Scrapper

by Matt Bell

  The good man in the bad world. He had believed once but now he knew the world was neither good nor bad. The world was death and against death there was no sufficient goodness. And what did goodness matter if it couldn’t change the world.

  He walked among the trees of the forest, gathering what dead wood had fallen since the last snowfall. It hadn’t snowed in days but there was snow on the ground, thick and crusted and long from melting. Everywhere he went there were tracks but not footprints, never footprints again. Only the mark of wild boar and wild deer, of wild dog and wolf. Everywhere the marks of beasts and on the trees the marks of his knife, her name, the name keeping him company, the last company he craved.

  He couldn’t remember her voice. He couldn’t call her last face to mind, not the false face she’d worn at the end. He liked seeing her as he’d met her, young, fresh, smiling. Even then full of the radiation killing her but without a hint of its effects. It would take so long for the evil to have its way. Long enough they could believe it never would. Evil got inside her but he couldn’t see it, but it didn’t change who she was. So kind and joyful, an antidote to himself, to who he knew himself to be. He had never known joy before her. When she was alive he’d thought he would never lack it again. But then the birth of their poor daughter. Then the wages of radiation, of dirt, of the pitiless earth.

  He would live but he wouldn’t live in joy. There would be no more gladness. He was a thing running its course. Empty as a river. Moral as a river. Until the earth opened up and swallowed it whole, spring and source and the carve of its route.

  A man living in the forest. A man who had lost everything he’d ever loved. Somewhere in the distance Pripyat waited outside the future and somewhere beyond that the plant did the same. All the Soviet architecture, Stalinist development plans. Districts of brick masonry, wet-stucco walls. Cities designed to last forever. The glory of empire. Pripyat, the ninth atomograd, the ninth nuclear city. Once fifty thousand Soviets strong and now who was left. A few stragglers, a few returning refugees.

  A story of perseverance but against what? The Soviet world had ended. Pripyat endured, the evidence of its failure. What the Soviet world had wrought. Was there anywhere else on earth, the last man wondered, that had ever indicted a nation so fully? Did every other nation contain a city whose failure cast such fear, such wide and lasting doubt?

  He dropped the kindling onto the snow, fell to his knees. The old grief was heavy upon him again but he couldn’t stay there long. The cold only killed you if you couldn’t keep moving. When he stood he took his knife from his pocket, placed its blade against the flesh of an unmarked tree. He remembered her name into its bark, carved the crooked memory. In his youth, he might have carved a plus, might have carved an and. He had been so sure then of his name, of who the man so named was, would become. Now he was not so sure. Or else he would not admit who he was. Only the last soul living in this frozen forest. Nameless to any who might see him, any beast or man. Walking, gathering, surviving. Reading everywhere the name of the woman he’d loved. The best thing he’d known between birth and death, between the air and the ground. Her name, of which too much was asked. Because what was a name. Because what was a name, even a name you could see in the skin of every tree, against the colorless evil of the earth, of every inch of dirt.

  DETROIT

  THE ARENA HAD SPECIAL SEATING for the handicapped and their caretakers, designated entrances. Kelly showed the parking-garage attendant their tickets, then followed the attendant’s directions to push the girl in her wheelchair out onto a street named for one of her heroes. When he said the name and pointed at the sign, her head didn’t move but he thought she might have shifted her eyes. They had lived together for almost a year now and he had spent the first months learning the new range of her expressions, had started to recognize the small differences between a good day and a bad day, slight shifts in her mood and movements.

  In the handicapped section he cataloged the previously unimagined configurations of men and women, their varied dependencies, the results of age, disease, awful chance: An old man with an oxygen tank strapped to his walker, linked armed in arm with a woman who must have been his daughter. Another woman in a wheelchair, her limbs distorted, her age impossible to determine through her deformity. A teenager ancient in his seat, his head wobbling, mouth open, full of soft teeth and dumb sound. All of them dressed in the same red jerseys as anyone else, loose over their differences. The other wheelchairs decorated with stiff flags, bumper stickers for the team, the city, other abstracted allegiances.

  The game hadn’t started yet. There were twenty-ounce beers available for nine dollars twenty feet away but he didn’t want to take her with him to get one, didn’t know how to ask someone else to watch her. There wasn’t much she needed but he wouldn’t leave her alone. To not leave her was the rule. There was a backpack hung over the back of her chair and it contained most of what she might require. Whenever he remembered he kept one hand on her shoulder, let her know he was there. He talked more now than ever before. She couldn’t talk but she could make some sounds and he applied certain kinds of sense to each. There wasn’t as much hunger in her as before but she was putting on weight, acquiring a sedentary sag to her flesh. They didn’t have sex anymore but one of his tasks was to lift her naked in and out of the tub, to rub soap and sponge over her sore skin. Up close there was still something sexual about her body but sooner or later he stepped back.

  He was thirsty and he knew caretakers left their charges, took breaks by stranding them in other rooms. Maybe it wasn’t right to leave your charges behind when you went to the store or the bank but sometimes it seemed impossible to bring them along. The caretakers learned how to be alone again, despite the work. When and where, even with someone else in the room. You took money from the government for caring for your own disabled person but presumably you loved the person too because the money was shit. Nothing given ever replaced what was given up.

