuable, to return to the surface without harm. Past this point in the taking there was almost nothing the salvor could do. There was no redemption in suffering, no correction in violence. Just diminishment and death. A bad thing happened and then another bad thing and another and another until you broke.

  Kelly removed the tape and the target began to speak. Kelly wasn’t confused by who was in the low room but still it took some time to recognize the soft voice. He had spoken to the brother only once before. The brother had been an idea more than a person but now here he was, his personhood everywhere, leaking in the low room. All the titles merely symbols for what had a better name. Estranging did not mean to make someone a stranger but Kelly did not know another word. Whatever he did next would be the final act of his friendship with the boy. He could hurt the target worse. He could let the brother go. The action was close to complete but nothing was yet irrevocable. To have free will was to be both good and evil. To have free will was to choose, moment by moment, one or the other.

  The salvor interceded, spoke for the last time. Kelly heard the words, voiced them into the low room. To the brother he said, What if you could become a good man. What if there is good you might do still, what if there is a good man who could be salvaged, someone better inside you who could be brought back into the light. What if the longest story is the story that bends toward the gravity of the good.

  Kelly said, What if the greater crime isn’t what we’ve done but that in trying to end it I stop some better you coming after?

  But what if I let you go, he said, and you hurt the boy again?

  With the tape removed the brother could at last speak in his defense. The brother’s voice was strained by a panic Kelly couldn’t bear to hear. He paced the dark stretch of room before the chair, clenching and unclenching his fists as the brother claimed unexpectedly familiar grievances: What if it wasn’t the mother’s house the brother had moved away from but the father’s. What if the boy and the brother had the same father Kelly had. What if their mother was his same mother, a kind woman but a woman who would say nothing, do nothing. Who accompliced herself by looking the other way.

  The brother kept talking, faster now, less intelligible. There were more words coming but Kelly wanted to already be past them. He howled, grasped for the table, missed and crashed into it instead. The solvable unsolved arrived again, taunting. The table shuddered, scattered whatever little remained. The clatter of tools, the sound of wood and metal impacting concrete, the zone’s most common refrain. He hadn’t known what he was looking for until he came back up with the pistol. He couldn’t see the safety in the dark but he thought he could work it by touch. Even after the brother stopped speaking Kelly could hear him breathing, could hear all the small involuntary movements of his body. Kelly took a few steps back, waited for his blood to slow. He wanted to see what was behind the blackness, wanted to hear whatever was at the bottom of the sound, the new confusion echoing in the dark.

  When nothing was louder than the ringing in his ears, then Kelly raised the pistol, lifting its heavy weight against the drag of the black air. Each time he fired the blast lit the room, light and dark interchanging so fast that all Kelly saw was a staccato sort of nothing. In the blindness that followed he put the pistol to his own chin, found the trigger. Nothing. Nothing and the smell of gunpowder. He put the pistol in his pocket. He took the pistol out of his pocket and placed it on the ground. There were new smells in the air and it was harder to hear with the ringing louder than ever. He stepped forward, moved toward where he thought the chair was, toward the body in the chair. With his hands outstretched he found the body gasping, speaking in syllables Kelly couldn’t understand, a tongue of one. He put his hands on the body, searching for the wound. When the body recoiled unharmed, shaking in its seat—all breath and voice, all blood and muscle moving beneath clammy skin, strong jumping flesh draped beneath the red hood—then Kelly stepped back disbelieving, fled the brother’s barking pleas until he tripped over some fallen object, its length sprawling him across the floor, smacking his face against the concrete.

  Kelly lay quietly on the floor, breathed the disturbed dust of the century. Somehow all the rage had gone out of him even though the task wasn’t finished. What was left? Only an anxious regret. When he stood with the sledge in his hands he felt tricked. The arrival of grossest inevitability. The limit between one life and the next. The way the blow you never saw coming pushed you over. The land of the living, the land of the dead. Not one and then the other, but one nested within the next. When had it even happened.

  The building would stand until one day someone claimed all that yet endured: they would tear it down with machines, they would break the bones of the buildings and rip the last of their guts from the ground. A mechanical reckoning, a recycling of the late greatness. A city collapsed, its citizens driven out, its halted factories left to linger. Thieves in the ruins, murder below the earth.

  All the metal in the zone would one day be removed, forgotten, reset. Dental records could identify the body, forensic evidence might find Kelly, but metal had no memory. He’d left the red robe behind. Surely other stains would last. In the grayer light of the hallway he took off his gloves, ran his hands over the door, the doorframe, every surface impossibly cool beneath the earth. He would take his chances with the fingerprints he wasn’t supposed to have. Either a detective would catch him or else a detective would not and he would let his worn hands decide. He trudged up the stairs, toward the surface of the world. Already the event began diverging and he recognized this quality of his thought for what it was, not a flaw of memory but an enhancement, a way to believe in a better life than the one he had lived, some good world without a past. What was wrong with him included a way to prepare for an aftermath. How aftermath wasn’t necessarily a pejorative. How he had lived with the version of himself that had made possible every bad thing he could remember doing, by damage, by weakness, by choice. But surely somewhere within there must still be another man, one who had never done anything wrong, had never hurt anyone, who had been loved back by everyone he had ever loved. But what was this man’s name, by what title could he be called to appear.

