Devil House(111)
Self-defense, he said, look it up, Christ, all over the country people shoot drunks who happen to have wandered into their back yards, on the Fourth of July, say, Memorial Day, whatever, castle doctrine it’s called, you have a right to defend yourself within your domicile, it’s a very old legal position. If I’m in your house without your say-so, then you have the right to consider me a threat. I thought about this long and hard and I know that’s the applicable statute here, in recent years it’s kind of been hijacked by gun nuts to justify opening fire on whoever they want, but I feel like there’s something deeper in it, not property rights, none of that, more like something on the books to protect you when the emissaries of the king decide you’ve got something the king wants, you have to have something somewhere that says to the crown, this far and no farther, that’s how I look at it, maybe I’m on my way to becoming some sad survivalist guy, plenty of stories there, those guys are pretty into dreaming about defending themselves with deadly force. I mean, don’t get me wrong, nobody deserves to get killed, but what are these guys supposed to do, everybody’s already thrown them away and they’ve got nothing, just nothing, and nobody was using that building for anything, they weren’t hurting anybody, would it have killed these people to just leave those guys alone, just do something else instead of fucking with the one thing they had that belonged to them? Would it have been so bad to just write it off? They could have done that. They could have just turned the other way. All three of these guys were nomadic enough by nature that they were going to pull up stakes reflexively sooner or later. And instead they just take bullets in their legs, they’re back out on the street with nowhere to live, strung out, desperate, scared, hurt. They drift, and they drown. No reason. And all the while I’m looking around, new construction going up, no room for anybody who doesn’t already have money, all these people just invisible to the Evelyn Gateses and the Marc Bucklers, less than invisible, nonexistent. And I thought about it, and I thought about it, and I thought about it, and after a while I just couldn’t stand it.
But Alex made it out, anyway, he said, and I tracked him down, he can be hard to understand but I got enough of the real story from him to turn it into what I got, a real enough story that people would maybe read it and care about it instead of just filing and forgetting it the way they do with every other story where some burnout gets kicked to death or set on fire or shot dead, at most a story like that gets half a day of social media outrage and then crickets, so I did what I did, I told Alex I was going to do it, he thought that was funny, he never laughs about anything but I got a little laugh out of him about that; he said, well, everybody was a teenager once, and then he zoned out again, he spends most of his time in the zone, who can blame him, people who live on the street see stuff every day that would crush your spirit but they just keep going, and then somebody writes an exposé for the Times or whatever every other year and people wring their hands, nothing does any good, but I got scared somebody would figure it out because the details of the scene were the same, all three of those guys really did dress up the store to look like a witches’ coven, if you saw the crime scene photos you’d think they went on to become rich artists or something—
I did see them, I said, they’re attached to your manuscript.
Right, yeah, he said
What about Angela? I said.
There is no Angela, he said. I wanted Alex to have another friend in the world. You know. His actual story is hard.
There was a silence in which I wondered why he hadn’t told me Alex’s real name, but I felt that in Alex we were somewhere near the center of something delicate, and I didn’t want to break any membranes that weren’t yet ready to break.
About the manuscript, though, he said as Angela West evaporated into the air. Can you send it back? I get paranoid about it. I don’t know what I’m going to do next, but I know I need to be the only person who has a copy.
Sure, I said, there’s a shipping place down the road.
Can you go there tomorrow? he said.
* * *
GAGE, I SAID, I just found out about all this as you were telling me about it, hold your fire. I was laughing while I said it but I felt defensive: I’m a safe haven.
I know, he said, sorry, I get worked up, I mean I guess I know, but on the other hand I don’t, the longer I do this stuff, the more enemies I see. If they never print this thing, maybe they’re doing me a favor, maybe I’ll end up looking at it that way, who knows. I don’t think they’re willing to print it with Siraj in it, but I kind of need to believe in Siraj, he’s there to protect the others.
We were quiet for a minute. It was dark outside. Summer in the South. Cicadas. I didn’t think anybody else would believe in Siraj, either. I thought Gage had spent too long trying to save people he couldn’t save and that the effort had clouded his vision in one way but maybe clarified it in another.
I don’t get how you can really protect anybody, I said after a while; I don’t see who there is to protect.
I know, he said, with a tenderness I didn’t expect: I know, that’s how it is with everybody, the idea that people might need to be protected from the facts of a case, it runs counter to what we’re taught, you know, but I had Jana Perez’s letter right there in front of me, like an air raid siren sounding the alarm, it matters which story you tell, it matters whose story you tell, it matters what people think even if it doesn’t matter to the people who needed it before the disaster hit. That’s the thing, those of us on this side of the disaster, we get so dazzled by the fireworks, by the conflagration I want to say, that we don’t see the gigantic expanse over there on the other side of the flames, but, you know. People have to live there.