  He didn’t care what anyone else did. He never left her behind, took her everywhere with him. They were sharing a life and this was it. At home he lifted her out of the chair and into the bath, out of the bath and into the chair, into the bed, into a recliner in her living room, into the passenger seat of her car. Twice a week she went to physical therapy where the therapists moved her muscles like she was a coma patient laid out on a mat in a room of the similarly injured.

  The doctors said this was the best it would ever be again. They said this to him and he asked them to talk to her. She was the patient. They were her doctors, not his.

  She had asked him if he understood what was coming but he couldn’t believe either of them imagined this. The difference between being told and being there. At first he’d thought what had happened to her was his fault: an eye for an eye, a pound of flesh to pay a debt, the taking of the girl for the taking of the brother. But this only was the old belief talking, the remnants of childhood, the holy before. The world without doubt. Even if she had never met him this was going to happen. He wasn’t the center of anything. Nothing revolved, nothing was attracted or repulsed by his command.

  Every day he told her another secret and the knowledge didn’t make her any sicker. He was careful to pace the telling, to make it last. There was only so much of him left.

  He wasn’t sure what she heard. Or if she heard, did she understand? Her eyes were alive and expressive enough but it wasn’t like he saw words in her gaze, it wasn’t like there was actual conversation happening between them.

  He told her about the low room, how he had named it and prepared it, how he had hurt the brother there. He tried to tell her why. He wouldn’t think the brother’s name but the brother’s last face lingered still. There was a photo the news showed but it wasn’t the face he’d seen in the dark. This was another person entirely, someone with parents, a school to attend, a future requiring having left the room. He’d made the brother something different, an abstracti
on in the dark, he’d hurt him to protect the boy, to remove a single danger from the boy’s world.

  Time and distance might have done the same work. He’d chosen to accelerate it. To not let a harm he could prevent continue even a single day longer.

  I lied myself into belief, he’d told her, in the first days of the wheelchair. It was a crime of impatience, of wanting to ensure causal effect. I was impatient with the good acts of others, he’d said. Because I knew the good was nothing anyone could see enough to fear. Goodness alone stopped nothing.

  But then the lie’s comfort had deserted him in the last moment. By the end the lights had been off and he had worked in the blackness, imagining whatever he couldn’t have seen. Now every night he remembered that imagining, relived it again.

  He had been questioned when the brother was reported missing, again when the brother’s car was found stripped a week later. Sanchez again, bulky as ever but now smaller than Kelly, the detective diminished by Kelly’s new size. But there were no suspect fingerprints and without a body Kelly didn’t have to tell the detective what had happened next, how after Kelly left the low room he walked from the blackened buildings of the plant out into the fading hours of night and into the predawn of the city, to a certain house in the zone, a certain driveway in a devastated block where he had left his truck overnight, where the brother had taken the boy the last day he had followed him, the day Kelly finished the case notes.

  When Kelly talked to Sanchez he had wanted to tell him about the boy’s father, about the brother’s last accusations. He had wanted to say that if he could have found the man in the red slicker he would have taken him first. But instead he had told himself the brother had not spoken in the low room and now he was no longer sure the man in the red slicker had ever been real. Now it was impossible for Kelly to see anyone else but the brother in the low room’s chair.

  There hadn’t been running water in the house but in the truck there was bleach. He’d known it wouldn’t remove everything but it would remove enough. In the dark basement he’d stripped, scrubbed his hands, his face, his neck and chest, twisted against the burn of the bleach. He lit another fire, sat on the basement steps and shook while his spent clothes smoldered on the concrete.

  When he’d arrived at her apartment she was already on the kitchen floor, slumped away from the counter, her feet splayed awkwardly, her face awake but her tongue stilled and her body turned out of sensible position. The burner had been turned on high to boil water, the apartment filled with steam long after the pot had emptied, its bottom blackened and starting to smoke. She’d been wearing slippers and one had fallen off her left foot.

  Almost morning then. The city waking up. There had been alarm clocks bleeping through her apartment walls, then the first sounds of breakfast, television news. She’d been making dinner when she fell, had lain there on the tile all night.

  Her cell phone was in her pocket but she hadn’t been able to reach it, couldn’t have opened her hands to work it if she had.

  She couldn’t talk anymore but her eyes found him, set him to action. He shut off the stove, moved to simplify her posture, untangling her limbs and laying her flat.

  He’d spoken in a low voice, spoke slowly in the careful and culled language of apology. He needed to call for help but he couldn’t call the way he looked. He had scrubbed his skin with snow and gravel and bleach but it was hardly enough. He wondered what she’d seen: he was her only hope but look at the condition he’d arrived in. Clean jeans and a t-shirt over skin roughed with grit and gore, bruised and battered from boxing and worse, hair streaked with bleach. He didn’t know what he’d looked like but he knew how he’d felt and he hadn’t felt like himself.