  Back out in the blue air of the zone, Kelly put his mouth to the cuff of his coat, sucked hard, tasted the crackle of sweat and grit. The visible world shuddered and the shuddering came in waves. He wanted to vomit again but the vomit was not coming out. He pressed his hands against his stomach, pushed his fingers and thumbs into the bruises he found. He gagged against the pain but nothing else came, only the familiar throb of overexertion. He sank down to his knees, rocked back on his heels, placed his hands on his thighs. He kept waiting to catch his breath and it kept not coming. Something had broken. His fingers were numb and if there had been anyone to call for help he knew he wouldn’t be able to work his mouth, wouldn’t be able to hear his own voice over the awful increase of the ringing in his ears.

  The car had been parked close but not close enough. He tried to walk, brought himself to life by the effort. Every ache and strain shouted its blame. He heard a sound like a blur, watched a throbbing cross his vision as he tried again to stand. The alley where he’d parked the car loomed emptie
r than he expected. Paper trash caught against the bricks, lay buried in the snow. The flotsam of a city. He put his hand along one wall, moved forward through a weariness so encompassing he hoped it couldn’t have originated within him. Air as exhaustion. One eye was bruised closed and the other so badly diminished his eyesight refocused uselessly as he sorted the blearing scene: something was gone that was supposed to be present and for a moment he couldn’t place it.

  He began to laugh when he understood the car was missing. A horrible, humorless sound, a high-pitched alien laugh that did not, at first listen, seem to belong to him. A loon, he thought, a bird of his childhood, a spirit bird announcing its flight. It was hard to know exactly how he was harmed, even when he had done the harm himself. Somewhere in the distance a horn honked, a warning or an exclamation, a horn honking and honking, panic and alarm but not from him.

  PRIPYAT

  EVERY YEAR HE THOUGHT HE was as thin as a man could get but the next year he woke up thinner. Now he knew the name of every rib. His eyes jutted far enough from his skull he thought he could see one orb with the other. The endless dryness of his tongue, how for decades it had been a fat animal and now it was small and black and useless, a worm inside a toothless cavern. When his last loneliness began he’d stopped speaking in sentences and now as he moved mutely through the forest it was only external sounds that broke the silence: the sound of last dogs and last birds, the sound of wind, the sound of creaking wood and straining metal and flapping fabric. The whispered threat of more snow falling, of winter forever.

  Now he was awake again. Grief never ended but it faded, went ambient. He took what he wanted wherever he went. It wasn’t much. None of it was his but who was he stealing from. No we, no us, but still him and them. Same as it had ever been. The other people left lived in the day while he lived in the night. Or else he lived in the distance.

  He didn’t covet what others had, where they were. He stayed where he was and everything he saw was his or close enough.

  Chain-link and razor-wire fences ran around the perimeter of the exclusion zone, contained Chernobyl and Pripyat and the forest and all this was for the best. Those who wanted to be part of Ukraine could live outside the fence. Those who wanted to be part of Pripyat could live within. He had been a soldier once: that was how he had come to Pripyat the first time, to the plant. Years later he returned, arrived at the gate, subjected himself to questioning. He was done with Ukraine, he said. Ready to be apart, within. The first time they had given him a white robe and a white cap, a shovel to clean the dirt down below the melting reactor. The great heat everywhere, the awful unknown of the danger. The feeling in the darkness that anything might happen next, that this was the beginning of something new, a lasting unknown. When he came out from beneath the earth he had watched the others climb the building, cleaning the roof of the reactor. They had called these soldiers the storks but now all the storks were dead, the real and the named. Surely the earth and the dirt ate the birds too, when at last they grew tired of flying.

  In Pripyat there waited ten thousand rooms he could sleep in but none of them were his. Not anymore. He walked the city streets on moonless nights but he did not have a home or else the forest was his home, the small caves in the forest where he might build a fire, fight for warmth in the endless winter. He would not kill for food but did not need much, could live off whatever he could gather.

  It had been seven years since he’d moved to the forest, since he’d last spoken to another person. Seven years since he’d spoken to a man or a woman. Longer since he’d seen a child. Everyone he’d ever known was either dead or gone and the ones who were gone were likely dead too. Seven years or close enough. Much of his life had been ruled by such numbers. Seven years in the army. Seven years between leaving the home of his parents and finding his wife. Seven years before their first child, then seven more before the child died, before they came back to Pripyat. Then seven years living here, in the house his wife had been born in. The garden, the stucco walls, the eventually shining everything. Now seven years lived in the forest, where there was no wife, no house or neighbors. Where there was no church, where there was no priest.

  Once he’d had sins he wanted to confess but now he thought, If there are no people, are there sins? Who was left to sin against?

