The Volunteer

by Salvatore Scibona

  Elroy said, “You don’t need to make room for my shit. I’ll keep it in my bag.”

  “You’re all right. Put your stuff where you want.”

  There was no refrigerator, only a pantry. And Elroy, looking inside it, said, “Alls you got in here is spring water and soup.”

  “I feel bad there’s no beer for you.”

  “Forget about that.”

  “You should have written you were coming.”

  “I did write,” Elroy said.

  He saw within the old man’s skull the workings of thought. He saw the thoughts themselves, the electric pulses and chemical surges and bondings. He saw them but couldn’t read them.

  Tilly slid the atlas next to the refrigerator alongside his broom. He did not need to hold the wall to help him stand back up. Lacking the weight, his movements were spry and strong as if whatever ailed him had also made him young again.

  “Sir, you look like yourself minus a third. Is the VA sending your check?”

  “Probably,” Tilly said.

  “Well, is it coming or not? I get all these emails, say the checks are coming. Wait a minute. Did you get none of my letters? Go to the P.O. box, or go to your other mailbox at the condo. There’s checks you’re not cashing.”

  “I got your letters. I told you I don’t need any checks. I got plenty right here.”

  “Sir, with respect, except for that car you got nothing. Let’s go back to town and buy you some groceries.”

  “You go ahead. I’ll wait here.”

  Elroy picked a piece of weed from his hair.

  “Take the car,” Tilly said. “What’s stopping you? Are you short?”

  The weed was a chamisa husk with a rust-colored pebble stuck in it. “I won’t be short in a couple of days.”

  Tilly opened his wallet and fished out the cash there and handed it to Elroy. It was about a hundred dollars. Then the reticent old man for once betrayed more than he had intended. “Go ahead,” Tilly said. “I should stay here and make some calls.”

  Elroy felt the floor beneath him give way or pitch sharply as on a foundering ship.

  “Why do you got to make shit up like that?” he asked.

  “What did I say?”

  “You know what you said.”

  “What? I forget.”

  “You don’t forget anything. You said it. You meant it.”

  Tilly watched the floor as if a roach were scurrying over it. He said, “I wasn’t even thinking.”

  “The hell you weren’t thinking. You’re always thinking. You didn’t get rid of your phone. You changed your fucking number, man.”

  “I meant to say I changed the service, before, that’s what I meant to say.”

  “You’re doing it again.”

  “What am I doing?”

  “Like when you up and run off.”

  “Elroy, I was going to write you and tell you where I was.”

  “No, you weren’t, man.” Elroy was crying openly. “You were going to do it again. And good luck to me tracking you down in Vado or wherever the place.”

  “Why don’t you sit a minute?” Tilly said, though he himself was getting up again. “I don’t want to see you like this. Stop this. You’ll pull it together. You’re all right.”

  “I ain’t,” Elroy said. “Don’t you get out of that chair.”

  “Elroy, I want you to tell me what this is about.”

  “Stay there.”

  “You’re all right.”

  “Nobody listens. I ain’t. I’m off.”

  “When you go back, you have to tell them. You shouldn’t be in a forward position if you’re like this. Think of your unit.”

  “You ain’t read any of my letters at all,” Elroy said.

  “Sure, I have.”

  “You haven’t. I didn’t re-up. I told you all about it. I get you. I know what you did. You got my letters and you kept them, but you didn’t open them, did you? That’s how you would do. Where are they? They’re in here someplace.”

  The dog approached the old man, and Elroy raised his hand and the dog flinched and came no closer and sat watching them.

  “I told you all about it,” Elroy said. “Why didn’t you answer?”

  “What did you need, money? Is that why you were writing?”

  “Why don’t you open them and find out, and why don’t you cash your checks and buy some fucking food? Don’t you dare get up,” Elroy said. He wiped his nose on his sleeve, and the snot came out in a long stretching tether.

  “Ellie.”

