Trapped

ONE

In a darkened mobile home on the outskirts of town, a wheelchair-bound woman sat at a picture window and stared out into the gray dawn. The cold sleet sky that winter morning seemed to reach down and wrap itself around the city, the skyline a brushstroke on the horizon.

The woman just stared. It was all she could do anymore.

He watched her.

On the other end of the home, in a dark overcoat and shrouded in shadow, he stood over a dresser strewn with old newspaper clippings and photos.

The pictures told a story...

A man on the steps of City Hall surrounded by reporters and photographers, holding an emaciated twelve-year-old girl, her sick limbs pulled unnaturally into her body.

The sign for NTX Industries at the company's chemical plant, a skull and crossbones painted over their corporate logo.

AG Announces Investigation Into Alleged NTX Misconduct. An engineer in a hard hat in front of the plant, talking to reporters.

A dour-faced woman in a wheelchair, pointing angrily at her legs, her family standing around her, grave.

Men—some in white lab coats, others in hard hats—dumping drums of waste into the Chicago River, a skull and crossbones on the side of the drums with writing: DANGER-POISON.

Dead fish washed up on the shore.

Boards across windows in an abandoned neighborhood.

A distinguished gentleman in an expensive suit emerging from the back of a limousine, flanked by reporters. NTX CEO Jerrold Manley...

NTX Abandons Controversial Plant. The now-shuttered chemical plant seen through a chain-link fence covered with a NO TRESPASSING sign—acres of empty parking lot, weeds shooting up through the cracks.

Protesters in front of City Hall. A man wielding a lead pipe brought to the ground by baton-wielding police. CEO Manley protected by private security guards, weapons drawn.

An eight-year-old boy in a hospital gown, using a walker in a physical therapy room.

The same boy—healthy, vibrant—smiling in a school picture atop his obituary.

Solemn pallbearers ushering a coffin down the steps of a church. A mother sobbing hysterically.

NTX Plans Chicago Headquarters. An artist's rendering of a new skyscraper. Expansive high-rise slated for completion in fall 1986...

Over the aged clippings, the man lay atop the dresser a large stack of blueprints. He rolled the stack open and scanned them—building schematics for a high-rise—going over details he had long since memorized.

After a while he crossed the messy trailer to his wife. He stroked her hair for a long time. Then he kissed her forehead, tucked the knit blanket around her a bit tighter.

She didn't respond.

He removed her eyeglasses and set them down on a table covered with orange pill bottles and stacks of medical bills. A baseball trophy seemed out of place in the midst of it all, a keepsake from a different time.

On his way out the man passed by another dresser, this one covered with family artifacts and photographs from that different time. There was a house, not a trailer. His wife was not in a wheelchair. And his son...

One of the pictures was a school portrait. The same picture was back on his dresser, above an obituary column as well as an article from the Chicago Tribune dated May 6, 1979: Victim of Toxic Waste Spill Dies.

The man's footsteps crunched over frozen gravel after he left the trailer and crossed the lot to his car, a 1972 Chevy Nova, its blue so faded it was almost gray.

The woman gazed sightlessly out into the trailer park. The Nova started up with a loud rattling, a brittle sound to the engine as it pulled out of the lot and disappeared.

Something moved in the woman's mouth, a mouth from which there was no breath. Out of her slightly parted lips emerged a cockroach, testing the air with its antennae.

The bug crawled up across her lifeless face, making a newhome in her hair.