Sir Derrick heard, in his companion’s voice, his troth; and thoughte unto himself, What we are, we are; a noble howse, but small. And behold, a silence came upon the compagnye, into which, all unexpected, intruded the sound of a hand knocking upon the door from the outside.
Both knights jumped as men awakened by thieves, so deep was their reverie; and then did both laugh as men helpless, until of a sudden they stopped again, and fell silent. For no visitor had been sought or called for, and none were expected; and who, then, of a day, should presume upon this fortress? For its ramparts in those days were as yet meager, and the walls without most modest, to speak truely.
Then heard they both, from without, a voice meek and familiar.
“It’s Alex,” came the voice. “I saw your bikes.”
DANISH INTERLUDE
Seth and Derrick exchanged a glance of unsoundable depths. It wasn’t that there was anything necessarily wrong with Alex; it was just that no one had seen or heard from him at all in several months. He’d gone missing from his foster family’s house in the middle of July. He didn’t leave a note or let anybody know he was leaving. People at school were starting to say he was probably dead. The few who’d known him well enough to care didn’t want to believe it, but it was hard to know what else to think.
An indispensable architectural feature of any adult bookstore is that nobody can see the inside of it from the street. By the mid-eighties, security cameras had become part of the standard package turnkey contractors offered bigger markets. But Monster Adult X never made it that far. There were safety mirrors in the two back corners of the store, and another above the front door, but there was no way of seeing outside the front entrance when the door was closed.
Seth had a hunch. “Weland?” he yelled, his hand cupped against the door. “Quit fucking around.”
“It’s Alex,” the voice said, no louder than the first time, with no real force or urgency.
“I told you quit fucking around,” Seth said. “Last time Alex was in town this place was still a comics store.”
“I don’t have any place to stay, man,” Alex said, and now both Seth and Derrick heard it clearly: the need, the resignation. Key suddenly in hand, Derrick rushed toward the door.
“Get in here, man,” he said, ushering Alex inside with one arm like an army nurse in wartime, trying to hurry the patient to safety before the enemy gets a chance to reload the cannons.
NEWS FROM AMIENS
He didn’t like it. His family had been affording him so much space and range this year; he already felt a little guilty about the time he spent inside the former store in the afternoons. Anthony Hawley probably wouldn’t have cared either way: but he didn’t know, and that was where the ethical question lay. There was no “probably” in the other half of the equation: his parents would not approve. They didn’t ask him to account for his hours between school and suppertime, but he knew if the truth ever surfaced, they would put an end to these afternoons; and these afternoons, with Seth, at this time in his life, as he prepared for the uncertain journey that lay ahead of him on the other side of high school: they felt special. They were special. He wanted to guard them. And so the matter took on several facets, some of them more inclined toward self-preservation than he would have liked to admit.
As he listened to Alex’s meandering accounts of his time away from town, though—stories that passed through numberless streets and shelters where he’d slept sometimes, tales without lessons, jokes without punchlines—and listened, in the silences between exchanges, to how his heart went out to his old friend whose path had run out into the wilderness so early, sovereignty began to seem like the only question of real import. Whatever the former porn store was now—whatever you call a shuttered store that will probably be razed in the near future—did he have the right to tell Alex it was OK to sleep there tonight? The next night? Until he figured out what he was going to do with himself, how to take care of himself, how to keep himself safe?
He didn’t think he did. Cutting up the posters and the glossy boxes, scribbling in the booths, reprogramming the VCRs: this was all essentially invisible work. None of it mattered. The only people who’d ever notice any of it would be the crew who eventually came in to tear the place apart. On the day that crew arrived, would any of them bring expectations about what they were or weren’t going to see inside? It didn’t seem likely. They’d get out their crowbars and start prying doors free from their hinges, and by the end of the day they’d have loaded everything into bins and driven them off the lot in forklifts. What the place they came to destroy looked like when they got there was none of their concern.