The trainer stopped him in the locker room, handed him a paper-wrapped package. He smiled as Kelly tore the paper to uncover the necessary ceremonial garb: a new pair of red gloves, the red-and-white shorts, the hooded red robe.
A gift, the trainer said. For your first and only fight.
Now the scrapper. Now the salvor. Until the duty was done.
Now the deep winter. Now the blue air and the slow cracking of concrete against the frozen and immovable earth. Now the streets ever more vacant in the zone, all Kelly’s knowledge of their topography blurred by constant snowfall. Now the unbroken clouds hiding the pale and heatless heart of the sun.
Now Kelly returned to the neighborhood where he’d found the boy, circled the missing house, read the street’s graffiti as prophecies, premonitions, threats. the great hope, he read. once again spelled once agian. Words he couldn’t read, words in Spanish and Polish and Arabic, other scripts he couldn’t identify, mangled senseless by ornamentation. the only age. A dead raccoon crushed in the street, tagged with blue spray paint, the photorealistic face of a child stenciled onto a brick wall, bracketed by birth date, death date. He rarely saw another person outside but he saw their evidence. dead serious. amos, lied to. He saw snowplows moving through some blocks but more of the streets went unplowed. There were streets where he wasn’t convinced there was one human soul remaining and those were the blocks he searched the hardest. The longer the walk the braver it made him. The boredom of being alone, walking below the many names of the Messiah scrawled in spray paint, the higher the holier. More names everywhere, names falling down, and when the names were gone what city would remain.
This was his last chance but what was the chance the man in the red slicker was wearing the same clothes. What was the chance he looked anything like what Kelly had imagined. Kelly didn’t know, kept moving house to house, block to block. He opened gates, walked up to front doors, tested locks and knockers, and in every entranceway he wanted to yell Hello, to yell Is anyone home, to yell out some right name.
In one living room he looked around at the frozen carpet and he said, If I knew a name I wouldn’t be here.
In some kitchen — the sink thick with the petrified shit of some animal, a cat or else something larger, wilder — he said, I want to be the one who stops this but I don’t know if I am.
The zone was bigger on the inside than on the outside, the interior spaces of houses each yawning blanker than Kelly had ever imagined. Even without the case notes he made new guesses, inferences, imprecise triangulations. When he was tired of driving he parked the truck in front of nameless bars, their windows lit by neon signs advertising brands he’d thought extinct. He ordered whiskeys until he slurred his questions and then he backed down to beer. Other men drank from tall cans and low glasses and they watched the aggressive way Kelly moved his growing body and he liked the way they watched. In some bars there were nothing but men. All of his responses became inappropriate, crossed up. Once he got so angry he got most of an erection. In a parking lot he broke an offending nose with his fists, put a boot into the wheezing man’s ribs before stumbling off to vomit into the gravel. He said, This wasn’t an investigation but an interrogation — but later he couldn’t remember who he had said it to.
The reporter sent him clips from their filming, private links to web-hosted videos Kelly loaded on his phone. In her email she apologized, said the news loved weird but this was too weird to air: the fight hadn’t happened but they were done filming. The phone’s screen was three inches wide and so he saw himself in miniature, a homunculus moving through a blighted landscape, the monochrome of the midwestern winter. A certain kind of starkness, the elemental bleakness of a man astride a wilderness of concrete and steel, acid rain and brick and rust.
The word homunculus. Where had it come from. What documentary, what book.
She was trying to get promoted, her email said, not fired.
His teeth were still firmly seated but he worried other connections in his head were loosening. He watched the clips and he tried to remember their context. In the first clip he saw a house he had scrapped before finding the boy, where the cameraman and the blonde reporter followed from outside the frame so Kelly appeared to be talking to himself. The walls of the house were opened, and on-screen he kneeled beside them, explained what he might have removed from where. He couldn’t recall being so knowledgeable but here he was describing the kinds of pipes the wall had held, the old copper, the discarded technology of the wiring, knob and tube everywhere in the house. Single-insulated copper conductors, he heard himself saying. Joist and stud drill holes, porcelain insulating tubes, porcelain knob insulators.
The insulating sleeves pulled through the walls were called looms, he said.
In this house the looms were made of cloth, he said. Other houses, rubber.
In her email, the reporter wrote, Please do not contact me again. Please consider getting help. Best of luck to you in your recovery.
One of his ears was swelled and bruised, an ugly organ. He strained to hear over the ringing. The second clip showed Kelly at work, silently shoveling swept debris into a dumpster. His face was blank, his eyes distant. There weren’t any other people in the frame and this shot was lonelier than the last. He was in the parking lot in front of an abandoned motor lodge but you couldn’t tell from this angle. He could hear an excavator but not see it. The whole block was being leveled and this was one of the last structures. The space around him swelled, swallowed him up. The camera angle widened to better show the absence of nearer structures, the length of the remaining building, a sign bearing some of the letters of the name of the motel. The latest in a line of such signs, partial namings. As if a part of a word did you any good. As if you could half name a city, a country, the world.
The third video showed Kelly at the gym in sweats and a t-shirt, Kelly bigger than he had ever seen himself before. Heaving steel weights over his shoulders until every part of him bulged. A look in his eyes Kelly didn’t recognize from any mirror. Then his fists on the heavy bag, too slow, his movements looking stunned and stupid but delivering enough force to shudder the bag out of the grinning trainer’s grip.
The final clip opened with a close-up of Kelly, seated before the camera on his couch, his living room splayed in the background. All the familiarity gone. How anything could be rendered alien by the camera. He took the phone into the living room, sat on the couch, and pressed play, then stood, walked around the coffee table, kneeled where the cameraman had kneeled.