  “Don’t call me that. Set back down. You aren’t hobbling away again. I got you now. I know what you’re doing. You’re sick and you’re giving up. You’ll say you just ain’t been hungry, but it’s a lie. That ain’t even a real bed over there.”

  “All right, you got me.”

  “Damn right I do.”

  Tilly had gone to the makeshift office in the opposite corner of the interior and opened a brown paper sack into which he was stuffing some documents and he rolled the top of the bag and fixed it under his arm. “I’m living in Pecos, only I haven’t put all my stuff in the new place yet. The car only fits a few boxes at a time. If I’d known you were coming I would have made better arrangements. Stay as long as you need. The place heats up quicker than you’d think. I’m here most mornings emptying stuff out, but I won’t bother you.”

  “I need to get my feet under me,” Elroy said, trying to hope.

  “Good. There’s a propane service that fills the generator. Use all the light you want.”

  “I think a guy from high school can get me on a highway crew. Then I’ll pay you whatever the rent.”

  “Forget the rent,” Tilly said. “What do you mean you’re off?”

  “Don’t let’s get into it now. Tell me why you got to live in Pecos.”

  “I’m not at liberty to say.”

  “This is more of your bullshit.”

  “Elroy, I’m sorry I said that about the phone.”

  “Oh yeah?”

  “Yes, I’m sorry I was hard to reach.”

  Elroy had finished crying and started crying again more calmly. “Prove it,” he said.

  Tilly said, “There’s something I owe you.”

  “You don’t got to tell me anything that’s your business.”

  “I don’t know if you remember once, when you were little, we had a phone that didn’t work.”

  “When did we ever have a phone that worked?”

  “It was in Ramah. One day the phone started ringing and scared the hell out of you.”

  “I don’t remember this.”

  “It was an acquaintance calling. I’d gone out of my way to break ties with him. Then he got me assigned a phone number and called it, and you answered and passed me the phone.”

  “You don’t owe me any of this information, sir, if that’s what all you mean.”

  “He had some money he felt belonged to me, and I didn’t want it. But I’ve changed my mind. I want you to have some of it. I want you to get on your feet.”

  “What?” Elroy said, aghast. “You think you owe me money?”

  “Let me give it to you. You can stay here as long as you like. Just let me get a few of these things out of here, and I’ll leave you be.”

  “Why can’t I stay down in Pecos?”

  Tilly’s eyes seemed young and in conflict, large amid the newly slim face, awake and undefended. He breathed with effort. He said, “I can’t take you where I live.”

  “What did I do?” Elroy asked. “I didn’t do anything.”

  “I’ll come out and see you, all right?”

  “Do you have a girlfriend I can’t meet?” Elroy said, getting up. “I see her hairbrush. Are you embarrassed of me?”

  “Stay where you are.”


  “This is crazy. Are you living in a nursing home? What kind of sick are you that they won’t let you have visitors?”

  “I’ll bring the Lincoln today for you to use.”

  “All right,” Elroy said. “So let’s go.”

  “You stay here,” Tilly said.

  The sugar from the sopaipillas reached its peak in Elroy’s blood and began to go the other way. The crash, the nausea. At the same time he couldn’t be sure it wasn’t the composition of Tilly’s blood he felt rather than his own. Once, while the two of them were working on a truck, a pulley had started turning and crushed Tilly’s thumb between the groove of the pulley and the timing belt, and the smart had shot right up Elroy’s own arm to his brain as if his own thumb had got trapped in the machine. He said, “But you wouldn’t be able to get back home to Pecos if you left the Lincoln here.”

  “I’ll get a buddy from the VFW to help me.”

  “Let me do it. I’ll come with you.”

  “Elroy, I can’t have you at my house.”

  “But I didn’t do anything wrong,” Elroy said.

  Tilly took his bag and headed to the door.

