“The Power Company Detective” by Joe Koch

The gun doesn’t remember you. The man you were was not important, nothing more than another in a series of shifting targets for the shouting hole of its small black mouth. Furthermore, you may have been a woman. Let’s say you were. It doesn’t make any difference to the gun. What matters is that the gun still matters to you. It will always matter. It speaks for you, for her, for whoever you once were.

She falls apart under questioning. Highly specified shadows fall across her face: a fedora, smoke from someone’s cigarette, a gesture from an uninvolved bystander cashing in on the drama; and last, the grey, long-nosed profile of the handgun, the fuzzy-edged shadow-impression of its barrel stretching far beyond the clenched fist, beyond that single thick decision-making finger poised in threat. The shadow crosses her upturned face like an airplane that briefly blocks the sun. The power station hums.

“Look, lady, I want to believe you. We’re all of us here to help. But you gotta agree, if you saw it in profile like you say, he wasn’t aiming at you. What or who are you hiding? I can’t help you if you don’t come clean with me.”

Her eyes grow wider, like they can’t hold everything they’ve seen one minute longer. They stay wide, like they can’t risk being closed. “I was, he was, there was no one else there.”

“Exactly what kind of firearm are we talking about?”

“What?”

“What kind of gun was it?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know anything about guns.”

“Well what did it look like? How many shots did you hear?”

“Black, I think.”

“Okay, okay.” He sighs. “This is gonna be a long night, isn’t it?”

The shadow of the gun grows larger. It blocks the sun completely for a moment that feels eternal, looming in pregnant hesitation over both of them until one thick finger chooses life or death. But unlike the movies, death happens only if you’re lucky or a damn good shot. The gun is not to be trusted, despite the certainty of its loud report. Its shadow deepens, remaining soundless like a memory as yet unshared.

***

Two boys are hitchhiking. Or maybe they run into the tall guy at a corner store. But you don’t remember that part. You remember the two of you, together for a few wild days, long enough to trust him. You’re young and stupid and neglected and abused with no good reason to trust, but why else would you run away in the first place? You were always stupid. Stupid to hope for better. Stupid always wins.

When you wake up in the back seat after the car stops, the other boy’s riding shotgun, riding in front, talking to the tall guy. Negotiating. Negotiating without you. He goes quiet when you stir. The first clue you should have caught, except that everyone seemed so human back then.

The mouths murmur at each other, making soft lip and tongue movements. They lack the force and finality of a single carbon steel shout.

If you tried to count all the gunshot deaths you’ve seen on screens in videos and movies, and then divided them by how many times a single shot blew a guy down resulting in instantaneous death, you’d have a number close to one. Add to that—or subtract, who knows, it’s not like you ever paid attention in math class—the news footage you’ve ignored of wars and disasters playing in the background during every supper since you were six years old, every classroom count of casualties, and you’d reach a solution something like zero.

Zero chance of survival.

“Where are you going?” Pushing your greasy hair off your forehead, you stumble out of the car to stop the other boy. Another car has pulled up to meet the tall guy’s, and the other boy’s leaving, leaving in the new car even though it’s been you two hitchhiking around the bayou together and scoring for days. Or maybe it was one long night with no stopping and no sleep and that’s why you passed out in the back seat. Either way, you call out, “Hey.”

Does the other boy look back? What kind of expression does he have on his face? Can you tell me his name?

What is this, some kind of trial? Your body through the car door spilling the way memory spills, clad all in black, stopping the way memory stops. No one forces you, but later the tall guy will tell you it’s in the trunk. You’ll have been fighting him, but you’ll freeze when your subconscious does the math. Zero chance.

Nothing stops you from leaving right now, half-asleep and perplexed. You could go with the other boy, but you’ve seen that look before. You’re not wanted.

The tall guy says you should get to know each other better. He says he has to see his mother. He likes you, okay? Come on.

“Your mother?” you say, freaked out.

“Yeah, you know, my mother.” The way he says mother you know it means something else besides mother but you don’t know what. The other boy glancing back with not guilt, not fear, not even relief or desire, impatient with the new driver. You don’t have a habit like him, can’t fathom the emptiness in that glance.

As long as it’s not an actual mother, you guess you don’t care. “Sure,” you say, and he drives you somewhere you’ve never heard of. The place is like a club or a bar, except it’s in someone’s house in a run-down neighborhood. No sign, no front door. You go round the back.

Musicians noodling and too many people crowded hot and close inside. No one here looks like you. They’re all staring at you like you stepped off a spaceship or a movie set. Part of you is stuck back there with the boy who left and another part can’t tell if any of this is real.

