“Of course not, for god’s sake.” He couldn’t decide whether he was trying to placate Julian or pick a fight. “All I’m saying is, he has to be a stranger—that doesn’t mean there’s no way to tell what kind of a person he is, there’s got to be a way to do this safely and still have it mean something.”
“It’s barely a motive!” said Julian despondently. “You argued with him a few times, months ago, in a class where people are supposed to argue. What kind of cop would ever dig that deeply?”
“My father, for a start,” Paul said.
Julian had no answer to that. He closed his mouth and sat up straight; he was very still, staring across the street at the darkening shape of Brady’s front door. Then he blinked hard, raked his hand back through his hair, and keyed the ignition.
Paul turned in his seat to watch Brady’s house recede behind them. It looked no different from its neighbors. It didn’t conceal anything that couldn’t be found behind millions of other front doors. If not for class rosters and long memories it could have been Brady, easily and cleanly, but only because Brady could have been anyone. They were everywhere, silent and safe behind opaque walls, waiting for an atrocity to which they could consent. Paul had known it his whole life, even before he could put it into words. He’d always been so small and helpless in the face of what the world was; no matter how he raged, nothing he knew how to do could ever leave a mark.
They turned onto an overpass headed south, soaring over a gleaming stripe of unmoving headlights. Pollution-orange sunlight seeped through the windows and set fire to everything between them, clothes and skin and particles of dust.
“It was almost right.” His voice sounded strange in his head, grown-up and certain.
Julian gave him a wary sidelong glance. But for the first time since they’d met, Paul was confident Julian wouldn’t be disappointed in him. He trusted the inevitability of their understanding each other.
“It’ll be someone like him,” he said. “They’re everywhere. He couldn’t help but reveal himself, so it won’t be hard to find another one. It doesn’t even occur to them to be ashamed.”
Julian’s eyes flitted back to the road, but the tension in his body broke, and Paul understood at last that the offering wasn’t a challenge or a dare but a declaration of trust. Amid all the weakness Paul couldn’t conceal, Julian had somehow seen the potential for something better, something fierce and vital and worth loving. It wasn’t just an entry in a private game. It was evidence of what Julian saw in him, of his potential to leave a mark on the world that could never be erased. It was a relief and a horror to be known so perfectly.
10.
The process was all Paul’s design. He drew up a flowchart on graph paper one morning and brought it with him to review with Julian over lunch.
Julian burst out laughing the first time he saw it—“I’m sorry, Pablo,” he said with giddy horror, “I’m sorry, it just looks like a poster at a fucking science fair.” But Paul didn’t retreat, even though his face was burning. Once he might have been too humiliated and self-conscious to hold his ground, but he reminded himself that Julian thought he was capable of better.
As they talked through the steps, elbow-to-elbow at the tiny Formica dining table, Julian’s nervous laughter gradually subsided. They would gather information in stages until the options winnowed down and they had enough data to make their final decision. It was a good process, precise and well considered, everything it needed to be if they were going to make this count.
“You’re taking this so seriously.” It was the first time Julian had managed to speak without laughing. There was something different in his face now.
“Of course I am,” said Paul. “We have to. Otherwise it won’t mean anything.”
They had to choose carefully—just the right weak point where they could leave their indelible mark. A single person, their pliant and obedient opposite, who carried atrocity inside him like a loaded gun.
The first step was easy. Paul had known it would be. The candidates were countless, their names suspended in the microfilm of back issues of the local papers. Dozens of names, hundreds, more than they would ever have time to investigate.
Some appeared as bystanders—innocently turning up the hi-fi to drown out months of the neighbors’ screaming, then just as innocently proclaiming shock when the man next door finally killed his wife. Paul culled other candidates from letters to the editor, where they signed their full names because they were proud of what they’d written. It was sad for the families, they wrote, but those longhairs at Kent State should have known what they were inviting on themselves. Agent Orange saved some American troops, and so did the atomic bomb; the collateral damage was the other side’s problem, not ours.
The My Lai courts martial had summoned the worst of these—the letters were so vile Paul often couldn’t finish reading them. The villagers weren’t really civilians, and even if they were, slapping any soldier on the wrist was too brutal a punishment. The soldiers had descended into savagery at Calley’s orders, and they couldn’t disobey their senior officer; Calley was just following Medina’s instructions, and so on, up the chain of command, until somehow the massacre wasn’t anybody’s fault at all. Orders were orders—you couldn’t fault a soldier for following orders.
If they could have made their decision with perfect objectivity, any of the candidates would do, but they had to be practical, and that meant a second step of disqualifying any candidates who might make them waver. The subject had to be a man, because otherwise their motive could be mistaken for common brutality; for similar reasons, they promptly abandoned any address that mapped to a black neighborhood. Sometimes the problem was simply that too many years had passed, and the names were no longer listed in the telephone directory at all—Paul always hoped those candidates had died on their own, destroyed by excruciating disease or the weight of their own shame, but there was no time to spare to search the obituaries.