  The dark room seemed to go white. It was insulin or adrenaline or testosterone or glucocorticoids. Or the old man’s spirit passing through Elroy’s body on its way elsewhere. Elroy’s tissues seemed to invert their functions: blood in the nerves, electricity in the arteries and veins; and he got up and pulled his knife from his pocket and before Tilly had reached the door he grabbed Tilly’s shoulder and turned him and shoved the butt of his hand under Tilly’s nose, pushing the head and stretching the neck backward and exposing it, and stabbed the knife into Tilly’s neck.

  The blood came immediately everywhere.

  Tilly seemed to smile and said, “Elroy, don’t.” His breath met with the blood in his throat and the words came burbling as though he were underwater and he coughed choking as his in-breath sucked the blood back down the throat into his trachea and lungs.

  There was blood. It was beautiful red and it was Tilly’s, and Elroy loved him with a focus he had never summoned in loving anyone else. He pulled the knife from the neck. He rotated it in his hand. Elroy felt how Tilly had already become too weak to struggle. He gripped the old man’s silver crown, moving the knife to the other side of the neck, and slid the blade across the length of Tilly’s throat and the scarlet blood came out like a garment, a veil of Tilly’s blood.

  Tilly’s eyes in their slowness seemed only now to comprehend something and looked at Elroy with recognition, seeing something Elroy himself did not yet comprehend, looking with horror and admiration at Elroy’s folly, his strength, his youth, the courage he knew Elroy to have though Elroy did not know it himself. The knowledge Tilly seemed always to have possessed of what Elroy was. The knowledge he’d held for Elroy in trust until the moment so long hoped for when Elroy too might consummate his lust for the world and become real, a man not a child, a full-blown person cognizant of what he was and his place and rank and serial number, and licensed thereby to hold the knowledge of others not yet knowing themselves, to have others entrusted to him.

  He saw Tilly falling away from him into the world of souls, where he had sent the dangling hajis, the one gripping the green extension cord, kicking the window shutter that smacked against the tan stone building, under the blue laundry that flapped over him like a spirit, and who Elroy shot at the base of the shoulder blade and saw explode while still gripping the cord. The body dove away from the arm. The lust to go on living that lived in the arm—in the hand that gripped the cord. Even while the body attached to it fell away and lost itself among the low roofs. The disembodied hand.

  The parents who had made the hand. Who had had names. Who themselves had been made by two others, who each themselves had once been bodies unknowing what they were, unknowing the past, and the selves held in trust for them by the ones who had come before them, and theirs in turn by the ones before them. The ones who made us, all of them knowing what came after them, none of them knowing what had come before.

  JENSEITS

  2029

  When Willy was twenty-four, the priest died. The medical director of the archdiocesan nursing home called to tell him. In Willy’s apartment, while she spoke, nothing moved. “An hour ago, he was outside reading,” she said.

  He thanked her for the call and left his building and walked along the street until he passed a shop window, where a second-hand Kross touring bicycle was hanging. He stood on the pavement looking at it. Others walked around him.

  Then he went inside and bought it and rode it down through the Augustusplatz, stopping at the university library to get a sweater from his study carrel, and continued riding out of Leipzig into a formless beyond.

  The time was three o’clock in the afternoon. He had been working as a junior researcher at the Institute for Geophysics and Geology in a unit dedicated to Arctic stratiform clouds and the radiative transfer effects within such clouds of horizontally and vertically distributed ice crystals. Here, there were no clouds. The highway continued through Naumburg. To one side, rapeseed grew in tight formation at an oblique angle with the road; to the other, rye. Night fell on the pastures, the pine woods, the rider alone on the machine that blinked in warning to no one and quickened the pace of its flashes the harder he pedaled.