  But himself had been a shifting thing then. Later the scrapper receded, sated, leaving something else behind, the remainder of Kelly, the broken salvor. He’d done something far from the irreducible center of the supposed law and what did it mean? Just another chink in the universe, another proof of its senselessness, its rules that did not reach all the way up from physics and chemistry and biology to define the right path of human action.

  Into that gap he had put his guess.

  The jersey was gone and with it all its borrowed symbolism. The gun he’d left in the low room, the sledge beside it. He’d never started praying again so there wasn’t anything to quit. Something had happened in the circle of swords but after the low room he let that feeling fly away, and as always when the last angels fled they left their ringing behind.

  The morning in the girl’s apartment he’d arrived knowing the boy was safe. Then he’d found his girl was not. Now protecting her would require a more ordinary violence, a killing of the moments to come.

  That morning Kelly had spoken to her in slow tones, tried to explain. He needed to know if she would die if he took a shower. He needed her to know he was going to leave the room but when he came back he would get her all the help she needed without anyone asking questions.

  It was harder to clean away blood than you expected. It took so much longer than he wanted it to take. When it was done he knew he would never do anything worse. In the low room, in its aftermath, he had found the furthest expression of his corruption. Now there would be no more waiting for the blow, only this unforgivable relief.

  The national anthem played and Kelly sang along, a swell of patriotism catching in his chest, how no matter what he did wrong he would always be an American. The game started but they were far enough from the ice that he had trouble following along without the girl’s constant commentary. The last greats of the past age were retired or retiring and she had mourned the passing of her giants, would have spoken in favor of their legacies, their place among the endless, the names and numbers memorialized on uniforms hung in the rafters. He watched her gaze flicking back and forth across the ice, wondered how well she could track the puck. He held a water bottle to her mouth, let her suck the straw as long as she wanted. He reached down with a thumb and wiped the corner of her mouth, dragged the cloudy spittle across the leg of his jeans. It wasn’t only her expressions that had changed. There was plenty of makeup in her apartment but he didn’t know how to apply it to her new face. He’d thought of trying to practice with her but couldn’t bring himself to do it.

  There were steroids for the spasms, amphetamines for fatigue, sedatives to help her breathing. The doctors prescribed an antidepressant but somehow Kelly got the idea she didn’t want it, stopped helping her dissolve the pills on her tongue, started taking them himself instead.

  She didn’t speak anymore but when agitated she laughed, a yelp, all rasp. At night Kelly might lie in their bed with his head on her fading chest, listen to her breath shallow, then recover, shallow again. The shortness of breath might be pain related, the doctors said, it might be the continued loss of involuntary systems, and one night her breathing would stop, the last breath impossible to name until it wasn’t followed by another.

  The doctors kept telling him to talk to her, that her mind was sound. He said he knew, said she was the same person he’d fallen in love with. He’d promised not to forget. It was an easy mistake to make. It was a hard mistake to stop making.

  He tried to say her name more often. To force it out of his stubborn mouth. It wasn’t her name he loved but he didn’t know what else to call her. Of all the things she’d lost he doubted she missed the limp.

  On the ice a fight broke out and he watched the way fighting on ice was different, how it required a different kind of agility to stay up on your skates with your jersey pulled over your head and fists thumping down on your back and neck. The crowd cheered and he cheered too. He wasn’t going to the gym anymore, hadn’t sparred since the fight. He didn’t plan to ever fight again but he didn’t want his body to go to waste so he kept working out at home. He lifted her from her wheelchair into her recliner, got down on the floor between her and the television, did long series of push-ups, sit-ups, squat
thrusts. He installed a pull-up bar in the doorframe between the living room and the hallway, rotated her chair to face him so they could look at each other while he did his grunting sets, shirtless and sweating.

  It seemed improbable but he was still growing. He looked taller too but taller was impossible. In the bed he took up more of the space, the covers, the air in the room. He thought often about buying a bigger bed or else another one. In the mirror he often saw he wasn’t as big as he imagined but he was big enough. This was how you stretched the limits of your frame, how you pushed how much muscle you could pack onto these bones, how you learned how much more could fit inside the shell, more again once the human was mostly gone.

  When he didn’t know what else to do he plucked her from her wheelchair and carried her around the apartment, being careful not to strike her head against lamps or doorframes or walls. When the weather was better he would take her for walks outside, carrying her up and down the sidewalk, going farther every day. When she started to burn from the sun he smeared her face and neck and hands with sunscreen, found her sunglasses so the light wouldn’t hurt her eyes.

  Despite his protests to the doctors she wasn’t exactly the same person she had been before, not the girl with the limp. That person never would have let him carry her, never wanted anyone’s help. But what choice remained. She made noises he interpreted as agreement or disapproval but mostly he was guessing.

  At last a whistle blew. The referees separated the fighters, securing them for an agreed-upon number of minutes, the penalty box the punishment for bad behavior, the power play the reward for someone else’s. Every game a microcosm of a longer one. Kelly thought he would wait a long time for his punishment, had already decided he would not fight it when it came. In the meantime, he would be with the girl, sharing her life. It was what he had told himself he wanted, even if he’d never said he wanted it like this.