How different this past year could have been.
He might be dead, consumed in the secondary blast bursting after he was already far enough for safety.
He might be in prison and then there would be no girl with the limp for him to know.
The boy would not have been found, at least not by him.
Memory didn’t require remembering to exist. Memory could wait dormant, metastasizing in silence. What he had forgotten might dismantle or appropriate what surrounded it. A mass of loaded neurons fired across gray matter, set off a squelch of wet distortion and biofeedback until there appeared these nameless men lost in the fire, lost as from a safe distance Kelly had stared helplessly into the scorched place of their anguish, their screaming and flailing.
Next came the boy, lost already, who was always to him the boy he became after his captivity, never again the same boy he had been before. It was an agreed-upon fiction that he could be made so again. This was the creed of parents, teachers, therapists, that there was a previous state the boy could be returned to. As if a boy were a fixed quantity. As if the quality of a boy were not a thing in flux.
Then the southern woman, then her child, her own boy, their names he couldn’t bear to speak.
How the nightmare of time was that time was not linear but simultaneous.
How everything that had ever happened to him or from him was still happening, even if he couldn’t always remember the cause. Even if he wouldn’t always admit what he remembered.
How what he’d done meant that he was still his father’s son. How he had become the man the father had been to him, that he thought the grandfather had been to the father.
Their inheritance: Once a killer, always a killer. Once a victim, always a victim.
And could the good man be made to last as long.
Now the fading twilight of the midwestern winter: the site of the fire lay below but whatever he thought he saw wasn’t lit by anything but memory. He had wanted to finish climbing the plant during the day but when he looked around him all he surveyed was the deepening gray of the zone, stretching as far as he could see. The streetlights extinguished, the roads untrafficked for long stretches, each set of headlights a mere wrinkling of the dark. In all directions he saw fewer windows lit than the architects and city planners had intended, than the first citizens of these blocks had hoped.
His headlamp illuminated almost nothing in the open air but if he pointed it at his feet he could see where he might go next. He took a step out onto the central girder leading across the open span of air below and the metal received his weight without movement or sound or other complaint. He put his arms out to steady his walk and then he took another step. Somewhere above him he heard the passage of a passenger jet but he didn’t look. Everything peripheral became unnecessary distraction, increased the danger of forgetting the necessary forms of attention. From this height he could see more headlights moving in the street around the plant, lone cars making lonely traffic. There was a tightness in his chest but it was only more fear. There was a ringing in his ears but there was always a ringing in his ears. He was sweating but couldn’t lift his hands to wipe his face. His legs didn’t start to shake until he was past the halfway point but then his heartbeat came unbound from expectation, set its own rhythm. There was the starting a task and there was finishing what you started and he was making the move across. The air freezing around him and above him, and in the zone below the air was black beneath the furrowed winter sky, and almost everywhere he looked there was no light. Only a single length of glass blazed, a fluorescent banner stretched at street level some blocks away: a storefront church, holding a late service. The power of prayers he had believed in, caught brightly behind distant glass. The girl with the limp believed there were good men and women in the city and as Kelly looked out across the architectural darkness of the zone he wished those secret saints would come to their windows, wished they would each lift to the glass a single lit lamp, a flashlight, a flame. For his sake, he wished they would make themselves known.
The place where the fire had burned waited closer than ever, a short plummet to the ground below, where in his nightmares he’d dreamed of the dirt mixed with concrete and dust, the char of bone, the flaky remnants of skin. A single breath gathered, enough to let out one or two words, no more than several short syllables. His body was moving forward as if disconnected from his mind but if he could retouch the connections he would begin to speak. What he wanted to say might have been Help me. It might have been I’m sorry. The cold slid through his layers of clothing, found purchase in the holds of his body. He had saved a boy but what other goodness could he do, alone in the zone. He blinked and when he opened his eyes the light had changed again and he was closer to the other side of the beam. When he thought he couldn’t take another step he reached up and strobed the headlamp, moved the switch back and forth, the lamp’s flashes lighting the nearest bricks. He noticed he was only wearing one glove, the skin of the bare hand blotched and rashed. He closed his eyes, wavered on the beam. This was the purest manifestation of alone: the cold, the dark, the absence of anyone to hear what he meant to say, the way he moved his mouth around the words. The cold grew absolute, its deep numbness a weariness piercing muscle and organ and bone, but he imagined there was a colder cold farther down, the permanent freeze, where movement and breath and heat would all cease. For a moment he saw around him every wrong thing stilled, slowed until he might step outside their wrongness. He knew who he was, who he had been becoming, what he would have at last done to himself if not for the girl with the limp, for the boy. How now he had something to live for, found in the zone where he had not expected to find it.
He took the next step. The step after. He wasn’t sure he believed he’d make it but with every step less of the crossing remained and into the abridged remainder of the dark he spoke the words he was most afraid to say, the admittance of his failure to find the man in the red slicker, the splash of color he sought surely moving somewhere within this muted world and still somehow nowhere to be seen.
8
IF THE INTRUDER FOUND YOU again it wouldn’t be in any basement. All the boy could give the detectives was the brown car and the black mask and the red slicker and you had left the car and the mask and the red slicker behind. The intruder couldn’t know where you’d fled but every night you imagined him finding you inside this upper room readied for a boy, readied for listening to his muttering, for watching his face, the tiny movements of a boy, the tiny features, the eyes, ears, nose, lips. The opening and closing of the hands. The little hairs tall on the arms but nowhere else, not yet.
When you were inside the room with a boy the only noises would be the boy breathing, the words the boy spoke, if there were words — and there were always words, small phrases, beggared queries — plus all the small exclamations of the body and of the shifting room. In the new city you began to have dreams of a new and better boy but you remembered the dreams best in the little room, inside its small measurements made smaller by mattresses secured to the walls, the carpeted floor thickened and deadened with more carpet, remnant scraps. Upon the carpet there was the bed and the chair, the bed prepared for a boy and the chair meant for a man, and in your dream the boy stayed in the bed, cuffed to the bottom rail, and in the bed the boy aged: first the age of the taking, then the ages after, one year after another, and at every age the boy was naked on the bed, too big for his first clothes and without you offering to find him anything else.