The brochure had a detailed map showing Kenyon College as it related to nearby cities and counties. Derrick couldn’t stop studying it. Some of the best science fiction books, he’d found, feature maps of imaginary terrain on their opening pages. He always found himself going back to the map as he read through them, trying to situate himself within the fictional space again and again, until it seemed as real as the outside world. Knowing where the rivers were, the names of the lakes. Anything short of full immersion felt like a cheat.
People his age often feel trapped by the towns they grow up in, he knew. They complained about it all the time, even if plenty of them were born elsewhere—Seattle, some of them; San Francisco, several more; Colorado, at least two he knew of. A couple of sophomores at school, two years back, had come all the way from Florida; they’d been welcomed with that mixture of awe and suspicion usually reserved in America for visiting royalty.
The other side of the coin, however, never seemed to merit much thought from his classmates: the comfort of living in a place you’d always known, the ease of knowing your parameters. Derrick’s bike ride from the store to his house, for example: he’d never once had to plot it out. Even when they tore up the street to put in fiber-optic lines, the grid beneath remained familiar. Second nature. Sometimes these days they’d pave over a whole cluster of old buildings to make way for an office building, but it made no difference to Derrick’s sense of his own position on the map, because the coordinates didn’t change.
He knew how people felt, though—he couldn’t imagine not having an urge to travel, to see new things, to encounter the unexpected. Those Florida sophomores hadn’t been able to hide how alien the California landscape was to their eyes, how small differences cropped up everywhere once you started looking for them: in the trees, in the air at dusk. There’s something appealing about being a visitor. The whole world’s a new thrill.
Ohio. A world away. Cold winters, wet springs. The brochures from the schools were, themselves, a kind of science fiction. They represented the possibilities he’d only vaguely known he was working toward over the past four years, urged on by his mother, and, more quietly, by his dad, who saw, in his son, a kind of resolve that seemed miraculous to him. He hoped some of it was down to good parenting, but it felt bigger than that, and better, too. He didn’t want to go spoiling it with awkward comments and observations.
As the pile of envelopes from the colleges grew higher, the feeling of new possibilities became general within the Hall household. It felt more like spring than autumn. Something new was under way for everybody. Who can resist such a good feeling within a family?
He let that feeling ripple for a second, and then reflected involuntarily on the question of Alex. It made him sad. Why shouldn’t Alex, who was as smart as Derrick, also be setting out into a new and exciting chapter of his life instead of just trying to secure a safe place to sleep? There were so many things to consider in this world. The scope of it all seemed too great to grasp. Maybe it got easier as you grew older, or maybe you just got numb. Either way, it was probably worse for a guy like Alex, whose options seemed to be sealing themselves off daily, like a long hallway interrupted, every few steps, by a new door, each of which locks itself behind you as soon as you’ve passed through it.
He looked again at the picture on the cover of the Kenyon brochure as he considered all this. Everybody in the picture looked sharp. They were walking across a campus in autumn, huge orange maple leaves underfoot. All of them were smiling. It was a hard image to resist.
THE HAGGLER’S LOVE OF DISCRETION
“This is some weird shit,” Buckler said as they entered the building. It was a planned line; he’d read in one of his how-to-succeed-in-business books that delivering a mild shock to the seller was a prospective client’s best leverage. Establish your ground. Make them inhabit your space, not the other way around. Evelyn Gates hadn’t even flipped the lights on before he said it, and she recognized the desperate cadence of an over-rehearsed opening.
“Excuse me?” she said. Her practice in business predated Buckler’s grade school days.
“Weird stuff,” Buckler corrected himself, making eye contact with her quickly and smiling. He had a lot of faith in that smile. “Weird stuff, I mean. No offense intended.”
Gates understood, then, the extent of the wetness behind her client’s ears. Her father had taught her how to spot a novice; now she began calculating markup, contemplating which structural anomalies she’d now frame as features. Her eyes would have been on Buckler, not out among the racks—a failed porn store didn’t interest her. She was a little annoyed that all the sordid merchandise was still there in the building, but not terrifically surprised. A tenant who can’t afford to make rent probably can’t afford to hire movers, either.
But Buckler—young, nervous, and out of his natural habitat—blinked once, and then again. To be in a place like this in the company of a woman old enough to be his mother was uncomfortable enough. Trying to find the least self-incriminating spot for his gaze to land made matters worse; no line of sight seemed safe. So he settled on some magazines, since their outer sheen seemed moderately less trashy than the big, glossy VHS cases lining the walls. He tried to diverge his gaze, to make it seem like he was lost in thought instead of scrutinizing a skin mag; but then some grainy break in the shiny surface would catch his eye and draw him in.
It was mainly Seth’s handiwork, one of his earlier pieces from the first day he’d spent in the store with Derrick. The magazine had originally been called Sinful Sluts. It had a parochial school theme. The model on the front, facing the camera naked from the waist down, now boasted curling ram’s horns drawn in ballpoint on either side of her head; Seth’s curling interior lines, simple but effective, made these horns look gnarled and ancient. On her thighs were tattoos of swords, their tips and hilts reversed to face one another from either side of the gap between her open legs. Her right hand had originally held an erect penis, jutting from the body of a man whose remaining parts were all out of the frame; Seth had shaded the shaft and sketched wire mesh across the glans to turn it into a microphone. Finally, with the X-Acto, he’d removed her eyes—a recurring and reliable motif in the renovated Monster Adult X; any face in the world looks creepier if you cut out its eyes.
Derrick, adept at lettering, had contributed the title. Using Seth’s pen and some Liquid Paper, he’d settled on the title Satan Sings; it fit the modified picture, and they both laughed after they put it back on the rack. You had to look twice to see where he’d altered the curve of one letter or the angle of another. That was the whole point.
“Don’t mean to offend again, but what the hell is this?” asked Buckler, turning to his host, who had no ready answer.
SOLO III
Alex heard the key turn in the lock just in time. He’d been sitting at the front counter, resting his head on his hands. Hidden away inside the store, he’d located a few places where, in waking hours, the energy felt less malevolent to him; the counter was one of them. His sensitivity to energy fields had grown quite acute during his time sleeping on the street. The crazier guys you meet out there talk about this kind of thing all the time, but if you listen past the crazy you begin to see their point. Every corner has an angle. Every room’s got a shape. The front counter felt warmer than the dark, claustrophobic booths. Warmth matters.
He jumped up; he’d been sleeping in the arcade for at least a week now, possibly more. His sense of time was pretty shot, but maneuvers in the dark were second-nature instincts by now. He made it back to his booth just as the front door opened; settling in, imperceptibly silent, he began hearing the sounds of people out in the store.