The tall guy leaves you to go talk to his mother. You’re the center of attention, not that you wanted attention, not like you didn’t try to hide in the shadows and keep quiet like he said. A fight almost breaks out when he comes back. He yanks your arm, possessive, hostile. “I told you, don’t say nothing here.”

“I didn’t.”

He drives you to another place. This one is worse. You’re outside the city, not that you know the city. Out past the old highway with no lights except the blinking reds atop scaffolding towers, the glow of pink fog. Maybe some green or yellow pinpricks. The hum of a power station shivers up from the swampy ground through your sneakers and judders your empty stomach.

Here and there, a few trailers. No lights on in the windows. This one is his.

After you go inside, you realize you’re never going to see the other boy again. You realize that love doesn’t conquer all, love doesn’t conquer anything, it just makes you stupid, and stupid wins again, and now that you and the guy are alone in the dark, after you protest, after he says it’s in the trunk and don’t you doubt he won’t use it, you realize that you’re never going to love anyone again and this is the place where you will die.

***

The gun doesn’t take your youth. It’s got nothing to prove. Time takes it, putting weight on your chest, packing the gun under blankets, wrapping it, hiding it where you’ll never remember you put it even when you can’t forget. She slept with a gun, they said, but not under her pillow. A gun under the pillow is a good way to get shot in the head. Nobody does that.

They were talking about indifference. They meant it in the carnal sense.

“We’re all here trying to help you, lady.” Now he’s sitting across from her instead of looming, skinny hunched back, elbows on his knees, hands folded with false patience. After business hours, the cluttered drama cleared from the station, the two of them alone. Maybe she’ll respond to a more intimate approach. “We all need someone to talk to sometimes.”

She slept with a gun, they said, and what they meant is that she was indifferent to pleasure and accepted what the machine demanded of her. He hasn’t heard the rumors, doesn’t have the right connections. In fact, working within the constraints of such firmly and unreasonably imposed limitations is a requirement of his job, rendering him more of a Maltese falcon than a Spade. She wonders if he’s ever solved a single case.

If she had children, and maybe she does, maybe she fucked the gun and more than a mere profile in shadow hovers over the two of them ready to explode if she answers. Maybe a brood of shadows fattening on her since her youth, fattening around one central fuck, crying like new machines under the blanket of adipose and epithelium ready to be thrown open and expose a new industry. The swamp around the station is full of the bodies of dying birds, poisoned by particulate matter that has no odor, fat white bodies grounded in the brown decay.

Her children are the proof he’s hiding, trying to pry the truth out of her with all the crass skill of an improvised medic digging a bullet out of a wound, making the injury worse. She can’t cooperate, even if she wanted to. She’s already lost too much blood. That’s the consequence of constantly giving birth, carrying everyone’s monsters to term and re-ingesting them again and again to gestate anew while the machines pump more water or gas or whatever the hell it is they pump out of the swamp, sucking at the land’s depleted teat until the power grid goes offline and the children come out, once and for all self-fecund, self-destructive, ever-annihilating, born to play. He’ll never find them, and if he finds them, he won’t know what he’s looking at. Most of the time, neither does she.

“It helps having someone to talk to. Maybe you need someone like that. I’m a good listener. Take your time and start at the beginning.”

She feels no compassion for the painful way his face wrenches into a forced smile. If there was anything else to say, she’d say it. His persistence, and the clear agony it causes him, the fact that he didn’t break for lunch and now ignores the nearing dinner hour, the poor state of his wrinkled suit as if he hasn’t been home to change for days, and the backward dialectic he trudges as if averse to progress is senseless anathema.

The shadows elongate. The view outside is distorted through lead-shielded containment glass. She rarely blinks.

Asks the question he won’t. “Which beginning?”

***

The tall guy isn’t a bad guy. It’s about survival. He knows. He was in the war. The conversations are the worst part of the next thirty-six hours. He’s rescuing you. Do you want to know about what goes on back there? He says you need to learn about people like that if you want to make it. He isn’t some kind of sadist. He’s pretty average. Killing isn’t something he likes, but you believe him when he says he’ll do what needs to be done.

When you go inside the cramped hallway—because you’re out in the middle of nowhere at a trailer he calls his pad like he’s stuck in the past, and no signs, no lights, where else can you go?—the first thing he does is grab you. But soft, nearly romantic, with only the spittle of moonlight to see him by.

“Sorry.” You squirm away.

He’s patient at first, asks if you like boys, yeah, of course you do, and acts like he’s taking you home after a date like people do in the movies, but in the movies it’s only ever a boy and a girl, so it’s not like you’ve ever been able to go out on a normal date, but sure, you’ve made out with guys. You’ve messed around. Except you don’t like him that way and no, shit, you’ve never taken it up the ass. You’re not ready for that. Not with him. He says he’ll be real gentle. He says he already paid.