Julian quickly stopped participating in the first two steps. He had no patience for them, and anger didn’t invigorate him; all it did was make him squeamish. Often Paul attended to this task alone, while Julian clocked into work and spent a few hours nearby shelving books. Other times Julian kept him company, sitting with his back to the screen and paging through his dog-eared copy of L’Etranger with endearing ostentation.
“I trust your judgment,” he told Paul, unconcerned. “It’s the same as mine, anyway. You’re just more decisive about it. Play to your strengths—I’ll play to mine.”
Paul only worried about it at the very beginning, and even then only a little; Julian’s enthusiasm returned so decisively after the first two steps that Paul quickly forgot his worry that he was really going it alone. The third step turned out to be Julian’s favorite.
They never forced a lock. Most of the candidates kept a spare key near their front doors. Under a welcome mat or a planter, usually; once they even found it in the gap between the exterior wall and the mailbox. If they couldn’t find a key, they struck the name from the list and moved on to the next. There was too great a risk that Paul’s penknife would leave a sliver of metal inside the lock, or that a tiny scratch left in the brass could be matched to the blade. (Not that either of them knew how to pick a lock, anyway. Neither had been the right kind of boy.)
Julian took to it like a naturalist setting foot for the first time in the Galápagos. Paul never tired of watching him work—the way he carefully stepped over magazine piles or strewn clothes, the fascination with which he examined family albums and desk drawers. Paul never lowered his guard, because a candidate might bring his mother home from church early or return from the bar after just one drink. But Julian’s unhurried enthusiasm steadied him, helped him see past his own nerves. Among the banal ephemera of the candidates’ lives, Paul began to see fragments of beauty and promise—the first bright strokes of their masterwork.
Paul’s watercolor sketchbooks filled with paintings of wood-paneled basement apartments
cast in stark shadow by blaring, forgotten televisions; October sunlight pressing through dented blinds; dingy kitchens with wallpaper and curtains stained by decades of nicotine. Paul planned to turn the sketches into oil paintings, a companion piece to the project that only he and Julian would ever understand. Each iteration brought them closer; even the names they struck from the list added a layer to the palimpsest. Nothing went to waste.
The “fact-finding missions,” as Julian called them, helped them eliminate any remaining candidates of whom they were uncertain. It was agreed that either of them could strike a name from the list for any reason, without being asked to explain. Certainty was essential. They were carrying something new between them now, the intoxicating relief of believing and being believed, and Paul knew how fragile it was. Any doubts, no matter how arbitrary, would undermine their ability to rely on each other.
Sometimes it was self-evident why a candidate couldn’t be used. Alfred A. Lucci had turned his refrigerator into a shrine to a long-dead child, papered over with photographs and yellowing crayon drawings. But other times it was completely inexplicable. Now and then one of them would catch sight of some innocuous object—a toothbrush, a drinking glass—and become so anxious that they had to leave. Paul knew better than to question any rejection, no matter how much it annoyed him that he couldn’t find a reason for it. There were still enough candidates who made neither of them balk. He trusted—forced himself to trust—that they’d know the perfect one when they found him.
Paul kept researching all the while, but the list of names gradually distilled. Eventually the remaining candidates became the topic of jokes and gossip, as if they were mutual friends neither of them much liked. “Tony probably never misses an episode,” Paul would say if he saw an ad for a mindless sitcom; “Looks like Lou’s been here,” said Julian, when they found a soggy Penthouse magazine crumpled at the base of a chain-link fence. The jokes were never particularly funny, but they still drove each other into hysterics. More than once Paul’s mother came to his room to check on them, curiosity disguised as wry concern. “You boys are having way too much fun up here,” she always said, and they had to avoid each other’s eyes to keep from laughing even more.
The method still wasn’t settled, but both their suggestions had become straightforward and blunt. It had to be clean and bloodless and quiet, quick enough to avoid a struggle. There was no overpowering the subject physically—the candidates were all grown men and often tough ones, ex-soldiers and steelworkers and former cops. It had to surprise or incapacitate, or the situation would turn against them before it began. That left only a few options, each with its own complications that had to be foreseen and accounted for. Simplicity was almost prohibitively complex.
“I like the ones that double as disposal methods,” Julian said once. Paul had returned to his microfilm research, compulsively as erasing and redrawing an imperfect line in his sketchbook. Until he’d spoken, Paul had assumed Julian was completely disengaged—he was reading idly in the next chair, ankles crossed on the opposite desk, Camus now replaced by Dostoevsky. Paul glanced sideways at him, but Julian’s eyes were still on his book.
“Saves us having to lug the bastard around afterward,” Julian went on. “No cleanup necessary, just”—he made a soft, descending whistle, bringing his fingertips down to mimic the subject plummeting from a great height—“splat! Show’s over, good job, gentlemen, and we’re home in time for Carson.”
They were the only people in the library basement, but Paul still glanced over his shoulder to make sure no one had overheard. A book cart sat near the bank of elevators; he kept expecting one of Julian’s fellow pages to appear beside it, sharp-eared and alert, nothing like a real bystander.
“You’re not wrong. I just don’t know how easy it is to convince a live subject to stand there and wait to be pushed.”
“There are many paths to persuasion,” said Julian loftily. “Once he’s dead, we’re down to just lugging.”
