FLAGSTONES
The architect’s name has been lost. The man or men who designed Lonnie Roberts’s diner, who planned its rise from pencil-on-paper to brick-and-beam, left no record of their instructions: they did their work, then vanished forever from the scene. There’s no record anywhere of anything that preceded the luncheonette, it’s true—but see, here, this walkway leading up to the door? These are old stones, old bricks. They were transported here in a time predating most of what we know about this plot of land. It’s hard to imagine anyone, even someone who didn’t have to do all the hard work himself, going to all that trouble for something so small as a luncheonette.
Sorting through available views of city streets—streets as they originally appeared, in the early days of the automobile, and earlier, even, than that—supports this thought, of a house preceding all. Businesses rely on foot traffic to survive; they abut the street as nearly as they can. Demanding that a curious customer cross the lawn just to get a good look at what’s behind the front window: Who does that? Not people who plan to build a business from the ground up. No. These flat stones whose jagged path arrives at Devil House’s odd, unnecessary porch suggest that, in its final guise, it finally succeeded in reverting to its original form: a place where people gathered, and ate, and slept, and lived. The vision that came, briefly, to possess it—this was no innovation. It was a return, a retracing, a rebirth. A radical, not to say new, form of excavation.
Whether the team that did the digging knew what business they were about doesn’t matter much, in the long view. Whether tidy or sloppy, planned or haphazard, restoration seems to come to its own aid, given the right hands to help. But you have to wonder what they felt, looking out through the worn patches in the painted-over windows: whether they sensed that they’d brought back something from a past no one remembered, to sit impudently in the light for a short while, proud to be itself once more, a shelter again at last.
SOLO II
Seth did not go home that night. Once Derrick left, he stood for a moment looking in from the back entrance, surveying the scene: the narrow arcade entrance projecting from the back wall, the tiled rows of wire racks along the floor, the display case up front. He headed up to the front counter and picked up the phone to check for a dial tone; it hadn’t been disconnected yet. Then he called home, telling Mom he planned to spend the night at Dave’s. Dave had a cool mom; she was young, and never ratted anybody out for anything. She let Dave smoke cigarettes inside the house. It was wild.
Seth Healey had a cool mom, too, according to most of his friends. Derrick especially had always been a little jealous about how it didn’t seem to matter what time Seth got home. For Seth, it was more complicated than that; he was an only child, and had been called “hyperactive” by his teachers from an early age. He’d gone through several different prescriptions intended to help him focus over the years, but he hated the way the medications made him feel. By the time he turned thirteen, he’d learned how to hide a pill in his cheek, and could hold it there until he got the chance to spit it out someplace—down the drain of the bathroom sink, or into a gutter while walking to school.
His adolescence seemed to exact, from Maria Healey, a greater measure of forbearance than she had left to give. Raising a child without a partner is hard enough; if the child in question needs extra care, it’s harder. Seth’s father was only good for two weeks a year, in summer; when Seth came home from Dad’s he was usually worse for the wear. Irritable but needy, moody but aloof. When, sometime during freshman year, he began spending more time away from home in the afternoons, his mother didn’t ask too many questions. Of course she loved her son; everybody who knew Seth wanted the best for him, she more than anyone. But if he was learning to make use of his own time, that was good, wasn’t it? And her job kept her out of the house until four. A little quiet allowed her to put dinner together in peace, to steal a little time with the TV or radio by herself.
“If you’re sure it’s OK,” she said over the phone. There was a pot of beef stew bubbling on the stove. “Call if you decide you want to come home early.”
“I’ll see you tomorrow, Mom,” Seth said. The sun was setting; it would be dark inside soon. But he could still see, in his mind’s eye, how things had looked in that moment when Derrick flipped the light switch on: all the fantastic angles, the dozen little projects a boy like Seth might make from a space like this. Showing off with a razor on a VHS case was just a toe in the water: now he would swim. He headed back into the arcade, precious felt-tip pens already retrieved from his backpack, a whole fistful of them: red, purple, black, pink, orange. When he crossed the threshold and saw the seven booths, their doors standing open, he felt the uncomfortable ache of inspiration. It made him want to jump out of his skin, but it wasn’t unpleasant. Just a little overwhelming. This was going to take all night, he knew. He figured Derrick would understand.
When he finally ran out of energy, with only an hour left before daylight, he set the code on the back door and curled up inside one of the booths to sleep. It was a tight, cozy fit. To Seth, it felt a little like what he imagined camping was like—drifting off all by yourself inside a small, confined space with nothing to distract you beyond the walls of your tent. It wasn’t comfortable in a physical sense, but there are many other kinds of comfort worth seeking out in this world.
3.
MINOANS III
The threshold to the arcade was changed. Curling strips of sturdy paper now hung from either side of the portal, affixed by tape, glue, or maybe staples—something slight enough that its presence could be entirely concealed by the scale and care of the greater composition. Derrick hadn’t hit the light switch after closing the door behind him; it seemed better to keep the place dark now. But the display cases, whose fancy interior lighting had always been dim when the store was open—nobody cared about the displays; no bells and whistles were required for the people who needed the things inside the displays—were lit now, and the light was enough to set reflective effects off throughout the store. It was like the inside of a dark ride: just enough light to make you ask questions about what you were seeing.
He headed toward the arcade entrance. As he approached, he saw that its fresh decorations consisted of repurposed glossy stock: shards cut from VHS cases, twisted into corkscrews. Someone—Seth—had spent an hour, possibly two, transforming the grey entryway to the arcade into the mouth of a cave as it might appear in a dream. There was a color scheme to these cascading curls: dominant shades of silver and white at the arch, darkening as they traced a path to the floor, resolving midway down into something gaudier—red, orange, the brown of high-teased hair and the obligatory pink of human flesh. The bottom went blue and yellow, faceless primaries that framed the frenzied, nearly ecstatic middle. Linking these fields were the body parts and flimsy lingeries favored by almost any printed surface to be found in the store—bits of skin, eye, and camisole insinuated themselves, more as suggestions than as whole visions, as Derrick considered Seth’s work.