The Things He Gave Away for Free
Matthew Derby

Jarvis spooned a mound of breakfast on his last remaining son's meal receptacle, an act that felt singularly fortifying against the backdrop of the new, empty house, the new life, an existence that had only just begun to degrade into normalcy, despite the insistence of the Event, always blooming in the deep pockets of his head.

"What is breakfast?" Alexander asked. After the Event, Jarvis had authorized a restart on the boy's head to protect him from the memory. There was a recursive biscuit in a safe deposit chamber in the city, should the boy ever decide to return to that particular space. The biscuit eased Jarvis's fear that he'd done the boy harm, but he still prayed nightly to the most vivid holy figure he could conjure, begging that the day would not come.

"Breakfast is a whole bunch of things," he said, turning the spoon over in the boy's hand. "A meal, a time of day, a flavoring for some beverages." This time, Jarvis would make the right decisions, fill the boy with durable, hearty information, nothing that would evaporate or crumble.

A sound like a colossal tidal wave echoed down the front hall. Jarvis had not heard the new house's door chime yet—the previous owner must have wanted to bring a sense of the ocean's cruel expanse to this chilled, boned-out periphery of other, larger peripheries.

Bashaw was at the door. His hair was glistening, sloped like a French bicyclist's, and he was standing on Jarvis's porch, scrubbing his hand with a crusted rag, an article that seemed out of place against the crisp, tubular fitness suit he wore.

"Hey." Jarvis did not like visitors, generally, but this was a new village, he reminded himself—a second chance, and he knew, now, the full value of having an ally.

"I hope it's not too early," Bashaw said, vigorously abrading his palm, which was red and puffy from the rag work.

"No, I just—"

"I see you're still in your morning clothes." Bashaw gestured at Jarvis's robe and lime pajama pants.

"If I'd known you were coming."

"Of course. You couldn't know in advance. It's early."

"Yes."

Bashaw grinned, but only half his face went along with the expression. "I guess you're thinking 'why is he here right now?' right?"

"No, I hadn't—I mean, it's fine."

Bashaw breathed deeply, casting a hard glance down one end of the hushed, well-kept street, and then the other. "This is awkward. We don't know each other well. You're just barely moved in. Thing is, there is a bit of a situation in my back yard."

"A situation?"

"Something happened back there."

"Something, happened?"

"You work for a ministry, right? Clean Skies or something like that?"

"I used to work for the Ministry of Environmental Fortitude, yes."

"Right. I remembered that from the news. I heard what you did. I understand how these things happen. Those kids—some would say they had no business being in that inflatable tent in the first place. Some would say those fumes were just part of the risk you take at an amusement park. Where I work, you don't judge people for what they've done, you judge them for what they could do. And now I have something you definitely could do. I have a situation in my back yard—I don't know, I think it's something you would be interested in. I think it could be serious."

It was happening already, Jarvis thought. Some people already knew. It would only be a matter of time until everyone knew—until they all wanted him out of their neighborhood. Jarvis looked back into his kitchen, where his son was slowly, resolutely submerging a breakfast stick into a vial of loganberry syrup.

"Look, I want to help, but my kid is here, I can't really leave him. Can you—could you just, maybe describe the nature of the situation?"

"The lady of the house isn't in?"

"She's—there is no lady."

Bashaw put up his hand. "I'll go get my daughter. She can watch your kid. She's old enough. A babysitter around town. I think this is situation is something you have to see, right away. Wait here."

Bashaw took off across the lawn. Jarvis stood in the door. He crossed his arms, wished he were holding something. Every time he looked at the houses in this neighborhood, they were different. Was that a feature you could buy? Some sort of rotating façade? He felt out of touch, worried that his house—an unadorned, sausage-shaped enclosure—would raise suspicion. He leaned against the doorframe.

Bashaw came back with a slim, face-heavy child. "This is Coco," he said, presenting the girl, gripping her upper arm, guiding her up the porch steps.

"Hi," Jarvis said, holding out his palm in a gesture that might, in another situation, been read as an invitation for a high five.

