Brophy was dying, and thus was on a great and varied number of medications—pills at mealtimes, upon waking, before he went to bed. He was a storing-house for dope: pills for nausea, for his low blood count, to fight the cancer itself. He kept a little pill organizer in his kitchen and, like clockwork, would forget to take his evening round until he’d already laid himself down to go to sleep, and then he’d promptly remember. So almost every night now, he’d get up and hobble into the kitchen, irritated and tired.
Tonight was no different, except there was a smoke sitting cross-legged on the kitchen floor.
Brophy stood there with his heart shuddering beneath his ribs, one yellowed hand on the dimmer switch. The room chock full of electric light and streamlined, laden with modern appliances and all the other physical things, the trappings of modernity that he’d lusted after for so much of life, like a goddamned fool, and now this one other thing as well. Just a black-haired little spirit sitting there next to Brophy’s rarely-used Miele dishwasher. Just hanging out. Sitting there.
The smoke’s elbows rested on his knees, his head was tucked down, his palms were pressed against his mouth—Brophy had done the same thing himself as a boy, usually during vastly inappropriate times, and he imagined in some spectral realm the kid was making one excellent farting noise. He almost smiled at the idea, and then the boy raised his head up and looked around and Brophy saw that: a) the kid was cross-eyed, and b) was missing the lower half of his jaw. Where it should be was simply a gored and ruined mess of bone and gristle, a flickering and wavering mess. If Brophy had to guess, he’d put him at seven or eight years old.
“War dead, maybe?” Brophy said, hardly even hearing himself, and the smoke certainly gave no notice, simply curled his hands around his head, tucked his knees in, faded to an almost invisible level and then snapped to opacity like some signal finally coming through.
And what had any of this meant? The last week? Hessler’s funeral, seeing Mike Vale. Vale coming back into his life after all of these years, what was that about? The showdown in the car? Brophy had been unable to avoid giving the guy one last dig at the memorial, lying when he said he never thought of him, never thought of the contract.
He’d deserved the punch. He thought of Vale all the time. He had been waiting for the other shoe to drop for years. Waiting to get found out. Waiting to admit to himself that it had been the wrong thing. When Vale had followed him onto the canyon road it had been like absolution had finally jackknifed his fear, finally taken it over.
Vale had given him an out.
He had so little time left, and what was owed?
If a smoke appears and nobody pays attention to it, does it matter to the remnant at all? Does the person that sees it owe it anything at all?
“I’m going to get my pills,” Brophy said, and of course the smoke said nothing, gave nothing away, just sat there rocking on his haunches. He walked around the thing, giving it a berth, and opened up his little pill kit on the counter—a thing so like a lady’s birth control organizer that he still felt a little weird about using it. Took out his pills, tried not to look at his own hand scooping them out, the knuckles like knobs of hewn wood, pronounced like that, the skin drum-tight and shiny and spotted.
Somehow he had become an old man, sweet Christ. It happened without him knowing.
Vale had released him. It was true. You sit with a bad move like that—even if it makes you rich, and God, that contract had made Brophy rich—and the fear of getting caught, of litigiousness, of retribution, of some karmic vengeance, it weighs on you. Your life stoops and buckles under the weight of it, conforms to that worry.
So now here he was, with Baby Smoke, the Boy Without a Jaw, some casualty of horrible violence stuttering through the living world and curled like an apostrophe on his kitchen floor. Brophy standing there in his ridiculous silk pajamas like some decrepit, cancer-laden playboy.
But this was the truth: death was in the neighborhood, and it was on roller skates. Zipping around, touching his neck as it passed. Playing with him. But Vale had freed him. There was that, at least. He’d been given the opportunity, the freedom, to correct that long-running error. He could make that right before he went.
He turned on the tap and drank a glass of water with his pills. The night was an ink wash against the window. Brophy saw his own face dim and skull-like in the glass, and on the floor behind him, the smoke rocked itself again and again. Jawless and mute.
Brophy sat the glass in the sink and snapped shut the lid on his pill organizer. He turned.
“So, where you from? What kinda poor kid gets something like that happening to him? Huh?”
And then, with the stiffness and slowness of a man that rarely moved in such a way, unnameable things in his lower back muttering in protest, he sat down cross-legged on the floor next to the smoke, the little boy. As consolingly as someone such as him could be, Brophy sat there on his kitchen floor and waited for the next thing to happen.