He didn’t like it. His family had been affording him so much space and range this year; he already felt a little guilty about the time he spent inside the former store in the afternoons. Anthony Hawley probably wouldn’t have cared either way: but he didn’t know, and that was where the ethical question lay. There was no “probably” in the other half of the equation: his parents would not approve. They didn’t ask him to account for his hours between school and suppertime, but he knew if the truth ever surfaced, they would put an end to these afternoons; and these afternoons, with Seth, at this time in his life, as he prepared for the uncertain journey that lay ahead of him on the other side of high school: they felt special. They were special. He wanted to guard them. And so the matter took on several facets, some of them more inclined toward self-preservation than he would have liked to admit.
As he listened to Alex’s meandering accounts of his time away from town, though—stories that passed through numberless streets and shelters where he’d slept sometimes, tales without lessons, jokes without punchlines—and listened, in the silences between exchanges, to how his heart went out to his old friend whose path had run out into the wilderness so early, sovereignty began to seem like the only question of real import. Whatever the former porn store was now—whatever you call a shuttered store that will probably be razed in the near future—did he have the right to tell Alex it was OK to sleep there tonight? The next night? Until he figured out what he was going to do with himself, how to take care of himself, how to keep himself safe?
He didn’t think he did. Cutting up the posters and the glossy boxes, scribbling in the booths, reprogramming the VCRs: this was all essentially invisible work. None of it mattered. The only people who’d ever notice any of it would be the crew who eventually came in to tear the place apart. On the day that crew arrived, would any of them bring expectations about what they were or weren’t going to see inside? It didn’t seem likely. They’d get out their crowbars and start prying doors free from their hinges, and by the end of the day they’d have loaded everything into bins and driven them off the lot in forklifts. What the place they came to destroy looked like when they got there was none of their concern.
But to offer the space as a shelter: that was another thing entirely. He and Seth had covertly assumed shared stewardship of the store, it was true; and any place friends spend time together eventually starts feeling like a sort of home. They’d logged long hours in the half-dark together for more than a month now, drawing pictures and shooting the breeze. He knew of a couple of nights Seth hadn’t gone home, it was true. He’d let these occasions pass without comment.
But Alex was homeless; when he talked about his situation, “homeless” was the exact word he insisted upon to describe himself, much to Derrick’s distress. Derrick didn’t want to be a person who turned his homeless friend back out onto the street. He didn’t want him to have to go back to San Jose, or San Francisco; he pictured Alex at the on-ramp with a sign in his hands, waiting for somebody to take pity on him, and he couldn’t stand it. It didn’t matter how long ago they’d lost track of each other. His own self-image required him to offer his help.
“You look pretty bad,” Derrick said after Alex took his parka off: it was a puffy army parka, too warm to wear in the fall. His face was dirty, and so were his hands.
“They took me downtown a couple of times,” Alex said in the slow, clear cadences people sometimes teased him about. Derrick and Seth waited for him to explain further, but sensed that no further explanation would come; he stood with his head half-hung, looking like he expected to be insulted, or rejected, or attacked.
People said his mom was Vietnamese, but nobody really knew. He talked like a guy who’d grown up in a suburb someplace, but the only place he ever mentioned living in besides Milpitas was Washington, D.C.; when people asked him where he was from, “I’m from D.C.” was always his answer. But he never elaborated any further about it, and he’d been no older than seven when his family moved to town. Seth heard that young echo in Alex’s voice now, the sound of a child grown older under pressure, and wondered how much he’d never really known about Alex.
There wasn’t much certain about who he’d been before he ended up in the foster system. Alex himself was unreliable when it came to information about his birth family. In grade school, he’d often made up stories, trying at first to keep them all straight; but it gets exhausting after a while, and you learn to just stick to whichever story you find yourself telling, whether it contradicts some earlier version of it or not. After years in the system, he wasn’t really even sure himself about what he believed. But it was hard to discern even the outline of that vigorous storyteller in the gaunt figure who stood by the front counter now, trying and failing to make conversation with a couple of old friends.
“You all right?” said Derrick. Seth was subdued; when he looked at Alex, he knew he was seeing a version of what people expected he himself would end up looking like, sooner or later.
“I’m always all right.”
Seth couldn’t take the tension. “We thought it was Weland,” he said. “Weland fucking around.”
Alex found Weland in his mind’s eye and looked like he was about to smile, but he only said: “Nah, man.”
Derrick pointed at the grimy backpack slung over Alex’s shoulder. “Is that, like, a mattress pad in there?”
Now Alex did smile. “Factory-fresh from behind the Kmart,” he said.
“There’s two bigger booths back that way,” Derrick said, pointing very demonstratively at the arcade; he wasn’t sure of how conscious Alex really was of his surroundings. “You could go get some rest.”
I wonder if anybody who’s never been trusted with any kind of responsibility can understand how it must have felt to be Seth in that moment—to be part of a mechanism that would afford a friend shelter, to have even partial responsibility for a space of comfort and relief. To provide safe harbor for a comrade in need. I try to imagine it, and I picture a young man suddenly seeing that the body in which he lives has grown bigger without him noticing it. I imagine him looking at his hands, just a passing glance, and thinking momentarily about his redecoration of the arcade just a short while back. I see him leading Alex to the arcade to help him find a place to sleep, and I want to tell him: Seth, in this moment, you are exactly who you think you are—a helper, a minister almost. The keys to the fortress are yours; in the right light, to the weary traveler, the luster of their gleam is almost holy. But of course I can’t tell Seth that. I can only hope he had a brief glimmering of it when the moment came, a sense of how sweet the face of the one who lowers the drawbridge appears to the one whose need for passage to the castle, for a home within its walls, has become critical.
VISIBLE FROM THE AIR