Kelly removed the tape and the target began to speak. Kelly wasn’t confused by who was in the low room but still it took some time to recognize the soft voice. He had spoken to the brother only once before. The brother had been an idea more than a person but now here he was, his personhood everywhere, leaking in the low room. All the titles merely symbols for what had a better name. Estranging did not mean to make someone a stranger but Kelly did not know another word. Whatever he did next would be the final act of his friendship with the boy. He could hurt the target worse. He could let the brother go. The action was close to complete but nothing was yet irrevocable. To have free will was to be both good and evil. To have free will was to choose, moment by moment, one or the other.
The salvor interceded, spoke for the last time. Kelly heard the words, voiced them into the low room. To the brother he said, What if you could become a good man. What if there is good you might do still, what if there is a good man who could be salvaged, someone better inside you who could be brought back into the light. What if the longest story is the story that bends toward the gravity of the good.
Kelly said, What if the greater crime isn’t what we’ve done but that in trying to end it I stop some better you coming after?
But what if I let you go, he said, and you hurt the boy again?
With the tape removed the brother could at last speak in his defense. The brother’s voice was strained by a panic Kelly couldn’t bear to hear. He paced the dark stretch of room before the chair, clenching and unclenching his fists as the brother claimed unexpectedly familiar grievances: What if it wasn’t the mother’s house the brother had moved away from but the father’s. What if the boy and the brother had the same father Kelly had. What if their mother was his same mother, a kind woman but a woman who would say nothing, do nothing. Who accompliced herself by looking the other way.
The brother kept talking, faster now, less intelligible. There were more words coming but Kelly wanted to already be past them. He howled, grasped for the table, missed and crashed into it instead. The solvable unsolved arrived again, taunting. The table shuddered, scattered whatever little remained. The clatter of tools, the sound of wood and metal impacting concrete, the zone’s most common refrain. He hadn’t known what he was looking for until he came back up with the pistol. He couldn’t see the safety in the dark but he thought he could work it by touch. Even after the brother stopped speaking Kelly could hear him breathing, could hear all the small involuntary movements of his body. Kelly took a few steps back, waited for his blood to slow. He wanted to see what was behind the blackness, wanted to hear whatever was at the bottom of the sound, the new confusion echoing in the dark.
When nothing was louder than the ringing in his ears, then Kelly raised the pistol, lifting its heavy weight against the drag of the black air. Each time he fired the blast lit the room, light and dark interchanging so fast that all Kelly saw was a staccato sort of nothing. In the blindness that followed he put the pistol to his own chin, found the trigger. Nothing. Nothing and the smell of gunpowder. He put the pistol in his pocket. He took the pistol out of his pocket and placed it on the ground. There were new smells in the air and it was harder to hear with the ringing louder than ever. He stepped forward, moved toward where he thought the chair was, toward the body in the chair. With his hands outstretched he found the body gasping, speaking in syllables Kelly couldn’t understand, a tongue of one. He put his hands on the body, searching for the wound. When the body recoiled unharmed, shaking in its seat — all breath and voice, all blood and muscle moving beneath clammy skin, strong jumping flesh draped beneath the red hood — then Kelly stepped back disbelieving, fled the brother’s barking pleas until he tripped over some fallen object, its length sprawling him across the floor, smacking his face against the concrete.
Kelly lay quietly on the floor, breathed the disturbed dust of the century. Somehow all the rage had gone out of him even though the task wasn’t finished. What was left? Only an anxious regret. When he stood with the sledge in his hands he felt tricked. The arrival of grossest inevitability. The limit between one life and the next. The way the blow you never saw coming pushed you over. The land of the living, the land of the dead. Not one and then the other, but one nested within the next. When had it even happened.
The building would stand until one day someone claimed all that yet endured: they would tear it down with machines, they would break the bones of the buildings and rip the last of their guts from the ground. A mechanical reckoning, a recycling of the late greatness. A city collapsed, its citizens driven out, its halted factories left to linger. Thieves in the ruins, murder below the earth.
All the metal in the zone would one day be removed, forgotten, reset. Dental records could identify the body, forensic evidence might find Kelly, but metal had no memory. He’d left the red robe behind. Surely other stains would last. In the grayer light of the hallway he took off his gloves, ran his hands over the door, the doorframe, every surface impossibly cool beneath the earth. He would take his chances with the fingerprints he wasn’t supposed to have. Either a detective would catch him or else a detective would not and he would let his worn hands decide. He trudged up the stairs, toward the surface of the world. Already the event began diverging and he recognized this quality of his thought for what it was, not a flaw of memory but an enhancement, a way to believe in a better life than the one he had lived, some good world without a past. What was wrong with him included a way to prepare for an aftermath. How aftermath wasn’t necessarily a pejorative. How he had lived with the version of himself that had made possible every bad thing he could remember doing, by damage, by weakness, by choice. But surely somewhere within there must still be another man, one who had never done anything wrong, had never hurt anyone, who had been loved back by everyone he had ever loved. But what was this man’s name, by what title could he be called to appear.
Back out in the blue air of the zone, Kelly put his mouth to the cuff of his coat, sucked hard, tasted the crackle of sweat and grit. The visible world shuddered and the shuddering came in waves. He wanted to vomit again but the vomit was not coming out. He pressed his hands against his stomach, pushed his fingers and thumbs into the bruises he found. He gagged against the pain but nothing else came, only the familiar throb of overexertion. He sank down to his knees, rocked back on his heels, placed his hands on his thighs. He kept waiting to catch his breath and it kept not coming. Something had broken. His fingers were numb and if there had been anyone to call for help he knew he wouldn’t be able to work his mouth, wouldn’t be able to hear his own voice over the awful increase of the ringing in his ears.
The car had been parked close but not close enough. He tried to walk, brought himself to life by the effort. Every ache and strain shouted its blame. He heard a sound like a blur, watched a throbbing cross his vision as he tried again to stand. The alley where he’d parked the car loomed emptier than he expected. Paper trash caught against the bricks, lay buried in the snow. The flotsam of a city. He put his hand along one wall, moved forward through a weariness so encompassing he hoped it couldn’t have originated within him. Air as exhaustion. One eye was bruised closed and the other so badly diminished his eyesight refocused uselessly as he sorted the blearing scene: something was gone that was supposed to be present and for a moment he couldn’t place it.