Why didn’t you just tell that story instead, I said.
Because I couldn’t, he said. For a whole lot of reasons I couldn’t. Some of them just easy technicalities, like not being able to chase down enough biographical details about people who’ve fallen off the map; only then, sometimes, even if you can track down their families, the last thing they want is to rehash how someone they loved and cared for had to fall off the face of the earth and stay there because of their proximity to a murder scene. Think about it. And then there’s the kinds of stories people want to read, I talked to you about that earlier, it’s a very important question in the field: drug addicts, lost souls, they make great victims when your perp is some sociopath mowing them down in flophouses or whatever. But this isn’t that. This is self-defense. You can try to break new ground with how a bunch of guys on drugs in a house they’re squatting didn’t deserve to get shot and APB’d just for defending their home, but—
Self-defense? I said. I pictured Marc Buckler, I pictured Evelyn Gates. It seems like a stretch.
Self-defense, he said, look it up, Christ, all over the country people shoot drunks who happen to have wandered into their back yards, on the Fourth of July, say, Memorial Day, whatever, castle doctrine it’s called, you have a right to defend yourself within your domicile, it’s a very old legal position. If I’m in your house without your say-so, then you have the right to consider me a threat. I thought about this long and hard and I know that’s the applicable statute here, in recent years it’s kind of been hijacked by gun nuts to justify opening fire on whoever they want, but I feel like there’s something deeper in it, not property rights, none of that, more like something on the books to protect you when the emissaries of the king decide you’ve got something the king wants, you have to have something somewhere that says to the crown, this far and no farther, that’s how I look at it, maybe I’m on my way to becoming some sad survivalist guy, plenty of stories there, those guys are pretty into dreaming about defending themselves with deadly force. I mean, don’t get me wrong, nobody deserves to get killed, but what are these guys supposed to do, everybody’s already thrown them away and they’ve got nothing, just nothing, and nobody was using that building for anything, they weren’t hurting anybody, would it have killed these people to just leave those guys alone, just do something else instead of fucking with the one thing they had that belonged to them? Would it have been so bad to just write it off? They could have done that. They could have just turned the other way. All three of these guys were nomadic enough by nature that they were going to pull up stakes reflexively sooner or later. And instead they just take bullets in their legs, they’re back out on the street with nowhere to live, strung out, desperate, scared, hurt. They drift, and they drown. No reason. And all the while I’m looking around, new construction going up, no room for anybody who doesn’t already have money, all these people just invisible to the Evelyn Gateses and the Marc Bucklers, less than invisible, nonexistent. And I thought about it, and I thought about it, and I thought about it, and after a while I just couldn’t stand it.
But Alex made it out, anyway, he said, and I tracked him down, he can be hard to understand but I got enough of the real story from him to turn it into what I got, a real enough story that people would maybe read it and care about it instead of just filing and forgetting it the way they do with every other story where some burnout gets kicked to death or set on fire or shot dead, at most a story like that gets half a day of social media outrage and then crickets, so I did what I did, I told Alex I was going to do it, he thought that was funny, he never laughs about anything but I got a little laugh out of him about that; he said, well, everybody was a teenager once, and then he zoned out again, he spends most of his time in the zone, who can blame him, people who live on the street see stuff every day that would crush your spirit but they just keep going, and then somebody writes an exposé for the Times or whatever every other year and people wring their hands, nothing does any good, but I got scared somebody would figure it out because the details of the scene were the same, all three of those guys really did dress up the store to look like a witches’ coven, if you saw the crime scene photos you’d think they went on to become rich artists or something—
I did see them, I said, they’re attached to your manuscript.
Right, yeah, he said
What about Angela? I said.
There is no Angela, he said. I wanted Alex to have another friend in the world. You know. His actual story is hard.