The angel was immense. The images that formed its bones ranged from solo shots of San Fernando Valley models in leotards to garish collages of graphic sex. Oral, vaginal, anal, gay, straight, group, and solo, stylized and raw, slick and no-budget, the entire imagined commercial spectrum represented in patches torn roughly or cut carefully from sleeves whose black splashes of all-caps text popped like word-bubbles from the covers of comic books: XXX. NO DIALOGUE! FOUR HOURS OF HOLES AND POLES.
If you circled around to the back of the angel, overkill gave way to understatement: white cardboard, the insides of the sleeves, framed the shape of the body a little more plainly to the eye, imparting a mood of helplessness to the figure. About a foot short of the floor, its feet dangled; any slight disturbance of the air caused them to sway, as if trying to kick themselves free of their staples.
Even as he examined it, admiring its balance—both legs the same length, a color gradient that could only have indicated a heavy hour in the Seth zone where attention deficit and deep focus were two sides of the same coin—he felt all the action out on the walls in his periphery, dozens of details begging to be noticed. “You gotta be kidding me here,” he said, his eyes finally reaching the carpeted floor, where the outlines of bodies, seven in all, had been drawn in chalk, adrift in a sea of trigger-words written in frenzied capital letters: ANGEL and MURDER and PRINCE and PLAYPEN and a half dozen others, a confusion of voices, a great chord of terror.
Seth emerged from the arcade. He’d forced himself to stay hidden all morning in case Derrick came by.
There is an entry in Seth’s journal about all this, in the journal I believe to be Seth’s. Like all the other entries, it’s brief, to the point, and undated. It says, Derrick had to admit we did it up right. Beneath, there’s a sketch of the angel in silhouette. Stripped of its lurid skin, rich with menace, it dances on the page like a lesser tormentor in an aberrant book of hours.
FOR KING AND COUNTRY
There are no army surplus stores in Milpitas. It’s too small a town to support one. There aren’t any over in San Jose, either; in San Francisco, you can find secondhand stores with decent supplies of outdated military stock, but you have to know where to look. In all likelihood, given the need to return inconspicuously with unwieldy cargo in tow, San Francisco is too far afield.
But 1986 is a long time ago. Might there have been a local source for weird army stuff back then, someplace that’s gone now: a storefront, a counter inside a hardware store? If you want to reconstruct local retail histories, contemporaneous materials are your safest bet—old newspapers, phone books, ledgers if you’re extremely lucky. Thrift stores, flea markets, any used-books place whose street-facing windows are caked with several seasons’ worth of dust and dirt: you learn to view them all as libraries operating under more modest auspices. Free from the obligations of outlines and dramatic arcs, you dig through documents whose faces never offer any eureka moment; you have to open them up, you have to go down the columns line by line. Sometimes you strike a vein and learn two or three things nobody else was ever going to remember: the storefront office that sold magazine overstock by mail order for a few months before closing up shop, its proprietor forever anonymous now; the fire somebody set in the same office, who knows why, just a week after the magazine guys moved out. But no matter how deep you dig, you’ll still probably have to guess when it comes time to say where a teenager might have gone to buy an old sword.
I have pictures of it; anybody who cares at all about the case has seen pictures of the sword. It looks heavy, though most swords weigh less than people think. It looks ancient, but cheap materials can bestow a kind of crude antiquity on their subjects. Its outsized handle looks like a movie prop.
It’s not a prop, though. In fact, when the forensics team retrieved it from its place atop the crushed bodies of Marc Buckler and Evelyn Gates, one of the technicians, betraying an adolescence spent in hobby stores and library multipurpose rooms, said, a little louder than he meant to: “Whoa. Two-hander. No wonder nobody heard anything.”
I don’t know whose sword it was, and I don’t know where it came from. There are conflicting stories. They cancel each other out, amounting to anecdotal evidence, only useful to people who’ve already got a story to tell. To get this kind of detail exactly right, meticulous care has to be taken with the initial investigation.
It happens sometimes. People take extra care, they bother to fill out the paperwork before their memories start to rust. You get lucky. But in the case of the Milpitas teenagers accused of plotting and carrying out the murders of a local property owner and visiting real estate developer, you don’t.
6.
MINOANS VI
The first thing Derrick said after Seth and Alex emerged from the arcade was “It’s beautiful.” He looked at his friends, and then back at the immense, terrible angel overseeing its new domain, the total repurposing of practically every item and surface in the store.
“You like it?” Seth was smiling broadly, his face tense with pleasure.
“It’s incredible,” Derrick said, circling the angel, watching it sway.
“Wait til you see the booths! Every booth is different! There’s a witch booth, there’s a wizard booth, there’s the Son of Sam booth. I saw something about him in People when I was a kid and I just went for it,” Seth said, unable to contain himself any longer, audibly catching his breath and then beginning again. He described how he and Alex and Angela had spent half the night working, making it all up as they went along; the characters he’d improvised and the symbols he’d assigned to them, all the half-grasped mythologies he’d been trying to invoke on every surface and in every corner. To every booth an angel or a demon, its face gazing menacingly out from plexiglass screen protectors, slogans and symbols clustering riotously on the walls and ceilings.
“On the floors, too!” Seth said, in triumph. “On the cushions! It’s crazy!”
Alex stood by him but didn’t look up; he was still good at drawing, and, given the right tools, could still lend form and shape to his ideas and visions. The night’s work had been a team effort; after Angela went home, Seth’s intensity had escalated, and Alex had managed to keep up with him. Something about the solitude of the project, its hermetic boundaries, allowed him to remain present to the moment instead of disappearing into the interior fog that called to him whenever things got quiet. But this feeling, which he’d harbored all night, didn’t survive Derrick’s arrival; the severe discomfort in just talking to people, even people he liked, remained. It wasn’t that the presence of others was intolerable; their bodily presence was actually nice. Space, left empty too long, might start to hum. But when those bodily presences began to talk—asking questions, getting animated, complicating matters—their need for some kind of response caused the pressure to push against the inner walls of his skull. The pain cut through the haze. It demanded relief. Seth was a perfect foil in these times: he never stopped talking. You could use his shadow like a blanket.
“I gotta see those arcades,” Derrick said. “It’s … it’s just beautiful, you guys. You did something great. They’re gonna hate it, and they’ll never know.”
“Never know what?” Seth said.
“Who it was,” Derrick said.
“I hope they do know!” Seth said, too loudly. Alex had caught a catnap in his booth at around 5:00 a.m.; Seth was still going. “I hope they see this and think: Better just leave whoever did this shit alone!”
Derrick flashed on Anthony Hawley’s last phone call with Evelyn Gates: How he’d tried, and failed, to ask for his key deposit back. How he’d hung up the receiver in silence. How he’d had to swallow his anger in the end, leaving behind thousands of dollars in wasted inventory because it felt like the only counterpunch available to him.
“Landlords don’t think like that, dude,” he said, trying not to lecture. “The last thing they think about is leaving people alone.”
“Wait til they see the booths!” Seth said. “They will shit themselves! They’ll never come back!”