A sweep of his headlamp revealed the low room as he’d imagined it, untouched since he’d last visited, its square space separated from the world above by a difficult distance. A home for spiders but not much else. Even the rats gone for ages. When he turned off the lamp a stratum of darkness filled the vacuum. He listened to his breathing, listened to the other’s, the crying and the heaving. There was enough tape around the target’s body to make it hard to move, hard to breathe. The crying a nasal wheeze, signaling disbelief in what was happening. Kelly was having trouble too. Both of them together now.
The stale room burst with human activity. Kelly started the generator, let its hum fill the two heavy lights set facing the target. Now there was a darkness where Kelly could retreat, a space beyond the light the target’s vision wouldn’t be able to penetrate. Kelly had forgotten to don the mask but he did so now, the welder’s shield heavy upon his swollen face, burdening his skull. He returned in silhouette, palmed the target’s bound face and pushed it back, applied some pressure. The muscles moving the bones, the teeth and the tongue trapped behind the tape, everything he touched young and healthy, no sign of sickness in the body.
Kelly had waited, watched for borders, thresholds, a birthday. He’d had to make the target a man so he could hurt him like one.
Not a man but a bully, he heard someone say. The face of a bully.
The mouth below his hand was trying to speak too but the words were muffled by the leather of the gloves covering the face, the duct tape beneath. Kelly pictured the head of a horse, then a wasted ape. Something dumbly animal. But who was he picturing. And was it ever the victim who stopped feeling human first.
He used a pair of scissors to open the target’s shirt but he finished the cut with his hands, ripping the fabric to expose the target’s chest, the belly, the arms, the back, the skin swallowed in hurt, heaving with sweat. He was having trouble seeing the target through the harsh glare of the lights but by their glow he knew his own body’s recent unfamiliarity, the largeness of every part of it, the way his straining muscles had stretched over his frame. He was the heaviest he had ever been, possessed a certain enormity he hadn’t imagined possible. Now he thought the deep gravity of the world dragged upon him, the way that gravity grew the lower you sank, the way his hands were not any larger than before but their thickness increased. His thighs squeezed into his pants, feet squeezed into tight boots. His neck a widening trunk for his heavy head, his head lean and strained with veins but weighted with memory begetting action, weighted with the mask and its slim slot of vision. All of it another mistake. As if improving the body were the same as improving the man. As if physical strength made moral right.
When the flesh was exposed he opened one of the duffel bags on the floor, empty except for one last folded item. He shook out the folds, then draped the red robe around the target’s shoulders, pulled the hood up over his head. The target tried to throw off the garment but there were ways to stop his struggling. What was done to the boy couldn’t be undone. Kelly could punish the people who hurt him but it would not rewind the clock. These things happened and somehow he couldn’t help them happening again. He had lived a life meant to avoid the problem and he had slipped once, had sworn off children of his own, but had loved a woman with a child, had loved the child. Then love had not been enough.
Understanding required argument. The scrapper thought the sound of fists was one place they might start their speech. His hands already aching. His theologies had grown muddled but he said he believed even a single crime could charge you. Everything was equal, every action and word that crossed over from intent to occurrence. The scrapper needed to transfer the fear from one body to the other. He put bruised fists to use, he moved through the tools. He kicked the chair, then righted it again, its frame heavy with the target’s taped weight. Perhaps there were deep rituals in the world but he was making this one up as he went. The sound from behind the tape turned his stomach but didn’t unturn his hand. He wondered at the words, trapped inside the other’s mouth, tasting of the tack of tape. The lungs full of beggared screams, unable to push them out. He heard his own voice speaking but he struggled after the words. There was a certain lack of comprehension he had grown accustomed to but how quickly this encounter had moved beyond any previous threshold.
Are you a boy or are you a man, Kelly heard the salvor ask. Because if he was a boy, then what different crime was this. Age was not enough. Age was hardly fair.
What if something horrible happened to you. What if some years later you passed it on. How long did your guilt indict you. What was the lasting effect of having been younger, of having been unhappy, of having been made mean and dumb in your unhappy youth.
Kelly knew he wasn’t different. One day someone might come for him too. An angry child grown stubborn and brave or else a champion sent on the child’s behalf. But first anything to protect his boy. Not his by birth or his by the law. His by the saving. His by the carrying up out of the earth. His by the taking, the better but not dissimilar version of this act.
The other had taken a boy and watched him. Now Kelly had taken a brother and hurt him.
It was a cheap escape to already render the act in the past tense. He rejoined his thinking to the present: He was hurting the brother, between some times of not hurting him. How far could he go and remain Kelly. How much farther could he go as the salvor. How he could go much farther by giving in to the scrapper. How he thought the scrapper could go all the way.
Beneath the lights Kelly watched the glassy eyes, the fading consciousness. There was blood trickling from the tape around the mouth and how long had it been there.
Kelly shut off the lights, removed the mask. He went into the far corner of the room and spit up into the dust. He took off his coat, the heavy flannel beneath, left the orange jersey sweat slicked against his skin. The low room wasn’t warm but his body was. When he returned to the front of the chair the target was awake, choked against the tape, his eyes wide and panicked. The target knew where he was again. Who he was with.
The man in the red slicker. Kelly’s father, his grandfather, himself. He could change roles with the brother and there would be no diminishment of what happened next, no matter who was in the chair.
A voice spoke, asked a question. Another spoke next, answered.
Because you hurt my boy.
The sudden appearance of the possessive. My girl, my woman, my boys, all my children I couldn’t risk. My parents, wasted and devoured. Myself, who had made nothing lasting and good. A person who couldn’t even speak the names of the people he loved. Who once prayed for the shapes instead of the persons within. Who saw the faces falling through his prayers and could not give them the names to lift them back up.
His father: Kelly remembered his face but not like he used to. The vague sheen of some last memory fading. It would have taken a picture to bring back the color of his father’s eyes but Kelly could still remember how it felt to hold his father’s gaze.
The scrapper remembered nothing. The man of action was a house of empty rooms, a city of empty houses, a nation of emptying cities. Dirt from end to end, from black to black. A dead land where there was nothing left to feel, no one to tell you how you had stopped trying. A place where you could do no wrong because you could do no right.
It wasn’t a place you found but a place you could make.
The salvor was not afraid of the dark or the deep but they were not his first elements. He was meant to descend, to take what was valuable, to return to the surface without harm. Past this point in the taking there was almost nothing the salvor could do. There was no redemption in suffering, no correction in violence. Just diminishment and death. A bad thing happened and then another bad thing and another and another until you broke.