The girl just bowed her head, as if to try to fold up inside herself and disappear. Her name bore down heavily on her—she was stooped with the ungainly responsibility of being 'Coco'—it came out as a profound and unsightly physical deformity. Her terminal disappointment showed up as a bright, furry cloak over a body that was like a sweaty handful of nails.

"Coco, go inside and find Mr. Jarvis's child…" He trailed off, waiting for more information.

"Alexander. He's in the kitchen."

"Go in to Alexander—make him something to eat, or play a game with him. Teach him something. A craft. I have to talk about important things with Mr. Jarvis."

The girl kept her head bowed, made a sort of deep swerve around Jarvis and slipped through the screen door.

Bashaw reached out for Jarvis's shoulder, cupping it forcefully. "Okay, let me show you this thing."

Jarvis leaned away from Bashaw, but his grasp was surprisingly firm and convincing. It was the first time Jarvis had been touched since the Event. "Can I just throw something on?"

"This is just—we're just going into my back yard."

Jarvis closed up his robe awkwardly as Bashaw led him from the porch. He looked back through the door to see Alexander looking up at Coco, who was standing, motionless, beside him at the kitchen table.

Bashaw directed Jarvis through the dense wall of shrubs that divided their properties, holding apart a clutch of branches so that Jarvis could pass through the narrow gap.

"I saw this thing—this really, really, weird thing, and I thought for sure you'd be able to diagnose the situation."

He led Jarvis to the far corner of a meticulously maintained yard, one that featured complex brickwork, running fountains, and elaborate statuary.

"See here? This is where I first noticed it."

He pointed at what looked like a tattered swatch of black fabric, draped on a cobblestone.

"You're probably wondering what that is. Look over here," Bashaw said, sprinting briefly ahead, motioning for Jarvis to come forward around a stand of pungent Forsythia, where chunks of a small, disemboweled animal were spread out in erratic circles on the lawn.

"It's a bat," Bashaw said, pressing his index fingers against his temples. "It was a bat. Those pieces there and there? Those are wings."

"You have a dead bat in your yard."

Bashaw nodded gravely. "Pretty disturbing, right?"

"I'm sorry, Bashaw. Maybe you're mistaken. This isn't something I deal with."

Bashaw regarded Jarvis, his forehead knotted like a baby's blanket. "You work with toxic substances, though, don't you? Aren't you, or weren't you, in charge of the cleanup of certain types of chemical events?"

"That's in my toolset. But this, what you have here, this is just a dead animal."

Bashaw bit the tip of his thumb. He was trying hard to follow what Jarvis was saying, as if it were coming out as some sort of complex code. Every attempt Jarvis made to clarify the scenario, Bashaw only looked more bewildered. He removed his thumb from between his teeth. "Look at this." He led Jarvis over to his house, pointing along the foundation. "I saw that bat over there, all mashed, or ground up—all, like, exploded all over the ground. And I thought to myself, how would a bat just explode like that? You don't see something like that happening in nature. An animal exploding into a million little chunks. The only time you would ever see an occurrence like that is with a radiation of some sort, right? Am I correct? Put a marshmallow in a microwave, it's going to explode. Put anything in a microwave, anything that's, like, alive? It's going to blow up all over the inside of the microwave. When I saw the bat, that is what I was thinking. I came over here, and I saw these holes along the foundation." He ran his fingers along the mortar between the bricks, some of which had fallen away, leaving cruddy, whispery gaps. "I saw these holes and I was thinking, radon, because these holes lead to the basement, and radon comes out of basements, if I'm not mistaken, and this radon, or some other waves, something stored underground, must have come out of these holes and blown up the bat. Am I right?" Bashaw's face, in describing his theory, had shifted, turned softer, almost triumphant.

"Radon doesn't work that way."

"No disrespect—tell me I'm wrong, though, about the explosion part? Am I wrong in thinking that an animal, when put in a microwave, will tend to blow up?"

"I can't say for sure, but I don't think the outcome would be good."

