Richard House - The Kills

‘People don’t disappear like that.’ Cathy wouldn’t let this go. How could a young American, worldly, white, male, be abducted from a train station in broad daylight? This was Italy, supposedly, where everyone makes it their business to know everyone else’s business. How could this be possible? Come on, not without one single person noticing. At the very least? The whole thing struck her as highly improbable. It wasn’t the film, so much, as the idea that people could disappear. It didn’t matter how loved they were, how vital, how dynamic. They could just vanish.

‘And why? Was that ever explained?’

‘The book.’

‘I don’t buy it. Imagine, you’re given a job stapling plastic to a wall in a basement room, and you never ask yourself why? What might this room be used for? Come on? You never ask? It just wouldn’t happen like that. And the names? Please. Mr Wolf. ’

Rem only knew things in retrospect. Only in hindsight when motives and meanings became apparent. In this regard film was the perfect media: with the answer laid out at the end.

* * *

Rem took it as his responsibility to clear out Fatboy’s room. Following Rem’s example Fatboy had moved from his assigned quarters and taken residence in a store closet in the corridor between the commissary and the PX. Rem didn’t like the idea of anyone messing with Fatboy’s possessions, and decided it was his duty to box everything up, ready to ship back to his family. The boy had mentioned a mother in Michigan, but no one else, although Rem had fashioned the idea that Fatboy came from a large family and couldn’t shake the notion. He saw Fatboy as the runt among many brothers and sisters and imagined that there were other versions, none of them quite so skinny or fragile.

The clean-out started one evening when other options were exhausted: he couldn’t face another game of poker with Santo, and didn’t want to watch another DVD, where the disc more likely than not would be corrupted. To avoid the other men in his unit he quietly roamed the PX, did the rounds of the food stalls, the vending machines, but couldn’t occupy himself. As he came out of the commissary and headed toward the showers he had to pass Fatboy’s closet.

The room: windowless and strewn with trash, the heat compacted the stench (Fatboy’s stink of sweat and sweet nutmeg). Shelving units on three of the four walls were stacked with boxes, TV monitors, radios, wholesale packages of candy, out-of-date chips, jars of chip-dip in flats of twenty-four. Fatboy lived like a shut-in; everything within reach of a makeshift bed, a modest single black mat laid across the floor with barely enough room to stretch out, a radio kept inches from his ear. How could he stand the heat? Under the bottom shelf Rem found clothes, laundry, stiff and stuffed away with things he didn’t want to see, some magazines and balled-up socks. The boy’s taste ran scattershot: small Asian girls, breasty hipster blondes in cowgirl outfits. Rem couldn’t imagine Fatboy with a woman, partly because he was so young, but mostly because Fatboy appeared innocent. He could be coy when the other men spoke of sex.

He worked with the door closed. Head throbbing when he stood up. He drank a warm Red Bull, the fizz hurt his throat, leaked through him, and he immediately began to sweat. He recognized this sweetness as the cause of the stink in the room: what he’d assumed to be the smell of the boy was only the smell of the drink.

On the bottom shelf Rem found a black folder with a notebook and a collection of loose paper. At first he thought that Fatboy had kept a diary and determined to burn this, because it was hard enough thinking about him, wondering if he had or had not ever loved anyone — and knowing, if he survived, that these injuries would blight his life.

Rem settled with his back to the door and began to leaf through the notebook. It looked like junk, just lists and scribbles, many of the pages swollen as if once wet. Fatboy had scrawled crosses on page after page; some plain, some three-dimensional with ornamentation as if wrought from iron. The notebook reminded Rem of a book of tattoo designs, demonstrating different varieties of the same thing. Loose rows and columns of crosses. On other sheets he found lists of names, possibly three to four hundred with a good number of repetitions, some from the military, but most of them contractors listed by their units. While he recognized some of the names, he couldn’t figure out what linked them. He found Santo, alongside Clark and Samuels, two other men working with Unit 409. Next to these names were the same simple crosses. Others — Watts, Pakosta, Chimeno — were annotated with a cross in a circle, others with an ornate cross with spiral arms. One, drawn in negative, in a black circle, appeared against names which had been crossed out: Forester, Marks, Bell.

For no good reason he’d thought of Fatboy as a Quaker. Rem liked to think of him equal to his peers, dressed in plain clothes, humble, sat alongside his brethren, waiting until the spirit singled him out. Instead the boy appeared a more common-or-garden evangelical Christian, born again, though that didn’t tally with what he knew. Didn’t those born-agains proselytize? Didn’t they hunt people, hound after their souls? Didn’t they pester God into every corner, bend every conversation? If Fatboy was a born-again he’d kept his counsel: Rem couldn’t see God in any kind of detail here, not the faintest trace, and thought the idea laughable. So what kind of God-fearer was Fatboy? Some youth holed up in a storage room who saved souls by writing names and scrawling crosses? Fatboy collected names not souls.

* * *

Rem took over the room. He packed Fatboy’s belongings and made sure they were returned to his mother. Night after night when he could not sleep he read repeatedly through Fatboy’s lists, but knew that he would never understand why the boy had collected them.

His missed Fatboy’s banter.

‘If you had a special power,’ Fatboy had asked, ‘what would it be?’ The power of flight, or X-ray vision, the ability to transform into a wolf, to swim like a dolphin?

Santo huffed. He already had a special power. ‘Invisible.’ He looked for a place to spit. ‘True. I’m invisible. The only time people see me is when they want something. Blame. I exist to shoulder other people’s shit.’

Rem said he wouldn’t want anything special. No. According to his wife, he needed the simple gift of instant hindsight, so it wouldn’t be hindsight at all. There probably wasn’t even a word for what he needed, but he knew there wasn’t one single day he didn’t need to go back and fix something.

‘I’m off-pitch,’ he said, ‘that’s what she calls it.’

‘Not a problem, bro.’ Santo leaned forward, let out a fine stream of spit. ‘I blow my nose, I get blood. The air. It’s dry. ’

Fatboy wanted everything. Let’s face it. What’s the point of just one thing? You’d need super-strength, super-speed, heightened senses, the whole bag of superpowers — and flight. One lone power wouldn’t cut it.

‘And what would you do with all that?’ The idea vexed Santo. He looked up, took in the hot white sky. ‘I mean, what’s the point? You get to do all this shit, but what for? There’s always stuff you can’t do. My sister, she sees angels. All over the place. Angels with wings. Everywhere. Her cat died and she still sees it. Follows her around. Why? She thinks she’s gifted. What use is this to her?’ He shook his head. ‘Nothing. She still works minimum wage. Still married to a creep. Still unhappy.’

Fatboy said he’d been reading, and found some differences. ‘We have people who do things. Fly, climb buildings, all that. Here they have things that do stuff. Carpets. Lamps. Bottles. Magic stuff. ’