The Confessor Read Free

fronts too wide to control. He slept most of the first two days, and when he went outside on the third night, he found a sleepy town a mile away, vegetable scraps in the garbage behind a diner, and an orphaned wind-breaker and bottle of water on a dugout bench at a ballfield. On day five he left at dawn, and it took four hours to walk the two miles to the highway on his mutilated leg. He only stuck his thumb out for trucks, and the first that stopped took him all the way to the city . . .
    Brooklyn was a mongrel jumble of edifice, ethnicity and class. Every turn seemed to transport him to someplace unconnected and alien. A shadowed stretch of warehouses and saggy-fenced lots became a well-lit block of townhouses with flat-screens and stuffed bookshelves behind windows, which morphed into a pocket of shabby check-cashing storefronts and grimy bodegas pouring reggaeton into the street, then around a corner came brick and chrome hipster restaurants and bars with neon ‘Brooklyn Lager’ signs.
    He’d considered leaving, starting over. He’d gone to Richmond, Brattleboro, Boston, and stayed a few days – but they never took hold. New York was his planet, its singular gravity kept him tethered. Another place would not hold him in orbit. He could float into black space and drift like a broken satellite. And – he had a task to finish here.
    It had taken months before he had healed sufficiently to run again. There was new pain, a prickly burn in the left quad under the fresh scars of Dalton’s cuts. Coupled with the old issues in his hips and ankles, equilibrium was at times elusive – but the music, as always, helped the alchemist in him transform pain into pure sensation . . . and power.
    As the light turned green and he jogged into the deserted intersection, the strings reached their peak, and in his mind’s eye strands of sound circled each other in a mating dance, then rushed into an embrace, fusing into a multicolored ribbon. The music was ripe. He tasted spearmint, strawberry – and heard the urgent snarl of the horn one second before the black, speeding mass entered his peripheral landscape, wrenching him around to a head-on view of the Dodge Dakota as it ignored the red light and barreled toward him. The streetlamps shone on the windshield, illuminating the three faces behind it – the widening eyes and stretching lips – then the driver jerked as he hammered the horn again and stomped the brake, and the vehicle flinched on the wet asphalt and went into a skid.
    The tires’ screech overpowered the strings, and he fought the drift of inner tumult. He’d been here before – caught unaware when the world snuck up on him, slowing the nature of things to an exquisite crawl. Perpetual motion broken into minute segments, falling dominos, connected but separate and distinct. Sounds spread like mercury on tilted glass, then lingered beyond their usual half-life. He put his hands out in front of him.
    In the final moment, a thought surfaced that he found unexpected:
    He wondered if someone had ever discovered his father’s body on the mountain, trapped under the truck’s tire, the knife deep in his heart. Geiger could feel the leather hilt in his child’s hand as he’d pushed it in. More likely, wolves had devoured the flesh. Mountain lions and foxes had played with the bones, scattering them, the sun had dried the blood-soaked ground, and the wind had scraped the darkened dirt free and swept it away. All that was left of the man was what Geiger carried with him, inside and out – the demented rituals, the elegant circuitry of scars, the kinship of pain, the final declaration from pale, bleeding lips:
The world knows nothing of you. That is my gift to you, son. You are no one.
    The truck was upon him. In the front seat, the young woman between the two men covered her face with her hands. The tortured cry of tires died as the gleaming silver grill met Geiger’s upheld palms – and stopped. Had there been witnesses,