Devil House(46)

“You could stay here and draw if you make sure and lock up,” he said.

“Yeah?” Seth said.

“Yeah,” Derrick said. “But you gotta punch in the code. You have to promise. The cops will come otherwise.”

“Is it—”

Derrick picked up a pen and wrote it at the top of the page where Seth was presently sketching a tall tower with half a dozen small, dark cave entrances ominously dotting its height.

“Five-seven-five-seven-one-star,” he said as he wrote. “OK? Five-seven-five-seven-one-star. The star is the lower right. Come have a look.” Together they went to the back, and Derrick armed and disarmed the alarm several times.

“That number seems pretty easy to guess,” Seth said.

“That’s because you’re ignorant,” Derrick said, ducking Seth’s punch in response. “That’s because you’re ignorant” was a phrase left over from a brief phase Derrick had gone through in grade school when he and all his friends had been trying out meaner aspects than the ones most would eventually settle into. It was a shared memory of long ago; calling back to that time made their connection vivid, immediate.

“Now you,” Derrick said. Seth passed the test on the first try.

“There’s a hundred thousand ways to make a five-number combo,” Derrick said, standing in the doorway to the outside now, the setting sun behind him. “Nobody’s ever going to guess it. I’ll see you tomorrow. Remember to lock.”

“Got it,” said Seth.

“No, man, seriously, though,” Derrick said. “Seriously. I don’t mean to be all like this, but if you don’t lock up, trouble for everybody. Lock up like I showed you or all this will be gone.”

“All this will be gone,” Seth said, lowering his voice and gesturing dramatically behind him with one hand, toward the clamshell cases and the racks and the as-yet-unexplored alcoves of the arcade.

THE ANCIENT ART OF ASTROLOGY

[Interior: a small office in the 1980s; MARC BUCKLER, a young man in smart business wear—grey blazer, crisp pink shirt—at his desk, atop which sit period-appropriate cosmopolitan desktop accessories: sleek black-and-silver multi-line phone, miniature “magic window” sand toy on a clear plexiglass stand, etc.]

[CHYRON lower screen center throughout scene. Text, yellow or red, all-caps: DRAMATIC RE-CREATION]

BUCKLER [mid-conversation]:… perfect. Perfect. And it’s how many square feet? [pauses] How many subdividable? [pauses, listens] Great. And, making sure I’m correct here, zoned commercial? [pauses, laughs] Well, OK, I hear you, but I have to be honest, “zoned commercial” makes us nervous down here. Not really our area. At all. They will ding you down here if you screw up on zoning. Just ding you. Just six blocks from where I’m sitting, one violation can tie your business up for— [pauses, listens] Sure, no, you’re right, you’re right, but I’ve seen it, people get cold feet. I’m just telling you. I have a colleague from up closer to you who says there’s some towns where nobody really cares, but I— [pauses, listens] Sure. Anyhow, no real reason to get ahead of ourselves. I can’t make any promises until I see the property. But I feel good about this! We had some good experiences last year expanding into, you know, Arizona. When’s good? I’m not in a hurry, but at the same time I could be there whenever.

[As he hangs up, PAN around office. Aside from the desk, décor is sparse. A corkboard on one wall with motivational phrases in Sharpie on lined paper, stuck to the board with colorful pins: BELIEVE IN THE RESULTS. REPRESENT WHAT YOU PRESENT. STAY OUT OF YOUR OWN WAY.]

FLAGSTONES

The architect’s name has been lost. The man or men who designed Lonnie Roberts’s diner, who planned its rise from pencil-on-paper to brick-and-beam, left no record of their instructions: they did their work, then vanished forever from the scene. There’s no record anywhere of anything that preceded the luncheonette, it’s true—but see, here, this walkway leading up to the door? These are old stones, old bricks. They were transported here in a time predating most of what we know about this plot of land. It’s hard to imagine anyone, even someone who didn’t have to do all the hard work himself, going to all that trouble for something so small as a luncheonette.

Sorting through available views of city streets—streets as they originally appeared, in the early days of the automobile, and earlier, even, than that—supports this thought, of a house preceding all. Businesses rely on foot traffic to survive; they abut the street as nearly as they can. Demanding that a curious customer cross the lawn just to get a good look at what’s behind the front window: Who does that? Not people who plan to build a business from the ground up. No. These flat stones whose jagged path arrives at Devil House’s odd, unnecessary porch suggest that, in its final guise, it finally succeeded in reverting to its original form: a place where people gathered, and ate, and slept, and lived. The vision that came, briefly, to possess it—this was no innovation. It was a return, a retracing, a rebirth. A radical, not to say new, form of excavation.

Whether the team that did the digging knew what business they were about doesn’t matter much, in the long view. Whether tidy or sloppy, planned or haphazard, restoration seems to come to its own aid, given the right hands to help. But you have to wonder what they felt, looking out through the worn patches in the painted-over windows: whether they sensed that they’d brought back something from a past no one remembered, to sit impudently in the light for a short while, proud to be itself once more, a shelter again at last.