Matt Bell - Scrapper

In one living room he looked around at the frozen carpet and he said, If I knew a name I wouldn’t be here.

In some kitchen — the sink thick with the petrified shit of some animal, a cat or else something larger, wilder — he said, I want to be the one who stops this but I don’t know if I am.

The zone was bigger on the inside than on the outside, the interior spaces of houses each yawning blanker than Kelly had ever imagined. Even without the case notes he made new guesses, inferences, imprecise triangulations. When he was tired of driving he parked the truck in front of nameless bars, their windows lit by neon signs advertising brands he’d thought extinct. He ordered whiskeys until he slurred his questions and then he backed down to beer. Other men drank from tall cans and low glasses and they watched the aggressive way Kelly moved his growing body and he liked the way they watched. In some bars there were nothing but men. All of his responses became inappropriate, crossed up. Once he got so angry he got most of an erection. In a parking lot he broke an offending nose with his fists, put a boot into the wheezing man’s ribs before stumbling off to vomit into the gravel. He said, This wasn’t an investigation but an interrogation — but later he couldn’t remember who he had said it to.

The reporter sent him clips from their filming, private links to web-hosted videos Kelly loaded on his phone. In her email she apologized, said the news loved weird but this was too weird to air: the fight hadn’t happened but they were done filming. The phone’s screen was three inches wide and so he saw himself in miniature, a homunculus moving through a blighted landscape, the monochrome of the midwestern winter. A certain kind of starkness, the elemental bleakness of a man astride a wilderness of concrete and steel, acid rain and brick and rust.

The word homunculus . Where had it come from. What documentary, what book.

She was trying to get promoted, her email said, not fired.

His teeth were still firmly seated but he worried other connections in his head were loosening. He watched the clips and he tried to remember their context. In the first clip he saw a house he had scrapped before finding the boy, where the cameraman and the blonde reporter followed from outside the frame so Kelly appeared to be talking to himself. The walls of the house were opened, and on-screen he kneeled beside them, explained what he might have removed from where. He couldn’t recall being so knowledgeable but here he was describing the kinds of pipes the wall had held, the old copper, the discarded technology of the wiring, knob and tube everywhere in the house. Single-insulated copper conductors, he heard himself saying. Joist and stud drill holes, porcelain insulating tubes, porcelain knob insulators.

The insulating sleeves pulled through the walls were called looms , he said.

In this house the looms were made of cloth, he said. Other houses, rubber.

In her email, the reporter wrote, Please do not contact me again. Please consider getting help. Best of luck to you in your recovery.

One of his ears was swelled and bruised, an ugly organ. He strained to hear over the ringing. The second clip showed Kelly at work, silently shoveling swept debris into a dumpster. His face was blank, his eyes distant. There weren’t any other people in the frame and this shot was lonelier than the last. He was in the parking lot in front of an abandoned motor lodge but you couldn’t tell from this angle. He could hear an excavator but not see it. The whole block was being leveled and this was one of the last structures. The space around him swelled, swallowed him up. The camera angle widened to better show the absence of nearer structures, the length of the remaining building, a sign bearing some of the letters of the name of the motel. The latest in a line of such signs, partial namings. As if a part of a word did you any good. As if you could half name a city, a country, the world.

The third video showed Kelly at the gym in sweats and a t-shirt, Kelly bigger than he had ever seen himself before. Heaving steel weights over his shoulders until every part of him bulged. A look in his eyes Kelly didn’t recognize from any mirror. Then his fists on the heavy bag, too slow, his movements looking stunned and stupid but delivering enough force to shudder the bag out of the grinning trainer’s grip.

The final clip opened with a close-up of Kelly, seated before the camera on his couch, his living room splayed in the background. All the familiarity gone. How anything could be rendered alien by the camera. He took the phone into the living room, sat on the couch, and pressed play, then stood, walked around the coffee table, kneeled where the cameraman had kneeled.

It was like watching through an instrument of magic. He could look above the phone and see he wasn’t there but through the screen he saw himself sitting in his usual spot, talking about scrapping, about the weight of things, the relative weights. Car batteries were worth so much a pound but they were so heavy, so dirty. Still he took one where he could find one, he said.

Steel was heavier than a lot of things, he heard himself say. A mass of aluminum weighed less than a mass of copper or iron.

The slow terror of his heartbeat. He didn’t remember saying what he was saying on-screen. Now he seemed to be reciting the weights of various mammals, various birds. A wolverine, he seemed to be saying.

What is the weight of a badger? he said. Twenty or twenty-five or thirty pounds.

He was a little drunk watching but how drunk had he been when he said these words, when he let them tape him saying them? A condor is a heavy bird, he said, and he looked so exhausted saying it.

The video was less than halfway over but he didn’t think there was anything else except more of this. The species and weights began to come faster, with less commentary. The weight of the hummingbird and the seagull and the common rat. The weight of the hyena. The weight of the buffalo— the bison , he slurringly corrected himself — and the weight of the spotted owl.

Where had he learned these things. What long-forgotten encyclopedia, read by flashlight so his father would know he wasn’t asleep, because his father would only enter after the room was dark. The accumulation of so many useless facts a by-product of a childish defense.

In the video his face was utterly serious but more animated than ever. His hands sat in his lap, atop his spread knees, one hand limp across each thigh. He spoke the weight of the whitetail deer. The weight of bears, the male, the female, the cub each a different weight. The weight of the whale and the squid. He was slurring worse, exhibited a strokelike stutter. If Kelly had been watching someone else he would have thought this was a man dying delirious.

If Kelly had been watching anyone else he would have been happier than he was watching himself.

The video ended. The phone was not a magic window. There was not another Kelly here. The Kelly he had seen was the only Kelly he was. He saw again how he didn’t have access to all of himself but no matter what was revealed he did not believe he could be made to quit the story or to turn from its end.

CONCRETE EVERYWHERE, CEMENT EVERYWHERE ELSE. Gray clouds and gray snow and gray earth. The destruction of the plant had advanced since he was last there or else he was more aware of what was gone. There was heavy equipment parked on-site, long red trailers for scrap and garbage. He couldn’t come during the day anymore, wouldn’t risk being seen by credible witnesses. He searched the plant at night, moved his light through the shattered rooms. As he walked he imagined finding a chasm in the floor of a building, and beneath that hole a great staircase spiraling into the earth, each landing another hallway full of rooms, locked and unlocked doors. Instead he found a tiny aperture secreted into the ground, a break in the surface wide enough to fit a man. Underneath, an uneven descent led to a single set of stairs, a single door. Beyond the door waited a hallway, its first span barely intact, the rest collapsed ten or fifteen feet in, and at the end of that hallway there was another door giving access to a small square room, a space sufficient to the task.