It was a well-established problem that needed a conclusion, but the detour from the flowchart annoyed him. He’d broken the process into discrete parts for a reason; he didn’t like to be distracted, especially at a stage when he was working without Julian’s help.
Paul had returned, inevitably, to the courts-martial. He couldn’t let the subject go, even as the sources began to run out. With the Post-Gazette’s archives spent, he’d moved on to the Tribune-Review, and he’d already reached the point of the Calley verdict. There were enough names by now, but he wanted everything he could find—each opinion-page apologetic, each letter to the editor, an exhaustive catalog of moral cowardice. He wanted every available scrap of data, so he would know they had arrived at the best possible decision. It was a matter of scientific rigor, he told himself. Though of course he knew that wasn’t all it was.
The microfilm reader lingered on the dregs of a feature about Calley’s conviction. Paul couldn’t stomach reading the articles from start to finish, so he just skimmed them for names. This one waited in obscurity, toward the bottom of the very last column. Paul had only realized recently that his meticulousness was a strength; without it, he might never have seen the name at all.
Charlie Stepanek has followed the Calley trial closely, discussing it with other veterans at his neighborhood bar in Polish Hill. The soft-spoken 27-year-old takes a nuanced view of the verdict. Stepanek himself was called to testify at the 1969 court-martial of his commanding officer, Cpt. Alden Beach, who was convicted that November of ordering the torture and murder of three Vietnamese noncombatants. The incident at My Lai, Stepanek says, is remarkable only for its scale. He believes similar events are more common than most Americans think.
“They have to court-martial a guy now and then,” said Stepanek, who agreed to a brief interview during his lunch break from his job at Wright-Howe Freight & Logistics in South Shore. “But if they want to be fair, they’d have to arrest half the armed forces or stop arresting anybody.”
Stepanek demurred when asked how he believed Calley should be sentenced, citing a lack of familiarity with criminal law. Before ending the interview, however, he suggested that civilian critics might not understand the reality of combat conditions on the ground.
“I don’t think anyone likes what [Calley] told his men to do,” he said. “I didn’t like what my C.O. did. But I also didn’t think it was unusual. I still don’t. It was war.”
Paul slowly lowered his pen and reached for the notebook. At the edge of his vision he saw Julian look sideways at him, but Paul didn’t meet his eyes.
“Got a live one?” Julian’s voice was light.
“Maybe not for long.”
Charles Stepanek (Polish Hill). Paul made a note after the name as he always did, though this time he knew he wouldn’t need help remembering. Nothing unusual. More common than you’d think.
The first step was complete. Next they would find Stepanek’s name in the directory, and then follow the map to his address to assess complicating factors (if there was a wife, a guard dog, a busy home street). Paul couldn’t afford to be impatient.
They wouldn’t say his name aloud until after the third step—until they’d scoured his house for any evidence of humanity and found nothing worth considering. Only then would they have a mutual friend. Until then, Charlie Stepanek was a ghost.
11.
Julian had found the bridge by chance. He showed it to Paul on a map from a Chevron station, an unnamed blue line across the Mon. It was only a few miles from the city, but the land around it was wild, swathes of it too ravine-sliced and remote to be worth the expense of developing. There was a long steep road, slick with wet leaves, where Julian handed Paul the keys because he didn’t dare drive it himself. Sparse shabby houses sat on the ridge at the far side of a deep fold in the earth, but once they reached the top of the road, the trees shielded them from view.
The freight company that owned the bridge had gone bankrupt three years ago, and a nearby steel mill had followed. It lo
omed dark on the opposite shore, fenced and shuttered. Between them was the bridge, and the wind, bitter cold, whistling and sighing through its frame.
“You’re afraid of heights,” said Julian, neither pitying nor cruel. “Aren’t you?”
Paul shut the driver’s-side door with his shoulder.
“It’s perfect,” he said. “You don’t have to worry about me.”
The steel trusses were caked in rust. Their skin and clothes always reeked of it after they visited, a smell that lingered long after they’d gone home. Paul had to throw away one of his sweaters when a powdery red streak on one sleeve refused to come off in the wash.
He got better with practice, but it never became easy. Some days he made it out to the center without reaching for Julian’s hand; other days they had to walk together, arm in arm, while the wind howled against them. The railings were low, only up to Paul’s hip, and when he looked down (“For god’s sake, Paul, don’t look down”) he could see the rushing gray-green of the river between the slats. He could never have walked it on his own. Alone, his head still swam when he stood in high places; he didn’t trust his own balance. But on the bridge his head could be clear because Julian’s was; his steps could be surefooted and steady because Julian’s were. Paul had him to trust now, and Julian trusted him. He no longer needed to try to trust himself.
On his best days, his bravest days, he didn’t hesitate. The hardest step was always the first one he took after a pause. Self-doubt grew in moments of stasis; it couldn’t take root if he kept moving.
“I’ll be able to do it when it’s time,” he would say, though Julian never asked. “It’s only because I know I don’t really need to.”
Julian just smiled, not quite reassuringly, and turned toward the wind. The river breathed beneath them, and they walked.
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