I WAS STANDING IN MY BACKYARD with my cell phone to my ear, and the strangeness of the moment rose up for me, like an orchestral cue in a movie: there were pine trees overhead, volunteers, twenty feet tall without anybody ever having put any effort into cultivating them or tending to them. Extras. There’s pine trees everywhere, of course, but back where we grew up, you don’t see this kind of riotous self-propagation. Or maybe I just never knew where to look. The view you get of where you’re from when you’ve been away is polyhedral; its lines appear to curve, and the overall shape shifts depending on where you’re standing.
I was going to ask you about Siraj, I said, I recognized a lot of the stuff about his parents, I went through a whole thing with the Hare Krishnas myself, they actually catered my wedding.
No shit, Gage said, small world.
So, yeah, I said, Siraj, this was the guy I had the most questions about, it’s hard to get a clear picture of him because he didn’t seem to know any of the other kids, and—
The other kids, yeah, Gage said, and there was that laugh again, kind of bitter, I didn’t get it.
You’re right, he went on, you’re a good reader, Siraj’s on the outside. Derrick you know, he’s any kid in California, Angela you know, she’s got school spirit, right, Seth, we all knew a Seth or two growing up, Alexes too, God, do you remember Martin from Quintana? He was so normal when we were kids.
I don’t remember Martin, I said, I only went to Quintana for summer school one year, the same summer you were just talking about, I think.
Oh, wow, you didn’t know him, OK, that’s good, whole different story, just one of those guys whose mind blew out early, by the time I was seventeen I remember Martin showing up at school needing a bath so bad, we were friendly and I’d get him to the showers in the gym when I could, it didn’t do any good, what’s a teenager going to be able to do about somebody who’s genuinely sick and in crisis. He could barely talk, it seemed like, when he did talk you could barely hear him, he’d be mumbling without a lot of articulation, this was a friend of mine, still a teenager, imagine if you’d found me and I was like that, you know, imagine how that would feel.
Gage was quiet for a few seconds; I waited.
I wish you’d known him, he said when he picked up the thread. Very funny guy when we were kids. Ended up in the system. His parents knew we’d been friends, they called me to tell me about it, I was in college at the time, I could tell they’d assigned some particular weight to letting Martin’s old friends know that he was being taken care of. It shook me up some, I mean, I was young, I didn’t have a real understanding of what a big thing it is to land in a state hospital at nineteen, just a year out of high school; anyway, Alex’s life wasn’t like that, there are several ways in which Alex’s life wasn’t like Martin’s but that’s who I was thinking of the whole time, old Martin, funny as hell when we were kids, sometimes you could still see it in high school, that one time I got him to shower I turned around so I wouldn’t be looking at him naked, and he stayed under the water for five or ten minutes and then I heard it shut off and he says: “Gar?on, my spats,” just a faint modulation in the monotone, even then I thought, He dug down, he found a little something of his old self, it must have been super-hard, I still think about it, Jesus Christ.
I heard him take a deep breath: in through his nose, big exhale through his mouth. So, yeah, Siraj didn’t know Alex, and Siraj didn’t really know Angela or Derrick or Seth or any of the other kids from school, and one reason for that is that he was a transfer student, it’s hard to make friends at that age in the middle of the school year, everybody’s little cliques are pretty well established by then, and the other reason, I’m still getting used to saying this out loud, give me a second; the other reason Siraj didn’t know Alex or Derrick or Angela or Seth is that there’s no such person as Siraj, he’s a literary conceit, which as you might imagine is a pretty big no-no in true crime, very frowned-upon, and this was what Tania had to ask me point-blank the next time she called, I’ve never met her in person but I have to say I have a tremendous amount of respect for her, she just went straight for the artery: So my next question, she said, after two or three softballs about the original names of buildings or whatever, my next question is does Siraj actually exist, because, as I mentioned on our last call, I haven’t been able to find any corroboration. And then she just let it hang there, I’d been wondering for a long time at that point how it would shake out if it actually came to that, and I know there’s people who are great at lying and making shit up but that’s never been me, I do nonfiction, true stories, it’s what I’m good at, it’s what they pay me for, I thought I’d done a pretty good job of making him real, pretty believable, right, weird kid, self-absorbed parents, no motive I guess but lots of things happen without real motive, motive’s overrated as an aspect of the crime, it’s another thing I talk about when I do a talk, sometimes people just do things, you can’t break your back bending over to find a motive.
Well, OK, sure, I said, but I have to tell you, I thought the same thing: All the other kids except maybe Angela have a pretty clear motive to protect their home, right? Even if they don’t live there, they have a place, it’s special, they don’t have a lot of other stuff going on in their lives, they’re from pretty much nowhere. I could see Alex losing it when people start sniffing around while he’s just trying to sleep, I can see Derrick trying to protect Alex because he’s got some idea about helping his friends, I can see Seth getting himself into a bad situation after staying up too many nights in a row. Any of those kids.
Those kids, yeah, Gage said, that’s the other thing.
* * *
TAKE SETH, FOR EXAMPLE, he said. You remember Seth, right?
Sure, of course, I said, owns a gym now, kinda closed himself off when he didn’t like the way your interview was going.
OK, yes, he said. Seth is actually Joe. Joseph Caleb Clayton when he was born, just Joe thirty-eight years later when he dies inside the store where he’d been sleeping.
Wait, I said.
I know, he said. I have some leads on who his folks were but there’s only so much you can take. Several arrests for loitering, public urination, the kind of charges mean cops use when they just want to bother someone but also the kind nicer ones use when they’re trying to get somebody housed on a psych ward so they’ll at least have a place to sleep. From the write-ups alone you get the sense that Joe mainly ran into the meaner type. They use the term “non-compliant” to describe him, which is their way of justifying use of force. Later down the line he notches several vandalism charges. Pay phones. Newspaper racks. From this I get a picture of a guy who’s living on the street just trying to get by, and who is hungry, but doesn’t want to hurt anybody, so he’s knocking over newspaper machines for quarters. Maybe he found Devil House because he thought he’d be able to break into the machines back in the arcade, get a couple hundred dollars and stash it in a sock he keeps in a garbage bag. He was pretty burned out by the time he got there. Not everybody on the street is strung out but JC sure was.
There was a crack in Gage’s voice as he spoke. He had been waiting to tell someone about Joseph Caleb Clayton. But Ashton sent you the news story, I said. It was teenagers.