It took some finagling to get Amtrak to let Brody use his old ticket when he had missed the scheduled return trip by well over a month. He assumed they caved because of his limp and the condition of the right side of his face, which was green and purple. Despite getting passage for the 12:10, the train was late, delayed heading out of Chicago due to ice on the tracks. He sat on their uncomfortable benches, closed his eyes, and thought about nothing but sleeping in his own bed.
He got to his private car and carefully eased into the seat. The cot in the county jail had done his bruises and aches no favors. After the doctor had referred Brody to a physician in the Twin Cities who could remove the stiches in his gut, he informed Brody that the gouge in his shoulder had gotten infected and the tube of antiseptic salve he gave him would make the pain stop. The opposite was true. Brody shouldered off his coat and applied the cream, cramming his hand down the collar of his shirt, gritting his teeth against the burn the salve created. He paused, feeling something land on the back of his wrist. He pulled his hand out: a single red dot.
He sniffed and dabbed at his nose, then looked at his fingers. A smear of red.
The collar was loosened, stretched out from trying to get his arm inside. It didn’t stop him from hooking two fingers and tugging at it, though.
On his home voice mail in Minneapolis, Brody had close to seventy-two messages. Samantha at the community center expressing worry. Chiffon trying numerous times to get a hold of him. His bank notifying him of severe overdraft charges. A few possible clients sobbing and saying, “I heard about you from a friend. Do you think you can help me?” His landlord reminding him that it was past the first of the month when rent is normally paid.
Brody went to his couch and sat down with his coat still on, looked at the dead face of his TV screen. He tugged at his collar and let his gaze trail up and down the walls, looking for any sign, any mismatch in the color of the polished cement, any irregularity at all.
He splashed cold water on his face. He looked into the expanse of glass making up the entire wall of the bathroom and in it he could see nothing, even with the new lenses from Nathan. Staring back at him: a face. A man. Bruised flesh and battered bone, a newly crooked nose. And as much as Brody didn’t want to admit it, he saw a puppet. The strings were cut, but he still bore the eye hooks, screwed in tight. Titian’s words came back to him. He slapped off the light.
In the living room he found his peacoat on the floor, lifted it just enough to get what he sought from the pocket, and dropped it again.
His fingers found their way into the knuckleduster with ease.
He wasn’t sure where to start, so he decided to just pick a place.
Looking up toward the wall next to his TV, he saw the smooth layer of new cement, a smooth-cornered square. It had been patched a few times when pipes froze or something needed fixing. He knew something had been altered whenever he came home and smelled the lime and congealing agent of the cement. Never even so much as a note regarding a work order from his landlord.
No reason to be suspicious, then.
The first punch resounded against the cement with a clang. The vibration trailed up his arm and dug into the fresh hole in his shoulder—the antiseptic cream that was supposed to subdue any pain proved yet again to be a bunch of bullshit. Brody punched once more, a puff of gray dust breaking free. When he twisted in order to throw a clean jab, the delicate flesh still held together by stitches screamed. A hairline crack an inch long formed in the wall. Another strike and the crack grew by two more inches. Another, the first crack lengthened and a new one started—a rough divot began to take form.
Wiping the grit from his forehead and nose, he peered into the hole he’d made. There, a dense collection of wires—most of them small and narrow—electrical, more electrical, a water filtration line, electricity. Brody sorted through them all, grunting, coughing at the dust.
He plunged his hand deeper into the hole and found it. Rubbery, thick as a wrist. He pulled it out of its nest of fellow wires. No markings or laser-etched codes at all, entirely black.
Brody let the wire hang there, the long loop nearly touching the floor, while he got a knife from the butcher block. He returned with the knife and stared at the black snake, ashy in a patina of cement dust in most parts and fiercely dark in dots here and there from his sweat.
So many years doing it, unaware. The community center, all the battered women he had helped. The urge to go out and act upon it, that persistent pecking to exact, settle, solve, fix. And the restraint he considered his biggest asset—the ability to stop once they’d had enough.
What if he had never learned of the wires and their frequency, of the project at all? Would he have continued to carry on, getting healthy doses of the stuff every minute he was in his apartment, forever solidified as an involuntary vigilante? Would he continue to be able to stand firm, knowing when to stop without it? Would he accidentally go too far and kill the next wife beater he got hired to rough up? He was certainly capable of it, he now knew. Titian’s words again. Not what Brody could be but what he would be, without it leashing him.
Brody held the knife by its handle and rolled it around in his grip, looking at the waiting belly of the black snake. Despite it being freed from its cement enclosure, he could hear the gentle thrum of the energy still coursing through it, droning. A cold prickle on his skin. A tug at the collar of his shirt.
He stared, standing in his living room with the knife in hand, resisting.