Devil House(65)
Had she been Alex, rationalizing her part in the rededication of Monster Adult X might have proved a more difficult task. Alex was attuned to the frequencies of life-changing moments. He’d heard that high tone droning all night, and felt the current traveling between himself and the others, an unmistakable circuit. He recognized its vibration. Angela felt it, too—the first twelve bottles of amyl nitrite she’d arranged into a cairn on the counter hadn’t felt like much, but after stacking six more brightly colored pyramids atop the glass display case, all separated by brand and tiered into a color spectrum from dark to light, she began to feel personal investment in the work; the shape she and her friends had begun imposing on the interior of the store felt like a personal expression, something privately satisfying, a confidential matter. In front of the seven pyramids, she’d placed a jumbled arrangement of letters cut from VHS sleeves to spell out MYSTERY? She especially liked the question mark. It made you stop a little longer, but even then, after you’d given it a whole extra minute, it didn’t give anything extra back. Before leaving, she made a point to regard the counter carefully: a mental snapshot of something for which no evidence was expected to survive.
For her, that snapshot was meant to be the whole of it. A captured moment in time, something crazy she’d done when she was young. One of a dozen oddball things she expected to do this year before she took her diploma and headed out into the world to see how the future looked.
Arriving to class that morning, she saw several of her friends already at their desks—Rhonda, from drill team; Rudy, who drove a Ford Mustang and was always offering her a ride somewhere. The life she’d dabbled in last night returned to the shadows of memory. She settled into the comfort of her daylight self, its ease and familiarity helping last night’s work slide into the acceptable context of the preterit. Even when we don’t find ourselves doing something wild, we sort out several selves along the line as we’re becoming the people we will be. It’s a constant, half-conscious process.
Most of the time, it’s hardly even worth trying to remember how it happened. Most of the time, no one will care.
THE BLESSING OF GOODLY COMPANY
To Anthony Hawley, it was a little surprising that Evelyn Gates had never given him at least some small indication of outrage about having to clean out his failed porno store. He knew she’d probably seen worse in her time; her targeted clientele, like her father’s before her, were the perennially at-risk, people with bad credit who knew when they signed the lease that cleaning deposits were a scam but who lacked the standing to object. Gates would have seen some hostile gestures in her time: rotting food left in refrigerators, or dirty old furniture abandoned in haste. Hawley figured it would take a lot to get any response out of her after she’d seen the last of his money. But a whole storefront full of hard-core porn, a video arcade with the floors unmopped? He’d’ve thought these would merit at least an angry phone call.
But there had been nothing. No letter announcing she’d be keeping his deposit, nor certainly any check for the remaining balance on the rent. It was as if he’d only existed for her until he stopped sending her a check every month.
He got up from behind his desk and went out into the office, where his three employees were all giving the pitch: tickets for a pancake breakfast to help the Firefighters’ Fund. They’d do this for three weeks and then move on to whoever wanted to pay for some phone solicitation next. The job was commission-only for the people working the phones. Hawley’s pay came from whoever owned the business, which was housed in a dingy grey building in San Jose; he didn’t know a lot about it and it seemed considerably shadier than the porn store.
Still, he got to go home at five, and nobody tried to talk to him about their personal business like it somehow involved him, and at the end of the day he didn’t have to feel shitty about sending the nice teenage kid who only wanted a quiet place to read back into the arcade to mop up the booths. It was good to have Monster Adult X behind him. Maybe some people were cut out for that kind of work; who knows? But every day he felt happier to be a little further away from those days. Phone sales wasn’t exactly the road to riches, either, but at least he didn’t have to think up creative ways to tell people what he did for a living.
MINOANS VII
By now Alex would have been awake. He’d gone to sleep around dawn; people who sleep badly know that the hours between five and eight may be your best chance to ramp down into a little of the restorative sleep that keeps madness temporarily at bay. Over time, sleep deprivation changes the texture of sunlight into a mild narcotic, a lilting force of such gentle, persuasive power that it can cause the terrors of night to withdraw their attack. Alex had thought long and hard about this. At the first rays of dawn he repaired to his booth.
The paint was still wet inside. He slept in the couples booth, the one on whose walls he’d spray-painted a witch last night. The paint still smelled, and he could have fit himself comfortably into one of the smaller units, but routine was a luxury for him, one whose comforts would shortly be receding into the distance.
Whether he turned on the multi-arcade tape machine before he went to sleep or much later, possibly not until after dark, I don’t know. A lot of people sleep with some kind of background noise, like a transistor radio or an electric fan. Vested interests in establishing the working status of the video tape machines that fed the arcade would have been of great value to a prosecutor, but I am not in the business of aiding real or imaginary prosecutors. I can only offer guesses based on available data.