When you freak out and fight, he grabs you harder, and he says, or yells, he can’t help that your boyfriend took his money and didn’t tell you. He gets that you’re hurt, but a deal’s a deal. It doesn’t matter to him if your body is alive or dead. Listen, he’ll make it real nice if you’ll let him.

The next thirty-six hours murders you, but only what’s invisible. Everything else is fine.

***

Twilight shadows reach into evening. The machinery hums.

“Who was he aiming for? Is that who you’re trying to protect? How many people were in the house? How many shots did you hear?”

“None.”

“He didn’t fire? Then how did you know it was loaded? Why didn’t you run? You’d have been a moving target. You could have gone for help. You see the problem here, lady. Your story doesn’t add up.”

She must concede, he’s right about the difficulty of the math, although maybe that’s a personal failing since it’s not like you ever really paid much attention in class. The basic calculations defy reason, like quantum solutions ruled by an internal and irrational logic. Every answer you can provide with certainty will sound like a lie.

The truth is that these entanglements across time fall shy of infinity or zero. She appears between shadows, observer below the threshold of memory, never alone. The truth is the gun is powerless without you. It’s a senile thing that doesn’t remember you, her, the hand that held it, or what it has taken. It knows only what it has given and continues to give. The sad indifference of the statistics combusts a new mother she can no longer conceal.

The gun doesn’t take youth. It gives age. It gives death, but not the kind that kills. Consensual death with the gun contains a formula for obedience enforced by violence, and the image of violence, and the idea that persists in the absence of the image after all prior images have been obliterated. It holds death irresponsible.

It gives erasure and removal as an ongoing process the same way shadows delete portions of her face, no longer upturned and wide-eyed, but dead on, attentive, waiting for the inspector to finish what he has been struggling for so long not to say.

“You know, sometimes what we think of as…”

But she’s not listening anymore.

She’s thinking about the big white dead birds, scattered like broken eggshells across the brown sludge of the swamp. Thinking she could teach them to fly.

The patterns of the shadows streaming back and forth across their faces change from black and white to pink, green, and a flashing intermittent red glow. The lights outside the power plant have a poignant aura she appreciates in the fog of dusk. There’s nothing else around for miles. Steam pours out of a chimney, rounded and towering, a giant gun barrel aimed at the sky.

No stench accompanies the smoke. Whatever god got shot here died a long, long time ago. The plant hums with the last dregs of its power, susurrating with unnatural agitation, forcing scant energy from the corpse. The disturbance is almost subliminal as the sky deepens to purple outside the window of the small control room building.

The real question, the one the interrogator won’t ask, is how long the company expects to keep milking a dead god, and who or what they think has arisen to take its place. They would not have brought her in without suspicion. Do they even know where to look? Has the machinery already begun to adapt, or will it be rendered obsolete by an unspeakable birth?

Invisible particles shake in the air.

***

For the boy, dying is the easiest part of the next thirty-six hours. It doesn’t require any effort to let your body be unzipped and your skin turned inside-out. Instead of a tan, a few moles, and the adolescent follicular energy of faint armpit and chest hair, you instead wear a slick kind of filth, the sensation of cow leather stained with afterbirth. The idea of diesel smoke resides in the cavities where you used to hold oxygen between breaths. Or perhaps it’s some other toxin. You have no idea what they’ve been dumping in the swamp, all you know is that something rubbery happens when you think you’re breathing, and that breathing is a habit that’s hard to break.

If you didn’t have to breathe, trading body parts would be a much easier task. You shouldn’t have to, since you’re dead. Your palate bruises with the challenge of stopping. The ghost glues itself into your throat.

A single thick senile shadow dominates the boy’s cadaver, the boy dead and not dead, you unimportant to the small hole of a shouting mouth from the black barrel aimed like an awakening, like an erection. If the gunman dumps a body in the brown sludge of the swamp, before the fish or flies find it, alligators claim their toll, feasting on toxins that change the boy into something new.

They claim your parts, pulling you under. You come clean in the filth, in death. Wetly, a leg sluices off in their jaws. An arm, a foot. Entrails comingle. Your internal gases meet the noxious effluvium of the maltreated wetland making smells so thick you can poke them with a stick. With a shadow, you are aiming. This long barrel you have swallowed by force or by choice becomes a lead alloy weapon of extraction. Pushing against the animals—and you don’t blame them for their hunger; the blame lies with that which has made you meat—you repel, using their girth against them. You ascend in shreds.

