Matt Bell - Scrapper

His headlamp illuminated almost nothing in the open air but if he pointed it at his feet he could see where he might go next. He took a step out onto the central girder leading across the open span of air below and the metal received his weight without movement or sound or other complaint. He put his arms out to steady his walk and then he took another step. Somewhere above him he heard the passage of a passenger jet but he didn’t look. Everything peripheral became unnecessary distraction, increased the danger of forgetting the necessary forms of attention. From this height he could see more headlights moving in the street around the plant, lone cars making lonely traffic. There was a tightness in his chest but it was only more fear. There was a ringing in his ears but there was always a ringing in his ears. He was sweating but couldn’t lift his hands to wipe his face. His legs didn’t start to shake until he was past the halfway point but then his heartbeat came unbound from expectation, set its own rhythm. There was the starting a task and there was finishing what you started and he was making the move across. The air freezing around him and above him, and in the zone below the air was black beneath the furrowed winter sky, and almost everywhere he looked there was no light. Only a single length of glass blazed, a fluorescent banner stretched at street level some blocks away: a storefront church, holding a late service. The power of prayers he had believed in, caught brightly behind distant glass. The girl with the limp believed there were good men and women in the city and as Kelly looked out across the architectural darkness of the zone he wished those secret saints would come to their windows, wished they would each lift to the glass a single lit lamp, a flashlight, a flame. For his sake, he wished they would make themselves known.

The place where the fire had burned waited closer than ever, a short plummet to the ground below, where in his nightmares he’d dreamed of the dirt mixed with concrete and dust, the char of bone, the flaky remnants of skin. A single breath gathered, enough to let out one or two words, no more than several short syllables. His body was moving forward as if disconnected from his mind but if he could retouch the connections he would begin to speak. What he wanted to say might have been Help me . It might have been I’m sorry . The cold slid through his layers of clothing, found purchase in the holds of his body. He had saved a boy but what other goodness could he do, alone in the zone. He blinked and when he opened his eyes the light had changed again and he was closer to the other side of the beam. When he thought he couldn’t take another step he reached up and strobed the headlamp, moved the switch back and forth, the lamp’s flashes lighting the nearest bricks. He noticed he was only wearing one glove, the skin of the bare hand blotched and rashed. He closed his eyes, wavered on the beam. This was the purest manifestation of alone: the cold, the dark, the absence of anyone to hear what he meant to say, the way he moved his mouth around the words. The cold grew absolute, its deep numbness a weariness piercing muscle and organ and bone, but he imagined there was a colder cold farther down, the permanent freeze, where movement and breath and heat would all cease. For a moment he saw around him every wrong thing stilled, slowed until he might step outside their wrongness. He knew who he was, who he had been becoming, what he would have at last done to himself if not for the girl with the limp, for the boy. How now he had something to live for, found in the zone where he had not expected to find it.

He took the next step. The step after. He wasn’t sure he believed he’d make it but with every step less of the crossing remained and into the abridged remainder of the dark he spoke the words he was most afraid to say, the admittance of his failure to find the man in the red slicker, the splash of color he sought surely moving somewhere within this muted world and still somehow nowhere to be seen.

IF THE INTRUDER FOUND YOU again it wouldn’t be in any basement. All the boy could give the detectives was the brown car and the black mask and the red slicker and you had left the car and the mask and the red slicker behind. The intruder couldn’t know where you’d fled but every night you imagined him finding you inside this upper room readied for a boy, readied for listening to his muttering, for watching his face, the tiny movements of a boy, the tiny features, the eyes, ears, nose, lips. The opening and closing of the hands. The little hairs tall on the arms but nowhere else, not yet.

When you were inside the room with a boy the only noises would be the boy breathing, the words the boy spoke, if there were words — and there were always words, small phrases, beggared queries — plus all the small exclamations of the body and of the shifting room. In the new city you began to have dreams of a new and better boy but you remembered the dreams best in the little room, inside its small measurements made smaller by mattresses secured to the walls, the carpeted floor thickened and deadened with more carpet, remnant scraps. Upon the carpet there was the bed and the chair, the bed prepared for a boy and the chair meant for a man, and in your dream the boy stayed in the bed, cuffed to the bottom rail, and in the bed the boy aged: first the age of the taking, then the ages after, one year after another, and at every age the boy was naked on the bed, too big for his first clothes and without you offering to find him anything else.

I’m hungry, the dream boy would say, his voice huskier now.

Or he would say, I’m thirsty.

The boy would grow but not by getting bigger, he would age but he would shrink against his bones and you would shrink with him. Your bodies slimmed to skin and thin muscle. Hair falling out. Teeth, toenails, fingernails. A complete lack of nourishment but never pain or diminishment or death. You were tired but you wouldn’t sleep. Both your tongues so large in your mouths, those disgusting organs. You not clothed either. Your bellies distended, plump with absence. Your penis collapsed, your scrotum hanging loose between skinny legs, your bones resting atop the wood of your chair, which by then you wouldn’t have left in decades.

See the bowl and spoon from the boy’s last meal, eaten years ago. See the flies, many seasons past. Their husks moving with the dust. The boy staying a boy as the years pass. Heartbeats louder without muscle between heart and skin. Ribs so soft without nutrition. The rubbery thud of the body, the papery rasp of breath.

One day the boy would be as big as you or else you would be as small as a boy and the boy would slide his emaciated ankle through the catch of the cuff and stand up beside the bed. Then he would speak or not speak, then he would stay or he would leave. If the boy went from the room you would follow. If the boy stayed, then you would stay too, content at last.

You were in the upper room when they entered the house. You heard their footsteps on the floorboards, their voices loud but casual. They were not the ones who were afraid. Whenever you were caught you hid and you were already in the best room for hiding, the last room with a lock, one you’d installed yourself. A padlock latch for either side of the door, for whichever world you occupied.

You closed and locked the door but what was a locked door but an invitation.

Inside the soundproofed room you couldn’t hear their movements. Time passed but how much. Impossible to tell. All the sound in the room the sound you made yourself. The huff of breathing, a nervous wheeze through weird teeth. Perhaps they were dismantling the bathroom, ruining the walls to get to the pipes. Probably they were tearing the wiring from the bedroom or the living room. There was a kitchen without appliances but there was more wiring, more pipes. There was a basement and there was more metal downstairs in the dark. Surely they wouldn’t need to enter this one room, the smallest room in the house.