I’m hungry, the dream boy would say, his voice huskier now.
Or he would say, I’m thirsty.
The boy would grow but not by getting bigger, he would age but he would shrink against his bones and you would shrink with him. Your bodies slimmed to skin and thin muscle. Hair falling out. Teeth, toenails, fingernails. A complete lack of nourishment but never pain or diminishment or death. You were tired but you wouldn’t sleep. Both your tongues so large in your mouths, those disgusting organs. You not clothed either. Your bellies distended, plump with absence. Your penis collapsed, your scrotum hanging loose between skinny legs, your bones resting atop the wood of your chair, which by then you wouldn’t have left in decades.
See the bowl and spoon from the boy’s last meal, eaten years ago. See the flies, many seasons past. Their husks moving with the dust. The boy staying a boy as the years pass. Heartbeats louder without muscle between heart and skin. Ribs so soft without nutrition. The rubbery thud of the body, the papery rasp of breath.
One day the boy would be as big as you or else you would be as small as a boy and the boy would slide his emaciated ankle through the catch of the cuff and stand up beside the bed. Then he would speak or not speak, then he would stay or he would leave. If the boy went from the room you would follow. If the boy stayed, then you would stay too, content at last.
You were in the upper room when they entered the house. You heard their footsteps on the floorboards, their voices loud but casual. They were not the ones who were afraid. Whenever you were caught you hid and you were already in the best room for hiding, the last room with a lock, one you’d installed yourself. A padlock latch for either side of the door, for whichever world you occupied.
You closed and locked the door but what was a locked door but an invitation.
Inside the soundproofed room you couldn’t hear their movements. Time passed but how much. Impossible to tell. All the sound in the room the sound you made yourself. The huff of breathing, a nervous wheeze through weird teeth. Perhaps they were dismantling the bathroom, ruining the walls to get to the pipes. Probably they were tearing the wiring from the bedroom or the living room. There was a kitchen without appliances but there was more wiring, more pipes. There was a basement and there was more metal downstairs in the dark. Surely they wouldn’t need to enter this one room, the smallest room in the house.
But what was a locked door but an admittance there was something worth hiding.
You counted your breaths. You lost count, counted again. The impossibility of knowing how much time passed inside a clockless room.
Then the door bucking in its frame. The dampened sound of a body thrown against wood. The return of motion to the air.
Then the door bucking again.
The door would not hold. Nothing in the wasted house would hold against such men. The door opened.
The heatless sunlight from the hallway windows flooding the room.
The silhouettes of the men, pausing only momentarily in the doorway.
You turned on the flashlight, caught white eyes and white teeth rushing into its beam of light and even though there were two men, didn’t you think they were him? The one you had been waiting for, ever since he took the last boy. Your intruder. Didn’t you think he’d somehow split into two men, each with slightly different reasons to want your blood?
Your intruder remained in the other city, the city you left, the city where all the gone boys were buried, but where it was no longer safe for you. What happened to you next had nothing to do with him or the last boy or anything else you’d done.
This was only the terrible randomness of the world.
You lifted the chair as the men with white eyes and white teeth charged, swung it once before it was taken away. They started in with their fists, a hammer. The men held you to the ground, opened your pockets, found your wallet, pulled your coat over your head. There was blood on the floor and when was the last time you’d seen your blood. Maybe never but there it was. How you’d assumed what was inside you was so different than what was inside everyone else. But you’d seen this mess before, inside the gone boys. How your last conscious thought was to renew your belief that you were at the center of a story — but then here was your premature ending — and outside your soundproof tomb the story continued without anyone even once having spoken your name.
9
BY THE NEW YEAR, ONLY one fighter stood out from the undistinguished rest and Kelly thought of him as the contender.
The others named the contender Bringer, a name that was an action, fit for cultivation into legend, this man a myth in the making, forged before the deed, taller than Kelly by six inches, every pound of his flesh corded and bulged even under a sweat suit, his skin covered in tattoos scribed in a script Kelly could never read, his footwork quick and sure and his reach like something out of prehistory, made for bringing down the megafauna. It was only the contender that Kelly avoided, by never approaching him in the locker room, by ceding weights and machines at his advance, giving up the speed bag, the heavy bag, the sparring ring itself. Kelly thought the contender was the only boxer in the gym who would escape the zone, who might one day earn his way out of the city by the strength of his blows, the steel of his skin, his endless will.
The contender’s trainer was younger and taut too, different than the other trainers, the aging men dressed in tracksuits, bellies barely covered, questionable primes long past. The contender paid no attention to Kelly but Kelly saw the trainer watching whenever he sparred on the mats at the center of the gym. Kelly’s punches would send another man reeling and in the gap the trainer would appear, standing beside the mats, his hands shoved deep into the pockets of his shorts, his eyes bright and scanning with the kind of gaze that lit you up to yourself.
Kelly, almost half past thirty and without an honest future, in this world or any other, but still strong, angry, willing. The human body as perfectible tool. The other men thought Kelly was without fear but in the trainer’s eyes Kelly saw a more honest reflection, how he was almost nothing but afraid, afraid in every straining muscle fiber, every sliver of bone, every gush of blood, bile, marrow. The fear sweat from his body, stained his clothes, broke his skin with every blister and bruise. What the trainer saw would make him want something from Kelly and one day the trainer would ask. And when the day came Kelly would not deny him. It was the man who was most afraid who needed to put his fear into someone else. There had been so few people who had seen Kelly for who he was and now when he met one he wished only to say yes.
His activities began to jam against one another, a tectonics of overlap and damage. At the gym, he lifted heavier weights, lifted to forget, heaved the loaded bars over his shoulders again and again, probed the limits of his endurance. He was getting stronger faster than ever before and he took his new strength into the ring with him. When he sparred the men he fought were like ancient golems brought to new life by his want for opposition, their muscles carved of rock, their fists hard as the oldest earth. They knocked yesterday’s booze out of his flesh and the breath from his chest and if he found he couldn’t win he thought he’d at least bloody a lip, bruise an eye.