Devil House(52)

Adorning the portrait, some simple white clouds to the right and left, establishing the face’s unearthly origin firmly enough for those who saw or heard about it later to put a name to it. A monster, a specter, a fiend. A ghost. A devil. It’s easier to rely on familiar things when you’re describing something different than to imagine a context whose parameters require faith, and vision. It’s a sure bet that when people see the easy way across such differences, they will take it.





4.


FROM ST. EVROUL


I should be clear about there being nothing left. On the property, I mean. It would be terrific to describe how I found access to some secret attic space behind a loose panel in the ceiling, and how, inside, I discovered ledgers or receipts or remnants of Derrick and Seth and Alex’s weeks-long redecorating spree—anything at all, really. Prying up the floorboards for primary sources, peeling back the paint: it might have made for a great hook, but, at the time, I couldn’t see any point to it. I’m fairly certain I have greater access to a wider range of contemporaneous artifacts than anyone who’s ever studied the case; I’m diligent in my research, and I’ve learned to be patient. I don’t need to use force to get to the story. The good stuff always surfaces in the end.

But as to the house itself: the refurb job was comprehensive. Try though I might, using my photographs, articles, diagrams, grim memorabilia, primary and secondary sources, and the method of inhabiting a space which is my signature, I’m still essentially living in a new house. Only the outer walls remain: the shape, the view from above. The fortress that this place became in the days following the demise of Monster Adult X was a moment in time, and its destruction, when it came, was total. I sit on my sofa and look out the window, having grown attached to the house in my time here: I feel a ghostly kinship with the lives once lived atop the same ground that now cradles me while I sleep. Sometimes, in quiet moments, this mood seems ready to gather an almost tidal force; I feel like the place is something handed down to me instead of something I bought outright and must vacate when my work is done.

But it’s impossible to squint hard enough to see all the way back to the era before the coming of the age of change, whose beginnings were heralded by the arrival, in San Francisco, of Marc Buckler, aboard PSA flight 295 from Los Angeles.

ATMOSPHERIC DRAG

The further you go back into the past, the more you have to extrapolate about details and specifics; try though you might, you can’t get around this rule. If an aspiring real estate speculator were to fly from Los Angeles to San Francisco today, and, later, for whatever reason, we needed to trace his journey, he’d leave data everywhere: Checking in with the airline. Buying mints at the newsstand. Drinking a vodka tonic at the airport bar.

This was true in 1986, too, but the entities gathering the data weren’t as well-organized as they would later become, and the market for consumer data was still relatively elite. Over time, as the storage space needed for vast troves of memory shrank to microscopic sizes, the detail available to data hounds has become almost obsessively minute: behaviors too trivial to recount are lovingly enumerated. Every transaction locked, every point of contact recorded. There was a time, now hard to imagine, when you had to rely largely on self-reporting to know what people were up to.

For this reason, the dead from the distant past—even if you frame “distant” at fairly close range; even if the ever-advancing present seems, each year, to exist at further remove from the days that gave it birth—tend to look, in the mind’s eye, like ghosts who don’t know they’re dead yet. The impressions they left on the world, great or small, seem to outline a prophecy, one consisting of hunches you can’t verify and stories largely woven from inference and innuendo. Even once you’ve collated as much real evidence as you can collect, the ends they met enshroud and obscure their remembered figures, as if gathered, rumpled at the shoulders, like a cloak.

Marc Buckler met Evelyn Gates at a Morton’s Steakhouse in San Jose—the venue had been her choice. If she was impressed by him, I don’t know about it. If she found him ridiculous, as I do most days, I don’t know about that, either. She’d probably changed into some fresh clothes: simple sales instincts. She wasn’t a real estate agent, but hiring somebody to sell a building she owned would have struck her as silly. People want to own property; her father, in so many words, had drummed the lesson into her all her life. All you have to do is tell people you have something and they want it. They want it already; they learn what they want when you show it to them.

As the lone steward of the properties her father’d left her, she considered herself rich, just as she’d always considered her father rich: collecting rent every month on places whose tenants didn’t have enough leverage to demand repairs, tenants who lacked the social standing to assert their right to a plumbing upgrade or to functional wiring in every room. At Morton’s, her focus would probably have been on the strong monthly cash flow her properties represented, and on ways one might increase their yield if he felt so inclined. Cosmetic improvements—subdivisions, even, if he felt up to it. Pay for themselves in a year, two at most. There was a whole side yard adjacent to the bookstore, big enough to build a second property on, an easy sell depending on what kind of client you found for the—

“I looked it up,” he might have said. “The porno store, right?” I know from the books his parents had to retrieve from his office later that he’d been reading up on the importance of establishing yourself as fearless in business.