The killer was not afraid of what he knew. These assholes.
The killer was not afraid when the dispatcher said, Stop.
When the dispatcher said, We don’t need you to follow him.
When he said, I’m not afraid.
The killer was not afraid because he knew he was in the right. The total absence of doubt. The end of almost.
These assholes, said the killer. They always get away.
The killer was not afraid when he drew the gun from his waistband.
Because at that range the killer couldn’t miss.
Because there was nothing to be afraid of.
Because all he had to do was close his eyes and squeeze the trigger.
The killer was not afraid because squeezing the trigger required basically nothing.
The killer was not afraid of the sound of the shot. He could barely even hear it, the blast muffled by the body.
These assholes. They almost always get away.
Not always. Not this time.
The killer was not afraid.
The killer was not afraid when the police arrived.
The killer was not afraid when they cuffed his hands behind his back or when they asked him if he needed medical attention or when they pushed his head down as they helped him into the back of the squad car.
The killer was not afraid when the ambulance came for the body.
The killer was not afraid when the news vans arrived.
The killer was not afraid when the squad car drove him from the scene in front of their cameras.
The killer was not afraid when the detectives questioned him at the station.
I stood my ground, the killer said. I saved myself first.
The killer was not afraid when he walked out into the lobby of the precinct, when he saw outside the protesters already gathering their anger against him, or when his wife appeared to take him home, when he saw she knew she was the wife of a killer.
The killer was not afraid because he had kept safe his family, his home, his community.
These assholes. The killer did not think in the first person except when the killer thought us and them. And so what if the kid had been living there too, if he had been a part of their community. Because inside a community there were other communities.
The killer was not afraid when he watched the television news, where the reporters and the pundits called him a killer for the first time. Nor when the pundits asked themselves who the killer was because if there was anything the killer knew it was this, who he was. He had almost been the killer before. Now there was no doubt. The law could quibble over whether he was a murderer but forever he would be a killer either way.
The killer was not afraid even during the lengthening nights in the dark of his house, where in those endless hours he lay unsleeping, listening to the charged noise of the street outside his house, listening to the steady clock of his heart while he thought about the spot blocks away where he had killed, where these assholes had made him kill.
Even now, deep in the aftermath, the killer is what the killer was. Surely this has not changed.
Because surely the killer was not afraid.
Surely the killer was not afraid then or ever again.
Surely the killer was not, is not, will not ever be made afraid.
PART THREE: THE LOW ROOM
7
THE PLANT BECKONED AGAIN. A year later and it was still merely scheduled for destruction, hunkered in all its crumbling glory upon the famous avenue. One January afternoon Kelly drove his truck around the front of the buildings first, then into the back alleys, parking along the frozen and rutted mud of the broken roads. He walked across the rubbled yard and into the vast vacancy of the plant, moving through rooms whose shapes loomed differently than what he’d imagined, with ceilings that climbed and swelled or else sagged and fell, with floors cracking and curving away from the level. In other places the reinforced concrete held, looked ready to last another hundred years, and in the interior there were places where no sunlight penetrated and in those dark halls he used his headlamp to peer through piled debris, followed a patina of mold and rust through doorways without doors, the wood long ago rotted, the hinges pocketed. But what was on the other side of any wall was never so different than where he’d come from: a similar kind of cold, better lit or more dark, scavenged or else cluttered with trash, the unmaintained grandeur of open space, everything useful carried away.
Inside the plant he followed the sun’s dappling path, the hours of the day clocked by its transit. It took longer to cross the building in this slow fashion but it was something to do with his body, its newly inexhaustible muscles. As he walked his cell phone rang and voicemail notifications beeped and though he rarely listened to the messages he never deleted them. He let messages pile into his inbox, let voices remain upon his device, caught between satellites in the sky and servers buried in the coolness of the earth. He was well acquainted with how anything might happen. If he wasn’t careful he could lose the people under his care and he feared then he would forget them so fast. This was the cruelty of the linear life, its adaptations: not that you would move on but that the moving on would obscure the past, bury it deep.
Once he’d thought he would never forget the sound of anyone he loved but now he couldn’t remember his grandparents, his mother, his childhood friends. The southern woman was gone only a year and it was as if he had never known her voice.
He could see her boy’s face but could he hear her boy’s speech?
Such a quiet son. So little conversation between them, even at the end when they were always together. More and more all he could remember was his error. All the good destroyed by what he’d done wrong. How he’d stood beside the boy’s bed in the night, how after he’d undressed he had thought he had not been naked but instead dressed in father, as he believed now his father had dressed in his own father’s skin, a trick of black magic for the blackest hours.
When he closed his eyes he could see the southern woman and her boy speaking but he could not hear their voices, their images keeping company among all the other silent faces, all motion, no noise. People he’d loved, fading toward the abstract. There were grids buried beneath the earth and floating above the sky and threaded up the bellies of skyscrapers and from them he would delete nothing. The machines would hoard it all. He didn’t love the modern world but he loved this. If the girl with the limp died tomorrow then he would listen again to her last messages because to keep her alive in memory would be to keep her alive. Because one day there would be no one living who remembered the form of your face or the sound of your voice and on that day it would be as if you had never existed. This was the final death of the unremarkable. No record, no remembrance, no one to carry your speech and your image forward into the future. It would happen to the memory of others because you couldn’t always be vigilant against it. You would not know when it happened to you.
He arrived at the location of the fire not from the outside but from within, from above. It took hours but he knew the general direction through the plant, climbed the floors as he walked until he emerged onto the roof at the edge of the building. The fire was a year old but he thought he could smell the blackened earth somewhere below him, beneath the snow, the bent steel moved aside for the extraction of the bodies. He remembered: How the fireball unfurled as every alight mote of dust lit the next, the distance of air so slim and the fire traveling easy across the gap. How he’d watched the fire engulf the building, the company of men. How he’d put his back to the fire and fled. How as he had he’d imagined the better man who might have stayed, the brave man who might have called for help, who might have heard the voice of the girl with the limp months earlier, when he’d needed it most.