  As he dug for wild tubers or edible roots in the hard and frozen ground he thought he heard an old voice answer, saying, God.

  But there was no God. No God and no church and no priest.

  Only death.

  And death did not care for goodness or badness. Death was uninterested in anything we pretended to be.

  With his hands he scraped back the snow and the soil. There had been food in this place before and perhaps there would be food there now. He did not need much. He was not hurrying toward death but he would not live much longer. God was dead too and death reigned and if there was evil left in the world then it was a kind of radiation living in the earth, invisible, without scent or touch, and in this place men had multiplied that natural evil, added their own part. They said a dog could sense radiation and he knew a dog would bark at a bad man and maybe they were part of the same seamless cloth. The radiation in the ground and in the air and in the water didn’t make you sick in any one moment and he didn’t think evil did either. It crept in, got stuck in the hair and the skin and in the bones, in the fatty tissues, the lower organs. You did things. You allowed things to happen. A child was born. A child was born but without everything a child needed. Your daughter, so different from other children. Different from the birds, from the butterflies, from everything that wasn’t her. A child died. You forgave yourself or else you allowed yourself to forget. You lied. You pretended you were a good man until one day you were dying of this hot glowing blackness everywhere inside you.

  But evil wasn’t a matter of physics. Evil existed before we knew the atoms by name. Man came out of the Garden with the names of the world tripping off his tongue but what had the naming changed. Now nameless dogs barked at everything. Now there were no pets left in Pripyat. Everywhere you saw a dog you saw ten, lean and scarred and fur torn and running headlong across the cracked streets, searching for something. Unnamed dogs, unloved dogs, wild again. If it was evil they hunted they would never see it. Because the only kind of evil that existed didn’t look like anything.

  What he pulled from the earth did not resemble the potatoes of his youth. Here in the forest they grew strange, pale skinned, thickened with unnecessary eyes, the flesh unimprovable by heat or any other method. Wanting for salt was only a memory of better days but if he could taste salt again then what else might he be able to remember.

  Seven years alone. No one who knew him before would recognize him now. The body changed. The mind moved slower than ever, thoughts arriving not by the seconds but by the quarter hour, the half hour, the hour. A meditative pace. In fifteen or thirty or sixty minutes more he would have a new revelation. Everything remarkable arriving at the pace of revelation. Everything more banal allowed to go unnoticed, unremarked, unremembered. He would see the exceptional remains of the world only after the rest was discounted.

  Seven years. He remembered everything before but he had let much of these seven years pass through him. Perhaps memory was like the radiation too. Memory and radiation and evil. The invisible accumulating substances of a life in Pripyat.

  No man who believed was ever truly alone. Who had said this to him?

  His wife, perhaps.

  And was the inverse true? Was any man without belief doomed to be alone, even in the company of others?

  He’d had a wife. When she died he took her to the cemetery where her parents and her grandparents were buried. He buried her on the grayest day of the year but after she was in the ground the sun came out and shined so brightly he thought the sun was saying to dig her up, to take her home. That she would live again. He had to throw his shovel into a stream to stop himself. The
water would make you sick if you drank it, if you bathed. He didn’t need the shovel anymore anyway. There wasn’t ever going to be anyone else to bury. He’d found other shovels since but the urge to get her out had passed. Death was death. There wasn’t any coming back. No afterlife, only afterdeath, and the afterdeath was in the dirt.

  The earth would eat us all but until then he would eat potatoes.

  He’d had a knife then. He had the knife still. Sometimes when he walked the forest he took out the knife he’d had when he’d had his wife and he carved her name into the trees. He wasn’t afraid to forget it but it was good to read it, to have the letters make the sound in his mind, to hear it spoken. She had been in the world. Her name was in it still. As long as the trees lasted he knew he’d carved enough trunks he wouldn’t ever go too long without her.

  What had her voice sounded like?

  Seven years since he’d heard her last words. She was the one from Pripyat. This had been her home. He had met her the first time, had taken her away, had brought her back. By then she was sick and he thought he would be sick soon too. But she had died and he had lived.

  They had come back together but sometimes he remembered it differently. In his memory he had come back alone because now it was hard for him to imagine doing anything not alone. And what was memory but imagination girded with fading truth.

  When he returned to the cave he found the coals of his fire gone cold and empty. If he wanted anything from Pripyat it was matches but there were other ways to start a fire. Dark would fall soon and the cold would increase and as he gathered kindling he knew that what he was making was no home, only a hole, a burrow for a man who knew at last that he was an animal like all the rest.

  He had wanted to do the right thing for his wife but she was gone, they were all gone, and he didn’t know if he still believed in right or wrong. He supposed he was no longer a moral creature. The earth was death and the earth radiated with evil and the evil soaked into your bones. He wasn’t born a moral creature but for a time he had been made one by motherland and marriage. A righteous task could make a righteous man but all he had left to do was live or die. The evil burned in the ground and it came up into his skin and his lungs and when it killed him he would go into the ground too, become one with it.