Whisper networks among the young are subtle and sophisticated technologies, better than any state spying apparatus: they leave no paper trails, and their points of contact seldom retain any memory of their own agency. People just talk, that’s all. How Angela West heard that Alex was back in town is anybody’s guess. Alex avoided daylight, and Derrick never talked to anybody about the store.
Unless there are some names still missing from the record, which remains possible, this leaves only Seth. It’s easy to blame Seth; where there’s trouble, he always seems like a possible suspect. He was proud of the daylight fortress he and Derrick had made of Monster Adult X, and probably talked about it if the opportunity arose. But Seth had never been popular at school; the only confidant he had was Derrick, from whom he had no secrets. It’s hard to say who else Seth would have talked to if he’d wanted to tell someone about Alex.
Alex himself makes a marginally better suspect. He had a key to the back door, given to him by Derrick. He’d learned, during his time in bigger cities, how to find a handout. And he knew where Angela lived; they’d been close friends before he got sick. She’d done her best to keep up with him through his sad changes, more than most of his friends had done. She’d tried to ignore the way talking to him was like trying to have a conversation with someone inside a plastic bubble, his voice muffled and hard to hear over on the open-air side of the membrane. Angela might have appeared to him as a beacon of safety here in the boredom and floating paranoia of his present days. There was a phone at the counter; hours inside the store were dead and empty. Time, opportunity, and motive.
These are the facts: Angela left her shift at the 7-Eleven one evening and got home late. She told her parents that a high school football team had shown up all at once for Slurpees just before closing, and that she’d had to ring them all up individually before she clocked out. None of this was true. She left at eleven on the dot; from work, she drove her mother’s Toyota to Monster Adult X, where she was granted entrance by the keeper of the key. And in that place she was straightaway bade good welcome, which welcome she returned with cheer; and behold, in their hidden glade deep within the forest, far from the reach of stern authority, the noble knights did then hold conference, to honor old friendships thought lost, albeit in the absence of Sir Derrick, who yet tarried at home; Sir Seth, out late, regaled the company with tales of the quests on which Sir Derrick intended, shortly, to embark: those journeys ahead, to lands unknown. And lo, while that he spoke, a quiet spirit of despair did descend upon the house, a known familiar whose name none dared invoke, lest its presence oppress the noble knights yet further; and Dame Angela, in the stillness of her heart, did rue upon the fickleness of time, whose hand grew stronger with each passing day, for which no remedy seemed apparent.
OATH BOUND
Inside, Seth was holding court. He stood in the middle of the racks, gesturing excitedly as he spoke. He’d had an idea, and now he had hands to help.
“Derrick’s serious that we can’t hang here anymore,” he said. “He’s going to call time on this whole thing, today or tomorrow. I know he is. We ran together since we were little kids, I know when he’s serious.”
Angela felt like a parishioner in the wrong church. She’d only come to see Alex; she had no personal stake in the future of Monster Adult X. She found the porno tapes disgusting; she didn’t like having to be around them. Seth’s tales of marauding interlopers profaning the sanctuary held no resonance for her. Who would want to spend their afternoons in a place like this?
But she looked over at Alex as Seth’s exhortations grew louder and more animated, and she saw something stirring in his eyes: the look of someone drawn to a purpose, the look of someone with something to defend. He’d called the back arcade home for a week now, maybe two; he told her during the half hour they spent talking before Seth turned up. “It was nice to have a regular place to stay,” he’d said, and she heard the yearning in him when he said it, the need for a center. She’d worked as a candy striper in a convalescent home back in the summer of her junior year; she knew how much small comforts could mean to people. And she hated to think of Alex out on the street.
“This is our home,” Seth said insistently at one point, his pitch ascending the scale.
Alex laughed. “It’s not really anybody’s ‘home,’” he said.
“It’s your home right now,” Angela said.
“It’s my spot right now,” Alex corrected. “Sometimes you just have a spot.”
“Any other spot we find isn’t really going to be ours,” Seth said. “Fuck this.”
“I knew some long-timers in San Francisco who used to shit in their tents if they got cleared out of an underpass,” Alex offered; Angela winced.
“That’s no good, though. You know? Nobody can tell one person’s shit from anybody else’s,” Seth said, a vision upon him, the sort of thing that made him feel like when he finally found his life’s purpose it would be something special the whole world would understand. “We just have to show them something that says this place is ours no matter what else they do to it, something they’ll remember after they see it even if the next thing they do is tear it all down.”
Angela pursed her lips against a smile; Seth sounded like he was quoting something he’d seen on a Saturday morning cartoon, sprinkling it with dirty words to make it more applicable to the moment.
“That’s a good speech, Seth,” she said.
“Thanks,” he said, already headed for the far wall. He shrugged his backpack off and reached into the top pocket, retrieving an X-Acto knife and a red Sharpie. For a second Angela felt panic: Was he crazy? Was he going to try something stupid?
But instead he did that which is recorded both in the Polaroids and in the tabloids which would describe the details of those renderings in future days, that act of wonder from which proceeded the great days of the castle, candle-short days marked both by mad revelry and the solemn raising of the ramparts: those thin but fearsome fortifications meant to guard the Knights of the Broken Mirror, who bore but few arms, if any, against those intruders then clearing the near horizon.
He slashed the number 7 into a section of the wall with his knife, then drew a circle around it in marker. Then he traced the 7 with the marker in one quick, intentionally sloppy movement, bringing it into harsh relief.
“They’ll put this place on the TV news when they find out,” he said in triumph to the gentle assembly.
MINOANS V
Seth was off to the races. In his mind, he imagined Alex and Angela joining in with abandon, caught up in his vision of turning the inside of the store into a scarecrow for the authorities. He was like this whenever an idea took hold of him. It had been causing him trouble all his life.
They watched at first. It was fun to watch Seth when he got wound up about something. Everybody knew it. After a while, Alex joined in; it would have been bad manners to sit and stare, even if his feeling for shared activity had been blunted by too much time alone. Awkward in his movements, he approached Seth’s backpack, leaning over it and asking: “Is it just pens?”