  He rode for two days and three hundred kilometers before at lunchtime he stopped in a Kashmiri restaurant in Würzburg. With the slotted spoon at the buffet he drained the gushtaba thoroughly of its sauce and piled the balls of mutton on his plate. He sat at a table that faced the rear exit where stairs came down from a residence above. He ate. The hostess went to the kitchen. No one else occupied the dining room. His mobile pinged, and he switched off the ringer and ate again ravenously. From a separate bowl he ate rice. The stairs began to creak in the pattern of two people descending, one behind the other. They were speaking Hindi or Kashmiri or Urdu in the soft private tones of long marriage. Their feet on the steps showed through a grate: a woman’s feet in bright sneakers, and a man’s in black orthopedics and argyle socks exposed below the rolled hems of linen trousers. As the couple came into the dining room, he stood and went to the cashier’s station and put a twenty-euro note on the counter and left.

  In the next town, he bought a compact repair kit, front- and rear-riding rainproof panniers, an ultraviolet water purifying pen, and a helmet. He continued riding into Switzerland. He texted his roommate and asked him to return his library books to the university and listed the titles. He disassembled his mobile and used a sewing needle to remove the magnesium power plate and threw it away and stowed the rest of the mobile components in one of the panniers. He followed the Rhone west into France. He slept in national forests and in a vineyard, leaving the bike propped for the night against the steel post of a frost fan that stood like a sentry amid the dense foliage. He made camp after sundown and cycled out before daybreak. He did not steal. To eat he carried cheese and muesli. He followed the Rhone to Lyons and south to the suburban districts of Vaucluse. There, he turned east through the massifs of the Luberon and the Mercantour, keeping away from the crowded coasts, the cities. In three days he shot across the top of Italy into Slovenia. No one knew him in any of the countries where he went. He rode through the Adriatic side of Croatia into the town of Petrovac in Montenegro, where in the morning at the beach he turned all the pockets of the panniers inside out looking for the notebook in which he had been logging his expenditures, kilometers traversed, high and low temperatures experienced, wind conditions, the periodization and duration of an ibex’s pattern of drinking from a pond in the Mercantour. He had lost the notebook. He rode on. Farther inland at midday he spread his polyamide camping towel on the rocks at Lake Skadar on the Albanian border and napped beside the water. He awoke beside the green lake, amid green cliffs and waterfalls. The sun, occluded by low nimbus clouds, did not warm him, but he got up and stripped and
took a bar of soap into the shallows and washed and threw the soap back to the bank and swam far enough into the lake that he lost sight of his things on shore, of any other animal, the dark water numbingly cold. By the time he swam back to shore, his bike, clothes, food, and equipment had been stolen.

  Wearing only his towel, he picked across the stony trail to a campground and borrowed a hiker’s mobile and ordered a car to come down from Podgorica and gave the mobile back to the hiker, and the car came and took him to the city. Still wearing the towel, he walked into a sport supply store where the car had dropped him off. The children there looked at him, the mothers looked away. The self-checkout kiosk confirmed his access to his Deutsche Debit account by sampling his body odor. Shortly, he stood outside again in vivid Lycra clothes and stiff-soled mountain bike shoes, stuffing the translucent packaging of his many purchases into the Dumpster of a Montenegrin shopping mall, having drawn down by 70 percent the money remaining in his account. He strapped new panniers onto the new bike he had bought and filled the panniers with his new equipment and rode into a disused park on the city periphery and bought a beer and a loaf of barley-flour bread and ate watching the traffic.

  He continued eastward across the Dinaric Alps through Kosovo and Serbia to the edge of Romania, where news reports in a coffee shop said that a ceasefire between Romanian-Moldovan forces resisting the Russian-backed rebels from Transnistria had broken down; non-Romanian EU nationals were strongly discouraged from crossing the Romanian frontier. Instead he pedaled north across the Great Plain of Hungary and up the steep trails of the Carpathian Mountains in Slovakia. He fell twice and got back on the bike and kept going. For an entire day he passed no one on the dirt roads. In the High Tatras at sunset, he was squatting by a current irradiating his drinking water when a fox appeared upstream and began to drink. It saw him too and screwed its head as if listening to something he was saying. When the length of it emerged from the spruce and fireweed, it was not a fox but a wolf. He did not move. They observed each other murderously.