Devil House(48)

He’d even thought about turning his bike around halfway home, to double-check, but he didn’t want to be a nag. Now he stood at the arcade gate, admiring his childhood pal’s initiative. Close up, you could see the care that had gone into this arrangement: the miserly space allowed to peek through the cut strips, the gradation of the color field.

“Are you back there, you crazy person?” Derrick hollered through the entrance, his hand cupped around his mouth.

MOAT

“Don’t be mad” was the first thing he heard from somewhere inside—down the hall to the right somewhere. Derrick took in the changes as his eyes adjusted to the relative darkness of the arcade, and smiled: he could see how Seth might have been worried he’d gone too far, but how could Derrick—or anyone—have felt anything but wonder in the face of a vision as vast as this?

Movies were playing in every booth—you could hear them going all at once. Their doors stood open, and the screens inside flooded the otherwise unlit hall with shifting patchwork patterns of light and dark. The scuffed-up floor looked like a bubbling stream underneath his feet: flashes of snow, gestures of grey.

On the rare busy day in the store, Derrick had heard what several movies playing at once sounded like from behind those doors when they were closed. Moans, gasps, and dirty words repeated with increasing urgency and rising pitch—a cacophony drawing on a common tongue, a roomful of people who weren’t aware of one another’s presence all making noise at once. The sound in the arcade now was different. “Seth?” he called, laughing now, the blurred sound too loud to let him think. He picked out the pornographic note from somewhere—some oohs, some aahs—but amid them, other notes, other voices: here dialogue, here music, here revving engines.

Seth emerged from the couples booth. “Your dude had a shelf of normal movies in the closet behind the counter,” he said. “I loaded ’em up. That whole chain of tape players under the counter is wild.”

Derrick leaned into the nearest single booth: he recognized Game of Death, Bruce Lee’s final picture. “Son of a bitch! Goddamn bastard!” he said, pointing his index finger stiffly at the screen and trying to make his lips move like an actor’s in a dubbed movie.

“I know!” said Seth, relieved; he’d spent much of the morning fretting about how Derrick might react.

“You skipped school to set this up?” Derrick said.

“They’re not gonna let me graduate anyway,” Seth said.

“They told you that?”

“Last year they said I’d have to take summer school to get enough credits.”

“So?”

“So, summer’s over, I stayed home.”

Now the squall of the screens became intrusive. Derrick wanted to tell his friend he still might make it to graduation if he started dedicating himself to his schoolwork, if he talked to the right people, if he made some kind of a deal. But none of that was true; Derrick would only have been describing how he might have dealt with Seth’s problem if the problem were his. He didn’t like to think of how different Seth’s path was going to be from his own in the future, because the future was almost upon them both. Derrick had worked very hard for almost four years. Seth probably had, too, in his own way, but the world beyond school didn’t seem like a place with tons of extra room for people who did things their own way.

“Man,” Derrick said.

Seth scowled a little; Derrick was ruining the moment.

“Look inside the booths, dude, there’s more to it than just the movies,” he said, finding his register. He was proud of his work. That it wasn’t going to last made it even better. It was just something cool to do while waiting for the next thing to come along.

Derrick ventured into the Game of Death booth. Its walls were covered in a canvas of flame through which peered cross-contour drawings of half-human faces arrested mid-scream, a vision of hell in red and blue Magic Marker. Fluctuations from the light on the screen obscured or illuminated the details. Anguished faces would resolve into clarity, then recede into the dark, only to reemerge again, as if asserting their own existence against the elements conspiring to keep them hidden.

“Dude, this is amazing stuff,” Derrick said.

“That’s only one!” Seth said, spreading his hands wide like a state fair pitchman saying, But wait, there’s more. “I worked all night!”

Derrick took in the six other open doors at a glance, and then he felt the contagion take hold. Seth was right. There wasn’t any point in letting a chance like this go to waste. He could find an hour or two in the afternoons. Anthony Hawley was done with this place. Senior year was when you finally got to have a little fun, right? People said that. No more summers, not like the ones you’d been having since you were a kid. Make this last year count.

THE SHIFTING PRICE OF DISCRETION

There’s a chance that, someday, I’m going to be the guy at the convention teaching the How to Succeed in True Crime workshop; I’ve known some of the guys who do these workshops, and they say it’s actually fun, that it can really give you a jump-start if you’re feeling stuck—young faces looking up at you like you might be carrying the philosopher’s stone in your pocket, scrutinizing your expression for signs of secret knowledge. There’s no end to the different ways you can do these workshops: you can talk about how to follow up on inspiration, that’s an hour all by itself with plenty of things to say in the one-to-ones afterward; or you can talk about structure, or plotting, or outlines—everybody needs technique; or you can talk about the Responsibility of the Author to His Subject, which nobody wants to hear about but which might come in handy later, and so on and on and on. No end. You can get down into the thorny details: how to talk to a stranger whose brother got killed by some maniac, what to look for in a crime scene photograph. But for me, the sticking point, the thing I’d want to talk about except that I don’t know how, is what to do about the people you can’t get close to because they’re completely gone. The conversations no one ever heard, the events you have to imagine, the unknown thing you have to bring to life and present as something real that came and went and left a small mark on the world.