"Right. So what do we have here? What's the procedure in an emergency such as this? Am I going to have to evacuate? I am getting all up in arms about this, in my head. You might not see it, because I am calm on the outside. I work in a high-pressure environment, so I'm trained to control myself. On the sales floor, people call me the Yeti, because I don't make a sound until the sale is made. I'm trained to keep my head in stressful situations. But this, here, is potentially like the equivalent of sitting on a nuclear weapon, is it not?"

A large dog emerged from the shade behind Bashaw's tool shed. It looked like the kind of animal that would roam freely in places like Alaska or British Columbia, back when they actually were places. It skulked up to Bashaw's side and sat on its haunches while he ran a set of pliable, nervy fingers through its mane. "Hey buddy," he whispered, "hey there, good buddy. There's my buddy."

"Why is that dog's snout covered in blood?"

"Hey, you're the radon expert. How am I to know why the dog has blood on its snout?"

"It's just that I'm thinking, maybe the dog ate the bat?"

"Oh God," Bashaw said, kneeling, so that he faced the dog. He palmed the dog's head, forcing it from side to side to inspect the glistening, burgundy patches staining its face. "Oh Good God. What you're saying is that Kevin ate the contamination. Oh God."

"No, no. I think Kevin maybe found this bat and used it as a toy. I am saying no contamination at all. I am saying that this is something that dogs tend to just do."

"But Kevin has a stigmatism. See?" Bashaw said, guiding the dog's head up toward Jarvis. It stared emptily at him with milky, gelatin eyes. "There's no way he could catch a bat out of midair. Have you seen how bats fly? They're fast. And erratic. You'd have a hard time if you were a dog with normal sight, getting up and catching a bat in midair, let alone a dog with an issue of the eye like Kevin."

Jarvis felt his voice going thin and runny. He was losing traction on the course of the interaction. "Maybe," he said, "the bat was wounded. Maybe it couldn't fly."

Bashaw looked into the dog's eyes, frowning. "No," he said after a long silence.

"'No'?"

"No. I see how you could jump to a conclusion like that. I see how that's something you would think, being an outsider, and a scientist and all. But I can't accept that Kevin would do that to an animal that was hurt. I can't accept that he would just, you know, tear an animal up like that. That doesn't make sense. That's not like him." Jarvis could see Bashaw's whole face begin to list from its foundation, like a child's sand castle at high tide. His lips were pursed in a genuine pout, an expression that was profoundly repulsive on a grown man, especially a grown man in a crisp, gray sweat suit embracing a panting dog whose snout was purplish with coagulating blood, some of which was coming off on the sweat shirt, leaving spastic, wispy splotches.
Jarvis motioned to his house, the white, convex roof of which was barely visible beyond the trees lining Bashaw's yard. "How about if I go inside and get you some pamphlets?"

Bashaw nodded, looking away from Jarvis, forcing his head into the wild fur along the dog's flank. "That would help. Thanks."

Jarvis moved backward, unable to turn away from Bashaw and his dog.

"Could you do me a favor?" Bashaw said, his voice muffled by the dog's unruly mane. "I might be overstating the obvious, but could you exercise discretion when you bring the pamphlets over? I don't want to alarm Coco. She's going to take the evacuation very hard, and I want to be able to tell her on my own terms."

"If she asks, I'll tell her you needed some tax forms."

"Thanks, Jarvis."

Jarvis went inside. The girl was kneeling on the floor in the living room with his son. They were knitting silently. His son worked carefully, following with a barely perceptible air of desperation each move Coco made, as if the cheap, stringy yarn was the primal substance that kept her in his world. Jarvis riffled through a stack of papers at his desk. There were no pamphlets. He had made the pamphlets up, but maybe he could find something that looked like a pamphlet. Some sheet with illustrations and graphs that could be folded into thirds. Through the window, he could see Bashaw, on his knees, gripping the impatient, panting dog. Bashaw was talking to the dog, patting its back, struggling to offer comfort in the only way he knew. Jarvis watched for a long time with a prayer-like concentration, because he knew that this was how a man looked in the hushed, voidal space between the things he burned up all his time working to accumulate inside himself and the things he gave away for free.

© Matthew Derby