He was thirsty and he knew caretakers left their charges, took breaks by stranding them in other rooms. Maybe it wasn’t right to leave your charges behind when you went to the store or the bank but sometimes it seemed impossible to bring them along. The caretakers learned how to be alone again, despite the work. When and where, even with someone else in the room. You took money from the government for caring for your own disabled person but presumably you loved the person too because the money was shit. Nothing given ever replaced what was given up.
He didn’t care what anyone else did. He never left her behind, took her everywhere with him. They were sharing a life and this was it. At home he lifted her out of the chair and into the bath, out of the bath and into the chair, into the bed, into a recliner in her living room, into the passenger seat of her car. Twice a week she went to physical therapy where the therapists moved her muscles like she was a coma patient laid out on a mat in a room of the similarly injured.
The doctors said this was the best it would ever be again. They said this to him and he asked them to talk to her. She was the patient. They were her doctors, not his.
She had asked him if he understood what was coming but he couldn’t believe either of them imagined this. The difference between being told and being there. At first he’d thought what had happened to her was his fault: an eye for an eye, a pound of flesh to pay a debt, the taking of the girl for the taking of the brother. But this only was the old belief talking, the remnants of childhood, the holy before. The world without doubt. Even if she had never met him this was going to happen. He wasn’t the center of anything. Nothing revolved, nothing was attracted or repulsed by his command.
Every day he told her another secret and the knowledge didn’t make her any sicker. He was careful to pace the telling, to make it last. There was only so much of him left.
He wasn’t sure what she heard. Or if she heard, did she understand? Her eyes were alive and expressive enough but it wasn’t like he saw words in her gaze, it wasn’t like there was actual conversation happening between them.
He told her about the low room, how he had named it and prepared it, how he had hurt the brother there. He tried to tell her why. He wouldn’t think the brother’s name but the brother’s last face lingered still. There was a photo the news showed but it wasn’t the face he’d seen in the dark. This was another person entirely, someone with parents, a school to attend, a future requiring having left the room. He’d made the brother something different, an abstraction in the dark, he’d hurt him to protect the boy, to remove a single danger from the boy’s world.
Time and distance might have done the same work. He’d chosen to accelerate it. To not let a harm he could prevent continue even a single day longer.
I lied myself into belief, he’d told her, in the first days of the wheelchair. It was a crime of impatience, of wanting to ensure causal effect. I was impatient with the good acts of others, he’d said. Because I knew the good was nothing anyone could see enough to fear. Goodness alone stopped nothing.
But then the lie’s comfort had deserted him in the last moment. By the end the lights had been off and he had worked in the blackness, imagining whatever he couldn’t have seen. Now every night he remembered that imagining, relived it again.
He had been questioned when the brother was reported missing, again when the brother’s car was found stripped a week later. Sanchez again, bulky as ever but now smaller than Kelly, the detective diminished by Kelly’s new size. But there were no suspect fingerprints and without a body Kelly didn’t have to tell the detective what had happened next, how after Kelly left the low room he walked from the blackened buildings of the plant out into the fading hours of night and into the predawn of the city, to a certain house in the zone, a certain driveway in a devastated block where he had left his truck overnight, where the brother had taken the boy the last day he had followed him, the day Kelly finished the case notes.
When Kelly talked to Sanchez he had wanted to tell him about the boy’s father, about the brother’s last accusations. He had wanted to say that if he could have found the man in the red slicker he would have taken him first. But instead he had told himself the brother had not spoken in the low room and now he was no longer sure the man in the red slicker had ever been real. Now it was impossible for Kelly to see anyone else but the brother in the low room’s chair.
There hadn’t been running water in the house but in the truck there was bleach. He’d known it wouldn’t remove everything but it would remove enough. In the dark basement he’d stripped, scrubbed his hands, his face, his neck and chest, twisted against the burn of the bleach. He lit another fire, sat on the basement steps and shook while his spent clothes smoldered on the concrete.
When he’d arrived at her apartment she was already on the kitchen floor, slumped away from the counter, her feet splayed awkwardly, her face awake but her tongue stilled and her body turned out of sensible position. The burner had been turned on high to boil water, the apartment filled with steam long after the pot had emptied, its bottom blackened and starting to smoke. She’d been wearing slippers and one had fallen off her left foot.
Almost morning then. The city waking up. There had been alarm clocks bleeping through her apartment walls, then the first sounds of breakfast, television news. She’d been making dinner when she fell, had lain there on the tile all night.
Her cell phone was in her pocket but she hadn’t been able to reach it, couldn’t have opened her hands to work it if she had.
She couldn’t talk anymore but her eyes found him, set him to action. He shut off the stove, moved to simplify her posture, untangling her limbs and laying her flat.
He’d spoken in a low voice, spoke slowly in the careful and culled language of apology. He needed to call for help but he couldn’t call the way he looked. He had scrubbed his skin with snow and gravel and bleach but it was hardly enough. He wondered what she’d seen: he was her only hope but look at the condition he’d arrived in. Clean jeans and a t-shirt over skin roughed with grit and gore, bruised and battered from boxing and worse, hair streaked with bleach. He didn’t know what he’d looked like but he knew how he’d felt and he hadn’t felt like himself.
But himself had been a shifting thing then. Later the scrapper receded, sated, leaving something else behind, the remainder of Kelly, the broken salvor. He’d done something far from the irreducible center of the supposed law and what did it mean? Just another chink in the universe, another proof of its senselessness, its rules that did not reach all the way up from physics and chemistry and biology to define the right path of human action.
Into that gap he had put his guess.
The jersey was gone and with it all its borrowed symbolism. The gun he’d left in the low room, the sledge beside it. He’d never started praying again so there wasn’t anything to quit. Something had happened in the circle of swords but after the low room he let that feeling fly away, and as always when the last angels fled they left their ringing behind.
The morning in the girl’s apartment he’d arrived knowing the boy was safe. Then he’d found his girl was not. Now protecting her would require a more ordinary violence, a killing of the moments to come.
That morning Kelly had spoken to her in slow tones, tried to explain. He needed to know if she would die if he took a shower. He needed her to know he was going to leave the room but when he came back he would get her all the help she needed without anyone asking questions.