Devil House(51)
“You look pretty bad,” Derrick said after Alex took his parka off: it was a puffy army parka, too warm to wear in the fall. His face was dirty, and so were his hands.
“They took me downtown a couple of times,” Alex said in the slow, clear cadences people sometimes teased him about. Derrick and Seth waited for him to explain further, but sensed that no further explanation would come; he stood with his head half-hung, looking like he expected to be insulted, or rejected, or attacked.
People said his mom was Vietnamese, but nobody really knew. He talked like a guy who’d grown up in a suburb someplace, but the only place he ever mentioned living in besides Milpitas was Washington, D.C.; when people asked him where he was from, “I’m from D.C.” was always his answer. But he never elaborated any further about it, and he’d been no older than seven when his family moved to town. Seth heard that young echo in Alex’s voice now, the sound of a child grown older under pressure, and wondered how much he’d never really known about Alex.
There wasn’t much certain about who he’d been before he ended up in the foster system. Alex himself was unreliable when it came to information about his birth family. In grade school, he’d often made up stories, trying at first to keep them all straight; but it gets exhausting after a while, and you learn to just stick to whichever story you find yourself telling, whether it contradicts some earlier version of it or not. After years in the system, he wasn’t really even sure himself about what he believed. But it was hard to discern even the outline of that vigorous storyteller in the gaunt figure who stood by the front counter now, trying and failing to make conversation with a couple of old friends.
“You all right?” said Derrick. Seth was subdued; when he looked at Alex, he knew he was seeing a version of what people expected he himself would end up looking like, sooner or later.
“I’m always all right.”
Seth couldn’t take the tension. “We thought it was Weland,” he said. “Weland fucking around.”
Alex found Weland in his mind’s eye and looked like he was about to smile, but he only said: “Nah, man.”
Derrick pointed at the grimy backpack slung over Alex’s shoulder. “Is that, like, a mattress pad in there?”
Now Alex did smile. “Factory-fresh from behind the Kmart,” he said.
“There’s two bigger booths back that way,” Derrick said, pointing very demonstratively at the arcade; he wasn’t sure of how conscious Alex really was of his surroundings. “You could go get some rest.”
I wonder if anybody who’s never been trusted with any kind of responsibility can understand how it must have felt to be Seth in that moment—to be part of a mechanism that would afford a friend shelter, to have even partial responsibility for a space of comfort and relief. To provide safe harbor for a comrade in need. I try to imagine it, and I picture a young man suddenly seeing that the body in which he lives has grown bigger without him noticing it. I imagine him looking at his hands, just a passing glance, and thinking momentarily about his redecoration of the arcade just a short while back. I see him leading Alex to the arcade to help him find a place to sleep, and I want to tell him: Seth, in this moment, you are exactly who you think you are—a helper, a minister almost. The keys to the fortress are yours; in the right light, to the weary traveler, the luster of their gleam is almost holy. But of course I can’t tell Seth that. I can only hope he had a brief glimmering of it when the moment came, a sense of how sweet the face of the one who lowers the drawbridge appears to the one whose need for passage to the castle, for a home within its walls, has become critical.
VISIBLE FROM THE AIR
Seth on the roof of the building by moonlight, enchanted to learn that its surface is a sheet of black rubber tightly attached to the frame. Seth with buckets of paint from somewhere, working with salvaged brushes, maybe, or with a broom, possibly, or with his hands. Who knows. Alex inside, asleep or just staring off into space as he does now, his childhood friends unsure of how to react, wanting to help, not knowing how. Derrick at home, asleep, sleep has never been a problem, he rests well even when he has things on his mind, when he hears people talk about how they have trouble sleeping he always thinks, I feel bad for you, but in his waking hours now he feels uncertain about several things, almost as soon as he wakes up he starts trying to wish them away because they can’t be resolved: the responsibility he feels about his friends, the difficulty he has reconciling that responsibility with what comes next. The intersection of now and what comes next: it’s visible from his front porch, a little closer every morning now as he sets out for school. He and his friends in his AP classes all seem to have noticed it at the same time, the fragility of their shared nexus. The spaces they’ve cultivated together will shortly undergo a seismic change. There is nothing for them to do at this point but wait.
Seth’s canvas, about which his surviving classmates will unanimously later claim to have known nothing, is vast but simple: it makes good on the promise of Derrick’s work on the MONSTER ADULT X sign by filling in the details. It is an enormous inhuman face. It looks a little like the Master from the TV adaptation of Salem’s Lot, and a little like the Creature from the Black Lagoon. It’s in three colors—white, black, and green—but that black is of course the black of the rubber underneath, Seth making use of negative space to complete this vision of a monstrous guardian for the house, a house whose existence the face proclaims to the heavens above it and to no one else. Its ears are webbed and leathery, its forehead high and pale, its cheeks sunken and greenish. Its thin-lipped mouth is agape as if to receive Communion. Its eyes are wide. It has seen something.