A rumor had been circulating that Zacharias Gorski had been, uncharacteristically, blind drunk while driving home through Mount Oliver three nights ago. Mark had heard only that he had hit a tree and been thrown from his car, but the rest seemed as clear to him as if he had been in the passenger seat: the upstanding surviving brother, college-educated and betrothed, swept down a fast black road almost against volition, headlights swinging wildly around a sharp corner, propelled into the night by drunkenness and the brute laws of random chance. It was as if Mark was witness to the stillconscious Zacharias being launched headlong through exploding glass and flung into the hollow that the headlights had dug out of the darkness, as if he heard Zacharias’s skull striking something hard, a rock or a tree trunk, at the edge of those woods. He heard it as the same sound — not an identical sound but the very same sound repeated — as the one he had heard when the younger brother died, when Mark accidentally killed Levi Gorski eight years ago. It was as though the eight years were a canyon and he was just now hearing the echo of the original impact undiminished from the opposite side. Sad about that family. And from here he could see that irrevocable night occurring across the canyon. Seventeen-year-old Levi shivering skinny and half-naked by the river, his face lit up by the flashlight, downy black mustache soaked in mud and bloodied snot. And underneath those vast stars made tiny by distance, beside the strand of water that was the Monongahela: just the slightest flick of movement. The shear streak of the Maglite, a small figure toppling backward, fragile head meeting the edge of a rock somewhere in the dark. And if that rock had not been there. Or if I had not been here.
If Mark Braun had not been here he would be a twenty-six-year-old Korean living amid a countryful of Koreans, maybe attending electrical school the way he had been planning for years now, and perhaps knowing of Pittsburgh only by way of Hines Ward. Levi Gorski would still be living, probably still a fuck-up, and Zacharias Gorski would not be brain-dead. But instead Mark was adopted by an American couple before he learned to speak and transported from Korea to Pittsburgh, brought here to be the Chinese boy in Carrick with the German last name. And instead he was raised on fish sticks and pierogies, surviving all the bullying and taunting, learning eventually to mock the few other Asian kids he encountered with even greater cruelty. And instead he grew up athletic and crew-cut and thick-necked and played hockey, never a star player but always solid enough to stay off the bench. He guzzled beer and bum wine with the best of them. Yet on some level he still sensed, even in people he had known since childhood, that they continued to perceive in him a touch of the simulated life — that, to them, each perfectly formed American word that came from his mouth remained perennially a small astonishment, the uncanny product of some tortuous craftsmanship that was occurring somewhere behind that face.
And there was something of the weight of this continental displacement behind the blow that killed Levi Gorski — Levi, a mangy kid who was rumored to have once eaten a sporkful of shit for twenty bucks, who had obliquely called Mark’s thengirlfriend Abigail — a white girl — a “gook” after she whirled and called him shiteater for squeezing himself indecently past her in the hall. Mark had betrayed nothing as she recounted the incident to him later that night. Outwardly he had only mirrored her casual disgust. But already he had felt himself being taken up by a fast-moving current, one he mistook for self-determined rage, a current which seemed to carry him to — and then leave him just a few beats after — the moment that found him by the river, flanked by two of his hockey buddies, drunk on Mad Dog 20/20 with the Maglite poised above Levi’s head. They had earlier found Levi smoking by himself in the dark near his house, the three boys crudely flush with purpose and wildness after four-wheeling through Mount Oliver in Nathaniel’s truck. It was still an incipient spring, a night when the wind seemed to be cutting in from the expired winter. They had forced Levi into the backseat like mobsters and sped to Riverfront Park, bloodying his nose along the way, with Isaac nearly singing about how they would beat him unconscious and leave him by the river to freeze. But Mark later understood that he was impelled toward the scene of Levi’s death not by the exuberance of adolescent violence but by the force of that ruthless current, which proved strong enough to sweep up the other three boys along with him, strong enough even to deliver Levi’s older brother to his fate eight years later.
They had parked near the Birmingham Bridge on a bleak vacant street lined with warehouses. In warmer weather they might have seen another parked car or two, signs of teenagers tucked away in the dark to smoke weed or make out, but on this night they were alone. They forced Levi to the riverside, their victim first squirming and yelling, but after being smacked quiet letting his boots drag in what seemed a parody of nonviolent resistance, then finally stumbling along with his head bowed: the consciously bland submission of someone, outnumbered and outpowered, who can at last only hope that his aggressors will soon grow bored of his meekness. The river, opening up wide before them, ran calm and tranquil, its edges lapping up in ragged doglike waves onto the dirt, and with the Maglite switched on they turned and navigated the black thread of scraggly wilderness along the water while shoving Levi shirtless into the jagger bushes, the bugs biting, behind them the civilized world quietly receding, seemingly from existence, the four of them hiking through that wooded darkness until about ten minutes later they stopped randomly at some sufficiently removed spot that afterward seemed predestined, and Mark, before even willing it, swung hard at Levi and knocked him to the hard-packed dirt, maybe even as surprised as he by the connecting impact of that first real uninhibited effort to inflict human damage. There had hung a beat of silence when he hit the ground. Then the three lit upon him, kicking and thrashing at the prostrate shape in the dark. The memory of this remained for Mark only as shredded sensation: the scribble of the flashlight over Levi’s curled backside, the panting of exertion, the guttural grunting when they would wedge a hard kick in the soft of his belly. They forced his head up and shoved a fistful of riversludge into his mouth, calling him shiteater, then batted him around again, all of them reluctant to be the first one to let up. And strangely, Mark could not even remember now whether or not he had felt any rage over Levi’s offense while in the act of assaulting him, any remnant of that burst of raw heat that had originally resolved him to beat this white boy into repentance. It was as though the record of that retributive heat, if there had indeed been any, had been expunged by the running river, leaving for memory only a cold, passionless violence even more savage for its bloodlessness. As though passion in the end had no bearing upon the governing forces of life and death, and at the river the four had unknowingly given themselves up in violent ritual to that greater logic which was inexorable in its progression. And it was on this force that Mark pulled Levi to his feet for the last time — his motility gone sluggish and boozy, his shivering torso thorn-scratched and slick from sweat and mud, the four of them in that instant a tableau of miniature figures seen from across a canyon of eight years — and without thinking brought the butt of the Maglite down on his head. Levi fell — seemed to backfall a distance far deeper than his standing height, with a force far heavier than his falling weight. They heard a blunter, meatier echo of the blow that sent him down, then nothing.