3.
MINOANS III
The threshold to the arcade was changed. Curling strips of sturdy paper now hung from either side of the portal, affixed by tape, glue, or maybe staples—something slight enough that its presence could be entirely concealed by the scale and care of the greater composition. Derrick hadn’t hit the light switch after closing the door behind him; it seemed better to keep the place dark now. But the display cases, whose fancy interior lighting had always been dim when the store was open—nobody cared about the displays; no bells and whistles were required for the people who needed the things inside the displays—were lit now, and the light was enough to set reflective effects off throughout the store. It was like the inside of a dark ride: just enough light to make you ask questions about what you were seeing.
He headed toward the arcade entrance. As he approached, he saw that its fresh decorations consisted of repurposed glossy stock: shards cut from VHS cases, twisted into corkscrews. Someone—Seth—had spent an hour, possibly two, transforming the grey entryway to the arcade into the mouth of a cave as it might appear in a dream. There was a color scheme to these cascading curls: dominant shades of silver and white at the arch, darkening as they traced a path to the floor, resolving midway down into something gaudier—red, orange, the brown of high-teased hair and the obligatory pink of human flesh. The bottom went blue and yellow, faceless primaries that framed the frenzied, nearly ecstatic middle. Linking these fields were the body parts and flimsy lingeries favored by almost any printed surface to be found in the store—bits of skin, eye, and camisole insinuated themselves, more as suggestions than as whole visions, as Derrick considered Seth’s work.
On the way home the day before, he’d wondered how things might pan out in the hours following his departure. Seth tried to stay out of his mother’s hair these days, he knew; it was one of the sweetest things about his old friend, how conscious he could be of the toll his company sometimes took on others. But he also knew Seth was easily distracted, and needed reminders for even the most basic tasks: To shower when you needed a shower. To zip up your backpack before you slung it over your shoulder. To follow through on promises you genuinely mean to keep.
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.