Behold the fourth chamber, the witch booth, upon which the luxury of spray paint has been bestowed! Alex is no apprentice, but has known one or two in his travels, seen them bestow their hurried work onto the sliding back doors of parked semitrailers in rest stop lots. From them he has borrowed a quavering line, an easy slope to his turns; the witch is bloated and her breasts sag. Over them hang the strands of her long, white hair, crossing each other in loose braids all the way down to her spindly ankles. On the floor of the chamber, stray symbols— stars and planets and letters from imagined alphabets. Her eyes are red X’s within black circles; from her place on the back wall of the booth, she surveys her domain’s original graffiti, lewd offers and phone numbers. Alex with the natural touch. Some things are scarier when you leave them as they are.
Behold, then, her mate, lord of the fifth chamber, namesake of the wizard booth! A new hand announces its presence herein, meticulous and excessive; she means to distinguish herself, to leave her mark in the moons and stars of the wizard’s robes. Behold the terrible demons in the skies around him, mouths agape with sorrow, drifting among white outcroppings of stardust that threaten to bury them but from whose caked, clotted smears they yet emerge, in eternal servitude to their lord, whose beard teems with six-legged insects. See, scrawled in cribbed, hasty felt-tip, the word Satan, inserted here and there amid the tableau, clumsy, awkward, effective. Note the slashes in the cushions, grouped in twos and threes like the marks of a nesting animal that hopes to return to its lair. Behold the work of Lady Angela, fair knight among knights, game for the hunt, there when you need her, tight-lipped when pressed for confession.
Behold the sixth chamber, repository of congealing paint left in supply closet cans, the very face of disorder: paint poured onto the vinyl seat, paint smeared on the screen, pools of spilled paint on the floor, their surfaces muddily reflecting the blackness of the ceiling above, and words, yet more words scratched into it while still wet, seeming now ready to recede into the lakes that gave them voice: HURT, alone on one wall; 7 alone in the screen, a clue, a sign, the tail of the red herring. Behold this obscure and unreadable signal to the coming invaders, curling question marks splashed onto the ceiling, a dozen of them at least, jumbled, mocking, senseless.
Behold, finally, the seventh chamber, the glass house, the room that gives the castle a name by which to be remembered: for someone has succeeded in shattering the screen, and affixing broken shards to the walls of the booth with glue, and nesting more of them in dug-out crevices here and there, so that everywhere one looks, one sees a partial reflection: enough to direct the eye toward the ceiling, where, behold, in marker, a portrait of a man in profile, five-o’clock shadow dotting his jawline, a swarm of flies around his balding head, a jagged line where his neck terminates suggesting rough decapitation; and, indeed, this caption beneath him telling the tale: ANOTHER ENEMEY OF THE HOPELESS ONES. Framing all, on the back wall, written sidewise, in evident haste, unadorned, a farewell to the onlooking eye:
look in the mirror and what do you see?
Bloody Barry, five of his friends, and me
those who knew us knew us well
those who didn’t SERVE IN HELL
And finally, on the single surface remaining, the inner door, Seth’s masterstroke of misdirection: the jewel in the crown, the christening of the shrine, in dripping script, the menacing starkness of its expression ready-made for the local camera crews, and, later, the nationals.
NOBL NIGHTS R WE
SOLO IV
“What do I even say,” Derrick said when he emerged back through the entrance, shaking his head, a huge smile on his face. “It’s … Seth. Alex. Ang. Man, you did it. You guys really did it.” In Seth’s heart, the glee of Derrick’s speechless awe clashed with the finality of the moment; the work was done. They would not return.
“I knew you would love it!” he said. “Did you see the mirror chamber, all that Son of Sam shit?”
“I saw it,” Derrick said. “Man, I saw it. When those people come back and see all this, there won’t be anything but a big puddle of piss underneath them.” For a brief moment, an ugly vision of interlopers in business dress pissing down their legs made everybody smile at once, a welcome break from the gathering feeling of departure.
“Let me go get my stuff,” Alex said. It hardly takes any time at all for a person to get used to packing up and moving along every night; he’d met plenty of people out there younger than him who’d been at it for years. Some of them get proud about it during bullshit sessions late at night, claiming not to know where their families live or to remember their last fixed address; many of these are probably telling the truth, except when it comes to saying how they feel about it.
For Alex, the notion of feeling proud about one’s station, however high or low, seemed alien. Some foster homes are good, and some are awful, and most are better than group placements except for the ones that are much, much worse; and some group placements are preferable to hospital units, though occasionally there’s a therapist who hasn’t yet given up hope, and who tries to help, and in so doing almost makes it worth living behind a locked door with no shoes on for a month surrounded by strangers who all think their problems are bigger than yours. A few nights in a shuttered porn store with some friends had been nice. But he’d harbored no illusions about it. He hoped to stay in town somehow; he’d heard that several people he knew from before had jobs at a car wash, and he thought he could maybe do that long enough to save up some money.
Derrick and Seth both knew that the loss of the store meant uncertain days ahead for Alex. Nobody knew what to say to make it better.
“Hey, man,” Derrick said.
“Hey,” Alex said back. “It was nice.”
“There’s probably not a big hurry, though.”
“I just have my bag.”
“I feel like all of us leaving together is a bad idea,” Derrick said. It was still very early in the morning, but people would be out and about soon enough. Seth was used to being the first person asked to leave; he grabbed his backpack from its place inside one of the chalk outlines on the floor.
“All right. I might wait until tonight,” Alex said.
“You going back to San Jose?”
“Maybe.” Alex knew telling people you had no actual plans made them feel sad. He was exhausted; his only real hope was to find someplace to rest after staying awake all night redecorating the store with his old friends from another life, from school.
“This sucks dick,” said Seth.
“It’s just how it is,” Derrick said; the sound of his own voice in his ears, saying those words, made the adult world ahead of him seem cold and ugly.
“I bet if you come to school one of the counselors can think of something,” Seth suggested, knowing from personal experience how useless the counselors at school were but having nothing better to offer.
Alex wanted to let them off the hook, and he didn’t want them to see him if he started getting loose, as usually happened when he didn’t sleep. “Maybe I’ll see you at school,” he said.
Derrick and Seth took the cue. “Probably doesn’t matter if you lock up when you leave,” Derrick said, heading for the back door.
Alex laughed and said: “All right.”
For the last time, now with a heavy heart, Seth followed his friend out through the back.
THE WAYWARD SCHOLAR
“School called,” Maria Healey said to Seth when he got home that afternoon, earlier than he’d been home in the afternoon in several months.
“I went to school!” Seth protested loudly, as if he’d already been arguing about the question for several minutes.
“I know,” said his mother, slowly, carefully, trying to look her son in the eyes. “They called because you fell asleep in class again. You’re not in trouble. They are worried.”
“I’m fine!” Seth said.
Maria took a deep breath.
“I’m worried, too,” she said. “I don’t know where you go at night. By myself, I can’t really do anything about it. You’re too big now for me. If you won’t take care of yourself, I—”
“Mom, I’m fine,” said Seth, wholly exhausted and in need of sleep, responding to the emotion in his mother’s voice like a sponge soaking up water until it can hold no more, feeling some of what she felt: changes just up ahead, the end of something.
“Well, I hope so,” she said, wishing she had something stronger than hope on hand, knowing better than to look too hard for whatever that stronger thing might be.