It was like watching through an instrument of magic. He could look above the phone and see he wasn’t there but through the screen he saw himself sitting in his usual spot, talking about scrapping, about the weight of things, the relative weights. Car batteries were worth so much a pound but they were so heavy, so dirty. Still he took one where he could find one, he said.
Steel was heavier than a lot of things, he heard himself say. A mass of aluminum weighed less than a mass of copper or iron.
The slow terror of his heartbeat. He didn’t remember saying what he was saying on-screen. Now he seemed to be reciting the weights of various mammals, various birds. A wolverine, he seemed to be saying.
What is the weight of a badger? he said. Twenty or twenty-five or thirty pounds.
He was a little drunk watching but how drunk had he been when he said these words, when he let them tape him saying them? A condor is a heavy bird, he said, and he looked so exhausted saying it.
The video was less than halfway over but he didn’t think there was anything else except more of this. The species and weights began to come faster, with less commentary. The weight of the hummingbird and the seagull and the common rat. The weight of the hyena. The weight of the buffalo—the bison, he slurringly corrected himself — and the weight of the spotted owl.
Where had he learned these things. What long-forgotten encyclopedia, read by flashlight so his father would know he wasn’t asleep, because his father would only enter after the room was dark. The accumulation of so many useless facts a by-product of a childish defense.
In the video his face was utterly serious but more animated than ever. His hands sat in his lap, atop his spread knees, one hand limp across each thigh. He spoke the weight of the whitetail deer. The weight of bears, the male, the female, the cub each a different weight. The weight of the whale and the squid. He was slurring worse, exhibited a strokelike stutter. If Kelly had been watching someone else he would have thought this was a man dying delirious.
If Kelly had been watching anyone else he would have been happier than he was watching himself.
The video ended. The phone was not a magic window. There was not another Kelly here. The Kelly he had seen was the only Kelly he was. He saw again how he didn’t have access to all of himself but no matter what was revealed he did not believe he could be made to quit the story or to turn from its end.
CONCRETE EVERYWHERE, CEMENT EVERYWHERE ELSE. Gray clouds and gray snow and gray earth. The destruction of the plant had advanced since he was last there or else he was more aware of what was gone. There was heavy equipment parked on-site, long red trailers for scrap and garbage. He couldn’t come during the day anymore, wouldn’t risk being seen by credible witnesses. He searched the plant at night, moved his light through the shattered rooms. As he walked he imagined finding a chasm in the floor of a building, and beneath that hole a great staircase spiraling into the earth, each landing another hallway full of rooms, locked and unlocked doors. Instead he found a tiny aperture secreted into the ground, a break in the surface wide enough to fit a man. Underneath, an uneven descent led to a single set of stairs, a single door. Beyond the door waited a hallway, its first span barely intact, the rest collapsed ten or fifteen feet in, and at the end of that hallway there was another door giving access to a small square room, a space sufficient to the task.
The enumerating of possibilities, the weighing of costs, the sharp rise toward a cliff of certainty: this wasn’t the easiest way but for every action there was a right space. Whenever the variables increased he tried to back up, to rethink. In his apartment he loaded the tools into two duffel bags, each meant for athletic gear but put here to different use. Their weight strained his new shoulders, curved his back. He loaded the truck with the bags, returned for the generator and the lights, everything else hidden at the back of his only closet, buried behind his few outfits. As he worked he heard from some cave within his chest the salvor, unopposed by the scrapper one last time.
He could always abandon the tools, he heard himself say. There was still a choice to be made.
It was enough to have saved the boy, he argued — but then he had to ask, Was the boy saved enough?
The salvor and the scrapper were not exactly voices, more urgencies, rushing gushes of suggestion, potential actions. At first hearing them had required a diminishing of Kelly’s own personality through alcohol or exhaustion. Now he heard their urges in every moment and either might make him move.
Underground there was no difference between day and night but he could only risk arriving in the night. He drove back to the plant, found the building again. Everything looked different in the dark but he was careful as he carried the duffel bags in past the shattered outer walls, over dumped trash, blown debris. There were long hallways leading into the plant but he knew which way to head. Inside one room there was the hole and the shattered slope of floor and at the bottom the door busted out of its shape.
Past the door there’d be no way to see him from the surface. There was a certain deepness he wanted, a certain distance from the ground and the city and the sky. Any violence there would be a private act: A man and a man went into a dark room and only one of them came out. A terrible fairy tale the length of a sentence.
When Kelly was finished he took the case notes from his back pocket and he placed them on the floor, their pages thickened with pasted maps, poor photographs, the weight of ink and frequent handling. He took his lighter from his pocket and because he didn’t need them anymore he set the case notes on fire. The flames of his confession didn’t last long but for a time they lit the blank cave of the room with their flicker.
There was the cave down within Kelly too and now he had made that cave this room.
He left the plant but he wasn’t ready to go home. The girl with the limp wasn’t at work but he knew he wasn’t ready to see her, not in this mood. The boy was lost to him and there wasn’t anywhere else he was wanted. As he drove the streets he passed the storefront church he’d seen from the top of the plant, the bright glow of the prayers within. When he parked the truck in front of the windows to watch the dancing prayer inside he caught the eye of some apostle, the leader of the congregation. The apostle held a plastic sword in one hand, lifted the other to beckon Kelly in. A gesture of ecstatic welcome. As if it were so easy for a prodigal to return to the fold.
THE CIRCLE TURNED and the congregation turned around its hem, the apostle leading his followers, their feet dancing behind his feet, tracing the invisible circle his steps circumscribed, a geometry of belief cut across the stained concrete floor, the blackened squares where the rows of washers used to be. The circle contained and guided them and as they turned they lifted toy swords and crimson banners, raised voices toward tongues. The folding-table altar held the speakers and the speakers were containers too, containing cheap electric crackle and the salvation of the congregation, which did not require fidelity, only volume, the voice of the spirit technology-amplified, extracted out of the fire and the dove and magnetized onto tape and uttered upward at decibel strengths born of the far end of the dial.
There were ways to take the air out of a room and this noise was one conceivable method.
Along the edges went the chairs, the buckets lined with plastic bags, ready for the vomit and the retching and the casting out. The congregation used to unfold the chairs into rows but now the chairs were rarely used. Let the faithful sit in their houses. In God’s house they would stand and move to his Word. The spirit needed space to churn but the apostle wasn’t fancy about smells, walls, former tenants. Any empty room could be a space for the spirit to move a miracle and the apostle and his ministers were there to work the deliverance, to cast out the demons of anxiety and shyness, the demons of addiction, the demons of obesity and fornication.