He cares about you. He says it’s always like this the first time. Soon you’ll crave it. “You don’t know how good you got it. Ladies be begging for this dick, and you act like ain’t nothing.”

“I’m just tired, that’s all.”

“I can go again. Don’t doubt it. Sure you satisfied?”

You nod, although the term doesn’t make sense. “I just want to go to sleep.”

He says, “You sure sleep a lot. You sick?”

You shake your head.

“You been tested?”

Shake again.

“Put this on.”

“But I’m tired.”

Fear has mutated his eyes. He tosses the clothes and keeps his distance. He’s restless, in a hurry to move you. He drives. You don’t know where. You don’t care.

“Go round back,” he says, hands you a business card. “Call me later if you need, uh, you know. I got to go attend to some shit right now, you feel me?”

You throw the card away as soon as he’s gone. Somehow you’re still out in the middle of nowhere past the old highway in the fog of the swamp, and yet you’re also at the weird house he called his mother.

The bar is empty. No music from inside. Smell of puke on the threshold. Plastic bags, dried mud, and broken glass inflame the floor in strata like geological deposits. Each step is wet and crumbling. Walking through the room where he yelled and yanked your arm—was it yesterday? Two days ago?—it’s obvious from the debris that no one has been here for months, maybe years. Maybe never.

Peeling layers of paint mottle the walls with a conflicting history, colors changing like snakeskin in spotted shafts of scarce illumination, curling like bark in darker corridors. The tight, steep stairwell is littered with a century of chipped paint. Exposed wood exhales with the humidity of the wetland, sharing spores of some new creature made from the union of house and poisoned swamp. Fecund toxins of failing machinery and the fungal network rooting upward from the landscape meet in a parasitic bond, animating the mind of the mother. An amalgamation of dumped chemicals and youthful fruiting bodies follows mycelial paths through rotting wood, growing wild in neglect, emerging as the charged neurons of a hallucinating brain.

The house is wide awake.

You’re sore inside and your balls clench when you lift your leg, sending the pain deeper into your guts. In a moment it softens to nausea. At the top of the stairs, an antique claw-foot bathtub juts diagonally as if wrenched from its fittings. The white porcelain is cracked and pitted with rust. White flakes like eggshells lie broken around it on the landing. You have to climb through it to pass. By the time you’ve maneuvered over, your tender body is turned all the way around, facing down the stairs.

You realize—or maybe this is the house thinking, and you’ve breathed too much of her secondhand air—that this is all happening backwards, or perhaps in a loop. The house is empty because you’re going back in time before the weird party, before you met the guy who was driving or the other boy, going backward from your murder, before you saw the gun.

“But I never saw a gun,” you confess to the empty stairwell. “I freaked out when he said he had it. I froze and did like he said.”

The floorboards are wet and sagging. You know it’s from the constant rain and humidity, but you’d like to think she has shed all these tears for your untimely death as you tread on her dilapidated lap. You turn away from the stairs, and you’re not surprised by what’s in the adjacent room under the attic’s missing floorboards. You recognize the jaws and throat, the metal alloys, the glowing mossy green that glistens with moisture, the emeralds of alien eyes, the foamy paper of disintegrating lichen skin, the meaty warm water of afterbirth, and the curling vulva rusted through the porcelain like a hole drilled through bone that you must now enter and penetrate for your full confession to be made.

***

He would like to gain her trust. It’s his job, and he’d like it to be done and over soon. God, it can’t be soon enough. When this is all over with he’ll—well, he doesn’t really know. Part of him still dreams about running away. They say he’s supposed to crack the case, but cases like this start out cracked and need mending.

Maybe it’s finally his turn to break. The thought almost makes him smile.

During the dull frustration of her silences, he’s forced to confront how he’s not sure if he cares about her as a client anymore, or if he’s pretending to care as a means to an end. He’s been at it so long he can’t tell the difference, either at work or at home. Funny how when he tries to picture home, his mind goes blank. It’s been that long of a day, or week, or year. He shifts again, a pained smile, ugly suit and shirt rustling, arranging his face into something he hopes she’ll trust.

There’s the right thing to say, the kind and understanding stance, and then there’s the unbearable panic at the center of his heart. Machines are working below the surface. Weapons are being built. The laws of thermodynamics say there have to be some casualties or something like that, right? It’s the price of doing business. He’s forgone the niceties of life to protect this science that he’ll never understand, and his job is the truth, but not that truth.

Anything but that.

“Look, you’re an attractive young lady. You’ve got your whole life ahead of you. Help me out here, and then you can go back home and forget this ever happened.”

The shadow of a fedora crosses her face. From his point of view, it looks like a flying saucer.

