Nameless Jaws

Nico pulled his boot back on slowly, pressing his heel against the cement baseboards until the dried leather gave way with a dull crunch, as if he were chewing gravel between the seams of the sole. The round pebble was forgotten on the floor, sitting alone among stains of fossilized grease and the rust dust that fell from the high beams with the cadence of a dead drizzle. He was no in a hurry. The service passageway opened into the main hall through a breach torn by shrapnel from the rivets, where expansion pipes hung warped like pig intestines dangling from a slaughterhouse beam. Through the tarpaulin covering the high window came a pasty, turbid, orange glow cast by the coking batteries of the coal dock; a heavy light that failed to purge the air of that smell of flash-cooled pitch and vegetable shortening burned on the guardhouse stoves.

Among the smoking wreckage of the broken boiler, Mateo woke with a wheezing breath and grayish skin, stunned by a dense nausea that rose in sour waves from his stomach. Dirty water reached mid-thigh, stagnant in a depression of the pavement where clogged siphons regurgitated a scum with violet iridescences of heavy oil. He groped to the sides with his right hand, searching for a firm hold, but found only loose rubble and the slick touch of industrial silt that smelled of vinegar and offal. The other limb—the one hanging awkwardly from his left shoulder like a poorly adjusted harness—barely responded: the freshly sewn tendon pulled with the hardness of dry wire, stiffened by the chill of the trench, crying out for the ice-cold brine that no one had come down to bring him. The flesh around the stitches throbbed with a dull, spasmodic beat, identical to the blind thrashing of a dying fish at the bottom of a wicker boat.

He could not remember the name of his street.

Nor could he remember the face of the woman who sewed his pockets with hemp thread before the foundry shifts began, nor the murmur of water in the old mill's irrigation ditch. When he tried to force an image, a sharp sting bit his temples and stirred his bile, leaving the metallic aftertaste of a dirty coin on his tongue. Childhood was missing; the harvesting songs sung by the estuary laborers were missing; the rough touch of warm rye bread broken with clean hands was missing. In their place, his skull returned only a viscous dizziness, the snap of a jaw breaking in the darkness of a cage, and the sour stench of synovial fluid spilled over the cobblestones. Four blocks away, the steam hammers of the central workshop fell with a vibration that climbed his spine, marking a machinelike pulse that had nothing to do with the heartbeat of men.

Nico crossed the twisted sheet metal with a weary stride, dragging the sole of his numb foot. He stopped two yards from the puddle, thrust his hands into the pockets of his greasy corduroy coat, and stared at the rust scabs floating around Mateo's knees.

"The bolt of the cylinder head blew upward," Nico said, with that voice devoid of astonishment peculiar to those who have seen too many tools break in a single winter. "It must be stuck in the floorboards of the third floor, among the bags of lime."

Mateo tried to lift his chin. The back of his neck felt as heavy as if a bucket of molten lead had been emptied under his skin, where the graft's tension cables pulled at the occiput with dry spasms.

"The boot," Mateo managed. His voice came out harsh, worn by sulfurous vapor, as if his throat were lined with emery sandpaper.

"It had a pebble," Nico replied, lowering his gaze to his own feet. "Flat. Like a fingernail."

"Right."

"It's been nagging my heel since lock five. I thought it was a burr from the stirrup, but it was river stone. I don't know how the hell river stone gets into a gallery that's been padlocked for forty years."

Mateo scratched the base of his thumb with the dirty nail of his index finger, lifting a dry crust of saltpeter that exposed pink, hairless flesh. He did not ask about Bruna Varga. There was no need: somewhere in that broth of iron and lime lay whatever was left of her, and nobody was going to go down for it. But he knew, with that mute certainty born of ancient fear, that her death changed nothing in the ledgers. Another foreman would already have signed the order with a steel nib, and by this hour the clearing crews would already have orders to wall up the north arcade with solid brick and quick-setting mortar. In the customs archives, there would be no record of a man named Mateo Cerna; only a revoked ration of whale grease, an evicted iron cot in barracks six, and three bronze bolts recorded as inventory loss due to ordinary corrosion.

The silence following the uproar of the escape slowly filled with the small noises of the cooling hall: the creak of zinc contracting, the hiss of a secondary valve losing air with the timidity of a punctured bellows, and the monotonous dripping of a manifold spilling trickles of turbid water onto a pile of rotted planks. Nico searched for a dry corner next to one of the granite footings supporting the master beams. He unhooked a frayed burlap knapsack from his shoulder, pulled out a brass stove with a bent burner, and set it on the ground, leveling it with a piece of slate so it would not wobble. He struck a sulfur match against the sole of his boot; the flame caught with a livid hiss and a stench that masked for a second the stink of burned oil. Around the wick, the vegetable fat began to liquefy with a gentle crackling, casting long, wavering shadows against the flaking wall that seemed to watch the trench with the patience of blind dogs.

No one came for the scrap metal.

Over the burner, Nico set a gray pewter saucepan with a chipped rim, where the flaking enamel revealed moons of rusted iron. The contents were a brown broth, thick as dishwater, in which swam two strips of woody turnip and the gummy cartilage of a pig's ear that no one had had the patience to clean entirely. While he waited for it to warm, the boy pulled out a pocketknife with a loose ferrule and cut a piece of stale bread that crunched under the blade with the resistance of pine bark. There were no words of encouragement or questions about the bones burning in Mateo beneath his sternum; in the drainage galleries, talking too much was like leaving a window open on a freezing night: it only served to let out the little warmth remaining in the gut. Mateo remained motionless in the mud, back pressed against the cold boiler hull, feeling the loose bolts of the structure vibrate with a dull complaint every time a mineral convoy braked on the dead track outside, up above, where the names of things were still remembered.

Nico removed the saucepan from the stove, wrapping his fingers in the grubby hem of his shirt to dodge the metal's heat. The broth barely gave off a thin vapor that smelled of grease and old humidity, but it warmed the immediate air like a miserable truce between two hammer shifts. With a tin spoon bent at the neck, he poured two-thirds of the liquid into a deep brass bowl with a dented base and handed it to Mateo without looking at his face. Mateo grasped it with both clumsy hands; the hot metal bit his calloused palms, abruptly returning the sensation of living flesh. He took a long sip, letting the warm fat lubricate his cracked throat. They said nothing more. The stove's flame burned down until it was reduced to a bluish ember barely able to light the sludge between their boots.