She continues not to speak and he continues flexing his face to fake a smile. He lied about finding her attractive. He’s shocked by what an ugly kid she is but knows better than to say so. It’s a relief when the shadow of the flying saucer hovers and blocks out her cleavage and chin.

Abruptly, she grins. She laughs.

***

The boy realizes—or maybe it’s the house thinking, since they share the same tainted, odorless air—that everything is wet because the house is upside-down and underwater. Wet, and yet dusty, a conundrum. He realizes this is what his life will be from now on. He must learn to swim, and breathe fluid, and breathe dust, and die, and die. Each time the clock resets, he will have to wake up and pretend to be alive again.

He will haunt this house with her alien moss and fuck this porcelain eye with its rusted edges tearing at him as if she wanted to ingest the thin strips of tender flesh forever. More precious than semen, she takes the meat to make—ah, but what is it that she makes?

He understands that this is a secret.

He accepts that secrets, like boys, are taken to graves.

Each time he wakes and surfaces, his animated corpse performs a misinterpreted pantomime, viscerally amazed and exhausted by how many times a single boy can be reborn and die. There are many such children in the swamp, their bodies dumped where chemicals achieve consciousness and a murdered ecosystem thrives on more murder.

He finds rest in his restlessness, grace in his graceless contortions as he hurls his meat into any open mouth. Another man rips him apart and makes him a god.

“You should take better care of yourself. You’re a good-looking kid.”

The god-boy gently snorts, nearly finished getting dressed. The man stands up to face him, wearing nothing but his Versace underwear. “I’m serious. I’m a physician. You’ll bounce back after tonight, but this will catch up to you someday. I feel, I don’t—I guess I don’t want to let that happen to you.”

“You don’t know me.”

“I could.”

The boy drops to his knees, lifts his chin, and spreads his arms. “If you want to help me, piss on my cuts and bruises and make them sing.”

“You mean sting,” the man says with a smirk.

“Piss on me and leave me by the highway.”

The man hesitates. “What are you talking about? God, you’re a slut. At least take off your clothes first.”

“No.” The boy grabs him through his tight designer underwear. His teeth are clenched, grinding near the rich man’s swell. “I swear if you don’t, I’ll bite it off.”

They kiss.

Later, out on the old highway, the sky shits another disgusting pink sunset down on the power station. The boy spits, adding something of himself to the indifferent landscape. Pinpoints of light blink in the middle of nowhere for no one to see. He’d thought all the birds were dead, but out here alone with no traffic, no doctor, no house except what hides below the brown water, he suddenly hears them.

Honking more chaotic and throaty than normal geese, a rhythmic moan like sighing skins, as if a drum could orate in melancholic vowels. Then their bodies pass above him, high up. A mass of fat white waterfowl churn across the sunset. With sad noise, they splash down in the brown muck of the swamp.

Somehow, they stay white. The god-boy inhales the smell of the physician’s urine from the folds of his shirt.

It’s not true as he was taught that gods are powerful. They have zero chance of survival, enslaved in mythical cycles. Zero is the same as infinity as far as he’s concerned. It’s not like he ever paid attention in math class.

Before he loops again into the house’s rusted hungry hole, he dreams of being a loud fat white bird.

***

“You forgot about the gun, didn’t you,” he says.

She laughs. After five hours—or has it been years?—of her grueling silences and bullshit half-answers, she laughs.

He’s infuriated, and then he’s too panicked to understand the bleeding, the way she tugs at the fabric across her lap and digs into the gap spreading between her thighs. Blood heralds an emerging form. A shadow crowns.

She laughs, pulling out black until the light of it is blinding.

He screams, “What are you trying to hide? Who is it? What have you done?”

***

The gun doesn’t remember you, especially if you never forget. Neither does the generator in the adjoining building, the filtration system in the control room, or the truck you drove to work yesterday that’s been losing air in the rear passenger side tire while you’ve been working all night or half a decade or for all eternity at a job you’ve grown to hate.

There’s nothing left but hate. He, the man you were, is not important, nothing more than yet another in a series of shifting targets and consumable sources of fuel.

Let’s say you were tricked into coming here. Let’s say you already put in your notice and planned to quit after this one last case. It doesn’t make any difference to the gun. What matters is that the gun still matters to you, whoever you once were, regardless of how much time has passed or rewound, or how much you’ve worked, or changed, regardless of whether you saw it or not, whether it even existed in the first place. You’ve had your chance to tell the truth, and all that matters, all you will remember of your life is this: from the dreary swamp of her skirt the shouting hole of its small black mouth will now, finally, irrevocably, speak.

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